Once again I called my crew together and, just like that, I was back in the game. We met in an abandoned factory, a place I knew wasn’t bugged, and I outlined my plan to get back into the robbery business. Everyone seemed happy. We rolled joints and toasted our renewed partnership. One of the boys raised a pistol in the air and let off a clip, shattering an overhead skylight.
My friend Jerry was about to get married; an occasion that gave me an opportunity to save a little time and do some business with the black crime elite.
Jerry and I sat down with O.J. and Big Joe Patterson to work out how to share power and divide up our areas of interest. It took a couple of hours.
I gave up my leadership position to Joe. With leadership comes responsibility, and with crime leadership comes fear of arrest, concerns about power, and worry about getting killed by other gangs. He was welcome to it.
Instead, I went back to planning the things I was good at: robbing card games, jewellery stores and banks, as well as loan sharks and drug pushers. Oh yes, and breakins – I was fond of furs and cigarettes.
My crew, as before, was multi-racial.
That requires a bit of explanation. In the hierarchy of the time, black Nova Scotians were suspicious of Jamaicans. That dated back to 1796, when a shipload of legendary fighters of mixed Indian and African race called Maroons were deported from Jamaica after rising up against their colonial masters. They ended up in Halifax, where they were set to work building the city’s defences. They swaggered around town. They were arrogant and received better pay. None of that sat well with Scotian blacks.
Even now, when a Jamaican walks into a Scotian function they are not exactly made welcome, and that’s 400 years of living history right there. We respected American blacks more in my day, but I was pragmatic, and I was an equal-opportunity leader. We tolerated West Indians in my crew.
Owen introduced me to a friend of his named Carrie Burke, and asked that he be included. I’d have to devise a test for him. I don’t trust anyone without making certain.
Not even you.
When my hearing on the weapons charge came up it became apparent that there was no established case law concerning Nunchakus. An entire morning was wasted with legal wrangling.
After lunch, my lawyers, David Newman and Michael Morse, invoked a bit of theatre, walking, into the courtroom with a couple of unconventional exhibits. Newman had two fence pickets joined by a chain, and Morse had two toothpicks held together by a piece of string; both were Nunchakus, according to the written definition of the law.
They demanded to be arrested and put in the box with Diane and me. Everyone burst out laughing until the judge asked if I was on Legal Aid. I was not.
“These arguments are costing Mr. Atkinson a considerable amount of money,” observed His Honour. “Between the four of us, we have well over one hundred years’ experience in the law. Why don’t I remand this case over until tomorrow, while we go over to the law library and find a solution to this problem?”
He said the law library, but I have a hunch he meant a bar across the street where they could kick around jurisprudence, toss back some Scotch and decide my fate.
The next morning the judge said – and even though it was more than thirty years ago, my recollection of what he said is clear – “Mr. Atkinson, since you had just gotten out of prison, and since this law is new, then we can assume you may not have had access to any news articles or information that would have kept you abreast of the law concerning the possession of Nunchakus. In this case, ignorance of the law is an excuse I can accept.”
My charges were tossed but Diane had not been in prison when the law was made so she could have had access to the information; as a result, he fined her $100 and discharged her, upon which the Crown attorney argued that a probation order be attached to the fine in case she didn’t pay.
I guess this stuff counts as legal cleverness.
I handed Newman a $100 bill. He paid the fine. We were free. I went back to work.
I began to case a bank. I had noticed a hole in the security at one branch that I felt we could exploit. Whenever a Brink’s van delivered bags of money, the guards left the bag on the floor of the open vault, in plain view. It happened like that more than once, a habit born of complacency.
I sent Owen the Crook. He simply jumped the counter, snatched the bag and ran right out the back door. Carrie, who was waiting for him in the alley, took the money and walked off between some houses.
I was the one setting out the goals and objectives. To carry out the action plans, I picked men who had both the skills and the motivation to do what needed to be done. By making sure everyone knew their roles and their responsibilities, I became a CEO of crime.
Guys who needed money were asking me to set things up for them. Hey, you’re getting married. Need some money for a wedding ring? Here’s a jewellery store.
We were efficient at hijacking trucks full of anything people in the neighbourhood might like to buy. There were trailers filled with useful items like toilet paper. There were “reefers” – refrigerated trucks – full of meat or cheese or peanut butter or olive oil etc. were especially profitable.
It’s all knowledge and planning.
Owen knew some hippies who were selling coke and weed, so I sent him and another member of the crew to take them down.
