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.