The Broadway Books Library of Larceny Luc Sante, General Editor For more than fifty years, Willie Sutton devoted his boundless energy and undoubted genius exclusively to two activities at which he became better than any man in history: breaking in and breaking out. The targets in the first instance were banks and in the second, prisons. Unarguably America’s most famous bank robber, Willie never injured a soul, but took on almost a hundred banks and departed three of America’s most escape-proof penitentiaries. This is the stuff of myth—rascally and cautionary by turns—yet true in every searing, diverting, and brilliantly recalled detail.

The story of Willie Sutton is one of the most astonishing in the annals of crime. Known as 'Willie the Actor' for his clever and disarming impersonations, his career was an amazingly successful one of fabulous bank robberies, daring prison breaks, and front page headlines, all of which captured the imagination of America. Yet Willie Sutton was 'clean'-throughout his life of crime he never killed anyone, and he was known as much for his intelligence, manners, and dapper elegance as for his audacious escapades.

"What Hilary Mantel did for Thomas Cromwell and Paula McLain for Hadley Hemingway . . . Moehringer does for bank robber Willie Sutton" in this fascinating biographical novel of America's most successful bank robber (Newsday). Willie Sutton was born in the Irish slums of Brooklyn in 1901, and he came of age at a time when banks were out of control. Sutton saw only one way out and only one way to win the girl of his dreams. So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. During three decades Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List. But the public rooted for the criminal who never fired a shot, and when Sutton was finally caught for good, crowds at the jail chanted his name. In J.R. Moehringer's retelling, it was more than need or rage that drove Sutton. It was his first love. And when he finally walked free -- a surprise pardon on Christmas Eve, 1969 -- he immediately set out to find her. "Electrifying." --Booklist (starred) "Thoroughly absorbing . . . Filled with vibrant and colorful re-creations of not one but several times in the American past." --Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row "[J.R. Moehringer] has found an historical subject equal to his vivid imagination, gimlet journalistic eye, and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. By turns suspenseful, funny, romantic, and sad--in short, a book you won't be able to put down." --John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road and The Commoner

Now a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club—with a new Afterword. J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak—and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys. Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, NPR's "Fresh Air," and New York Magazine A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Booksense, and Library Journal Bestseller Booksense Pick Borders New Voices Finalist Winner of the Books for a Better Life First Book Award

A washed-up, middle-aged British philosopher teams up with an incompetent, one-armed bank robber to plan the ultimate bank job.

The most extensive account yet of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have created, deeply sourced and based on field research in the world’s technology-crime hotspots. Cybercrime seems invisible. Attacks arrive out of nowhere, their origins hidden by layers of sophisticated technology. Only the victims are clear. But every crime has its perpetrator—specific individuals or groups sitting somewhere behind keyboards and screens. Jonathan Lusthaus lifts the veil on the world of these cybercriminals in the most extensive account yet of the lives they lead, and the vast international industry they have created. We are long past the age of the lone adolescent hacker tapping away in his parents’ basement. Cybercrime now operates like a business. Its goods and services may be illicit, but it is highly organized, complex, driven by profit, and globally interconnected. Having traveled to cybercrime hotspots around the world to meet with hundreds of law enforcement agents, security gurus, hackers, and criminals, Lusthaus takes us inside this murky underworld and reveals how this business works. He explains the strategies criminals use to build a thriving industry in a low-trust environment characterized by a precarious combination of anonymity and teamwork. Crime takes hold where there is more technical talent than legitimate opportunity, and where authorities turn a blind eye—perhaps for a price. In the fight against cybercrime, understanding what drives people into this industry is as important as advanced security. Based on seven years of fieldwork from Eastern Europe to West Africa, Industry of Anonymity is a compelling and revealing study of a rational business model which, however much we might wish otherwise, has become a defining feature of the modern world.

In this witty guide for seekers of all ages, author Henry Alford seeks instant enlightenment through conversations with those who have lived long and lived well. Armed with recent medical evidence that supports the cliche that older people are, indeed, wiser, Alford sets off to interview people over 70--some famous (Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom, Edward Albee), some accomplished (the world's most-quoted author, a woman who walked across the country at age 89 in support of campaign finance reform), some unusual (a pastor who thinks napping is a form of prayer, a retired aerospace engineer who eats food out of the garbage.) Early on in the process, Alford interviews his 79 year-old mother and step-father, and inadvertently changes the course of their 36 year-long union. Part family memoir, part Studs Terkel, How To Live considers some unusual sources--deathbed confessions, late-in-life journals--to deliver a highly optimistic look at our dying days. By showing that life after 70 is the fulfillment of, not the end to, life's questions and trials, How to Live delivers that most unexpected punch: it makes you actually want to get older.

30 YEARS ON THE RUN: THE HUNT FOR THE MOST PROLIFIC BANK ROBBER IN HISTORY, is told masterfully by author and retired FBI Special Agent Raymond J. Carr. Readers will follow the painstaking and extraordinary steps that led to the discovery of the most prolific bank robber in history, an evil genius who evaded police for 30 years and whose robberies totaled more than those of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and Willie Sutton combined. This was Carr's case, and his story to tell. As one of few FBI agents privileged to play a role in the early success of the FBI's formidable Behavioral Analysis Unit, known worldwide as the BAU, Carr delves into the fascinating world of profiling. Via actual FBI documents, the book details the offender's background, revealing the intimate discussions that helped Carr understand how the well-educated man chose a life of crime and circumvented law enforcement for decades. Carr also discusses poignantly how he survived numerous roadblocks throughout the investigation, including the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and devastating family hardships. The notorious bank robber also suffered, and readers learn how a specific event in his youth changed the course of his life.

Glancing quickly over the bar, he saw the bartender lying face down in a pool of blood, senselessly gunned down simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. New York City in the prohibition era, and Bill Sutton's wife thinks he earns an honest crust as a rent collector. Instead, he leads an extraordinary double-life as 'Willie the Actor', a notorious bank robber. Based on a true story, the novel's protagonist is a gentle gunman who never once fires a shot.But it was believed he was jinxed and almost everyone he works with comes to a violent end.

Paddy Mitchell grew up on Ottawa's Preston Street to become the leader of the Stopwatch Gang, earning a place on the FBI's most-wanted list by working with fellow Canadians Stephen Reid and Lionel Wright to steal about $15 million, mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, from more 140 banks and other sites across Canada and the U.S. The gang, which was famous for its speedy heists -- including the 1974 robbery of $700,000 in gold bars from the Ottawa airport -- took its name from the stopwatch worn by Reid. Incarcerated several times, he was a prison escape artist. Paddy Mitchell wrote about his life and adventures while serving his sentence in a maximum security prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. He died January 14, 2007.].