Twisted REAL story of Dog Day Afternoon: Dark truth the Al Pacino classic didn't dare show

By BROOKE KATO, US ASSISTANT FEATURES EDITOR Published: 16:20, 7 June 2026 | Updated: 16:21, 7 June 2026 It was late afternoon one December weekend and the blushing bride with a blonde bouffant and billowing beaded gown towered over her 5ft5in groom, dressed in military garb, at the altar. They said 'I do' in front of 300 guests at a since-shuttered, aptly named Greenwich Village piano bar, What's Inn a Name – indeed it was a 'wedding' in name only. In 1971, the union of John Wojtowicz and Liz Eden was not recognized; gay marriage was not yet legal. And even if it had been Wojtowicz was still very much married to his wife and mother of his two young children, Carmen Bifulco. He had walked out on her three years prior, the New York Times reported, and later met Eden, a trans woman who at the time had not yet transitioned. Their nuptials were dubbed 'New York's first drag wedding' - outside the police precinct across the street officers, none the wiser, flirted with Eden and offered to 'stand in for the groom.' 'As I was about to find out,' Eden later wrote in an account of her life, 'I should have grabbed the cop when I had the chance.' This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Wojtowicz's death at the age of 60, but he will be forever remembered not for his complicated love life but for the infamous, botched bank heist it inspired. Desperate to fund his lover, Eden's, then ground-breaking gender reassignment surgery, Wojtowicz staged a bank robbery.  The attempt on August 22, 1972 – which resulted in a 14-hour stand-off, his accomplice shot dead and no cash secured – was immortalized by Al Pacino in the Oscar-winning movie Dog Day Afternoon and is now the subject of a Tony award nominated Broadway adaptation. But, two decades on, the man who knew him best has told the Daily Mail that these lauded dramatizations are little more than a travesty, a superficial skim in which the woman who inspired it all is traduced as a flighty hysteric who merits barely a mention. Wojtowicz and Eden said 'I do' in front of 300 guests at a since-shuttered, aptly named Greenwich Village piano bar, What's Inn a Name Wojtowicz and Eden in 1979 after he was released from prison Wojtowicz is pictured at the Chase bank during the attempted robbery in 1972 Randy Wicker, who worked as a freelance journalist at the time and filmed the couple's wedding, said: 'There was no attempt to go beyond the surface.' Indeed, the truth was a complex and twisted tale. As his marriage to Bifulco crumbled, Wojtowicz – who, in LGBTQ+ social circles referred to himself as 'Littlejohn Basso,' taking his mother's maiden name – started frequenting bars popular among gay men, earning himself a reputation for being incredibly promiscuous and an exhibitionist, according to one LIFE Magazine account. In a 2013 documentary about the robbery titled The Dog, Wojtowicz, a self-proclaimed 'pervert,' said he joined the entertainment committee of the Gay Activists Alliance to 'meet and greet new gay people coming into the scene.' He added, 'I could have sex with them quicker than anybody else, because they were just coming out.' Wicker once told the New York Post that 'Littlejohn' was considered 'a disgrace': 'He would fall on a couch and start having sex with somebody in a semi-public place.' But when Wojtowicz met Eden, he fell and he fell hard. In her memoir, CLUB, Eden described him as 'sweet, kind and one of the most thoughtful men I'd ever known. Every week he would appear at my door with a dozen red roses.' Despite his diminutive stature – described by friends as short like a 'troll,' Eden herself once called him 'dumpy' - she seemed to adore that he loved her so, once describing their rather adventurous sex life in excruciating detail: 'We carried on everywhere - buses, cars, trains, subway platforms, in bars, behind bars - you name it!' A giddy Eden was always thrilled when Wojtowicz, whom she nicknamed 'Sonny' (also the name of the Dog Day Afternoon anti-hero), came around. According to the autobiography of Andy Warhol 'superstar' Holly Woodlawn, who lived down the hall from Eden's New York apartment, the enamored lover would holler, 'Sonny's coming and he's gorgeous!' But, according to Wicker, the relationship was complicated to the point of toxic. Eden (pictured) described Wojtowicz as 'sweet, kind and one of the most thoughtful men I'd ever known. Every week he would appear at my door with a dozen red roses' In 1971, the union of Wojtowicz and Eden was not recognized; gay marriage was not yet legal Carmen Bifulco is pictured with her daughter in their Brooklyn home in 1972 Randy Wicker worked as a freelance journalist at the time of the robbery 'He was an abuser,' said Wicker. 