They leave Dean Street, cruise south on Fourth. At a red light Photographer sets his camera on his lap, pats it like a dog. He opens his camera bag, picks a lens, checks it for smudges—fixes it to his camera like a bayonet.
Locked and loaded, he says to Sutton’s reflection in the rearview. Show time, brother.
The light is green, Reporter says.
Photographer hits the gas.
Reporter unwraps a candy bar, puts half in his mouth, opens a file. So—Mr. Sutton. February 18, 1952. According to this article you’re living on Dean Street, dating Margaret, knocking off a bank every few weeks with two guys. Tommy Kling and Johnny DeVenuta?
Sutton loosens his tie. Mad Dog and Dee, he says. Yeah.
Walk us through that day.
I was supposed to take Margaret to the doctor to see about her eye.
What was wrong with her eye?
It kept getting bigger.
Bigger?
We didn’t know why. And she was afraid of doctors. So I had to insist, and promise to go with her. I had coffee that morning with Mad Dog. Then I headed back to Brooklyn. I was late. As I walked down the steps of the subway station I heard the train coming. I ran. All out. Like Jackie Robinson stealing home. Imagine kid?
Imagine what?
How much would be different. If I hadn’t run. If I hadn’t jumped through those doors just as they were closing. If I hadn’t had a dime in my pocket. If the fare had still been a nickel. You know who kept the subway fare a nickel all those years? Mr. Untermyer. He practically ran the transportation system in New York. But he died.
What would be different?
For openers? We wouldn’t be sitting in this goddamn car right now.
The cops return minutes later.
Mr. Loring, Right Cop says. We’re going to need you to come with us.
What’s the trouble, Officer?
Left Cop hitches his pants. There’s been a rash of car thefts in this neighborhood. Our sergeant wants us to check everything.
I showed you my license and registration.
Yes sir, Right Cop says. It’s just routine.
Willie shrugs, drops the hood. He follows the cops to their squad car, climbs in the backseat.
Where are we going?
The Seven Eight. It’s only a half mile away.
Willie tells them he’s got to take his girlfriend to the doctor.
We’ll have you back to your car in no time, Right Cop says.
You having some engine trouble? Left Cop says.
Dead battery, Willie says.
We can give you a jump when we get this all cleared up, Left Cop says.
At the precinct they lead him through a door with a pebbled glass panel. An interrogation room. All his old scars tingle.
Coffee, Mr. Loring?
Sure, thanks.
He sits at the table. They take his fingerprints. Procedure, Mr. Loring.
I understand, fellas. Doing your jobs. Mind if I smoke?
Go right ahead. Where you from, Mr. Loring?
Brooklyn. Born and raised.
You a Dodgers fan, Mr. Loring?
Och—don’t remind me.
They talk about Branca. Sutton’s got a .22 tucked into the breast pocket of his suit coat.
What line of work you in, Mr. Loring?
I’m a writer.
You don’t say. That seems like a tough racket.
It is, it is.
What kinds of things you write?
Novels. Stories. I don’t sell much, but my folks left me a little money, so I get by.
More coffee, Mr. Loring?
Sure. You fellas make it strong. That’s how I make it at home.
Left Cop leaves, comes back. Right Cop leaves, comes back with a detective. They ask about the car, the battery, then they all leave. Then Right Cop and Left Cop come back and they make some more small talk about the Dodgers. From outside the room, far down the hall, a cheer. As if Thomson just hit another homer. Loud voices, hasty footsteps, the door with the pebbled glass rattles and bangs open. In walk three, five, ten cops, and half a dozen detectives, all grinning. No one speaks. No one is sure who should start. Finally one of the detectives steps forward. Hello, he says.
Hello, Willie says.
It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Willie the Actor.
Laughter.
Someone tells Willie to stand. Someone else frisks him. When they discover the .22, the laughter abruptly ceases. Right Cop and Left Cop look at each other, then at the floor.
And so it ends.
And also begins again.
They book Willie, photograph him, interrogate him. They ask who he’s working with, who’s been hiding him, where he stashed all his money. They ask about his friends, girlfriends, partners.
He stares.
They ask again.
