Girl Bandit Ubiquitous

     Perhaps the most interesting, at all events the most spectacular crook of modern times is the girl bandit who appears here, there and everywhere.  She circulates around Brooklyn at her own sweet will, cheerfully pointing a revolver at whoever she believes is in charge of available loot, with a pleasant, “hold up your hands.”  Always she is accompanied by a male comrade to whom she gives orders and who is apparently “tied to her apron strings,” as the old saying is.  Sometimes she holds up a room full of men and women at a time.  “Don’t touch the ladies,” she says.  “Treat them gently, But if these men make a move let them have it.”

     She is nothing if not aggressive.  She writes notes guying the police, daring them to interfere with her operations and declaring that she will continue her ambitious and lucrative career of robbery without regard to their feelings.  Wednesday night she held up and robbed a drug store just opposite the armory of the Thirteenth Coast Artillery, where 150 police reserves were drilling.  This was less than an hour after 500 police reserves had been sent out by the police captains with special instructions to find and arrest her.

     But perhaps there is more than one girl bandit.  There may be a number of them.  Women’s rights to a career in banditry cannot be gainsaid—at least until the girl bandit or bandits are run down or caught.  Perhaps, again the so-called girl bandit is not a girl at all but a man who has assumed this disguise.  The victims may be too badly frightened to tell whether the voice is soprano or basso, or whether the bandit has French heels or not.  Usually there is no mention of a bonnet or cap or the lack of one.  But she has bobbed hair and looks like a girl.  Somehow it takes away all the romance to be robbed by a pleasant-voiced, bobbed hair girl and then find out afterward that the robber is only a prosaic male masquerading to fool the police.

     At all events, the police have been completely fooled.  If the whole police force cannot run down the bandits male or female, who operate in this borough, it is certain that something is lacking and it behooves Commissioner Enright to find out the reason for the inefficiency of the force.

[Brooklyn Citizen, March 8, 1924, p.4]