'He would beat her up. He had threatened her life. He was really a horrid person.' Wojtowicz disapproved of Eden's desire for gender reassignment surgery, despite later risking everything to fund it. Three days before that fateful day, on August 19, 1972, Eden turned 26. She was morose, no closer - she later wrote in her memoir - to what she wanted; a sex change: 'Alone, my depression grew deeper. I came to what I thought was a rational decision. I decided to kill myself.' Eden's account was that she went to a drug store and bought a sleep aid, then picked up some downers on the street. A report from the New York Times said she overdosed on 30 sleeping pills and 15 tablets of a pain killer. She woke up at King's County Hospital. It was the event that pushed Wojtowicz to do the unthinkable. By the time Eden had any awareness of what was going on, it was too late to stop it. The first knowledge she had was when she was driven, still in a haze and clutching her hospital gown, to the Chase bank where an armed Wojtowicz, then 27, and accomplice Salvatore Naturile, then 18, had demanded her presence as a condition of the release of some of the nine hostages they were holding. But despite sitting across the street from the bank, Eden refused to see her lover, though she spoke to him on the phone. According to a LIFE account of the robbery, bank staffer Shirley Ball overhead the conversation piecemeal, telling the magazine that, at one point, Wojtowicz pleaded, 'I did this for you, so you could have your operation. Why are you afraid of me?' Eden later recalled, 'He was crying on the other end, and he said that he wanted to come out but he was afraid to, and that if he left, that Sal would kill everybody. So, I just told him to surrender and come out and he said, "I can't." 'Then he just said, "Would you please come to the door to kiss me goodbye?"' Eden refused to see Wojtowicz (pictured) at the Chase bank that fateful day Wojtowicz was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison but served just five According to Wicker, Wojtowicz never regretted his crime Wojtowicz boasted that he was 'The Dog' after the movie was released In reality, the police had never intended there to be meaningful contact between the two and were using Eden's presence as a negotiating tactic to draw Wojtowicz out of the bank and end the standoff. It was a prelude to them providing a vehicle to take him to the airport on the false promise of letting him escape. Of course that did not come to pass. But despite it all, Wojtowicz, who considered himself a 'romantic,' never expressed any regret for what he did. In The Dog Wojtowicz said: 'If I had a dream, and in that dream, I saw everything that happened, would I still go out, and do it? You're damn right I'd still go out and do it.' Wojtowicz was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison but served just five, getting parole in 1978. Ultimately it wasn't the robbery that garnered the funds for Eden's surgery, but the proceeds of the deal Wojtowicz struck with Warner Bros to turn the caper into Dog Day Afternoon. He gave her $2,500 of the $7,500 he got for selling his rights to the story. He was thrilled by the Al Pacino film which came out in 1975 and bolstered his ego so much so that he referred to himself proudly as 'The Dog.' 'That was his whole identity,' Wicker said. (Indeed, there were reports of Wojtowicz later appearing outside of the very same Chase bank to charge passersby for signatures and photo ops while wearing a tee emblazoned with, 'I Robbed This Bank.') For Eden's part, Wicker told the Daily Mail, 'She suddenly sort of had a mini fame as being the woman - the transgender lover - of the guy who robbed the bank to pay for her operation. 'And from my point of view - because I, at the time, didn't understand gender dysphoria - I felt that that sort of gave her a push towards going ahead [with the surgery].' For Eden's part, Wicker told the Daily Mail, 'She suddenly sort of had a mini fame as being the woman - the transgender lover - of the guy who robbed the bank to pay for her operation' Chris Sarandon played the character modeled after Eden in Dog Day Afternoon Wojtowicz's crime inspired the movie Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino  In the Broadway adaptation, John Bernthal plays the lead Wicker accompanied Eden to the first of her two procedures. 'It was horrible,' Eden told Wicker. 'And any queen who asks me if they should have a sex-change, I'd tell them, "No." You feel every needle.' Wojtowicz's loyalty to Eden endured. He wrote to her from prison, signing his letters 'your loving sweetheart,' and he passionately reminded her, 'I love you honey!' Perhaps unsurprisingly his long-suffering wife – who visited him in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary with their two children in tow – eventually had enough. She served him divorce papers in 1978, and the divorce was finalized in 1983. Journalists who covered the story at the time noted that, for all his ardor, Eden seemed to love Wojtowicz, 'only half as much,' as he loved her. But it made little difference to him. He once said: 'I loved [her] enough for the both of us...That's why I did what I did.' But there would be no happy ending for the pair, and Wojtowicz's relationship with Eden - who died in 1987 due to AIDS-related pneumonia - did not survive long past his incarceration. When Dog Day Afternoon premiered in 1975, Eden was already flirting with announcing another wedding – this time to her 17-year-old beau, Tony. It seemed that, even after his passionate crime, Wojtowicz's Helen of Troy no longer loved him. 'Never did,' Eden quipped to a Village Voice reporter at the time. 'I must have told him a thousand times.' No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. 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