The random movie of the day — "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975). I knew the story of the Brooklyn bank exactly the way everyone knows it: a hapless robber, a crowd of gawkers, Al Pacino, a gunshot at the end. I went digging into where the movie diverges from reality and found that the film's primary source wasn't police blotters at all. Frank Pierson wrote the screenplay from the article "The Boys in the Bank" in Life for September 22, 1972, and the article hung on a single motive: on August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz walked into a Chase Manhattan branch on Avenue P to pay for a sex-change operation for his partner, Ernest Aron.
That motive was disputed more than once afterward. But when I started unwinding the money thread — how much they took from the till, how much they were paid for the story about him, where that money went — it turned out the strangest thing happened not in the bank and not even in Hollywood. A law named after a serial killer was put to real use for the first time — against this robber. And he paid more under it than for the robbery attempt itself.
The plan was never about seven hostages or fourteen hours of negotiations. According to the version Wojtowicz laid out on the very first evening, by phone, from inside the seized bank, to Village Voice reporter Arthur Bell, an armored car was due to bring $150,000 to $200,000 to the branch at 3:30 p.m., and the whole robbery was engineered around that half-hour window. The stakeout turned out remarkably sloppy: at one bank, a rifle fell out of their car and went off; at the second, Bobby Westenberg ran straight into his mother's best friend; and the whole trio had gone to the movies to see "The Godfather" for inspiration — the note to the teller ended up reading: "This is an offer you can't refuse."
The money was hauled out of the bank at 11 a.m. The preparation cost Wojtowicz about $1,500, run up as debt on a BankAmericard — suits, rifles, and mirrored sunglasses in case of a chase. And from the till, by different counts, they scooped either $29,000 (Bell, the next day), or roughly $37,000 in cash and checks (the Second Circuit's wording), or $37,951 in cash plus $175,150 in traveler's checks (the Chicago Reader's 2014 version).
The traveler's checks are a separate story: the film swapped them for a burning ledger, because paper you can't cash is dramaturgically useless. The cash in the picture was compressed to $1,100 to underline the poverty of the venture. The real sum, by all appearances, lay between $29,000 and $38,000, and I never did find a source that reconciled the discrepancy. None of the figures is zero, but none of them covers what was later wrung out of this story.
They were wrong about the main thing, too — speed. Branch manager Bob Barrett managed to grab the phone and, in a very strange voice, talk to a personnel officer from head office who had asked to have a teller transferred over from the branch: "What a lovely young lady, I'm so glad she's going to be working for us." The personnel man, Ralph Aiello, caught the unnatural intonation, asked whether everything was all right, and got the answer: "More than, and have a nice day." He called corporate security; security called the police. Within minutes, cherry pickers pulled up to the storefronts, and the robbery turned into a siege.
What came next was a format we'd now call a live broadcast. Outside stood a crowd — more than a thousand people by the Times' estimate at the time, up to two thousand by the BBC's count — complete with TV cameras, reporters, and vendors. One of them was Geraldo Rivera. Inside sat the hostages: six women and one man, if you believe Bell, and eight people if you believe the New York Times and the BBC — a one-person discrepancy that survives in the sources to this day. Ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit, the air conditioning shut down, and a phone over which Wojtowicz answered the bank's customers like a genuine teller: credit histories, balances, even one approved loan for "the long Polack, one of my people."
He ordered the pizza, paid for it, and refused to eat it — the hostages decided it had been laced with sleeping pills. He threw part of the money out into the street: about two thousand dollars, by the Times' description, which agents later gathered off the sidewalk. As for the shouts of "Attica!" into the crowd — the film's most-quoted shot — I couldn't find them in the reporting of the time. Bell's article does contain the phrase "pull an Attica" — but there it refers to the assault Wojtowicz feared, not to any shout of his own. There's plainly more screenwriter's conjecture in that scene than newsreel, and I won't claim he shouted it in real life.
The least is known about the most expensive person in this story, because mostly it was Wojtowicz who spoke for her. Elizabeth Debbie Eden was born Ernest Aron on August 19, 1946, in Ozone Park, Queens, into a Jewish family. The two met in June 1971 at the Italian feast of San Gennaro, and on December 4 of that year they staged a public wedding — with a dress, invited guests, and a priest who was later defrocked. The groom was still in his first marriage at the time; Aron, for that matter, had a wife in the past too, something the press learned a little later.
What a "sex change" meant in 1972 is best described by the price itself: the 2012 Times piece values the operation at three thousand dollars. Not the movie's mythical millions — three thousand, a sum a man with a teller's job could borrow if he set his mind to it. What he couldn't do was the other part: in those years the operation couldn't simply be bought — it had to be obtained from a system that called it a "gender identity problem" and treated it with psychiatry. Wojtowicz set out to pull his partner out of the hospital ward — and out of the category the system had filed him under as a patient — and could think of only one path: a lot of money, very fast.
A few days before the robbery, Aron attempted suicide — August 19 or 20, 1972; the sources disagree, and Wojtowicz's own letter says "8/29," which is almost certainly a typo on the writer's part, since the 20th was in fact the Sunday. He was brought from the hospital to the bank straight in pajamas and a bathrobe, with bunny slippers, and he refused to join the negotiations.
