Solomon Gursky Was Here (60 page)

In any event, Solomon was not seen on the prairie for months, and when he came back it was, to everybody's surprise, to marry a girl in Winnipeg. She was six months' pregnant at the time, living in seclusion in The Victory Hotel, her parents having disowned her. Solomon, they said, married her merely to give the child a name. An unnecessary gesture, as it turned out, because the baby girl was stillborn. Libby Gursky pronounced that a blessing in disguise, because otherwise the poor child would have been bound to live out her life under a cloud of shame.

Three

Moses Berger never visited a city without seeking out its second-hand bookshops, not satisfied with scanning the shelves but also rummaging through unsorted cartons in the basement. One of his most cherished discoveries was a memoir of R.B. Bennett, the New Brunswick-born prairie lawyer who led the Tories into office in Ottawa in 1930, ending a nine-year reign by Mackenzie King. The memoir, written by the prime minister's secretary, Andrew D. MacLean, began:

The Right Honourable Richard Bedford Bennett, P.C., LL.D., D.C.L., K.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Canada, foremost statesman in an Empire of over four hundred million people, rises at seven-thirty, enjoys an ample breakfast, and is at his office, every morning, a few minutes before nine.

At sixty-four years of age, he works fourteen hours a day, and plays not at all. His admirers fear for his health; his political enemies delight in spreading stories of his impending collapse; yet he carries on—for such has been his habit for twenty years—in his quiet way; occasionally complaining of the trials of public life; doing three men's work, with little outward indication of the strain put upon his powerful mind or his clean body.

Struggling for clients in a little Western town—when the West
was
wild and when clients were usually found in the bar room; “Dickie” Bennett did not drink, did not smoke, yet his friends were legion, and I should imagine that the majority of them are not averse to the uses of strong spirits, and of nicotine.

 

R.B. Bennett, descendant of United Empire Loyalists, a Methodist millionaire, a bachelor and former Sunday School teacher, was pledged to bring to justice the bootleggers who had been coddled by
the Liberals for so long, but he didn't get round to it until 1934. By that time the Gurskys, directors of the thriving James McTavish & Sons, were happily ensconced on the Montreal mountainside. Mr. Bernard's mansion was dug into the highest ground, enabling him to look down on the adjoining homes of Solomon and Morrie as, one spring morning, he sat down to breakfast with Libby, three months' pregnant. The maid announced that there were two men at the door who wished to see him. “They're from the RCMP, sir, and wish to speak with you at once.”

They had warrants for the arrest of Bernard, Solomon, and Morrie, who were taken to RCMP headquarters to be fingerprinted and photographed and then escorted to the Montreal Court of the King's Bench Chambers, where they were released on bail of $150,000 each. The Gursky boys, as the newspapers called them, were charged with the evasion of $7 million in customs duties and a further $15 million in excise taxes. Mr. Bernard was also charged with attempting to bribe Bert Smith, a customs officer.

It was the murder of Willy McGraw that ignited the prairie fire, politicians in faraway Ottawa sniffing the smoke that eventually led to the Gursky boys being scorched by a humiliating arrest. Following a plague of bank robberies instigated by bored American rum-runners, the murder of McGraw infuriated the law-abiding citizens of three prairie provinces, vociferous members of the Loyal Orange Lodge in particular. Prime Minister Mackenzie King heard the cry of his western children, consulted his crystal ball and the hands of his wall clock, and decreed an end to the export liquor trade in Saskatchewan, giving the Gurskys a month to shut down their operations there. However, King was too late to save the provincial Liberals from electoral defeat. A Tory candidate, taking to the stump, declared, “The Liberals have been in cahoots with the booze peddlers from the very beginning. Take Bernard Gursky, for instance, a millionaire many times over. He is alleged to have offered Inspector Smith a bribe of fifteen thousand dollars. Then how much do you think he and his brothers paid into Liberal coffers for immunity from prosecution all these years?” Next the Bishop of Saskatchewan, Cedric Brown, a former chaplain to the intrepid settlers of Gloriana, took to the pulpit.
“Of the forty-six liquor export houses in Saskatchewan,” the bishop proclaimed, “sixteen are run by people of the Hebrew persuasion. When the Jews form one half of one percent of the population, and own sixteen of the forty-six export houses, it is time they were given to understand that since they have been received in this country, and have been given rights enjoyed by other white men, they must not defile the country by engaging in disreputable pursuits.” Then he quoted from a dockside sermon by the legendary Reverend Horn, who had led a company of God-fearing Britons westward ho to Gloriana. We are bound, the reverend had said, for the land of milk and honey. Not, the bishop added, for the fleshpots of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The bishop's condemnation of the Jew bootleggers swiftly turned into a chorus, joined by the United Grain Growers, the Loyal Orange Lodge, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Ku Klux Klan and the Tories. The Tories sailed into office in the provincial election, promising to bring the Gurskys to the bar of justice.

