Jericho Page 8

  No more than a couple of blocks down from the BA was the Prince Edward Hotel. It was near the entrance to the Tunnel, which people called the Funnel. Windsor was the wide end where you poured in all the booze, Detroit was the narrow end where it came out all day and night. The Prince Eddy was a big modern place with a plain front like a face with no expression. Very ritzy. Some of Snaketown’s most prominent individuals kept rooms there full-time. That’s one of the signs of a city, you know: when people live in hotels and leave their shoes out at night to be polished and come down in the morning and always get a cigar at the stand in the lobby, even if it’s a cigar for later, and always find a cab right outside. That’s practically the whole definition of Civilization. That’s the way we used to think when I was a young fellow your age. The fashion back then was for wide, wide trousers. I had a pair with twenty-four-inch cuffs, can you believe it, and a crease you could shave your face with.

  [Lonnie laughed one of those laughs that sounded like it might turn into a wheeze or something even worse.]

  My buddies and I would go over to Detroit to drink and chase the girls and listen to the bands. We’d always start out at Woodward and Monroe and end up someplace in the Circus. But that’s another story. I was starting to tell you about Cappy Smith, about the murder of Cappy Smith. He was the same age as me when he got deep-freezed the night after I went looking for him because I had overheard that bad things were going to happen. So I always felt that I was living out the rest of my days on his behalf, if you know what I mean. They got him while he sat having dinner with his girlfriend and her family in an ordinary-looking house. Four men, at least two with kerchiefs over the lower part of their faces, busted into the kitchen. Words were exchanged. One guy shot Cappy in the gut with a .45, then kicked him in the face and ribs. Another one robbed him of a few thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery and cash. Cappy and the intruders all seemed to be acquainted, though Cappy refused to identify them during the half-hour he had left to live. It didn’t look like the usual robbery. What it looked like was people from Detroit were delivering a message to the Mayor of Snaketown.

  This was an incredibly big story at the time because there hadn’t been a really high-class gangster killing on the Canadian side in a very long while. Lots of sledgehammer stuff, but no killing. Even the Toronto papers went real big with it. Especially the Toronto papers. They all had people down here, swarming over the place. I remember that the front page of the Globe and Mail next morning had a black banner headline with type two inches tall: WINDSOR GANG WAR CLIMAXED BY MURDER. The papers were all sensational in those days, not that there wasn’t stuff to get sensational about. Aside from the fellows involved, I was probably one of the last couple dozen people to see Cappy alive. I really got scared I was going to be dragged into it somehow.

  Cappy lived right here where we’re talking now, at the Dempster. Needless to say it was quite the place in those days. Big lobby with a humidor and all the out-of-town papers. It was owned by Harry Hourmouzis, long dead, who already had another hotel not far away. He was a well-known Lebanese all-round athlete. Not a professional, but he’d played baseball in an amateur league—that kind of thing. You were always reading his name in the sports pages of the Border Cities Star. His other place, the Royal, which still had an old sign on it that said YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME, was a centre of betting activity. By this I mean playing the ponies. The numbers racket was pretty much confined to certain segments of the population, but people all over the city, hell, all over the country, were nuts about betting on the horses in those days, even more than people are now about pro sports and lotteries put together. Besides the two tracks here, there were the four tracks in Toronto—the original Woodbine, Thorncliffe, Long Branch and Dufferin—plus of course Fort Erie and Hamilton. But this wasn’t enough to satisfy folks back then, and they bet on races at all the American tracks too. There was even one betting shop in downtown Windsor that broadcast the radio results over loudspeakers outside. The cop walking the beat would hear all this stuff about the fourth at Narragansett and he’d have to just carry on like he was hard of hearing. The rumour—that’s what we called the truth in those days—was that the Lebanese was paying some of the people at the station house to play deaf.

