Sinner Emeritus

Stephen Dutton was always considered a very fast man with a dollar -- preferably someone else's dollar. But in his prime, in the dim, goldbrick, 0. Henry era of gentle grafters, patent-medicine fakers, conmen and bunco artists, Steve the Swindler was regarded as especially expert in talking himself into funds and out of trouble. He ranked with Grand Central Pete and Paper Collar Joe, who were tops in bilking the rubes; for a time Steve Dutton was partner of the old master, Perrin Sumner, who was known in the Gay '90s as The Great American Identifier, for reasons lost to history.

In those days the old New York Herald made line drawings of Stephen Dutton's sharp-featured face, his sleek mustache.

Three times he was put away in Sing Sing, to the widespread dismay of widows & orphans. But the clippings faded yellow and crumbly in newspaper morgues; the detectives who arrested him and the judges who sentenced him faded and crumbled too. In Brooklyn's once-tough, now tame Red Hook district, Steve Dutton has recently lived in a frame house with his two dogs, three cats (two of them 22 years old), and a 21 -ft. snake, preserved in formaldehyde, which he said he caught in Florida in 1908.

Three weeks ago Stephen Dutton, 97 years old, was arrested again. The charge: stealing a three-ton paper-cutting machine.

New York City's police crowded the line up last fortnight to get a look at the old est criminal on their books.

If they expected to see a doddering oldster, they were surprised. Old Steve Dutton is built like the village smith, bullnecked, his nearly-six-foot frame wrapped with 180 Ib. of muscle as tough as a lion-tamer's boot. He has never worn glasses. His hearing is acute. Neat in a black suit and powder-blue topcoat, clean shaven and impatient, he stomped out under the bright lights, roaring in a deep black bass. He raged at being held without bail, bawled out a stripling cop who dared touch his shoulder.

Under New York's Baumes (four-times-is-out) law, conviction would automatically jail him for life. Steve Dutton didn't give it a thought. Before the judge he pleaded not guilty: seems he was passing a building in his neighborhood when he remembered that the paper cutter inside was his own property years ago. He broke in, dismantled the 6,000-lb. machine, horse-carted it to a junkman to be sold.

Magistrate Nicholas Pinto just looked at him.

Steve rambled on: he was born near Ithaca, N.Y., when John Tyler was President; as a boy he saw Iroquois Indians roaming the woods. His grandparents gave their land to Cornell University--so he said. In 1861 he enlisted in Pennsylvania's 71st Infantry. "I fit in the Battle of Gettysburg. A Minieball took the tip of my finger off. Shell creased my scalp. When the battle was over I rode a horse to the White House to tell the President. ... I left Gettysburg at 3:30 p.m. and arrived at Lincoln's place at 9:15 that evening.

Lincoln greeted me and took me into the White House kitchen. I don't remember how much I ate. . . . Mr. Lincoln keeps talking, asking me about the battle. I sleep all night there on the kitchen floor.

The next morning Mr. Lincoln made me a captain and sent me back. ... He shook my hand before I left and said: 'If we had more men of the same stuff, we'd get the job done.' " Steve Dutton helped build the New York Central Railroad; he knew John L.

Sullivan and sparred with him. He bellowed at the court: "I'm as good a man as I was 50 years ago. Hit me on the chest! ... I can hold two men so they can't move. I ain't started yet." Magistrate Pinto ventured to mention his record: three times in Sing Sing.

"What was that 1896 charge?" Dutton thumped his cavernous chest. "Jealousy," he rumbled. One thing always caused his downfall, said he: women. He bristled.

Magistrate Pinto, sighing, last week dismissed the charge, shooed out the massive Methuselah. "Go along now. Try to behave from now on." The iron man breathed heavily, took a reef in his galluses, clumped home to his dogs and cats and the 21-ft. snake in the dusty jar.

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