What Happened to Mickey?. Peter McSherry
had been arrested while, at the same time, wondering why he, himself, was now suddenly a suspect in the Windsor Murder. Shea’s unexpected presence surely supplied a possible, or probable, answer. Mickey’s big worry about Shea was not only that he now found himself in a line-up of murder suspects right after Shea’s being freshly caught, but that Shea had likely been arrested in an apartment that Mickey had visited several times in the 12 days prior to his giving himself up on the James Elder robbery-with-violence charge. In fact, as both he and Shea would later agree, Mickey had gone to Shea’s apartment on the night of the Windsor Murder. And that would be, as Mickey would have surely considered it might be, the biggest part of the rub.
If Shea had turned “rat,” Mickey knew, he would have had to cough up something big to get consideration for himself on the charge he was now facing. James Windsor’s murderers would do nicely. Had Shea talked to the police about him? And, if so, what would, or could, he have told them? What would, or could, Shea have been able to concoct, if he did not actually know anything solid? Or if Shea was a part of the Windsor Murder himself? Depending on the truth of the matter, some or all of these questions were all over Mickey’s mind a few seconds after he spotted Jack Shea’s presence. Not maybe. Not perhaps. Take it to the bank. Shea would have known, or should have known, what Mickey was thinking — but, like Mickey, he was best off to say nothing and await developments. The situation was like a boxing match where neither competitor ought to lead for fear of a devastating counterpunch.
The criminal world is a world of paranoia. Mickey knew this, too. Jack Shea’s reputation in that world was as solid as his own. Shea was widely thought to be “good people,” “solid,” “a stand-up guy.” Mickey must surely have hoped and considered, as well, that all of these sudden suspicions were only his own paranoid criminal mind acting upon imaginary fears. It had happened before that he had doubted a trusted associate, only to be proven wrong. It is a part of criminal life.
Depending on what Shea really did know, Mickey was surely more than mildly alarmed at Shea’s presence there that afternoon. Edith Warner’s seeming identification of his profile could only have compounded his concern.
Another upsetting presence was that of Louis Gallow, born Luigi Gallo, a short, dark thief of Italian extraction who well fit the description of the man who came in from the hallway and dragged Jimmy Windsor to the spot on the hall floor where he died. Though not under arrest at the moment, Gallow was, in fact, now suspected by the police of being that man. Older than the others, Louis had a criminal record rife with crimes of theft and violence dating back to 1914, and he was known by the police to be a long-time criminal associate of Mickey’s. If Gallow and Mickey were both real parts of the gang that killed Windsor, and Shea knew this, all of what Mickey was thinking about Shea’s presence in the line-up was grossly magnified by Gallow being there, too. Gallow, himself, if he was truly part of the gang that killed Windsor, and if he had reason to think or know that Shea knew this, would have been worried by Shea being there too.
And, so, it was with “the man with the yellow gloves,” whose presence would have disturbed Mickey in the same way as would have Gallow’s — and for family reasons as well. “The man with the yellow gloves” was Mickey’s 19-year-old brother, Alex, who had taken Mickey’s place in the robbery of the Bank of Commerce in Port Credit, since Mickey was indisposed at the time. Alex and Leo Gauthier were already charged with that robbery, and both were out on $7,500 bail on the night of the Windsor Murder, and at the moment, too. At 9 a.m. that Sunday morning, 15 days after Windsor’s death, a dozen detectives, armed with a warrant, had appeared at the Poplar Plains Road house and, as Alexander MacDonald Sr. later said, “without knocking or stopping at the door went from the top to the bottom of the house, and searched it all.”[11] They found nothing. Alex was pulled out of bed and taken to headquarters for questioning, and to be paraded in this line-up. Later that afternoon, Herbert McCready misled Alex by telling him, “You haven’t been identified, so you can go.”
