Arthur Williams

Who is Arthur Williams?

Arthur Williams 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.

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".