The Tipping Point Revisited: An Excerpt

of the epidemic. This time around, in Revenge of the Tipping Point, I'm taking those ideas and going one big step deeper. Now I'm interested in the dark side. I go to Miami and try and figure out why Miami is so strange. I go to a seemingly perfect little town called Popular Growth, where a tragedy is unfolding. I have a chapter on the Holocaust that I think will completely surprise you. Yet another takedown of Harvard University. I know, I know, I'm a broken record, but I'm inordinately proud

of this one. On and on a mixture of narrative ingredients baked into a highly entertaining suffle. And today we're sharing an exclusive preview of Chapter one of the audiobook of Revenge of the Tipping Point. It's all about bank robbers and doctors. And that's all I'm going to tell you, because you'll have to listen to find out more. But that's not all. Coming up in the next couple of weeks on revisionist history, we have all kinds of goodies

related to my book. We've got a two part episode on maybe my favorite criminal trial ever, something I call the Georgetown Massacre. Then an episode where I go back and audit the chapter I wrote on crime in the original Tipping Point. Did I get it right? And finally we're going to run the comment station I'm having with the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, at the ninety second Street y in New York. Stay tuned and for now enjoy this preview of Revenge of the Tipping Point.

You can find Revenge of the Tipping Point wherever you get your audiobooks. Part one three Puzzles, Chapter one Casper and Sea Dog. It was just like wildfire. Everyone was jumping into the gate. One In the early afternoon of November twenty ninth, nineteen eighty three, the Los Angeles Field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation received a call from a Bank of America branch in the Melrose District. The call was taken by an FBI agent named Linda Webster.

She was the person in the office who fielded what were known as two elevens shorts. A bank robbery's there had just been a hold up. She was told the suspect was a young white male wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, slender, polite Southern accent, well dressed. He said please and thank you. Webster turned to her colleague, William Rader, who ran the FBI's local bank robbery division. Bill it's the Yankee. The Yankee Bandit had been active

in Los Angeles since July of that year. He had hit one bank after another, slipping away each time with thousands of dollars in a leather suitcase. Raider was growing frustrated. Who was this man? All the bureau had to go on was that telltale baseball cap, hence the nickname the Yankee Bandit. Half an hour passed, Webster got another to eleven. This one was from a City National Bank sixteen blocks west in the Fairfax District. They had been taken for

two thousand, three hundred and forty nine dollars. The caller gave Webster the details. She looked at Raider, Bill, it's the Yankee again. Forty five minutes after that, the Yankee hit a Security Pacific National Bank in Centry City, then immediately walked one block down the street and held up a First Interstate Bank for two thousand, five hundred and five dollars. Bill, it's the Yankee twice, back to back.

Less than an hour passed, the phone rang again. The Yankee had just hid an Imperial Bank on Wilshire Boulevard. If you drive from Centry City to the Imperial Bank on Wiltshire, you pass right by the FBI's office. He probably waived at us. Raider told Webster they were now unnoticed. History was being made. They waited, could the Yankee possibly

strike again? At five point thirty, the phone rang. An unknown white male slender an accent Yankee cap had just robbed the First Interstate Bank in Encino, fifteen minutes north on the four or five Freeway, for two thousand, four hundred and thirteen dollars. Bill, it's the Yankee. One man, four hours, six banks. It was a New World's record, Raider would later write in his memoirs Still Unbroken two, no criminal has ever held as exalted a position in

American culture as the bank robber. In the years after the Civil War, the country was riveted by the exploits of bands such as the James Younger Gang, who terrorized the wild West with bank hold ups and trained robbers. In the Depression, bank robbers became celebrities. Bonnie and Clyde, pretty Boy Floyd John Dillinger, Billy brought.

A definitive study at bank robbery was entitled nothing to lose, meaning that the act seemed so irrational that its perpetrators must have run out of other options. It seemed like the twentieth century equivalent of cattle rustling, who does it anymore? But then came an epidemic. In a single year, from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy the number of bank robberies nearly doubled, then rose again in nineteen seventy one, and once more in nineteen seventy two. In nineteen seventy four,

three thousand, five hundred and seventeen banks were robbed. Two years later, the number was four thousand, five hundred and sixty five. By the beginning of the nineteen eighties, they were five times more bank robberies than there had been at the end of the nineteen sixties. It was a crime wave without precedent, and it was just getting started.

In nineteen ninety one, the FBI fielded a two to eleven call from a bank somewhere in the United States nine thousand, three hundred and eighty eight times, And the center of this astonishing surge was the city of Los.

