Where the Money Is: Why to Rob a Bank

Willie Sutton

In 1960 a physician with the absurdly appropriate name Dr. William Dock advised his medical students to apply Sutton’s Law when they diagnosed patients. He explained that the notorious criminal Willie Sutton, on being asked why he had robbed banks, had replied, “Because that’s where the money was.” Doc Dock’s lesson: always look for the most obvious cause first.

Sutton was among the most celebrated figures in America’s pantheon of hold-up men. By his own estimates, he robbed more than a hundred banks and got away with two million dollars in loot. An intelligent and keenly observant man, he used a rare combination of planning and audacity to divest financial institutions of their assets.

Another of Sutton’s consuming interests was breaking out of prison, an appropriate avocation for a man who spent half his adult life in jail. Escaping from under the noses of the guards, Sutton said, was “like nothing else in the world.”

He broke out of the venerable Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia through a tunnel — only to be quickly recaptured. He fled an even tougher Pennsylvania prison by taking several guards hostage. Accosted from a tower while carrying a ladder across the yard, he simply yelled, “It’s all right — it’s an emergency.” He went over the wall and vanished.

Eastern State Penitentiary

Born in 1901 to an Irish immigrant family, Sutton was raised in a cold-water flat in the slums of Brooklyn. His father was a blacksmith. The younger Sutton never went past eighth grade in school but read constantly. He studied everything from English grammar to the philosophy of Schopenhauer. “I would never allow them to imprison my mind,” he vowed.

Before any robbery, he would spend days casing the target. He used a variety of disguises so that he would not be noticed — he was known as “The Actor.” He and one or more confederates would usually arrive at the bank at the exact time the first employee unlocked the door. They would take control of each additional worker, whose routines they knew precisely. Then into the vault, followed by a meticulously planned getaway.

Sutton claimed that the guns he used in his robberies were not loaded — he didn’t want to take a chance of someone being hurt. Some bank employees said that being the subject of a Sutton robbery was like being in a movie. He treated his fellow “actors” with politeness.

In 1952, Sutton, having escaped prison, was living back in Brooklyn. A twenty-four-year-old clothing salesman named Arnold Schuster spotted him on the subway. The young man tipped off the police — they took Sutton into custody.

Schuster was celebrated in the media, while Sutton faced a lengthy jolt in prison. Bad enough. But two weeks later, while Schuster was walking home to his parents’ house, a gunman shot him in the face, killing him. It was the worst thing that could have happened to Sutton, who had hoped for sympathy from the presiding judge.

Eleven years later, the mystery of Schuster’s murder was partly cleared up by Joe Valachi, one of the first Mafia informers. He said that Albert Anastasia, the head of a gang of killers known as Murder, Inc., had seen Schuster being congratulated on television. The gangster, nicknamed The Earthquake, had erupted: “I can’t stand squealers!” and ordered one of his crew to shoot the public-spirited Schuster, regardless of the grief it caused Sutton.

The events left Willie in prison for the next seventeen years. Only in 1969, did a judge rule that the convict’s good behavior and ill health merited a commutation of his sentence. In the years that followed, Sutton published a memoir (his second), consulted with banks about security, and appeared in a credit card commercial. He died in 1980.

The interesting thing about Sutton’s Law is that Sutton insisted that he never made the statement, even though he called his book Where the Money Was. The wisecrack, he said, was dreamed up by a reporter to spice a story.

“Why did I rob banks?” Sutton wrote. “Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life.”

So it wasn’t the money at all. That was just “the chips,” he said. He did it for something more fleeting, more satisfying. The robberies gave him a sensation of intensity, a chance to be fully alive.

Perhaps this unrepentant crook was thinking of the moments that the Irish poet William Butler Yeats described, the times that come over a man when “something drops from eyes long blind. He completes his partial mind . . .” Perhaps that’s what we’re all after, why we dare, why we take our chances. For the sheer experience of living.