He graduated from Chaminade High School in 1982 and earned a Bachelor of Arts in government and English at the College of William & Mary in 1986.

[2] From 1994 to 2005, Sullivan served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted the Maisonet heroin organization, which sold approximately $100,000 worth of heroin per day in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx and carried out numerous murders in aid of its racketeering activity.

[3] Among those prosecuted in that case was Bronx defense attorney Pat Stiso, who acted as house counsel to the RICO enterprise.

[4] Other notable cases included the investigation and indictment of Mario Villanueva Madrid, who as governor of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo accepted millions of dollars from Mexican drug cartels in exchange for providing safe passage for ton quantities of cocaine en route to the United States.

[7] Among the noteworthy defendants prosecuted by that unit were Colombia kingpins Alberto Orlandez Gamboa, Diego Murillo Bejarano, and Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela; Afghan warlord Bashir Noorzai; Dutch ecstasy kingpin Henk Rommy; and the leadership of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

[12] Sullivan sits on the executive board of the New York American Inn of Court and is an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law, where he teaches courses on white collar crime and trial advocacy,[13] and Columbia Law School, where he teaches a course on sentencing.