Wrong Side of the Law Page 10

  Five years later, Lass was arrested in Detroit for robbing a pawn shop. He was sentenced to ten-to-twenty-five years in the Michigan State Penitentiary, with the judge recommending that he serve at least fifteen years. It was 1920, and Sunny Lass was still a teenager.

  The purpose of prisons at that time was simply to administer harsh punishment. The concept of educating and rehabilitating inmates was still in its infancy. Wayward, impressionable youths were tossed into a brutal environment with hardened criminals. Prisons were little more than schools for crime. Lass no doubt considered himself lucky when he was paroled after ten years, and sent back to Canada. But he hadn’t changed much from the seven-year-old boy who’d been caught stealing.

  An escort of six detectives and constables took Ainsworth to Orillia for a preliminary inquest into the hardware store burglary. The senior officer carried warrants for the arrest of O’Brien and Lass. He took along the extra manpower because there had been reports that O’Brien and Lass might try to rescue Ainsworth or kill him to shut him up. A large crowd of Orillians hung around the courthouse “to see what would happen.” However, the suspected bandits were nowhere to be seen, and the police were told they’d fled to Montreal. The police doubted the truth of that information. After Ainsworth had been committed for trial, they took him back to Toronto over a secret route that involved criss-crossing secondary roads to hide the movements of the police cars in order to foil anyone who might be following or lying in wait.

  On October 1, while Toronto police staked out the haunts frequented by the likes of O’Brien and Lass, The OPP began a province-wide search. They thought they had a lead when the manager of the liquor store in Lindsay reported to local police that a woman had tried to purchase more alcohol than was allowed by the strict regulations of the time. She’d presented a permit for purchasing liquor made out to John Ainsworth. After being refused, she’d left in a car with two men. It took the police a day or so to locate the woman’s residence. The house was empty. Neighbours said there had been two men staying there, but they’d gone to Detroit. The police didn’t know if the strangers were O’Brien and Lass.

  The search suddenly shifted back to Orillia with the report of a missing girl. Anna Bryson, age seventeen, had been an “admirer” of O’Brien, and police had questioned her. Anna quit her job without notice and then disappeared.

  Meanwhile, O’Brien and Lass had been seen in a restaurant between Orillia and Barrie. A waitress recognized them from photographs in the newspapers. Anna had given those pictures to the police. The waitress phoned the OPP detachment in Barrie. She said that when the men left, they drove toward Orillia.

  Police feared that O’Brien and Lass were after Anna because of the pictures. The girl might have been thinking the same thing and had gone into hiding. She no doubt would have been terrified to learn that the man she knew as Jack O’Brien might really be Pat Norton, a convicted killer.

  Police raided Anna’s home, but it was deserted. A squad of officers searched the swampland near Orillia, but found nothing. Then on October 2, officers tracked Anna down as she was attempting to get some extra clothing before fleeing Orillia. They wouldn’t say where they found her or where they had taken her for safekeeping. A police spokesman would say only that Anna lived in fear of O’Brien.

  Certain that O’Brien and Lass were in the Orillia area, police threw out a wide net, expecting to snare them as they drew it tighter. But if the two were indeed in the district, they managed to slip through the cordon. On the night of October 3, Toronto police responded to a report that O’Brien and Lass had been spotted in the city’s west end. Police cars and motorcycles sped to the location and prowled the surrounding streets. After a few hours of fruitless searching, they gave up. “Just another rumour,” an officer told a reporter.

  Police still had no real evidence to support O’Brien’s drunken boast that he was Pat Norton. Even though Norton had been known to use the alias Jack O’Brien, it was almost as common a name as John Smith. Police had very little concrete information on the Pat Norton who’d been a member of the Murrell gang. But now, thanks to Anna Bryson, they had a photograph.

  Chief Draper personally went to the Kingston Penitentiary to talk to Bill Murrell. Bill had been in prison for over nine years and hadn’t set eyes on Pat Norton since the day of the Melbourne bank robbery. Nonetheless, he identified the man in Anna’s photograph as Pat Norton.

  Toronto police and the OPP searched for O’Brien and Lass for several weeks without finding a trace. Then they received information that the fugitives were in New York City, and two Toronto police detectives, Walter McConnell and Archie McCathie, were sent there. On Saturday, November 1, the Canadian officers accompanied by a squad of New York police caught O’Brien and Lass in Pennsylvania Station as they were about to board a train. McConnell said, “We want you O’Brien, and you too, Lass.”

  Lass had a revolver in his pocket, but with four police guns pointed at him, he didn’t try to draw it. The pair had arranged passage on a ship to Europe, and were on their way to the harbour when they were arrested. In a West 34th Street apartment where O’Brien and Lass had been staying, police found guns and burglar tools.

  According to American police records, Jack O’Brien couldn’t have been the Pat Norton who’d been in on the Melbourne bank robbery, because he was in jail at the time. His real name, the Americans said, was Elmer J. Giller. He was indeed an escapee from the Michigan State Penitentiary, but he’d been doing time for armed robbery, not murder. Even so, the New York police said that O’Brien was one of the most “hard boiled” gunmen they had ever encountered.

  “The only thing I would go back to Toronto for would be to shoot up a bunch of their dicks and people there,” O’Brien snarled to New York police. “Youse’ll never get me to Toronto or anywhere else in Canada.”

  The New York police sent photographs of O’Brien and Lass to Toronto and witnesses there identified them as the Durable bandits. A New York magistrate dismissed the local charges against the pair to smooth the extradition process. Evidently, Michigan authorities hadn’t requested that O’Brien be extradited to that state to complete his prison term.

  O’Brien and Lass were held without bail in a New York City jail. Both initially decided that they would fight extradition. Lass’s mother, Ethel “Fanny” Lass, went to New York and was in the courtroom for the bail hearing. She broke down in tears when federal marshals wouldn’t allow her to approach her son. Later, she obtained a pass to visit him in the detention cell for half an hour.

  O’Brien attempted to escape when he was being taken from the court building back to jail. He tripped one of the officers escorting him and ran from the building. Three police officers fired at him as he ran down the street. None of the shots hit O’Brien, but two officers caught up with him before he got very far. They beat him into submission with blackjacks.

  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.

  Chapter 7

  The Hyslop Gang:

  Suicide and the Hangman

  In 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.