Dog Day Aftermath

Tuesday, August 22, 1972.... As historical footnotes go, it was the summer night America watched Sammy Davis Jr. Plant a kiss on Richard Nixon, the most spontaneous moment all evening on the telecast of the G.O.P. renominating convention in Miami. Up in New York, however, folks were getting cops-'n'-robbers suspense when reports of a stick-up in progress at a Chase Manhattan Bank periodically flashed on the tube, even in the middle of the President's acceptance speech.

There he was, a swaggering, boyish gunman who could easily pass for Al Pacino, lecturing reporters on the death penalty, then pacing the sidewalk, screaming, "Back off!" at the cops, while calling the FBI into bargaining chats concluded with a handshake, while his partner, Sal, held a gun on hostages inside the bank.

Meanwhile, in Miami: "And I say to you, my fellow Americans...."

They had a thing in common, those two, Nixon and the crook at the bank, a young out-of-work teller named John Wojtowicz (Wot-o-wits). Both were destined to pay dearly for their crimes as a result of extra efforts on the part of the media.

In Wojtowicz' case, it was inadvertent overkill. Not counting the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, this was the first crime to be played out on television, both because it went on for 14 hours and because the robber's style was so friendly, his motive so original---he needed the money, he announced, to pay for a sex-change operation for Ernie, his male "wife." For viewers, it had everything, crime, sex, money, love---and death. Within a few days, there was a nationwide media burnout on "the gay bank robber"; and a month later, Life ran a seven-page article that then inspired hard- and softcover books and the hit movie Dog Day Afternoon, which went on to win an Academy Award for best screenplay.

Although screenwriter Frank Pierson followed the facts rather closely, some events in the movie were fictionalized, such as John's conversation with his mother in the street (he told her on the phone, "Ma, I don't know what I'm doing"), fistfights at the barricades between hard-hats and gay activists (gays scoffed at John as any kind of hero), John's sending up shouts to the crowd of "Attica! Attica!" ("That," he assured me, "would have scared the hostages shitless.")

It's true that the bank employees began to fall for the manic charm of Wojtowicz. "We were having a party," one said. "We never really thought we'd be harmed; the gunmen treated us so nicely."

Not every act of bravery---or lack of it---could be shown. For example, in the movie, the first hostage released is an elderly bank guard in poor health. In real life, he was a strapping, 24-year-old dude who begged on his knees, "Please, man, don't shoot me," and made everybody so nervous they were glad to get rid of him. By contrast, when they had a chance to get away, both Robert Barrett, the bank manager, and Shirley Ball, a teller, chose not to do so.

Finally, wrapped in hostages, the gunmen were driven to Kennedy airport, where, under the wing of a waiting jet, the FBI rushed them. Bang!---a gun crack---and suddenly, the hostages were safe, John was in custody and Sal was dead, with a bullet through his heart. It's not nice to fool with the FBI.

•

I have a light over my little cell.... When I lie down, I think of you constantly and I make believe the light is the moon. Just let me know what time you go to sleep and I will make believe I'm lying next to you and we are together at last and happy and in love.

---John Wojtowicz, in a letter to Ernie from West Street jail

Legally insane---acting under compulsion---was the obvious line of defense. John was a first offender with a family history of mental illness who had recently been under psychiatric care, and whose behavior gave strong suggestions of schizophrenia. The court-appointed lawyer, Mark A. Landsman, promptly petitioned a psychiatric evaluation.

Kings County Hospital examined John by order of Federal judge Anthony J. Travia, a conservative Democrat with a reputation for very tough sentencing. John was kept under sedated observation for a month and after a one-hour chat with a psychiatrist---no tests---the hospital pronounced him legally sane. He stood indicted on four counts: bank robbery, armed robbery, kidnaping and conspiracy. Travia would not hear of more exams at state expense and John had no money for psychiatrists, which seemed to rule out any bargain-basement version of the type of defense later amassed for Patty Hearst.