Marx brothers. A short o beast robber was Miss Piggy. A beautiful robber was the Miss America Bandit. A guy who waved a knife was the Benni Hahonna Bandit. On and on it went. They were robbers named after Johnny Cash and Robert de Niro. One group robbed in threes, one dressed as a biker, another as a cop, and the third as a construction worker. Do you need to ask what they were called? This was the nineteen eighties.

They were known as the Village People. It was just like wildfire, remembers Peter Hoolihan, one of the unofficial historians of the La Bank robbery Surge. Everybody was jumping into the game. Ten years into the surge, incredibly, things got much worse. The first generation of Ellie robbers were like the Yankee Bandit. They walked up to a teller and they had a gun, scooped up whatever cash was on hand, and fled. People called them a bit dismissively note passers.

But then came a two man group called the West Hills Bandits. The West Sails Gang went back to the grand tradition of Jesse, James and Bonnie and Clyde. They came in hot in wigs and masks, waving assault weapons. They would force their way into the teller's cage and clean out the entire bank, empty the vault if they could,

before executing a meticulously planned escape. The Bandits had a bunker in the San Fernando Valley filled with military grade weapons and twenty seven thousand rounds of ammunition to prepare for what their leader believed was an imminent armageddon. Even by the standards of nineteen nineties Los Angeles, the West

Hills Gang was a little crazy. On their fifth robbery, the West Hills Gang broke into the vault of a Wells Fargo bank in Tarzana and made off with four hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars more than one million in today's dollars. And then Wells Fargo made a crucial mistake. The bank told the press exactly how much the West Hills Gang had stolen. It was like putting a match to kindling. Four hundred and thirty seven thousand, Are you

kidding me? One of the first to take notice was an enterprising twenty three year old named Robert Sheldon Brown. His street name was Casper. Casper did the math. I've robbed, I've done burglaries, I've done a little bit of everything, he would explain later. But the money couldn't compare to the bank. You could go into a bank and in two minutes get what on the streets would take you

six or seven weeks to get. John Wiley, one of the prosecutors who eventually brought Casper to justice, remembers him as a standout. He said, Casper was really ripped and really smart.

If you were doing as many bank robberies as Casper was, you needed a lot of cars. Then he would pick the crew Prosecutor Wiley.

postal service truck. Casper had imagination he would exercise managerial oversight of his operations from a position of safety parked in a car somewhere far down the block, then follow his hand picked team as they raced through the streets.

Yankee bandit was a one man show. Casper was doing something infinitely more difficult, organizing and supervising teams of robbers. Once Casper showed the world how easy it was to take over a bank, other gangs jumped in. The eight tray gangster crips started putting together cruise. A duo called the Nasty Boys did almost thirty takeovers in under a year just the two of them. The Nasty Boys were nasty.

They liked to herd everyone into the bank vault, talk loudly about executions, and fire their guns next to people's ears just for the fun of it.

a car down the street. All the FBI had was a testimony of terrified teenagers who skipped school between lunch and recess. Finally, prosecutors thought they had enough evidence. They found Sea Dog at his grandmother's house in Carson and arrested Casper as he stepped out of a cab with the two of them behind bars. The bank robbery fever that had seized Los Angeles finally broke. Within roughly a year, the number of robberies in the city dropped thirty percent,

then drifted even lower. Bank robberies didn't head for the moon. The contagion passed. When Casper and Sea Dog got out of federal prison in the summer of twenty twenty three, they shopped their story around Hollywood and took meetings with film producers. Movie executives who heard their story were incredulous that happened here. Yes it did. Three. I want to begin Revenge of the Tipping Point with a series of puzzles, three interconnected stories that seem at first glance to defy explanation.

The third involves a little town called pop Lagrove. The second involves the story of a man named Philip s Forms. And this first chapter involves the exploits of the Yankee Bandit and Casper and Sea Dog. The Los Angeles bank robbery crisis of the early nineteen nineties was an epidemic. It fit all rules. This was not an outbreak generated inside each robber like a toothache. It was contagious. A low grade fever surfaced across the United States at the

end of the nineteen six sixties. In the nineteen eighties, the Yankee Bandit caught that bug in Los Angeles. The West Hills Bandits later picked up that virus, and in their hands it mutated into something darker and more violent. They passed a new Strainnan to Caspar and Sea Dog, who reinvented the process outsourcing the labor and scaling up

dramatically like the late twentieth century capitalists they were. And from there the infection went clear across the city to the Eight Tray gangsters and the Nasty Boys, and on and on, sweeping up hundreds of young men, until by the time the bank takeover boom peaked in Los Angeles, the small time note passing of the Yankee Bandit era

