Thursday Open Line


Banks had operated in America for about a half century before someone tried to make an unauthorized withdrawal. On this date in 1831, Edward Smith committed the first bank robbery in the U.S. — hitting the City Bank on New York’s Wall Street. He entered the bank after it closed, using a duplicate set of keys, and got away with $245,000 — a huge sum at the time. By various calculations, that would be worth from $5.4 million to $6.6 million today. But he was caught, convicted and spent five years in New York’s Sing-Sing Prison. Now, across the nation, there are over 97,000 commercial banking establishments. As one 20th century bank robber supposedly noted, that’s where the money is — bank deposits total nearly $11.6 trillion. Profile America is in its 18th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.