Spence needed some money. He had his eye on a credit union, so I planned that one and sent my cousin Tommy and another guy to take care of it. It took thirty seconds in total. The bandits got $20,000. Spence and I took a cut of five grand each.
Shakey was always hungry for cash. He was using speed and playing with whores, so his needs were constant. I sent him and a friend of his to take down a jewellery store. They grabbed just over $200,000 in gold. I dropped the haul off with a fence and took a twenty percent cut, which we split three ways.
Then one of our guys, Skippy, spotted a truck filled with cigarettes. We took it in the middle of the night, sold the smokes for thirty percent of retail and walked away laughing.
One day I noticed a fur store on Spadina where the alarm wasn’t working properly – for some reason there was a delay. We spun the lock on the front door, rushed in and took as many coats as we could in the forty-five seconds it took for the alarm to ring. That bit of business netted just over $300,000 in furs, which I sold for twenty percent, splitting the money with everyone involved.
You might not think so but even as I planned, tested and executed each score I was still clinging to the hope that I’d be free of crime one day, and able to concentrate full-time on boxing. Teddy McWhirter had given me the skills to step in the ring with anyone and hold my own. I had yet to be knocked down, or knocked out. I hadn’t been stopped or taken a standing eight-count or been hurt in any way. The future looked good, although the toll of working on scores sapped me of energy best spent in the ring.
But so much of life is chance.
One night, while I was smoking joints with some whores, one of them blurted that she had a kinky trick who worked in the movie industry. He’d told her there was a growing need for makeup artists who could do prosthetic work. She was thinking of taking a course, which got me thinking.
Makeup, serious professional makeup, was a skill I could use. My skills at disguise were useful, but crude. So, I found a course at a modelling agency and signed up.
I was the only guy in a class of ten girls, and Marg Harlang seemed pleased that I was making something of myself.
A while later, I bumped into a pretty redhead named Cindy at the Paddock Tavern. She was in a bit of a jam. She wanted to get away from her pimp and she said she’d pay me if I pretended I was her man.
I already had a lovely woman who stood by me when I was in the slammer – and I didn’t need the hassle of managing a whore but she was easy to look at and it was possible that the relationship might prove fruitful.
Her pimp was a tall white guy I’d spent years in prison with. When he walked in I took him aside and told him the bad news – his woman was now my woman.
That’s the nature of the game. One minute you had a woman sweet as pie who treated you like a king and paid your bills. The next minute, you were on your own, looking to start over.
I moved Cindy into an apartment a block away from mine, and hired two lawyers to handle my upcoming trial. I wasn’t entirely happy about being labelled a pimp, but neither did I see anything wrong with managing business for a girl who chose to make her living pulling tricks.
I didn’t see anything morally wrong, not with my family background. I hadn’t put her in the game, and I wasn’t the one encouraging her to continue, I was merely looking out for her interests. All in a day’s work for a man on the edge of society, who also happened to have relatives in the business.
I often took Cindy with me to makeup class, to practice on her. A kick, really – the other girls were no different, looking to catch the attention of men or women to further their interests. Plus, I was the only player in the city who could do a makeup job on his woman before she hit the streets.
Cindy, you might like to know, got in touch via Facebook some thirty years later. She was still attractive and still had that youthful sparkle in her eye. Soon after we parted company, she left her old life and started a business making floral arrangements for special occasions.
I got full parole, as I expected, but it was clear that I needed more money than Cindy could provide. We parted company and I began to take stock and get busy.
One job from that time stands out because it had all the hallmarks of my work, using tricks of the trade I’d learned thanks to a government rat, Warren Hart.
We decided to take the bank in Kensington Market. It was the only bank there. Everyone used it, so it was always full of cash, so much that on Monday mornings the Brink’s truck would arrive and just back up to the front door whereupon they would unload sacks of cash for a full fifteen minutes.
I’d had my eye on it for years.
I hired eleven guys for that job.
The Market is a compact couple of blocks. It was easy enough to block off all the streets with stolen cars in such a way that nobody – not even the cops – could get in.
I parked a van in front of the bank to protect the guys inside. The idea was to go in the front and come out the back, escaping through the laneway. At night, the cops would never catch us.
I filled the van with tires, and I put a bomb inside, rigged to go off on a timer: hit a switch, and the bomb would explode a minute later. The noise would be a shocker. The burning tires would give us a smoke screen.
When that bomb went off, I would call the fire department and tell them how to get in, which was through a parking lot. I wanted a diversion, not a conflagration, and the presence of the fire trucks would also impede the cops.
I had a second explosion planned to go off as we escaped: another pile of tires, soaked with gasoline, which we would detonate using certain chemicals. Toss, and boom.
