John Sullivan emigrated to the US from County Clare, Ireland. Leaving his wife and babies behind to fight in the Civil War, he was shot in the forearm at Bull Run. It was a non-life-threatening injury but he sickened and died at Harewood Hospital, pictured above, three weeks later of typhoid fever.

John Sullivan’s oldest son Jim Sullivan met President Abraham Lincoln at the Reception at Buffalo’s St. James Hall in 1861, then attended his funeral in 1865 in the same building.

John Sullivan’s widow remarries out of desperation after she is denied her widow’s and surviving children’s pension, and the her nefarious ex-convict husband Peter Halloran gets caught up in the Fenian Invasion of Canada in 1866.

A chance encounter with Buffalo Express editor Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, leads to a friendship that will reverberate with the teenage Jim Sullivan for a lifetime.

John Sullivan’s youngest son, John P. Sullivan, is installed amidst widespread election fraud as alderman of Buffalo’s First Ward by his childhood friend, the voracious William J. “Fingy” Conners. John P. Sullivan holds on to power for the next 35 years.

John Sullivan’s eldest, James E. Sullivan, founds the Mutual Rowing Club in 1881, joins the Buffalo Police Department in 1883, and spends the rest of his life cleaning up his alderman-brother’s messes, along with those of saloon-boss Fingy Conners and the odious Sheehan Brothers, William F. and John C.

John P. Sullivan and brother Jim Sullivan’s childhood friend Fingy Conners rises to power following the unrelated deaths of 4 members of his family within a year’s passing, amasses fantastic wealth by corralling thousands of First Ward laboring families, and subsequently commands the Buffalo Police Department and the Democratic Party of New York State.

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Q- When I began reading about the character of Fingy Conners in your novel, The First Ward, I naturally assumed that he had to be a fictional device that you created. Otherwise, this guy would be famous, or rather, infamous. How do people react finding out that this frighteningly powerful Buffalo character actually existed, just as depicted?

A- I grew up hearing references to Fingy Conners, but the stories were all just two or three sentences long, having to do with bodies found floating in the canals at dawn and the like. He was a close childhood friend of my great grandfather Jim Sullivan and his brother John P., the famed Buffalo alderman. Fingy grew up just a few doors away on the same street, Louisiana St.. They remained “frenemies” throughout their lives, alternately or even simultaneously working with, and working against each other.

Q- How is it possible Fingy Conners could be forgotten? Practically nothing comes up when you google him.

A- Yeah, you’re right. And this is someone with thousands of news articles online about him. His birth name is William J. Conners, so you do find a bit more when you search using that. But I had to be very creative and persistent in my searches. There’s a massive amount of information found online that Google doesn’t cover, partly because if the OCR can’t read the contents of a degraded newspaper page, then it’s not searchable. That’s where creative searching comes in. I became very adept at finding and transcribing virtually unreadable microfilm records.

Q- So, who was Fingy Conners exactly?

A- Conners was a street fighting juvenile delinquent with a massive chip on his shoulder who set out to punish the world, and take control of it. And he succeeded admirably at both. Very much like in the Godfather II, Fingy’s street youth gang graduated to become his lieutenants in his adult gang. But unlike the Corleones, he was mind-bogglingly brilliant and far more calculating than Vito and Michael Corleone. And unlike the Corleones, Fingy was an actual historic figure. He juggled dozens of balls in the air simultaneously, entrapping thousands of laborers’ families in indentured servitude, controlling the entirety of shipping on the Great Lakes —holding the nation’s grain supply captive along with it. He became chairman of the Democratic party of New York State. Teddy Roosevelt tread lightly around him; Fingy boomed William Randolph Hearst for governor of New York—twice. Everyone feared him. All the while as he rose to social respectability he kept an iron grip on the docks and the men who worked them, importing trainloads of hooligans from New York’s Bowery to Buffalo to come in and invade the saloons that allowed men with plans to unionize to gather there. His thugs crippled and murdered family men with clubs and bricks, and then Fingy tried to stick Buffalo’s taxpayers for their return train fare back to New York. Audacious, right?  And this is just the tip of the Fingy Conners iceberg. “Sociopath” doesn’t begin to describe the guy.

Q- Why couldn’t anyone stop him, do you think?

A- Why didn’t anyone stop Hitler? Every once in a while history spits out a personality so unswerving and unstoppable that they steamroll over absolutely everyone. And Fingy was just such a personality. He reveled and thrived in people hating him. Their hate and fear fueled his enterprise. He controlled banks, shipping, food, the police department, politics. He owned a huge brewery, a giant poultry farm, two of Buffalo’s most powerful newspapers, vast amounts of city real estate. He had contracts to pave the city’s streets; he was a director in two Buffalo banks, he owned a state-of-the-art printing plant and maneuvered to have the city purchase his vacant lots at inflated prices to build the public schools. He tried to get South Park High School built on one of his lots, right next door to Holy Family Church, much to the chagrin of the parish. He bought 70,000 acres in Florida, and discovering that it was inaccessible, built the famed Conners Highway on his own dime in record time and under budget. He owned mansions in Palm Beach, Okeechobee, The Hamptons, and on Buffalo’s Delaware Avenue. The guy had his fingers in every pot, literally.

Q- It’s all the more mind-boggling that someone of his power and reach could just disappear from the nation’s memory.

A- Fingy Conners was the original Teflon Man. Nothing at all stuck to the guy. It appears he encountered no punishment at all, and suffered little personal loss in his life, compared to everyone around him. He lived a fabulous existence, and died surrounded by loved ones two weeks before the stock market crash of 1929, so he didn’t even live to experience any kind of financial reversal. And he died a revered man, which is really crazy. People bought into his schemes and then gave him a hero’s funeral. The Fingy Conners Story is an amazing one.

Q- The First Ward doesn’t touch on some of the things you just mentioned, but I know you are writing a sequel.

A- The First Ward is a saga, as would be dictated by a life as troubling and magnificently overpowering as Fingy Conners’. There will be at least one more volume, if not two. I keep discovering new revelations, even as we speak, so Fingy’s story keeps expanding.

Q- You’ve ben talking to someone in Hollywood, I hear?

A- Umm. No comment. Yet.

Q-Who would play Fingy Conners in the movie version? Do you have anyone in mind?

A- I like Patton Oswalt. He was terrific in The Big Fan. Besides the striking physical resemblance, the fact that he’s a comedian could well bring some humanity to a character who is so completely lacking, that in the wrong hands he could well end up a cartoon character.