While looking for Pearson’s brother, a low-level Albany dope dealer, the cops found his wife—Kayson’s sister-in-law— who was on the outs with the Pearson family, saying she’d been raped and beaten by her husband. She gave the cops an earful, including the fact that the fugitive Kayson had sent her an e-mail asking her to send his Social Security card, birth certificate, and other identification to an address in Georgia.
That sent cops racing to the airport to catch the first available flight to Georgia. They had no authority to make an arrest out of state, but Georgia cops accompanied them to the small house where they were sure Pearson was hiding. He wasn’t there.
Flying back to New York—and closing in on a hundred hours without sleep—cops followed a fresh tip to a house in Yonkers where Pearson was staying with an eighteen-year-old girl he’d recently met. (The deadly charm had worked once again.)
Cops staked out the building and intercepted the young woman as she returned home. They showed her a picture of Pearson. She confirmed that he was inside and gave them a key to her apartment.
The capture was violent. Pearson had barricaded himself inside the bedroom, pushing the bed against the door. When cops burst in, Pearson lunged at them with a knife. A Yonkers cop shot him twice in the leg before he was taken into custody.
Back in Brooklyn, Hinrichs and his team were still shaking their heads.
“If you told me it’s two young kids snatching girls at random off the street and raping and killing them, I’d think you’re crazy,” said Hinrichs. “You know, this shit happens in fucking Idaho or some shit.”
Like everything else about the case, the trial was dramatic, violent, and sickening. Pearson and Hendrix each accused one another of murder, leading the court to pick two juries to hear the case—one to judge whether Pearson was guilty, the other for Hendrix. It made for long, complicated proceedings: It took twice as long as normal to find twenty-four jurors; every time evidence came up that might unfairly prejudice one set of jurors, the proceedings would stop and twelve people would be hustled out of the courtroom until the evidence was heard, after which they shuffled back in.
On January 19, 2006, several days into the trial, Pearson showed up in court dressed in white and wearing a yarmulke. Ever the charmer, he’d told his lawyer, Mitchell Dinnerstein, that he planned to convert to Judaism.
“We even recited some Hebrew blessings,” Dinnerstein later said.
It turned out to be just another con job by the murderous Pearson. A few minutes into the proceedings, members of Romona’s family noticed Pearson and Hendrix winking at each other. Both men saw they were being noticed, and accordingly brandished Plexiglas shivs, the nasty homemade blades inmates fashion out of jailhouse debris. The monsters had secreted the knives in their underwear before coming to court. Now they used the weapons to make a bloody bid for freedom.
Wheeling on Dinnerstein—the man he’d prayed with just minutes earlier—Pearson slashed him across the face. At the same time, Hendrix leaped over the rail separating witnesses from spectators, pouncing on a court officer and grabbing for his gun.
All hell broke loose.
There was blood everywhere. Dinnerstein’s shirt quickly became soaked in red. He would later need stitches to close the gash in his face. A fifty-eight-year-old court officer, Sergeant James Gorra, sprinted toward Pearson, who kept trying to stab Dinnerstein.
“I saw a weapon, and when he got close I gave a forearm as hard as I could and grabbed him. I couldn’t let him get behind me because the judge is behind me,” Gorra said later. “He hit me with the shiv twice, and then I flipped him over my side and then he hit me the third time. We were rolling around. I remember screaming out, ‘He’s going for my gun!’”
Albert Tomei, the sixty-six-year-old judge hearing the case, was at first puzzled by the chaos.
“While I was watching all this, I heard, ‘Gun, gun, gun!’” he said. “As soon as I heard that, I said, ‘I’m outta here!’”
Judge Tomei tried to leap from his perch on the bench and get to safety. “I’m not very good at jumping,” he said. “I missed the first time.”
Hendrix missed too. Officers swarmed over him, kicking him to the ground and hosing him down with pepper spray before he could get his hands on a gun.
Spectators fled the courtroom. Jurors dove to the floor. Romona’s mother, Elle Carmichael, was rolling on the ground, crying hysterically.
“They could have killed everybody in that room!” she screamed. “Hang them right now by the neck!”
Minutes after the escape attempt started, it was all over. Hendrix was wheeled out to an ambulance on a gurney, his face covered with an oxygen mask. He gave reporters the finger.
