You could tell from the tone of her letter, sent to Mayor Allan Lamport of Toronto in September 1952, that the lady was interested and engaged.
My dear Lamprey [sic],
The “Over Sixty Club” desires to express its sincere sympathy in the dilemma in which you find yourself today.
We realize that the full blame for the jailbreak should not be resting on your shoulders even if you did appoint a controller’s brother to a post for which he was quite unfitted.
Here is a smart tip for the raising of funds to pay for a new prison.… When the wretches are rounded up why not have a public hanging of all four on a Sunday afternoon in front of the grand stand at Exhibition Park? People would come from far and wide to participate in such a gala festival and seats would sell for as much as choice vantage points along the coronation route.
Think it over Lamprey. The idea will make you famous.
Sincerely yours,
Margt S. Rogers,
Secy.
The four wretches referred to by the secretary of the Over Sixty Club were Edwin Alonzo Boyd, Leonard Jackson, Willie Jackson, and Steve Suchan, collectively known as the Boyd Gang. The mayor’s dilemma was that on September 8, 1952, the foursome had collectively escaped from death row in the Don Jail, three of them (incredibly) for the second time. The unkindest cut for Mayor Lamport was that he was being accused of something completely beyond his control.
The fiery and outspoken mayor had already made his feelings crystal clear, calling the administration of the jail “the operation of a bunch of morons,” so it was perhaps a wise idea to delegate his response to this letter and the dozens of others he received after the jailbreak to his more diplomatic executive assistant: “As you assume, the blame for this occurrence does not rest with the City as the operation of the jail comes within the jurisdiction of the Provincial authorities, who appoint the Jail Governor and the guards. The City had nothing whatever to do with the appointment of the Controller’s brother to the post of Jail Governor.”
Moreover, added the executive assistant, “I am afraid that your suggestion regarding a public hanging of the four escapees, when recaptured, would not meet with the approval of the public, whom [sic], I am sure, would consider this an indecent and inhuman method of carrying out any death sentence that might be imposed. In any event, of course, the City has not any jurisdiction over such matters.”
The headlines on page 1 of the September 8 edition of the Toronto Daily Star blazed out the news in three lines of bold print that filled a third of the page:
REWARD $4,000 FOR EACH
BOYD, SUCHAN, 2 JACKSONS
SAW WAY OUT OF DON JAIL
The next day, “Wanted, Dead or Alive” the Globe and Mail trumpeted on its front page. This was followed by a banner in big, bold letters: “$26,000 IN REWARDS,” and, on the same page, another article with the headline: “What Fool Put Them in Same Block With Club Car Privileges? Mayor Asks.”
A grim-faced Mayor Allan Lamport visits the Don Jail on September 8, 1952, following the second escape of the Boyd Gang — this time from death row, supposedly the most secure area in the jail.
The Toronto City Police report dated September 8 was a bit more muted:
At 6:58 A.M. this date an Alarm was received re a disturbance at the Don Jail. All Cars available in the City and Provincial Police were despatched [sic]. It was found that four prisoners had escaped. Alonzo Boyd, Leonard Jackson, William Jackson, Steve Suchan. These prisoners had been confined in four seperate [sic] cells in one block. Cell doors were opened by a key and three iron bars sawed out of a window which gives access to a retaining wall which divides the Graveyard from the Excercise [sic] Yard. By walking along this wall they could walk either east or west to the end of the Jail then a drop of 18 ft. to the ground.
The public was enthralled by this latest chapter in the unfolding saga of the Boyd Gang. For the past three years, people had been regaled with episode after lurid episode, both factual and embroidered, of the gang’s exploits. And what a plethora of details: Flamboyant bandits! Daring bank robberies! Fast cars! Beautiful women! Bungling police, frustrated politicians, gun-happy bank officials! But also, grimly, a police officer, murdered in the line of duty.
Meanwhile, mortified police in Toronto and beyond launched the biggest manhunt in Canadian history. They were determined to get their men, and, this time, to hold them.
It had all started in rather a small way.
