What happens at the end of Dog Day Afternoon — and how much of it really happened in Brooklyn in 1972

Here's how it ends — and how the real thing played out on Avenue P in Brooklyn.

How the film ends

Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) negotiate a limousine to Kennedy Airport and a jet out of the country, taking their bank hostages with them. On the tarmac, FBI agent Murphy uses a concealed pistol to shoot Sal in the head, and Sonny is arrested on the spot. Closing titles report his 20-year sentence — and that his partner Leon got the operation the whole robbery was meant to pay for. Roll credits.

What really happened on 22 August 1972

Just before 3pm, John Wojtowicz, 18-year-old Salvatore Naturile, and Bobby Westenberg walked into a Chase Manhattan branch in Gravesend, Brooklyn, armed with shotguns. Almost everything the film shows has a real counterpart:

• The vanishing accomplice — Westenberg fled within minutes after spotting a police car, leaving two men to run the siege.
• The empty vault — the day's cash collection had already been made. The New York Times reported the pair found about $38,000 in cash and $175,000 in travellers cheques.
• The circus outside — roughly 2,000 spectators gathered, and the robbers threw money into the crowd during the 14-hour standoff.
• The motive — Wojtowicz wanted to pay for gender reassignment surgery for his partner, Elizabeth Eden (then known as Ernest Aron), whom he'd wed in a public ceremony in 1971.
• The airport ending — Naturile was shot dead by an FBI agent at Kennedy Airport as they waited to board the getaway plane, exactly as the film stages it.

The screenplay came almost directly from "The Boys in the Bank", a Life magazine feature by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore published on 22 September 1972 — barely a month after the siege.

What the film changed

Names, mostly, plus some biography. Wojtowicz became Sonny Wortzik; he also insisted he'd separated from his wife Carmen two years before meeting Eden, whereas the film implies Eden broke up the marriage. And the surgery was only part of his stated motive. Frank Pierson's script still won the film's sole Oscar, from six nominations.

What happened to everyone afterwards

Wojtowicz served about five years of his 20-year sentence and was released in 1978. He was paid $7,500 plus 1% of the film's net profits for his story — and that money funded Eden's surgery in 1973. The film gave her the ending the robbery couldn't. Wojtowicz died of cancer in 2006.

A Broadway stage adaptation arrived in 2026. Fifty-four years on, Brooklyn's strangest afternoon still sells tickets.