Willie Sutton - Career in Crime

Career in Crime

Sutton was an accomplished bank robber. He usually carried a pistol or a Thompson submachine gun. "You can't rob a bank on charm and personality," he once observed. In an interview in the Reader's Digest published shortly before his death, Sutton was asked if the guns that he used in robberies were loaded. He responded that he never carried a loaded gun because somebody might get hurt. He stole from the rich and kept it, though public opinion later turned him into a perverse type of Robin Hood figure. He allegedly never robbed a bank when a woman screamed or a baby cried.

Sutton was captured and recommitted in June 1931, charged with assault and robbery. He did not complete his 30-year sentence, escaping on December 11, 1932, using a smuggled gun and holding a prison guard hostage. With the guard as leverage, Sutton acquired a 13.5-meter (45 ft) ladder to scale the 9-meter (30 ft) wall of the prison grounds.

On February 15, 1933, Sutton attempted to rob the Corn Exchange Bank and Trust Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He came in disguised as a postman, but an alert passerby foiled the crime. Sutton escaped. On January 15, 1934, he and two companions broke into the same bank through a skylight.

The FBI record observes:

Sutton also executed a Broadway jewelry store robbery in broad daylight, impersonating a postal telegraph messenger. Sutton's other disguises included a police officer, messenger and maintenance man. He usually arrived at banks or stores shortly before they opened for business.

Sutton was apprehended on February 5, 1934, and was sentenced to serve 25 to 50 years in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the machine gun robbery of the Corn Exchange Bank. On April 3, 1945, Sutton was one of 12 convicts who escaped the institution through a tunnel. Sutton was recaptured the same day by Philadelphia police officer Mark Kehoe.

Sentenced to life imprisonment as a fourth time offender, Sutton was transferred to the Philadelphia County Prison, Holmesburg section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On February 10, 1947, Sutton and other prisoners dressed up as prison guards. The men carried two ladders across the prison yard to the wall after dark. When the prison's searchlights hit him, Sutton yelled, "It's okay!" No one stopped him.

On March 20, 1950, Sutton was the eleventh listed on the FBI's brand new FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, created only a week earlier, on March 14.

In February 1952, Sutton was captured by police after having been recognized on a subway and followed by Arnold Schuster, a 24-year-old Brooklyn clothing salesman and amateur detective. Schuster later appeared on television and described how he had assisted in Sutton's apprehension. Albert Anastasia, Mafia boss of the Gambino crime family, took a dislike to Schuster because he was a "squealer." According to Mafia turncoat and government informant, Joe Valachi, Anastasia ordered the murder of Schuster, who was then shot dead outside his home on March 9, 1952.

Judge Peter T. Farrell presided over a 1952 trial in which Sutton had been charged with the 1950 heist of $63,942 (equal to $617,664 today) from a branch of the Manufacturers Trust Company in Sunnyside, Queens, part of more than $2 million he was estimated to have stolen from various banks over the course of his career in crime. Sutton was found guilty and given a sentence of 30 to 120 years in Attica State Prison.

Farrell suspended Sutton's sentence in December 1969, ruling that Sutton's good behavior in prison and his deteriorating health due to emphysema justified the suspension of the sentence. After the ruling was delivered, Sutton said "Thank you, your Honor. God bless you" and started crying as he was led out of the court building. Sutton still had to receive a suspension of a separate 30-year-to-life sentence he had received in Brooklyn in 1952 and then could be released on parole from a 1930 conviction.