Background
William was born on June 30, 1901 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of William Francis Sutton, a blacksmith, and Mary Ellen Bowles, a native of Ireland.
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(The Broadway Books Library of Larceny Luc Sante, General ...)
The Broadway Books Library of Larceny Luc Sante, General Editor For more than fifty years, Willie Sutton devoted his boundless energy and undoubted genius exclusively to two activities at which he became better than any man in history: breaking in and breaking out. The targets in the first instance were banks and in the second, prisons. Unarguably America’s most famous bank robber, Willie never injured a soul, but took on almost a hundred banks and departed three of America’s most escape-proof penitentiaries. This is the stuff of myth—rascally and cautionary by turns—yet true in every searing, diverting, and brilliantly recalled detail.
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William was born on June 30, 1901 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of William Francis Sutton, a blacksmith, and Mary Ellen Bowles, a native of Ireland.
Sutton attended both public and parochial schools. An intelligent boy with a retentive memory, he earned excellent grades and learned to dress well, though not ostentatiously. He later credited his aunt Alice, a half sister of actress Billie Burke, with teaching him social graces.
Sutton also acquired antisocial habits early, breaking into a department store at age ten, then entertaining his friends with his stolen money. Interestingly, his early ambition was to become a criminal lawyer; in later years he thought he would have been a good one. At age fifteen, after being caught stealing quarters from his teacher's purse, he left school to work as an errand boy for a Brooklyn bank.
Later, he became a mail clerk for an insurance company but lost his job when he was caught stealing rolls of postage stamps. A romance at age seventeen led Sutton into big-time thievery.
In 1919 the pair wanted to marry, and when her father objected, she helped Sutton steal $16, 000 from her father's safe, and then fled with him to Albany, New York. There the father and the police caught up with them. Sutton was placed on probation and ordered never to see the girl again.
In July 1921, Sutton was charged with murdering a man with whom he had quarreled. He fled, changing his identity. Then he was falsely accused of robbing a safe, so he changed his identity again.
In 1923, he was arrested on charges of robbery and murder. He spent nine months in jail before a jury found him not guilty. Sutton began planning a career as a bank robber. One day, watching an armed guard letting employees into a bank before business hours, he saw the guard admit a Western Union messenger. Soon, in one uniform or another, Sutton was persuading guards at the banks and jewelry stores to admit him before business hours. When the manager walked in, Willie was waiting with a gun. He earlier had learned how to circumvent burglar alarms and to use tools to break locks and open safes.
He also had become an amateur metallurgist. In 1926, Sutton was arrested for breaking into a bank and sentenced to five to ten years in Sing Sing Prison at Ossining, New York. Three months later he was transferred to Dannemora Prison in northeastern New York. He was there in August 1929 when inmates rioted, burning and destroying everything they could.
A few days later he was paroled. In prison he studied psychology and other subjects, either by reading books from prison libraries or by correspondence courses. He supplemented his studies with carefully plotted plans and schemes for escaping. At Sing Sing in 1932, he and another inmate used prison ladders to climb over the wall on a dark night.
In 1945 he crawled through a sewer under the walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, but he was caught immediately.
On February 3, 1947, he and four other convicts, disguised as guards, used ladders to climb over the walls of "escapeproof" Holmesburg Prison during a snowstorm. Out of prison, Sutton used makeup and a varied wardrobe to conceal his identity, and he avoided areas where police would look for him.
As a consequence the William F. Sutton who had escaped from Holmesburg in 1947 attracted widespread public attention as "Willie the Actor" in 1950's magazine feature stories. Despite his makeup and precautions, on February 10, 1952, Sutton was recognized by twenty-four-year-old Arnold Schuster, a presser in a tailor shop.
After Sutton's subsequent arrest despite some police bungling, Schuster was interviewed on television. On March 8, 1952, Schuster was found shot to death. Sutton denied having anything to do with the murder, and he was not charged. He was found guilty, however, of a 1950 bank robbery and was sentenced to a minimum of thirty years in prison, where he began working with writer Quentin Reynolds on an "autobiography, " dedicating it to his daughter. Despite his lengthy sentence, Sutton was released from prison for the last time on December 24, 1969, because he was suffering from emphysema.
From 1923 until his release, Sutton had spent a total of thirty-three years in prison. There he and writer Edward Linn composed a second "autobiography, " Where the Money Was. The book both repeats and updates the 1953 book, again using fictitious names for some people. Despite the book's title, Sutton denied ever saying that he robbed banks "because that's where the money was. "
Late in life Sutton estimated that he had stolen almost $2 million from banks and merchants - and he had little to show for it. Sutton died in Spring Hill, Florida.
During his forty-year robbery career William Francis Sutton Jr. stole an estimated $2 million, and he eventually spent more than half of his adult life in prison and escaped three times. For his talent at executing robberies in disguises, he gained two nicknames, "Willie the Actor" and "Slick Willie". Sutton is also known as the namesake of the so-called Sutton's law, although he denied originating it.
(The Broadway Books Library of Larceny Luc Sante, General ...)
Quotations:
He said that he robbed banks "because I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. "
In his autobiography, Sutton denied originating the pithy rejoinder:
"The irony of using a bank robber's maxim as an instrument for teaching medicine is compounded, I will now confess, by the fact that I never said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter who apparently felt a need to fill out his copy. I can't even remember where I first read it. It just seemed to appear one day, and then it was everywhere.
If anybody had asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would say . .. it couldn't be more obvious. "
Sutton married Louise Leudemann on October 21, 1929. They had one child and were divorced in 1947 soon after he was again sentenced to prison. Their daughter, Jeane, was to grow up hardly knowing her father - she saw him only two or three times until he was an old man.
In Look magazine (May 20, 1952), a Jeanne Courtney claimed to be Sutton's second wife.
