Willie Sutton - Where the Money Was. The Memoirs of a Bank Robber

Contents

The Affirm-the-Order,
No-Opinion Blues

Where the Money Was

W hat am I doing, I ask myself, standing on a corner at six o'clock in the morning freezing my ass off? Hell, I am almost forty-nine years old. I have been a fugitive for three full years now. I am number one on the FBI Wanted List. If I am caught I will go back to prison for life. They don't even have to catch me for another bank robbery, all they have to do is get their hands on me.

Even to me it makes no sense. I have a safe harbor in Staten Island. I have fifty thousand dollars or so stashed around that I could get my hands on with a couple of phone calls. And still, I am out here on a cold winter morning putting it all on the line in order to rob a bank for money that I neither want nor need. The most brilliant student of the criminal mind that I have ever known once told me that banks would always present an irresistible challenge to me, and any doubts I may have had about that are now gone. I am not only determined to get this bank, I am determined to get it my way, even though my modus operandi is so distinctive that I might just as well be leaving my calling card behind.

Maybe not, though. The Willie Sutton trademark has always been to get inside the bank by wearing the kind of uniform that would lead the guard to open the door for me without question. On this oneif everything goes exactly rightI am going to get in without a uniform and it is a prospect that excites me more than anything has excited me in years.

The bank is the Manufacturers Trust Company in Sunnyside, Queens, and everything about it is ideal. All around me along Queens Boulevard during the next two hours is the traffic of a city on its way to work. Thousands of residents are pouring out of the high-rise apartment houses. Thousands of cars are passing on their way toward the Queensboro Bridge and Manhattan. On the corner of Forty-fourth Street there is a bus stop. Directly across the street is an elevated subway station. Also a taxicab stand in which dozens of cabs are lined up. I like to work in crowds, that's another of my trademarks. The more that is going on outside the bank, the less chance there is that anybody is going to bother to look in. And if despite all my planning something should go wrong, only a psychopathic cop would shoot into a crowd.

All that activity also makes it easier to case the place. For three weeks now I have been charting the arrival of the employees, changing my vantage point daily so as to attract no attention. Wearing different clothes and different disguises. The land alongside the rising elevated structure is used by neighborhood people and commuters alike as one huge parking lot, and some mornings I would simply pull in and sit there in my car. Sometimes I would mingle with the crowd at the bus stop. Other times I would go up on the elevated structure and look down into the bank.

There is one other thing that makes the Manufacturers Trust perfect for me. On every other bank I have ever taken, the first employee, the man who opened the bank, arrived at eight o'clock, the time lock to the vault released at eight-thirty, and the bank opened to the public at nine. Between eight-thirty and nine, that was the half hour I always looked upon as my time.

At the Manufacturers Trust, the guard arrived at eight-thirty, the time lock was released at nine o'clock, and the doors weren't opened to the public until ten. That was going to give me half an hour to take the employees under control, and another full hour to clean the place out.

There are seventeen people who will have to be taken care of, sixteen employees (eleven men and five women) and a mailman. By now I know them all so intimately that I haven't bothered to bring my notebook with me. People are, above all things, victims of habit, especially when it comes to time. They set their alarm for the same time, catch the same train or bus, and arrive at their job within the same minute. There is also a pecking order in a bank which is unfailing. The employees will always arrive in reverse order to their importance. Weston, the guard, who evidently lives nearby, rounds the corner at 8:30 on the dot. Mr. Hoffman, the manager, arrives at 9:01. He is a heavy set man who always reminds me of a wrestler who has allowed himself to go fat.

The only man who has changed his pattern is the outsider, the mailman. For the first few days he hadn't come to the door until somewhere around 9:40, which could have presented a minor problem. Apparently he has changed his route, though, and for at least a week now he has been arriving between 8:45 and 8:55.

It is the routine of the guard, though, which has particularly fascinated me. One last time I want to watch him, because tomorrow is the day. At exactly 8:30 he comes walking down from Forty-fifth Street in his uniform, gun and all, turns into the boulevard and walks west for half a block, picks up a newspaper at the stand outside the variety store two doors from the bank, drops his coin, takes the key out of his pocket and walks on, so completely engrossed in the paper that he is oblivious to everything around him. With his head still in the paper he puts the key into the lock, pushes the door open, and enters.

Twenty times out of twenty he has done exactly the same thing. Tomorrow, I am betting that he is going to make it twenty-one out of twenty-one.

After Mr. Hoffman arrives, I drive across the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan where Tommy Kling, my crime partner, has a room. The main weakness of my M.O., as I know only too well, is that it calls for the use of two other people. Two times I have gone to prison because I have been betrayed by partners whom I had every reason to trust. But Tommy is the best partner I have ever had. Small but tough. He will follow orders without question. If you told him to stay on that corner, he'd stay there if he had to beat off an army to do it. Down at the docks where he had been a strong-arm man for the union his nickname was Mad Dog. As small as he ishe is only five foot sixhe would take on heavyweights and they would have had to kill him to beat him. When I first met him in prison his hands were like claws, that's how hard he hit. The nerves on both hands had been damaged. A rough kid. Tomorrow he will be wearing elevator shoes to add four inches to his height.

Tommy's weaknesses are the usual weaknesses of thieves: booze and broads. He spent money the way he fought. All out. He did everything all out. Tommy couldn't just pick up a prostitute, he had to shack up with her. He couldn't just shack up with her, he had to fall in love. And so although I trusted Kling as much as I trusted anybody in the world, I would not tell him where I was living. And even though he understood the reason for it, he resented it bitterly.

We hop into the car and drive back across the bridge to Flushing where the third man of the team, John De Venuta (usually referred to as either Dee or Venuta) has taken a furnished room. Since the room is less than a mile from the Manufacturers Trust we have to ride right past it. By this time Queens Boulevard has converted back into the main street of a lazy suburban community. Very little traffic on the wide street. A few housewives here and there carrying shopping bags and wheeling baby carriages. Even the bank looks kind of middle-class and settled.

Although De Venuta was in for a full share of any job he was on, I never looked upon him as a crime partner. He was a functionary, that's all. I never contacted him directly; that was left to Tommy. And although Tommy had recommended himTommy had served time with both Dee and his brother, Nick, in Trentonthey didn't get along at all. Which wasn't too surprising in that Venuta was unlike any other thief I have ever known. He was a miser. With his share of the robberies we had already committed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, he had purchased two modern delicatessen stores in Newark and then hired the cheapest help he could find so that he could continue to work in a sweatshop pressing marine overcoats at thirteen cents per coat.