The Bank Robber, the Quote, and the Final Irony

A reporter's odyssey finds that 20 years ago, the noted bank robber and prison escape artist locked himself up for the last time This is the story of what became an obsession. Sometime last fall, I slit the last of the Monday mail and found the text of an executive's speech. I skimmed the document for news. There it was, a few pages into the text, "it" not being news, but "THE QUOTE," which I have read and heard, even borrowed, hundreds of times in 18 years of writing about banks. If you've ever been to a banking conference, you've heard, or even used it, yourself. With many variations, it goes like this: "As Willie Sutton the bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, 'because that's where the money is'." I can't say what triggered the two questions that morning, but neither would leave me alone: 1. Who the heck was Willie Sutton, anyway, and why did people keep quoting him? 2. Did this Sutton ever really say this quote--or was this just one more in the long line of myths and legends of banking? A search of the records Though I had plenty of more important things to do at lunch I connected my computer to the Nexis/Lexis research database and searched the system for a clue. What I found was impressive, if one considers that a bank robber is a fairly heavy-duty criminal. This robber's words, if they were his, had been borrowed by hundreds of people to illustrate all sorts of points just in 1996. Indeed, THE QUOTE has been used in articles and speeches about bond issues, religious matters, Medicaid fraud, alcohol on campus, mutual-fund investment strategies, and even, in a surprisingly small number of cases, bank robberies. Back in the 1980s, Walter Wriston used to enjoy quoting Sutton in speeches calling for financial modernization. Once, he pointed out that Sutton couldn't regard banks as the only place to get money. But who was Sutton, to be quoted so authoritatively? The quest continued over the next couple of months, taking me from databases to sites on the World Wide Web to the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to bankers association records to--you get the idea. The source of the best information? Willie Sutton himself. When apprehended for the last time, in 1952, Sutton wrote, in cooperation with a well-known newspaperman of the day, a streamlined tale of his life of crime called I, Willie Sutton (reprinted in 1993 by Da Capo Press, New York). Years later, after his final "escape," Sutton and another ghostwriter came up with Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber (Viking Press, New York, 1976). Meet Willie Sutton Willie Sutton was a refreshing hood. He robbed banks and he was good at it. He made no bones about that. He usually packed a gun, either a pistol or a Thompson submachine gun-- "You can't rob a bank on charm and personality"--but took a professional's pride in never using it. Sutton stole from the rich and he kept it, though in later years he was popular with the public through some misplaced Robin Hood idea. A tough Irish kid born in 1901 and raised near the Brooklyn, N.Y., docks, he actually preferred to be called "Bill," when a life lived mostly on the lam didn't make an alias necessary. The "Willie" was bestowed by the police, who apparently! thought it went better with the nicknames they devised. Sutton's criminal activity started early, with pilferage when he was nine or ten, graduating up to breaking and entering the business of a girlfriend's father so the pair could elope. Even an early dose of incarceration didn't quell the criminality in Sutton. He said he tried, but somehow the temptation was always too much for him. Though he was to gain his fame as a bank robber, his first experience in unauthorized withdrawals from banks and jewelry stores was learned at the knee of a crook named "Doc" Tate, an expert safecracker. …