by Brian Vallee
On January 9, 1952, calling himself Charles Hunter of 17 Hillcrest Avenue, Montreal, Boyd purchased a grey 1951 Nash sedan. “I got a car that I could rely on. I used it to run back and forth to Montreal several times.”
By mid-January, Boyd was down to his last few dollars and Suchan was complaining that he was nearly broke. Boyd decided it was time to rob another bank. He would have preferred Lennie Jackson’s advice and participation, but Lennie was still out west with his new wife. “I didn’t trust Suchan,” says Boyd. “But Leonard knew what he was doing. He really was astute when it came to handling guns and throwing a scare into people. It was reassuring to have him standing at the door with a machine gun. If Len Jackson and I had hooked up without the others, we probably would have been still going.”
Boyd picked the Bank of Toronto at 1436 Kingston Road as his next target. After studying the layout and possible escape routes, he decided he would need at least two more accomplices to pull it off. Boyd had met Willie Jackson’s brother, thirty-one-year-old Joseph, who lived in Toronto. “Joe was a more serious type than Willie, but he was just as interested in the money and it didn’t take much to convince him to go along.”
Next, Boyd telephoned Suchan in Montreal. “I told him I was getting the job ready and gave him the date. He said he would be in Toronto the next day, but he didn’t show up. I was mad as hell.” No doubt Boyd also continued to harbour animosity towards Suchan for not sharing his take from the Royal Bank after his father walked away with most of Boyd’s and Willie’s share. Boyd waited two days and telephoned Suchan again.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted into the phone. “I had this job all ready to go.”
“Oh, I thought you were just fooling,” was Suchan’s feeble response.
“Hell, I don’t fool about things like that! I’ve already lined up another man to help, and if you’re not in, I’ll get somebody to replace you.” Suchan and Mary Mitchell were in Toronto the next morning. To Boyd’s surprise, Mary wanted to participate in the robbery. He thought it over and agreed.
Waldimar Weisman parked his 1950 black Ford sedan behind the College Theatre at College and Dovercourt about 11 p.m. on January 24, planning to leave it there until morning. But during the night Boyd hot-wired the car and drove it to a rented garage, where he replaced the licence plates with a set stolen from an auto wrecker.
About 11 a.m. the next day, Boyd was whistling softly as he entered the Bank of Toronto, on Kingston Road near Warden, with Suchan and Joe Jackson. Teller Beverly Machesney was standing at the rear of the bank facing the front door when Boyd came in and walked towards him. Beverly, the teller, was about to ask, “What can I do for you?” when Boyd produced a revolver. “It’s a stick-up!” he shouted. The manager, Robert Chambers, was standing near Machesney and turned when he heard the words. Boyd ordered them and the other employees to face the wall and lie face down on the floor.
Mrs. Murray Finlay, who lived across the street from the bank, dropped in to make a deposit and was confronted by Boyd. “Get over to the wall,” he said, waving his gun at her. She stood frozen. He nudged her with the barrel. “Face the wall!” he ordered. “It’s a stick-up.” She went to the wall but stood facing the interior of the bank, and saw Boyd leave the main cashier’s cage and move to the north end of the bank to empty the cash drawers there. Then he vaulted the counter and went through the manager’s office to the accountant’s desk, where Mrs. Finlay watched as he pried open the drawers. “At this time he was looking directly at me and grinning,” she said.
David Forgie, a Scarborough fireman, was standing in the doorway of the bank talking to a friend when the three gunmen came out of the bank, one of them carrying a cloth bag. Forgie heard someone shout that there had been a hold-up, and he started after them until Suchan turned and pointed a revolver at him. Forgie retreated to the doorway as the gunmen jumped into the stolen Ford and sped off. Forgie was able to get the licence number. The getaway car headed west on Kingston Road and then north on Cornell Avenue. They drove about four blocks to a Dominion Store parking lot, where Mary was waiting in another car. She drove through the city while they lay on the floor out of sight.
The robbery netted $10,000 and a .38 calibre Ivor Johnson revolver. The newspapers gave the story the usual dramatic play, with photos and screaming headlines, and the police had no doubt the Boyd Gang was at work again. Later, one witness would make a lukewarm identification of Joe Jackson, and charges against him would be dropped at a preliminary hearing. Several witnesses would identify Boyd and Suchan, but defence lawyers would raise enough doubts that they too were eventually acquitted.
After the robbery, Steve Suchan and Mary Mitchell took a short working vacation to the United States. Suchan, the former King Edward Hotel doorman, had befriended Edward Allard, the doorman at their Montreal apartment building. Allard would tell the Toronto police that Suchan, whom he knew as Vic Lenoff, had several times invited him up to his third-floor apartment. The visits were short, since he could not leave his post for more than five minutes at a time. On one occasion Suchan played the violin for him. On another he demonstrated his marksmanship using an air pistol to shoot at magazine covers. On January 30, 1952, a postcard addressed to “Eddie (Doorman)” at the Croydon Apartments was sent from Syracuse, New York. The card read: “Hello Ed. Having a pleasant trip so far, will send you a card from New York.” It was signed Vic and Mary Lenoff. A second card followed from New York City a few days later. The message was similar: “Hello Ed. Having a wonderful time here. See you soon.” While in New York, Suchan also telephoned Anna Camero, telling her he was there on business. On their way back to Montreal, Suchan and Mitchell stopped in Buffalo, where he placed an order for several handguns through an underworld contact. The guns would arrive in Montreal a few days later.
