Joseph Sullivan (mobster)

Joseph "Mad Dog" Sullivan (born c. 1940) was an Irish-American hitman who acted as a contract killer for the Mafia in New York City and was also rumored to be involved in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.

Personal background

Joe, a native of Woodhaven, Queens was born into a Catholic family. Many of his relatives are still located there. From his earliest years, he embarked on a series of violent activities and began to garner the attention of neighborhood criminals. He had a physically and verbally abusive childhood at the hands of his tyrannical alcoholic NYPD detective father. The elder Sullivan would frequently beat his son and demanded that he pursue a career in the police department. The more his father harangued, the harder Joseph resisted. Joseph began pulling armed robberies at the age of twelve. Throughout his life Joseph suffered from an undiagnosed salivary gland disorder which earned him his unflattering sobriquet.

Ironically, he was polite, soft spoken and humble in nature. He stood at 5'11 and weighed 180 pounds with most of the weight in his legs. He had legs as powerful as pistons, and a thin, wiry strong upper body. Permanent veins emerged from underneath his skin on his neck and arms with a stomach as flat as a sheet of steel. He had a close resemblance to actor Kevin Dillon. While incarcerated, he assisted in the prison chapel, exercised and read voraciously and had a penchant for poetry. Sullivan was the first inmate to escape from Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York in April 1971 (he was recaptured several weeks later in New York City).

Later crimes

When he was paroled in the mid-1970s, Sullivan was hired by Fat Tony Salerno of the Genovese crime family to assassinate Tom Devaney, Eddie "the Butcher" Cummiskey, and Tom "the Greek" Kapatos, three underlings of Mickey Spillane boss of the Hell's Kitchen Irish Mob. This move was an effort by Salerno to take control of the hiring and construction contracts at the yet unbuilt Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, located in Hell's Kitchen.

After the assassinations of his four top enforcers, Spillane's criminal enterprises were drastically weakened. (Spillane later moved his family to Woodside, Queens for their own safety. However he was later gunned down presumably on orders from DeMeo.

Sullivan was arrested in the early 1980s after a shootout with the FBI and New York State Police in Upstate New York and was reincarcerated.

References

*English, T.J. "Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster". New York: HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN 0-06-059002-5
*Tears & Tiers: The Life and Times of Joseph "Mad Dog" Sullivan, the Only Man to Escape Attica Prison, The True Story of a Legend ISBN 0977265609

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