by Brian Vallee
Individual and team winners from each corridor would play off until there were champions for each sport or game. There was no money for awards or trophies, but the prisoners collected their old newspapers and sold them to buy apples or oranges as symbolic prizes. Sanderson used the recreation activities to maintain discipline by threatening to withdraw a prisoner’s right to play if jail rules were contravened.
Guards liked the program because the overall mood was much improved and prisoners were much less hostile and noticeably more co-operative. Provincial inspectors praised Sanderson and suggested that money be found for equipment, such as volleyball nets and balls for the exercise yard.
Sanderson backed up his guards, but before dispensing discipline he always listened to the prisoner’s side of the story. If he decided the prisoner was at fault, he had no qualms about ordering corporal punishment – the strap – which he did at least eight times while he was governor. But sometimes he sided with a prisoner. There were many first-rate guards at the Don, but the pay was so poor that Sanderson couldn’t get enough of the “good, sound men” he needed. He knew about the bad apples. He had been a guard himself and had witnessed guards deliberately goading prisoners into breaching regulations so that they would receive the strap. “There are some officers who have neither the ability nor the intelligence to properly carry out their orders,” he said, “and they expect the head of the institution to cover up their deficiencies by force.”
One of the young guards at the Don told Sanderson he had once been assigned, with two older guards, to search three new prisoners in the bullpen. The prisoners were stripped and searched, and when they stooped over to retrieve their clothes, the two older guards kicked them in the buttocks, sending them sprawling.
“Why did you do that?” asked the young guard later.
“To put them in their place and let them know who’s the boss,” replied the older guards. The young guard told Sanderson he was relieved that kind of conduct was no longer tolerated.
Not one guard or inspector ever complained about the job the new governor was doing. The jail was considered so stable under his administration that when the Burwash prison farm was on the verge of a riot in the fall of 1951, twenty of the ringleaders were taken out and sent to the already overcrowded Don.
This, then, was the world that Edwin Alonzo Boyd was entering when he was led to his second-floor cell at the north end of the west wing of the Don Jail. His cell, on a corridor with eighteen others, was seven by six feet. There was a bed, blanket, and pillows. There was no plumbing in the individual cells, and prisoners were required to use a “night pan,” which was stored under the bed. During the day they could use the toilets and sinks at the end of each corridor. Across the corridor from the cells, Boyd saw large windows facing north to the exercise yard. He noticed that the glass on the windows was frosted, and covered by large screens of heavy mesh that were hinged at the top and bolted on one side at the bottom and had a padlock on the other side. He figured there were probably bars over the windows behind the screens and the glass, and he was right.
17
Cellmates
Although Edwin Alonzo Boyd had been anonymous until he was caught trying to rob his seventh bank, the publicity given his successes no doubt inspired others to try their luck. His exploits were certainly noticed by Toronto’s underworld, and by the “rounders” on its fringes. It perhaps even made them envious. Sergeant of Detectives Edmund “Eddie” Tong, who had helped put away the Polka Dot Gang and many other robbers and murderers, was certainly interested. Tong was a legend within the Toronto police and in the city’s underworld. He had a large network of informants in the criminal world whose identity he would never reveal, even to his partners.
Eddie Tong was born in Leeds, in Yorkshire. He immigrated to Canada in 1926 and joined the Toronto Police Department three years later at the age of twenty-four. His abilities were noticed early in his career, and by 1933 he had been transferred to the detective office at the College Street headquarters. Retired staff superintendent Jack Gillespie remembered Tong as an exceptional investigator with a wonderful sense of humour – a stocky version of Columbo, the TV detective. “He always had a nice suit and tie on but he had this awful-looking hat and old overcoat, and in the winter he never did his galoshes up. He’d walk into the office with an old satchel that was always open.” The noise of the galoshes’ buckles flopping against each other announced his arrival.
“Eddie, why don’t you do your galoshes up?” one of his fellow officers would ask.
