WILLIE SUTTON Ep. 4 | “Maximum Security”

He had escaped from Sing Sing Prison in December 1932.

. According to some reports, he tried to rob a bank just three days later, but failed. Exactly two months later, in February 1933, he definitely tried to rob a branch of the Corn Exchange in Philadelphia, but that one failed too. That same month, it seems likely that he tried to rob a bank in New York, but failed again. Success finally came with the July 1933 robbery of the Corn Exchange in Philadelphia that he had failed to rob five months earlier.

For the second half of 1933, Willie and his two accomplices seemed content to live off the proceeds of the heist. But by January 1934, they needed to, or wanted to, get back to work. Though their crime in early 1934 would not be nearly as well known as the highlights of other bank robbers to come, it jump-started a legendary year in the history of American crime. In January 1934, two days after Willie Sutton's upcoming robbery, the Barker Gang kidnapped a wealthy banker in St. Paul, Minnesota.

In May, Bonnie and Clyde were killed in Louisiana. In July, John Dillinger was killed in Chicago. In October, Pretty Boy Floyd was killed in Ohio. In November, Babyface Nelson was killed outside Chicago. And those were just the high points of the high points.

With all that going on, and much more, and the nation still in the grips of the Great Depression, and towering dust storms ravaging the southern plains, it was no wonder that a bank robbery in Philadelphia flew under the radar for the average American. But it would be an exciting highlight of Willie Sutton's career, and it was also the last bank robbery highlight for the next 16 years of his life. If Willie Sutton had not already cemented his legacy as a master escape artist with his prison break from Sing Sing, he would do so over the next few years, with not one, not two, but three elaborate attempts, and at least a little bit of success.

From BlackBeryl Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the story of Willie Sutton, one of the most successful bank robbers and escape artists in American history. This is Episode 4, Maximum Security.

Willie had spent a lot of time casing the Corn Exchange Bank in Philadelphia, so naturally, when his first attempt to rob the bank failed, he wanted to try again. But after Willie's botched heist, the bank had started taking extra security measures to protect itself. Willie went back to scope out the bank one morning and saw that every employee had been given a key to the building's outermost door. As they arrived in the morning, they would enter through the main door, lock it behind them, and ring a bell for the guard to let them into the bank. The Corn Exchange Bank thought this little procedure would make it difficult for a robber to get inside the bank, but Willie saw it as an advantage.

Willie planned to enter the bank and overpower the guard before the employees arrived. Then, the fact that the employees were locking the outer door behind them made it that much more difficult for them to raise the alarm when they saw Willie with the guard inside the bank. All that was left was for Willie to find a way inside the bank without being seen. For all of his other robberies, Willie Sutton had dressed in a variety of costumes and used them to take the door guard by surprise. Essentially, he walked right into the bank through the front door.

But that wouldn't work this time. Now he decided on a creative and dangerous approach. He and his partner Eddie Wilson, would try to get in through the skylight on the bank's roof.

Eddie and Willie found an empty house a few blocks away from the bank. Their plan was to climb up to the roof of the house, hop across rooftops until they reached the bank, and then drop down through the skylight. They had arranged for their third partner, Joe Perlango, to park a car close to the bank to help them get away as fast as possible. When the day of the heist arrived, January 15, 1934, two days before the Barker Gang's kidnapping in Minnesota, Eddie and Willie got to work in the early hours of the morning. They skipped across rooftops to the bank and then entered by dropping down through the skylight.

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any surviving details of exactly how they pulled it off. Did they rappel down from the roof with ropes? Were they able to climb down using stuff that was in the bank? Or did they simply jump? Sadly, there are no answers.

When they were down, Willie's account of the robbery suggests that they let Joe into the bank through the door. But another source suggests that Joe also dropped down through the skylight with them. Either way, their plan was working perfectly, and all three robbers were in the bank before the guard arrived. They took their positions and waited. The guard unlocked the door and stepped inside to find a rude surprise waiting for him.

Three robbers pointing guns at him. Willie had a machine gun, and Eddie and Joe had revolvers. The guard was so frightened that he could hardly speak. as Willie took his pistol. The guard finally stuttered that he remembered Willie's face from the failed heist.

Willie told him he was right, and Willie had come back to take what he couldn't last time.

As the bank employees arrived, the robbers forced the guard to admit them, then the robbers handcuffed them and sent them to wait in the vault area. It was nearly 9 a.m. when the manager reached the bank. The robbers forced him to open the vault. They quickly grabbed the cash and made their escape.

Willie recorded his disappointment with the haul of $10,980.

