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Pulitzer-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer takes down some banks with ‘Sutton’


ABC/Donna Svennevik

J.R. Moehringer

J.R. Moehringer was furious. Every day he turned on the TV and watched aghast as the big bankers passed the buck on the economic collapse.

That’s when he remembered a guy beloved for taking down banks: Willie Sutton. Willie the Actor. The master of disguise who grew into a legend. He didn’t hurt anyone. No prison could hold him. He was famous for saying something he apparently never said, but it’s still a great line. Asked why he robbed banks, he was said to have replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Moehringer is no bank robber. He’s an acclaimed memoirist (2005’s The Tender Bar), and he helped Andre Agassi write his 2009 autobiography, Open. But as his blood kept boiling, he asked himself a question: What would Willie do?

We have Moehringer’s bank rage to thank for Sutton (Hyperion, $29.99), a breezy debut novel based on the winter day in 1969 when Sutton, fresh out of jail, told his story and embellished his legend to a young newspaper reporter and photographer.

“I started thinking about how fun it could be to rob a bunch of banks vicariously with Willie Sutton riding shotgun, telling me where to turn and where to park,” Moehringer says from his Phoenix home. “Believe me, it worked. It was hugely cathartic.”

Critics have been enthusiastic. “With a voice at once sentimental and muscular, Moehringer is like the kid brother of John Irving or Roddy Doyle,” wrote Entertainment Weekly. Kirkus Reviews gave it a coveted starred review, calling it “a captivating and absorbing read.”

Moehringer’s Sutton is a well-read gentleman criminal with tragic dimensions but also a sense of humor. Sutton, who died in 1980, wrote two memoirs rife with contradictory statements. After spending half his life in prison, he starred in a bank commercial to tout the security benefits of a new credit card.

In Sutton, Willie forms a bond of sorts (and gets stoned) with the shaggy, counterculture news photographer, who also happens to hate banks. “Photographer,” as he’s called in the book, lays it all out: “Banks gamed the system, caused the crash of ’29, drove the world into the abyss and paved the way for the rise of fascism — Stalin, Hitler — and they got disgustingly rich in the process. Banks. Banks did all that.”

From his lips to Moehringer’s pen.

“One of the overarching points of the book is that guys who rob banks, we send them to jail for 50, 75 years,” Moehringer says. “Banks that rob us, we give them $50 [million] or $100-million bonuses. This just seemed like a fun way to look at this ridiculous paradox. Willie himself was aware of that paradox. He was having the last laugh, doing commercials for a bank at the end of his life.”

Writing Sutton gave Moehringer a way to rage against the machine, but it also put him back in touch with his original calling. He won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000 for the Los Angeles Times, and always thought he’d remain a newspaperman. Then the business began changing, Agassi came calling, and Moehringer made the full-time switch to books.

But he never lost his hunger for journalism. He had a blast immersing himself in old files and interviews as he researched Sutton. And he gave “Photographer” and “Reporter” prime roles in the novel.

“This was a way of exploring my nostalgia, too,” Moehringer says. “It felt fantastic to have the time and the freedom to do old-fashioned reporting. That was a lot of fun. It is all storytelling, and you have to remind yourself of that.”

All that, and he didn’t even have to use a gun.

Follow Chris Vognar on Twitter at @chrisvognar.

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