“What for?” he would reply. “I’m going to have to take them off eventually.”
Tong drove a battered old Buick. One day somebody gave him a secondhand Buick to use for parts. He came into the detective office the next day with a big smile. “Listen, you bunch of jerks,” he said. “I’m the only guy in the department who owns two Buicks.”
Tong was called “the Chinaman” because of his name and his black hair, which he combed back off his forehead. “I went for the odd walk through Chinatown with Eddie,” Gillespie recalled, “and all the people knew him and liked him. He made them laugh.”
“I’m the mayor of Chinatown,” Tong would announce, “and don’t forget my name – Tong20 – means warfare.”
Tong was devoted to his wife and two children – a young son, and a daughter who suffered from a debilitating disease. Even though he couldn’t afford it, he was always giving handouts to people in need. “I’d see him walk along the street and there’d be some poor old guy down on his luck,” said Gillespie. “Eddie would be talking to him and the next thing you know, Eddie would slip him five dollars and say, ‘Go get something to eat.’ That’s why he never had any money. He was broke all the time.”
Tong may have been sentimental, but he could be tough when he had to be – he had been a semi-pro soccer player before coming to Canada. He was stocky – about five-foot-ten and 180 pounds – and had a ruddy complexion and noticeably red lips. Tong kept himself in good shape, Gillespie recalled. “If he was making an arrest he could handle himself, but I never, ever saw him pull his gun out or raise his hands to anybody.”
Gillespie was of Irish descent, and Tong always called him “Reilly” when they worked together. During a four-month stint as full-time partners in 1949, Tong introduced Gillespie to his routine of visiting some of the taverns that had opened since the Ontario government began issuing lounge licences. Places like the Silver Rail on Yonge Street, the Holiday Tavern at Queen and Bathurst, and the Horseshoe Tavern at Queen and Spadina had become the water-holes of choice for Toronto’s criminals and their hangers-on. Tong visited more often when there was a sudden, marked increase in bank robberies. “There were a lot of criminals hanging around these bars,” said Gillespie. “Eddie Tong would say, ‘Okay Reilly, let’s go in and let them know we’re around.’ ”
Tong was so well known to the underworld types that they would call out his name and offer to buy him a drink. Many of them had spent time in jail, and it was probably Tong who had put them there. “Eddie would just look around and smile and nod. I never saw him take a drink with them. But they sure knew who he was. When any of the big-time gangsters got out of jail, they’d have a party and send Eddie an invitation. He might show up just to see who was there, and maybe sing a song with them.”
Reporter Jocko Thomas and Tong had been friends. They had been to each other’s homes. “I’d been down to his place for supper when my wife was away in the States with her illness. He had this nice little house in the Don Valley area with a white picket fence. He was very, very devoted to his wife and children.”
Thomas says Tong was a natural for police work. “He had a certain way about him. Stool pigeons and informants liked to give him information.” One of the complaints about Tong was that he refused to share his informants with fellow officers, but Thomas understands that. “He didn’t trust anybody. He didn’t want them to know who his stoolies were. He wouldn’t tell anybody, because it can ge
t around, you know. A lot of those guys weren’t as discreet as he was. And he also knew that – just like a newspaperman’s contacts – his stoolies and informants were his bread and butter. Tong was a real good copper. He would have gone to the top, I think.”
Thomas says Tong was tough when he had to be. “Those were the days when police were rough with prisoners. The police were expected to get statements. If you had your statement, your case was pretty well over. Today, statements seem to be thrown out of court, ninety percent of the time.”
The Horseshoe Tavern, now over fifty years old, started out as a blacksmith’s shop in 1861. By turns it was a shoe store, an apparel shop, and a “fancy goods shop”, until the legendary Jack Starr purchased the property in 1947 and over the next three decades developed its foot-stomping reputation as a country music mecca.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, most of the Horseshoe’s customers, especially in the day and early evening, were merchants and workers from the garment district on nearby Spadina Avenue.
