Rich man, graduated valedictorian of architecture, George Leslie socialized with the elite during the day, and at night dressed up with gangs caused 80% of bank robberies across the country during the course of 9 years.

George Leonidas Leslie was born in 1842, in New York, into a wealthy English family. After moving the family to Cincinnati, Ohio, George’s father started a brewery and got rich quickly.

While in school, George had to enlist in the army, participate in the Civil War, and his parents paid $300 so that their son would not have to go, a huge amount of money at the time. Ignoring the criticism behind his back for evading enlistment, George excelled in his studies and earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture, graduating as valedictorian of the University of Cincinnati.

After graduating, he ran his own architectural firm in Cincinnati. Both of his parents died in 1867, prompting him to decide to sell his family home, brewery, and architectural firm, and set out east, to New York.

George relied on his bravery, architectural talent and family background to “go straight” into the life of the New York elite. He was graceful, elegant, and had an excellent understanding of architecture, and was able to please any of the wealthiest clients in the city, making friends with them.

But George didn’t come here to show off his architectural talents. His aptitude was used to read bank drawings and figure out how to break in and steal money.

He diligently attends private gatherings of the elite but not just for cocktails and gossip. George would tell a wealthy businessman or banker at a dinner party that he was the architect, offering to see their bank blueprints.

“If you’re designing it alone and struggling to get stuck, let me take a quick look and I’ll help,” he said with a casual and well-intentioned look that always worked. No one doubted George, for he was wealthy, well-dressed, educated, and designed the great buildings of the city.

Even if that didn’t work, George simply went to the bank he was aiming for, told the manager that he wanted to send a large sum of cash, but first wanted to see the design of the vault to make sure that the bank was safe. The ploy worked, and in most cases, the design of the building was handed over directly to him immediately.

George also had a natural gift for seeing architectural details that were easily overlooked. He could see blind spots and holes that others couldn’t see, and could sketch the interior of a building and the dimensions of a private safe with just one glance.

When he was successful enough with his upper-class relationships, he began to cultivate relationships with locksmiths, black market pimps, etc., and set up his own bank robbery gang

Among the dozens of recruits, Fredericka Mandelbaum, nicknamed “Marm”, the queen of the New York underworld.

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She was the owner of a crime den known as the “labyrinth on the Lower East Side” of Manhattan, with multiple entrances, armed guards, and even a meeting point disguised as a tavern on an upscale street. All of these labyrinth exits led to a grocery yard where her gang could make transactions.

More importantly, Marm owns a cluster of warehouses across the river in Brooklyn where stolen items will be stored, hidden, and sold.

George used this space as a rehearsal area for his accomplices. From the drawings he had obtained, he reconstructed a replica of the architectural space of the banks he wanted to rob, accurate to each object. George would then make his accomplices rehearse repeatedly in the darkness before embarking on the actual robbery.

January 25, 1876, went down in history when one of the largest bank robberies in global history occurred. He and his accomplices successfully stole $1.6 million (nearly $43 million today) from Northampton Bank in Massachusetts.

Most robberies take place in a rather intense fashion. Thieves often appear with a lot of explosives and some matches to explode the safe, which is quite dangerous and cumbersome. But with his intellect, he even created a safe opener that doesn’t need to know the code.

For “research”, George bought the exact same models of safes that banks used to break them. Eventually, George came up with a device in the shape of a tin wheel with metal wires. The device could be slid into the dial of the safe. When the bank’s person opened the safe, the number would be automatically marked on the device.

None of the bankers could tell it was there, and the next time they turned the dial, the mechanism would cut the tin wheel to indicate which numbers had been used.

The use of this tool required George to enter the bank at least twice before committing the robbery, once to place the device and the second time to retrieve it. But in return, thanks to it, he was able to open the safe quickly and easily. This is also one of the reasons why George is known as “The King of Bank Robbers”.

But it was also at the peak that the gang began to disintegrate . The accomplices believed that Geroge was not focused on his work and spent too much time working as a mentor to other gangs. With his popularity in the criminal underworld, George would go anywhere and plan bank robberies for other gangs.

He made quite a bit of money from these side jobs without any comrades, which caused instability. In addition, he was a well-known promiscuity, and it was rumored that he had an affair with the wife of one of his associates.

The most notorious case was the robbery of the Manhattan Savings Fund in October 1878. It took George three years to plan but did not have the opportunity to see his gang succeed. He had mysteriously disappeared 5 months earlier.

Despite the absence of a leader, the gang continued the robbery. With George’s plan of operation, they stole about $2.5 million (more than $70 million today).

Although it was the biggest of the bunch, the gang ran into unexpected problems: only $12,000 of it was cash, $250,000 was transferable bonds, and the rest was registered bonds. George’s gang gradually disintegrated due to a conflict over the division of material evidence.

Not long after, the police arrested most of the members of the robbery group, charging them with robbery. In a decade of struggling across the country’s East Coast, the gang is believed to have pocketed more than $7 million (equivalent to $200 million today).

George was not arrested. His body was found in a bush in Yonkers, New York, on June 4, 1878 with bullet wounds to his ears and under his nose. The police knew that he was not murdered there because they found no blood at the scene. The murder has not been solved, although there is much speculation that it was related to his affair with his accomplice’s wife.

By the time Goerge died, no one thought he was behind all the thefts. Only when his accomplices were arrested after the last theft did the true identity of the giant be revealed.

He is therefore considered the “fallen superhero” of the architectural world. George’s “intelligent theft” style paved the way for later Hollywood films, typically the Ocean 11, 12 and 13 trilogy.