Arthur Williams (Elevator Bandit)
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Arthur Williams (September 26, 1946 – July 11, 2010) was an American career criminal who achieved early notoriety as New York City's "Elevator Bandit", who perpetrated a string of armed robberies in apartment buildings across Manhattan, mostly to support a heroin addiction. Given a three-year term in prison, Williams was released after two years. During the 34 years from 1975 to 2009, Williams spent 33 of those years in prison, with the exception of a two-month period after his release from jail when he went on a drug-fueled crime spree in 1980 that was widely publicized in the media. In 2010, he drove from his home in Alabama to New York City, where he conducted an armed robbery of a Manhattan boutique while using a cane and an oxygen tank and wielding a gun which he fired in the store. On the road back to Alabama, Williams robbed a pair of roadside hotels and then went back on the highway, where a police chase in Maryland ended in his death when he was thrown out of his Cadillac, which he had been driving at 120 miles per hour (190 km/h).
Williams came from a family of ten children and grew up in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. He variously posed as a doorman, a messenger or a Vietnam War veteran, offering pleasantries before pulling a gun and taking cash and other property from his victims, most frequently in an elevator, earning him the moniker the "Elevator Bandit".[1]
After being paroled from Green Haven Correctional Facility in June 1974 after serving two years of three-year sentence, Williams was arrested the following September and charged with 40 separate holdups, with as many as 100 victims including a deputy United States Attorney and a Legal Aid Society lawyer. In one of the incidents in the spree, Williams dressed as the doorman of an Upper West Side apartment building, greeted residents in the lobby and then robbed them in the elevator. Precincts across Manhattan had reported similar incidents that were traced to Williams. In other crimes, he and a female accomplice, both well dressed, would enter a building and join residents on the elevator, with the woman pulling a gun out of her purse and Williams taking the belongings.[2] Over the objections of prosecutors, New York State Supreme Court Justice James J. Leff sentenced Williams to 10 to 20 years in jail after Williams pleaded guilty to each of the 84 robberies he was charged with. New York County District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau argued that Williams was a "persistent felony offender" and should have been sentenced to a longer term in prison, but Leff said he would not "be badgered or harassed" and that the 10-year sentence was sufficient, noting that Williams had never physically assaulted any of his victims.[3]