Wrong Side of the Law Page 13

  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.

  Morgan, whose nose bled steadily from the blow he’d received, struggled for twenty-five minutes to get his hands free. Then he untied his feet and ran from the building. Four blocks away, at the corner of Dupont Street, he came to a restaurant, the nearest place with a telephone. To his frustration, a soldier in a wheelchair was using the phone and wouldn’t give it up. Morgan was reluctant to take the phone away from a disabled war veteran. Ten minutes passed before he was finally able to call the police.

  Back at the dairy, the bandits laboriously hauled the safe to the loft door. Then one of them went downstairs to check on Morgan and Kirkey. They were gone! Instantly alarmed, the gang abandoned the safe and fled. As they sped away in their vehicle, they passed Kirkey lying in the darkness by a pool of water, just a few feet short of Christie Street.

  Morgan’s call brought squads of constables and detectives to the dairy, “ready for a gunfight.” But even through the robbery had been thwarted, they arrived too late to nab the Polka Dot Gang. The uncooperative war vet had given the bandits the time they needed to escape.

  The gang hadn’t done very well in Toronto, so they immediately headed out of the city to look for prey in smaller communities. While Toronto was still buzzing over the failed Hall’s Dairy heist, the Polka Dot Gang drove to Stratford. Their target was the Swift Canadian meat-packing plant.

  At eleven o’clock on the night of October 12, Viola Taylor, the company’s cleaning lady, had just finished her duties. She’d been assisted by her sons Ernest, fifteen; and Don, eleven. Joseph Miller, the night engineer, opened the door to let them out. They were suddenly confronted by five men wearing polka-dot bandanas and armed with machine guns and revolvers. The intruders pushed their way in and one announced, “This is a stickup!”

  The robbers ordered Miller, Taylor, and her frightened sons into the office. They tied up Miller and the boys, but only told Taylor to lie face down on the floor and not move or make a sound.

  “The only thing they said was that they were not here to kill us,” Miller later told reporters. “One said, ‘We were trained in the army only to kill the enemy.’ They said they wouldn’t hurt us if we did what they told us.”

  The four prisoners could only lie still and listen while the bandits hammered open one of the two safes in the office. Miller saw one of them pilfer a flashlight, which he would eventually identify in court. Startled by a ringing telephone, the gang hauled the smaller safe out to their vehicle and drove away. It was found smashed open a day later on a side road near Tavistock. The gang’s take was $3,216.

  After the bandits left the office, young Don Taylor wriggled out of the ropes that bound his hands and feet. Before untying the others, he barred the office door because he was afraid the robbers would come back. The phone call that had frightened the gang off had come from the Stratford police station, where a sergeant was making his regular check with the night engineer. When no one answered, constables were sent to the plant, but arrived minutes aft
er the bandits had fled into the night.

  Then on October 17, two men armed with revolvers and wearing polka-dot bandanas hit the Canadian Bank of Commerce on King Street in Toronto. They ordered the three staff members and five customers, all of them women, to line up facing a wall with their hands in the air. One of the customers, Laura Rolling, was checking her safety deposit box when the bandits burst in. She described the robbery for the Toronto Star:

  At first I thought some men had come in for repair work, then I saw a man at the door with a polka-dotted handkerchief over his face. I knew it was a holdup. “Don’t look at us,” he said. Then he pointed a silver revolver at Hilliard Brian, the bank manager, and said, “You open the vault.” As he stood in the doorway of the manager’s office, I risked another look. He said, “If you keep looking at me, I’ll give you something.”

  The way he said it made me think he meant it, and I was pretty careful after that. Then he came into the manager’s office and marched Mr. Brian and I out into the main part of the bank … “Don’t look at me and face the wall,” he told us. “There’s no danger. Nobody’s going to get hurt. Just don’t look at me.”

  Another customer, Mrs. E. Patton, had her little daughter in the bank with her. The toddler had wandered away from her mother when the bandits charged in. Mrs. Patton saw the guns and cried, “Oh, my baby!” The gunman nearest to her said, “Oh, that’s all right. We won’t hurt her.” He let the frightened mother pick up the child and then ordered her to join the others facing the wall.