seemed like a dim memory. Socio epidemics are propelled by the efforts of an exceptional few people who play outsized social roles, and that was exactly how the LA outbreak unfolded. This was never a mass participation event like one of those big city marathons where tons of thousands of people sign up. It was a reign of mayhem, driven by a small number of people who robbed over and over and over again. The Yankee Bandit robbed sixty four banks

in nine months before the FBI finally grabbed him. He went to prison for ten years, got out, then robbed eight more banks. The Nasty Boys did twenty seven banks. Casper and Sea Dog masterminded one hundred and seventy five. If you focused only on the Yankee Bandit, Casper and

the Nasty Boys. You would have a pretty complete picture of what happened in Los Angeles in the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, A contagious phenomenon that rose and tipped, fueled by the extraordinary actions of a few Casper, while he said, is the super spreader if you want to talk about epidemics, was the context in the nineteen eighties and the early nineteen nineties ripe for a bank robbery explosion? Yes,

it was. Between the nineteen seventies and the end of the nineteen nineties, the number of bank branches in the United States tripled. Casper and Sea Dog were shooting fish in a barrel. The fever that swept Los Angeles in the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties makes perfect sense, except for one thing. There's a puzzle.

and padded in such a way as to alter his silhouette. Satisfied, did he no longer look like Willy Sutton? Willie Sutton left his house in Staten Island for Sunnyside, Queen's to a Manufacture's Trust Company branch at forty fourth Street and Queen's Boulevard in New York City. Sutton had spent the previous three weeks standing across the street every morning, learning the routines of the bank's employees. He liked what he saw. There was an elevated subway stop across the street, a

bus stop, and a taxi stand. The street was busy and Sutton like crowds. The bank's guard, a slow moving man named Weston who lived nearby, arrived every morning at eight thirty, engrossed in his newspaper. Between eight thirty and nine, he would let in the bank's other employees, culminating in the bank's manager, mister Hoffman, who arrived like clockwork at nine o one. The Manufacturer's Trust opened to the public at ten o'clock, much later than most bank branches. This

too made Sutton happy. He regarded the time between the arrival of the first employee and the arrival of the first customer as his time, and his time in this case would be more than an hour. At eight twenty, Sutton mingled with the crowd waiting at the bus stop. A few minutes later, the Castilian Weston turned the corner, lost in his newspaper. As Weston took out his keys to open the door, Sutton slipped in behind him. Weston turned in shock. Sutton looked him in the eye and

said quietly, come inside. I want to talk to you. Sutton wasn't a fan of guns. Guns for him were props. His real weapon was a quiet authority that compelled the attention of others. He explained to the guard what would happen next. First they would let him one of his accomplices. Then the remaining employees would be admitted, exactly as they were each morning. As each one entered, Sutton's accomplice would emerge and lead them by the elbow to a row

of chairs he'd set up in preparation. Once you've taken control of the bank, Sutton would write years later in his memoirs. Sutton was sufficiently famous by that point that he wrote not one, but two sets of memoirs. Like a statesman who feels the need to respond to the turns of history, it doesn't really matter who comes to the door. A trio of painters once arrived unexpectedly while I was taking a bank in Pennsylvania, and I simply told them to spread out their drop cloths and go

to work. The pay you guys get, the bank can't afford to have you hang around doing nothing. They're insured against bank robbers, but nobody would insure them against you robbers. All during the robbery, I was able to keep up a line of chatter about how I could have retired by now if we bankrobb had as stronger union as they did. Everyone had a good time, and by the time we walked out the door with the money, they had one of the walls completely painted. Sutton was terrifyingly charming.

Did the employees of the Manufacturer's Trust Company realize that the famous Willie Sutton was robbing them that morning? Undoubtedly they filed into the conference room one by one. Don't worry folks. He told them, it's only money, and it isn't your money. At nine oh five, four minutes late, mister Hoffman, the manager, arrived, Sutton sat him down. If you give me any trouble, I want you to know that some of these here employees of yours will be shot.

