Real Life Mafia Story Behind “Dog Day Afternoon” Movie

On August 22, 1972 John Wojtowicz and his 18-year-old partner-in-crime Sal Naturale — a “slender, fair-haired youth” with a long history of juvenile delinqency and barbituate abuse — robbed a Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank which became the basis for Dog Day Afternoon starring Al Pacino as Wojtowicz and John Cazale as Naturale.

The principal motivation for the robbery was so Wojtowicz could afford the gender reassignment surgery for his transgender wife Liz Eden whom he had married a year earlier after meeting at the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy. However, Wojtowicz apparently also was in debt to Mafia loansharks which included the money he borrowed to pay for the wedding according to Eden.

According to FBI documents Wojtowicz and Naturale had met a month prior to the robbery at the gay bar Danny’s at 140 Seventh Avenue South, and Naturale moved into Wojtowicz’s apartment at 250 West 10th Street which then was an all-male rooming house known as Boystown. At the time Naturale was employed as a stock clerk and errand boy at the Penny Candy Store at 136 Seventh Avenue South.

Often lost in the story behind the bank robbery was the persistent rumor that the Mafia may have had a role. Wojtowicz was a close associate of Mike Umbers who fronted several gay bars, callboy rings and smut operations for the Gambino and Genovese crime families. At the time of Wojtowicz’s arrest he was in the possession of a handwritten list of several gay bars, bathhouses and restaurants with their telephone numbers and the names — albeit redacted in the released FBI documents — of the individuals associated with those enterprises. The list reads like a pocket guide to the gay apple for 1972, and several of the identified establishments long had been suspected of Genovese and Gambino ties.

In his review of Dog Day Afternoon critic Eric Holm laments how “left out of the film entirely is any mention of Wojtowicz’s reported Mafia connections”:

Wojtowicz had decidedly fallen out of favor with the Gay Activist’s Alliance in Summer 1971 over his association with Mike Umbers, the Mafioso manager of Christopher’s End (a gay bar) and various callboy and porno operations. * * * After the bank robbery [Arthur Bell for the Village Voice] investigated claims by Wojtowicz’s friends that Umbers and soldiers of the Gambino family (New York-based Mafiosi owning many gay bars, including the renowned Stonewall) had set Wojtowicz and Sal up for the job at the Chase Manhattan branch bank.

Even the newspaper of record found the mob rumors compelling enough to warrant coverage, and an August 26, 1972 article (“A Mobster Is Linked To Bizarre Holdup”) from The New York Times states that according to a source “an underworld figure supplied the guns used by Wojtowicz and two accomplices in the holdup,” and “Wojtowicz was pressed to carry out the robbery by the underworld figure, who owns Greenwich Village bars and is involved in pornography” in order to repay an outstanding debt.

The inventory of items found on Naturale — shot and killed by the FBI — hauntingly reflects one who was only 18, and included a pair of aviator style sunglasses, a blue pocket comb, a sales receipt for a pair of sneakers from Morris Department Store at 328 Bleecker Street, and a business card for the Golden Disc at 163 West 10th Street with the following handwritten notation on the back: “Summer Surfing Sand, by the Beach Boys 1964.”

Playwright Wallace Hamilton had been a mentor of sorts to Naturale, and he had the grave duty of officially identifying the young man’s remains at the city morgue. In Christopher and Gay: A Partisan’s View of the Greenwich Village Homosexual Scene (Saturday Review Press: 1973), Hamilton writes about Naturale whom he had known as “a dreamy, gentle, affectionate kid”:

He had a fey sense of humor and a roving imagination, but when he got serious, he got very serious, and the thing he was most serious about was not going back to prison. He had been in and out of institutions since the age of eleven for various minor infractions and truancy and, at eighteen, wanted very much to get his head together “on the outside.” * * * Sal wanted to be cared for, and to follow those who’d care for him.

Hamilton further writes that Naturale disclosed to him the plans for the bank robbery — even showing him a hand gun — and the rest was tragic history. The keenly observant Hamilton discusses the pervasive influence of the Mafia in the gay community:

The headquarters of the Gay Activist Alliance was an old firehouse on Wooster Street in SoHo. Dances were held there on Saturday nights as a manifest of “Our Place” as opposed to the Mafia-run gay bars in other parts of the city. * * * I was also interested to note a considerable lavender streak running through the lower levels of — of all things — the Mafia, an organization I had been led to believe was given to firm hetero domesticity. But members of the Mafia had interests in various gay bars and soda joints around town, and an equally keen interest in some of the customers, who happened also to be guys who hung around my place. So I developed a rather strange interchange with Godfather types. It reached a climax of a sort one summer afternoon when some of my egghead neighbors were assembled outside the house. A long, sleek black Cadillac pulled up in front of the house with two white-on-white types in the front seat. Out of the back seat came one of my Cherished, duly delivered, and the Cadillac purred away. The expression on the neighbors’ faces was something to behold.

Upon Wojtowicz’s arrest he apparently was contemplating suicide or otherwise expecting an imminent death because he wrote a last will and testament on September 12, 1972 at the Federal Detention Headquarters on 427 West Street in which he alloted a portion of the proceeds from his life insurance policy to Liz Eden for gender reassignment surgery which states:

I love you with a Passion as no other has loved another man in all eternity. My love will live on forever, & we shall be together once more in the hereafter. I will always be by your side in spirit & will watch over you, till you join me in the hereafter. I leave you $2,700 from my $10,000 life insurance policy at the Richburg Savings Bank of which [redacted] is the beneficiary. This money is only to be used for your Sex Change or Sex Reassignment Operation. * * * That your life from that point on Shall be full of happiness & Joy. I hope you will visit my grave on My birthday, March 9, & on our Anniversary December 4. May God Bless you & watch over you as I will, till we are reunited in the hereafter.

Wojtowicz died from cancer at the age of 60 on January 2, 2006, and Liz Eden died from AIDS-related illness in 1987.