. But another source states that the trio made away with nearly double that amount. Even if it was closer to $11,000, that would be about $253,000 today and would give each man the equivalent of more than $84,000.. Still not a bad day's work. But Eddie, Willie, and Joe Perlango never got to spend the money.

Eddie started feeling like he was being tailed by the law. Willie thought it was just nerves, but he was wrong. It turned out that Joe Perlango had caught the police's attention. Joe was living a flashy lifestyle and he had been arrested. The police grilled him about his partners and supposedly threatened him by saying they would hurt his wife.

Joe gave up Willie and Eddie. Philadelphia police arrested Willie Sutton on February 5, 1934, just three weeks after the Corn Exchange robbery and 14 months after he had escaped from Sing Sing Prison. Willie was quickly tried and given a sentence of 25 to 50 years. And now the Pennsylvania prison system would learn what the New York prison system already knew. The label Maximum Security did not apply to a facility that held Willie Sutton.

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It's open for visitors and during the Halloween season, the prison embraces its haunting appeal. The prison, which might have actual ghosts, transforms into five separate haunted houses for thrill seekers. By the time Willie Sutton arrived in 1934, the prison was already more than 100 years old, so it probably had a haunted quality. even then. When Willie walked in, he was probably the second most famous inmate in the prison's history.

The first was Al Capone, who spent eight months in Eastern State Pen between August 1929 and March 1930, as his reign over Chicago's underworld was rapidly coming to an end. Four years after Capone left Eastern State Pen, the warden welcomed bank robber and escape artist Willie Sutton and promptly told Sutton how it was going to be.

The warden was a tough, cigar-smoking man who summoned Willie to his office nearly as soon as Willie reached the prison. The warden had seen a lot of crazy things go down behind bars and he told Willie directly that he knew Willie was going to try to escape. Before Willie could protest, the warden added that there was nothing Willie could say to convince him otherwise. The warden warned Willie not to try anything stupid. He told Willie that no inmate had successfully escaped from the prison in his long career as warden, and he added that the guards had special instructions to watch Willie carefully.

If they saw Willie make even the slightest false move, they would shoot to kill. Willie told the warden that he shouldn't worry. He had no intention of escaping. That was a lie, of course. Willie had been thinking of nothing else from the moment he set foot inside the prison.

But Willie took his time. He needed to understand the place he was in before he could find a way out of it. That meant he spent a long time quietly observing the systems and processes of the facility. There are reports that he attempted to escape twice in 1936, two years after he entered prison. But details of the attempts are relatively scant.

Then he spent the next five years, organizing a better way. There was a slanted window on the roof of each cell. It dawned on Willie that with the way the prison was laid out, it would be much easier for him to go up through the roof than through the door. Every night, Willie climbed up to the slanted window and looked outside. He had a good view of the prison yard, and two things stood out.

One was the change of guard. at midnight. There was a brief period where the prison wall was left unattended. The second was the weather. Every once in a while, a thick fog rolled into the prison.

The fog was so dense that it was impossible to see through it at night, even when the lamps were lit. And that gave Willie an idea.

He would wait for a thick fog to come in. At midnight, he would climb out of the cell window and dash across the yard. Then he would climb over the prison wall to freedom. The simplicity of the plan might have worked for any other prisoner, but not for Willie Sutton. The guards had special instructions to check on his cell, especially at night.

They would notice if he was gone and raise the alarm long before he reached the prison wall. The solution to that problem was that Willie needed to create a decoy. He carefully and methodically fashioned a mask and a fake head out of plaster. With the help of inmates who worked in different parts of the prison, Willie got his hands on everything he needed to make a decoy. He painted the plaster mask so well that it actually resembled him.

And that's serious. It's incredible how good it looks. On August 19th, 1941, all the forces aligned. A thick fog rolled in, and it was now or never. Willie had unscrewed the bolts of the window and replaced them with dummy bolts that could be easily removed.

He waited until a few minutes before midnight, and then positioned the mask and the bust of his head under the blanket on his bed to make it look like he was sleeping. He climbed up to the window and looked out at the dark prison yard. The prison lights were barely visible in the thick fog. There was less than a minute left until midnight when the guards would change their shifts. And that was when Willie heard a shout from the yard, and all hell broke loose.

The prison yard came alive with activity, and Willie watched helplessly as his plan to escape disappeared before his eyes. The sounds of shouting men and blaring sirens filled the air. Willie didn't know what was happening, but he knew his chances of getting out that night were gone. He also knew he needed to move fast. Willie screwed the window frame back in place and hid the mask and bust.

