George Leonidas Leslie

George Leonidas Leslie (1842 – May/June 1878), who sometimes went by George Howard and George Herbert, was an American bank robber and architect. Known as the "King of Bank Robbers", he was involved in 80% of the bank robberies in the United States from 1869 to 1878.

Leslie grew up in Ohio, where he created a successful architectural firm. He closed it and left for New York City in 1869, due to ostracism over him evading the Union Army draft in the American Civil War. In New York, he met Fredericka Mandelbaum, a fence; she put Leslie in charge of a gang that stole almost $800,000 from the local Ocean National Bank in June 1869, the largest robbery in the city's history at the time. In 1876, Leslie was involved in the Northampton Bank robbery in Massachusetts, which netted $1.6 million.

In 1878, Leslie attempted a bank robbery in Maine, where two of his gang's members murdered a cashier against Leslie's will. The gang became paranoid that Leslie would cooperate with Pinkerton investigators, and threatened him. In response, he delayed the Manhattan Savings Institution robbery in New York that he was planning with them, hoping to do it with another gang. He was killed before it happened, and police theorized someone in the gang murdered him over the Maine incident. His gang did the robbery by themselves; its investigation led authorities to finding out about Leslie's robberies. Both the Northampton and Institution robberies were the largest-paying robberies in history at the time.