Whitey's Payback (30 page)

In most accounts of Sully’s life, his many murders stand out like a horrible gash, an open wound so gruesome that anyone pondering the life of this man is unable to see anything beyond his penchant for destruction. I have never asked Sullivan exactly how many people he murdered. It is a long list. He knows now that these killings were the product of a deep-seated sickness, though he notes that the people he killed were almost always people in the criminal life—gangsters, or even killers themselves. Sullivan did not have a psychological compulsion to kill people. He did it for the money. He did it because it was his job.

Sully is not proud of his role as an angel of death, but there is one aspect of his long criminal career that does warm his heart, and that has to do with his many escapes from jails and prisons. His early life was driven by a deep-seated fear of entrapment, which, subconsciously, led him to embrace a philosophy based on Newton’s third law of motion, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Up until his most recent extended incarceration, Sully’s life was a cycle of entrapment and escape, escape and entrapment.

At the age of fourteen, not long after his father died, he ran away from home. He was apprehended by police and sent to the New York State Training School for Boys in Warwick, and later the New York State Vocational Institution in Coxsackie, both notorious reformatories in upstate New York. When Sullivan was released at the age of nineteen, he went on a petty burglary spree out west with a boyhood friend. They were apprehended by police in Cheyenne, Wyoming. There, Sully pulled off his first escape by diving through a plate-glass window at a police station. Bloodied and on the run, he walked into an Army recruitment station and joined up, mostly as a means to escape the law.

In the Army, he went AWOL on numerous occasions and fled back to New York City, where he was captured and thrown in a military stockade on Governor’s Island, in New York harbor. Sullivan escaped from that facility by covering his body with Vaseline, throwing himself into the frigid waters of the harbor, and swimming all the way to Brooklyn.

Sully’s course in life was set: His hatred of institutional authority meant that he would never hold a legitimate job. In his early twenties, he undertook a more serious life of crime, with a series of robberies and stick-ups, until he was caught and thrown in prison in New Jersey. In Trenton State Prison and later in Rahway, Sully witnessed prison rapes and killings, and was in the middle of a horrific prison riot. He was released in 1965. Not long after that, he killed a man at the Willow Bar and Grill, near his home neighborhood in Queens, and was sentenced to prison for manslaughter. This led to his most daring escape, in 1971, from Attica, a maximum-security facility.

The Attica escape is perhaps the most noteworthy item on Sully’s résumé. Using a pole constructed from pieces of pipe, he shimmied over a prison wall, dropped to the ground, and sweet-talked an unwitting visitor in the parking lot to drive him to the nearest town. From there, he hopped a Greyhound bus to parts unknown. He was captured a couple of months later in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, with a sawed-off shotgun stuffed in the leg of his pants.

Sullivan smiles when I tell him that I live two blocks from where he was pinched, at East 10th Street and University Place. “Nice area,” he says. “Some nice diners, a few good bars. I used to go down there to visit my wife. That’s how I got caught. They staked out the office building where Gail worked and nailed me when I tried to see her.”

Talk of Gail, Sullivan’s wife of thirty-seven years, is a subject that often brings a tear to the eyes of this unreconstructed tough guy. They were married in 1976, after Sully—having served ten years for manslaughter—was paroled, thanks in part to the help of former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had befriended Sullivan and served as his attorney before the parole board. Gail was an account executive at a small advertising firm who met Joe through a friend. They soon had a child who they named Ramsey, in honor of the man who got Joe out of jail. Three years later, they had another boy named Kelly.

Gail did not know that her husband was a hired killer for the Mob. It was her understanding that he worked at various construction jobs that he had secured through union connections.

After my first prison visit with Sullivan, I met Gail at a diner in Manhattan, and she told me, “Joe could be difficult. He had a problem with drugs and alcohol, and I suspected he was having affairs, but he was a good provider. He cared about his family and his kids. Most of the time, he was a good man.”

