How to Win Friends and Influence People By Dale Carnegie

Introduction

“If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over
the Beehive”

On May 7,1931, the most sensational manhunt New York City had
ever known had come to its climax. After weeks of search, “Two
Gun” Crowley – the killer, the gunman who didn’t smoke or drink
was at bay, trapped in his sweetheart’s apartment on West End
Avenue.

One hundred and fifty policemen and detectives laid siege to his top
floor hideaway. They chopped holes in the roof; they tried to smoke out
Crowley, the “cop killer,” with teargas. Then they mounted their machine
guns on surrounding buildings, and for more than an hour one of New
York’s fine residential areas reverberated with the crack of pistol fire and
the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. Crowley, crouching behind an overstuffed
chair, fired incessantly at the police. Ten thousand excited people watched
the battle. Nothing like it had ever been seen before on the sidewalks of
New York.

When Crowley was captured, Police Commissioner E.P. Mulrooney
declared that the two-gun desperado was one of the most dangerous
criminals ever encountered in the history of New York. “He will kill,” said
the Commissioner, “at the drop of a feather. ”

But how did “Two Gun” Crowley regard himself? We know, because
while the police were firing into his apartment, he wrote a letter addressed
“To whom it may concern.” And, as he wrote, the blood flowing from his
wounds left a crimson trail on the paper. In this letter Crowley said: “Under
my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one – one that would do nobody any
harm.”

A short time before this, Crowley had been having a necking party with
his girlfriend on a country road out on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman
walked up to the car and said: “Let me see your license.”