What Happened to Mickey?. Peter McSherry
A few days later, he and another troubled youth grabbed $15 from the cashbox of Josephine Columbo’s Davenport Road candy store and escaped in a waiting car. Detective Fred Skinner of the Ossington Avenue Station pulled the pair out of their beds in the early hours of the morning and charged them with robbery with violence. In court, however, likely after some parental begging, the two were allowed to plead guilty to simple theft. This time, though, when Magistrate Jones passed sentence of two years-less-a-day, Donald had to “do the time.” Many years later, Detective Skinner remembered Mickey as being both likeable and polite. “He often met me on the street. He would always stop to talk to me. He always called me ‘Mr. Skinner’,” recalled the detective.[5]
Donnie became Guelph Reformatory’s #37514 on October 6, 1925. He did not then, or later, serve time well. His Guelph medical sheet runs several pages and has to do with mostly trivial medical matters — colds, headaches, constipation. Likely the tensions of life “inside” caused him anxiety. He was a worrier who eventually developed a gastric ulcer, which had to be treated in Guelph and later in Kingston Penitentiary. He made a good impression where it mattered, though, and was released “on permit,” on September 27, 1926, to go to work. Six months later, on March 18, 1927, The Office of the Commissioner for the Extra Mural Employment of Sentenced Persons, at 40 Richmond Street West, Toronto, notified the Superintendent of Guelph Reformatory that Donald McDonald had “disappeared” and was therefore “unlawfully at large from your institution.”[6]
Why would such as Mickey want to work for wages when there was “easy money” — big money — to be made selling illicit liquor?
Mickey had escaped to Detroit, Michigan, where, according to the street story, he became for a time a distributor of good Canadian whisky on behalf of a Windsor racketeer named Raymond “Dolly” Quinton. This was the heyday of the Volstead Act — American Prohibition — when, even though the Province of Ontario was itself “dry” by reason of the Ontario Temperance Act, the federal government permitted the manufacture and sale of liquor “for export,” ostensibly only to countries where liquor consumption was legal. Along the Detroit River, on the Windsor side, every day congeries of rumrunners in boats both big and small, many of them rowboats, would pull up to any of a dozen or more government docks, sign a B-13 form — a declaration that they were buying liquor to take to “Cuba” or some other country where the consumption of alcohol was legal — then they would sell the liquor wherever they cared to. The usual destination from Windsor was, of course, Detroit, where good Canadian whisky was in high demand, but much whisky and other liquor was simply U-turned back into Ontario to be bootlegged throughout the province.
Mickey’s career in alcohol distribution could not have lasted long before he was pushed out of the game by the Detroit Police or, more likely, by competitors who were too tough to give an argument. But he adapted. In July 1930, at Detroit, as “Michael McDonald,” he was sentenced to from 9 months to 10 years for “indecent liberties,” a charge that he himself later variously described as having to do with his living with an underage girl, and as having to do with the making of pornographic pictures. He served the minimum 9 months in Michigan State Prison at Jackson, Michigan, then was released on April 10, 1931, the day before his twenty-fourth birthday.
Mickey learned much in the Michigan lockup, and, it seems, by the time of his release had chosen crime as his career. Now calling himself “Michael McDonald” — hence the nickname “Mickey” — he returned to Toronto and headed straight for Jarvis and Dundas streets, a location that, by this time, was becoming known as a gathering spot for bootleggers, prostitutes, drug dealers, assorted criminals, and all of their hangers-on and fellow travellers. “The Corner” was what those “in the know,” including the police, had begun calling the intersection. On the street, the term would hold up as such for the next 30 or 35 years.
Mickey was soon tied into a loosely-associated gang of shopbreakers who lived an expensive criminal lifestyle. They did “kickins” by night, spent their afternoons at racetracks, were often at bootlegging establishments, and often philandered among prostitutes. The gang’s usual target was women’s clothing stores, which yielded items that could be easily disposed of for cash.
