Wrong Side of the Law (11 page)

Back in Ontario, information provided by Ainsworth led police to the guns that had been stolen from the hardware store. Some had been buried near Orillia, and others had been tossed into the Don River. After a judicial hearing held in Orillia, County Crown Attorney F.G. Evans told the Toronto
Star
, “If we can show evidence from this hearing to the New York court which would convict the pair there, we shall get them back to Canada to stand trial.”

The extradition process ran into delays in the office of the British consul-general in New York. The attorney for the consul-general requested an adjournment until December 1 to allow time for the attorney general of Ontario to forward official depositions. At that time, Canadian foreign affairs were still overseen by the British government. It wouldn’t be until December 1931, with the passage of the Statute of Westminster, that the final strings of colonialism were cut and Canada became fully independent of Mother England.

Lass finally decided that it might be in his best interests to waive extradition and voluntarily return to Canada. Things might go easier for him in court, he thought, if he didn’t put the Canadian government through a lot of trouble. O’Brien was still determined not to be sent back to Canada.

Ainsworth was sentenced to three years in the Kingston Pen. In Toronto, Chief Draper cancelled the Lido Restaurant’s licence, effectively shutting down the hoodlum hangout. The proprietors eventually went to jail on convictions of perjury.

In spite of Lass’s reluctant agreement to return to Canada without a legal fight, O’Brien’s extradition proceeding had to run its course. It was mid-December before the New York court ruled against him and turned both men over to Canadian police. Once the pair were lodged in Toronto’s Don Jail, they had to wait for the next assize to have their day in court.

O’Brien and Lass went to trial for armed robbery on February 17, 1931. The Crown presented witnesses who positively identified them as the men who had robbed the Durable payroll. Then the trial took a dramatic turn when Ethel Lass was on the stand. She told the court that she hadn’t known the whereabouts of her son between 1921 and 1926. She also said Sydney was married and that before the holdup he’d been living in Toronto with his father-in-law. Ethel insisted that Sydney couldn’t have been involved in the robbery, because he’d left Toronto more than a week before it occurred. Asked why Lass’s wife wasn’t in the courtroom, Ethel replied, “She’s sick in bed.”

As Ethel was being cross-examined by Crown prosecutor Charles W. Bell, K.C., she suddenly swooned on the stand. She swayed sideways and then collapsed into the arms of a court matron. Two constables carried her out of the room. Lass put his hand over his eyes.

Shortly after, as Ethel was returning to the courtroom, she slumped to the floor. There was a cry for “a doctor in the house.” A physician named Laxton, who was among the spectators, went to Ethel’s aid. Later he spoke to the presiding magistrate, Mr. Justice Jeffrey. The judge told the press, “It has been stated to me that she is in a state of hysteria; that she could throw it off, but that she does not appear to want to help herself.”

Ethel’s hysterics didn’t win any sympathy for the defendants. They were each sentenced to twenty years in Kingston. In passing sentence, Mr. Justice Jeffrey said to Lass and O’Brien, “I am going to teach you, and by your example, others like you, that the criminal does not break the law. He breaks himself against the law.”

Before being shipped off to the pen, O’Brien spoke at length to a Toronto
Star
reporter. He admitted to leading a life of crime and said he’d broken out of American prisons twice. He said he would rather have been sent back to the Michigan State Penitentiary because he’d heard that Canadian prisons were “too tough.”

“I might as well have got thirty years,” O’Brien said. “Long terms make criminals. Look at me. At eighteen I was put away for a long sentence and I was educated to be a criminal in that prison.… Society has done nothing to help the criminal. True, we break the law and the law sees that we are punished, but we are sent to prison and herded together. No one sees that first offenders are kept separate from the hardened type. I wish I had it all to live over again, that’s all. It has paid me poor dividends.”

O’Brien said his mother was dead and his father was living in Detroit. “I have no one to worry over, anyway.” He strenuously denied being a violent, notorious character.

“I never shot a man in my life. The Toronto police thought I was Pat Norton, wanted for murder and bank robbery. They painted me black. They knew I wasn’t Norton. I was in prison when the Murrells and Norton committed that crime at Melbourne.”

