J.R. MOEHRINGER
Sutton
About the Book
One of the most notorious criminals in American history is brought blazing back to life by a master storyteller.
Willie Sutton was born in the squalid Irish slums of Brooklyn, in the first year of the twentieth century, and came of age at a time when banks were out of control.
Over three decades, from Prohibition through the Great Depression, from the age of Al Capone until the reign of Murder Inc., police called Sutton one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted list. But the public loved him. He never fired a shot, after all, and his victims were merely those bloodsucking banks.
Based on extensive research, Sutton is the moving story of an enigmatic man, an arch criminal driven by love, forever seeking the beautiful woman who led him into a life of crime, then broke his heart.
About the Author
J.R. Moehringer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000, is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Author of the bestselling memoir, The Tender Bar, he is also the co-author of Open by Andre Agassi.
For Roger and Sloan Barnett,
with love and gratitude
AUTHOR’S NOTE
After spending half his life in prison, off and on, Willie Sutton was set free for good on Christmas Eve, 1969. His sudden emergence from Attica Correctional Facility sparked a media frenzy. Newspapers, magazines, television networks, talk shows – everyone wanted an interview with the most elusive and prolific bank robber in American history.
Sutton granted only one. He spent the entire next day with one newspaper reporter and one still photographer, driving around New York City, visiting the scenes of his most famous heists and other points of interest in his remarkable life.
The resulting article, however, was strangely cursory, with several errors – or lies – and few real revelations.
Sadly, Sutton and the reporter and the photographer are all gone, so what happened among them that Christmas, and what happened to Sutton during the preceding sixty-eight years, is anyone’s guess.
This book is my guess.
But it’s also my wish.
I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is tr ue.
—LEWIS CARROLL,
“THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK”
Table of Contents
PART ONE
Thus in the beginning all the world was America … for no such thing as money was anywhere known.
JOHN LOCKE, SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT