Experimentalism and education

The records of the New York City Police Department and the New York State Department of Correction would show that my career of crime began at fifteen when I was committed to the Elmira Reformatory for robbing a Tenth Avenue grocery store. These records are slightly inaccurate. My underworld career really began four years earlier, at the tender age of eleven, when I “turned off” a Ninth Avenue cigar store for a load of cigarettes and candy and an armful of Nick Carter and Old Sleuth magazines. I have indelible memories of that blood-and-thunder fiction which furnished me with patterns for my adolescent exploits. Moreover, it convinced me that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were sissies compared to Jesse James, “High Card Mike,” and the Younger Brothers. Safe cracking and train robbery, it also convinced me, was a better racket than statesmanship.