Brian’s job was to call time.
Shit happens. He called time too soon and the guys on the inside only managed to get two boxes of mostly cheques. All we made for all that work was about what an average doctor would make for a day’s work saving lives when any one us could have lost ours. It was the least amount of money and the most number of guys I ever used on a score.
The only pleasure I got from that job?
I was standing by the brick wall in the Projects. From there I could see a cop standing on top of his car, jumping up and down, screaming into his walkie-talkie.
One of the things he said? “I seen three black guys with guns.” I know what he said because we were tapping into their conversations.
Around that time, the cops were calling us the Nightmare Bandits, not just because we often worked at night, but also because we really were a nightmare for them.
I read a warning later from a cop psychologist who was quoted in the news, along these lines: “Whoever did this has to be approached with caution. He doesn’t want to be caught. He’s thinking at another level, several steps ahead of anything you can think of.”
In other words, be careful.
That was useful to us in another way. It sent a message to the other gangs about how organized and determined we were. If we could seal off the Market and take it down, think of what we could do to any gang that challenged us.
A while later, my cousin Shakey was on my case to rob a jewellery store. He wanted his little brother Mike as one of the gunmen. I was greedy for some easy money, so I gave in and began to plan the score.
I spent a couple of days driving around the city, looking for a location with minimal risk for Shakey. I wanted something easy, so that Mike would not feel the need to shoot anyone.
Shakey had ideas of his own.
There was a jewellery store near Queen and Spadina. That’s a busy corner with lots of citizens. Cops from 14 and 52 Divisions were always patrolling around there. Nobody wants to work under those conditions, especially with an untrained and untested guy. Shakey assured me his brother was capable enough.
The score had to go down flawlessly. Two robbers had to pass muster at the door and be buzzed in by security. My skills as a makeup artist had to be top drawer.
A third robber would be behind the building outside of store’s back door, equipped with empty bags, a hammer and a shotgun. When the front-end robbers got into the store, their job was to jack up the owner immediately, run to the back door, get it open and grab the hammer and the bags. That was to be followed by the smashing open of the cases and then stealing as much as possible before running out the back and escape down the lane. Textbook, really.
I sent Shakey to the Malabar costume house on McCaul Street. He came back with three masks. With a little modification, two of them made perfect disguises. But the third one, a gorilla head, made me wonder about him.
I thought we should wait and get another mask.
Shakey argued that, as the back-door man, only the store owner would see the gorilla mask, so it didn’t really make a difference what he wore. His brother Mike and a second gunman – we’ll call him Billy – agreed.
I shrugged; everything was set. The cars were stolen and waiting in place. There was a fence down the block, waiting to buy the gems. All the alibis had been taken care of.
They were the ones taking the risk, so I gave my approval.
But crime often fails for reasons beyond anyone’s ability to foresee complications; in this case, things began to go wrong right off the bat.
Mike didn’t come to the back door quickly enough, so Shakey ran around the front to see what was going on, wrestling with his gorilla mask while at the same time hanging onto his shotgun, running along the sidewalk of the busy street.
He got to the front of the store just in time to see Billy and Mike make their entrance, so he rushed around to the back in front of hundreds of shoppers, ready to take care of his end of the robbery.
I repeat: In his gorilla mask. In broad daylight. With a shotgun.
In spite of all that, the score went off without anyone getting hurt or arrested. I took the jewellery to the fence and put the score behind me, thinking that would be the last I’d hear of it. But the Hold-Up Squad doesn’t forget about victims who’ve had guns waved in their faces, and they were turning over every lead they could in order to find the robbers; that is, us.
Now here’s a thing, and it has an echo: Diane was working at the Magic Pan restaurant in the Eaton Centre. I was taking her to work one day, as usual, with the idea that I could case the Birks jewellery store at the same time. O.J. was in the back seat, having begged a lift downtown.
As we made out way east on King Street, at Jameson – a nasty little corner – two detectives walked into the street and approached the car, waving at me to pull over.
The copper on my side levelled his gun at my head, shouting: “Don’t fucking move or I’ll blow your head off.” At the same time, I could see a detective had his gun trained on O.J. Both cops walked alongside the car through the intersection until I pulled to the curb.
They searched the car and they searched us and they found nothing. The copper said, “Okay, everything is fine, you can go.” And they walked away. Just like that. As if it was normal.
O.J. was rattled. He said, “If I ever ask you for a lift again, tell me ‘no.’”
Here’s the echo.