On August 5, 1931, as “Michael McDonald,” Mickey appeared with two others before Magistrate Robert J. Browne charged with the theft of 130 ladies dresses from the store of L.A. Finch at 483 Bloor Street West. Associates Louis Gallow and Jimmy Douglas were convicted and sent “down East” for three years each, but the magistrate threw out the case against Mickey. Two nights later, Mickey celebrated by making a drunken show of refusing P.C. Fred Falconer’s suggestion that he “move along” from the corner of Church and Dundas streets. He was charged with “obstruct police.” That cost $50 and court costs on pain of 30 days in the Langstaff Jail Farm.
Then came the night in a Sherbourne Street booze can when Mickey McDonald, for no reason that made any sense, smashed a banjo over the head of a prostitute who was known on the streets as “The Old Gray Mare.” She was the wife of William “Big Bill” Cook, a pimp, drug dealer, and gunman, who was also the former doorman of the Chicory Inn, a roadhouse on the Lakeshore Highway in Clarkson. It was at the Chicory Inn that Bill Cook had famously shot Oscar Campbell, a thug at least as dangerous as himself who had previously bested Cook in a street fight by whacking him over the head with a hammer. A few months before the banjo incident, Cook was acquitted of shooting Campbell with intent to maim.
Big Bill caught up with Mickey inside Trotter’s Lunch, a Dundas Street East restaurant-cum-dive, at 4 a.m., Sunday, October 13. There followed a comic-opera attempt at murder, in which Mickey found the courage to physically attack Cook, who was 30 or more pounds heavier than he was, while Bill fired a gun at Mickey before he got the gun out of his own pocket and, so, shot himself in the leg. Cook was then beaten and kicked by Mickey and others among Trotter’s swanky clientele, one of whom grabbed Cook’s gun and left with it. In a state of high excitement, Mickey then clobbered the restaurant manager over the head with the receiver of his kitchen phone, when the man, somewhat ridiculously, tried to establish order in his place of business.
The next afternoon, at the Lakeshore Racetrack, Mickey met Detective Frank Crowe and, in a jocular conversation between “friendly enemies,” made the mistake of having too much to say about what had happened at Trotter’s. He would not afterward sign a statement naming Cook and wound up being charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm on the restauranteur. Worse, he was bound over as a material witness against Big Bill, who was claiming to the police that he had been mysteriously shot on Sherbourne Street by a stranger. Cook’s coat, which had a bullet hole through the pocket, told the true story, while Mickey — who chose to maintain his reputation as “good people” — perjured himself, very obviously, in the interest of Bill Cook, a man he hated and who hated him. On December 17, 1931, again as “Michael McDonald,” Mickey pleaded guilty to aggravated assault before a County Court judge and was meted out a sentence of two years in prison. Twenty-nine days later, before Justice Hugh Edward Rose in the Supreme Court of Ontario, he pleaded guilty to perjury and was handed three years concurrent with the first sentence. Mickey smiled and wore an air of nonchalance at both proceedings.
As inmate #2479, McDonald spent his first 10 months in Kingston Penitentiary working in the canvas shop (“the mailbags”) where he toiled at the manufacture and repair of Canadian Postal Department mailbags. These were the last days of the Silent System and of a rigid set of prison rules and regulations put in place decades before. The Kingston riot of October 17, 1932, was the convicts’ idea of their first move in a process of change. At 3 p.m., about 450 of the institution’s 700 inmates walked away from their work and barricaded themselves in the Shop Dome before being overcome by guards with guns and herded back to their cells. Mickey McDonald was one of 32 later charged and tried before a County Court judge. Two guards and a shop instructor testified to having observed Mickey taking an active role in the riot, one saying that Mickey appeared to be giving orders in the Dome. Thus, on August 5, 1933, after a lengthy trial, again as “Michael McDonald,” Mickey was convicted of riotous destruction of property and sentenced to 6 months in reformatory, to be served after the completion of his Kingston sentence.
“Mickey”