It all went like clockwork. On Sunday, November 4, 1951, while fellow inmates answered evening roll call on their behalf, Boyd and the two Jacksons wriggled through the window, rappelled to the ground below, scaled the outer wall of the prison and dropped down to freedom. Boyd thought that Lennie would be seriously hindered by his prosthetic leg, but, surprisingly, he turned out to be the most nimble of the three.
The last member of the unholy quartet should have made his appearance at this point, but he didn’t. Lennie had arranged with fellow bank robber Steve Suchan to pick them up in his car on the Don Roadway (which, in those days, extended north past the jail). But Suchan was nowhere to be seen.
Suchan later told Lennie that he had simply forgotten. Boyd, however, was reportedly furious that Suchan’s carelessness had so nearly derailed their plans.
Suchan, originally Valent Lesso, was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to Canada with his parents in 1936. He attended school in Cochrane, Ontario, and then moved to Toronto in 1946. He was a talented violinist, but in 1950 he swapped his instrument for cash and a .455 Smith & Wesson revolver. In March of that year, Suchan became an inmate at the Guelph Reformatory for attempting to pass forged cheques. After his release, he worked as an elevator operator at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, and it was there that he met and became friendly with Lennie. Within a year, the two pals were robbing banks together.
Much later in the evening of November 4, Suchan finally collected the three Don Jail escapees from the apartment where they had taken refuge. Now there were four, all of them armed and dangerous.
The next fifteen weeks were totally miserable for the police. By November 20, the gangsters were back doing what they did best: robbing banks. In short order, they hit a downtown branch of the Bank of Toronto for $4,300 and the Leaside branch of the Royal Bank of Canada for a whopping $46,270, reportedly one of the largest cash grabs in Toronto’s history.
Jail personnel were not having a pleasant time of it, either. Two long-serving guards were dismissed for what a subsequent inquiry called “inattention” and the press called “negligence.” They were eventually rehired and transferred to a different institution. The governor of the Don, Charles Sanderson, was reprimanded for failing to ensure that his guards were doing their duties properly. Ontario Reform Institutions Minister John Weir Foote called the reprimand a “regrettable incident,” but it marked an abrupt tumble from grace for the governor.
Sanderson had stepped into the post following the death of Allen Armstrong some seventeen months previously. Globe and Mail reporter David MacDonald described the forty-two-year-old Sanderson as “a short, chunky man … whose quiet voice and cherubic face wouldn’t qualify him in Hollywood as a jail warden.”
He had immediately started making waves — in a good way.
Inmates were set to work sprucing up the exterior of the forbidding pile (often referred to by visiting grand juries as “a Black Hole of Calcutta” or “a stinking dungeon,” notes MacDonald helpfully), and pretty pastel shades replaced the battleship grey of the walls within. Colourful murals adorned the main corridor, rotunda, and dining room. Even the air was sweeter, with the usual pungent scents replaced with fragrant aromas of disinfectant and deodorizer.
“If I thought my only job was to keep men behind bars, I wouldn’t be here,” Sanderson said simply.
He felt that the correctional system was a scandal, much of it caused by enforced idleness. “We aren’t pampering prisoners,” he said. “We still have discipline. But by keeping them busy and keeping their minds occupied we’re preventing them from just sitting around and talking crime.”
Prisoners could now enjoy “recreational diversions” like cribbage, rummy, and bowling tournaments, and there was even an essay-writing contest. Instead of walking round and round the circular sidewalk in the high-walled exercise yard, inmates could play quoits.
An appreciative young worker with the John Howard Society, an advocacy group for correctional and criminal justice that provided support services at the Don, summed up the transformation: “I just can’t believe that this is the Don. The change seems impossible. And yet it’s true. Everybody is talking about it — and the governor.”
But nothing lasts forever, it seems. By January 1952, on the heels of the Boyd Gang’s well-publicized escape, Sanderson had been shunted out — promoted to superintendent of the Burwash Industrial Farm near Sudbury. His replacement at the Don was Thomas Woodward Brand, an appointment that probably had everything to do with another January promotion: that of George Hedley Basher, both former governor of the Don Jail and superintendent of the Guelph Reformatory, to deputy minister of reform institutions.
Brand, like Basher and indeed Sanderson, was an ex-soldier. Basher had first come across him during a prison riot in 1947. Impressed with Brand’s cool handling of the situation, Basher had brought him in as assistant superintendent at Guelph. Now, with the Don Jail dissolving into chaos, Basher wanted his own strong-armed man in charge.
Initially, this seemed to work well. Although Brand retained many of Sanderson’s progressive programs, he introduced various measures to tighten up security: for example, he restricted traffic behind the jail, he had an armed rifleman positioned at the Isolation Hospital overlooking the exercise yard while it was in use, and he organized a search of the yard with a mine detector — which turned up a tin cup, a shoehorn, and a pair of pliers. His recommendations included the installation of more floodlights, a steel cabinet for the proper storage of arms and tear gas, and the fingerprinting and photographing of all jail employees.
