Wrong Side of the Law (13 page)

The women said they had met the men in British Columbia and had no idea they were criminals. They were deported back to Canada. Lawler and Anderson were held in a Chicago jail until Vancouver police detectives arrived to take custody of them.

Lawler and Anderson were tried for the botched jewellery store robbery and the Royal Bank stickup, and were sentenced to twenty years in prison. John Godbolt got ten years for his part as a getaway car driver. Frances Morton and Mary Gorry were released. That left the gang members who were charged with murder and accessory to murder in the death of William Hobbs. The trial was held in April before Chief Justice Aulay Morrison.

The chief suspects, James Russell and Earl Dunbar, had backgrounds in petty crime, auto theft, and bootlegging, and had done time in jail. Dunbar admitted to participation in the bank robberies, but said he had been the driver and therefore wasn’t in the bank when Hobbs was shot. Moreover, he claimed that he had gone along on the robberies out of fear of Jack Hyslop. He said Hyslop had threatened to blow his and Russell’s brains out if they didn’t help him rob some banks. Hyslop, said Dunbar, had once told him he would “bump off a fellow who took a roll of money off him.”

Russell denied any involvement in the crimes at all. He said he’d been out shopping at the time of the murder and knew nothing about it until he heard the news on the radio. Russell’s lawyer, T.F. Hurley, argued that the gun that killed Hobbs had discharged accidentally. He also suggested that bank manager Winsby fired first and that the bandits shot back in self-defence.

Russell seemed impassive throughout the trial, smiling occasionally. Once, when a witness made a statement that struck most of the people in the courtroom as funny, he joined in the outburst of laughter. Dunbar was the opposite; sullen, and constantly licking his lips in nervous anxiety.

The testimony of the accused men and the arguments of their defence counsel didn’t stand up to the evidence. Eyewitnesses again identified Russell as the “iron-nerved” bandit who had killed Hobbs and Dunbar as the robber who had shot Winsby. The jury took only ninety minutes to reach a guilty verdict.

Chief Justice Morrison sentenced Russell and Dunbar to death. Upon hearing the terrible words, “To be hanged by the neck until you are dead,” Russell hardly flinched. Dunbar almost collapsed. “He is weak,” Russell later told a guard.

Fred Healy was convicted of being an accessory after the fact and sentenced to fifteen years. Walter Davies was also charged with being an accessory, but the Crown withdrew the charge due to lack of evidence. The judge advised him to follow the example of the Greek philosopher Socrates who “made a practice of never looking into a tavern or getting himself mixed up with tumultuous or ill-considered people.” Davies was released, along with Mary Gorry and Frances Morten.

Charles Russell went to the gallows in the Oakalla prison at 6:45 on the morning of November 6, 1936. He approached the scaffold smoking a cigarette, which he tossed aside before his arms were pinioned and the hood was pulled over his head. Earl Dunbar, whose execution was postponed due to an appeal, followed Russell to the gallows on November 27. Suicide and the hangman ended the short and sordid tale of the Hyslop Gang.

The Polka Dot Gang:

“A Strange Fraternity of Men”

T
he
idea of a bandit gang using a specific article of clothing as a badge of identity may seem like the stuff of adolescent comic book fiction. Surely, any “professional” criminal would realize that anonymity is a key factor in avoiding arrest. For a bandit to advertise himself with a trademark would be foolish. Nonetheless, there have been robber gangs who, out of a desire to be flamboyant or a juvenile need for attention, have accessorized so as to make their mark for the media and the public. For example, John “Red” Hamilton, the Canadian member of the John Dillinger gang in the 1930s, was in his youth associated with a band of hoodlums whose leader wanted them all to wear white hats when they pulled robberies, so the world would know them as the White Hat gang. In Chicago, over a period of a few months in 1942, a gang of young gunmen who wore blue polka-dot bandanas gained national notoriety as the Polka Dot Gang. Whether by coincidence or deliberate imitation, polka-dot bandanas gave a name to a robber gang that plagued southern Ontario around the end of the Second World War.

The robberies began in the spring of 1945. Nazi Germany had been defeated and the newspaper front pages were full of information on the trials and executions of Vichy traitors in France and speculation on how the war with Japan would be brought to a close. A series of armed holdups in cities like London, Guelph, and Hamilton caught the attention of the press when it became apparent that the same gang was responsible for all of them.

The Guelph robbery was typical of the gang’s methods. Early on the morning of June 25, four bandits forced open a back window of the Wellington meat-packing plant on the eastern outskirts of the city. The thieves quietly made their way to the office. They had likely been watching the place for a few nights, because they seemed to know the routine of the watchman, sixty-eight-year-old J. Forestell. He had just done his rounds and had sat down in the lobby for a smoke when they broke in.