One day Landsman got a phone call from Martin Elphand, a film producer (Kansas City Bomber), who said Life's story called "The Boys in the Bank" suggested to him a movie script. Would Wojtowicz, his wife, his mother and Ernie be willing to sign releases for the rights to their stories? Oh, maybe $7500 to Wojtowicz and one or two percent of the net profits if a film were made---provided everybody signed. With John facing life in prison, nobody dickered much about numbers and points, least of all Landsman. "To be perfectly frank, I didn't want to get involved," he said recently. "I was just a letter carrier. How should I know what it takes to pay off a criminal for his story?" (Though he did say in court, "I negotiated on behalf of this defendant with people who are producing a movie.")

A bit of checking would have shown Landsman that the going rate was much more than Elphand was offering. For example, Lenny Bruce's heirs will receive from $250,000 to $400,000 for Lenny, and even 14 years ago, Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, shared $25,000 and ten percent of that movie's net.

Everyone signed releases without a thought and a $7500 check promptly arrived, payable to Landsman. John had $2500 of it sent to Ernie for his sex-change operation and the rest was set aside for psychiatrists' fees.

As it turned out, Landsman's fee was $3500. Psychiatrists weren't necessary, it seemed, if John took his advice: A long and involved jury trial, pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, could mean a life behind bars if he lost, and Landsman recommended the safer, easier course of plea bargaining, confessing guilt to one of the four counts to get the others dropped. Landsman must have wondered how he would line up 12 jurors who held no feelings one way or the other about homosexuals, transsexuals or drag queens and who had no knowledge of "the gay bank robber" case. However, journalist Randy Wicker claims Landsman didn't want to bother.

Certainly, John would have been any attorney's nightmare---naïve, arrogant, erratic. As terrified as he was of being declared insane, he was as opposed to plea bargaining, because he felt no guilt. To help make his mind up, Landsman enlisted Ernie's enigmatic charms, arranging an unprecedented visit for him alone with John in a private room at the jail. On February 16, 1973, John plea-bargained one count of armed robbery, which carries a maximum penalty of 25 years and $25,000, and he had assurances that that normally meant a ten-to-fifteen-year sentence.

Meanwhile, competition for John's favor was heating up among his wife Carmen, Ernie and John's mother, Terry, especially when they all collided in the visitors' waiting room.

"Oh, Carmen," said Ernie, "how do you ever sit in skirts? I'll never learn."

"Ernie, I don't have to learn nothin'," said Carmen. "I'm a real woman."

"Wanna see my tits?" snapped Ernie.

On the sidelines, Terry grumbled, "Ernie sure is getting better looking than that fat thing John married."

Despite resolutions and diet pills, Carmen's weight had climbed to 255, a result of her unhappiness. "Some mother-in-law she is," Carmen said later about Terry's preference for Ernie. "What does she expect Ernie to do---shit out grand-children?"

•

Flashback: One weekend in 1966, on a ski trip run by his employer, the Chase Manhattan Bank, John met a cute typist named Carmen Bifulco, a jolly, Kewpie-doll blonde who worried about her weight (155 pounds at 5'1"), especially when standing next to John (127 at 5'4").

While John was no swinger, he liked women to look up to him, lean on him, obey him, especially a girl like Carmen, who also tended to undervalue herself.

Drafted by the Army a week later, he dated Carmen steadily that summer on weekend passes from Georgia, until one dog day in August, as they cuddled under the boardwalk at Far Rockaway, he slipped a beer-can ring on her engagement finger.

The following year, when John returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam as an artillery instructor, they were married in a $6000 Italian wedding. Then, while he was moved around to teach at Army bases on the East Coast, Carmen stayed close by in rooming houses, where they enjoyed noisy quarrels and an Olympic sex life. Whether on sway-backed Murphy beds, bathroom floors or back seats of moving convertibles with the top down, their lovemaking stopped for (continued on page 142) Dog Day Aftermath (continued from page 130) nothing, including her periods and the early labor of childbirth. The first baby, a girl, arrived after 11 months. "I never could breast-feed," Carmen remembers with pride and wonder. "Johnny took it all."

After an honorable discharge, John returned to the bank and they set up a honeymoon apartment in Brooklyn. Like all romantics, he liked to remember their wedding anniversary, as frequently as possible, sending her a yellow rose on the 21st day of the month. Since John didn't mind, Carmen put on weight, reaching more than 200 pounds. By the 21st month, the marriage cooled, however, and they separated to move back with their parents.

