Northampton Bank Robbery Mural

In downtown Northampton, on the corner of Main and Central Streets, an eye-catching mural commemorates a historic crime. The mural is at the site of the former Northampton National Bank, where on January 26, 1876, robbers stole $1.6 million. At the time, it was the largest bank robbery in American history.

The heist was pulled off by the Rufus Gang, a notorious group of bank robbers from New York. The ringleaders were Thomas Dunlap, Robert Scott, and George Leslie. It took nearly a year after the Northampton Bank Robbery for Dunlap and Scott to be arrested. Leslie was never caught or convicted, and the money was never recovered.

The mural, however, depicts a slightly different version of events—one where the masked robbers don’t get away with their crime. Instead, they run with their fat bags of cash into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, gold-toothed and grinning with justice about to be served. The mural was completed in 2019 by Brooklyn artist Ramiro Davaro-Comas, and it’s a whimsical merger of historical events.

That’s because the 135 Main Street building was also once owned by Kevin Eastman, one of the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Mirage Studios, the production company of TMNT, was formerly headquartered in Northampton, and the city maintains a fondness for the vigilante turtles.