Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth by Tim McLoughlin Page A
Authors: Tim McLoughlin
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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
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
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