Leo Gauthier was there on Sunday, January 22, too. He and Jack Shea were also being looked at by two victims of the $100 robbery of the Dominion Shoe Repair, at 467 Queen Street East, Toronto, which happened four days before, on the early evening of Wednesday, January 18. The Toronto Police had obtained three search warrants that morning and made simultaneous raids on the living quarters, not only of Alex MacDonald, but of Gauthier and Gallow as well. One consequence was that Mickey was not the only rounder in the identification parade who was worried about Jack Shea. Alex, Gallow, and Gauthier were all thinking similarly, Leo with somewhat less to lose than the others.
CHAPTER SIX
Jack Shea and the Port Credit Bank Robbery (December 9, 1938–January 21, 1939)
On Friday, December 9, 1938, a month before the Windsor Murder, Jack Shea, as he would later testify, was one of three gunmen who robbed the Canadian Bank of Commerce in the Village of Port Credit, 12 miles west of Toronto, of $2,732.48. This violent crime, which for nearly a year afterwards was routinely referred to in the Toronto-area press as “the Port Credit bank robbery,” was absolutely essential to the charge of murder in the death of James Albert Windsor being preferred against Mickey McDonald and his brother, Alex MacDonald, and, similarly, essential to the eventual disposition of that charge against Mickey. For nearly a year, the two prosecutions — the murder and the bank robbery — were anything but mutually exclusive in the eyes of the Attorney General of Ontario, the Crown Attorneys of York and Peel Counties, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Toronto Police, the Port Credit Police, the attorneys for all of the defendants in the two criminal cases, the defendants themselves, the Toronto and area press, and the interested public.
The son of a Montreal policeman and a well-spoken former student at McGill University, John Roderick Shea was a strange duck to be mixed up with the likes of Mickey McDonald and Leo Gauthier. At different times, Shea claimed to be a chartered accountant and a stock broker who had been worth $90,000 before the Crash of 1929 — and he was believed by some to be both. An OPP wanted circular, dated December 31, 1938, described John Roderick Shea, aged 36, as a man of slim build, about 6 feet tall, weighing 165 pounds, having a thin face, a dark complexion, blue eyes, and “a very pleasant and talkative manner.” He was also said to be a thief who “drinks, bets horses, and is a ladies man.”[1]
In 1930, Jack Shea was convicted of forgery, and uttering and false pretenses at Winnipeg, Manitoba, and sentenced to two years in Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Four years later, in February 1934, Shea was one of a gang of shopbreakers who made off with 160 parcels of silk, valued at $10,000, the property of the Canadian Celanese Company, at 106 Spadina Avenue, Toronto. The thieves broke through a brick wall at night and loaded the silk onto a rented livery truck. On his way to Montreal with the stolen goods, Shea skidded the truck into a ditch on an icy Highway 2, near Cardinal, Ontario, and was arrested later in Toronto. The others involved were not caught and were never certainly identified.[2] On September 29, 1934, a jury convicted Shea of shopbreaking and, three days later, he was sentenced by a County Court judge to five years in Kingston Penitentiary. While awaiting his day in court, Shea cunningly broke out of the Don Jail and was chased through the Don Flats, and along a residential street east of the Don Valley.[3] He was found hiding in the yard of Withrow Public School. His twenty minutes of freedom cost a year in the lockup, concurrent with the shopbreaking sentence.
John R. “Jack” Shea, as he looked on October 13, 1934. One of the Port Credit bank robbers of December 9, 1938, Shea would testify against his partners in that crime as well as against Mickey and Alex MacDonald for the murder of Jimmy Windsor. (Library and Archives Canada)
Any competent bank robber knows that the robbery is the easy part and the getaway is the hard part. The Port Credit robbers botched the robbery, almost committing murder, and planned their getaway so poorly that, 90 minutes after the stickup, Shea was certain to be going back to prison as a consequence. Another of the three talked about the robbery — and to the wrong person. Inexperience, financial desperation, alcohol, and stupidity foiled them, though Jack Shea and Alex MacDonald were certainly bright men, and Shea and Gauthier were experienced criminals.
In the days before the robbery took place,