He stares, smokes.
Then they do something shocking. They sit back, smile. Willie’s refusal to talk is part of his legend, and the cops are enjoying that he’s being true to form. They accord him a grudging respect. They ask if he’d like another cup of coffee. They offer him a donut.
At dusk they politely ask him to stand, he’s going to Queens.
Why Queens? he asks.
We have witnesses who put you at the Manufacturers Trust job in Queens.
I don’t see how, he says. Wasn’t me.
He’s already plotting his defense. He’s thinking of how good a lawyer he might be able to afford. If the cops don’t hate him, maybe a judge won’t. Maybe the system will go easy on him. At the very least maybe he can stop them from sending him back to Holmesburg.
The hallway is full of reporters, photographers, gawkers. Two cops stop Willie at the front door, where the police commissioner takes him by the elbow and gives a speech. The commissioner must be running for something. He praises Left Cop and Right Cop, praises the entire force. Then, in a moment that feels both political and personal, he shouts: We’ve got him! We’ve caught the Babe Ruth of Bank Robbers!
Flashbulbs pop—a sound like carbonated beverages being uncapped. Willie grimaces, not at the lights, but the nickname, which will be splattered across tomorrow’s front pages, and along the Times Square headline zipper. He likes Babe Ruth. But couldn’t the commissioner have compared him to a Dodger? Would it have killed the commissioner to call Willie the Jackie Robinson of Bank Robbers?
In Queens they give Willie a private cell with a cop at the door around the clock. He lies on his bunk thinking of Margaret. Will she see the news? Will she be bold enough, foolish enough, to visit? He thinks of Bess—same question. At midnight the warden appears. Open it, he tells the cop at the door.
Willie stands. The warden gives him a look that’s hard to read. Hello, Willie.
Hello, Warden.
Willie Sutton.
Yes sir.
In my jail. Willie the Actor.
Some call me that.
Born June 30, 1901.
I take people’s word for that. I don’t remember.
Anything you need, Willie?
Need?
Yes, Willie.
Now Willie sees: the white hair, the blue eyes, the face lined with red veins like a bus map of Belfast. Warden is Irish.
Gee, Warden, I’d love a book.
He can see that Warden wants to smile, to wink, but his position, his role, prevents it.
A book, Willie?
I’m a big reader.
You don’t say, Willie. Me too. What book would you like?
Warden tells the dozens of reporters outside the jail that Willie the Actor has requested the epic historical novel by John Dos Passos—1919. The reporters breathlessly include this detail in their stories and none knows its significance. Despite the private cell, despite the cop at the door, Willie Sutton has escaped again. He’s in 1919, with Bess. He’s never really been anywhere else.
New York is enthralled by the story of Willie’s capture. Left Cop and Right Cop, even though they didn’t kn
ow at first whom they’d caught, get the hero treatment. They’re pictured on every front page, shaking hands with the mayor, accepting a promotion from the commissioner. A red-letter day for two conscientious cops, outfoxing the slickest fox ever, that’s how the story plays, until everything goes haywire. The kid from the subway comes forward and tells the newspapers it was he who spotted the Actor, he who followed the Actor off the subway—he who alerted the cops. The kid walked up to the nearest radio car and said, Don’t think I’m crazy, but there goes Willie Sutton. Left Cop and Right Cop checked Willie’s ID, decided the kid was indeed crazy. Then went back to the precinct. Luckily they told the story to the desk sergeant, who told them to go back and bring in this Julius Loring, just to be sure.
Naturally the kid wants the reward. For years banks have been touting a big payday for anyone with information leading to Sutton’s arrest. The amount is said to be north of seventy thousand dollars. The kid just got out of the Coast Guard, that kind of money could set him up for life. He could get married, start a family. Also, he tells reporters and cameras pressing in around him at the Seven Eight, he’d like to help his parents fix up their house in Brooklyn. Maybe even buy them a better house.
Shy, earnest, the kid says these things with a thick Brooklyn accent, just like Willie’s.
Reporters ask him how old he is.
Twenty-four, he says, as if it’s an accomplishment.
