Copyright © All rights reserved. Made by James Martin Sandbrook.

On May 7, 1931, the most sensational manhunt New York City had ever known had come to its climax.

After weeks of search, Two Gun Crowley, the killer, was at bay, trapped in his sweetheart's apartment on West End Avenue.

One hundred and fifty policemen and detectives laid siege to his top-floor hideaway.

They chopped holes in the roof; they tried to smoke out Crowley, the cop killer, with teargas.

Then they mounted their machine guns on surrounding buildings, and for more than an hour one of New York's fine residential areas reverberated with the crack of pistol fire and the rut-tat-tat of machine guns.

Crowley, crouching behind an over-stuffed chair, fired incessantly at the police.

Ten thousand excited people watched the battle.

Nothing like it ever been seen before on the sidewalks of New York. When Crowley was captured, Police Commissioner E. P. Mulrooney declared that the two-gun desperado was one of the most dangerous criminals ever encountered in the history of New York. "He will kill," said the Commissioner, "at the drop of a feather."

But how did Two Gun Crowley regard himself?

We know, because while the police were firing into his apartment, he wrote a letter addressed To whom it may concern, and, as he wrote, the blood flowing from his wounds left a crimson trail on the paper.

In this letter Crowley said, "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one, one that would do nobody any harm."

A short time before this, Crowley had been having a necking party with his girlfriend on a country road out on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman walked up to the car and said, "Let me see your license."

Without saying a word, Crowley drew his gun and cut the policeman down with a shower of lead.

As the dying officer fell, Crowley leaped out of the car, grabbed the officer's revolver, and fired another bullet into the prostrate body.

And that was the killer who said, "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one, one that would do nobody any harm."

Crowley was sentenced to the electric chair.

When he arrived at the death house in Sing Sing, did he say, "This is what I get for killing people?", No, he said, "This is what I get for defending myself."

The point of the story is this: Two Gun Crowley didn't blame himself for anything.

Is that an unusual attitude among

criminals? If you think so, listen to this: "I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man."

That's Al Capone speaking.

Yes, America's most notorious Public Enemy, the most sinister gang leader who ever shot up Chicago.

Capone didn't condemn himself.

He actually regarded himself as a public benefactor, an unappreciated and misunderstood public benefactor.

And so did Dutch Schultz before he crumpled up under gangster bullets in Newark.

Dutch Schultz, one of New York's most notorious rats, said in a newspaper interview that he was a public benefactor. And he believed it.

I have had some interesting correspondence with Lewis Lawes, who was warden of New York's infamous Sing Sing prison for many years, on this subject, and he declared that few of the criminals in Sing Sing regard themselves as bad men.

They are just as human as you and I.

So they rationalize, they explain.

They can tell you why they had to crack a safe or be quick on the trigger finger.

Most of them attempt by a form of reasoning, fallacious or logical, to justify their anti-social acts even to themselves, consequently stoutly maintaining that they should never have been imprisoned at all.

If Al Capone, Two Gun Crowley, Dutch Schultz, and the desperate men and women behind prison walls don't blame themselves for anything, what about the people with whom you and I come in contact?

- Dale Carnegie.