  Of course there would be raids from time to time. Usually they fell on a Tuesday. That’s because a certain Protestant minister would preach a sermon on Sunday about the evils of gambling and the Star would publish it the following day. But the raids never seemed to surprise anybody. Least of all the Lebanese, who had long since expanded into fancy gambling clubs where there were crap tables and roulette and so on, in addition to bookmaking. Later someone set up a rival spot, the St. Clair Sporting Club. In these places outside the city limits, the rumours were about the politicians and the provincial cops instead of certain people on the Windsor force.

  Remember, this was in the forties, before you could buy a legal drink of liquor in a cocktail bar in this province, despite the way it had supplied booze to half of America all during the twenties and into the thirties. Once in the late thirties a friend of mine, a grown man, actually got pinched for buying tobacco on a Sunday. It wasn’t the tobacco that was illegal; it was doing business on a Sunday. Of course he was a nobody like me. Rules like that didn’t apply to the Mayor of Snaketown or the Lebanese, who, everybody said, were friends of the working man, real square dealers. But this reputation took a quick tumble when, after one of the newspaper “crusades,” the cops raided the Lebanese’s permanent suite at the Prince Edward (the Lebanese didn’t live in his own hotel). They missed him—he got away through a back door—but he dropped a key that turned out to fit one of the security boxes in the hotel safe. They got a court order to open it. What they found was a box full of loaded dice. They looked and felt like regular dice, but no matter how long you rolled them you got nothing but sevens and elevens.

  Besides the gambling there was the prostitution. A carryover from the horse-and-buggy days was the rule that to get a beer parlour licence you needed to qualify as a hotel and have sleeping rooms upstairs. Even the smallest beer parlour had at least three of these rooms. This was a great bonanza to the neighbourhood as the rooms were rented out to whores by the hour. The morality cops especially made prostitution raids, but the business was so spread out and so tied up with the gambling that it couldn’t be separated out nicely. There was a lot of jockeying for power, if you’ll pardon my play on words. Cappy Smith, a former beer-runner and one-time boxer (though he was just a short guy), was an example. He was a muscle type that would put the squeeze on some of the pimps—you know, for a rake-off—while also making book. As the investigation developed, it came to look like bigger fry were putting the squeeze on him in return. This is his story as best I can remember it, and I think I remember it pretty clearly.

  Like I was telling you, when Cappy went in the Frigidaire it was big news. There were gangsters in Canada but Canada was also a place where American gangsters liked to come to play or hide out. There were reliable witnesses that saw no less than Al Capone in Windsor briefly, about the time he was having his tax troubles in Chicago, where more than five hundred hoodlums got killed by other gangsters during the fourteen years that the Volstead Act was in force. (Five hundred killings, a few arrests, no convictions.) It’s a wonder that it took twenty years from the start of American Prohibition for this particular form of public entertainment, what the papers called the gangland slaying, to arrive in Canada, which is what was happening in the Cappy Smith case if you believed what you read, which nobody in their right mind did in those days. I saved the clippings.

  [Lonnie picked up an old scrapbook. The paste had shrunk, making the pages curl.]

  It says here that “the murder of Smith was swiftly followed by one of the greatest manhunts in Canada’s criminal annals.” This meant they were rounding up all the rounders they knew and throwing them in the tank overnight on vagrancy charges. The cops were told to bring in Eyetalians especially. (That’s how
the word was pronounced back then—and Cappy’s real name wasn’t Smith, needless to say, it was something like Cappy Vermicelli.) Cappy’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend and her family had told the investigating officers that the gang that burst into the house “looked like Eyetalians.” When they finally broke the case, the two suspects were Scots, the MacLeod brothers—Donald, who was about thirty and was always called Mickey, and Sandy, who was only nineteen. To tell their story I’ve got to tell you more about how things were run in those days.

  Gangs looked to gambling and girls and were always trying to figure some way to control the whole pot in both rackets. But this was hard to do because of how everything was divided up not just according to neighbourhoods but street corner by street corner. You’d never see the Lebanese down around the Dempster here. He may have been here, but you’d never see him. He was the big cheese, but he had I don’t know how many little cheeses working for him all over downtown. Cappy was one of them. Cappy also owned a little roadhouse of his own outside the city (it was famous for its barbecue), but he made his public appearances, conducted his real business, at the Prince Eddy coffee shop, a great place in those days, run by a husband and wife. The wife personally made all the desserts and pastries, including a wonderful pineapple pie. I think she invented it. I’ve never seen it on any other menu and I never pass that corner even now without tasting it.

