Monday, Jan. 08, 1945

Lady Robin Hood

Blue-eyed Madeline Green Dunnigan, a 22-year-old Brooklyn shipyard worker's wife, just wanted to make unfortunate people happy. To achieve her ambition, she became a thief.

As a $40-a-week bookkeeper-cashier in Oscar H. Cropper's luggage store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, Madeline began a year ago to pocket sales money that should have gone into Cropper's cash register. She used it to pay for a costly cancer operation for her father; and after he died, she stole to pay medical bills for her mother. Stealing from easygoing, trustful Cropper was easy, and Madeline knew plenty of unfortunate people in Brooklyn. She gave away lump sums of $300 to $600, and to cover up, began to falsify Cropper's books. A penniless young mother whom Cropper never saw was put on his payroll at $25 a week. She raised the salary of one Cropper clerk from $30 to $55 weekly, another from $3 to $15 a day. The errand boy got a $10 raise. Nearly all the money Madeline stole, she gave away. Easy as it was to raise the pay of others, she never raised her own.

Rich to Poor. Madeline continued her taking & giving for eleven months, until Cropper suddenly discovered that his bank balance was so low that he could not pay his bills. Madeline was arrested, and light-heartedly told all to the district attorney. The astounded prosecutor gave her a nickname which Manhattan tabloids delightedly took up: "The Lady Robin Hood." A hasty audit showed that Madeline stole at least $35,000. Said she: "I had no idea it was so much."

Madeline's success at taking from the richer to give to the poorer made a poor man of Oscar Cropper. Facing bankruptcy, at 57, he shrank from making a new business start.

One midnight last week, while his wife and daughter slept in an adjoining room of their hotel apartment, Oscar Cropper wrote them a note: "Thefts have ruined me." Then he walked to the window, plunged nine stories to his death.

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