Lennie and Ann Jackson were back from their honeymoon by the time Suchan and Mitchell returned to Montreal in the second week of February. On Valentine’s Day, Suchan’s twenty-fourth birthday, he sent greetings via telegram to Anna Camero and their month-old baby. Two days later, Sunday, February 17, Suchan arrived in Toronto for a short visit, during which Camero expressed her displeasure at how he was treating both her and their son. Her displeasure would deepen a few days later when she received a letter from him asking for $200. His cut of the bank robbery loot had been just over $3,000, but his trip to New York, the weapons purchase, and his taste for expensive suits and fine restaurants had left him nearly broke again. When Camero ignored the letter, he telephoned her and was able to convince her to wire the money to him. She was at home ill, but wrote a cheque to her mother, who in turn purchased a money order and wired it to Victor J. Lenoff on February 26. That money wouldn’t last long, and he would soon be forced to sell his car.
Ed Boyd was disappointed in the take from the most recent bank robbery, and he was becoming disillusioned and despondent. “It was kind of difficult to be a member of a bunch of crooks and at the same time have to raise a family. I tried to do it but it wasn’t possible.” And he felt his gang had let him down. “I was a guy who trusted people. I thought if you were a crook – like in the James Cagney pictures – the guys backed each other up. But they didn’t do that in Toronto. They always stuck with their own group. I wasn’t really pulled into their company. Whenever a bank robbery was over, they were away with their buddies and their women. They never came near me. The only time they came near me was when they wanted help with a bank robbery. I was trying to make an income from robbing banks, and so I would plan one and I’d get them into it. Len Jackson wasn’t around much, and Suchan didn’t listen. They boasted a lot about what they were doing. I learned in Kingston some of these underworld types were narcotics peddlers and the like. If I had known that, I might have just stayed away from all of them.”
But Boyd planned another robbery and got the word to Suchan and Jackson in Montreal. They agreed to a date for the job but failed to show up. This time he decided to go ahead without them. And this time
he would use most of the proceeds to build a future. His plan was to pay a minimum fee to whomever he recruited, and start a nest egg to purchase a small apartment building or rooming house. He would offer his new partners a share in the project. He envisioned himself living in the building, which he would manage and maintain, with the income from rentals going to support his family and pay his partners.
Boyd approached Willie Jackson’s brother Joe, who quickly agreed to the proposal. He would receive $2,000 from the robbery and would be a junior partner in the rooming house scheme.
“Do you know anybody else we can get to come in on it?” asked Boyd.
“Well, there’s my brother-in-law, Allister Gibson,” said Jackson after a moment’s thought. Both Jackson and twenty-five-year-old Gibson were living at 327 Jarvis Street.
“Gibson was just in on the one robbery,” says Boyd. “We talked him into it because we needed another guy. He liked the money part, so Joe and I played that up pretty good. He saw we were living off the top of the land, so he figured he’d get in on it too.”
Gibson would tell police later that he thought over Boyd’s proposition “and decided to go into it to see if I couldn’t make a better life for my wife and family, as I was sick of living in the hole I was in. I had worked steady for the past six years for the same company, with the exception of six months when I went to the tobacco fields to try and make more money. I guess I didn’t realize what I was getting into.”
Boyd set his plan in motion on February 28, 1952, when he stole the licence plates from a Nash coupe. Sometime before noon the same day, he stole a dark-green 1948 Chevrolet coupe from the parking lot behind the A&P Store at Yonge Street and Lawrence Avenue. Boyd drove the car to a garage he had rented behind a house on Euclid Avenue between College and Dundas Streets. There he switched the licence plates.
Four days later, at 12:25 p.m., Boyd parked the stolen Chev a few doors west of the Bank of Montreal on the north side of College Street at Manning. He sat in the car while Jackson and Gibson entered the bank and mingled with the customers. Then he entered and walked to the rear of the bank, and the hold-up went into action.
Teller Margaret Smith was running some cheques on the adding machine with her back turned when she heard Boyd shout, “This is a hold-up!” She quickly turned and tried to get to the floor alarm in her cage. “But the man jumped right over the top of the cage, and right down in front of me,” she told police. “He had a gun and told me to get out of there and face the wall.” Smith complied, but glanced back to see the gunman scooping the money from her till into a shopping bag. The cage beside hers was locked. But “he tore the top of the cage door off and cleaned it out.”
There were more than thirty customers and staff in the bank, and Gibson was petrified. “My job was to jump the counter and clean out the money in the middle tills,” he said. “I did jump the counter and waved my gun and got the bank employees to face the wall, but I was too scared to touch the money.” Joe Jackson was at the front of the bank holding a revolver on the customers as Boyd cleaned out the tills.