The Life article grew into a book-and-movie package. Three months after the robbery, Wojtowicz sold the film and book rights to Artists Entertainment Complex for $7,500. $3,500 of that, with Wojtowicz's own consent, was kept by the court-appointed lawyer Mark Landsman, who handled both the guilty plea and the deal. He described his role in his memoirs without a shred of shame: "I was just the messenger in this movie deal... frankly, I didn't want to get involved. How was I supposed to know how much you pay a criminal for his story?" Producer Martin Bregman's defense was simpler: "If $7,500 seems like a low sum today, remember — all we were risking back then was that the movie would get made at all."
Frank Pierson, the screenwriter, tried many times to get into the prison to see Wojtowicz for details. Wojtowicz wouldn't receive him — over what he considered inadequate pay. The Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1976 went to Pierson, while the man whose life the film was based on sat in Lewisburg writing the Times a letter the paper wouldn't take: "I feel used." The rejection letter survives, and it's a beauty: "I simply don't believe that you have deeply grappled with the motives of your crime and the complex relationship between art and reality in this case."
The first wife, Carmen Bifulco, got even less. She signed away her rights to the book standing in a bookstore on West Fourth Street, sliding the paper under a casual acquaintance's briefcase; for her taped account of life with her husband she was paid $50, and she bought her daughter a red raincoat and new kitchen curtains. Then Warner offered her $600 to appear in a promotional documentary — she asked for $1,500, and they accepted her counter without haggling. And when she watched the finished film, she cried and asked: "Am I really that repulsive?" A cheap novelization of the movie described the hero's wife in words it would be unseemly to repeat here, and Carmen, with two children, went to court — and lost: in New York at the time, protection against invasion of privacy existed only as two sections of the Civil Rights Law covering rights to one's name and likeness, and their names weren't in the book.
On August 11, 1977, Section 632-a of the Executive Law took effect in New York — the one that went down in history as the "Son of Sam law." The occasion was David Berkowitz's letters, and Senator Emmanuel Gold put the motive without much delicacy: "It offends the sense of justice and decency that a man like the .44-caliber killer can expect to be paid big money for his story while five people are dead." The mechanics were simple: a publisher or studio that signed a contract with an accused or convicted person to retell his crime had to pay his fee not to him but to the Crime Victims Board, which held the money in escrow and handed it to whoever won a civil suit within five years.
Tucked into the law alongside the escrow was a second half — the one that restarted the clock on the statute of limitations. It was because of that half that Robert Barrett went to court in January 1978 — the very branch manager whose strange "more than, and have a nice day" had set off the whole siege. He filed suit for assault, unlawful imprisonment, and invasion of privacy five and a half years after the robbery — far beyond the one-year window the procedural code allowed. In March 1979 the appellate court held that Section 632-a creates not a revival of the old claim but a new and independent cause of action. The suit survived.
And then something came to light that made this whole thread stop being a legal footnote. In December 1977 the Crime Victims Board received into escrow about $43,000 paid to Wojtowicz for the screen rights to his crime. A law invented against a killer had struck its first serious blow at a robber whose story was by then already being sold as melodrama. Five years earlier, the same producer Bregman had sworn to the Village Voice that Wojtowicz had no share of the profits and no such contract existed — and now a $43,000 payment existed on paper. Maybe it was a different deal, not that same percentage; I never found a document explaining the basis of the payment. But those two facts sit badly side by side.
What follows is the story of the people who tried to take a bite out of that money, and none of them really managed it. In his Lewisburg cell, Wojtowicz acquired a "jailhouse lawyer" — cellmate George Heath, who was owed, for his troubles, 16 and two-thirds percent of one percent of the royalties. Heath litigated for decades. Wojtowicz died in 2006, in his mother's house, of cancer, at sixty, having spent his last years on public assistance; the city's welfare agency then put a lien on his estate, including the Warner royalties, to claw back what it had paid out. The lien was lifted only in 2009, and in 2011 an appellate court barred Heath from filing new suits, citing outright the "continuous and vexatious" — that is, harassing — litigation that had run on for decades.
The law itself had already come apart by then. In December 1991 the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of Simon & Schuster, whose money for Henry Hill's book "Wiseguy" the Crime Victims Board demanded — the book later made into "Goodfellas." By the way: the Son of Sam never did sell his story, and when he later wanted to publish a book, he required, under the terms of his settlement, that his lawyer hand the fee to the victims' families, though no law compelled him to — so the "Son of Sam law" was never applied to the Son of Sam.
The judges struck the book law down as unconstitutional: it swept in any work, on any subject, in which the author mentions his own crime in passing. The court's opinion contains a list worth reading in full: the autobiography of Martin Luther King, arrested for resisting arrest at a lunch counter; Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"; Augustine's "Confessions"; Bertrand Russell's seven days in jail at eighty-nine; Sir Walter Raleigh; and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." A law written around one man, given enough breadth, would fit nearly the whole of the world's memoir writing.
The ending this thread got, in my telling, isn't a legal one. In 1999 the artist Pierre Huyghe staged a video installation, "The Third Memory": Wojtowicz was brought onto sets built from frames of "Dog Day Afternoon" and invited to reenact his own robbery. On screen, the 1972 archival footage and clips from the film run side by side — and there is a living man who gets mixed up and corrects himself. For the story he was paid $7,500, then tens of thousands more, then the city seized the royalties to recoup the welfare; and by then the story itself belonged to the movies, and he was playing in it off someone else's script, on someone else's stage, twenty-seven years later.