Gail is no dummy. She is not naive. Through arrests, trials, and incarceration, she has stuck by Sullivan because she believes, “inside of him, along with everything else, there is a good person. That’s the part of him I fell in love with.” Gail made sure their two boys grew up knowing their father, with regular visits to prison. They have become fine young men, never in trouble with the law, with kids and families of their own.

The idea that Sullivan has somehow managed to maintain a marriage and healthy nuclear family while being a hit man and longtime prison inmate does not fit the profile of a psychotic mad dog. Sully gives Gail most of the credit. “I told her if she wanted to leave me and get on with her life, I would understand,” says Sullivan. “I told her, ‘You have a choice.’ She stayed. I owe everything I have to her, no doubt about that.”

The dedication that Gail has shown to the man she married, and the relationship Sullivan has been able to salvage with his two sons, is—in the savage narrative of Joe Sullivan’s life—as miraculous as the Immaculate Conception. Improbably ennobled by family relationships that have survived and grown stronger over a forty-year period, Sullivan, the inveterate gangster and cold-blooded killer, can’t talk about any of this without choking up: “Gail, my sons, the grandkids—it’s more than I deserve. I don’t know why or how I got to be this lucky. It’s all I have to live for.”

It’s getting late in our visit, and Sully wants to hear more about Whitey Bulger. He has followed my writing about Bulger in
Newsweek
magazine, and he is fascinated by how Whitey maintained his power by gaming the system for all those years.

The Bulger story, of course, is right up Sully’s alley. He never met Bulger, but he knows the type. “He reminds me of Joey Gallo,” says Sully. “Machiavellian. Always playing one side against the other.” Gallo was one of numerous Mafia bosses who, in the late-1970s, hired Sully to whack out their enemies in the underworld.

Sully admires Bulger’s mastery of the criminal universe in which he operated, but he is not pleased to hear that Whitey’s attorney has announced that Bulger will take the stand at his trial and reveal all about his criminal career, particularly as it relates to his relationship with the U.S. Department of Justice. Sully sees my excitement as I detail how Bulger, realizing he has nothing left to lose, will finally tell all and name names of people in the government who, he says, promised him immunity from prosecution as long as he supplied them with information about the Mafia. Says Sully, “See, you’re all for it because you’re a writer and it makes for a good story, but from where I’m sitting, it’s the lowest thing a guy can do.”

Sully, of course, is referring to “the code,” the principle that under no circumstances does a person rat out anyone, not even his enemies. Sully is in prison because his accomplice in the Fiorino hit cooperated with the government and testified against him at trial. Sully would rather be dead than be a rat, and he has paid a heavy price for adhering to the code. It is likely that he would be out on the street right now, his sentence reduced by many years, had he offered up testimony against the many Mob bosses with whom he did business.

Sticking to this principle of never being a rat under any circumstances has caused Sully distress within his own family.

“Him and his code,” says Kelly Sullivan, Sully’s son, whom I met and interviewed after my first meeting with Sully. Kelly told me that he and his father have often had arguments over the issue. “I’ve said to him, ‘Dad, what good has your code done for you? Many of your enemies are out on the street because they cut deals with the government. You’re in here … in prison for life. What you’re saying is that your code means more to you than your own family.’ ”

Sully knows that it is hard for anyone to understand, especially law-abiding citizens—civilians—who have never been in his shoes.

I attempt to explain the nuances of the Bulger situation, how this is slightly different, Bulger naming names of people in the government who he feels have sold him out, but Sully is not interested. He’s spent an entire lifetime living by his code; it is the only thing he has, other than his family. Though, like his son, I may have issues with it, I respect Sully for sticking to what he believes is the highest principle of the streets—even if, in this day and age, it makes him seem like the last of the Mohicans.

As our visiting time nears an end, Sully and I have our picture taken. It’s part of the visiting ritual: Girlfriends, wives, brothers, and other visitors stand in front of a fake background—a wide-open sky and trees, or some other nature scene that will never exist in reality within the prison walls. Sullivan and I lean in close together as a prison guard, for the price of two dollars per photo, snaps our picture with a Polaroid camera.