In a matter of minutes, he was back in his bed. The next day, Willie found out he wasn't the only one who was planning to escape that night. Another group of inmates was also trying to take advantage of the fog to jump the prison wall at midnight, but they had botched the timing. They were a couple minutes early and ended up running right into the prison guards and creating chaos in the yard. In response, the warden ordered a sweep of the cell blocks.

Guards searched every cell, and when they got to the top tier of cell block seven, they found the mask, bust, and dummy bolts inside Willie's cell. As punishment, Willie was sent to the isolation block for six months, where he spent every single day thinking about his next plan to escape.

Soon after Willie was released from the isolation block, he received notice that the prison psychiatrist wanted to see him. The psychiatrist was a smart young man named Dr. Philip Roche. Willie thought the doctor was going to evaluate him, but the doctor offered Willie a job as a personal secretary. Willie's main job was to type up the records of the doctor's interviews with other inmates.

Willie learned a couple of things about the prison, a great deal about the field of psychiatry, and Willie became curious about his own mentality. Willie asked the doctor if he thought Willie would ever be able to go straight after he was released. The doctor said in his professional opinion he found it very hard to imagine a scenario where Willie would not rob banks. The doctor turned out to be right, but it would be six more years before Willie could test the doctor's theory.

In 1945, four years after his failed attempt on the foggy night, Willie joined a group of 11 other inmates who had a plan to escape Eastern State Penn. They identified the cell block closest to the prison wall and wanted to try one of the oldest tricks in the book, tunneling out. A member of the group named Clarence Kleindienst, whom Willie called Kleine, lived in the cell block and also worked in the prison's plaster shop. His cell became ground zero for the project. He made a frame with plaster blocks that looked like the granite blocks of his cell wall.

The frame could be used to hide the work that went on behind it. Every day, at a certain time, all the inmates left their cells for their assigned jobs in the prison. The members of the escape crew snuck into Kleine's cell whenever they could to dig out his wall and tunnel behind it. At the end of the day, they gathered the dirt that had accumulated and sprinkled it out in the yard, almost exactly like the character of Andy Dufresne did in the movie The Shawshank Redemption and the prisoners did in The Great Escape. It was slow, dangerous work.

But after six long months, the tunnel was ready. That didn't mean it was perfect. Parts of the tunnel had filled up with underground reserves of water. Men could get trapped in the tunnel under layers of soil and water, but they didn't care. It was worth the risk.

They chose April 3rd, 1945, for the day of the escape. The time would be the short interval between breakfast and the order to report to their jobs. The inmates were nervous. And, as Willie had learned repeatedly through his bank robberies and escape attempts, the act rarely goes according to the plan. And this particular act would feature a comical surprise that was straight out of a Three Stooges skit from the era.

The 12 inmates made it to Kleine's cell and started to crawl through the tunnel. Willie was number four in line. He crouched low and waded through the mud, dirt, and water as fast as he could. The tunnel was reportedly 99 feet long, or about 33 yards, a third of an American football field. Soon, Willie crossed under the prison wall.

When he reached the end of the tunnel, he stood in the hole that led up to the surface. He paused for a moment and looked up at the clear blue sky. After nine years in prison and possibly as many as three failed escape attempts, freedom was finally in sight. Willie reached up through the hole, grabbed the solid ground outside, and started to pull himself up. When he was halfway out of the hole, his heart sank.

Willie saw two Philadelphia policemen approaching the hole as he hoisted himself out. It turned out that the spot where the tunnel broke through to the surface was at the end of a routine walking beat for two patrolmen. The inmates had no way of knowing, but they had spent six months digging a tunnel away from prison guards only to deposit themselves right in front of two policemen.

Willie and the other inmates only had one small advantage. The policemen were even more shocked to see the inmates than the inmates were to see the policemen. As the policemen stood there, stunned by the sight of prisoners crawling out of a hole in the ground, Willie scrambled out of the hole and broke into a run. The patrolmen, finally coming to their senses, chased after him. Willie ran as fast as he could and raced past a long row of factories, but his wet shoes were filled with muddy water and they slowed him down.

To make matters worse, the patrolmen drew their guns and started shooting. The bullets whizzed past Willie and slammed into the brick wall of the factory next to him. Willie wasn't hit, but he knew that he couldn't keep this up. He dove into one of the buildings. He rushed ahead and tugged at the factory door, but it was locked.

All Willie could do was crouch on the floor below the window and hope the patrolmen ran past. But Willie was unlucky again. A pedestrian had seen him duck into the factory. When the cops arrived at the spot, the citizen felt compelled to point them in Willie's direction. The patrolmen approached the door with their guns drawn and ordered him out.

