Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (11 page)
I
t is a convention of crime fiction that the detective is haunted by the case he did or didn’t solve. Me, I never was a detective. Too many off-duty incidents in bars.
But I did have some memorable moments, as in hairraising, as a patrolman in the 1970s in Bushwick specifically, the self-styled “Fighting 83rd” Precinct. And not without justification.
The ’70s in New York City was the worst of times, in that crime was rampant. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy, had laid off a quarter of the police force, and arsonists—for profit or revenge—were busy burning down the wood-frame tenements of Bushwick, to the point where whole blocks had the look of a lunar landscape.
But the ’70s were also the best of times, in that a cop never had a dull moment. Cops of the Fighting 83rd were a tight band of brothers; female officers had yet to debut in the patrol precincts. We were bound together by the shared perils of the street.
On the night of July 13, 1977, the lights went out in Bushwick and everywhere else in the city. In what the media has referred to as “blackout looting,” larceny commenced forthwith along a two-mile stretch of Broadway, the main shopping artery dividing Bedford-Stuyvesant from Bushwick. Bodegas, supermarkets, discount furniture emporia, a gun shop, jewelry, clothing, and shoe stores had the gates ripped from doorways, and the contents inside were carried off into the night. For extra measure, the stores were then set afire.
All that night and into the next day, we cops roamed streets that looked like the siege of Atlanta as pictured in the movie version of
Gone with the Wind
. And yet, despite the
Sturm und Drang
, it is not the events of that blackout night that remain in the forefront of my memory. That place of honor belongs to Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
Mad Dog and I met in an after-hours Puerto Rican social club on a cold January night in 1977 when neighborhood cops—myself among them—were motoring through the streets of Bushwick in what was known as a “precinct conditions car,” an umarked Plymouth sedan, a.k.a. the “brown car,” the scourge of drug dealers, gunsels, chop shop operators, counterfeiters, and after-hours social clubs that catered to the ungodly.
Shortly after midnight, we exited said vehicle and burst through the barred front door of the Puerto Rican club on Jefferson Street, just off Knickerbocker Avenue.
As we made our entrance, glassine envelopes and various drug paraphernalia floated to the floor like autumn leaves. But what caught my attention was two white guys sitting by themselves in a corner, the only non-Latinos present. So my first words to the two, as they sat at the table looking up at me, were, “On your feet and against the wall.”
I gave the muscular guy to my left a little push against the wall, off which he bounced, spun around, and stood stock still, staring at me. He was Irish-looking, five-foot-ten with a mustache and chiseled features.
Thus, without benefit of names, did I make my initial acquaintance with Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
The first thing I noticed about Mad Dog was his flat, dark, dead eyes, with which he assessed me for a long minute, then slowly turned around and assumed the position. His Italianlooking tablemate did the same, without objection.
Looking down at the floor, I found something that didn’t surprise me—a Beretta semi-automatic, which, I would later discover, was loaded with seven live rounds, one in the chamber. I hollered “Gun!” whereupon the four other cops with me focused attention on the two guys I had on the wall.
I didn’t find out who these desperadoes were until we got back to the precinct house for arrest processing. We had a dozen other patrons of the bar for various drug possession counts, but only Mad Dog and his companion for the gun.
In those days there were no computers. You made a phone call to the Bureau of Criminal Identification at NYPD headquarters in downtown Manhattan. BCI eventually identified one Joseph Sullivan, a.k.a. “Mad Dog,” on lifetime parole as a convicted murderer. His Italian cohort was Anthony “Snooky” Solimini, a Genovese soldier out of place here because around the corner on Knickerbocker Avenue were the Bonanno lads sipping espresso and plotting mayhem.
In those days, everything was done manually. You took a prisoner by the hand and rolled his fingertips over an ink pad and then pressed each one onto a print card. Then you handcuffed the prisoner and went through his personal effects. Then you vouchered (recorded and packaged) drug evidence for the police lab and the gun for ballistics, after which you transported the guy downtown to Central Booking, which back in the day was on Gold Street in downtown Brooklyn. There he would be processed further, and a cop like me would be interviewed by an assistant D.A., who would draft charges based on what I told him.