On September 9, 1949, thirty-five-year-old Edwin Alonzo Boyd dabbed rouge onto his face, donned a brown fedora, gulped down half a bottle of Irish whiskey, and, clutching the Luger pistol he had taken from a dead German soldier during the Second World War, set out to rob a bank. He was inspired to do so, he told the Toronto Star’s Dale Brazao in a 1996 interview, after reading a newspaper report about a mentally challenged teenager who had made off with $64,000 in a bank robbery.
“After that, I said, ‘What am I doing working?’”
What, indeed.
Boyd, born on April 2, 1914, had an early induction into the seedy side of life. His father, Glover, was a constable with the Toronto Police force. His beloved mother, Eleanor, died of scarlet fever in 1930. Edwin (“Ed” to family and friends) had bitter childhood memories of his troubled relationship with his father. As quoted by Brian Vallée in Edwin Alonzo Boyd: The Story of the Notorious Boyd Gang, Ed said, “He had a temper, and whenever he got mad he would take me down [to] the basement and pick up a hockey stick or a broom handle, whatever was handy, and give me a few good swats.”
Ed cut himself loose from his father’s influence, and in 1932, as the Great Depression tightened its hold on the country, he hopped a freight car and spent the next few years in and out of trains, casual jobs, and jails for a series of petty offences, including theft and bumming money from susceptible householders. In 1936, a break-in at a service station in Saskatchewan led to more serious charges of break, enter, and theft, and earned him a three- and- a- half- year sentence in the Saskatchewan Penitentiary at Prince Albert. Meanwhile, Glover Boyd worked tirelessly to have his son released on parole. The efforts of Ed’s highly respected policeman father finally paid off, and in March 1939 Ed was on his way back to Toronto.
Speaking of his father to Vallée, Boyd said, “He thought my going through the penitentiary system would make a big difference in my life, but all it did was teach me how to handle myself under authority.”
That skill was soon to be tested, with so-so results: with the Second World War looming, Boyd enlisted. He had multiple absent without leave (AWOL) charges levelled against him during his military service, and was both promoted and demoted several times. After serving in England, France, and Germany, he returned to Toronto in 1945 with an English wife and three children in tow. He found a well-paid position with the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) but quit after just eight months. Was it a case of the job being too mundane after the thrills of wartime, or was he pushing back against his nagging wife?
“One thing I couldn’t stand was people telling me what to do,” Boyd told Vallée. “I’d had enough of that in the penitentiary and in the army. I enjoyed working at the TTC and I could have had a good career there, but I got tired of listening to [his wife] Dorreen. She wanted to run my life — so I quit.”
Boyd drifted from one dead-end job to the next. Then came 1949 and his first foray into robbing banks. In spite of having to scamper away from the scene of the crime in a hail of bullets, Boyd netted $2,256. He was hooked. Over the next two years he carried out at least six more heists. Finally, he’d found something he was really good at. In later life, Boyd complained that he would have been so much more successful in his chosen occupation if he’d not been hobbled by inept accomplices. And, in fact, after a bungled robbery in late 1951, his partner in crime, Howard Gault, snitched on him, and Boyd found himself in the Don Jail on six counts of bank robbery and one of attempted robbery.
It was there that he met fellow prisoners Leonard “Tough Lennie” Jackson and Willie “The Clown” Jackson (no relation). His collaboration with these hoodlums, and later with Valent Lesso, alias Steve Suchan, ushered in a new and much more dangerous phase of his criminal career.
Boyd was the titular head of the Boyd Gang (a name given by veteran crime reporter Gwyn “Jocko” Thomas of the Toronto Star to a loosely associated group of hoods who sometimes worked together, and sometimes as individuals). With his “matinee idol” good looks, his bravado, and his swashbuckling antics, such as brandishing a gun and leaping over the counter of a bank during a robbery, Boyd was a natural for the role. However, he was not really a violent man, and probably not the true leader of the gang. As Toronto Police sergeant of detectives Adolphus Payne, who investigated the series of robberies committed by the gang over a period of three years, explained to the judge in October 1952 during Boyd’s trial for multiple bank holdups, Boyd was “a very safe man with a gun.” He added that Boyd “has less respect for his own life than for the lives of the people he robs or the police; he has been fired on many times, but only once did he ever return the fire, and then over the heads of police.”
