Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook

Eddie Guerin was once hailed as 'America's Greatest Criminal' - a notorious bank robber, escape artist, and heist master who became a legend of the early 20th century. He wrote this autobiography from prison, and he pulls zero punches. This is not a glamorous crime story or a romanticized outlaw tale. It's the grim, granular account of a man who spent decades running from the law, sleeping with one eye open, watching his back in every room, and watching every door - and still losing. Guerin chronicles his escalating crimes, his hairsbreadth escapes from supposedly inescapable prisons, and the grinding psychological toll of a life lived in shadows. It's a document from an era before criminal memoirs became a genre, raw and unpolished and completely without redemption-seeking. This is the real article: a criminal telling his own story, decades before Papillon or any modern true crime bestseller, and laying bare the brutal arithmetic of a crooked life.