Just finished up watching Dog Day Afternoon, an Al Pacino vehicle that chronicles a bank robbery in the 1970’s. Pacino plays Sonny Workzit, who was robbing the bank to finance a sex-change operation for his gay lover. The credits roll and you see that Sonny was serving a 20-year term. That means he’s out now. So, I decided to google it and see what came up, didn’t find much beyond Dog Day Afternoon stuff. I gave Vivisimo a shot, which does this cluster style search. I found an article with comments about the robbery. Not an easy thing to find info on (well, fast info anyway).
His real name is John Wojtowicz and he still appears to be alive (judging from the message board posts). This site has facts about the film and a Life magazine article about the actual robbery. Apparently, there was another movie made (The Third Memory) in which Wojtowicz reenacts the bank robbery and tells the story from his perspective. Here’s an interview with Pierre Huyghe, the artist who directed the film and a Village Voice article. Lastly, here are some newspaper clippings.