Oddly enough, O’Brien claimed to have known the Murrell brothers in their hometown. “I met them in London,” he said. “Sidney was quite a boxer.” O’Brien said he was honestly employed with a boat-building company in Orillia when he drunkenly announced that he was Pat Norton.

O’Brien told the reporters it was a letter Sydney Lass had written to his wife in Toronto that sent the Canadian police to New York City. He also claimed to have come close to escaping from the New York jail. “I gave it up. I was nearly away there.”

O’Brien closed the interview with a statement that would have pleased Chief Draper and the Canadian public in general. “Your courts are different … Your whole procedure of law is different. No fooling with the Canadian police or law courts — they mean business. I watched my chance [to escape] in Toronto, but I didn’t get one.”

O’Brien’s claim to have been associated with the Murrell brothers in London raises questions, especially since, while intoxicated, he’d blurted out that he was Pat Norton. The Murrells began running afoul of the law soon after they returned home from military service in the First World War. Then, in April 1921, they were involved with Pat Norton in the tragic Melbourne bank robbery. O’Brien said he was in prison at the time. So when did he meet the Murrells in London?

Bill Murrell identified Anna Bryson’s photograph of O’Brien as a picture of Pat Norton. Of course, time could have clouded his memory. Then Michigan authorities had said that O’Brien was really escaped bank robber Elmer Giller. O’Brien went along with that to the extent that he tried to have himself sent to the Michigan State Penitentiary instead of Kingston. But was that really because he was concerned about the “tough” Canadian prison?

The science of criminal investigation was still primitive by today’s standards. Communications and information sharing among police forces and various other law enforcement agencies was often poor. Criminals were sometimes known only by their aliases, and could be registered into prisons under false names. If a convict had never before had a mug shot taken or been fingerprinted, authorities would be unaware of the deception. It could be possible that O’Brien really
was
Pat Norton, and wanted to avoid a long incarceration in Canada in case Canadian authorities discovered his real identity.

Whatever the bandit’s name was, he was registered into the Kingston Pen as John O’Brien, prisoner #2119. He was lodged in cell 7-1-H, and worked as an orderly in the prison’s hospital and dental office. He once lost his smoking privilege for a week for refusing to unload potatoes for the officers’ mess. O’Brien was released on April 27, 1946, and disappeared from official record. He was most likely deported to the United States.

Sydney Lass (prisoner #2125, cell 2-4-F) was put to work in the prison tailor shop. His record shows that he was not as well-behaved an inmate as O’Brien. He was reprimanded for such offences as refusing to obey guards’ orders, refusing to cut stone, having contraband in his cell, insolence to an officer, and fighting in the tailor shop. In January 1935, Lass was transferred to the Collins Bay Penitentiary.

Even though he hadn’t been a model prisoner, Lass was released on a ticket-of-leave in December 1942. Two years later he was back in the Kingston Pen, convicted on charges of shop-breaking and receiving stolen property. He’d served about a year of his most recent sentence when his name came up in a police investigation into a robbery that had taken place in Brantford while he was out of jail. Lass would have to be sent to Brantford to stand trial for that crime. On December 9, 1945, guards searched Lass before putting him on a train. In the lining of his coat they found a dagger that had been made from a prison mess hall table knife, and a small bag of pepper. Lass intended to use the pepper and the blade in a hare-brained escape plan once he was on the train.

Lass escaped conviction on the Brantford robbery charge. He was released from prison on May 5, 1946. Like O’Brien, he slipped into obscurity. No criminal who could be identified as Pat Norton of the Murrell gang was ever taken into custody.

The Hyslop Gang:

Suicide and the Hangman

I
n
the decade known as the Dirty Thirties, Canada, like the rest of the world, was in the grip of the Great Depression. In the United States, the early years of the 1930s had seen a brief but spectacular era of banditry brought about by such notorious criminals as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde. There had been a rise in the crime rate in Canada, too, as desperate unemployed men decided to steal what they could no longer earn through honest labour. And while Canada didn’t experience the so-called “Golden Age” of gun-toting, bank-robbing desperadoes, there were nonetheless dramatic criminal exploits that caught the public’s attention, and more often than not ended in tragedy. One such story began with a bungled robbery in New Westminster, British Columbia.