  As late as noon on the day before he was killed, Cappy came into the Prince Eddy like a banker and six or eight runners took their turn going up to his table and giving him the betting slips they’d collected. He’d pay them their ten percent—that’s why they were called commission men—and then he’d phone in the bets and settle up what he had to pay out. He was a very powerful person in about a one-block radius of where he sat drinking the same thing every day: black coffee. Which is probably how come the MacLeods or whoever killed him heard about him. They saw he carried a fat roll of banknotes and wore more fancy jewellery than you’d see in a really good pawnshop window. The cops knew all about Cappy too. The previous August, his suite had been raided. They were looking for betting slips but didn’t find anything because all the paper had been burned. Being so unsuccessful, the cops hadn’t released this event to the press. Which is one reason why hardly any Citizens seemed to have heard of Cappy Smith until he got toe-tagged. The main reason, though, was that he was a big fish only in this one small stretch of pond.

  The papers, which never seemed to get anything right and didn’t seem to care, quoted one of Cappy’s commission men saying that Cappy was killed because he’d refused to pay another twenty-five dollars a week in extortion money to some new muscle. That sounded pretty lame to me, as we knew he was already paying thousands a year in protection.Another source claimed he was exterminated because he’d refused to pay off on a race he thought was fixed. There were also stories, no surprise, tying the murder to characters from Detroit. Theories like that were always being floated.

  But the first pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place only three days after Cappy’s death, though the connection wasn’t obvious at the time. In November 1938, three men and a woman broke into the Snaketown apartment of one James Senior, respected hoodlum and convicted armed robber, roughed him up a little and stole an awful lot of beer, whisky and gin. The complaint was laid by a character who was identified as the money man in Senior’s operation. Before leaving, the assailants ripped the telephone from the wall, just like the guys who killed Cappy later did. Those charged by the Crown were Joseph Coppalano (an Eyetalian!), John (the Bug) Howard, a prominent holdup artist, Mickey MacLeod (who had been in Kingston Pen as recently as two weeks before) and Mickey’s wife or girlfriend, Margaret MacLeod, known to everybody as Muff. On January 11, the day before Cappy’s funeral (an event so quiet, the Globe said, that it “might have been the funeral of a little-known labouring man”), Coppalano, the Bug and Mickey were found guilty. Muff, who was quite a looker, was found innocent. Only a few days later, Muff was back in court, testifying that Coppalano, the Bug and six others had beaten her, and two female roommates, after busting into their apartment, which was apparently not a domicile she shared with Mickey. You follow me?

  At this point no one had pinned Cappy’s murder on Mickey, and so the raiding of bookie joints and the dragnet of suspects all over the city went on some more, except that by now it moved far beyond people suspected of being Eyetalian and became a crackdown on gambling and liquor in general. These were the two greatest evils to the idiot chief constable, who believed, for example, that bookmakers should be given the lash. He had been brought in right around the time Yankee Prohibition ended to straighten out the force, which had gone through a big corruption scandal. He was puffed up in all his glory with news stories about raids on a Snaketown address that netted a bank of twenty phones with their bells removed. Hundreds of people got questioned and a lot of them arrested in various parts of the city—a dozen in one twenty-four-hour period. The Chief called this real progress and asked the politicians for a budget increase. The fact that the grieving witnesses to Cappy’s murder weren’t able to identify any of the dozen in a lineup didn’t seem to matter. Finally, during the last week of February, after about six weeks of putting people in the Box, Mickey and Sandy were charged with Cappy’s murder—Mickey as the trigger man. Both, the public learned, had been free on bail, for different crimes (in Mickey’s case, a liquor hijacking, in Sandy’s, a Sarnia bank robbery) when Cappy was killed.