Forestell heard a noise and went to investigate. When he opened the office door, he was confronted by the intruders. One of them said, “This is a holdup.” Then another one slugged the unarmed watchman over the head with a wooden stick that was used for hanging meat.

The blow knocked Forestell out cold. Twice he stirred and began to come to, and both times he was bludgeoned back into unconsciousness. The robbers put him in a chair and tied him up.

The bandits went to work on the safe with a sledgehammer and other tools. Investigators later determined that these criminals were experienced in cracking safes. Once they had the double doors open, they scooped out over a thousand dollars in cash and bonds. They scattered the rest of the contents around the office. Then, instead of hightailing it, the robbers pulled up a table and sat down to a snack. They broke into the smoked meat room from which they filched a cooked ham and helped themselves to some chocolate milk and soft drinks staff had left in the office icebox.

After the bandits left, it took Forestell an hour to wriggle loose from the chair and call for help. It was about 4:00 a.m. when the phone rang in the Guelph police station. Constables who responded to the call sent the battered old night watchman to St. Joseph’s Hospital where he was treated for severe lacerations to the head and a broken jaw.

(L–R): Kenneth Green, Hubert Hiscox, Bruce Kay, George Constantine, and George Dobbie were the core members of the Polka Dot Gang that terrorized postwar southern Ontario.
Toronto Star.

Another victim whom the gang handled roughly was Norman Bowman, engineer of the Duff & Sons packing plant in Hamilton. In the early hours of August 27, five bandits broke in and stole $14,000 in cash, Victory bonds, and war savings certificates. Bowman was subjected to a pistol-whipping. “They jumped on me when I was in the engine room,” Bowman said. “I was hit in the face twice. I was told to lie down on my face. I obeyed. I told the fellow who hit me, ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ He replied, ‘Shut up or I’ll put a bullet through you.’ Then they tied me up.”

Bowman suffered a broken nose and cuts to his face. The night watchman, Frank L. Tomlinson, was also beaten and tied up. Help didn’t come until after 4:00 a.m., when Tomlinson failed to punch in his regular signal to a security company.

From witnesses’ accounts, police concluded that no more than five men made up the gang, and not all of them participated in all of the robberies. This was later proven to be only partially correct. Victims described the leader as a six-foot-tall, well-dressed youth. They were armed with revolvers and machine guns and they all masked the lower parts of their faces with red polka-dot bandanas. War news was soon sharing space in Ontario newspapers with stories of the depredations of the “Polka Dot Machine Gun Gang.” The name would soon be shortened to the Polka Dot Gang as the robbers struck again and again.

The gang’s favourite targets were the offices of dairies, creameries, packing plants, and flour mills. The safes in those businesses were full of cash for payrolls and daily operations. Such places were easy pickings because they lacked the security measures used by banks. On some occasions the bandits even robbed employees of any money they had in their pockets.

Emboldened by their successes, the Polka Dot Gang turned their attention to the big city. Their first known attempt at a robbery in Toronto came on the night of August 24. Four of them were attempting to break into the office of Urquhart Motors on Dufferin Street, when they were interrupted by Constable Walter McGowan of the York Township police. They fled after exchanging shots with the officer. McGowan was later able to identify two of the suspects in court.

The gang had better luck on September 16, when they broke into the Lake of the Woods Milling Company on Dupont Street. The robbery was carried out with the violence that had become as much the gang’s trademark as the polka-dot bandanas. The victim was the night watchman, William Cunliffe.

“I had just reached the shipping room on the main floor when three men appeared,” Cunliffe recalled later. “One man had a small machine gun, the others two revolvers. The man with the machine gun hit me four times on the head with some part of it. I crumpled to the floor.”

The robbers wrapped a towel around Cunliffe’s bleeding head and tied him up. Then they dragged him along with them as they went from room to room. “They seemed perturbed about the clocks,” Cunliffe said. “They kept asking me how they operated.” The robbers were concerned that the plant might have a signal system that was connected to the clocks.

In the office, the thieves left Cunliffe tied up on the floor while they hammered away at the safe. “It sounded like a boiler shop,” he said. The robbers got away with over $1,200. Cunliffe was found seven hours later. His injuries kept him hospitalized for two weeks.

The Roselawn Farm Dairy on Dufferin Street was the next target. The office safe contained $7,000, and in a storage vault was $17,000 worth of furs. Early in the morning of October 8, the gang forced their way into the building. They took night watchman William Bartie and employee George Bradley by surprise, beating and kicking them into unconsciousness. Bartie said later, “They slugged me on the back of the head so hard, it broke my false teeth.” The bandits took $150 that Bartie had in his wallet. They bound both men’s hands and feet and threw a cover over Bartie’s face to muffle his groans.