A week or two later, on a wet Friday night, I was driving to the Paramount Tavern with Diane when O.J. saw me on the street and flagged me down for a lift. I wouldn’t have acted as a cab driver for anyone except O.J., so I stopped, backed up, flipped the lock and he opened the door so my woman could jump into the back seat.
He hopped in next to me, pulled out a bag of weed and passed it back to Diane. I eased into traffic, with my window down, listening to O.J. talk about this and that, mainly about bands. I turned left on Queen Street and was sliding down Portland when another car pulled up alongside us. Before I knew what was going on, I was looking at the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun, inches from my face.
Detective Pat Kelly was leaning out of the back window of an unmarked car while another detective held him around the waist to steady him in case he had to shoot.
He sneered at me. “Ricky, pull over slowly or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” O.J., who had his head in the bag of weed, thought we were being jacked up. Without bothering to look, he said, “Fuck them!”
I said, “You tell them that.”
I leaned back so he could see Kelly’s shotgun.
O.J. panicked. His pockets were full of pills. He began stuffing his mouth full of weed with one hand, and with the other he was spilling and scattering pills all over the floor of my car and out the window.
I pulled over slowly. The cop slammed his car into park and jumped out screaming, gun pointed at us. Kelly leaped out the back but he caught his heel on something, his shoe flying off as he stumbled forward.
Steady on, boys. Let’s be professional.
And then a gaggle of other cop cars came squealing up, hemming us in, and there was a shotgun aimed at my head again, and I saw Kelly’s shoe on the street in the rain, and I wondered why I couldn’t have a normal job like most people.
“Ricky, get the fuck out with your hands up!”
I eased my way out of the T-bird, followed by O.J. and Diane, all of us with our hands up. Uniformed officers surrounded us.
One of the uniforms, a rookie, ran past me to cover Diane and O.J. It was a stupid move. Kelly yelled at him to duck, because he was going to shoot. The rookie dropped to one knee, and Kelly came up to me and pressed the 12-gauge into my chest. Kelly turned his head slightly and yelled at the rookie. “This fucker is a marksman. He’d blow us away if he had the chance. Don’t you ever run in front of my gun again.”
Oh, please, let’s all just relax.
When we were cuffed and patted down, Kelly unloaded his shotgun and placed five fat shells on the roof of his car, grabbed me in a headlock and walked me roughly around to the trunk. His thoughts mirrored my own.
“Ricky, you fucking asshole, why don’t you find another job? This shit is crazy, man.” And then he added, “I know for a fact that you were the gorilla. We’ll kill you if we get the chance. Pack it in before it’s too late.”
I didn’t want to tell him he was wrong. I just looked at the guy and grinned.
Kelly ordered the rookies to take O.J. and me to 14 Division, and then he jumped into the T-bird with Diane; they headed for my place, followed by the unmarked car, to search for evidence.
On the way to 14 Division, O.J. said, quietly, “Ricky, I don’t say a word when we hit the cop shop.” He was implying that I shouldn’t say anything, either.
I took it as an insult.
When we got to the police station, we were stripped, searched and put in separate interrogation rooms. After an hour or so, I heard O.J. telling the detectives he was a pimp and not a robber, that he didn’t know anything about any robberies. Every time they asked him a question, he spun them an answer until, finally, they finished with him and came for me.
I took note of my surroundings. There was blood on the walls and on the floor of the room I was in, but I wasn’t worried about being beaten. I had boxed professionally. I was a street fighter. Also, they knew I had no fear and that changed everything.
Detective Kelly had a brown envelope that contained everything that I’d been carrying. He dumped it out on the table – a wad of cash, maybe a thousand dollars, along with my parole card, my driver’s licence, and twenty tickets to a boxing match that George Chuvalo was promoting; I’d taken the tickets to help George out.
Kelly picked up the tickets and looked at the other cops. “You guys want to go to the fights?” They nodded. He reached for his wallet. I waved him off. I didn’t want his money.
He started by asking me where I was on the day of the gorilla mask robbery. I stared at him.
“Come on, Ricky, play the game, don’t be a prick. I’ve got to file a report. Give us something to write down.”
I said, “Pat, can I call my lawyer, Michael Morse?” He made a fist and for a second I thought he was going to hit me. He sparred at the Lans-downe Gym. I knew some of the fighters there, and I knew he could hit. I didn’t give him the chance.
I made a fist of my own and smashed it into my face as hard as I could, and then I ran my fingers across my lips to let him know I wasn’t going to talk under any circumstances.
The other cops seemed surprised.
One of them said, “Pat, anyone who beats himself up worse than we would has got to be crazy.”
