Willie Sutton - An Urban Legend

An Urban Legend

Sutton is famously — but apocryphally — supposed to have answered reporter, Mitch Ohnstad, who asked why he robbed banks, by saying, "because that's where the money is." The supposed quote formed the basis of Sutton's law, often taught to medical students.

In his partly ghostwritten autobiography, Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber (Viking Press, New York, 1976), Sutton dismissed this story, saying:

The irony of using a bank robber's maxim as an instrument for teaching medicine is compounded, I will now confess, by the fact that I never said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter who apparently felt a need to fill out his copy...

If anybody had asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would say...it couldn't be more obvious.

Or could it?

Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I'd be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that's all.

Go where the money is...and go there often.

Nevertheless, the legend has resulted in the "Willie Sutton rule," used in activity-based costing (ABC) of management accounting. The law stipulates that ABC should be applied "where the money is," meaning where the highest costs are incurred, and thus the highest potential of over-all cost reduction is.