With these particular arrests, both my prisoners stood to be charged with felony possession of a loaded gun if I wanted to go by the book—but it was a tenuous charge to lay against both. What I had to do, practically speaking, was select the one more likely to have possessed the weapon. Based on my estimation of Mad Dog’s background, he was elected as the guy who made a motion under the table to toss the gun. A complete fiction, but no more of a fiction than those invented by prosecutors and judges in criminal court, where they are known as “legal fictions.”
Although my statement to the assistant D.A. could be seen as a lie, it was in fact expected as a professional courtesy. The last thing a prosecutor or judge wants to hear in a criminal case is what actually happened. What they wanted was what they could put together to make a solid case against whomever the perpetrator was that I had dragged downtown. So every cop in my day would say what he was expected to say in order for the wheels of justice to grind exceedingly slowly and for no bad guys to escape. This is no doubt true even today, as I do not expect anything has changed. So, the D.A. was pleased to accept my legal fiction that I saw Mad Dog ditch something under the table. After all, he had Mad Dog’s complete and lengthy history on his yellow sheet, so-called because a criminal record was then printed on yellow paper. Mad Dog had been paroled after being sentenced to twenty-to-thirty years in 1967 upon conviction of manslaughter. Yet there he was in 1977 in my clutches. Which was a mystery to us all.
What was known, though, is that we had a very bad guy on our hands. As the D.A. said, “We’re gonna stick it to this guy, he’s going back upstate.”
I could certainly endorse the sentiment. So I gave the D.A. a story he could live with.
We then adjourned to the courtroom. By this time, the sun had risen and day court was in session. In those days, the arresting officer actually went to court with the prisoner for arraignment. Not so today, as the police department, in its wisdom, has found a way to avoid all the overtime wages involved in having a police witness to a crime appear in court with the perpetrator.
So there we were, waiting for the case to be called so we could stick it to Mad Dog and send him back upstate where he belonged. Then Mad Dog’s lawyer appeared—Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general of the United States.
I recognized Clark, even if some of my partners didn’t. Certainly the court did, and so did the D.A., and he and the judge fawned all over the ex–attorney general. Of course, Clark didn’t have a clue as to criminal court procedure. However, the Legal Aid lawyer on arraignment duty couldn’t do enough for Ramsey, leading him by the hand through an unfamiliar process.
Oh! By the way, how was it that Mad Dog Sullivan got lawyered up with the former attorney general of the United States—?
Ramsey Clark had evidently been instrumental in gaining parole for Mad Dog in December 1975.
Since 1967, Mad Dog had been incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility, which is so far upstate you can hear Canadians hiccupping on the other side of the border. Maybe Canada is where Mad Dog had been heading when he escaped from Attica in ’71 by hiding in a delivery truck on its way out of the penitentiary gates; thus goes the honor to Joseph Sullivan as the only inmate in the history of Attica to ever have busted out.
But he wasn’t missing for long. Two months after his departure from the pen by truck, Mad Dog was captured on West 12th Street and University Place in Greenwich Village by agents of a state task force. A judge slapped an additional ten years onto his sentence and he was returned to prison.
Ramsey Clark was, at the time, active in the prison reform movement, and Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan became something of a movement poster boy. Just as the Brooklyn novelist Norman Mailer was attracted to the late murderer/writer Jack Henry Abbott, author of the acclaimed
In the Belly of the Beast
, so too was Ramsey Clark fascinated with Mad Dog Sullivan.
And just as Jack Henry Abbott had failed to mend his homicidal ways while on parole—thanks in part to Mailer’s efforts in creating a cause célèbre, Abbott was free to fatally stab a young waiter at the Binibon Café in the East Village— Mad Dog Sullivan also eschewed the path of redemption.
Some time after Ramsey’s intervention on behalf of inmate Joseph Sullivan, the newly paroled Mad Dog was a suspect in the execution of Mickey Spillane—ex-boss of the Irish mob in Hell’s Kitchen, not to be confused with the nom de guerre of a certain crusty pulp novelist. Spillane was shot dead on May 13, 1977, outside his hideaway apartment in Woodside, Queens, where he mistakenly believed he was living under the radar. Mad Dog was never charged with the hit, nor was anyone else.
