WILLIE SUTTON Ep. 5 | “Most Wanted”

It was that attempt that caused prison officials to transfer Willie and a few others to Holmesburg. Like most maximum security prisons, Holmesburg was believed to be escape-proof. As always, Willie Sutton would prove otherwise. Some of the prisoners had secured hacksaws to cut through the bars of their cells and at least one gun to threaten the guards. On February 10, 1947, they were ready to go.

They were just waiting on the weather. That day, it happened. A snowstorm slammed Philadelphia. Visibility was severely reduced, which was perfect for a prison break. There are conflicting accounts of the escape, but here's Willie's version, in which he obviously plays a starring role, but which probably isn't entirely accurate.

After dark, Willie said he cut through the bars of his cell and replaced them with putty. He waited for a prison guard to finish his check at 1 a.m. When the guard was done, Willie slipped out of his cell and joined the others, who had also made it out and waited down a corridor. The prisoners with guns pulled them out, and the group crept up on unsuspecting prison guards. The guards were so frightened by inmates with guns that they agreed to do whatever the prisoners wanted.

Willie ordered the guards to give the inmates their coats and hats. The inmates put on the disguises, and the party of fake prison guards and real ones went to find ladders. The only feasible and relatively fast way out of Holmesburg was to use ladders to climb over the extra-high walls. It was risky as hell, especially in a snowstorm, but it was the only choice. Under the threat of the guns, the guards helped the inmates tie the ladders together with ropes.

The motley crew moved outside, and the inmates kept their guards as hostages. as they crossed the snow-covered prison yard. They raised the ladder to the wall, and suddenly they were lit up by a bright searchlight. They'd been discovered by a guard who regularly swept the yard with a spotlight. According to Willie, he told the guard with the searchlight that they were making emergency repairs because of the snow.

The guard with the searchlight bought it, and Willie was the first to climb up the ladder and drop down into the deep snow on the other side. The other four prisoners followed, and soon they were all out and hustling toward a nearby road. It would be no more than a few minutes before the plot was discovered, and they had to hurry. Shortly after they made it to the road, they saw the approaching headlights of a milk truck. The inmates, dressed as prison guards, flagged it down.

When the drivers stopped, no doubt surprised to see men on foot in a blizzard, the inmates produced their guns and politely instructed him to drive them to Philadelphia. As the truck rumbled away from Holmesburg Prison, Willie and the other inmates heard the prison sirens start blaring.

From Black Barrel 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 5, Most Wanted.

For three of the five escapees, freedom was short-lived. David Akins, Clarence Kleindienst, and Spencer Waldron were captured the day after the prison break. The fifth man, Freddy Tenuto, was never seen again. He could have escaped to a beach somewhere, or successfully changed his identity, or met a quiet and unsavory end. Kleindienst was one of particular note.

Willie seemed to think of him as something close to a magician. Willie wrote, If you gave Kleini two weeks, he could get you Ava Gardner. If you gave Kleini a year, he could get you out of prison. Clarence Kleini Kleindienst had helped mastermind the tunnel breakout from Eastern State Pen and the latest escape from Holmesburg, but he was caught within 24 hours after each one. He was great at breaking out of prison, but he was bad at staying out.

Willie Sutton would be more successful. When the group made it to Philadelphia. during the night of the escape, they split up. Willie hitchhiked to New York, where he had a network of associates who would help him get out of a sticky situation. He went home to the docks of Irish Town, where he had grown up.

He met an old friend named Thomas Kling, whom Willie called Tommy. Tommy was thrilled to see Willie, and took him back to his apartment. Over the next couple days, Tommy gathered new clothes and some money for Willie.

Willie would have loved to stay longer, but he knew he couldn't afford to. After the police finished scouring Philadelphia for him, they would move on to the next logical place, his hometown in New York. If Willie had any chance of staying free, he needed to disappear. He found the perfect cover, through, of all things, a local employment agency. Willie found a job at an old age home on Staten Island.

He thought he would move on in a couple months, he just needed a place to hide until the immediate heat died down. But he ended up staying for two and a half years. Willie was 45 years old. when he initially took the job. He was a helper who was responsible for cleaning, mopping, and polishing things around the place.

But over time, Willie's role grew to be more meaningful than that. He grew attached to the people living in the home, and they grew attached to him, though of course, they didn't know him as Willie Sutton. To them, he was Eddie Lynch. He was also Eddie Lynch to a nurse's aide at the home named Nora Mahoney. They soon became a couple and started living together.