On the morning of December 18, 1935, the store windows of downtown New Westminster glittered with all the trappings of Christmas. However, the mood of the people in those grim “Hard Times” was probably more accurately represented by the thick fog that rolled through the city streets. At 8:45, two armed men entered Philip Spurgeon’s jewellery shop on Columbia Street and announced, “This is a stickup; no fooling!”

The bandits ordered Spurgeon and his employee, Rene Winston, to the back of the store at gunpoint. Before they could grab any merchandise, Miss Winston began to scream. Startled, the robbers ran out the front door. Spurgeon pursued them, shouting for the police.

Constable Danny Gunn of the New Westminster Police Department had just come off night duty. He was standing at a corner waiting for a streetcar when Spurgeon’s cries caught his attention. He saw two men run across Columbia Street. They shot at Spurgeon, who was hot on their heels.

Immediately Constable Gunn drew his revolver and took up the chase. He engaged the stickup men in a running gunfight as they raced up Lorne Street to Clarkson Street. There, a confederate awaited them in a car with the engine running. The gunmen jumped in and the car roared away with Gunn’s bullets whistling after it.

Visibility was poor in the dense fog. At the intersection of Second and Durham Streets, the bandit car collided with a milk-delivery truck. The dazed milkman stumbled out of his vehicle and saw three men flee the scene of the accident on foot and disappear into the fog. An examination of the car showed that Dunn had hit it twice. The occupants had been very lucky, because one of the constable’s bullets had pierced the back window and shattered the rear-view mirror above the driver’s seat.

The getaway car was registered to a local man, John Roy Godbolt, age twenty-five. Godbolt had a criminal record and had only recently been released from prison. He was soon identified as the driver. Police issued a warrant for his arrest on a number of charges, including the attempted murder of Constable Gunn.

At 11:35 on the morning of December 23, the same two gunmen who had tried to rob the jewellery store burst into the Royal Bank of Canada on Commercial Drive. One of them said, “This is a stickup!” While they made the three clerks and six customers line up against a wall, another bandit entered the bank. All were armed with automatic pistols.

Branch manager J.W. Logan was in his office with the door locked, unaware of what was happening. He heard a pounding on his door. He had only partially opened it when he saw a gun in the hand of the man on the other side. Logan tried to slam the door shut, but the robber threw himself against it, sending the manager sprawling. Logan then tried to kick the door shut, but the gunman smashed the glass with the butt of his pistol. Logan made no further resistance. This wasn’t the first time his bank had been robbed. He joined the rest of the staff at the wall.

The bandits cleaned out the drawers of one teller’s cage of about $2,000. The second teller’s cage was locked and they wasted no time trying to open it. They backed out of the bank and made their escape in a taxi driven by a fourth member of the gang. He had circled the block while his companions robbed the bank.

Twenty minutes later, the taxi was found parked on a side street. On the floor of the back seat, with his hands tied behind his back and adhesive tape over his mouth, was cab driver Bill Perry. He told police that two men had walked into the Star Cabs office and hired him to drive them to Stanley Park. Along the way they had hijacked his cab at gunpoint and bound him. En route to the bank, they’d picked up two more men. The driver, he said, wore horn-rimmed glasses.

The robbers had not been masked. They all wore dark overcoats and fedoras pulled down to hide their eyes. Even so, witnesses could see that one rather tall man had red hair and freckles. The robbers all appeared to be in their late twenties. The Vancouver police had the witnesses go through stacks of mug shots and wanted posters, but apparently to no avail. Several known underworld characters were picked up for questioning, and then released.