In fact he celebrated a birthday just days before spotting Willie on the train. He was born in February, of course, the month of all momentous occurrences in Willie’s life. Twenty-four years ago, just after Willie left Dannemora and returned to the world, the kid was entering the world. His parents, Max and Ethel Schuster, named him Arnold.
Arnie to his friends.
The cops stonewall for a day or two, but they can’t win against Arnie’s Boy Scout face. They’re forced to admit that the first official version of events—vigilant beat cops, crackerjack police work—wasn’t quite accurate. With gritted teeth they usher Left Cop and Right Cop offstage and embrace Arnie Schuster, the Good Samaritan. For the cameras anyway.
If Arnie has irritated the cops, he’s infuriated parts of Brooklyn. To many he’s the rat who squealed on a hero. He’s the stoolie who put the finger on Willie the Actor. And he’s Jewish. Many of the death threats he receives are addressed: Dear Judas.
People know where to write him because every newspaper prints his address: 941 Forty-Fifth Street.
Meanwhile, the cops continue to search for Willie’s crew. They sift through the contents of his wallet, find his address, barrel into the boardinghouse on Dean Street. Landlady leads them upstairs to Willie’s room, where they discover tens of thousands of dollars, a small arsenal, and a bookcase overflowing with books. What shocks them most are the books. Newspapers publish the list. The bank robber’s syllabus.
Within a day bookstores sell out of Proust.
The room is also full of Willie’s paperwork. Sketchbooks, notebooks, a draft of a novel—and one slim address book stashed under the mattress. The cops find and arrest Mad Dog and Dee. And Margaret. When they kick in her door she’s lying in bed, a hand over her eyeball, now twice its normal size. Anguished, she pleads for a doctor. The cops won’t let her have one until she gives them information. She swears she knows nothing.
Cops and reporters fan across the city, visiting all the banks mentioned in Willie’s notes. They get a call from Head Nurse and race over to Staten Island, where they learn about Joseph the Porter, the Angel of the Farm Colony. Landlady helps fan the flames of Willie’s growing myth, telling one reporter that Willie was always a perfect gentleman, that he gave her money for a doctor when her son was sick, that he bought her roses for her birthday. The cops want to question her daughter, who was tutoring Willie in Spanish. The daughter tells the cops to suck eggs, which makes her a heroine in the barrio.
A week after his arrest Willie is lying on his bunk. He lifts his head. He hears something. It sounds at first like the breakers at Coney Island.
Guard?
Yeah.
What is that?
Crowd.
Where?
Outside.
What are they doing?
Chanting?
What for?
You.
Me?
Willie cups his ear, trying to make it out.
WILL-ie, WILL-ie, WILL-ie.
The guard turns, eyes him through the bars. With heavy sarcasm he says, You’re a hero.
Willie hears only the word, not the sarcasm.
Photographer turns left on Ninth. Reporter, rifling through files, speaks quickly:
Arnie Schuster’s poor mailman. That guy was busy in February and March of ’52. Death threats started pouring into the Schuster house. Crude, unpunctuated, misspelled. Here’s a nice one. Mac—Your number is up. You stooled on Sutton. You know what happens to double-crossers. You’re finished. Signed, One of the boys.
The newspapers printed the threats, Sutton says. Which encouraged more people to make threats.
Here’s another one, Reporter says. A model of simplicity: Rat Rat Rat.
Photographer looks in the rearview. Hey—what happened to Margaret? Your girlfriend?
Sutton lights a Chesterfield, looks out the window.
Willie?
Her eye, Sutton says.
What about it?
It just—I don’t know how to say it. Exploded.
It did what?
Margaret kept begging to see a doctor, and the cops kept refusing, and the tumor in her eye—that’s what it turned out to be—just—exploded. An infection set in. She went blind. She sued New York for negligence. I don’t know what became of the suit. I wrote to her many times, but I never heard back. She just disappeared.
Around midnight, when the chanting crowds have gone home, when the jail is quiet, Warden stops by Willie’s cell. He confesses to Willie: he grew up in Irish Town. Not far from the corner of Nassau and Gold. He even went to St. Ann’s. They talk about the old neighborhood. They talk about swimming the East River.
