Why Crime Does Not Pay

Why Crime does not pay SOPHIE LYONS POPULAR BOOKS I IN CLOTH BINDING. The following books contain from 200 to 400 pages each, printed on best quality of antique wove book paper from new large type plates, many of them fully illustrated, and are handsomely bound in full cloth similar to the regular $1.50 books. Price, sent by mail, postpaid, $1.00 per copy, The Fortunes of Betty. By Cecil Spooner. Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. 1 By Maurice Leblanc. Arsene Lupin, versus Herlock Sholmes. By Maurice Leblanc. A Gentleman From Mississippi. Founded Upon the Play. The New Mayor. Founded George Broad- Upon" hurst's Play The Man of the Hour." The Devil. Founded Upon the Play by Fer- ENC MOLNAR. Way Down East. Founded Upon the Play. The Peer and the Woman. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. The House by ths River. By Florence Warden. The Kreutzer Sonata. By Count Leo Tolstoi. The Seven Who Were Hanged. By Leonid Andreyev. The Man in the Street Stories. From the N. Y. Times. J. S. OGILVIE PUBLISHING CO., 57 Rose Street, New York. #^m /Si MB ^ • University of California Berkeley Jack Fleming Prison Collection WHY CRIME DOES NOT PAY. BY SOPHIE LYONS Queen of the Underworld. Gr^a) New York J. S. OGII/VIE PUBLISHING CO. 57 Rose Street COPYBIQHT, 1913, BY THE STAR COMPANY CONTENTS Chapter Page I. How I Began My Career of Crime . .11 II. The Secret of the Stolen Gainsborough—And the u Lesson of the Career of Kaymond, the Prince of ' ' Safe Blowers, Who Built a Millionaire 's Eesidence in a Fashionable London Suburb and Kept a Yacht with a Crew of 20 Men in the Mediterranean . 37 III. How I Escaped from Sing Sing, and Other Daring Prison Escapes from That Profited Us Nothing . 62 IV. Women Criminals of Extraordinary Ability with Whom I Was in Partnership 89 V. How I Faced Death, How My Husband Was Shot, and Some Narrow Escapes of My Companions . 118 VI. Behind the Scenes at a $3,000,000 Burglary—the Bobbery of the Manhattan Bank of New York . 14$ VII. Bank Burglars Who Disguised Themselves as Police- men and Other Ingenious Schemes Used by Thieves in Bold Attempts to Get Out Their Plunder . 173 Till. Promoters of Crime—People Who Plan Bobberies and Act as il Backers" for Professional Criminals—The Extraordinary "Mother" Mandelbaum, "Queen of the Thieves,' * and Grady, Who Had Half a Dozen Gangs of Cracksmen Working for Him . 186 IX. Surprising Methods of the Thieves Who Work Only During Business Hours and Walk Away with Thou- sands of Dollars Under the Very Eyes of the Bank Officials 212 6 CONTENTS Chapter Page X Startling Surprises That Confront Criminals—How Unexpected Happenings Suddenly Develop and Up- set Carefully Laid Plans and Cause the Burglars Ar- rest or Prevent His Getting Expected Plunder . 225 XL Thrilling Events Which Crowded One Short Week of My Life—How I Profited Nothing from All the Risks I Faced 238* HL €*ood Deeds Which Criminals Do and Which Show That Even the Worst Thief Is Never Wholly Bad . 250 INTRODUCTION The publishers believe that a picture of life sketched by a master hand—somebody who stands in the world of crime as Edison does in his field or as Morgan and Rockefeller do in theirs—could not fail to be impressive and valuable and prove the oft repeated statement that crime does not pay. Such a person is Sophie Lyons, the most remark- able and the greatest criminal of modern times. This extraordinary woman is herself a striking evi- dence that crime does not pay and that the same en- ergy and brains exerted in honest endeavor win enduring wealth and respectability. She has aban- doned her earlier career and has lately accumulated a fortune of half a million dollars, honestly acquired by her own unaided business ability. " ' Sophie Lyons was a thief from the cradle/ as one Chief of Police said; at the early age of six years she had already been trained by her stepmother to be a pickpocket and a shoplifter. A beautiful child with engaging manners, she was sent out every day into the stores and among the crowds of shoppers, and was soundly whipped if she came out of a shop with less than three pocketbooks. "I did not it was to steal know wrong ; nobody every taught me that," Sophie Lyons writes. "What I was told 7 8 INTRODUCTION was wrong and what I was punished for was when I came home with only one pocketbook instead of many." As the child grew into womanhood she was con- spicuously beautiful, and soon became known as '* Pretty Sophie." Then romance entered her life and she married Ned