That had been tried before, of course, by Bert Smith, who claimed that, as a consequence, Mr. Bernard had attempted to bribe him. The charge would be vehemently denied by Mr. Bernard before the Royal Commission on Customs and Excise, but the commission ruled that in their view a prima facie case had been made sufficient to warrant prosecution being entered against Bernard Gursky. Unfortunately, such was the press of other business, the commission neglected to set a date for the trial.

The Royal Commission, as a matter of fact, did not convene until several years after the alleged bribe attempt, but only a week following Smith's confrontation with the Gurskys in the warehouse, he was, to his astonishment, reprimanded by his superiors and transferred to Winnipeg. He had only been in Winnipeg for a month when he discomfited the Gurskys again, this time impounding another bootlegger's car on a back road, the culprit fleeing into the bush. When Mr. Bernard heard the news, taking the call in Morrie's office, he ripped the telephone off the desk, flinging it out of the window. “I'm stuck with a little
goyishe
splinter under my fingernail.”

“Aw, he's just a kid doing his job. One car. Big deal. You make a fuss and you'll draw even more attention to us from the newspapers.”

“And I don't make a fuss the word will get out that a fucken Boy Scout can make trouble for Bernard Gursky and get away with it.”

So Mr. Bernard went to Ottawa to meet the plump, rosy-cheeked Jules Omer Bouchard, chief preventive officer for the Department of Customs. Though Bouchard earned only four thousand dollars a year, he managed to maintain a mansion across the river in Hull, looked after by a niece; a retreat in Florida; and a riverside cottage in the Gaspé, a cabin cruiser tied up at the dock, the estate cared for by yet another of his nieces. He would end his days as a prison librarian, driven out of office by Tory scourges who pronounced him “a debauched public official, rolling in opulence like a hippo in the mud.” Actually, he was a most affable fellow, prescient as well. Once having adjudged the liquor laws unenforceable, a Presbyterian perversion, he saw no reason why he shouldn't benefit from them. He was not avaricious, but savoured the good life, lavishing expensive gifts on his nieces and impecunious painters and writers whose work gave him pleasure.

A discerning art collector, Bouchard was an early patron of the work of Jean-Jacques Martineau, possibly the most prodigiously talented painter ever to emerge from French Canada. Alas, Martineau was unrecognized until years after the debt-ridden artist committed suicide in Granby in 1948. An event that led in 1970 to a seminal essay by a Parti Québecois metaphysician,
“Qui a tué Martineau?”,
in which it was charged that the painter had been murdered by anglophone indifference, which would be the lot of all Québecois artists, the white niggers of North America, until they were free to paint in their own language.

Bouchard paid Martineau four hundred dollars a month, and never descended to his cabin on the Baie de Chaleur without bringing a crate of Beaujolais, a quarter of venison or a freshly caught salmon, as well as a couple of his nieces. In exchange, he was allowed his choice of five canvases a year, one of which always hung behind his desk.

“Hey,” Mr. Bernard said, after describing his troubles with Smith, “that's a wonderful painting you've got hanging there!” Pea-soup cod fishermen bringing in their catch. What a life, he thought. “You know, I'd give ten thousand dollars to own a picture like that.”

“You must be joking.”

“Fifteen. Cash,” Mr. Bernard shot back grumpily, indignant because he had seen better on the cover of many a jigsaw puzzle box which would have set him back only twenty-five cents.

A week later the bootlegger's car that Smith had seized in Winnipeg was released by the Department of Customs and Excise and Smith was rebuked for having been seen driving the car for his personal use, a stain on the department's honour. A fulminating Smith wrote back to Ottawa to protest that he had been seen driving the car to the garage and that there had already been an attempt to bribe him by the Gurskys. Furthermore, his apartment had been burgled, documents stolen. Everything possible, he wrote, was being done to hinder his investigation of the Gurskys and their ilk.