A clerk was in the basement of the bank gathering papers for a messenger when he heard a commotion upstairs and heard a voice shout, “This is a hold-up!” The clerk got halfway up the stairs before deciding it might be wiser to stay in the basement. He retreated, and flipped the alarm switch, believing it would ring at the police station. But he had not been instructed in how to use the switch and had turned it to the off position. Upstairs, two employees had managed to press alarm buttons, but because the system was off, the police department was not alerted.
Marie Upritchard, the manager’s stenographer, was sitting on a swivel chair at her desk typing when Boyd announced the hold-up. “I was so nervous, I couldn’t do anything but stare,” she told police. She said Boyd kept checking his watch and shouting orders to the others. “I just couldn’t turn away from the calm one … the leader. I was fascinated by him.” Another witness described Boyd as “very handsome.”
The Telegram and the Star ran banner headlines with wildly differing estimates of the amount taken. In the body of the Tely’s main story about the hold-up, it was reported that “Edwin Alonzo Boyd, suspected mastermind of many of the robberies, is still at large.” The actual take from the robbery was $24,696, about $4,000 of which was in U.S. bills.
The afternoon traffic was heavy. Boyd drove the getaway car west two or three blocks along College Street before cutting south and circling back to the garage on Euclid, just a couple of blocks from the bank.
In a statement to Detective Dolph Payne five weeks after the robbery, Gibson said Boyd paid him $1,000.
“Is there any of this money left?” asked Payne.
“No.”
“What did you do with the thousand dollars?”
“I spent three hundred of it on a Studebaker car, gave away two hundred, took a trip to the United States, and spent the rest on clothes for my boy.”
“Is there anything further you wish to say?”
“I’m glad it’s off my mind, and it will never happen again.”
Joe Jackson told Payne that all of the $2,000 Boyd paid him went into buying and repairing vehicles.
Boyd would explain to Payne that he kept most of the money from the robbery because “we intended to invest a large portion of it in a rooming house, the profits or income to be split between us.” He also told Payne that the only reason he went back to robbing banks “was because I was up against it and needed money to support my wife and children.”
23
Politics and Intrigue
The escape of Edwin Alonzo Boyd and Lennie and Willie Jackson from the Don Jail, and a new surge in bank robberies around Toronto, precipitated a political and public outcry that resulted in a shake-up at the Don Jail and at City Hall.
The influence of the rigid Col. G. Hedley Basher was again felt at the Don Jail when the provincial government plucked him from the Guelph Reformatory, where he had been superintendent since February 1946, and appointed him deputy minister of the Department of Reform Institutions. His appointment took effect January 1, 1952, and by the end of the month the Don’s progressive governor, Charles Sanderson, was gone. Both prisoners and guards had liked Sanderson and feared his job was in jeopardy because of the escapes. The Civil Service Association of Ontario, representing the guards, took pre-emptive action at a meeting in early November 1951, when it approved a “spontaneous vote of confidence … with reference to your administration and policy” and promised Sanderson close co-operation in the future. But such sentiment didn’t stop Basher.
Sanderson left the Don Jail on January 28, 1952, after just eighteen months on the job. Basher transferred him to the Burwash prison farm and replaced him with Thomas Woodward Brand. Basher had first met Brand during a riot in Burwash in 1947. Brand had been there for two and a half years at the time and was in charge of 150 inmates in Burwash’s outlying camps. “I was very much impressed with the manner in which he had this place under control and the manner in which it was operated, despite the fact there had been very serious disturbances in the main institution,” Basher said later. “He had such good control of his unit there was no difficulty whatsoever.”
When Basher took over the Guelph Reformatory, he had brought Brand in as assistant superintendent. Now he appointed him governor of the Don Jail. Brand liked many of the programs Sanderson had introduced, and made only a few minor changes. Overall discipline was tightened somewhat, but prisoners continued to feel that they were being treated in a civilized manner.
Meanwhile, on January 1, Allan Lamport had taken over as mayor of Toronto, following his victory at the polls in the fall election. Lamport was a feisty, flamboyant self-promoter who had pushed hard as an alderman and controller to bring taverns, Sunday sports, and lotteries to Toronto. He considered himself a crime-busting mayor and a strong supporter of the police. He was also pushing hard for amalgamation of Toronto with its neighbours. Lamport, who turned ninety-four in April 1997, re
mains in good health and as outspoken as ever. In his day he was a soldier, alderman, mayor, provincial Member of Parliament, and chairman of the TTC. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1994.
In the late 1940s Lamport pushed to have taverns licensed when he saw carloads of Torontonians travelling to Buffalo to drink. He wanted them to spend their money in Toronto. “For a long time I stood alone at council on that one,” he says. A 1950 magazine article stated that “Lamport was the only city politician to speak solidly in support of cocktail bars and now that they are open he is probably the only city politician who has absolutely no compunctions about visiting – or being seen in them.”
Lamport was defeated in his first run for mayor in 1950 but won the next time “even with the churches and the newspapers against me.” When he took office as mayor – the last mayor before amalgamation – he went on the offensive against the bankers and defended the police. He blamed the banks for having so much cash lying around with very little protection. “The bank guns weren’t much good, because these crooks had more nerve than any manager or teller with a gun, and you know who’d get shot first. We had an organized gang