Cigar-chomping wholesalers and manufacturers, and salesmen and models were part of the mix, as were the unsavoury regulars who gathered around some of the tables at the back. Among the latter was Frank Watson, who was well known to Eddie Tong and the Toronto police and had a record dating back to 1937. Watson, who wore rimless glasses and was slight of build, looked more like a bank clerk than a criminal. Tong considered him a thug, like many of the others who drove big cars, wore flashy suits, flaunted wads of cash, and left big tips.
Leonard Jackson was a twenty-eight-year-old waiter at the Horseshoe. He was polite and friendly, and Frank Watson took a liking to him. Jackson was impressed by the cash and the cars, but he knew they were unattainable for someone slinging beer and waiting tables. Jackson wore an artificial foot as a result of an accident, and some of the regulars and his fellow workers gave him the nickname “Stubby”. But soon he would earn another nickname – “Tough Lennie”. For although Jackson was polite and friendly, seldom drank, and didn’t smoke or use foul language, he was an intense man, bitter about his handicap, and a very good street-fighter.
Jackson was slightly under five-foot-ten, with a medium, wiry build and dark hair and eyes. According to Gillespie, Tong and Jackson became aware of each other for the first time in the summer of 1950 at the Horseshoe. A few months later Gillespie met Jackson while paying a routine visit to a petty thief who lived on McCaul Street, south of College around the corner from police headquarters.
“I was with a different partner by then,” said Gillespie, “and we walked into the house to see this criminal and there was Lennie sitting in the kitchen. I didn’t know him, but I got talking to him and he wasn’t like a criminal at all. He was very polite, pleasant, and easy to talk to.” But what Gillespie remembered most from that brief encounter was the look in Jackson’s eyes. “They were dark, deep-set, and very intense.”
Lennie was born Leonard Stone in Toronto on April 23, 1922, to a Jewish mother and an English father. His mother, Lillian, had two children from her first marriage and three, including Lennie, from her second. After her second husband abandoned her, Lillian kept the name Jackson and moved to Niagara Falls, where she went into the hairdressing business. The family attended the local Anglican church, and Lennie was a regular at Sunday School.
Lillian must have found it difficult to raise five children and run a business on her own. One relative says she was strict and domineering with her children, and that didn’t sit well with Lennie and at least one other son. Samuel, who went by the name Sammy Stone, was charged with break-and-enter in Niagara Falls in May 1931 and sent to the Victoria Industrial School at Mimico, Ontario. (Years later, he would do time at Kingston for armed robbery.) Lennie, who was nine at the time, went his own way. After completing eighth grade in Niagara Falls, he quit school and went to work as a farm labourer, just as Ed Boyd had. Also like Boyd, he gave that up and was soon riding the rods. But instead of travelling west, Lennie headed to the United States. Four months before his sixteenth birthday, in December 1937, police arrested him in El Paso, Texas, and deported him to Canada. Undeterred, he headed right back to the United States, where he was convicted of various minor offences, similar to the vagrancy and panhandling charges Boyd had piled up during his years riding the rods.
On September 10, 1939, at the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto, Lennie Jackson joined the Royal Regiment of Canada – Col. G. Hedley Basher’s reserve army, which had been activated at the start of the war. The age requirement was eighteen, but like thousands of underage recruits, Lennie lied about his age and signed up. Two months earlier, Ed Boyd had signed on with the Royal Canadian Regiment.
Col. Basher, former governor of the Don Jail, and Lennie Jackson, inmate-in-waiting, arrived in England in November 1940. Eight days later, Jackson stayed out all night and was disciplined: seven days’ field parade and eight days’ loss of pay for being absent without leave (AWL).