Lyons, the famous bank burglar. Her husband was a member of the great gang of expert safe-blowers who were the terror of the police and the big banks of some years ago. Women are regarded as dangerous and are sel- dom taken into the confidence of such criminals as these. But Sophie Lyons was not only welcomed to their councils, but was taken along with them to the actual scenes of their operations. Many of the most daring bank robberies were, indeed, planned by her and to her quick brain and resourcefulness the burglars often owed their success. Sophie Lyons became famous not only among the burglars who work with dark lantern and jimmy but also among those specialists who are called "bank sneaks"—the daring men who walk into banks in broad daylight, in the midst of business, and get away with great bundles of money. Her fame spread, too, among other specialists—the shoplift- ers, pickpockets, confidence women, jewelry rob- bers, importers of forbidden opium, and the men engaged in bringing Chinamen into the country (a very profitable and hazardous field). For twenty-five years Sophie Lyons was "The Queen of the Bank Burglars." the active leader of INTRODUCTION 9 many expeditions in various parts of the world, and with her were associated about all of the great criminals of Europe and America. It has been said that she has been arrested in nearly every large city in America, and in every country in Europe ex- cept Turkey. She has served sentences in several prisons, and, on one occasion, her husband, Ned Lyons, was in Sing Sing while she herself was con- fined in the women's wing of the prison across the road. Ned Lyons managed to make his escape and very soon drove up to the women's prison and ef- fected the escape of his wife, Sophie Lyons. But all this belongs to the past. Sophie Lyons has learned that her new life as a respected woman is the only one that is really worth while. The com- fortable fortune she has now honestly accumulated has proved that it is not true that "once a thief always a thief." The actual happenings in her career have been more extraordinary than the imagination of any novelist has dreamed; more surprising than any scene on the stage. Yet nearly every one of those whose exploits she has recounted here is now an outcast, has served a good share of life in prison, is in poverty, or has died poor. Surely, as she has asserted again and again—and hopes to abundantly prove—CRIMjlI DOES NOT PAY. This great truth forced itself upon her after many, many years of profitless life in the Under- world. And her own life experience and her pres- 10 INTRODUCTION ent fortune of half a million dollars, all honestly acquired, have demonstrated that half the industry and ability that great criminals expend will return them richer and more enduring success in honest fields of endeavor. SOPHIE LYONS QUEEN OF THE BURGLARS CHAPTER I HOW I BEGAN MY CAREER OF CRIME I was not quite six years old when I stole my first pocketbook. I was very happy because I was petted and rewarded; my wretched stepmother patted my curly head, gave me a bag of candy, and said I was a "good girl." My stepmother was a thief. My good father never knew this. He went to the war at President Lincoln's c&ll for troops and left me with his second wife, my stepmother. Scarcely had my father 's regiment left New York than my stepmother began to busy herself with my education—not for a useful career, but for a career of crime. Patiently she instructed me, beginning with the very rudiments of thieving—how to help myself to things that lay unprotected in candy shops, drug stores and grocery stores. I was made to practice at home until my childish fingers had acquired considerable dexterity. Finally, I was told that money was the really valu- 11 12 SOPHIE LYONS able thing to possess, and that the successful men and women were those who could take pocketbooks. With my stepmother as the model to practice on I was taught how to open shopping bags, feel out the loose money or the pocketbook and get it into my little hands without attracting the attention of my vic- tims. In those days leather bags were not common —most women carried cloth or knitted shopping bags. I was provided with a very sharp little knife and was carefully instructed how to slit open the bags so that I could get my fingers in. And at last, when I had arrived at a sufficient de- gree of proficiency, I was taken out by my stepmother and we traveled over into New York's shopping district.

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