As it happens, Mad Dog’s youth was spent in the vicinity of Woodside. He grew up in Richmond Hill, Queens, where he committed his first murder.
His last recorded murder occurred on December 17, 1981, when Mad Dog took a shotgun to John Fiorino, a reputed Mafioso and vice president of Teamsters Local 398. Mad Dog was convicted of killing Fiorino outside the Blue Gardenia restaurant in upstate Irondequoit, near Rochester.
Mad Dog is today a sixty-nine-year-old resident of the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York, eligible to appear before the New York State Parole Board for the first time in the year 2069.
Jack Henry Abbott died in the Wende Correctional Facility in 2002. Unless Mad Dog Sullivan sees his 130th birthday, his fate is likewise sealed.
—And so there I was in the courtroom with Ramsey Clark and his toady from Legal Aid. I sat and listened with foreboding. With an inkling that Mad Dog might not have to go north after all.
As it happened, my instincts were correct.
Later on, out in the hallway, the D.A. approached me and said, “Ah, we didn’t have a case anyhow.” I didn’t bother pointing out that he’d said earlier we had a very solid case.
Then Ramsey and Mad Dog emerged from the courtroom. Mad Dog had the grace and style to ignore us cops. Ramsey, being a gentleman, came over to me with a look of compassion and said these words I will never forget:
“Officer, I think justice was done.”
To which I replied, “I doubt it, Ramsey.”
Well, Mad Dog has stayed with me all these years and I have followed his career as best I can. I have discovered both what he’d done before we met in January of ’77, and what he did after. Most of this I learned from Mad Dog’s autobiography, entitled
Tears & Tiers
, a seminal book self-published by Mad Dog and his wife, Gail Sullivan, and first released in 1997.
One thing I learned from the autobiography was that before we met in ’77, Mad Dog had been paroled from Attica in December 1975 despite a murder conviction and, as mentioned, his being the only escapee from Attica back in ’71.
An extraordinary guy, this Joseph Sullivan, and an inscrutable situation from a legal point of view.
Not long after his parole, in May of ’76, Mad Dog had a relapse. He hooked up with an old comrade—a made member of the Genovese crime family—who brokered gainful employment as a hit man. Mad Dog was to be under the direct supervision of Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, top boss of the Genovese organization.
On July 20, 1976, Mad Dog did his first job for the family by executing Tom Devaney, an enforcer for the Mickey Spillane mob, forerunner of the more famous Westies gang of Hell’s Kitchen.
Mad Dog put a bullet in Tom Devaney’s head as Tommy was drinking at a Hell’s Kitchen bar. After which, on a sunny day in August of ’76, he did the same to another Spillane enforcer, one Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, in another saloon. In his autobiography, Mad Dog tells us that he also did three or four subsequent hits, but he doesn’t identify the bodies.
Then Mad Dog and I met, on January 29, 1977. A week prior to our evening meeting, in the daylight hours of January 22, Mad Dog gunned down Tom “the Greek” Kapatos on a Midtown Manhattan street, according to the autobiography and T.J. English, author of
Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of
the Irish American Gangster
(HarperCollins, 2005).
When he walked out of court a free man, thanks to Ramsey Clark, Mad Dog was given a new assignment by his handlers within the Genovese family: the cancellation of Carmine “Cigar” Galante, boss of the Bonanno crime family who, ironically, began his career as a hit man for the late patriarch Vito Genovese (1897–1969).
Up through the summer of ’78, Mad Dog was running all over the city trying to corner Carmine Galante and knock him off. He explained in his book that he regrettably was unable to do so on account of being called off the job by Fat Tony.
On July 12, 1979, however, Galante was sent to his maker at the hands of others: murdered by close-range shotgun blasts just as he finished eating lunch in the back garden of Joe &Mary’s restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue, Bushwick. He’d been dining with his cousin, Giuseppe Turano, and his bodyguard, Leonard Coppola.
Then along came the shooters—Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato, Dominic “Big Trin” Trinchera, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, Cesare “CJ” Bonventre, and Louis “Louie Gaeta” Giongetti—and the rest became pictorial history. The tabloids captured a photograph of the late Mr. Galante sprawled in his own blood in the garden at Joe & Mary’s, cigar firmly clenched between his teeth.