  Mickey, who was a better criminal than his kid brother and a known associate of Cappy’s in happier days, was suspected first. The Chief ordered Mickey kept in jail as long as possible, while other prisoners who were passed through were transferred to Kingston as their cases were disposed of. The theory was that if he was confined in one place long enough, he would mention the crime to a fellow inmate, though this is not precisely what the Crown would base its case on. Meanwhile, the heat stayed turned way up, particularly along the streets of Snaketown, as the cops were trying to make the other pair in the case. The MacLeods had separate counsel. Mickey’s was one of the sharpest criminal lawyers in the city. His death a year later, of a heart attack at only fifty-six, was a loss to all those who like to watch a clever lawyer doing his work. At one of the pre-trial appearances (there were several remands), he tried to convince the police court magistrate to charge a reporter with contempt of court for printing information leaked to him by the cops, but the magistrate responded that the lawyer himself was more likely to be in contempt. Mickey blurted out: “We’re being framed, kangarooed—there isn’t any justice.”

  A couple of weeks later, at the preliminary hearing, one of the longest anybody around here could remember, two men took the witness box and claimed that they’d heard Mickey say hours after the crime that he had just killed a bookmaker. The two men were John Cecil and Jack Odeon. Odeon was the son of a cop and was awaiting trial on a bank robbery charge at the moment he remembered this; Cecil ran a hand-book but right then wasn’t being charged with anything as far as I can recall. Odeon claimed the brothers had both been armed when they set out for the job, Mickey with a .38 and Sandy with a .45, but that they switched guns at some point along the way. The cops found the dealer who said he’d sold a box of .45 shells to somebody like Mickey and the bullets were the same make as the one picked out of Cappy’s intestines during the autopsy. Plus they lined up two bystanders who claimed to have witnessed the transaction, and the Crown introduced all this evidence. This was once the brothers’ joint trial actually got underway in Assize Court in May 1939. The trial would get an amazing amount of attention considering that it took place during the Royal Tour of Their Majesties the King and Queen.

  [I looked this up and Lonnie was right. I gotta say though that for somebody with a lot of facts in his old head he sure got mixed up on his dates a lot. There’s no telling when some of this stuff happened. I guess old people are like that.]

  Mickey’s lawyer objected a lot and kept finding obscure points of la
w. Once he charged that the police “deliberately suppressed information that should have been in the Crown’s hands.” He was aggressive that way. No surprise he often seemed to be squaring off with the judge, who would insult him outright every now and again. At another place in the trial, one of the jurors, overcome by the stuffiness of the room and the fact that the testimony was getting kind of gruesome, fell out of his chair like a parrot falling off a perch. A medical doctor, who happened to be testifying at that moment, had to shout out first aid instructions from the box. By then it was clear that the defence lawyer planned on trying to prove that the brothers were not at the murder house at the time of the crime. He produced a witness who testified he saw the brothers both ass-over-electric-kettle drunk at the Egyptian on the night in question when the murder was known to have taken place only ten minutes before, miles away. In a strange bit of business, or maybe it was extra insurance, the lawyer called the lads’ father to testify. The old man said he didn’t know where Mickey was on the night of the murder but Sandy had been home all evening listening to the radio. The lawyer also introduced evidence that went against what Cecil and Odeon had already said. He also charged that Odeon was known to police as one of the killers but, as Sandy’s lawyer said, had been “induced to lie” in exchange for his freedom. But none of this quite washed. All five people that were witnesses to the murder picked out Mickey as the killer and Sandy as his accomplice.

  After two weeks, the Crown surprised everybody including the bench by resting its case without calling Odeon or Cecil to testify. Mickey’s lawyer was caught off guard, flummoxed. He was mad, but he and his associate fought on for several more days and then finally rested their defence. Muff MacLeod visited the press room in City Hall to flirt with the reporters while the jury was out. The verdict came back about eleven at night. Sandy MacLeod, not guilty. Mickey MacLeod, guilty. Two months later to the day, Mickey got sentenced to hang.