Willie Sutton

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Sutton

William "Willie" Francis Sutton Jr. (born June 30, 1901 in Greenpoint (Brooklyn) , New York City , † November 2, 1980 in Spring Hill , Florida ) was an American serial bank robber and folk hero. He got along with people without the use of firearms, and never injured or killed anyone. And he escaped spectacularly from several maximum security prisons.

Life

Sutton grew up as the son of a farrier in the Irish Town in Brooklyn , then a poor slum where many new immigrants from Ireland lived. He left school at the top of his class and worked for a bank for almost a year, to the great satisfaction of his superiors. Then he and almost all of the younger employees were fired because of an economic depression. As a result of these not infrequent economic crashes, the young people of his generation not only occasionally had the impression that they had no regular chance at paid work and that US society simply did not need them.

Sutton therefore switched to bank robbery, so he looted a total of nominally about $ 2,000,000. He became the first new addition to the FBI's initial list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives on March 20, 1950 . Sutton was arrested for the last time in February 1952 on a tip from the salesman Arnold Schuster. Schuster was murdered the following month, presumably on the instructions of Albert Anastasia , although Anastasia was not directly known to Sutton. Until his death, however, it was speculated that Sutton himself played a role as a possible client in the murder of the traitor Schuster.

Sutton survived his long prison term by reading classics and world literature intensively. He came to writing through reading. Sutton recorded his own life in two autobiographical works. In addition, several authors have dealt with it, u. a. JR Moehringer .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b see JR Moehringer: Sutton
  2. ↑ Willie Sutton and Edward Linn: Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robbery. Broadway, 2004, ISBN 0767916328 .
  3. ↑ Willie Sutton and Quentin Reynolds: I, WILLIE SUTTON . Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 1999.
  4. ^ JR Moehringer: Sutton . Hyperion , New York 2012 (German: Knapp am Herz , translated by Brigitte Jakobeit. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2013. ISBN 978-3-10-049603-4 ).

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personal data
SURNAME Sutton, Willie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sutton Jr., William Francis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American serial bank robber and folk hero
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Greenpoint (Brooklyn) , Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH November 2, 1980
Place of death Spring Hill , Florida