The robbers were working on the safe when two employees, Roy Downing and Lloyd Kearney, arrived at the dairy. Two bandits armed with a machine gun and a revolver met them on the stairs that led to the second floor office. “One move and you’ve had it!” a gunman snarled, and ordered them up the stairs. “Going upstairs, he jabbed the gun in my back and made me put my hands up,” Downing said. “He acted like he meant business, so I put them up … It was a gruesome sight to see Bill (Bartie) lying on the floor in what looked like a pool of blood. Bradley was lying there too. I thought they were both dead.”

Downing and Kearney were both made to lie face down on the floor while the thieves resumed their sledgehammer attack on the safe. They were still at it when they were suddenly startled by a sharp ringing noise. “It’s a burglar alarm!” one bandit cried. In an instant they all dropped their tools and ran for the stairs.

The “alarm” was actually the telephone. It rang because a twenty-year-old shipping department employee named Lew Ireland, who had arrived at work early and had no idea a robbery was in progress, tried to call the office. That attempted phone call brought young Ireland within a hair’s breadth of losing his life.

When nobody answered the phone, Ireland suspected something was wrong. He jumped into a truck and drove around the building to the front entrance. His truck almost collided with the bandits’ getaway car and was blocking their escape. Ireland wasn’t alarmed at the sight of a strange car. “At first I thought they were pranksters,” he said later. “Strangers often park on our lot.”

Then a machine-gun barrel poked out of one of the car’s windows and fired a quick burst of eight bullets. Ireland immediately backed out of the way and the bandits roared off. “There was a steady flame from the barrel of the gun, but none of the shots hit me,” Ireland told a reporter. “It must have been my lucky day.”

Inside the building, a groggy William Bartie heard the shooting. He told the press, “When I heard the eight shots, I thought somebody was killed. They were desperate men, all in their early twenties. The big man gave the orders, and only when the telephone rang did any of the others speak. He was frightened and the mention of a burglar alarm made the others scared, too. All wore red-and-white polka-dot bandana handkerchiefs over their faces.”

The newspapers praised Lew Ireland for accidentally thwarting a major robbery. The fact that Lew’s sister Kay was the current Miss Toronto added to the story’s appeal. But the papers were hardly off the presses when the Polka Dot Gang struck again.

At 4:00 a.m. on October 9, night mechanic Howard Segee was in the grease pit under a bus in the garage of the West York and District Bus Lines on St. Clair Avenue West. It was the first time in many nights that he was alone at work. The Polka Dot raid was sudden and swift.

“There was a terrific crash when they smashed down the front door,” Segee said. “Then the five of them were on top of me. They all had their guns on me. One got out some sash cord and bound my wrists and ankles. Another held a gun over me. They made me look away from the front office where the others were rolling the safe out.”

This time the gang didn’t waste time trying to open the safe on the premises. They loaded it onto a truck they had stolen for the job. Less than twenty minutes after they’d first burst in, the bandits drove away.

Fortunate to have escaped the beating the Polka Dot Gang gave other victims, Segee wiggled over to the desk and knocked the telephone to the floor. He managed to use one finger to dial the operator and tell her to call the police. Two detectives arrived within minutes. Police found the stolen truck and the smashed safe on a side street. The raid had netted the gang $400 in cash, a $100 Victory bond, and $350 worth of bus tickets. They’d overlooked $3,000 in cheques on the office manager’s desk.

Probably disappointed with the scanty swag, especially after the failure of the Roselawn Dairy raid, the Polka Dot Gang swooped down on Hall’s Dairy on Christie Street just two nights later. The prize was a safe containing $4,000. That night’s events might almost have been taken from a comedy sketch, had it not been for the real danger to which employees James Morgan and Basil Kirkey were exposed.

Morgan was the company’s stableman. “I had just cleaned up the stable and was preparing to feed the horses, when they [the bandits] came into the harness room,” he said later. “The big fellow, who didn’t have a gun, came up and struck me a blow on the nose.”

Kirkey, who’d been working outdoors, had just stepped inside to take shelter from a rainfall. He was sitting on a milk case when the “big fellow” who had assaulted Morgan took him by surprise with a hard blow.

“They all had red polka-dot handkerchiefs over their faces,” Morgan said. “They ordered us into the stable. First they told me to hold my hands behind my back and they tied them with clothesline rope they had with them. They made me go on my hands and knees and laid me at the rear hoofs of a horse. They tied Kirkey the same way, threw him on the floor and put an old blanket over him. Then they went upstairs.”

Once again, the robbers planned to steal the safe and break it open later. They tossed two bales of hay from the loft to serve as a cushion when they dropped it from the second floor to the ground. But moving the extremely heavy mass of iron and steel from the office to the loft door was time-consuming and required the efforts of all five men.

Down below, Morgan and Kirkey had no intention of waiting for the robbers to come back. Bound as he was, Kirkey turned somersaults across the stable floor, out through the open door, and down the driveway. He was trying to reach Christie Street where he could call for help.