When it came to violence, “Tough Lennie” Jackson was your man. Like Boyd, Jackson left home and rode the rails at an early age, and, again like Boyd, was in and out of trouble with the law. In 1939, he enlisted and collected a litany of wartime offences, often for being AWOL. Bored and footloose after his discharge, he tried a stint in the merchant marine, then drifted back to Niagara Falls, Ontario, his hometown, then to Toronto, then back to train hopping.
Riding the rails was always fraught with danger: railroad police or “bulls” would arrest, beat up, or even kill non-paying customers, known as hoboes. Hoboes would have to run alongside a train as it was gathering speed after leaving a railroad yard and hop into a freight car. Sometimes they missed their footing and fell to their deaths, or lost a leg. And so it was with Jackson: in 1946, he slipped when trying to jump aboard a freight train. His left foot was severed, and doctors had to amputate just above the ankle. He left hospital six months later, depressed and fitted with a wooden prosthesis.
By 1950, Jackson was again in Toronto, working as a waiter at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street West. He envied the clientele for their fancy cars and probably ill-gotten wads of cash. No epiphany sparked his decision to change careers. He simply came to the same conclusion as Boyd: working at a dead-end job would not get him the rewards he craved. He had to rob a bank or two. Between February and July of 1951, in fact, he carried out at least five armed and violent robberies in association with a gang called the Numbers Mob. By that time, he was one of the elite, driving a shiny metallic-blue Oldsmobile and flashing bundles of banknotes.
Then, on July 30, 1951, Jackson came face to face with the man who would prove to be his nemesis: Toronto Police sergeant of detectives Edmund “Eddie” Tong, who had been out looking for him. Following a tip-off, Tong and three other officers raided Jackson’s lodgings in Toronto. His room was empty. But when Tong left the building through the back entrance, he came across Jackson climbing the fire escape. Both Jackson and his accomplice, Frank Watson, were taken into custody and charged with five bank robberies.
Eddie Tong was a loving family man, generous and funny, but a very tough cop when he needed to be. He was well known to the criminal community in Toronto, and he was exceptionally successful at getting its members off the streets and into jail. He was also skillful when it came to getting information. According to reporter Jocko Thomas, who knew Tong well, “He had a certain way about him. Stool pigeons and informants liked to give him information.” Tong had been on the trail of the Numbers Mob for about six months. He had made several arrests and recovered money and weapons.
On October 25, 1951, twenty-five-year-old William Russell Jackson joined Boyd and Lennie Jackson in number 3 corridor at the Don. Willie was awaiting an appeal of his sentence for robbery with violence: seven years in the Kingston Penitentiary and twenty lashes. He earned the nickname “the Clown” for his propensity for firing off one-liners, but his criminal behaviour was nothing to joke about. Police records described him as “seldom out of jail.” His rap sheet included vagrancy, car theft, and robbery with violence. Typically, his robberies netted him between five and seven dollars. His last crime had been a brutal mugging: he stole a few dollars from an elderly man after beating him senseless with a beer bottle.
Shortly after Willie’s arrival, Lennie Jackson approached Boyd with a proposition: he was considering a jailbreak. Did Boyd want to join him? Jackson had everything planned out. Hacksaw blades? Check. He had a few hidden in his prosthetic leg. The bars in the window? No problem. They were made of soft iron. It would be like cutting through butter. The steel mesh over the window? That could be bent back to allow a man to wriggle through to work on the bars. And the forty-foot drop to the ground? Again, no problem. They could tie sheets together to make a rope. And use another rope to help them scale the eighteen-foot-high prison wall and drop to the other side. Then: freedom.
Boyd was facing a long prison term. It did not take him very long to consent. Willie Jackson became the third party to the agreement. Boyd would do most of the sawing; Willie would take over when necessary. The other fifteen prisoners in their section would help by distracting the guards.
The stage was now set for The Boyd Gang: Escape from the Don, Take #1.