What I have to tell you to-day about "bank sneaks" and their methods will furnish as good an example as anything I know of the fact that CRIME DOES NOT PAY.
The stealings of a clever "sneak" often run as high as $100,000 in a single year. But what benefit does he get out of this easily acquired wealth? It invariably goes as easily as it comes, and, after a few months, he is as badly in need of money as he was before. I can count on the fingers of one hand the "sneaks" who are getting any real happiness out of life—and they are all men and women who, like myself, have seen the error of their ways and reformed.
If crime could ever prove profitable to any man, it would have proved so to Walter Sheridan, long the foremost "bank sneak" in America. So varied and far reaching were his adroit schemes that within twenty years the gangs which he organized and led stole more than a million dollars. He was a past master in the art of escaping punishment for his crimes, and he was also a shrewd, close-fisted financier, who claimed the lion's share of all the booty and carefully hoarded his savings.
Yet what did all his cleverness avail this prince of "sneaks"? His fortune was swept away, and he finally died a pauper in the prison cell to which he was sent when he was picked up starving in the streets of Montreal.
Sheridan introduced many ingenious new methods in "bank sneaking," just as Mark Shinburn did in burglary. He was the first to conceal a pair of tweezers in the end of his cane and use them to pick up bundles of money which were beyond the reach of his arms.
This cane was a really wonderful device. To all appearances it was only a fine, straight piece of bamboo, nicely polished and fitted with an ivory handle—the sort of walking stick any prosperous man might carry.
Only when you unscrewed its heavy brass ferrule was the dishonest purpose for which it was intended revealed. The bamboo stick was hollow, and in it were two narrow strips of steel which dropped down below the end of the cane and could be operated like tweezers when you released the spring, which was concealed under a heavy band of solid silver just below the handle.
When Sheridan was his natural self he was a stout, good looking man of dignified presence and refined manners who would readily pass for a well-to-do merchant or manufacturer. But when occasion required he could change his appearance so that even his closest friends wouldn't recognize him.
Once when he was arrested in New York he effected in his cell in the Tombs a transformation which mystified the authorities and nearly resulted in his release on the ground of mistaken identity.
He exchanged his expensively tailored suit and fine linen for the dirty rags of a tramp who was locked up in the adjoining cell. With a broken knife blade he hacked off every bit of his long flowing beard. He dyed his reddish brown hair with coffee grounds and clipped and twisted it to make it look a life-long stranger to comb and brush. By eating soap he managed to reduce his portly figure to a thin, sickly shadow of skin and bones.