THIEF FOR LOVE
How a botched bank job for sex-change loot inspired classic ‘Dog Day Afternoon’
PEOPLE MAY rob banks for a lot reasons, and tops on the list is because “that’s where the money is,” as Willie Sutton famously observed.
But on Aug. 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz, 27, offered a novel motive — a sex-change operation.
Wojtowicz, a married father of two, had fallen hard for willowy cross-dresser, Ernest Aron, 26. The couple needed cash for the gender switch.
A little before 3 p.m. on that sultry afternoon, just as the customers were leaving, an assistant manager noticed three men enter the Chase Manhattan Bank at Avenue P and E. Third St. in Brooklyn.
One, later identified as Bobby Westenberg, 21, put a large paper-wrapped bundle on the floor. As he left, his two companions, Wojtowicz and teen troublemaker Sal Naturile, 18, ripped off the paper, and pulled out a rifle, shotgun and pistol.
Naturile held a gun at bank manager Robert Barrett’s head as Wojtowicz filled an attaché case with $38,000 and $175,150 in traveler’s checks. But when the duo headed out the door, they found that Westenberg, who had been in charge of the getaway car, had vanished. The street was teeming with hundreds of cops, some on roofs, with binoculars and high-powered rifles.
The escape had been foiled by a routine call to Barrett from an official at the bank’s main office in Manhattan. Barrett’s conversation was strained, all “double talk,” and to the official it sounded like trouble. He called police.
Wojtowicz and Naturile retreated back inside, making hostages of seven women employees, a security guard and Barrett. The guard, Calvin Jones, walked out of the bank three hours later, freed as a goodwill gesture.
Wherever police gather, reporters follow, and then the curious onlookers. By nightfall, thousands of people were outside the bank, including a priest, psychiatrist and Wojtowicz’s mom and godfather.
Wojtowicz, in a white wh T-shirt, played to the crowd, strut- ting in the police floodlights, cursing at cops, and sometimes stealing a smooch from one of the admirers who knew him from the gay bars as Littlejohn Basso.
“Bandit in Trap Bares Strange Life,” blared a Daily News headline on Aug. 23. “I’ll shoot everyone in the bank,” Wojtowicz told reporters in one of his many phone interviews with the press. “The Supreme Court will let me get away with this. There’s no death penalty. It’s ridiculous. I can shoot everyone here, then throw my gun down and walk out, and they can’t put me in the electric chair.”
Wojtowicz said that his love for Aron had led him to the crime. Some years earlier, both men had been in conventional marriages, but realized they were living a lie, and left the straight world behind. In January, Wojtowicz “married” his male lover, who wore a white wedding gown and veil over his blond curls.
But Aron was still in agony, yearning for the surgery that would make him physically a woman. A suicide attempt had landed him in a psychiatric ward.
Wojtowicz demanded Aron be released from the hospital and transported to Kennedy Airport so the pair could fly away together.
Travel arrangements were made, and police brought Aron to the scene, in hospital whites, his long hair in a wild halo around his head. No one, not even Wojtowicz, could predict what happened next.
“He doesn’t love me anymore,” Aron told police. He said he feared his one-time lover might kill him. Police led him away.
Around 10 p.m., the robbers demanded three pizzas. “With an utter disregard for the value of a dollar, one of the bandits had tossed out on the sidewalk a fistful of bills,” noted a News reporter. “The bills totaled $1,099.”
Five hours later, Wojtowicz, Naturile and the hostages climbed into an airport limo, chauffeured by FBI agents, for their trip to JFK, where a small jet waited for them. The plan was for the bank robbers to let the hostages go and hop on the plane to freedom. But it didn’t happen that way. One of the G-men had concealed a gun, and, as they pulled up to the plane, he shot Naturile dead and took Wojtowicz captive.
None of the hostages was hurt, and, as one broadcaster noted on the day after the 16-hour ordeal, “The bank considers the matter closed.”
But it was far from closed. Life magazine commissioned an investigative piece on the holdup, and hired reporters P.F. Kluge g and Thomas Moore to write it. In the September 1972 19 article, “The Boys in the Bank,” Kluge described scr Wojtowicz as having the “broken-faced good go looks of an Al Pacino or a Dustin Hoffman.”
As Kluge tells the story, Pacino’s agent read the article art and thought it would be a dandy role for his rising ris star.
“Dog Day Afternoon,” released in 1975, was directed rec by Sidney Lumet and starred Pacino in the role rol based on Wojtowicz. It won an Oscar for screenwriter scr Frank Pierson, as well as a slew of other accolades. a
Wojtowicz W received $7,500 for his rights to the film, film and used part of the money to fund the longsought sou sex-change surgery. Finally female, Aron took too a new name, Elizabeth Debbie Eden, and married someone else. The marriage ended in divorce, and Eden died in 1987 from AIDS-related complications. cat
Wojtowicz W ended up living with his mother until his death from cancer at age 60 in 2006, just as the 30th 30t anniversary edition of the movie was to be released. rele