CRIME The Actor & the Bulls In two decades of robbing banks and big jewelry stores, hollow-cheeked Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, 51, got away with close to a million dollars. His audacity, his passion for detail, his penchant for masquerade, kept two generations of New York and Philadelphia cops in an almost continuous state of heavy-breathing frustration. And when the bulls caught Willie they usually compounded their own embarrassment—"Slick Willie" repeatedly demonstrated a genius for escaping from prisons.
When Willie slipped out of Pennsylvania's tough county prison at Holmesburg five years ago—after donning a guard's uniform and waving jauntily to real guards on the walls—many a police inspector ground his molars into a veritable paste and detectives hurled so many cigars into so many stationhouse cuspidors that the night trembled to a sound not unlike the clashing of Oriental gongs. Willie came to New York and got a city job as a porter in an old folks' home. After three quiet years he led five helpers into a Queens branch of the Manufacturers Trust Company, asked employees to take chairs, politely bundled up $63,942 and vanished again.
Sirens moaned. Stoolpigeons were squeezed like grapefruit. No juice, no Willie. He was automatically suspected of pulling Boston's million-dollar Brink's, Inc. robbery in 1950. But, after two years had passed, many a bluecoat began to guess hopefully that the king of U.S. bank robbers must be dead. Then, one afternoon last week, an electrifying message clacked out on New York's police teletypes: Willie Sutton had just been arrested in Brooklyn.
Unwilling Celebrity. Police Commissioner George P. Monaghan leaped into a car and set out for Brooklyn, where a jostling crowd of awed detectives were craning at Willie like bobby-soxers goggling at Frank Sinatra. Triumphantly, after suitable briefing and a fond look at Willie himself, the commissioner called in the press and announced: "We've just caught the Babe Ruth of bank robbers."
The reporters were told how two uniformed radio car patrolmen, Joseph Mc-Clellan and Donald Shea, had spotted Willie tinkering with the battery of a 1951 Chevrolet on a street close to the station. "Hey," Shea recalled saying, "that looks like Willie the Actor." Turning, McClellan had answered: "Don, I think you're right." When braced, Willie had naturally denied his identity. But the two coppers, the commissioner delightedly made clear, had not been fooled.
Shea drove back to the station and got Third-Grade Detective Louis Weiner. Mc-Clellan kept watch. And in a few minutes the three closed in again and seized the glittering prize. "The best collar in recent years," said the commissioner. Beaming, the commissioner dramatically promoted both Shea and McClellan to first-grade detective with a $1,000-a-year raise.
A day later the commissioner learned the disconcerting truth. A 24-year-old pants salesman named Arnold Schuster had recognized Willie while riding on the subway, had trailed him to a gasoline station, where the bank robber got a battery for his stalled automobile, and had then gone up to the radio car in which Policemen Shea and McClellan were lounging.