From Boniface to Bank Burglar; Or, The Price of Persecution How a Successful Business Man, Through the Miscarriage of Justice, Became a Notorious Bank Looter

“Curses on it, George; my key won’t lock it!” groaned Mark Shinburn, as he turned, twisted, and in every way tried to move the bolt of the key lock in the door of the big steel...

Jack Utley’s persistent disregard of all caution worried me much. As I thought of his chicken-stealing episode and of the fire he insisted upon having in the old hut, it occurre...

It was toward the middle of October that Shinburn and I were brought to trial, in the meantime the grand jury having presented indictments against us, but that didn’t seem to af...

Late in May of 1870, I was driving up Fifth Avenue in one of my finest carriages, for an afternoon spin in Central Park. My name was called, and, glancing toward the sidewalk, I...

“By the eternal, they’ll not beat me out of my own,” fumed Irving. “What right have these Pinkerton hounds to mix in my business? If I feel like doing things my way, suddenly th...

Mark Shinburn, under remarkable circumstances, escaped from Concord prison, after his sudden leave-taking of the jail at Keene the day he was convicted, and his recapture and fi...

At midnight the first telling stroke in the attack on the Cadiz Bank was made when Eddie Hughes, with a pair of nippers, “turned off” the key in the front door of the cashier’s...

“I was wondering whether you were one of the bunch captured,” remarked Billy Matthews, whom I went to see at 681 Broadway, the same day I arrived back in New York. I related, in...

Despite the discovery by the bank officials that a plot was afloat to obtain the riches of their vault, and regardless of the fact that I had lost three of my trained men, I det...

After the ingenuity of a master cracksman has been taxed to its utmost in an effort to get the combination numbers of a presumably impenetrable vault, and success seems assured,...

The day following our reconciliation, Shinburn and I went down to look over the Ocean Bank and its surroundings. It was most essential that we should know the habits of the poli...

After the failure to capture the Corn Exchange Bank treasure, my Police Headquarters friends were exceedingly anxious that I try to even up accounts by obtaining the wealth of t...

I awoke the next morning, with a start, from a night of interrupted slumber. The closing hours of the trial and the escape of Shinburn had command of my brain till it was a reli...

“Who’s that pale-looking chap at the first table to the left?” asked Chelsea George, one of Jack Hartley’s coterie of misfit burglars. His remark was addressed to a faro dealer...

When Captain Young left Police Headquarters for Maryland, it was whispered that he’d gone to Albany. This rumor was confused with another, to the effect that he’d been called So...

It has been, and is yet, claimed by companies which make it a business to supply banking institutions with burglar-alarm systems, that while bank clerks and night watchmen may b...

I would not have the impression go abroad that I believed the New York Police Department, as a whole, or even its detective force, at the period of which I have written, were in...

I have no doubt that my readers will readily believe that shortly after the opening of the Ocean Bank vault on the morning after our departure there was a considerable stir in t...

We were to be ready at ten o’clock that night to begin our work, and the hour having come upon us almost too soon, there was not a little hurrying to the various points at which...

The “Little Joker” won for Mark Shinburn, me, and our associates the contents of the vault of the New Windsor Bank of Westminster, Carroll County, Maryland, while the Ocean Bank...

Eddie Hughes was to be the leader in the crack at the Wellsburg Bank, and soon he, with suggestions from others, laid out the plan. I took no part except that of the snubbed one...

A letter came to me in the summer of 1868, two years after the Cadiz, Ohio, bank robbery. It was in June, and upon opening it, with no little curiosity, it proved to be from Mrs...

The Ocean National Bank occupied the first floor of the building on the southeast corner of Fulton and Greenwich streets. Fulton Street at this point has quite a downward slope...

Shortly after the Cadiz burglary, having been able to insure myself from arrest at the hands of the New York police by lining their palms with gold, and the life of a criminal h...

Hunted out of honest employment, I found myself very much in the position of the pursued rabbit; therefore I was compelled to seek the first cover that presented itself. I had b...

To get out of town I determined to do at the first opportunity, and by railroad too. I looked up the best hotel I could find on short notice and consulted a time-table. A train...

Innocent of the crime of burglary, a man who had always stood up boldly among his fellow-men, looking all squarely in the eye, to be thus ignominiously, horribly entangled in th...

“Here I am back again, Ellis, my dear boy!” I said to my clerk in the Central House, as comfortable and inviting a country hostelry as the average man of travel would want to ma...

B. F. Aldrich was the cashier of the Walpole Savings-bank, and the bank was in his general merchandise store. Thus it can be readily understood that the village of Walpole wasn’...

In the fall of 1866 my old Boston friend Charles Meriam sold out his business at that place, and, with the proceeds, some fifty-four hundred dollars, set out for the West to gro...

“How do you do? Upon my word, sheriff, but you’re the last man I expected to see in Stoneham to-day. How’s business in Fitchburg?” Such was my response to Sheriff Butterick, who...

Too many irons in the fire spoiled an opportunity to add a few thousand dollars to our cash capital. This occurred in that busy year, 1869. Mark Shinburn and I got word of a ban...