Willie Sutton

[1] During his forty-year robbery career he stole an estimated $2 million, and he eventually spent more than half of his adult life in prison and escaped three times.[3] His family lived on the corner of Gold and Nassau Streets in the neighborhood of Irishtown, Brooklyn, now called Vinegar Hill.In conversation with Donald Frankos he would sadly reminisce about the 1920s and 1930s when he was most active in robbing banks and would always tell fellow convicts that in his opinion, during the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, the criminals were the bloodiest.Frankos declared that Sutton made legendary bank thieves Jesse James and John Dillinger seem like amateurs.[citation needed] The FBI record observes: Sutton also conducted a Broadway jewelry store robbery in broad daylight, impersonating a postal telegraph messenger.Sutton was apprehended on February 5, 1934, and was sentenced to serve 25 to 50 years in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the machine gun robbery of the Corn Exchange Bank.[citation needed] During February 1952, Sutton was captured by police after having been recognized on a subway and followed by Arnold Schuster, a 24-year-old Brooklyn clothing salesman and amateur detective.According to Mafia renegade and first major government informant, Joe Valachi, Anastasia ordered the murder of Schuster, who was then shot dead outside his home on March 9, 1952.Judge Peter T. Farrell presided over a 1952 trial in which Sutton was convicted of the 1950 robbery of $63,942 (equal to $809,755 presently) from a bank of the Manufacturers Trust Company in Sunnyside, Queens.In December of 1969, Farrell ruled that Sutton's good behavior, along with his deteriorating health, justified commuting his sentence to time served.He made a television commercial for New Britain Bank and Trust Company in Connecticut for their credit card with picture identification on it.The quote evolved into Sutton's law, which is often invoked to medical students as a metaphor for emphasizing the most likely diagnosis, rather than wasting time and money investigating every conceivable possibility.In his autobiography, Sutton denied originating the pithy rejoinder: The irony of using a bank robber's maxim as an instrument for teaching medicine is compounded, I will now confess, by the fact that I never said it.