As we are waiting for the photo to develop, I mention to Sully that I’m currently working on a magazine article about some armed robbers who used state-of-the-art synthetic masks to disguise themselves while robbing a check-cashing store in Queens. I tell him, “Two black guys pulled off a couple of robberies disguised as white cops. That’s how good these masks are. You can completely alter your identity.”

I see Sully’s eyes lighting up. He’s like a cocaine addict who hasn’t done blow in thirty years when someone just placed a bowl of coke in front of him.

“Hey,” he says, “do you think they could make one of those masks according to specifications? Like, if I gave them a photo of someone, say, a guard in here, could they make a mask that looked like that?”

I smile, because I know where this is headed. “I don’t know, Sully. Maybe they could.”

We’re both smiling now. Riffing. It is a lark—a fantasy—that Sullivan, age seventy-four, down to one cancer-infested lung, could pull off one last glorious escape.

“How would I get it in here?” I ask.

“You fold it up and stuff it down the front of your pants, in your crotch area. You could get by security with that.”

I nod. Yeah, maybe I could.

“You pass it to me here in the visiting room. I’ll take it into the bathroom. I can get a guard’s uniform. I’d put on that mask and walk right out of here. They’d think I was a guard.”

Sully says all this with a twinkle in his eye. We both know that, although I write about criminals in books and magazine articles, and attempt to do so with knowledge and even a certain degree of intimacy, I am, after all, a civilian. I am not going to help Mad Dog Sullivan break out of prison.

I chuckle and say, “Okay, Sully, I’ll check and see if they can make that mask.”

“Yeah,” he says, “would you do that?”

Visiting time is over. There is a common practice for both visitor and inmate as a visit comes to an end: The inmate is escorted by a guard to a door on one side of the room, and the visitor is also escorted by another guard to different door on the other side of the room. Visitor and inmate, knowing they will not see each other for months or years or maybe ever again, watch each other being led from the room, wanting to get one last look at their friend or loved one.

I shout across the room, “Take care, Sully. And stay out of trouble.”

Sully gives me a pumped-fist salute. He knows what I mean. Nearly on his death bed with lung cancer, bowed but unbroken, I watch him disappear through the electronic, steel-plated door, a twinkle in his eye, a smile on his face, visions of escape dancing in his head.

This book represents more than two decades’ worth of labor, all of it enabled and supported by contacts in “the field”; by editors and their staffs in the magazine, newspaper, and webzine trades; and by fellow journalists and friends who helped usher these articles from the proposal stage to published/posted reality. It is impossible to name them all. Some contributors have been lost to memory. Nonetheless, I have attempted to reassemble a list of those who played a role, either through professional obligation or personal generosity, in these articles having originally appeared in some of the best periodicals in the country.

You will notice that many of the pieces in this collection were first published in
Playboy
magazine. That is no accident. Over half a century,
Playboy
has been a tremendous supporter of quality journalism, especially crime journalism. I am particularly indebted to two former
Playboy
editors, Peter Moore and Chris Napolitano, who helped conceive and line edit some of the most complex and lengthy pieces in this collection. I also owe much respect to Hugh Hefner. Although we have never met, I tip my hat to Hefner for having created such a valuable forum for good work; for commissioning the best writers and paying them accordingly; and for being a tireless advocate for First Amendment rights, civil liberties, and courageous reporting.

The following acknowledgments are organized into sections, according to the particular piece for which an individual made a vital contribution.

Special thanks to Gail Sullivan and Kelly Sullivan for facilitating my time with Joe Sullivan; to the late Mike McNickle, who worked with me as a research assistant on many of the earliest pieces in this collection; to Laurie Gunst, who graciously led me to many key sources in Jamaica and in Brooklyn; to Flo O’Connor at the Jamaican Council on Human Rights in Kingston; and to Steven Wong, who for many years served as my
dai lo
, or big brother, in New York City’s Chinatown, and who also led me to many key sources in Hong Kong, the city of his birth.