Kelly said, “He’s not crazy.” He took the tickets out of his pocket, threw them at me and left the room.
He was finished for the moment. I was free to go home. Picking up my belongings, I stuffed them in my jacket. As I was leaving, I saw them turn O.J. loose.
“Pat, where’s my car?” I asked.
“It’s at your place,” he said. “You want a ride home?” A little cop sarcasm. I declined his kind offer.
Outside the station, I had words with O.J. “You played me, man – if it happens again, we’re going to be rolling and rocking. You were going to keep your mouth shut, but I heard every word you said. What did you hear me say?”
He hadn’t heard me say a thing.
I left him standing there and hailed a cab. When I got home, Diane was putting the apartment back together in the wake of the search.
I still had to report to the halfway house at night. They did half-hour checks all night long, to make sure we were still in our beds.
One night I heard the woman on duty open the door and I saw her peek in. I could tell in the half-light that she’d been crying. I put on my robe and went downstairs to ask if she was okay. She was a university student, working on her sociology degree. Her cheeks were wet as she ran her fingers through her Afro. She said she hadn’t been paid for two months, and she was behind in her rent. She was such an idealist that she was stressing out over the thought that she might have to abandon us to save herself.
Oh, great – Josiah Henson House, the first black halfway house in Canada had money management problems.
I took $500 out of the pocket of my robe and gave it to her. She said she’d pay me back, but I stopped her short. There was no way I wanted anyone to know I’d paid her to keep me locked up.
“Think of it as a secret grant,” I told her. “One you don’t have to pay back.”
Four days later, the Mounties swooped in and shut the house down. Apparently, the supervisor had conned the government into giving him a cheque to cover a year’s expenses; he then took the money and ran off to Dominica. Turns out he donated it to the island’s communist party.
All the other parolees went back to the Don Jail to wait for space to open up elsewhere but, because I was four days away from my release date, my parole officer let me go.
I wasn’t free because I was still on parole, but I was free enough. Diane and I hopped in the car and snuck off to New York, then to Cleveland and Detroit.
We were stopped a couple of times and let go. I could have been slapped with a parole violation, but in those days nobody was worried about a Canadian convict having a peaceful good time, and there was no such thing as Homeland Security.
After my little vacation, I went back to work. I began to make a bunch of bombs. I wasn’t sure why. I just thought they might come in handy. I also began to collect a stash of guns and ammunition. Because you never know.
Bert Novis knocked on the door one day. He was with another detective. I let them in. They looked around and found a metal box with 1,000 rounds of ammunition, all calibres. Having ammo – even that much ammo – was not against the law, but he took it anyway and said I had major heat – his.
He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know; they were on us all the time. But what does a cop learn from a box of bullets? He knew what kind of weapons we had access to. He knew that some of the bullets were armour piercing.
And I knew it meant there would be increased heat.
I’d been making plans to rob Brink’s trucks. I’d follow their routes, watching drops and pick-ups, but my plans went out the window in a hurry one day. As I was watching a driver make deliveries, I spotted someone in a parked car watching me with binoculars.
I called my brothers and asked them to do a little counter-surveillance. Turns out I was being watched by Brink’s security. They were watching us, and they were tailing us, which meant that I was not only being watched by all the Squads - Hold-Up, B&E, and Organized Crime – but by private security as well. They all had guns, and they all had the power to shoot a guy like me. It was tiring. I had to be alert at all times. But I was soon to get a rest, not one of choice.
A few days later, I was picked up on possession of burglar’s tools and taken to the Don Jail. The fact that I’d applied for a locksmith’s course– and had some books on the subject and a set of picks – didn’t seem to matter.
Or maybe it was all that mattered.
They transferred me to Kingston to wait for a bail hearing. When my turn came around, the judges asked the Crown if there were any break-and-enter charges to go along with the possession of the tools. The Crown shrugged, the police glared, and the judge tossed the charges.
You can see how the game is played, and why some people become cynical – do me for something I’ve done, not for something you think I might do.
Diane was waiting for me in the van when they let me go. I hadn’t had a woman in five weeks, and there were things I wanted to do before we pulled away. I guess the guards saw the van rocking and, before too long, I heard a handful of rocks crash down on the roof. I opened the door and looked out.
A guard called down from the prison wall, “This ain’t a hotel; get that van out of here.” I got back in and went back to rocking, but I was not rocking long before four guards walked over and banged on the doors. They said I better get off the property or be charged with trespassing.
I wasn’t too concerned, but I didn’t want to face the parole board again. We headed for Toronto.