(Victor Alcorn)
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NYPD patrol cop Donald Shea spent his first four years on the job carrying a folded piece of paper that served as a wanted poster for William Francis Sutton.
Better known as “Willie the Actor” and “Slick Willie,” Sutton was the most famous bank robber in America, as well as a notorious prison escape artist.
Nabbed three times over a 25-year criminal career, he broke out three times and stole some $2 million from banks.
Shea had kept Sutton’s picture in his police memo book for so long it had become torn and faded.
“After a while, I even forgot I had it, with all the papers I had in my book,” Shea, now 86, recalled yesterday. “Once in a while, I would look at it. Knowing that he was a known bank robber and they were looking for him all those years, it was part of the job.”
Sixty years ago today, it changed his life forever.
Shea and his partner, Joseph McClellan, were in a radio car in Brooklyn “and this guy, Arnold Schuster, comes up to us and says he just saw Willie Sutton in the subway,” he said.
Schuster, a 24-year-old clothing salesman on his way home to Borough Park, spotted Sutton on a BMT train, got out at Pacific Street and told the cops he followed him to a gas station on Third Avenue.
“We went to the gas station, and there was no one there except a mechanic. We asked him if anyone was there recently and he said, yes, he bought a battery and went up Dean Street,” Shea said.
“We went up there, and there was a fellow standing there with the hood of the car up,” he said.
But the man, about 50, dressed in a white shirt and black slacks behind his 1951 Chevy sedan, said his name was Charles Gordon, and he had ID to prove it.
“He was a very cool guy, very calm,” Shea recalled.
“He said he lived in that house right there. ‘That’s my car,’ he said. “He was helpful. He had the driver’s license and everything was the way you would expect it was to be.
“He was like, ‘Oh, come on. This is too much.’ ”
Shea had the photo, but “it was beaten from carrying around in my wallet all those years, so I couldn’t quite make him out.”
The cops went back to their 66th Precinct station house in Borough Park and told Detective Louis Weiner. The three of them went to Dean Street, and Weiner asked the Chevy owner to come to the station to check his license.
“Sure,” the man said.
“He answered all the questions with no problems, but when we said we’ll have to fingerprint you . . . he said, ‘OK, you got me. I’m Willie Sutton,’ ” Shea recalled.
“From then on, we were floating on air.”
But there was another surprise when they checked him out.
“We proceeded to take his clothes off, but he got very uptight about that. He said, ‘This is embarrassing,’ when it came to taking his pants down. We said, ‘Take your shorts down.’ He said, ‘Now, come on.’ ”
When Sutton finally dropped his underwear, “we found a gun in between his legs, held down by a ladies sanitary belt with a strap in the front and the back,” Shea said.
Word of the arrest quickly spread. Police Commissioner George Monaghan came to hug all three cops and promote them on the spot to detective first grade.
“It hasn’t been done since,” Shea said of the promotions. “It changed my life.”
Later in 1952, Sutton was convicted of stealing nearly $64,000 from a Sunnyside bank and was sentenced to 30 to 120 years at Attica state prison. But he was released in 1969 and died quietly in 1980.
He is best remembered for something that never happened. According to legend, when reporters asked Sutton why he robbed banks, he said, “That’s where the money is.”
“I never heard him say [that],” Shea recalled. “Somebody else, another reporter, said, ‘That’s where the money is.’ ”
Shea retired in 1983 and is the last survivor of the three cops who made one of the most famous collars in NYPD history.
And Arnold Shuster? He never really got to enjoy his moment of greatness.
Three weeks after the arrest, Shea was having a dinner date in the city.
“Someone came up to me and asked, ‘Aren’t you the detective that locked up Willie Sutton?’ and he said, ‘Don’t you know Arnold Shuster was shot?’ ”
Schuster was walking in his neighborhood when someone pumped a bullet into each eye and two into his groin. The murder was never solved.