The reward offer, as it appeared in the March 26, 1831, Post.

Late on the night of March 20, 1831, two men with a set of homemade keys approached the City Bank of New York. The keys, which had been made from wax impressions of the door locks, enabled the men to let themselves into the bank and lock the doors behind themselves.

What happened that night is generally considered to be the first bank robbery in the U.S. The two men—James Honeyman and William J. Murray—emptied the vault and several safe deposit boxes. By the morning, they had filled several bags with $245,000 in bank notes and coins. It was an incredibly large sum for a robbery, roughly equivalent to $52 million today. The robbery was sensational enough to be rushed into print in the next edition of the Post, under a bold headline offering “$5,000 Reward.”

Honeyman and Murray got away the next morning as the sun rose and the city’s night watchmen went off duty. Carrying the loot under the large capes they were wearing, they hurried to Murray’s house where they divided the money.

Honeyman put his share of the loot into three trunks, then drove to a boarding house, where he rented a private room under the name of Jones.

Less than a month later, the Post was able to report that “something peculiar in his conduct, particularly regarding the trunks, seems to have excited the suspicions of his landlord.”

Once in the rooms, Honeyman divided the stolen money again, taking $37,000 to the house of a Mr. Parkinson, his brother-in-law.

The site of the old City Bank, directly across the street from 55 Wall Street, where the bank now does business under the name of Citibank.

Meanwhile, news of the bank robbery had sped across town and reached the ears of New York’s Chief Constable Jacob Hays. He immediately knew whom to suspect. Honeyman had recently been charged with robbing a store in Brooklyn, but had escaped conviction due to lack of evidence. He had also been caught trying to steal money from a steamboat. And there were rumors that he was still the chief suspect in an English mail-coach robbery. Hays immediately went to Honeyman’s home, but found neither his suspect nor any money.

The following Saturday night, March 24, Honeyman left the boarding house with one of the trunks and told the landlord he would soon return for the others. The landlord, now convinced the trunks contained the stolen bank money, summoned Hays. Together, they opened the remaining trunks where they found $185,758.

The men seated themselves and waited. Three hours later, when Honeyman walked into the room, Hays seized him, put him in handcuffs, and took him before a judge.

The landlord also told Hays that another man had often visited Honeyman. From the description, Hays recognized the man as Murray. The two men were frequently seen together. In fact, they had been close friends ever since meeting in the penal colony at Botany Bay. Both men had beat long odds and escaped Australia to return to England, commit a few more robberies, then flee to the states.

High Constable Jacob Hays, the pride of New York.

After depositing Honeyman in jail, Hays went to Murray’s house but found the man had fled to Philadelphia. Hays followed after, apprehending Murray and bringing him back to New York for trial.

Both Honeyman and Murray were convicted and sentenced to five years at New York’s Sing Sing prison.

Hays recovered about $176,000 of the stolen money, but had no idea where to find the remaining $69,000. Months passed by, and his searches turned up nothing. City officials accused Hays and one of his associates of keeping the money to themselves.

Then, on September 20, Parkinson entered a bank to exchange some of the bank notes Honeyman had left with him. The bank clerk thought the notes resembled those he had deposited at the City Bank before it was robbed. He notified Hays, who quickly arrested Parkinson. He told the police all he knew and, in exchange for immunity, returned $37,000.

This still left $42,000 unaccounted for, but Hays was exonerated in public opinion. The Post’s editors felt that now, even the most skeptic would see “Mr. Hays is worthy of the important situation which he has so long filled.”

Hays even had the support of the men he’d put behind bars, the Post reported. “While Smith [one of Honeyman’s aliases] and Murray were in prison, awaiting their trial, they were informed that Mr. Hays was openly charged with abstracting that part of the money which was missing. They expressed great indignation at so malignant an accusation and stated that the amount not found had been placed beyond the reach of Hays before Murray was arrested. It can hardly be supposed that any unworthy suspicions can now be attached to this meritorious public servant, who had passed the prime of his years in the discharge of an arduous and unpleasant duty.”

