Wrong Side of the Law (15 page)

The Toronto trial of George Constantine, Kenneth Green, and Hubert Hiscox couldn’t begin until after the Detroit court had finished with Dobbie and Kay. It finally began on June 11, 1946, and lasted a week. The prisoners in the dock were handcuffed together to discourage any attempt to escape.

Investigation had led police detectives to a building they called a “cottage” in a rural part of Richmond Hill. It was actually a dilapidated shack with two rooms and a loft, owned by Mary Clay, whose husband John was serving a term in the Kingston Penitentiary on a weapons conviction. Among the items the police found in the cottage and presented in court were two polka-dot bandanas. A considerable body of circumstantial evidence pointed to the cottage as the Polka Dot Gang’s hideout.

Detectives had also located a garage on St. Clarens Avenue in Toronto that the gang used for storing a car registered to Kay. In the car were another polka-dot bandana and the flashlight stolen during the Stratford robbery. Several articles of clothing found in the garage: shirts, overalls, coats, and jackets, were identified by witnesses as garments worn by the robbers. There was also a hat with George Dobbie’s initials in it. Searches of various addresses connected with the gang turned up what the Toronto
Globe & Mail
called “a formidable assortment of guns”. In a field outside Hamilton where one of the smashed safes was found, police even picked up a cast-off milk bottle from a dairy many miles away that had been hit by the Polka Dot Gang. Dobbie was known to drink milk constantly for relief from a stomach ulcer.

The defendants all presented alibis to account for their whereabouts at the times the robberies took place. For Green and Constantine, the flimsy stories didn’t stand up against the evidence. They were convicted on several charges of armed robbery, assault, and shooting at a police officer. Judge James Parker sentenced them each to fourteen years in the Kingston Penitentiary.

In the case of Hubert Hiscox, the police had been able to connect him with only one Polka Dot crime, the Lake of the Woods Milling Company robbery. The evidence they had on him wasn’t strong enough to gain a conviction. Hiscox was acquitted and walked out of the courtroom a free man.

Hiscox had a checkered past. He was in the Kingston Pen doing time for armed robbery when the Second World War broke out. Hiscox got out of prison by volunteering to join the Canadian Army. He was first in his class with a pistol and a machine gun. Hiscox saw action at Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, and Italy, where he was a member of the famous Devil’s Brigade. However, even as a Canadian war hero, Hiscox had his hands in crime. Wherever he was stationed, robberies occurred. When Hiscox returned to Canada and civilian life, he took his pistol and machine gun with him. After his acquittal, Hiscox would certainly have considered himself lucky not to be heading back to prison with Constantine and Green. But he had been drawn to the wrong side of the law and fate would soon catch up with him.

The prospect of fourteen years in the Kingston Pen didn’t sit well with Kenneth Green. Rather than wait until he was confined in the prison fortress, he began planning a breakout from Toronto’s Don Jail, where he and the others had been held since their arrest. Constantine was one of the prisoners brought in on the plot.

On June 27, thirty-one prisoners were in the exercise yard when Green, Constantine, and several others suddenly jumped the two guards on duty. They pulled strips of torn bedsheets from under their shirts and trousers and used them to bind the guards’ hands and feet. One guard managed to cry out before he was gagged.

The prisoners who were in on the breakout rushed to a twenty-foot wall and quickly formed a human pyramid against it. Green was the first to climb up, with Constantine right behind. Unfortunately for them, the Don Jail’s administration had a policy of putting an armed guard in the lane on the other side of the wall whenever prisoners who were considered extremely dangerous were in the exercise yard. The Polka Dot Gang members had earned that distinction. The guard in the lane heard his colleague’s shout and drew his gun. When Green’s head popped up over the wall, the guard ordered him to get down or he would blow it off.

Green obeyed instantly and the pyramid of prisoners disassembled before more guards poured into the exercise yard. The guards who had been bound — but were otherwise unhurt — were able to identify only five prisoners, besides Green and Constantine, who had participated in the failed breakout. But, as jail officials told the press, it required a good number of them to form the pyramid.