Willie was happy. He was enjoying a calm, quiet, peaceful life for the first time in decades. But he also missed the thrill of a heist. After a few months had passed at the old age home, Willie started going back into the city. on his days off.

He met up with his pal Tommy Kling, who was also a professional thief. And when two robbers got together, there was only one topic of conversation, their next big job. Soon, Willie developed a new routine. Every day after work, he took short trips to New Jersey, to Newark and Elizabeth, across Newark Bay, and sometimes to Trenton, 40 miles south. The trips were scouting missions for banks to rob.

Willie and Tommy pulled off a series of smaller bank jobs on the weekends. Like school kids with weekend jobs, Willie and Tommy were weekend bank robbers. The money was decent, and Willie wasn't worried about being caught in the middle of a robbery. It was the aftermath that scared him. He knew the police would eventually figure out he was behind the string of bank robberies.

He was right, but it only happened after he and Tommy hit a much bigger target, Manufacturer's Trust Company in Sunnyside, Queens.

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The story generated so much interest from the public that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover decided to make the concept permanent. On March 14th, 1950, one year after the newspaper story, the FBI debuted its list of its 10 most wanted fugitives.

Of the 10 men who were featured in the newspaper story, only 4 were on the FBI's first list. Presumably, the other 6 were killed or captured in the year between the story and the list. And the list didn't debut with 10 men on it. Each day, starting March 14th, the FBI added a new name to the list. Technically, Willie Sutton was number 11 on the 10 most wanted list, but he was added on the same day as number 6 because the man who had been number 3 was caught just 2 days after he appeared on the list.

Within 4 days of the debut of the list, it led to its first arrest. Within a year and a half, 9 of the first 11 men were arrested. Only Henry Randolph Mitchell and Willie Sutton were still on the run. And of those two, only one was planning to rob a bank in New York.

Willie said some of the inspiration for the manufacturer's trust job was to take Nora Mahoney to Ireland. She'd always had a dream to visit the country where they both traced their lineage. But that was an expensive dream to fulfill. As Willie and Tommy planned the manufacturer's trust job in early 1950, they ran into unexpected trouble. A gang of robbers in Boston pulled a historic heist.

It's often called the crime of the century, and it's now referred to as the Great Brinks Robbery. On January 17th, 1950, 11 men robbed the Boston office of the Brinks Security Company. The company is best known for transporting cash and other valuables between banks and other locations. But at the end of each day, a sizable amount of money and valuables are returned to the Brinks building for safekeeping. On January 17th, 11 men, wearing coats, hats, and rubber masks that are often referred to as Halloween masks, broke into the building and stole $1.2 million in cash and an additional $1.5 million in checks and securities.

Their haul of $2.

7 million worth of valuables set an American record, and it would be the equivalent of more than $34 million today. And because the robbers had worn disguises, and because the robber, who was famous for wearing disguises, was still free from prison, suspicion for the Great Brinks Robbery naturally fell on Willie Sutton. In short, he didn't do it. But the suspicion was logical, and it forced him to lay low. Two months later, in March 1950, he decided he was ready to do his own robbery.

He told Nora he was involved in a real estate deal that was about to close, and he would have to go away for a few days to take care of it. The real estate deal was actually the robbery of the Manufacturer's Trust Company in Queens. Willie's plan for the heist was simple. He had spent several days looking over the bank and had noted the routine. The guard came in first at 8.30 a.m., and then the rest of the employees filed in between 8.30 and 9, and the bank manager showed up last at 9 a.m.

If Willie timed it correctly, he and Tommy Kling could capture all the employees, force the manager to open the vault, and walk away with the money before the bank even opened for business.

The day of the heist was March 9, 1950, five days before the debut of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, and 11 days before Willie Sutton's name would be added to it. The guard entered the branch of the Manufacturer's Trust Company on Queens Boulevard in the Sunnyside neighborhood at his usual time of 8.30 a.m. When Willie walked up to the front door shortly thereafter, the guard already had his nose buried deep in a newspaper. The guard didn't even look up as he put the key in the lock and turned it. He just assumed, as always, that the figure he could see in his periphery was an employee.

As the guard stepped back into the bank, still reading his newspaper, Willie simply followed him inside. Once the door was shut, Willie pulled out his gun and threatened to use it unless the guard listened to him. It was that easy. Willie told the guard to stick to his routine. when the employees arrived.

That way, they would enter without suspicion. Willie tied the guard's leg to a radiator near the vestibule so he couldn't run away. Willie quickly let in his partner, Tommy Kling, and their getaway driver, John DiVinuta. In short order, the employees started arriving. The robbers rounded them up and herded them into a conference room.

