A Wife Recalls Her Estranged Husband\'s 1972 Failed Bank Robbery

By EMILY S. RUEB

On Aug. 22, 1972, Carmen Wojtowicz was at Rockaway Beach getting some sun with her two children when she heard a news bulletin on her portable radio about “an admitted homosexual” robbing a bank.

She didn't think about it again until she was taking off her bathing suit at her home in East New York that night, when a neighbor called across the yard asking if she had seen the news.

“Your husband's robbing a bank,” she recalls the neighbor saying.

When she turned on the television, Ms. Wojtowicz saw police cars lined up outside the a Chase Manhattan Bank in Gravesend, Brooklyn, where John Wojtowicz and an accomplice had taken nine employees hostage. The newscasters were mispronouncing their last name; they should have been saying “Water-witz.”

“It was horrible,” she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, 40 years later, well after she had taken back her maiden name, Bifulco. But it was mad e worse when a photo of Mr. Wojtowicz's “wife” was splashed on the screen, showing Ernest Aron, the man her husband would later “marry.” Mr. Wojtowicz wanted the bank money so he could pay for a sex-change operation for Mr. Aron.

As the hostage standoff continued that night, she took a tranquilizer and went to bed, Ms. Bifulco said.

“I didn't want him to die,” she said. Today, Ms. Bifulco, 65, has few kind words to share about the man she married right out of high school.

He had walked out on her three years earlier, “the day a man walked on the moon.” The couple had been at a baseball game and “Johnny” left early. When she arrived home with their 8-month-old girl, the apartment had been cleared out. Even the baby's crib and stroller were gone. A $10 bill was on the table. Cab fare, she said, to get to her mother's house.

He was always mean, she said.

In 1971, Mr. Wojtowicz and Mr. Aron were “married” in Greenwi ch Village by a priest, though this was long before same-sex marriages were legalized. Ms. Bifulco did not attend the ceremony, but based on photos, she described it as “a regular bridesmaid wedding.” To mark their anniversaries, Mr. Wojtowicz gave Mr. Aron a red rose and her a yellow one.

After the robbery, Ms. Bifulco, still married to Mr. Wojtowicz, took their two children to visit him in prison - “like a fool,” she said, thinking that he eventually would shape up and return to her. But she was constantly in competition with his new partner.

“Ernie was first and I was second,” she said.

She remembered a time she and Mr. Aron were sitting together on a bench visiting Mr. Wojtowicz in jail when Mr. Aron lifted up his shirt to show his chest.

“Oh, Johnny, my breasts are growing!” he said. Ms. Bifulco went “berserk,” she said.

“Why are you doing this in front of my kids?” she said she had screamed before leaving.

Wh en “Dog Day Afternoon,” the 1975 movie inspired by the botched bank robbery, was screened at the prison in Lewisburg, Pa., where Mr. Wojtowicz was serving his 20-year sentence, some inmates thought Al Pacino's character, Sonny, based in part on Mr. Wojtowicz, was a sellout. Mr. Wojtowicz's confederate, Salvatore Natuarale, was killed at the end of the 14-hour siege, while Sonny came out unscathed.

They beat Mr. Wojtowicz badly enough to send him to a hospital. When Ms. Bifulco visited him there, an attendant looked at her and said, “Oh, you're the other wife,” she said in the interview. Mr. Aron was listed as “next of kin,” which was the final insult.

“I got the lawyer and that was it,” Ms. Bifulco said.

In 1978, when Mr. Wojtowicz took her to lunch for their anniversary and gave her the rose, she served him divorce papers.

After the divorce was finalized in 1983, Ms. Bifulco worked three jobs and put herself through college, “ge tting A's,” she said, and got off welfare. She and her two children also went to therapy, which restored her confidence.

The last time Ms. Bifulco and Mr. Wojtowicz saw each other, at a gathering for her grandson in 1997, they barely made eye contact. Mr. Wojtowicz died in 2006; his death certificate listed him as never married, she said.

In 2001, she retired after working for 25 years as an education associate for children with special needs (first and sixth graders) in the New York City public school system. She said she lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, and spends time traveling and going to the racetrack with her boyfriend of 11 years.

“It took a long time to find love. I didn't trust anybody after that.”