I don't want you to have any false illusions about that. Now. Perhaps you don't care about your own safety, but the health of these here employees of yours are your responsibility. If anything happens to them, the blame will be yours, not mine. It was a bluff, of course, but it worked every time. He scooped up the money from the vault, ambled out the door to a waiting getaway car, and

vanished into the New York City traffic. Willie Sutton was the New York version of Casper, although that doesn't quite do Willie Sutton justice. Nobody knew much about Casper at the time he was orchestrating his bank robbery spree. Even his trial barely made a dent in the news. Not so Willie Sutton.

story into a biographical novel. In Today's Dollars, He claimed to have stolen more than twenty million over the course of his career. Casper wasn't even in the same tax bracket as Willy Sutton, assuming of course, that they paid taxes, which neither of them did. The point is that if anyone were to start a bank robbery epidemic, you'd think

it would be Willy Sutton. You would think that the impressionable criminal classes of New York City would look at slick Willie effortlessly slipping into bank branches without firing a shot, and making off with the king's ransom and say to themselves, I can do that. In epidemiology, there's a term called the index case, which refer to the person who kicks off an epidemic. We're going to talk about one of the most fascinating index cases in recent history later in

this book. Willie Sutton should have been the index case, right. He turned the grubby job of holding up a bank into a work of art. But Willie Sutton did not start a bank robbery epidemic in New York City, not in the nineteen forties and fifties, in his heyday, nor in the years afterward, as he wrote one memoir after another.

After talking his way out of prison in nineteen sixty nine, claiming ill health, he would live another eleven years, Sutton recreated himself as an expert on prison reform, giving lectures across the country. He consulted with banks on how to prevent bank robberies. He even did a TV commercial for a credit card company pioneering a card with a photo on it.

cities altogether. Why this is the first of the three puzzles, and the answer involves a famous observation made by a physician named John Weinberg five life. In nineteen sixty seven, fresh out of his medical training, John Wenburg got a job in Vermont as part of a federally funded operation called the Regional Medical Program. These were the years of the Great Society, when the US government was making a

concerted effort to expand the American's social safety net. Weinberg's job was to map the quality of care across the state to make sure everyone was getting access to the same standard of medicine. He was young and idealistic. He had studied under some of the best minds in medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Weinberg arrived in Vermont, he said later, still believing quote in the general paradigm that science was advancing and that it was being translated rationally into effective

care end quote. Vermont had two hundred and fifty one towns. Weinburg began by dividing up those communities according to where their local residents got their medical care. That left him with thirteen hospital districts across the state. He then calculated the amount of money that was spent on medical care

in each of those districts. Wenberg assumed that what he would see was that in some far away corner of Vermont where there wasn't much money, spending would be low, and by the same logic, in wealthier communities such as Burlington, the biggest city in the state, home to the University of Vermont and Champlain College, where the hospitals were the newest and most sophisticated and the doctors more likely to have trained at prestigious medical schools, spending would be a

bit higher. He was completely wrong. Yes, they were differences in spending from one hospital district to the next. But the differences weren't small. They were enormous, and they didn't follow any apparent logic. They were as when put it without rhyme or reason. Surgery for removing hemorrhoids, for example, was five times more common in some districts than in others.

Your chances of getting an enlarged prostate surgically removed, or your uterus removed in a hysterectomy, or your appendix removed after an attack of appendicitis were three times higher in some districts than in others. Here's Wenberg years later, describing his early work in an interview with the Community Health Centers podcast Conversations on Healthcare.

you an idea of what the basic variability was. And this variation sembly could not be explained on the basis of differences in the incidents of sword throats or tonsilitis or anything like that, and it was traced pretty much directly back to the medical opinion of the physicians and the different communities.

full of weathered nineteenth century buildings. Nobody seriously I thought that one was more worldly or was in the grip of a different medical ideology than the other. It wasn't that Stowe attracted one kind of person and Waterbury attracted another, very different kind of person. The people were the same, except that is that the children of Waterbury tended to keep their tonsils and the children of Stowe did not. Wenburg was now deeply confused had he stumbled upon some

strange quirk of the small towns of Vermont. He decided to expand his analysis to other parts of New England. He compared Middlebury, Vermont versus Randolph, New Hampshire. These two cities are essentially twins. But when he looked further at the data, he found that in Randolph the doctors conducted themselves in a kind of over caffeinated frenzy, spending freely hospitalizing and operating on everyone inside. But Middlebury Middlebury was

a different world. Weinberg called what he had discovered small area variation, and he found evidence of it across the entire United States. And what started as an idiosyncratic observation about the small towns of Vermont has turned into an iron law that, half a century after Weinberg made his

startling discovery, shows no signs of going away. How your doctor treats you, in many cases, has less to do with where your doctor was trained or how well he or she did in medical school, or what kind of personality your doctor has, than with where your doctor lives. Why does place matter so much? The easiest explanation for small area variation is that doctors are simply doing what

patients want. So, for example, let's pick a relatively simple medical event, how many times a doctor visits a patient in the last two years of their life. The national average in twenty nineteen is around fifty four visits. In Minneapolis, by contrast, the average is much lower, thirty six. But you know what it is in Los Angeles, it's one hundred and five. You get three times more doctor visits in your dying days in LA than you do in Minneapolis.

