What Happened to Mickey?. Peter McSherry
and in the beverage room of a nearby hotel, where the three were sufficiently apparent that a sharp-witted bookmaker, who operated from there, was later able to finger them as the bank robbers to the police. Shea, Mickey, and Gauthier were supposed to work “the score,” but Mickey went on a drinking spree instead. Teenaged Alex MacDonald, who barely knew the other ex-convicts, went to a beer parlour with them and asked in on “the job.” After four months of operating Pop’s Lunch, a Parkdale food counter and delivery service that his father had bought for him, Alex was tired of working for a living. He wanted to go out to British Columbia and figured “easy money” was the way to get there. Alex had already served a reformatory term for possession of burglary tools and another for riotous destruction of property while an inmate of the Guelph Reformatory.
About 11:40 a.m. that bleak Friday, the three robbers, all wearing coveralls, peaked caps, and cotton gloves, strutted into the Port Credit Bank of Commerce and pulled revolvers.
“All right, this is a holdup. Get down on the floor, all of you,” Gauthier barked.
Accountant Ray Bryant, furthest from the door, did not properly hear the instruction and made an unlucky move to fetch a book from his desk.
One of the robbers promptly shot him.
Hit in the right arm above the elbow, the accountant did not immediately fall, but blood was soon gushing through a quarter-sized hole in his arm, colouring his suit coat red.
“Stop shooting,” Jack Shea shouted, in fear of worse, his face visibly creased with anger and frustration.
After this, the gunmen — all unmasked — settled in to work and, using all manner of threats and foul language, forced four staff and one lady customer, who came in after the robbery was in progress, to lie face-down on the floor. Then Shea athletically jumped the bank’s counter and ransacked the teller’s cage, stuffing bills and change into the deep pockets of his coveralls.
One of the thieves spotted a man outside in a truck, who seemed too interested in what was going on inside, so after Gauthier refused to do it, Shea went out and brought the watcher into the bank at gunpoint. He was forced to lie face-down on the floor with the others by a gunman with “a snarly voice” — Gauthier — who threatened to kill him if he did not do as he was told.
Then the bandits turned their attention to the vault.
“Open that safe in a hurry or I’ll put a bullet through your head,” one of the robbers now menaced the wounded accountant.
Bryant, seeping blood, got up from the floor and did his best to meet the demand. He worked the half of the combination he knew with trembling fingers before managing to get it across to the robber who had a gun in his ribs — Shea — that the other half was known only by Norman Thacker, the bank’s teller. Thacker was brought to the vault in the same manner and made to open its door.
Meantime, in the customer area, Leo Gauthier — “the short man” — ushered two more patrons into the bank and, on pain of instant death, got them to lie down, faces to the floor. Alex watched the bank’s front entrance.
In a minute or two, Jack Shea had gathered up what money he found in the vault, not knowing there was $4,000 in a drawer he might have opened, but didn’t. The three thieves then left the bank in what seemed no particular hurry.
Outside, there were by then 30 or 40 people on the street, all or most of whom had already gathered that a robbery had taken place inside the Bank of Commerce.
The robbers briskly crossed the Lakeshore Road and went down a side street where, incredibly, they got into a pea-green light delivery truck with the words “Rogers-Deforest-Crosley-Majestic Radio” written on its side, and with two large loudspeakers on its top. A citizen took the license plate number of this preposterous getaway vehicle, which, it was shortly learned, was registered to Damon Stannah, the proprietor of Stannah’s Radio Store in Long Branch.
The police soon found out from Stannah that the usual driver of the truck was “J. Roddy Shea,” a salesman, radio repairman, and deliveryman, whom Stannah had hired earlier that year and whose pleasing manner and all-around ability he was quite impressed with. Stannah had considered making Shea the manager of the store but hesitated because three appliances Shea had sold had been paid for with worthless cheques totalling $450. He did not know that Shea had been released from Kingston Penitentiary on February 14, 1938, or that he was a convicted confidence man, cheque passer, shopbreaker, and jailbreaker. Nor did he know that Shea had been selling other radios and refrigerators for cash, then creating bogus paperwork that said the goods would be paid for “on time.” The truth was that Shea’s legitimate talents could not keep pace with his liking for fine whisky, fast women, and slow horses. The reason he had organized the bank robbery was that his scheme at the store was collapsing. It had reached the point where impending sales of electric goods for cash could not make all of the bogus time payments. He needed more money than he was earning and stealing at Stannah’s store — and he had to have it right away or he would be found out.
The green truck went west on the Lakeshore Highway, then north on Mississauga Road, where it was seen travelling at high speed. Somehow the robbers cut back east into the west end of Toronto, where most of the artifacts and clothing used in “the job” were dumped in an industrial lot in south Parkdale. After a fast split of the swag, Shea’s accomplices were dropped off not far from there and found their own ways home.
Shea, still driving Stannah’s truck, then went 4 or 5 miles west to 48 Twenty-Ninth Street, Long Branch, the rooming house where he lived. There he learned the police had already been looking for him. He knew then that the truck had been “made” — identified — and it would not be long before the police would be back knowing enough to suspect him of being much more than the victim of the theft of a vehicle. Shea quickly packed a bag and prevailed upon a casual friend to drive him into Toronto. Later that day he answered a classified ad for a rented room at 72 Gloucester Street, close by the city’s downtown. About 3 p.m., the police found Stannah’s truck on Twenty-Ninth Street. They had missed catching Jack Shea by an hour or more.
But far worse had already happened.
About 2:30 p.m., less than three hours after the robbery, a well-practised police informant had telephoned Constable Alex S. Wilson, at Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) headquarters at Queen’s Park, Toronto, claiming to know the identities of the three Port Credit bank robbers. Jack Shea and the MacDonalds perhaps never knew that the initial stool pigeon in the chain of events that would follow was Marjorie Constable, Leo Gauthier’s girlfriend of less than three weeks, whom OPP Inspector George MacKay years later would describe as “a good-looking woman from the Bruce Peninsula who slept with the crooks then gave information to the police about them.”[4] Gauthier, “the short man” at Port Credit, who, as Shea would later say, was quite drunk after the robbery, was untoward enough to have allowed his prostitute-girlfriend in on what ought to have been a professional secret. The eventual cost to Leo would be a 10-year sentence behind the grey limestone walls of Kingston Penitentiary. He was lucky that was all it was.
A half hour after the phone call, Wilson brought Miss Constable to Chief Inspector A.B. Boyd’s office, where she named Jack Shea, Leo Gauthier, and Alex MacDonald, as the three Port Credit robbers, and Alex as the quick-shooting gunman who wounded the accountant. Shea would later testify in a Brampton courtroom that Gauthier, not Alex, shot Bryant. The accountant did not know who shot him.
Notified by Shea that too much was already known at Long Branch, Gauthier vacated Marje Constable’s apartment in favour of an apartment on Lippincott Street. That meant the police, who obtained warrants for the arrest of the three perpetrators that same evening, could only immediately lay their hands on Alex, who resided at his parents’ home on Poplar Plains Road. They chose to wait on Alex’s arrest until Marje reconnected with Gauthier again.
A week later, Miss Constable — hungry for the Canadian Bankers’ Association’s long-standing reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any person or persons responsible for the robbery of any bank in Canada — again contacted P.C. Wilson, this time with information concerning Leo Gauthier’s whereabouts. At 7:20 that evening, by pre-arrangement