Jackson, who suffered from chronic respiratory problems – asthma, hay fever, and bronchitis – spent a month in hospital in October 1941, and again in February 1942, and was classified as unfit for duty because of his health. Two weeks after being reinstated, in May 1942, he was back in hospital once again. Shortly after his recovery he disappeared for two weeks. This time he was sentenced to fourteen days’ detention and twenty-nine days’ loss of pay. In May 1943, Jackson was transferred to the 48th Highlanders and promoted to lance-corporal, but a month later he was back in hospital and again classified as unfit for duty. Shortly after returning to duty in July 1943, he went AWL again for a few hours. This time he lost two days’ pay and was given a severe reprimand. By November 1943 he had lost his stripe and was back with the Royal Regiment of Canada as a private.
On February 1, 1944, Jackson was rotated back to Canada and sent to the #2 District Depot at the Exhibition Grounds to await his discharge from the army. Before his official discharge, Jackson underwent three pre-discharge interviews.
“Jackson is a single youth who lived most of his life at home,” the first interviewer wrote. “His parents separated when he was about nine years old and he was raised by his mother who established a hairdressing business in order to take care of her five children. At times the family suffered privation. As a youth he was fond of mechanics but had little opportunity to pursue the development of any hobby. He cared little for study and his reading was not significant.
“This soldier impresses one as being thoroughly dissatisfied with the Army.… It is felt he should be given the opportunity to prove his worth in some task which requires little mental acumen.” The interviewer’s last comment, though disparaging, related to tasks that might be assigned to Jackson during his last weeks in the army, not to potential civilian employment.
The second interviewer wrote: “Jackson has apparently made arrangements to enter the employ of the Michigan Central Railway as a fireman. He is ambitious to extend his education however, and wishes to take at least six months schooling in English and Mathematics. In view of his normal school progress there should be no hesitation in granting this request in this matter as it will be of great assistance to him later on in advancing himself in the type of work he has elected.”
The third interview, conducted two days before Jackson’s discharge, indicated that he had no assured employment, but mentioned the railway job and the merchant navy as possibilities: “Stated he wanted to get to England, made no mention of interest in returning to school.”
Finally, on June 28, 1944, three weeks after D-Day, Jackson was officially discharged. He was twenty-two years old and had been in the army four years and nine months. Jackson was restless, and when he found he couldn’t get the Michigan railway job he coveted, he decided to join the merchant navy. It would allow him to travel, there would be less of the rigid discipline of army life, and the fresh sea air might provide relief from his allergies and chronic respiratory problems. On August 4, 1944, less than two months after leaving the army, he applied for and was grante
d a Merchant Seaman’s Identity Certificate in Toronto. His fingerprints and photo were included in the application. His weight was 165 pounds, and a scar over his left eyebrow was listed as a “visible distinguishing mark.”
Like many Canadian merchant seamen, Jackson decided to serve on Norwegian ships. In the last year of the war he was on three different ships, sailing to ports in Russia, Norway, England, Scotland and Italy, and to New York. Jackson’s second ship, the Idefjord, was torpedoed by a German submarine. It stayed afloat, although Jackson and the rest of the crew abandoned ship. They later boarded again, and the ship was towed to Murmansk for repairs.
Jackson left the merchant navy in the late summer of 1945 and returned home to Niagara Falls, but he was soon bored there. He tried Toronto for a while, but he wanted adventure and was gripped by wanderlust and the lure of the unknown, and this led him once again to the rails – this time with tragic consequences. In late summer or early fall of 1946 he slipped while trying to hop a freight train at the railway yards near the Exhibition Grounds. As he fell to the ground his left foot went under a wheel and was severed. He was rushed to hospital, where doctors, unable to reattach the mangled foot, cut the leg cleanly just above the ankle.
Now twenty-four, and disillusioned and despondent, Jackson spent six months recuperating in hospital and at home in Niagara Falls. He was fitted with a prosthesis and eventually pulled himself out of his depression and began going out. One of the places he frequented was Rocco’s Pool Room on Victoria Avenue at the top of Clifton Hill.
This was a low-income neighbourhood of small shops and restaurants that the locals referred to as Niagara Falls Centre.