Willie was trapped. With nowhere to go, he surrendered. He had tasted a few brief moments of freedom and those had been spent sprinting away from the cops. Of the 12 inmates who escaped through the tunnel, six, including Willie Sutton, were captured. the same day they escaped.

Four more were captured within eight days. And the last two stayed on the run for seven weeks before they were both caught in New York. Back at the prison, the warden was furious. The inmates had come close to tarnishing his record of never allowing a successful prison break while he was in charge. He was determined to make their lives miserable and he assigned Willie and the others to complete the rest of their sentence in the isolation block.

The group was also indicted for the prison break and a trial soon commenced. Willie was found guilty and given 10 to 20 more years in prison for instigating the escape.

Willie and the other inmates knew that the warden would not let them out of solitary as long as they were in his prison. They decided to go on a hunger strike to pressure him into transferring them to another facility. After 14 days without food, the warden relented. Willie was transferred to a maximum security prison in Philadelphia called Holmesburg. And, like all other prisons, Holmesburg was not nearly as secure as its administrators believed.

Holmesburg Prison sits along the banks of the Delaware River, 12 miles northeast of Eastern State Penn. Like Eastern State, Holmesburg is now a ruin. But unlike Eastern State, Holmesburg is not open for tours. Over the course of its history, it would be known by many as the worst prison in Philadelphia. It was nicknamed the Terror Dome because of bloody riots and the murder of a warden by an inmate.

And strong allegations emerged that unethical medical experiments were performed on prisoners from 1951 to 1974. The allegations prompted congressional hearings, public outcry, and numerous articles and books. But prison records were destroyed, so the full truth will probably never be known. Willie Sutton and four other inmates who had been part of the failed tunnel escape arrived at Holmesburg in 1945, six years before the medical experiments were supposed to have started. It would be easy to say that Willie Sutton probably started thinking about breaking out of Holmesburg the second he set foot inside, but in reality, he never stopped thinking about it.

Every day he spent in prison, he thought about breaking out. And his time at Holmesburg was no different. It was simply a new challenge. And in the end, it took him two years to figure it out.

The prison was built on top of a hard granite subsurface, which meant there was no chance of tunneling out. The wall that ran around Holmesburg was extraordinarily high, so climbing over would be a serious obstacle. And like Eastern State Penn, the warden of Holmesburg knew all about Willie Sutton's ability to escape. The warden would be watching Willie like a hawk, and the guards had orders to shoot on sight if they saw Willie trying to escape. The warden put Willie and the other transfers in the prison's isolation block.

Willie was allowed in the exercise yard for one hour a day. The other 23 hours, he was in his dungeon of a stone. cell. Security was tight, and options for escape were few. But eventually, an unexpected problem led to inspiration.

Willie got really sick, and it ended up being a blessing in disguise. Willie caught a raging fever that didn't subside for several days. Because the warden didn't want to risk sending Willie to a hospital, he assigned another inmate to take care of Willie. Jimmy McGee was a trustee, a prisoner who was trusted by the guards and given special privileges. Jimmy had the job of being a night nurse to prisoners, and now he was responsible for Willie Sutton.

Under Jimmy's care, Willie's condition improved significantly. But unknown to the warden, Jimmy helped Willie in many other ways. Willie was toying with a vague plan to find ladders in the prison and climb over the wall. Jimmy told Willie where he could find ladders and ropes in Holmesburg. He also gave Willie valuable information about the schedule of the prison guards.

By the time Willie recovered, he was in a much better position to break out of Holmesburg. Willie and four other inmates soon hatched a plan to escape. Three of the four had been part of the escape from Eastern State Penn and had been transferred to Holmesburg with Willie, so they knew each other. Here, the plan called for them to cut through the bars of their prison cells, get their hands on the uniforms of prison guards, find some ladders, change into their disguises, and then climb over the walls using the ladders. By February of 1947, less than two years after the transfers arrived at Holmesburg, the gang was ready to break out.

They had information about the guards, the uniforms, and the ladders. They had secured hacksaws from another inmate to cut through the bars, and they had at least one gun to disarm the guards. Similar to the fog at Eastern State Penn, the group waited for a heavy snowstorm to pound Philadelphia. That happened on February 10, 1947.. There was so much snow that visibility was severely reduced, which was perfect for a prison break.

Next time. on Infamous America, Willie completes a daring escape from Holmesburg, and of course, he goes back to robbing banks. And if the Corn Exchange was his favorite target in the 1930s, the Manufacturer's Trust Company is his favorite target in the 1950s. Willie Sutton's most profitable and probably most famous robbery is on the way. That's next week on Infamous America.

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Original members Rob Valier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram, and B Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube.

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