Bernard R. Sullivan, who became one of Connecticut’s most influential lawmen as chief of both the Hartford and State Police departments and later held powerful positions in politics and business, died Tuesday morning after a long illness. He was 78.
Sullivan grew up in a cold-water flat in Hartford’s north end, was hired as a city patrolman and rose through the ranks to become chief at age 39, the youngest in city history. Two years later, former Gov. William A. O’Neill named him Commissioner of Public Safety with orders to straighten out a troubled State Police Department that was feuding with the judiciary and had been caught secretly recording conversations between arrestees to their lawyers.
Later, Sullivan served as chief of staff to one of the most powerful politicians in the state, former Speaker of the House Thomas Ritter. And when the huge, New Britain-based Tomasso brothers construction interests were caught up in the corruption investigation that forced Gov. John G. Rowland from office, the firm hired Sullivan to lead it back onto the straight and narrow.
Sullivan died Monday night after a years-long battle with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, a rare form of blood cancer.
Sullivan’s rise was an unlikely one that started with a hardscrabble childhood in Hartford’s historic Clay Hill district. Born in 1943, he was one of eight children of Arthur and Kathryn Sullivan, a nurse at McCook Hospital in the North End.
As an altar boy at Sacred Heart Church, Sullivan would go with the priest to the tobacco fields north of Hartford to celebrate Mass with the workers there, journalist Susan Campbell wrote in a 2018 column for the Courant.
After graduating from Hartford High School in 1960, Sullivan worked in the mail room at Aetna and then joined the Hartford Police Department, where one of his brothers was a captain, in 1964.
“Bernie was a regular guy,” retired Hartford police captain John Bowen said Tuesday. “But he had a way about him. He got along with everyone and everyone got along with him.”
He spent 25 years with the department, the last seven as police chief, during which he made sure the department surpassed its goals for diverse hiring and considered race and gender when making special assignments.
He was well known for working with the Greater Hartford Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance to extend recruitment into the center of Black life in Hartford, the churches.
“Bernie knew the politics of the city, he knew people, he was a good judge of people, and he was genuine,” said Lew Brown, a former news reporter for WVIT, Channel 30, and a close friend of Sullivan’s since their days at Hartford High School. “He recognized his own humanity and recognized the humanities of other people when he was on the job.”
As chief, Sullivan also gave now-Commissioner James Rovella his first-ever promotion when he tossed a detective badge across a desk to the officer and said, “Now get back to work, kid.”
Sullivan briefly left public safety in 1989 to become chief of security for The Hartford insurance company, but was pulled back in by the ouster of the state’s top law enforcement officer in 1989.
But Sullivan also had a strong sense of duty and wasn’t afraid of a fight if he believed it was necessary to accomplish a greater good.
Few thought he would succeed when he walked into the Public Safety Commissioner’s office at state police headquarters in 1989, then on Washington Street, an agency known for chewing up outsiders.
A secret taping scandal had been the last straw for Gov. William A. O’Neill, who had fumed for years about public criticisms by ranking state police officials of state judges and the judiciary in general. The Courant had reported the existence of the surreptitious telephone recording system in State Police Barracks and the reports were followed closely by federal investigations.
Over a weekend in Nov. 1989, O’Neill sacked then commissioner and state police commander Lester Forst, who at the time was on a bear hunting trip in Alaska, and replaced him with Sullivan. Forst said he had been unaware of the recording. One of Sullivan’s first acts when he reported to work the following Monday morning was to fire or reassign key figures in the department hierarchy.
He told his new state police employees: “The two messages I want to get out right away are ‘Settle down. Do your job.’ Look. This thing happened. It was wrong. We will deal with it and we will cooperate with these investigations.”
He remained commissioner until 1991, then took the position as Ritter’s chief of staff, staying through two speakers until retiring in 2000.
“I’m honored to have worked with Chief Sullivan and call him friend,” Rovella said Tuesday evening. “He was my patrol captain and chief at the Hartford Police Department. I consider him a mentor, a role model, and a compass. He was an innovator and a respected police chief and commissioner. His words and leadership will forever benefit the State of Connecticut and those who served with him.”
He had a way of dealing with people, of diffusing frequent interpersonal and political battles, while building trust and respect, said Mike Lawlor, a former member of the House. It made Sullivan a difficult person to argue with.
“What are you going to say to someone like Bernie Sullivan? You can’t say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, cause he did, and he was sincere and he wasn’t mean-spirited at all,” Lawlor said.
Ritter said Sullivan brought professionalism and high moral standards in his staff and the lawmakers he worked with. He also found time to mentor young people, helping them get and succeed at their first jobs.
“He’d go out and say, ‘Hey, if you’re not at work at 8:30 in the morning, I’m gonna kick your ass, because that’s what you need,” Ritter said. “Trust me, you don’t want to get on his bad side. And if you’re on his good side, there’s no one better.”
Sullivan returned to public service in 2018 with his appointment as assistant to the president at Central Connecticut State University to update the campus police force’s policies and procedures. He had previously served as an acting police chief of CCSU.
Sullivan had been in failing health and suffering from leukemia for years. He had known since spring that the condition was terminal, but he continued to look forward to meeting with old colleagues. When former Hartford police Lieutenant Frank Rudewicz came down with a cold and cancelled a lunch meeting a week ago for fear of spreading his infection, he said Sullivan cracked, “What’s the matter? Afraid you’re going to kill me?”
“I had the good fortune of knowing Bernie Sullivan over the years as a boss, a chief and always as a mentor,” Rudewicz said. “He was a stand up guy.”
Sullivan had gone into hospice care at his Glastonbury home on Sept. 1, as he shared in a Facebook post the next day in what was both an expression of gratitude for his life and a stoic goodbye.
“First off no tears, no prayers, no feel good stuff, not in my DNA,” started the post, in which Sullivan joked that he had not even a T-shirt to show for his frequent flyer status at St. Francis Hospital.
If there was one thing that unsettled Sullivan it was the of the country he was leaving behind, still bitterly divided by the structural racism and party politics he’d worked against first as an Irish police chief in the diverse capital city and later a politician tasked with building common ground between Democrats, Republicans and four caucuses at the State Capitol.
“Going forward I have a simple plan,” he wrote on Sept. 2. “I will eat the cake, drink the occasional cold brew and because I genuinely fear for my grand children’s future I will continue to speak truth to power.”
In June 2020, the same month he learned his cancer had spread to his lungs, Sullivan wrote an op-ed for the Hartford Courant advocating for police and gun reforms.
Funeral arrangements through Farley Sullivan are being finalized. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Sullivan’s honor to the Hundred Club of Connecticut, of which he was a past president, or the House of Bread in Hartford.
Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com Edmund Mahony can be reached at emahony@courant.com.
