What Happened to Mickey?. Peter McSherry
Canada)
During the 33 months he was in “the Big House,” Mickey’s weight dropped from 161 to 138 pounds. A medical examination in September 1934 concluded, “This man is principally run down from a lack of exercise in the open air.”[7] A psychologist’s assessment stated, “At the present time he is quite embittered towards the penal system and feels that he was harshly treated. His father is regularly employed and has promised to obtain steady work for Michael when he is discharged from custody.”[8] As always, Mickey’s parents were worried and trying to help. Their letters to the right authorities got the result that Mickey was allowed to serve his six-month sentence in the Mimico Reformatory rather than in Guelph. But 13 days after Mickey entered Mimico, a jailhouse “rat” named him as being involved in sending out letters by the “underground method.” Superintendent J.R. Elliott interviewed Mickey and, the same day, reported to Deputy Provincial Secretary C.F. Neelands:
William “Big Bill” Cook, pimp, drug dealer, gunman, and the man who tried to shoot “Mickey” McDonald in Trotter’s Lunch in the early morning of October 13, 1931. (Library and Archives Canada)
I had hardly spoke to him when he flew into a rage in a threatening manner, calling me a Son-of-a B, Bastard etc., completely losing his head. He is a bad character….
He is now in the cells.
I will see him again in the morning, and if his attitude is not changed I will recommend the strap and possible removal to another institution.[9]
Given time to think, Mickey became cutely submissive. The cost of his tantrum was a charge of “Insolence to the Superintendent,” which lengthened his stay in Mimico by 26 days. He was released February 1, 1935.
He was soon back at The Corner, again mixing with others like himself who imagined the “easy money” of a life of crime, and the uncertain existence that came with it, were to be preferred to a life of honest labour. Twice in 1935 he was before the courts charged with offences related to shopbreaking. In May 1935, together with Jack Cosgrave and another man, Mickey was stopped in a rented truck in possession of a jimmy and several types of keys. The three were charged with “possession of housebreaking instruments.” The case got to court but all were acquitted. In September, Mickey and Leo Gauthier, a long-time associate, were arrested after a pursuit by car from the scene of a break-in at Hooper’s Drug Store at 391 Jarvis Street. They got off, perhaps because the taxi driver who fingered them to the police found reason to water down his story in court.
These days Mickey at times went about with a fat roll of bills in his pocket, which he soon frittered away on gambling and alcohol. He was often broke and asking for a loan. Then he was apt to turn into a mere street-corner clip-artist, rolling drunks or steering marks to rigged card games — any mean little “score” for a desperate buck.[10] The Toronto Police saw him as one of their “usual suspects” and would routinely pick him up and question him in connection with shop break-ins, house burglaries, and at least one armed robbery. In normal circumstances, Mickey’s disposition was sunny and pleasing, but, when down-on-his-luck and drunk, which he now often was, he was known to get nasty, to pick fights, to take his inner anger out on almost anyone who was handy at the moment. Years later, Jenny Law, a prostitute of the 1930s, remembered Mickey as good-looking, well-dressed, well-groomed “trouble.” He was, she said, barred from a lot of the tap rooms and bootlegging “joints” in the vicinity of The Corner. “He would go to a bootlegger’s, get drunk, and start a fight, so he wouldn’t have to pay,” Jenny remembered in a tone of wonderment.[11]
The MacDonald family, now renting a house at 3 Poplar Plains Road in central Toronto, saw Mickey as it suited him, although, as his mother later said, he made a practice of calling her on the phone every day.[12] When he did come home, he often brought one or more of his risky “friends.” His parents’ need to continue loving their wayward son allowed people with corrosive ideas, Mickey especially, to have exposure to their younger boys, Alex and Edwin. It was a mistake that would have serious consequences. Maggie MacDonald would live to see the day when all three of her sons were in federal prisons at the same time. Detective-Sergeant Alex McCathie, at least twice a visitor to the MacDonald home in 1935, went there on October 26 and, afterwards, reported:
.... armed with a search warrant and in company with other officers, I had occasion to search the home of the McDonald (sic) family. Upon entering the premises I was assured by Mrs. McDonald that none of the goods outlined in the search warrant were concealed in the premises, but on executing the warrant articles stolen from two shops which had been broken and entered in Toronto, and a store which had been broken and entered in Preston, Ontario, were found in practically every room in the house. Members of the family were found to be wearing stolen clothing, which they admitted had been brought to their home by John Cosgrave, a dangerous shopbreaker, an associate of Donald (Mickey) McDonald....
A further search was made of the premises occupied by one of the McDonald daughters, who was married, and further stolen articles found in her possession....
Previous to this I had contact with the McDonald family as a result of locating a stolen car in their garage...[13]
No one at the house knew anything about the car, and none of the MacDonalds were arrested as receivers of stolen goods by reason of the fact that Maggie MacDonald and two of her minor children appeared as Crown witnesses against Jack Cosgrave at his trial in Preston.
On December 15, 1935, Donald John MacDonald, aged 28, legally married Margaret Holland, a strikingly beautiful 19-year-old girl. In the following months, Margaret — usually as “Mary Wilson” — was charged twice with keeping a disorderly house (a euphemism of the law for keeping a house of prostitution), charged once with vagrancy, and once with public drunkenness. “Kitty Cat,” as Margaret became known on the streets, had a Depression-era job as a prostitute, while Mickey, having borrowed $200 from a bookmaker named Cecil Clancy, tried briefly to make a living as a bookie himself.[14] He soon gave that up and went back to being a thief. A comment on the marriage might be that Kitty tried to commit suicide in October 1936. Maggie MacDonald promised in Toronto Police Court that she would look after her daughter-in-law. “She had some trouble,” Maggie told Magistrate Cowan. According to a story, the trouble was Mickey, who hadn’t quit his philandering ways.
Early on the morning of December 3, 1936, Mickey and Kitty, likely both drunk, were perambulating along Queen Street East near Carlaw Avenue when Kitty chanced to admire some apparel in the window of Pearl Trimball’s Riverdale Ladies Wear. Mickey impetuously decided to show Kitty how easy a “kickin” really was. The police of the nearby Pape Avenue Station arrived in short order, to find the thief still in the store, with 14 overcoats and 3 dresses piled up by a door.[15] Charged with shopbreaking and let out on a $10,000 bond, Mickey promptly absconded bail. He made for Windsor, Ontario, and his friends of the 1920s. There, on January 30, 1937, Mickey, Dolly Quinton, and another man were drinking beer in the tap room of the British-American Hotel with their coats on hangers behind them when someone noticed a revolver showing from a pocket of one of the coats. Windsor detectives soon after arrested all three suspects, since all denied owning the guilty coat. Mickey, who gave the name John Ross of 121 Main Street, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, later flew into an angry “you-don’t-have-to-do-this-to-me” rage at one of the arresting officers and, as part of this, volunteered that the gun-heavy coat was his. The detective’s account of this before Magistrate D.M. Brodie in Windsor Police Court got Mickey a conviction for possession of a revolver without a permit — and a sentence of two years in Kingston. Plainly, as the magistrate said in court, Mickey’s having had too much to say was the reason for his conviction.
Mickey McDonald and wife, Margaret “Kitty Cat” MacDonald (she was always MacDonald), circa 1935–37. This photograph appeared in the late edition of the Telegram of February 24, 1939, the day after Mickey and his brother Alex were charged with the murder of Jimmy Windsor. (York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC07405)