Although he still spent weekends with Carmen, John, at 24, was free for the first time to explore the homosexual part of his nature. Never secretive or apologetic, he had often tried to explain, but Carmen refused to believe it until a year later, when a reconciliation went sour in six weeks and she guessed why.

"Hey, who's this girl you got?" she asked one day.

"It's no girl," John said.

"Don't tell me you're messing with another guy?"

"Uh-huh...."

"We're even," she said triumphantly.

"So am I."

John was deeply hurt. When they had married, he had vowed never to step out with another woman. That eight, he drowned himself in bitter lovemaking with a girl somewhere and after that, things between them were never the same.

•

John met Ernie at a street fair in Little Italy that summer. Tall and fey, with a nasally languid way about him, Ernest "Curley" Aron made a startling, big-faced amazon when he wore women's clothes. In some other life he had a wife and children, too, but had decided in the final analysis he was "a woman trapped in a man's body" and had taken to full-time "cross-dressing" until he could make up his mind whether to ride the lightning of a sex-change operation. When he was not a dishwasher or a cocktail waitress, he lived on welfare, a tortured soul caught in the persecuted half life of transvestites. He preferred the name Liz Eden (for Taylor and the Garden of). As different as Ernie was from Carmen, John sensed they had a similar need. Ernie lacked a manly protector against a world that could be cruel and soon John was sending a dozen red roses every week.

That was 1971, two summers after the gay liberation movement was launched, and John got drunk on the new freedoms. Taking the alias Littlejohn Basso (his mother's maiden name), he joined the Gay Activists Alliance in Manhattan, which prided itself on a policy of encouraging the freest range of self-expression at its clubhouse. A member who knew John in those days recalls "a tenderhearted little guy who played the clown." Another describes "a jerk who was into role playing." Both, however, agree his flamboyance and overactive libido were a bit much, even for the G.A.A.

In December of that year, John rented a night club and married Ernie in a big splashy affair that had the bride in a $650 white-lace gown, backed by three bridesmaids in maroon. More than 500 strangers wandered in and out of the reception, partaking of food, booze and a giant four-layer cake. John's mother came. So did Ernie's father. (Al Pacino studied a video tape of the wedding to develop his portrayal of John for Dog Day Afternoon, a performance John calls "flawless." They never did meet. Warner Bros. could not get through the prison politburo---never mind all those Bogey, Cagney, Robinson crime-busting films the studio made.)

The wedding made up Ernie's mind. "I finally decided," he recalls, "we gotta have the cunt." It took $2500 to start the ball rolling, but John's ready cash had gone for the wedding. He had been unemployed for months, fired from his last teller's job when they discovered he was homosexual. His health was shaky, too, after a bad case of hepatitis and cancerous cysts in the throat, which, after surgery, reappeared as intestinal lumps and for which he refused more surgery, believing he was dying. When he had to go on welfare, he flushed with shame and tried to hide it. Asked how he paid for the wedding, he hinted at running errands for the Mafia, but Ernie laughs at the idea. "It was loan sharks," he says. "John was all mouth."

From the start, nothing went right for the Bassos. Ernie sank deeper into depression as John drifted from the G.A.A. and began to grow inexplicably violent. One quarrel ended with his smashing down a door, another with his holding a gun to Ernie's head, then to his own. Ernie persuaded him to get help at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, where a psychiatrist recommended commitment; but John would not return after the second visit. His older brother has been in a mental institution since the age of four and it has made a deep impression on him. "Once they get you in," he says, "how do you get out?"

Ernie decided John was "more nuts than I was" and fled their Village apartment to hide in Queens, determined to change his gender or end his life.

Packing a .38, John chased rumors of Ernie's whereabouts to Hyannis Port and Upstate New York. He found him working in a midtown Manhattan disco and terrorized him into a tense reconciliation; but it was useless, because Ernie was sinking into despair about the operation. Finally, John promised Ernie $2500 for his birthday on August 19, 1972. How? By robbing a bank.