That's a huge difference. Is it because dying Minnesotans behave like stoic Scandinavians whereas the very old of Los Angeles are needy in demanding The answer seems to be no. Weenberg and other researchers have found that small area of variation does not result from what patients want their doctors to do. It stems from what doctors want to do to their patients. So why do doctors behave so differently

from place to place? Is this just about money? Maybe more people in Los Angeles have the kind of insurance that rewards doctors for treating their patients aggressively. The technical

term for this is payer mix. A city with one hundred percent of its citizens covered by fee for service insurance where a doctor gets paid for everything they do is going to have a very different pattern of care than a city where one hundred percent of its citizens are enrolled in managed care, where payments to doctors and hospitals are fixed. But does Los Angeles have a radically different payer mix than any other big city? No, it doesn't. Okay,

what if this is just random? After all, doctors are people, and people are all over the map in what they believe. Maybe Los Angeles is a place where, by chance, many aggressive doctors happen to practice, while Minneapolis is a place where, by chance, there are very few.

What he found instead were medical clusters where the doctors in one hospital district took on a common identity, as if they had all been infected by the same contagious idea. Jonathan Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth University who's one of the heirs to Weinburg's work, said, it's a birds of a feather flock together puzzle.

The state of California keeps the public database of what percentage of seventh graders at any middle school in the state are up to date with their recommended vaccines chicken pox, measles, mom's rebella, polio, and so on. If you give the list and it's a long list. A cursory glance, it seems pretty straightforward. The overwhelming number of public school kids in California have received all their shots. So what about private school kids. Private schools tend to be smaller and corkier.

Could there be more variation there? Let's take a look. Here are vaccination rates chosen at random from a selection of private elementary schools in Contra Costa County east of San Francisco. Saint John the Baptist one hundred percent, El Sebrante Christian School one hundred percent, Contracosta Jewish Day School one hundred percent. The list goes on. There are a lot of private elementary schools in Contracosta County, and the parents who live there seem pretty intent on protecting their

children from infectious diseases. Saint Perpetua one hundred percent, Saint Catherine of Siena one hundred percent. But wait, there's one school that's very different, East Bay Waldorf forty two percent. Forty two percent. Is this a fluke, a chance deviation from a consistent pattern. Let's take a look at private schools in El Dorado County, just down the list alphabetically from Contra Costa g HS Academy ninety four percent, Holy Trinity School one hundred percent, and then wait for it,

Cedar Springs Waldorf thirty six percent. Estra Los Angeles. Most middle schools, like their counterparts around the state are up in the nineties or at one hundred percent, but once again, there is an exception far on the west side of the city, in the exclusive neighborhood of Pacific Palisades West Side Waldorf twenty two percent. If you've never heard of Waldorf schools, they're a movement started by the Austrian educator

Rudolf Steiner in the early twentieth century. Waldorf schools are small and expensive and focus on holistic learning, seeking to develop the creativity and imagination of their students. There are several thousand Waldorff schools around the world, mostly kindergartens and elementary schools, and about two dozen in California, and almost without exception, the lowest vaccination rates in any California town that has a Waldorf school are at the Waldorf school.

There are other schools with unvaccinateed rates as highest Waldorf, but they're rare. Here is Sonoma County Saint Vincent de Paul Elementary School one hundred percent, Rincon Valley Christian one hundred percent, Sonoma Country Day School ninety four percent, Saint Eugene Cathedral School ninety seven percent, Saint Rose one hundred percent, Summerfield Waldorff School twenty four percent. California had two measles outbreaks in the mid twenty tens.

lesson of social epidemics. When we look at a contagious event, we assume that there is something fundamentally wild and unruly about the path it takes. But there is nothing wild and unruly about the La Bank robbery epidemic, or the patterns of medical practice in Waterbury versus Stowe, or the ideas of Waldorf parents. Whatever contagious belief unites the people in those instances has the discipline to stop at the

voters of their community. There must be a set of rules buried somewhere below the surface, which brings us to puzzle number two. Thanks for listening to that preview of my new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. You can hear the rest on audible, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Spotify, Pushkin,

dot FM, or wherever you like to listen. Coming up next on Revisionist History, two narrative episodes about my favorite trial of all time, and a deep dive on broken windows, a theory that I helped popularize in The Tipping Point? Did I get it right? And what's changed twenty five years later?

Operations and Publishing. Special thanks to Jasmine Faustino and of course el Hefe Greta. Come, I'm Malcolm Popple