National Affairs: The Good Citizen

Three weeks ago, Arnold Schuster, 24, was going about his uneventful life as a clerk in his father’s gents’ furnishings store in Brooklyn. Fame touched him when, riding a subway, he spotted Bank Robber Willie (“The Actor”) Sutton, the nation’s most wanted criminal, on an opposite seat. Schuster’s tip led police to capture Willie (TIME, March 3). Then, when the cops tried to hog the credit, he hired a lawyer to establish his claim to a rumored reward.

There was no reward, but just after 9 one night last week, a gunman met Arnold Schuster in the shadows of a tree-lined street near his home in Brooklyn, and pumped four .38-cal. slugs into his brain and abdomen.

Police Commissioner George P. Monaghan launched an all-out search for the killer. An alarm was flashed for the only known pal of Willie Sutton who is still at large—Frederick J. (“The Angel”) Tenuto, 37, a scarfaced murderer who broke out of prison with Sutton in 1947. Police technicians began a laboratory analysis of a dozen threatening letters Schuster had received. Sample: “You won’t have long to live. Willie has friends.” A great many people immediately leaped to the conclusion that Good Citizen Schuster had been killed by Willie’s friends.

Although there had been no reward for Schuster’s identification of Sutton, several were offered for bringing Schuster’s killer to justice. The New York Journal-American offered $10,000 to anyone who gives its city editor—not the police—information which “solely” would lead to the arrest and conviction of Schuster’s killer. The Brooklyn Eagle and television station WPIX, owned by the New York Daily News, put up $1,000 each; New York City offered $25,000.

Sutton, awaiting trial for bank robbery in a Long Island jail, heard about the killing on his cell radio. His initial reaction was highly egocentric: “I could have fallen off the bed. This sinks me.” Then he scrambled back to his role as a bandit with nice manners. His lawyer announced that Willie was writing to Schuster’s family to express “his sincere regrets at this senseless, disgraceful murder.” Willie has been offered $250,000 for his memoirs and will turn this money over, his lawyer said, to the “Willie Sutton Helping Hand Fund,” to assist ex-convicts and wayward juveniles who want to go straight.