Accounts vary of that fateful spring, so it's hard to say with any certainty what turned the outcast into the criminal. A smart defense attorney might have asked: Did John look at himself and see a man who was broke, on welfare, dying, unemployable, losing his marbles, separated, hated by his father, rejected by his friends and up against a lover's suicide ultimatum? Did his mind snap? Did he act out of "irresistible impulse"? But no one ever asked.

•

At four A.M. on the morning of his sentencing, John was found on the floor of his cell, unconscious from swallowing an unknown number of Doridens and slashing his wrists and forearms. Relations with his attorney had broken down altogether and he had become despondent when Ernie's (now Liz Eden's) letters and visits stopped a month after the sex change.

Just the same, John was patched up by ten A.M. and delivered to the courtroom cleared of spectators other than press and family, a sad little figure in handcuffs, leg shackles and blood-spattered clothes. Groggy from drugs, he managed to speak in a low, even tone:

"Your Honor, love is a very strange thing and some people feel it more deeply than others do. I love my wife, Carmen, very much; I love my daughter; I love my son and I love Ernie and I need all of them."

He spoke of Ernie's suicide tries, of how he "couldn't watch him 24 hours a day" and of how he had looked in vain for work to pay for the operation. He felt he'd saved the hostages from Sal's itchy trigger finger and claimed the FBI had shot his accomplice after he was fully disarmed.

"My love for [Ernie] is more important than anything else in the whole world.... That's why I did what I did. You can't condemn love; love is a gift from God, your Honor."

Unmoved by any of this, Travia gave him 20 years and left as though he had a plane to catch.

•

John Wojtowicz #76456, Terre Haute Penitentiary

July 9, 1973

Dear John,

I met a new guy named Ralph and he feels that it's bad if I write to you and so from now on I'm not going to. Hope all works out well for you.

Love, Liz

P.S. Please don't bother me anymore.

•

After three months in Indiana, John was moved to Lewisburg Penitentiary in central Pennsylvania. Unlike Allenwood prison, the "country-club farm" of Watergate fame three miles away, Lewisburg stands on a gentle rise, edged by a moat of creeks and piny woods, asserting its maximum security like a Norman fortress with 22-foot walls and gun towers. Until Nixon pardoned him the prior Christmas, Jimmy Hoffa was there: but it held no celebrities now, certainly none like Littlejohn, The Gay Bank Robber.

Shortly after arrival, John was knocked unconscious and gang-raped by three men in the laundry. Though he did not identify them, he displayed the bad form of reporting the attack, which pained inmates and authorities alike. Prison officials tend to publicly deplore and privately wink at homosexual activity, a sensible compromise in light of new Kinsey findings, recently published in C. A. Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix, that 71 percent of men in prison engage in it. In any case, John was off to a bad start. At the time, he wrote to screenwriter Pierson, "I have Ernie and Carmen and my children and that is all I will ever need." But to avoid rape, he needed, in fact, to "marry" again: Attractive newcomers to prison are wise to get hooked up with an "old man" or an "old lady," an inmate lover who will help fend off sexual assault.

Enter Joe, a soft-spoken, 29-year-old father of three, oddly enough, himself serving time (eight years) for a robbery-kidnap attempt on another Chase Manhattan branch in Brooklyn. The way his nappy hair, slim, angular frame and vulnerable manner resemble Ernie's says something about the persistence of dreams.

Safe with Joe, his old lady, John could have kept a low profile and worked for parole in 1979; but nine months after he was raped, he insisted to officials he was pregnant. Then he tried to become Lewisburg's first streaker. There were other incidents. Compulsive behavior was keeping him a target for assault as well as a hot gay potato for officials---and the movie wasn't even out yet.

Dog Day Afternoon opened in 14 cities on September 21, 1975, with lines down the block even before the rave reviews were out. Its audience last winter ranked about third in size after Jaws and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, with estimates for its eventual world-wide net running over $20,000,000. It might seem as if Landsman's low deal would be compensated for by the film's jackpot success. Even one percent works out to $200,000, enough to pay back welfare, work for a sentence reduction and buy a lot of roses. At last, Littlejohn's first break.

But wait. Asked to show the contract, Warner Bros. revealed that none had been drawn up and that what Landsman had accepted was a brief memo from Elphand to himself, listing "items we spoke about regarding John Woodowitz' [sic] release." No commitment. Period.