Vancouver’s first bank robbery of 1936 took place at 10:45 a.m. on January 13. Two bandits, one of them a tall redhead, strode into the Bank of Montreal at Prior and Main Streets and told the five people within to “Stick ’em up!” Each bandit wielded two pistols. While one covered the people with his guns, the other rifled the teller’s cage of about $1,000. Then he told manager G.W. Richardson to open the vault.

Like Mr. Logan at the Royal Bank, Richardson had been the victim of bank robbers before. On that occasion, the thieves had locked him in the vault. This time, he said he couldn’t open the safe. With no further words, the robbers fled, taking with them a .38 revolver that was in a teller’s drawer. The bandits wore mufflers to partially conceal their faces, but several times during the holdup the mufflers slipped, allowing witnesses to provide police with good descriptions. The day after the robbery, British Columbia Provincial Police arrested two suspects in Port Coquitlam and sent them to Vancouver. They were interrogated and placed in a police lineup, but finally proved to be the wrong men. Within twenty-four hours, the real culprits struck again and this time the raid was bloody.

So far, there had been no casualties in the holdups pulled by the still-unidentified hoodlums. Witnesses had even commented on the relatively quiet manner in which they had gone about the business of armed robbery. That changed when just before noon on January 15, the gang hit the Canadian Bank of Commerce at the corner of Powell Street and Victoria Drive in Vancouver.

Hugh Gibson, one of just two customers in the bank, was cashing a cheque at William Hobbs’s teller’s cage when three armed men dashed in through the front door. One of them yelled, “This is a holdup!” A bandit shoved Gibson aside, levelled a pistol at Hobbs, and barked, “Stick ’em up!”

Before Hobbs could make a move, the bandit shot him in the throat. Hobbs collapsed with blood pouring from the bullet hole. Another bandit fired a shot at manager Thomas Winsby, but missed. Winsby rushed to the vault and grabbed an automatic pistol. He managed to get off a couple of wild shots before a bandit’s bullet pierced his arm and shoulder, knocking him out of action.

The bandits ordered the ledger keeper, D.A. McRae, to open the cage. McRae obeyed, and the bandits stepped over the prone figure of Hobbs, who lay in a spreading pool of blood. They cleaned out the cash drawers of about $1,200. Then they exited the bank to the street, where a taxi driven by a fourth gang member picked them up. McRae immediately phoned the police, who arrived within minutes. They found Hobbs on the floor with Gibson crouched beside him, holding up the wounded man’s head in an attempt to slow the flow of blood.

“I thought it was a joke,” Gibson told a Vancouver
Province
reporter after an ambulance had whisked Hobbs and Winsby to a hospital. “But when I saw the gun in the man’s hand, I knew it was a holdup all right. I was watching the bandit and I don’t know if Hobbs did put up his hands, but almost at once he fired. As I looked up I saw Hobbs fall. It was a dirty low trick. He didn’t give the poor fellow a chance.”

Some men in a beer parlour across the street from the bank had been drawn to the doorway by the sound of gunshots. They had seen the bandits come out of the bank. One of them, a tall red-haired man, put his gun in his pocket and then calmly lit a cigarette. When he noticed the men at the tavern door, he pulled the gun out again. The men ducked back inside and didn’t see the thieves make their getaway in the cab. A man named L.P. Gordy had just come out of the nearby Hamilton Café. He saw the bandit wave his gun at the men and heard one of the other bandits say, “Shoot the son of a bitch.” When the taxi arrived and the robbers climbed in, he heard one of them tell the driver, “We had to shoot a guy.”

A motorist coming down Powell Street had seen men come out of the bank with guns in their hands and get into the cab. Realizing at once what was happening, he followed the cab to a location on Clark Street where the gunmen jumped out and ran around a corner. The man knew better than to try following them further. He hurried to the nearest telephone and called the police. Radio squad cars arrived quickly, but the robbers were gone. No doubt they’d had another getaway car parked nearby. While officers were questioning people in the bank and scouring the downtown area for any sign of the hoodlums, Vancouver police headquarters had a phone call from Daniel Warnock, the taxi driver whose car the bandits had used.

