Infamous criminal and prison escape artist Willie Sutton is perhaps best known today for the reason why he robbed banks: “because that’s where the money is,” a comment he might not have even said. Starting his career in crime in Park Slope in 1910 at the age of 9, Sutton reached national prominence on the first FBI Most Wanted List, but was captured back on Dean Street in 1952.
Sutton stole more than $2 million during his career. He was a master of disguises, earning him the nicknames “The Actor” and “Slick Willie.” When not in disguise, he was apparently a sharp dresser. He was also good at breaking out of prison, escaping for the last time in 1932.
He never killed anyone during his career. Although he carried weapons in the course of his robberies, they reportedly were never loaded, because he didn’t want anyone to get hurt. The guns were just for show. The New York Times obituary on Sutton said: “It was banks that presented irresistible challenges to him. Often, according to the police, he would leave a bank with a cheering admonition for his frightened victims: ‘Don’t worry, the insurance will cover this.'”
After escaping in 1932, Slick Willie robbed a few more banks, but then laid low for many years. When the FBI created its “Most Wanted” list, in 1950, Sutton was 11th on the list.
Two years after Sutton made that list, 24-year-old Arnold Schuster was helping out in his father’s tailor shop at 5507 Fifth Ave. in Sunset Park. A bit of an amateur detective, Schuster was fascinated by the Most Wanted poster that FBI agents had dropped off in his father’s shop. Schuster studied it carefully for months, and became very familiar with the mugs on the poster.
After shopping in downtown Brooklyn on Feb. 18, 1952, Schuster boarded a downtown BMT train at the DeKalb Avenue station for the trip home. Seated across from him was a face he recognized from the Most Wanted poster. The man across the aisle looked down, then got off the train at the next stop: Pacific Street in Park Slope.
Schuster followed his man to a gas station on Third Avenue and Bergen Street. He then flagged down a couple of police officers, saying, “I think that guy is Willie Sutton.”
The officers trailed the man back to Dean Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, where they found him changing a dead battery in his car in front of his rooming house at 340 Dean. The officers questioned him, and ultimately took him over to the precinct house at Sixth Avenue and Bergen, just a few blocks away, where he was positively identified as the notorious bank robber and escapee.
The capture of Sutton was a huge news story. When Schuster’s role in it was made known, he started receiving threatening phone calls and letters. One letter read: “You don’t have long to live … Willie has friends.”
Less than three weeks later, on the evening of March 8, Schuster left his father’s tailor shop and began walking to his home about a mile away at 941 45th St. in Borough Park. He never made it. A few doors from his home, near the corner of Ninth Avenue and 45th Street, he was gunned down, shot once in each eye and twice in the groin, if certain accounts can be believed. His body was found in the driveway adjacent to 913 45th St. Despite a massive manhunt, his killer or killers were never apprehended.
Albert Anastasia, a leader of one of the so-called Mafia families, had supposedly ordered Schuster to be offed after seeing the story on television, exclaiming: “I can’t stand squealers! Hit that guy!”
After decades in prison, Sutton was released in 1969. Upon his death in 1980 at the age of 79, he was buried in Brooklyn, at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Flatbush. “His name is not on the tomb,” his sister Helen Mottola told the Times. “He specifically said that if anything ever happened to him he just wanted it very quiet and no one was to be notified. He had enough publicity during his lifetime.”
In 2003, when I first heard this story, 340 Dean St. was still standing, although abandoned and boarded up. But even five decades after his capture and 23 years after his death, Willie Sutton was not forgotten. Spray-painted on the doorway, back in 2003, superimposed with “KEEP OUT,” were the words “Willy [sic] Sutton RIP.”
Sometime in the last year or so, 340 Dean was demolished to make way for what will undoubtedly be marketed as another luxury condo tower. The site has been quiet of late, with no sign of its role in Brooklyn’s criminal history.
— This article was adapted from the Save the Slope blog by Civic Council trustee David Alquist.
from the January 2011 Civic News