After he was arrested, John Wojtowicz stated that he tried to rob a bank, so that he could finance the change of the gender of the person he loves. The failed robbery served as the inspiration for the film "Dog Day Afternoon" with Al Pacino in the role of Vojtović, and later for numerous documentaries about this bizarre event, but about John when they characterized him as a hilarious person.
On August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz and two accomplices - Salvatore Naturale and Robert Westenberg - entered the Brooklyn branch of Chase Bank with shotguns in their hands. As soon as they entered, the operation went catastrophically upside down: Westenberg suddenly changed his mind, said he couldn't do it, and went outside; the bank safe turned out to be half empty; one of the bank employees managed to activate the alarm. The building was soon surrounded, and six employees became hostages. Police set up a crisis headquarters in a nearby beauty salon, and negotiations began. A group of almost 2,000 people quickly gathered in front of the bank building. On a hot summer night, everyone was there: the FBI, the ambulance, the snipers on the rooftops, the TV crews. Like Robin Hood, Wojtowicz threw money out the window, ordered a hostage pizza, and gave the deliveryman a pile of money.
Two hours after the start of negotiations, Wojtowicz announced his conditions for the release of the hostages: "I want my wife to be brought from Kings County Hospital. His name is Ernest Aron. He is a guy. I am gay." (He married Aaron at an impromptu wedding a year before, but no one knew)
It was the most shocking moment on television until then, the confession of a man who is married and has two children, who were on the beach at the time of the robbery and did not even know what was happening. His wife saw on the news that a bank robbery was being carried out by a "declared homosexual", but she had no idea that it was the work of her husband.
Aaron was brought to the place of the robbery, upset and disheveled, dressed only in a house dress, but he refused to talk to Wojtowicz (they quarreled because he tried to kill himself due to lack of funds for gender reassignment). Then came Wojtowicz mother, who was in front of the bank for a full 13 hours. The hostage crisis lasted for a full 14 hours, and the hostages were released only when the bandits were promised a plane flight outside the United States. An FBI agent took the kidnappers and hostages to the "JFK" airport, but as soon as they arrived there, Naturale was shot, Wojtowicz was arrested and the hostages were released.
Wojtowicz was sentenced to 20 years in prison, which he was serving in the federal prison "Luisburg"; when Sidney Lamet film appeared in 1975, he was still in prison. The money he got for the story was given to Aaron, who finally had surgery and became Elizabeth Eden. Wojtowicz was very proud of that. In a TV show broadcast just before his untimely release in 1975,Wojtowicz told Eden: "I don't regret doing that, because it saved your life."
That was an interesting article about the man