“In all my time on the criminal bench, it was the most frightened I’ve ever been,” Tomei later told colleagues. But there in the courtroom, amid the pandemonium, he was more blunt, looking at Dinnerstein’s soaked bloody shirt and voicing the feeling of everyone present.
“Holy shit!” said the judge.
Tomei had no choice but to declare a mistrial, which he did the following week. The juries that watched the escape attempt would be hopelessly prejudiced against Pearson and Hendrix. The judge also excused Dinnerstein from the case, assembled two more juries, and resumed the trial in February.
Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, the prosecutor assigned to the second trial, squeezed Elle Carmichael’s hand, then began explaining to the jurors what had happened to Romona.
This time, Pearson and Hendrix were banned from the courtroom and made to watch the proceedings via video feed to the Rikers Island lockup. On the rare occasions they were brought to court individually to testify in person, each man’s arms and legs were shackled, their hands encased in mitts and surrounded by twenty officers.
“Any outburst on your part, any showing of your hands or shackles on your part in order to create a mistrial, will not result in a mistrial,” Justice Tomei told Pearson.
The trial dragged on for weeks, but the outcome was never in doubt. Both juries convicted the monsters on all counts.
At sentencing, Judge Tomei told Pearson and Hendrix he would not call them animals.
“That word is not appropriate because animals do not torture each other,” he said. “You are a deadly human virus … a deadly vessel of human terror.”
Then he sent them to jail forever.
“You’re going to be consigned to a place where there is no love, there is no compassion—[a place that is] cold and lonely. And you’ll be consigned to that place for a very, very long time,” he said.
Elle Carmichael sued the city for more than a million dollars, claiming that delays in searching for her daughter—along with the fact that the police closed the case while Romona was still alive—contributed to her death.
But for Carmichael, money is the least of her concerns.
She moved from the home she shared with her daughter and went for months of psychological counseling. She carried a picture of her smiling daughter as a kind of talisman to ward off thoughts of Romona’s final terrible days.
“The one question I always ask is, Why did it happen? I feel like at my worst times, when I feel most helpless, that’s the question I ask,” she told a reporter. “It puts me into a trance sometimes, so I try to avoid that question. But I still wonder, Why did this happen?”
The killers have their own chilling answer to that question.
“We did it for fun,” Pearson said at his second and final sentencing, when he got an extra twenty-two years for the bloody escape attempt. “It was fun to see a system that has so much power and control lose it in a second. The judge—he’s the one with all the power—was running away, bumping his knee. That was the most fun I’ve had all my life.”
GETTING TO KNOW MAD DOG
BY ROBERT KNIGHTLY
Bushwick
It is a convention of crime fiction that the detective is haunted by the case he did or didn’t solve. Me, I never was a detective. Too many off-duty incid
ents in bars.
But I did have some memorable moments, as in hairraising, as a patrolman in the 1970s in Bushwick specifically, the self-styled “Fighting 83rd” Precinct. And not without justification.
The ’70s in New York City was the worst of times, in that crime was rampant. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy, had laid off a quarter of the police force, and arsonists—for profit or revenge—were busy burning down the wood-frame tenements of Bushwick, to the point where whole blocks had the look of a lunar landscape.
But the ’70s were also the best of times, in that a cop never had a dull moment. Cops of the Fighting 83rd were a tight band of brothers; female officers had yet to debut in the patrol precincts. We were bound together by the shared perils of the street.
On the night of July 13, 1977, the lights went out in Bushwick and everywhere else in the city. In what the media has referred to as “blackout looting,” larceny commenced forthwith along a two-mile stretch of Broadway, the main shopping artery dividing Bedford-Stuyvesant from Bushwick. Bodegas, supermarkets, discount furniture emporia, a gun shop, jewelry, clothing, and shoe stores had the gates ripped from doorways, and the contents inside were carried off into the night. For extra measure, the stores were then set afire.