Willie made it a point to tell the hostages exactly what his plan was. To wait for the manager, take the money, and get out without hurting anyone. In his long career, he had found that frightened people were unpredictable. But if you just tell them what's going on, people are much more obedient. The bank manager was four minutes late.

But when he arrived, Willie marched him down to the vault. He told him that the fate of all his employees was in his hands, so he'd better open it up. The manager relented. Willie, scooped up the cash and headed for the exit. His partners were already in motion as Willie walked out the front door with nearly $64,000, the equivalent of more than $800,000.

today. John DiVinuta and Tommy Kling were in the car with the engine running when Willie climbed in. As always, this was the most critical time in a robbery. Within a few seconds of the robbers leaving the bank, the employees would rush to the alarms. That process was happening behind the robbers as they drove west on Queens Boulevard.

The branch of the Manufacturer's Trust Company was in a great location for a fast getaway. It was right on Queens Boulevard, just a couple miles from the Queensborough Bridge, which crosses into midtown Manhattan. The robbers were already starting to cross the bridge when they heard police sirens arriving at the bank behind them. In minutes, they were in the congestion and chaos of Manhattan, and the police were none the wiser. By nightfall, they had dumped the getaway car and were celebrating their riches at Tommy's apartment.

Later, Willie took his share of the money, something like $21,000, and journeyed home to Staten Island. He was in high spirits, and he knew Nora would be waiting for him with a cup of tea. He couldn't wait to tell her that they were going to Ireland. But the minute he walked through the door, Willie knew something was wrong. Nora was waiting for him, but when he saw her face, he knew she had found out the truth.

A newspaper had picked up the story that a man calling himself Eddie Lynch, who worked at an old-age home on Staten Island, bore a striking resemblance to the fugitive bank robber Willie Sutton, who had escaped from prison three years earlier.

Willie was caught by surprise. The best story he could come up with was that he had a half-brother who was always in trouble. The black sheep of the family, who looked just like Willie. Willie claimed he had lost several jobs and had even been arrested because of the similarity in appearance. Willie watched Nora carefully as he told her the story, and he could tell she wasn't buying it.

Willie knew what he had to do. It broke his heart, but he had to leave. Even worse, he would have to lie to Nora one more time. Willie told her that he would go back to the city and bring her proof of his story, things like pictures of himself and his half-brother together as children. Willie left $700 of his heist money with Nora and told her that he would see her soon.

And that was the last time they spoke. As a fugitive, Willie was right to leave when he did. A few days later, the police showed up at the old-age home. They questioned everybody, and when they got to Nora, she told them everything she knew. Even though Nora volunteered the information, the police gave her a hard time.

They held her in a women's jail for a period of time. And a situation like that was one of Willie's biggest regrets, the fact that other people had to pay for his crimes.

The manhunt for Willie Sutton escalated, and Willie went back to Manhattan and stayed with Tommy Kling. As Willie grew more fearful of being recognized, he turned to the same technique to disguise himself that John Dillinger had used 16 years earlier. He tried to make his skin darker and dyed his hair, and then he contacted a doctor about plastic surgery. He told the doctor that he wanted surgery on his nose because its unshapely appearance had caused him to get into fights in his younger days. The doctor agreed to help, and he performed the surgery.

Much like Dillinger's, before and after, and with the benefit of hindsight and photo comparisons, Willie doesn't appear to look dramatically different. But like Dillinger, who reportedly strolled through police stations after his surgery without being recognized, Willie Sutton's surgery seemed to have worked well enough for a time. And again, like Dillinger, Willie started feeling more confident that he didn't have to hide every minute of the day. And Willie was a big believer in the concept of hiding in plain sight. He understood, like the best robbers did, that the smartest way to hide was to observe the same type of routine as everyone else.

That way, no one noticed you. But if you stayed inside all day and only left for a short time at night, the neighbors would get suspicious, and your attempt to hide would backfire. Willie rented two apartments, one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan. Willie's neighbors in Brooklyn knew him as a man called John Mahoney, who worked a regular day job. And the folks in Manhattan knew Willie as Arthur Buckley, who worked the night shift.