  Hilliard Brian opened the vault as ordered, but he stalled for time as he did it. By the time the door finally swung open, the robbers knew they had been in the bank too long. They snapped up $2,000 in bundled bills that they stuffed into their pockets, but they left $1,000 in bonds. Then they ordered the staff and customers into the vault.

  Brian begged the robbers not to shut and lock the door. In that airtight space, the prisoners could suffocate before help came. One of the bandits said, “I won’t set the lock. I’ll just close the door and set a chair against it. But don’t you open it right away.” Brian waited less than a minute before he pushed the door open, but the robbers were gone.

  Police were unsure if the robbery was a Polka Dot Gang job, or the work of other criminals wearing the now infamous bandanas to mislead investigators. These men had struck in the daytime and hadn’t shown the kind of callous brutality that had accompanied other Polka Dot holdups. Nonetheless, police officials declared that the Polka Dot Gang now topped the list of “Public Enemies” in Ontario. They believed the gang had a hideout somewhere in the Toronto suburbs and wasn’t likely to give up without a fight.

  There was no report of Polka Dot Gang activity for days after the bank robbery. Police said the gang had gone into hiding because with every cop in Ontario on the lookout for them, the situation had become “too hot” for them to risk venturing out into the open. A Toronto Star editor, making a bad pun on the word “polka,” wrote, “Those polka dot hold-up men who are waltzing around the country naturally lead the police in a dance.”

  Whether or not the police were amused, they were certainly determined to have the last laugh. In fact, they already had several suspects under surveillance. These men all had criminal records, and in spite of the polka-dot masks, they had certain physical features that matched up with descriptions given by witnesses. Toronto police detectives who had been quietly running down leads were almost certain they knew the identity of the six-foot-tall gang leader who had a taste for expensive clothes.

  On October 26, the suspects drove through Toronto, making stops in front of large bakeries and dairies. There were unaware that police were tailing them. It seemed to the detectives that the five men were “casing” potential targets. The suspects were outside the Acme Dairy on Spadina Road when the police moved in.

  Realizing they had been spotted, the suspects made a run for it. Their car sped through downtown traffic at speeds of up to fifty miles an hour, with the cops in hot pursuit. Seven police cars full of constables closed in to cut off their escape. At the intersection of Dufferin and Van Horn Streets, Sergeant Keith Sisson and Cadet Earl Snider intercepted the fugitives with their patrol car, forcing them to stop. Cadet Snider jumped out and covered the suspects with a shot gun. Sergeant Sisson placed them under arrest as more police cars, with sirens wailing, arrived on the scene. The suspects were not armed and no polka-dot bandanas were found on them or in their car. Nonetheless, the police had good reason to believe they had captured the Polka Dot Gang. The men were held without bail on charges of vagrancy while detectives continued their investigation. Within a week, the police had enough evidence to lay serious charges.

  On November 2, the prisoners were taken to police court and their pictures appeared in the Toronto Star that same day. For the first time, Canadians saw the faces of the Polka Dot Gang: George Constantine (also known as Constantino), twenty-two; George Dobbie, twenty-nine; Bruce Kay, twenty-five; Hubert Hiscox, twenty-six; and the tall man believed to be the leader, Kenneth Green, twenty-two.

  Ken Green, nicknamed Budger, was born in Toronto. His alcoholic father often disappeared from home for long periods, leaving Green’s mother, who had a speech impediment, to raise four children. She took in boarders, but still had such a difficult time making ends meet that she had to periodically send the children to stay with relatives. At one point, the young Greens were placed in a children’s centre. As a boy, Ken was clever and fun-loving. But he was hot-tempered and could explode at the slightest provocation. He had a deep resentment for discipline and the law that led him into delinquency and two terms in reformatories. Toronto police came to know Ken Green as a tough, brutal criminal.