Most often they talk about books. They love all the same authors. The warden mentions Joyce.
Put two Irishmen in a cell, Willie says, sooner or later they’ll talk about Joyce.
Warden laughs. I reread Ulysses once a year, he says. History is a nightmare from which I’m—you know.
I’m partial to the stories. I tried reading Ulysses during my last bit. I only made it as far as Episode 12.
The Cyclops! Sure. The scene in the pub—with the anti-Semite.
Tough sledding. This go around, I guess I’ll have time to read it front to back.
Stately, plump, Warden offers Willie a smoke.
Chesterfield, Willie says. My brand.
I know, Willie. I know.
On March 8, 1952, around midnight, Willie is lying on his bunk, reading Dos Passos. Warden appears at the door. Willie sits up, slips in a bookmark. His mind is still with Eugene Debs and Henry Ford and William Hearst—he never knew that Hearst’s friends called him Willie.
How’s tricks, Warden?
He sees in Warden’s face, in the set of his mouth, that books could not be farther from his mind. O Warden let me up out of this.
Photographer hits the brakes. The Polara almost rams the back fender of a Buick that’s stopped for no apparent reason in the middle of the street. Photographer leans on the horn.
Go around, Reporter says to Photographer.
This asshole won’t move, Photographer says. Move, asshole!
Reporter, shouting to be heard over the horn, tells Sutton: Here’s an interesting story in the files. After spotting you on the subway Arnie went home and found his mother at the kitchen sink. He told her, Guess what—I just saw a thief. Arnie’s mother said, Go away with you, who’d you see? And Arnie said, I saw Willie Sutton. His mother said, Who’s that? And Arnie said, He’s a man police want, I pointed him out, I played detective today. Arnie’s mother recounted this convers
ation word for word to investigators. After—you know.
Poor Arnie, Photographer says.
He held up like a champ under the pressure, Reporter says. He wrote a pretty stiff-necked letter to one of his best friends, who’d just joined the Army. Want to hear it, Mr. Sutton?
No.
It’s dated March 4, 1952. Dear Herb—How are you, boy? How does the Texas weather agree with you? I’m sorry I didn’t write any sooner but as you know I’ve had plenty of excitement these past two, three weeks and I’ve been pretty busy. Now things are getting back to normal and I’m getting back to the same old grind. But let me tell you—it was murder.
Ah God, Sutton says.
It’s funny how your life can change from one day to the next. One day I’m just plain Arnie Schuster and the next I’m THE Mr. Schuster and now I’m back to just plain Arnie again. Oh well maybe I can realize something out of it. But even if I don’t I won’t be sorry. Right now I’ll just be happy to have the whole thing blow over. Arnie.
The banks fucked him, Sutton says.
The banks?
The banks didn’t pay him the reward. The banks said they never promised any reward. They said the newspapers made it all up about the reward. Arnie got nothing.
Fucking banks, Photographer says.
Interesting how many things you had in common, Mr. Sutton.
Who?
You and Arnie Schuster.
How do you figure?
Both sons of Brooklyn. Both Dodgers fans. Both folk heroes—and also public enemies. Both unpopular with cops.
Sutton closes his eyes. Out of a turmoil of speech about you.
Sorry?
I didn’t say anything.
Anyway, Reporter says, Arnie had a cold. He’d been in bed all week, and March 8 was his first day back on the job. He worked all day at his father’s clothing shop. About eight-thirty that night he phoned Eileen Reiter, sister of his best friend, Jay. Arnie and Jay belonged to a Brooklyn basement club—the Knaves.
Knaves? Sutton says.
Yeah. They’d get together once a week, plan social events, talk about girls. They’d fine each other a quarter for bad language.
Boy Scout, Sutton says.
Arnie and Eileen made a plan to meet up later that night. A party. First Arnie was going to head home, take a shower, change clothes. He locked the door to the shop, walked three blocks, boarded a bus on Fifth Avenue, rode to Ninth Avenue and Fiftieth, walked down five blocks to Forty-Fifth. He might’ve been thinking about the party. Or the reward. He might even have been thinking about you, Mr. Sutton. He had sixty seconds to live.
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