Читать книгу Why Crime Does Not Pay - Mrs. Sophie Van Elkan Lyons Burke - Страница 13

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With increasing vivaciousness, I rattled along entertaining the cashier. In a few moments I saw the wire door gently open as if by a spirit hand. Creeping low along the floor, a shadow crossed the little corridor to the outside door; noiselessly it opened and closed—the work was done!

And thus this job, which had taken us weeks to plan, was done in less than five minutes from the time I entered the bank until Meaney stole out of a back door with his satchel full of bank notes and securities. Then the three of us quickly made our way by separate routes to New York.

The loss was not discovered until it came time to close the vault for the day, and we thus had nearly three hours' start of the police. A large reward was offered and numerous detectives engaged, but no one was ever arrested for this crime. I am just vain enough to think that the old cashier was probably very reluctant to believe his pretty widow had a share in the robbery, in spite of her mysterious disappearance on the very day it occurred.

Our plunder amounted to $150,000, of which $20,000 was cash and the rest good negotiable bonds. The money was divided and I undertook the marketing of the securities, which were finally disposed of through various channels for $78,000, or about 60 per cent. of their value.

Those squeaky door hinges cost Meaney, Bigelow, and myself about $6,000 apiece, for through the addition of Taylor to our party we had to divide the spoils among four persons instead of three. After paying my expenses, my share of these ill-gotten gains amounted to about $20,000. This I thought ample to provide for the wants of my children until I could establish myself in some honorable business, and I returned to Detroit fully determined never again to risk, as I had, a long prison term.

But my good resolutions were short lived. Two weeks later word came that my husband was in jail for complicity in an attempted bank robbery which had been nipped in the bud and urgently needed my assistance. It took several thousand dollars of the money for which I had paid so dear to secure his liberty, and the remainder soon melted away before the numerous needs of my little brood and my husband's unfortunate gambling propensities.

Here I was again just where I was before the robbery of that New Jersey bank. My money was gone, my old reputation still pursued me, nobody would trust me; "once a thief, always a thief," they said; nobody believed in my sincere desire to abandon my early career and lead an honest life.

I did not feel vindictive at the sneers at my protestations of a desire to earn an honest living—I could not blame anybody for doubting my sincerity. But my home and my little ones, dearer to me than life, what was to become of them? Was there no way to escape from my wretched career? If ever a woman and a mother realized that crime does not pay, I was made to learn that truth.

It is a long and difficult road—the narrow path that leads from crime to honest living. I have traveled it, thank heaven! but it was hard, it was slow—and many times I strayed from the path.

Some of my companions of the old days traveled that road with me. A few, a very few, succeeded as I did at last. Many gave it up, turned back. A thousand episodes of my career and of their misguided lives all illuminate the one great inevitable fact that crime does not pay!