  Curiously, two days before the arrest, police had picked Green up in Markham for public drunkenness. He’d put up a fight, giving one officer a broken nose and a black eye. A day later he was out on bail. Perhaps he’d been the key in leading detectives to the rest of the gang. At the time of the gang’s arrest, Green had allegedly threatened to blow Sergeant Sisson’s stomach out.

  The men faced six charges of armed robbery, two charges of assaulting night watchmen, and one charge of firing a gun at Constable Walter McGowan with intent to maim. Magistrate R.J. Browne warned defence counsel Harold Chaplin, “Don’t take up my time talking about bail.”

  With charges officially laid, the case was remanded to a later date. Over the next few weeks, while the Polka Dot Gang members sat in jail, several petty robberies were pulled by imitators wearing polka -dot bandanas. On victim had his skull fractured by a “polka dot hoodlum” who robbed him of thirteen dollars. Newspaper editors were still mining the name for silly puns. “Criminals, it is claimed, can be reformed,” wrote one. “Can the Polka Dot gang change its spots?”

  On November 7, George Constantine pleaded guilty to a charge of breaking and entering. On the night of July 29, he’d been caught in a solo attempt to burglarize a gas station on Queen Street West. Police had not yet connected him with the Polka Dot robberies, and he’d been granted bail. Now that he faced those charges, Constantine no doubt thought it best to own up to the break-in, and present himself as a repentant criminal.

  “He wants to go straight,” said Harold Chaplin. “He told me there’s nothing in the game.” Constantine was sentenced to two years in prison for burglary. He would face additional time if convicted on any of the Polka Dot charges.

  On December 10, all of the gang members pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and chose trial by judge without jury. Constantine, already under sentence, was ineligible for bail. Magistrate Browne again denied bail for the other four. On December 27 there came the surprising news that Chaplin had convinced Judge James Parker to release George Dobbie and Bruce Kay on $20,000 bail. The principal condition was that they appear in court on a specified date in January 1946. Dobbie and Kay had no intention of keeping that appointment. They fled to the United States. However, their freedom was short-lived.

  On January 17, Detroit
police stopped a car for a traffic violation. The car was registered to Kay’s wife, Mary. In it were Kay, Dobbie, and another Toronto hoodlum named Albert Hall. The car’s trunk was full of burglary tools. It didn’t take the Detroit police long to learn that two of the men had jumped bail in Toronto. The three Canadians were arrested and locked up in a Detroit jail. A judge set their bail at $25,000 each. Nobody was willing to post it.

  The apprehension of Kay and Dobbie, whose names were now notorious, touched off an international legal dispute. Officials in Ontario wanted the pair back in Toronto to stand trial for their Polka Dot crimes. Michigan authorities wanted to prosecute them for possession of burglary tools. In May 1946, Inspector John Nimmo of the Toronto Police Department went to Detroit to testify at Kay and Dobbie’s trial. He was to give evidence about the pair’s criminal activities in Canada.

  Theodore Rogers, a Detroit lawyer who was representing Kay and Dobbie, accused the Toronto police of trying to “frame” his clients for crimes in Canada for which they had not yet been tried, let alone convicted. Inspector Nimmo’s intent, said Rogers, was to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the Toronto police,” by giving prejudiced testimony that would have Dobbie and Kay convicted in an American court and sent to an American prison, so they wouldn’t be available to testify in Toronto at the trials of their alleged confederates.

  “I think there is animus in this case,” Rogers argued. “I did not come prepared to combat the police of the Dominion of Canada. We might as well send them down the river now if we are going to allow the Toronto police and everybody else stick their noses in … I have never tried a case so unfair, where everyone cooperated to convict the accused.”

  The jury didn’t agree with Rogers and neither did Judge William McKay Skillman. Upon hearing the jury’s verdict of guilty, he sentenced Dobbie and Kay to four to ten years in prison, and Hall to three to ten years. “We have enough customers of this type in our own country without importing them from Canada,” Judge Skillman said.