At about a quarter past eleven that morning, Warnock had stepped out of his cab company office and found three men sitting in his taxi. They said they wanted to be driven to Coal Harbour. Thinking them to be legitimate passengers, Warnock got behind the wheel. As they neared the destination, one of the men stuck a gun in Warnock’s side and growled, “Keep driving.”

The hoodlums made him stop on Pipeline Road, about a quarter of a mile from the Vancouver Police Department’s horse stables. They ordered him out of the car, bound his hands and feet with tape, slapped tape across his mouth, and dumped him in the bushes. Then they drove off in his cab. One of them wore horn-rimmed glasses.

Warnock managed to struggle to his feet and hop to a tree. He rubbed his face against the trunk to get the tape off his mouth. Then he hobbled to the road. He was rescued by a passing driver who freed him from his bonds and then took him to the police stables where he phoned to report the theft of his cab.

Thomas Winsby’s wounds were not life-threatening. But the bullet that had torn through Hobbs’s throat had struck the top of his spine. Even if he survived, he’d be paralyzed. Hobbs spent the last night of his life in an oxygen tent in Vancouver’s General Hospital, fighting for every breath. At 8:45 on the morning of January 16, twenty-five-year-old William Hobbs died. Now the fugitives were wanted for murder. Only one bandit had shot Hobbs, but under Canadian law at that time, if two or more people set out with the intention of perpetrating a criminal act, and one of them committed murder, all were held equally responsible.

At a special meeting of Vancouver’s City Council, Mayor Gerald McGeer speculated that the bank robberies and murder had been the work of American criminals “of the most dangerous and vicious type” who had been driven out of their country. In the United States, McGeer said, the forces of law and order co-operated in a crackdown on bandit gangs. But in British Columbia, the provincial police and the various municipal police departments lacked the funding and the organization required to be effective. McGeer said the situation left Vancouver’s city police “under handicaps that work to the advantage of the criminal element … It should be fairly clear to everyone that we cannot prevent the operations of twentieth-century criminals with nineteenth-century police methods.”

Vancouver Police Chief William W. Foster assured City Council and the press that everything possible was being done to apprehend the culprits. Suspects were being rounded up and questioned. Routine police work had been set aside so officers could concentrate on the manhunt. Roadblocks had been set up throughout Vancouver and the Lower Mainland. Police were watching the bus terminals and train stations. No motor launch could leave the docks without inspection. Police in Alberta and the states bordering British Columbia had been alerted. The Canadian Bankers Association posted a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bandits.

Meanwhile, the press reported that William Hobbs’s shocked and grieving parents were en route to Vancouver by train from Edmonton. Reporters had learned that Hobbs had briefly regained consciousness in hospital. He’d managed to gasp to detectives, “He did not give me a chance to put up my hands. He fired first thing.”

What the press didn’t know yet, and Chief Foster was keeping quiet for the sake of the investigation, was that the Vancouver police already had some strong leads. Witnesses from the bank robberies had in fact pointed out three faces in the Vancouver Police Department’s “Rogues Gallery” of photographs: George “Blackie” Lawson, age thirty-five; Charles Russell, age twenty-five; and Jack “Red” Hyslop, age twenty-three.

These men all belonged to a pack of thieves and troublemakers the Vancouver police had labelled “the Hyslop Gang” because the tough young redhead appeared to be the leader. Although Lawson was much older, he had only recently slipped into a life of crime. A native of Melita, Manitoba, he had worked for several years in the logging camps of Vancouver Island. Men who had known Lawson there recalled him as a hard worker who was friendly and well liked. It was a mystery to most of them why he had suddenly gone bad. Others suspected it was because he had caught what newspapers of the time discreetly called a “social disease,” which affected his mind.

Jack Hyslop was born in Scotland in 1914. His family immigrated to Vancouver when he was ten years old. Jack’s father fell ill with chronic asthma and couldn’t work. His mother’s only income was a small pension. Jack had to quit elementary school and take a job as a delivery boy. He gave his pay to his mother. Jack was known as a good, honest kid who attended church and Sunday school. But like many youngsters growing up in poverty, he made some bad choices.