By March 1952, just one of the Boyd Gang was again under lock and key. Days before Christmas, Willie Jackson had made the error of getting drunk in a Montreal pub and flashing his .45 revolver and a roll of cash. With two years tacked on to his existing sentence, he was sent straight to the Kingston Penitentiary.
Then Eddie Tong, the same detective who had nailed Lennie Jackson in July 1951, received word from an informant — who, bewilderingly, turned out to be Jackson’s half-sister, Mary — that unnamed bandits were using a black Monarch sedan to ferry hot goods to Montreal. Those mystery men were actually Jackson and Suchan. Mary’s motive? Possibly that she was in a souring relationship with Suchan, and she craved revenge on him and the “other woman,” who owned the car. Tong and his partner, Detective Sergeant Roy Perry, kept the suspect vehicle under surveillance for several days, and on March 6 pulled it over on College Street in Toronto. Tong got out of the police cruiser to question the two men in the Monarch. Suchan was in the driver’s seat, with Jackson beside him. Grabbing his gun, Suchan shot at Tong; the bullet tore through the policeman’s chest, mortally wounding him. In all, Suchan and Jackson fired six shots. Perry, still in the police car, was hit, too, but he threw up his arm and miraculously stopped a bullet aimed at his head.
Suchan gunned the engine of the Monarch, the gangsters sped away — and all hell broke loose.
Tong was no stranger to the villainy of vicious criminal gangs. In addition to arresting Lennie Jackson and fellow Numbers Mobsters in 1951, Tong had been a member of the squad that took down the notorious Polka Dot Gang in the mid-1940s. Now, for Tong, the perils of tangling with violent criminals were chillingly clear.
“Tong Fights for Life; Failing, Says Hospital,” was the solemn headline in the Globe and Mail on March 8. The bullet was wedged near his shoulder blade, and the prognosis was not good. Even if he survived, he would probably not be able to walk again.
On March 6, 1952, Toronto Police officers Eddie Tong and Roy Perry pulled over a suspect vehicle on College Street in Toronto. The occupants, the Boyd Gang’s Steve Suchan and Lennie Jackson, opened fire, leaving the police cruiser riddled with bullets and Tong with life-threatening injuries.
The story had suddenly taken a sinister turn: it was no longer a case of dashing folk heroes versus bumbling Keystone Cops.
Police reaction was swift and intense. According to the Toronto Daily Star on March 7, “squads of detectives working around the clock swept across Toronto today hunting two known gunmen whom they accuse of trying to kill Sergt.-of-Dets. Edmund Tong and Det.-Sergt. Roy Perry at College St. and Lansdowne Ave. yesterday…. Detectives carried high-powered rifles in raids which they thought might produce the suspects. They said they were prepared to shoot it out.”
And shoot it out they did.
Police investigations led them to Montreal, where they staked out Suchan’s glitzy Côte-des-Neiges apartment. Thirty hours after the incident in Toronto, Suchan walked straight into a police ambush. Taking no chances, the detectives shot him three times. He was admitted to hospital in serious condition and under heavy police guard.
Jackson’s takedown was even more violent. On March 11, Toronto detectives, together with local police, trapped Jackson and his wife in a basement apartment in Montreal. More than two hundred shots were exchanged before the fugitive surrendered. He would probably have continued firing furiously to the bitter end if his pregnant wife, Ann, hadn’t begged him to think of the baby. Jackson had been shot four times in the arms and abdomen, and he, too, needed emergency medical treatment.
After all that, Boyd’s arrest was an anti-climax. Sergeant of detectives Adolphus Payne had a hunch that he might find Boyd’s whereabouts by keeping tabs on the gangster’s brother Norman. The payoff came on March 15, when Payne surprised Boyd and his wife in bed in a second-floor apartment on Heath Street in Toronto. Police found revolvers and $23,329 in cash in a briefcase beside his bed.
Toronto’s relentlessly self-promoting mayor, Allan Lamport, rushed to the scene so he could be seen emerging with the police and the captive.
“I’m pleased to meet you. Should I smile?” Boyd asked the mayor.
“If I were in your place,” Lamport shot back, “I wouldn’t smile.”
Toronto policeman Jack Gillespie, who was on first-name terms with Lennie Jackson, was a member of the team that brought him down in Montreal. Although Gillespie fired the shots that wounded the gangster, he had a certain sympathy for the man and visited him in hospital. According to author Brian Vallée, Jackson told Gillespie that he would get out again.
“Don’t tell me I have to go through all of this again,” said Gillespie.
“No. Don’t worry; you won’t have to go through this again.”
As for Tong, by March 10 a relieved public, which even included several criminals who phoned police to offer good wishes and their blood when a call went out for donors, believed that Tong was out of the woods: “Sgt. Tong Much Better,” reported the Globe and Mail. But their hopes were short-lived. On March 24, the paper sombrely informed its readers of the sudden death of Edmund Tong. “It is a pity that just when he had seemed to have got past the danger point in his recovery, he was struck down by an embolism.”
Murder of a police officer. This was a capital offence. And Tong’s alleged killers, Steve Suchan and Lennie Jackson, now faced the ultimate penalty: death by hanging.