Without waiting for a reply to his letter, an aroused Smith took it upon himself one evening to raid the United Empire Wholesalers, the Gursky warehouse in Winnipeg. He stumbled on Morrie, seated on a stool, straining a drum of alcohol through a loaf of rye bread.

“What are you doing?” Smith asked, coming up behind him.

“I have to. The stuff's rusty. Oh my God, it's you.”

Smith found illegal compounding equipment on the premises, as well as a cardboard carton filled with counterfeit U.S. revenue stamps and a tea chest laden with forged labels for famous brands of American whiskies. He packed the evidence in a box, secured it with an official seal, and drove it down to the CPR express office to be shipped to Ottawa.

“What have you got there?” the clerk asked.

“Enough evidence to put the Gurskys in prison where they belong.”

“Then I'd better keep a sharp eye on it and get it on the first train out.”

Unfortunately by the time the box reached Ottawa much of the evidence was missing. Bouchard wired Smith to take no further action but to report directly to him in Ottawa at once. However, when Smith got to Bouchard's outer office he was told to wait. Mr. Bernard was already seated with the chief preventive officer.

“Holy cow,” Mr. Bernard said, leaping out of his chair for a closer
look, “where in the hell did you get another Martineau, my Libby is crazy for his stuff.”

“Oh, I couldn't part with this one,” Bouchard said. “It's a favourite of mine. His masterpiece.”

A sugaring-off party in the woods, fat women lugging pails, men boiling the maple syrup, kids cooling the stuff off in a snowbank and eating it, an old fart playing the fiddle, everybody freezing their balls no doubt but for them a whoopee time. Some bunch.

“I'm talking fifteen thousand dollars,” Mr. Bernard said, clicking open his attaché case.

“You've got to be joking. This one is a lot bigger than the first one you talked me out of.”

Fucking frog chiseller
. “How much bigger would you say, my good friend?”

“Twice.”

“I'd say only as much again. Shake on it, Jules.”

Mr. Bernard and Bouchard retired to a restaurant in Hull for lunch and then a dozy Bouchard stumbled back to his office, aching for his sofa, but reconciled to dealing with Smith first. “The fact is,” he told Smith, “your action against the United Empire Wholesalers, while not constituting illegal entry, has shown a failure of judgement that reflects badly on this office and, therefore, I must tell you that you are temporarily suspended from further duty in excise work. Until we rule otherwise you are confined to customs work at the Port of Winnipeg and you are not authorized to undertake any outside investigations unless ordered by me.”

On his return to Winnipeg, Smith composed a long letter to the minister of justice asking why, after a Royal Commission had established that there was a prima facie case against Bernard Gursky for attempting to bribe him, no trial date had yet been set. The minister wrote back to say, unfortunately many of the Crown witnesses were ill and in any event the matter was really the concern of Saskatchewan's attorney-general. So Smith wrote to the attorney-general who replied that in his humble opinion the problem was one of federal jurisdiction. Smith also wrote to his MP. He wrote to the prime minister. Several weeks later Smith received a letter discharging him from
the Customs and Excise service. A cheque for three months' salary was enclosed.

Smith moved into a rented room, setting his photograph of his parents standing before their sod hut in Gloriana on his bedside table, his Bible alongside, and began pecking away with two fingers at his second-hand Underwood, writing letters to cabinet ministers in Ottawa, proffering evidence of Gursky transgressions and querying the integrity of Jules Omer Bouchard. He had proof, he said, that the Gurskys had acquired a farm straddling the border in Quebec's Eastern Townships, where one Albert Crawley had been wounded in a gun fight. He speculated about the Gurskys' activities on the Detroit River and observed that they owned a shipping company in Newfoundland, with as many as thirty schooners on charter, each one bound for St. Pierre and Miquelon.

Smith's letters went unacknowledged. Then, just as he despaired of ever seeing justice done, R.B. Bennett was thrust into office and soon had to contend with tin and tarpaper shacks springing up everywhere and with farmers who called their necessarily horse-drawn Model-Ts “Bennett buggies”. When thousands of the unemployed marched on Ottawa, Bennett was convinced that the country was teetering on the edge of a revolution. Unable to supply bread, he provided a circus. The Gurskys were arrested in Montreal, charged with the evasion of customs duty and excise tax. Prominent photographs of their mountainside mansions began to appear in newspapers. Reporters revived interest in the unsolved murder of Willy McGraw.