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A Guy Named Gordon. "Don't think I'm crazy," he told them, "but I think Willie Sutton is down at the corner." Shea and McClellan drove down the street, got out and asked, "Are you Willie Sutton?" Willie didn't bat an eye. "Willie Sutton?" he said. "Hell, no. My name's Gordon." With that he handed over a fake driver's license bearing the name Charles Gordon and went back to tinkering with his Chevrolet. The two cops got apologetically back in their car and drove away.
At the stationhouse they told Third Grade Detective Louis Weiner: "Well, we almost caught Willie Sutton, but he turned out to be a guy named Gordon." Weiner saved the day by hustling them back for a second look. Willie, who was calmly going on about his business, was hauled in to be fingerprinted. The embarrassing disclosures did not end there. Willie, with $7,733 in bills and a loaded .38-caliber pistol in his coat, had been left sitting around the stationhouse for an hour before anyone thought to frisk him. On top of that, it developed that he had lived in a $6-a-week room within three blocks of the police station all during the two years since he robbed the bank.
Red-faced, but clutching a surefire clue —an address book which Willie had carelessly left in his room—the cops set out to brighten up their tarnished honor. They picked up Willie's girl friend, a forlorn Irish immigrant named Margaret Mary Moore. She had met him in a park, where both went to feed pigeons, and she knew him only as John Mahoney, a kind, gentle, lonely man who occasionally took her to dinner and the movies and was "always a gentleman."
Members of the Club. But Willie's black book led them to bigger game, too. The police arrested his spectacled pal, Thomas ("Mad Dog") Kling, who, like Willie, was one of the FBI's ten most wanted criminals. In Kling's apartment they found three pistols, 19 handcuffs and six empty money bags—a haul which made them strongly suspect that Willie had been planning another big robbery. One John Venuta, another friend of Willie's, blundered into Kling's apartment and was grabbed too.
While all this was going on, Willie announced that he was through with crime and was writing his memoirs. If he had threatened to blow up the jail he could not have been guarded more closely. When he was arraigned, a double rank of armed bluecoats stood around him, and a burly bailiff kept a hand gripped on Willie's belt as though he were afraid Willie was going to flap off out the window.
But over the whole proceedings hung an atmosphere of uncertainty. Well-read Willie once commented on the escape of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte-Cristo: "Imagine anyone taking 14 years to spring himself out of an old dump like that." Willie has always worked faster: he sawed his way out of the escape-proof wing at Sing Sing in 18 months, dug a 90-ft. tunnel out of Philadelphia's Eastern State Prison in 1945. Last week it was hard for a cop to keep from, wondering how soon he would have to be hunting for Willie all over again.