Between the two locations, Willie could come and go as he pleased, day or night, and still look like a normal, hard-working citizen. Over time, Willie's face healed from his surgery. And, as always, he was hard at work scouting his next heist. The robbery of the Manufacturer's Trust branch in Queens had gone so well, he decided to strike the company again. This time, he chose the branch on the southwest corner of West 14th Street and 8th Avenue in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

The bank was housed in a classic old stone building with big columns in front. Today, and since 2018,, the building is home to the New York location of the Museum of Illusions. But in early 1952, it was home to one of the busiest banks in the city, though it wasn't the busy nature of the bank or one of the bank's unique features that caused problems for Willie Sutton. It was that damned FBI Most Wanted list.

Within 18 months of the debut of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list in March of 1950, nine of the first ten men on the list had been arrested. By 1952, Willie Sutton was easily the most prominent fugitive on the list. But a year and a half earlier, in July of 1950, Willie's partner, Tommy Kling, had also been added to the list. So by the time the two partners were planning to rob the branch of Manufacturer's Trust in Chelsea, they were two of the most wanted men in America. In February 1952, it had been exactly five years since Willie successfully broke out of Holmesburg Prison outside Philadelphia.

On February 18th, eight days after the five-year anniversary of the prison break, the freedom ride was coming to an end. That day was a comedy of errors in the life of Willie Sutton. It was the kind of day that if modern audiences saw it in a movie, they would laugh and say it's too far-fetched. The filmmakers are making everything too convenient. It would never happen that way in real life.

Except it did. Sometimes. that's what life is. A series of crazy coincidences or random intersections that would seem absurd in a movie but actually happen all the time. In Willie Sutton's case, it was the intersection of not one but two broken-down cars, a true crime fan, and a pencil-thin mustache.

Before the upcoming heist, Willie bought a new car. He had planned to use it for the job, but he needed to get fake license plates first. Before he could do that, Tommy Kling called. He wanted a meeting. Willie thought it was a good idea for the crew to meet to finalize the plan for the robbery, so he jumped in his new car to head to Tommy's apartment.

When Willie turned the key, the car wouldn't start. The battery was dead. Willie walked to a nearby service station to get a mechanic to look at the car, but he hit another problem. The mechanic was late for work. Willie learned it would be at least an hour before the man arrived, and Willie had a meeting to go to.

He took the subway to Tommy's house, and when he arrived, the first thing Tommy said was, Where's your car? It turned out. Tommy's car was also in the shop, and Tommy needed a ride somewhere. Willie was exasperated, but he agreed to go back to his mechanic, get the guy to fix his car, then drive it back to Tommy's house. Willie hustled to the subway, but he was almost late catching the next train.

He ran through the turnstile and managed to squeeze through the subway doors just as they were closing. At least that part of the day had been lucky. He made it to the train. It was the only lucky thing that had happened thus far, and it would be the last. On that train, at that exact time, was 24-year-old Arnold Schuster.

Arnold worked for his father at his family's tailor shop, and Arnold loved crime stories. When he wasn't working at the shop, he was reading about the latest unsolved crimes in New York. By 1952, Willie Sutton's name was at the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list, and it appeared in newspapers all the time, especially after the police had been close to catching him on Staten Island. Arnold was such a true crime fan that he had the FBI's Most Wanted poster of Willie Sutton tacked to a wall of the tailor shop. For two years, Arnold had looked at the poster almost every day.

It featured Willie's photo, plus five more that were artist renditions of what Willie would look like with a variety of mustaches. The FBI knew Willie liked to disguise himself, and they hoped the variations would help the public recognize him. As it happened, Willie had chosen that day to draw a pencil-thin mustache on his face in an effort to disguise himself. It may have fooled 99.9% of people on Earth, but not Arnold Schuster, who had spent two years looking at a poster of what Willie would look like with that exact type of mustache. And imagine Arnold's surprise when he looked up and saw the face from the poster in a crowded subway train.

Arnold Schuster recognized the FBI's Most Wanted fugitive almost immediately. And that's how it can happen in life. If the battery in Willie's new car hadn't died, if the mechanic wasn't running late, if Tommy's car wasn't in the shop, if Willie hadn't tried to disguise himself with the mustache, and if Arnold Schuster, true crime fan, hadn't been riding that exact train at that exact time, who knows how it all would have turned out.

Next time on Infamous America, the what-ifs continue and turn into an incredible string of near-misses and potential opportunities. Even after Willie Sutton sees the inside of a police station for the first time in nearly 20 years, he has ways out if he chooses to take them. But in the end, he remains a gentleman, true to his reputation, and he solidifies his place in American crime history. That's next week on the season finale of the Willie Sutton story here on Infamous America.

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Original music by Rob Vallier. 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 BBarrel Media on Twitter, and you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast.

Thanks for listening.