All that night and into the next day, we cops roamed streets that looked like the siege of Atlanta as pictured in the movie version of Gone with the Wind. And yet, despite the Sturm und Drang, it is not the events of that blackout night that remain in the forefront of my memory. That place of honor belongs to Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
Mad Dog and I met in an after-hours Puerto Rican social club on a cold January night in 1977 when neighborhood cops—myself among them—were motoring through the streets of Bushwick in what was known as a “precinct conditions car,” an umarked Plymouth sedan, a.k.a. the “brown car,” the scourge of drug dealers, gunsels, chop shop operators, counterfeiters, and after-hours social clubs that catered to the ungodly.
Shortly after midnight, we exited said vehicle and burst through the barred front door of the Puerto Rican club on Jefferson Street, just off Knickerbocker Avenue.
As we made our entrance, glassine envelopes and various drug paraphernalia floated to the floor like autumn leaves. But what caught my attention was two white guys sitting by themselves in a corner, the only non-Latinos present. So my first words to the two, as they sat at the table looking up at me, were, “On your feet and against the wall.”
I gave the muscular guy to my left a little push against the wall, off which he bounced, spun around, and stood stock still, staring at me. He was Irish-looking, five-foot-ten with a mustache and chiseled features.
Thus, without benefit of names, did I make my initial acquaintance with Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
The first thing I noticed about Mad Dog was his flat, dark, dead eyes, with which he assessed me for a long minute, then slowly turned around and assumed the position. His Italianlooking tablemate did the same, without objection.
Looking down at the floor, I found something that didn’t surprise me—a Beretta semi-automatic, which, I would later discover, was loaded with seven live rounds, one in the chamber. I hollered “Gun!” whereupon the four other cops with me focused attention on the two guys I had on the wall.
I didn’t find out who these desperadoes were until we got back to the precinct house for arrest processing. We had a dozen other patrons of the bar for various drug possession counts, but only Mad Dog and his companion for the gun.
In those days there were no computers. You made a phone call to the Bureau of Criminal Identification at NYPD headquarters in downtown Manhattan. BCI eventually identified one Joseph Sullivan, a.k.a. “Mad Dog,” on lifetime parole as a convicted murderer. His Italian cohort was Anthony “Snooky” Solimini, a Genovese soldier out of place here because around the corner on Knickerbocker Avenue were the Bonanno lads sipping espresso and plotting mayhem.
In those days, everything was done manually. You took a prisoner by the hand and rolled his fingertips over an ink pad and then pressed each one onto a print card. Then you handcuffed the prisoner and went through his personal effects. Then you vouchered (recorded and packaged) drug evidence for the police lab and the gun for ballistics, after which you transported the guy downtown to Central Booking, which back in the day was on Gold Street in downtown Brooklyn. There he would be processed further, and a cop like me would be interviewed by an assistant D.A., who would draft charges based on what I told him.
With these particular arrests, both my prisoners stood to be charged with felony possession of a loaded gun if I wanted to go by the book—but it was a tenuous charge to lay against both. What I had to do, practically speaking, was select the one more likely to have possessed the weapon. Based on my estimation of Mad Dog’s background, he was elected as the guy who made a motion under the table to toss the gun. A complete fiction, but no more of a fiction than those invented by prosecutors and judges in criminal court, where they are known as “legal fictions.”
Although my statement to the assistant D.A. could be seen as a lie, it was in fact expected as a professional courtesy. The last thing a prosecutor or judge wants to hear in a criminal case is what actually happened. What they wanted was what they could put together to make a solid case against whomever the perpetrator was that I had dragged downtown. So every cop in my day would say what he was expected to say in order for the wheels of justice to grind exceedingly slowly and for no bad guys to escape. This is no doubt true even today, as I do not expect anything has changed. So, the D.A. was pleased to accept my legal fiction that I saw Mad Dog ditch something under the table. After all, he had Mad Dog’s complete and lengthy history on his yellow sheet, so-called because a criminal record was then printed on yellow paper. Mad Dog had been paroled after being sentenced to twenty-to-thirty years in 1967 upon conviction of 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 Parole Board for the first time in the year 2069.
Jack Henry Abbott died in the Wende Correctional Facility in 2002. Unless Mad Dog Sullivan sees his 130th birthday, his fate is likewise sealed.
—And so there I was in the courtroom with Ramsey Clark and his toady from Legal Aid. I sat and listened with foreboding. With an inkling that Mad Dog might not have to go north after all.
Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (Akashic Noir) Page 8