Two weeks later, when the seven prisoners were taken to court to be charged with attempting to escape custody, police armed with machine guns patrolled the route from the Don Jail to City Hall. Two cars full of heavily armed detectives followed the paddy wagon. Extra officers were on duty in the courtroom. These were precautionary measures in case underworld friends of the Polka Dot Gang tried to liberate Green and Constantine. No such attempt was made and a trial was set for late July.

With the exception of Hubert Hiscox, who was laying low after his acquittal, all of the Polka Dot Gang members were in jail. But their well-publicized criminal exploits, highlighted by the polka-dot “trademark,” had made them almost legendary. In Toronto and other southern Ontario cities, burglars, muggers, and armed robbers were wearing polka-dot bandanas as though they had become the underworld’s fashionable attire. Unfortunately for their victims, many of the criminals also copied the Polka Dot Gang’s use of unnecessary brutality.

It remains uncertain just how many hoodlums were actually members of the Polka Dot Gang. Of the five who were arrested on October 26, 1945, not all had been present at all of the holdups for which the gang was held responsible. However, a man named Bruce Rodden, who may well have been involved with most of the gang’s robberies, was not with the others when they were arrested, and so escaped the glare of publicity. The law finally caught up with him in 1948 and he was packed off to prison to serve a ten-to-twelve-year stretch. The police at that time referred to Rodden as a former member of the Polka Dot Gang. Robert Simpson, who was wounded by a police officer while resisting arrest after he was caught burglarizing a tobacco warehouse in 1948, was also considered to be a former gang member. Criminals associated with known Polka Dots, like John Clay and Albert Hall, could have been in on some of the gang’s robberies. Green and Constantine blamed Toronto
Star
writer Gwyn “Jocko” Thomas for tagging them with the Polka Dot name, and said it caused bias against them in court.

Rumours began to circulate in Toronto about buried Polka Dot Gang loot. The total amount of stolen money the gang had accumulated was estimated to be about $25,000, and not all of it had been recovered. After the bandits’ arrest, a woman named Iska Stone moved into the cottage in Richmond Hill. Knowing that the somewhat isolated building had been the hideout of the infamous Polka Dot Gang, Mrs. Stone and her friends had gone on “treasure hunts.” They searched the ten-acre property and the cottage itself, even removing some of the bricks from the fireplace. They found nothing.

Then in the last week of July, two men showed up at the cottage and paid Mrs. Stone $10 to let them search for buried money. She followed them behind the cottage and watched as they dug in a spot marked by a scratch on the back wall. The men turned over just two shovelfuls of earth and uncovered a bundle of rags. From that they pulled out a glove that had $400 rolled up in it.

Mrs. Stone immediately told the strangers she wanted more than $10. She said she needed money for groceries. The men took a soggy $50 bill from the roll, dried it on the engine of their car, and then drove her to a grocery store. After she made her purchases, they drove her back home.

Over the next few nights, Mrs. Stone heard what she thought were prowlers outside the cottage. She became nervous and reported it all to the police. The two men were soon picked up for questioning. Police wouldn’t give their names to the press, but said only that they were thought to be relatives or criminal associates of the Polka Dot Gang.

The newspaper stories about the $400 brought treasure hunters armed with spades, looking for buried loot. Mrs. Stone called the police, who subjected all of them to interrogation before letting them go. The Polka Dot treasure story fizzled out after the Toronto police announced they would be ploughing up the grounds in the unlikely possibility that more stolen cash might still be buried there.

Meanwhile, On July 30, the seven would-be escapees were taken to court to be tried for their attempted breakout. In the midst of the proceedings, the magistrate had the court cleared. Police said there were too many known friends of the Polka Dot Gang among the spectators. Six of the accused, including Green and Constantine, were found guilty.

Not until October 11 were the prisoners taken back to city hall court to be sentenced. They were kept in the court cells while they awaited their turn to go before the magistrate. Almost an hour passed before they were finally escorted to the courtroom.

Arthur Maloney, a lawyer representing three of the defendants, tried to explain why his clients had failed to report the escape plot to the Don Jail guards:

This is a strange fraternity of men,” he said. “The unwritten law that governs their lives is stricter and harsher than the law with which your honour and I have to deal. I do not condone men perjuring themselves in the witness box, but to admit and divulge a plot to escape is too much to expect. Heaven would be more understanding of the sin of perjury than the men in this strange fraternity would be of informers.

