Where the Money Was The Memoirs of a Bank Robber

Irishtown Made Me I was born on June 30, 1901, on the corner of Nassau and Gold in a section along the Brooklyn docks known as Irishtown. When I was three, we moved over one block to High Street, between Gold Street and Bridge Street, and about five years later we moved down the block from 183 High to 227 High. Irishtown was wedged in between the East River on the north, the Navy Yard on the east, and the Washington Street entrance approach to the Brooklyn Bridge off to the west. To pin my own neighborhood down more closely, the Manhattan Bridge was built while I was nine or ten and we kids used to drive everybody crazy by clambering up the structural ironwork which was going up only a block away from my house. It was a workingman's neighborhood of one- and two-family dwellings and small neighborhood stores in which credit was extended from payday to payday. We weren't bad off, considering. My father, William Francis Sutton, Sr.--I'm William Francis, Jr.--was a hard-working blacksmith who earned fifteen dollars a week, which was not a bad salary in those days. A blacksmith at that time was like an automobile mechanic today. No matter how bad the times got, there was always a place somewhere for a good one. My mother's father, who was totally blind, lived with us, and so did her brothers, John and Jim, plus John's wife, my Aunt Alice. My grandfather had gone blind from working over the coffee roasters for the A & P stores, and he had a pension. The others all worked and contributed to the upkeep of the house. We were the first family in the neighborhood to have a Victrola, a brand-new Victor in which the music was produced from round cylinders and projected through a cone-shaped horn. It was a tough neighborhood, but it was a toughness without any strut or swagger. There was constant warfare for control of the docks, because to control the docks meant that you controlled the gambling, the loan-sharking, the pilfering, and the kickbacks. Plus the loading racket, which was the sweetest racket of all. Two rackets really. A flat rate, otherwise known as extortion, was levied against the importer, and then another charge was levied against the truckers for every crate they loaded. Lead pipes and brass knuckles were standard equipment. Murder was commonplace. No one was ever convicted. A code of silence was observed in Irishtown more faithfully than omerts is observed by the Mafia. A code of silence that was to have a powerful influence on my life. Since it was all muscle, the gang members were generally in their late teens or early twenties and therefore very easy for a kid to identify with. The dock boss--the leader--would usually be a little older, all the way up into his mid-twenties, maybe. They gained control by killing their predecessors, and they in turn were killed by their successors. Two years was a long time for a dock boss to stay alive; the turnover was very rapid. They were beaten to a pulp on a dark street; they were shot or stabbed and dumped into the water. Bill Lovert, my first idol, held power longer than most. A slim man, not very tall, with a sure sense of command and a vibrant personality. Or, at any rate, he was before he had his head bashed in along the docks one night. His successor, Dinny Meehan, was the only dock boss I can remember who died in bed. By which I mean that somebody slipped in through his bedroom window while he was asleep and put a bullet in his brain. It wasn't only the gangs that were at war with the police. Everybody was. If a man was arrested, his whole family would run alongside the paddy wagon screaming: "Stop beating my husband!" "Stop beating my son!" "They're murdering my daddy!" The word would go out and in a matter of minutes all his friends would gather outside the police headquarters at Poplar Street and set up a clamor: "Murderers! Cowards! Leave theSutton, Willie is the author of 'Where the Money Was The Memoirs of a Bank Robber', published 2004 under ISBN 9780767916325 and ISBN 0767916328.