Martin Bregman, senior producer of the film and Pacino's manager, admits to feeling guilty about it. "If we get fat," he says expansively, "some of the fat will flow in his direction. A job, an apartment, something."

In the fast game of movie-deal making, while Littlejohn got buggered and Liz got castrated, Carmen managed to get $50. A Warner Bros. agent left it one day when he went to the house to taperecord her recollections, the basis for the most unflattering portrayal in the film. "I got a little red raincoat for my daughter," she says of the money, "and some new kitchen curtains."

Recently, Carmen filed suit for $12,000,000 against Warner Bros., Dell Publishing Company and three other parties, claiming invasion of civil rights, defamation and libel. She's also acting for her children, who are briefly portrayed in the film without permission or payment. Terry has joined Carmen's suit and there is another suit to test the implied intent of the one percent memo; but none of the Wojtowiczes have a very strong case, because they signed those releases.

•

I thought the movie was a piece of GARBAGE & didn't like it one bit. I must admit I did laugh sometimes but, otherwise, I didn't think it was so funny....I've taken a lot of harassment over it, especially the part they hinted I sold Sal to the FBI....

---John, writing to Carmen from Lewisburg Penitentiary

The film was shown privately to John on October 2, 1975. Except for two guards leaning on the back wall, he sat alone in the prison's big third-floor auditorium, its soiled green curtains shutting out the midday light. As did Carmen when she saw it incognito at a swanky preview in New York, John cried during the moment when Pacino dictates his last will, saying, "My darling wife. You are the only woman I have ever loved."

Unwisely, all of Lewisburg's 1000 inmates were shown the film at two performances that followed. Afterward, some said John was a rat, because the film implies he made a deal to deliver the accomplice to the FBI; and, in the prison pecking order, not even a child molester is considered lower than a rat. Some inmates who prefer to feel guilty about being homosexual resented his liberated feelings or saw in them an enticement. Other inmates smoldered with envy for his celebrity status and the expected fortune he'd reap.

On November 29, as he was taking a shower, John's cell was set afire with a kerosene bomb. It happened again with a burglary on January 12 and once more a week later. At Lewisburg, where homicides average one a month, the message was clear. John was placed under protective custody while arrangements could be made to move him speedily to another prison. At last report, one in California might accept him for its solitary-confinement section, after five other prisons said no.

"The hole" is a lonely hamster hutch beyond Lewisburg's hospital, where John's 6'x9' cell has a bunk, a basin and a toilet. There's a small high window and a steel door with a peek-through. Except for pairs of unfriendly eyes that look in and meals that are slid in on a tray, life here has no change and no sound. Once a week John is let out for a private run in the gym and a shower, but it's dangerous. There have been threats.

His only friend, Joe, has left as a result of sentence-reduction proceedings. Meantime, Playboy's September 1975 Playmate is taped to the wall over John's bed and he clips pictures of yellow roses out of magazines to mail to Carmen. On the ceiling there is a 60-watt light bulb, his make-believe moon, but really, who is there to dream of anymore?

•

A statuesque 40-27-39 redhead, Liz Eden at 30 is legally married to a man named Tony. Through the combined wonders of plastic surgery, silicone injection, implantation, dermabrasion, electrolysis and Nice 'n Easy light auburn---$20,000 worth in all---she is at last a real woman.

She frankly discusses the difficulties of sexual reassignment. She says that due to some vaginal malfunction during her first sexual intercourse, the man's penis punctured her bladder. And recently, she's had to give up go-go dancing at a Manhattan disco because a lump appeared under one breast that required surgery. As long as the doctor was in there, she says, she traded in the 38-inch breast implants for 40s, double-D cup. But now the lump has returned.

Liz and Tony live on a tidy out-of-court settlement she made with Warner Bros. while she dictates her autobiography. Tony is 18 and goes to air-conditioning-repair school. What does she like about him? "Well, he's kinda short and dark and cute and hot and Italian looking. But don't say it." Liz warns, holding up a hand of red Dragon Lady nails stuck on with Krazy Glue. "I know who that sounds like."