The Actor & the Bulls

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.

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.

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