Willie Sutton was one of America’s best known bank robbers. Between the 1920s and 1950s, Sutton grabbed headlines by pulling off daring robberies and audacious jailbreaks. He became infamous for things that he did and things simply attributed to him, including the answer he allegedly gave when asked why he robbed banks.

“Because that’s where the money is,” journalist Mitch Ohnstad said he answered. He denied the answer many times and offered his own reason: because it was fun.

Sutton spent most of his criminal career in New York City and the Philadelphia area. Briefly in late 1933, Sutton paid a visit to Southwestern Pennsylvania. On the run from the police in Philadelphia, he and a woman drove to Braddock. After Sutton’s capture in early 1934, newspapers around the nation told the story. Sutton himself recounted it in his 1976 autobiography, Where the Money Was.

Braddock was a steel town a few miles out of Pittsburgh. The dirtiest, smokiest city I have ever seen. The whole town lived off the Carnegie plant. One immense steel mill and a bunch of small wooden houses begrimed with soot. It was never light, there was too much smoke in the air, and it was never dark because those open-hearth furnaces would light up the skies at night.

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