In spite of Maloney’s eloquence, Green, Constantine, and the other escape plotters each had eighteen months added to their prison time. According to the usual routine, the prisoners should then have been returned to their court cell to await transport back to the Don Jail. But the desperate men had seized an opportunity to make another attempt at escape.

While the prisoners were in the courtroom, a pair of sharp-eyed city hall guards looked into the empty cell and spotted a tiny pile of metallic dust on the floor beneath the window. Closer inspection showed that the steel padlock that secured the frame of the bars in the window had been almost cut through. It was a hopeless bid for freedom, because even if the prisoners had succeeded in opening the barred window, they’d have found themselves facing a fifty-foot drop in view of busy Bay Street, with no way of getting down safely. The fact that they were all chained together added to the futility of the plan. The men had obviously used a hacksaw blade on the padlock, but it was never found, in spite of a close search of the cell and the courtroom.

Green and Constantine were finally put on a train to Kingston. They passed through the gates of the prison known as the “Canadian Alcatraz,” and were lodged in the narrow cells that would be home for many years. The only member of the Polka Dot Gang still on the streets of Toronto was Hubert Hiscox. For months nothing was heard of him. When his name finally made the newspapers again, it did so with all the melodrama of a Hollywood gangster movie.

In the early morning of February 28, 1948, Hiscox broke into the office of the McKay-Muldoon Construction Company on Lascelles Boulevard in North Toronto. A storm was raging. Over the previous fourteen months, thieves had taken advantage of blizzards and thunderstorms to muffle the noise made by explosives they used to crack open safes in a series of late-night robberies. Whether or not Hiscox was involved in any of the burglaries would never be proven. But on this night there would be no doubt that the robber was the man the newspapers claimed was the “machine-gunner of the notorious Polka-Dot gang.”

The first charge of nitroglycerine Hiscox used blew the bottom hinges off the safe’s door. At the same time, it set off an alarm in the North Toronto police station. Patrol Sergeant Albert Russell and constables George Forest and William Vanson responded. When they arrived on the scene, they saw a single set of footprints in the snow. Sergeant Russell followed the tracks around to the back of the building while the two constables stood guard at the front door.

Russell found an open window and climbed in. Peering through the darkness, he saw a man standing by the safe. For a moment the man seemed preoccupied with whatever he was doing. Then he realized someone else was in the room and began to walk toward the window. Russell ordered him to “Stick ’em up!” The man stopped and raised his hands.

Russell later reported:

As I stepped toward him, he suddenly wheeled and raced through the darkness to the front of the office. I went after him and saw him crouching behind a desk on which he had piled a filing cabinet. He had evidently seen the men at the front door.

I yelled at him four or five times to get his hands up and then I could see him fumbling with something at the bottom of the desk. For a moment I thought he was trying to aim at me. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion and I thought somebody’s gun had gone off. I returned fire, but apparently did not hit him. We found the bullet later.

I was dazed for a moment and then I saw the man topple over on his left side. Then he told me he had no gun. He also told me his name. I could see he was badly hurt, so I shouted to the others to get an ambulance.

Sergeant Russell was fortunate to be alive and not even seriously injured. The explosion had cracked the plaster on the walls and blown out all of the windows. The constables outside said they thought the whole building was coming down. It’s possible that the desk protected the sergeant from the full force of the blast.

An ambulance rushed Hubert Hiscox to St. Michael’s Hospital. Part of his face was blown away, he was blinded in both eyes, his right hand had been blasted off, and the fingers of his left hand were pulverized. Three hours after he was wheeled into the emergency ward, Hiscox died.

At first it appeared that the explosion had been accidental. Investigators found a pair of wires leading from a spot under the desk to a set of batteries. From there, more wires stretched to the front of the safe where there were several detonated blasting caps. But it wasn’t the charges Hiscox had set to blow the safe that had killed him. The nitro-soaked cotton batten he had packed around the safe door was still intact and had to be removed by a police-explosives expert.