What Happened to Mickey?. Peter McSherry

      Alex MacDonald, Mickey’s 19-year-old brother, took his older brother’s place in the Port Credit bank robbery. He would be charged with that crime and with the murder of Jimmy Windsor as well. (Library and Archives)

      On the afternoon of December 30, 1938, at Gauthier’s request, Mickey McDonald met Jack Shea by appointment in a west end tavern. For three weeks, Shea had been laying low in the Gloucester Street room and, alternately, in a furnished apartment on Westmount Avenue, near Dufferin Street and St. Clair Avenue West. As a trusted ally, Mickey was asked to help Shea move to a more convenient location and, afterwards, to run errands for Shea, who, for obvious reasons, did not wish to walk the streets more than he had to. About 6:30 p.m., the pair answered a newspaper ad for a two-room furnished apartment over a grocery store at 209A Ossington Avenue. Shea introduced himself to Mrs. Caldare, the landlady, as “Dave Turner.” He said he was a railway inspector who was at times required to go out at night but rarely in the daytime. Mickey was introduced as “Clarke McCabe,” a friend. The rent was $6.25 a week.

      Later, Mickey’s and Shea’s remembrances of what happened in the 12 days between Shea’s rental of the apartment and January 10, 1939, when Mickey was required to give himself up to face the charge of robbery with violence, would diverge sharply. There was agreement about the events of December 30, and agreement that, beginning late on the night of Tuesday, January 3, they both joined with Leo Gauthier on a train trip to Ottawa, where whatever they went there for turned into a drunken revel with two women who Mickey and Shea picked up in a Hull nightclub. Later, Jack Shea would testify that the real purpose of the Ottawa trip was to rob a bank and that Mickey badly needed $50 as an advance for his lawyer, Frank Regan, who had threatened not to be in court on January 10 unless the money was paid. Though they didn’t use the word, Mickey and Gauthier essentially told in court that the true purpose of the Ottawa misadventure was “tourism.” No bank was robbed, and Gauthier had to wire his father for enough money to get the entire group back to Toronto. They went and came back in less than three days, arriving home on the morning of Friday, January 6, poorer than before they went. Supposedly, Mickey still needed the all-important $50. The Windsor Murder happened 30 hours later.

      Clearly, from what Shea and Mickey were afterwards able to agree on, Mickey was extraordinarily indiscreet with regard to Shea’s secret whereabouts. He brought several drinking friends to the apartment, none of whom, from a criminal perspective, ought to have been taken there. Gauthier was one thing, but, in the week between January 3 and January 10, Mickey also took to 209A Ossington Avenue Cecil “Doc” Clancy, a middle-aged bookmaker, who was a long-time boozing companion of his own; Teddy Wells, a twice-convicted safecracker who often tippled with Mickey and Clancy; and Joe Smith, an alcoholic gofer, who liked to hang around with criminals. To all of these, Mickey introduced Shea as “Dave Turner.” Clancy, for certain, knew better, as he had had prior contact with Jack Shea that Mickey did not know about, and he knew Shea was wanted for bank robbery. Mickey later testified that Shea took him into the apartment’s back room and asked, “Why did you bring that drunk here? He might talk.” Mickey said, though he couldn’t hear it, Clancy had Shea’s concern figured out, but, for obvious reasons, said nothing. According to Mickey, though both were by then badly befogged by drink, he and Clancy left shortly after for The Corner by taxi.[5]

      On the morning of Friday, January 6, Mickey and Gauthier met Marjorie Constable not far from her stroll. All three went to 225 Sherbourne Street, near Dundas, where Leo and Marje rented another apartment. By the next evening, Marje had three broken ribs, such that Leo had to take her to the Toronto General Hospital, from where he managed to make three verifiable telephone calls roughly coincident with the time of the deadly incident at 247 Briar Hill Avenue. The telephone calls were Leo’s very-convenient alibi.

      Whatever the story was at the time, it seems likely that Leo had Marje figured out and gave her a beating. Then, by design, he gave the appearance of forgiving her or of pretending to believe that he was wrong. The romance was on again. A criminal acquaintance of Mickey’s, interviewed years later, got it right when he said, “Leo would have suppressed her guilt for the sake of his own good health.”[6] The same, obviously, could be said for Marje. In their league, staying together, notwithstanding their mutual grievances, made sense. They both had to keep on breathing.

      Yet Leo was the alcoholic flannel mouth that he was and, so, inevitably, Miss Constable made her third contact with P.C. Alex Wilson, by telephone, on the evening of Friday, January 20. By then Marje knew the address of Jack Shea’s hideout, that two revolvers were stashed in a buffet in the apartment and, supposedly, that Shea, Gauthier, and Alex MacDonald were planning to pull off another “score” over that weekend. P.C. Wilson immediately gave the information to the Toronto Police, who raided Shea’s apartment at 9 o’clock the following morning. A five-man squad of detectives, led by Detective-Sergeant John Hicks, managed to catch Shea sound asleep in bed and arrested him without incident. The early edition of that Saturday afternoon’s Evening Telegram flashed the banner: ARREST MAN FOR PORT CREDIT BANK HOLDUP. The officers had found two fully-loaded revolvers, a .32- and a .38-calibre, in the buffet. The police did not then, or ever, find the weapon that killed James Windsor — said by an expert witness at trial to have most likely been a Webley .455-calibre revolver.[7]

      P.C. Wilson’s memorandum of these events, addressed to Chief Inspector Boyd and clock-dated Saturday, January 21, 10:30 a.m., ended with a pregnant sentence: “There is some suggestion that Shea may have been mixed up in the Windsor Murder of the 7th.”[8]

      Now where might P.C. Wilson have got an idea like that? And who might have had her eyes on the $2,000 reward for the murderers of James Windsor?

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Jack Shea’s Tale

       (January 21, 1939, and after)

      Because the eyewitnesses to the murder of James Windsor had indicated some of the killers, including the actual shooter, were Italians, Detective-Sergeants William McAllister and Frank Crowe, who were initially in charge of the investigation, naturally focused on suspects of Italian origin.[1] They soon learned that, in the months before his death, Windsor had been having worrisome trouble with a gang of 8 or 10 Italian men, some as old as 37, who were frequenters of the Windsor Bar-B-Q on North Yonge Street. The elite of this crowd were known criminals, who possessed records for such offences as possession of heroin for the purpose of trafficking, armed robbery, and theft. After his son’s funeral, Albert Windsor of 453 McNab Street North, Hamilton, had a lot to say about this same faction, who he thought to be the murderers of his son:

      ... This bunch that started to hang around there got the idea they were running the place. If someone did something they didn’t like, they would gang him. They just seemed to move in on Jimmy. They were making his place a headquarters and because they said they were keeping order they wanted money.[2]

      “Jimmy