Jericho (12 page)

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 law. 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.

That’s where the lawyer becomes even more important to the story, see. He was a real legal scholar. At the appeal he completely shot the Crown’s case out of the water, showing how witnesses had been bought with promises of leniency. The appeals judge overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. At the second trial, which began October
16
and ended on November first, MacLeod was acquitted, after the jury had been out nine hours. Now the cops were furious. But by that point everybody’s attention was on the war.

When his conviction got quashed, Mickey was still awaiting trial on the unrelated matter of hijacking the booze truck. On that one he was convicted and stayed convicted and got sent down to Kingston for fourteen years. Halfway through the sentence, though, Mickey goes over the wall along with two other cons. There were suspicions they got help from some of the guards. There was an enquiry. The second of the three went his own way and was recaptured.
Mickey and the third one beat a straight line back to Windsor, where they pulled off a bank heist for forty thousand in getaway money—a very big haul in those days, let me tell you—and made it across the bridge to disappear in Detroit.

Now very few men have ever busted out of KP and lived to keep quiet about it. Mickey was a hard case all right but sometimes you get a grudging admiration for people that tough, even though you kind of hate yourself for it. Years went by and word filtered back up to Canada through official channels that the decomposing body of the fellow Mickey had escaped with had been discovered in a swamp somewhere in Mississippi. I think it was probably true. Everybody’s priorities had changed by then. The force and the Crown, I think, were happy to believe that Mickey must have died there too. Myself, I’ve always wondered if Mickey didn’t kill his travelling companion himself, the way a guy I once read about back in history somewhere killed his own dogs to keep them from fouling up his getaway.

Today he’d be a very old man like me and we know how bloody likely that is, even for somebody that probably spent almost half his life taking it easy in Mexico, drinking those bright-coloured drinks and watching young girls come out of the surf.

[Lonnie stopped talking, which was unusual for him, and stayed quiet for a long time. I thought that was the end of what he had to tell me. Then he started back up, like a TV that suddenly comes on again in the middle of the night.]

Snaketown’s economy was what you would call diversified. Hostesses. Smuggling—goods and sometimes people. Boiler rooms selling penny mining shares over the phone.
Bucket shops selling stocks in companies that didn’t even exist. Peddling gold bricks made out of lead to sucker lists of Citizens (there was a good trade in sucker lists). And yeah, dope too, though not like in your generation. And of course gambling, which included laying off bets. By the time I’m talking about, during the war and right after, there was so much legitimate money being coined on both sides of the river making vehicles for the army and then cars for the vets coming back that earning it the other way was never more of a cinch. There was so much money that the river stopped existing in a way. Or maybe it became a river of money and not just water, with two currents, you see, one flowing up and down and the other straight across from bank to bank.

[I inherited my love of language from Lonnie.]

For a while, Detroit took over from Chicago as the centre of gambling in the whole of America. This was before there was much of anything in Las Vegas except gophers and guys with lariat ties. Runners all over the country phoned their bets to the bookies that phoned them to Detroit where somebody else phoned them to Windsor or just carried them across the border. Getting into Canada was a snap, especially by taxi or bus. Going the other way was harder, so many Windsor cabs had Michigan plates to make it easier. Anyway, Windsor was where the risk was spread around. As far as gamblers were concerned, Windsor and not London was the insurance capital of Canada. The people in Detroit, they did all their accounting in Windsor. Snaketown was kind of the back office of the Circus over in Detroit, which appointed the Mayor of Snaketown, you remember him.

[I reminded Lonnie of the time he took me along when he went to talk about building the sauna for the jockeys.
Remembering, his face took on a little smile that showed off the weak circle around his mouth, where his dentures were.]

Mr. S was a Greek named Nick Soumakis or, for some reason, Nick the Drum. Some said that this was because he used to be a musician. Believe me, he never played in no jazz band, though I guess he hired a lot of them in his day, for all those different nightspots he ran at one time or another, on one side of the river or the other: the Rounders’, the Egyptian, the Club Intime.

The Soumakis family was big in the coal oil business. This is back when a lot of people used coal oil in their homes. Old people in East Windsor said they could remember him working for his father, driving a horse-drawn wagon with a big tank on the back. Personally, I can’t picture it, but this is what reputable people sometimes told me. Of course, reputable people will say anything that makes them seem more important than they are. Me, I was always happy just to be a handyman. That way I got to observe stuff. That way I could study history when none of the participants were watching.