America’s First Bank Robbery The Saturday Evening Post

Illustration by James Yang.

Attempting to regulate large companies is like trying to dam a large river. You may change the way the water flows, but you’re not going to stop that water from running. When banks were hit with new government regulations in 2010 limiting or eliminating fees they could charge their customers, they hit back. They complied with the rules, sure enough, but they shifted the fees to different transactions. At stake were billions of dollars per year—money the banks were counting on to keep them in the black.

The banks assumed consumers would not notice the new, tiny fees tucked away under vague, misleading headings in monthly statements. Or, if people did notice, banks counted on them to quietly suffer with the new fees, as they usually do.

Boy, were they wrong! The surprising (to them!) breaking point came last fall in the form of a proposal by Bank of America and others to charge $5 per month for the privilege of using their bank-provided debit cards. That fee was shelved after igniting a massive public outcry, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and a well-publicized exodus of big bank customers to the fee-friendlier waters of credit unions and smaller community banks.

But other fees quickly and more quietly took its place—and then some.

Now, lose that debit card and Bank of America charges $5 for a replacement (or $20 if you want rush delivery). Need a teller? Its eBanking enrollees have to pay $8.95 each month they use one to make a transaction. And most recently, the behemoth bank has been testing a menu of new checking account fees as high as $25 a month.

Bank of America is not alone. In 2009, before the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act ended sudden interest-rate hikes and other money-making “gotchas” on credit card accounts (whose plastic is often issued by big banks), nearly all of the major players offered free checking.

Today, Citibank charges $20 a month unless you keep at least $15,000 in deposits—up from a $6,000 minimum balance in December. At Wells Fargo, expect a $15 monthly charge unless you have at least three accounts, maintain a $7,500 balance, or carry a Wells Fargo mortgage. No matter where you bank, it costs an average of nearly $8 a month in fees for basic (and longtime “free”) checking and ATM use, a 21 percent increase from six years ago. And a checking account isn’t the only service where fee has replaced “free.” Want a paper statement at month’s end or a photocopy of a past transaction? Making a deposit with your mobile phone or receiving one sent by wire transfer? Don’t have, in your bank’s view, enough account “activity” in a given month or need to cash in too many coins? There’s a fee for each at some banks, from 50 cents to a few bucks per use. Meanwhile, fees for longtime services have also increased: Cashier’s checks that used to cost $3 now cost up to four times as much, while money orders have doubled.

Outraged by it all? You’re in good company. In the 90 days following last November 5, the so-called Bank Transfer Day ignited by a 27-year-old art dealer’s Facebook post urging consumers to flee the ever-growing fees of big banks, nearly six million heeded the call—and moved their money to credit unions, which have lower or no fees for many of the same services. (As nonprofits, their tax-exempt status is one reason.) Guess what? There’s a fee for closing a recently opened account: $25 at CitiBank, PNC, U.S. Bank, and Sovereign, and some smaller financial institutions demand up to $50. All told, this nickel-and-diming amounts to some serious coin. Last year, $41 billion in fees alone was generated for America’s financial institutions—including $9.5 billion for “everyday” (and sometimes previously no-cost) services on customers who never overdraw their accounts.

Bigger banks, with higher operating costs, tend to be the biggest offenders. They have an average of 49 different fees, according to a study by Pew Charitable Trusts—ranging from $1.50 for a Xerox page to $175 to drill open a safe deposit box if keys are lost. Many are buried deep in government-mandated “disclosures” statements that now typically run 111 pages long, and are “full of legalese” not easily digested by many customers, says Pew’s Ardie Hollifield.

Overall, fees are fewer and less expensive at smaller banks and credit unions. “You’ll pay roughly one-third fewer fees at a credit union or smaller regional or community as opposed to a mega bank,” says Michael Moebs, CEO of Moebs Services Inc., which conducts independent research about banking services and fees for the financial industry’s federal regulators. “Bigger banks charge higher fees because they have to. There’s a huge cost in having 10,000 braches scattered across the U.S.”

Attack of the Killer Fees The Saturday Evening Post