Wrong Side of the Law (20 page)

This was a significant find. So far all of the evidence the police had collected was circumstantial. They had nothing that conclusively tied the suspect to the crimes. A competent defence lawyer would be able to challenge everything, even the finger and palm prints on the Meteor.

At the time of his arrest, McAuliffe was wearing a grey coat that had been stolen from a farm bunkhouse and he had no shirt. The coat and shirt Larry Holmes had found were positively identified as the ones the bank robber had worn. Most important was a thumbnail-size bit of tinfoil a constable found in the coat pocket. On it was a partial fingerprint that matched the print of the little finger of McAuliffe’s left hand. The police now had proof, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that McAuliffe was the gunman.

McAuliffe’s second pistol and the Sten gun that was the actual murder weapon were never found, but the Crown prosecutor had all the evidence he needed to make a strong case. McAuliffe went to trial in the Norfolk County Courthouse in Simcoe on September 5. He was defended by W.E. Ross, a young Simcoe lawyer involved in just his second important case. Ross made an argument for self-defence. McAuliffe fired back, he said, after Lierman had shot at him first.

There was conflicting testimony over whether or not Lierman had actually fired his gun. Witnesses had seen him holding the gun out the window of the Plymouth and said they had heard shots. But had those sounds of gunfire actually come from the .22 rifle? The constable who had first examined Lierman’s rifle at the murder scene testified that the gun hadn’t been recently fired and that it was in fact inoperable. The constable had found the rifle on the back seat of the Plymouth. Had the killer thrown it there after shooting the two men? Or had a wounded Lierman tossed it back there in a desperate attempt to show the bandit advancing on him and Goddyn with a Sten gun that they were unarmed?

McAuliffe was silent and presented a calm expression as more than sixty witnesses gave their testimony and Crown Attorney D.E.W. Tisdale introduced 102 exhibits. The jury retired on September 14 and took only three hours to reach a verdict of guilty on both charges of first-degree murder. When Mr. Justice R.W. Treleaven sentenced him to hang, McAuliffe’s only betrayal of emotion was a slight twitching in his face.

The execution date was set for December 19. On October 3, with his case now in the hands of the highly respected Arthur Maloney, K.C., of Toronto, McAuliffe submitted a “Pauper’s Appeal” on the argument that the trial judge erred on some points of law in his instructions to the jury. It was rejected first by the Supreme Court of Ontario and then by the Supreme Court of Canada. On December 4, when McAuliffe learned of the final failure of his appeal, he nonchalantly said, “Well, that’s that.”

Like so many other condemned prisoners, McAuliffe spent his last days seeking comfort in religion. He was visited by the aunt who had raised him, and by his father and sister, all of whom refused to believe he was guilty of murder. His only other visitor was a Roman Catholic priest. Because he was scheduled to hang six days before Christmas, McAuliffe’s jailers said they would provide him with an early Christmas dinner if he wanted it. He didn’t.

Nobody in Simcoe doubted that McAuliffe was guilty of murder, but the idea of a hanging taking place in their community didn’t sit well with many of the residents. Some were opposed to capital punishment and called it “a barbaric hand-me-down from the stone age.” Hundreds of them signed a petition — in vain — to have the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Others felt that “a central place of execution should be established where local people are not forced to participate in the affairs.” Two hours before the execution, the municipal council made a request — which was granted — that the custom of having church bells toll to announce the carrying out of the death sentence not be observed.

Inside the jail, McAuliffe had to listen to the sounds of the gallows being constructed within a few feet of his cell. When the dreadful moment came for that last walk, he was offered a glass of whiskey, but refused it. McAuliffe went to his death without a word. The trap was dropped at 12:31 a.m. It wasn’t a “clean” hanging. The executioner botched the job, and McAuliffe slowly strangled for seventeen minutes before he was pronounced dead.

The body was placed in a cheap casket that police officers accompanied under cover of darkness to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery. The constables needed flashlights to pick their way through the pathways of the snow-covered graveyard. Art Lierman and Bill Goddyn, who had bravely, if foolishly, met their deaths in pursuit of a criminal, had been laid to rest surrounded by mourning family and friends. For Joseph Herbert McAuliffe, the end result of that lethal pursuit was an unmarked grave.

Lucien Rivard:

The Great Escape

O
n
March 2, 1965, Montreal’s old Bordeaux Jail was the scene of an escape that would go on record as one of the most infamous in Canadian history. The ease with which two prisoners made their break was embarrassing enough for authorities at many levels of government. But what rocked the nation and brought about an international scandal was the fact that one of the escapees, Lucien Rivard, was already a key figure in allegations of political corruption that threatened to bring down the Liberal government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson.

Rivard, age forty-nine, had been in Bordeaux for almost ten months, fighting extradition to the United States where he was wanted on charges of drug trafficking. His fellow jail-breaker, Andre Durocher, age twenty-eight, had been sentenced to five years for robbery with violence. According to the story that appeared in the newspapers, at 6:20 p.m., Rivard and Durocher received permission from a guard, Sergeant Roger Beaupre, to get a hose so they could flood the jail’s hockey rink. Ten minutes later, guard Noel Bonneville escorted Rivard and Durocher to the boiler room where the hose was stored. Durocher suddenly pulled a gun on him. “No tricks,” Durocher warned. “This is serious.” The weapon was made of wood and covered with black shoe polish, but it looked real enough to the guard. Rivard and Durocher tied him up with electric wire, along with two boiler attendants. Then they smashed through the door leading to the guards’ target-practice room.

Guard Roland Gadoury was patrolling the lower inside jail wall at 7:15 when the two prisoners jumped him. They bound him with electric wire and black tape and took his twelve-gauge shotgun. Rivard and Durocher squirrelled their way across a ladder from the lower interior wall to the top of the twenty-foot-high main outside wall. Then they used the hose as a rope to slide down to the ground.

This story has become almost legendary. But how much of it is true is questionable. It was a spring night, with the temperature at 40 Fahrenheit (4.4 Celsius); not ideal for flooding an outdoor ice rink. (Inmates played broomball on it, not hockey, which the administration considered too rough.) Two days after the escape, a Bordeaux guard who preferred to remain anonymous told Toronto
Star
reporter David Proulx that it would have been impossible for Rivard and Durocher to have escaped without inside help. The going rate for buying one’s way out of Bordeaux, he said, was $10,000. Rivard had access to that kind of money. He had plenty of it stashed away — proceeds from his various criminal activities. He also had strong contacts among the gang bosses of Montreal’s notorious east end.

The escapees did in fact use a hose to get down from the top of the wall. A photograph of the wooden gun appeared in newspapers. Rivard worked in the jail’s woodshop and could have made it there. But the hockey rink story seemed too contrived to many officials. There would be a lengthy investigation into just what happened before Rivard and Durocher went over the wall.

Once they were out of the jail, the two men ran across fields until they came to the intersection of Edmond Valade and Poincaré Streets, where there was a traffic signal. The first car to stop was a Dodge convertible driven by an accountant named Jacques Bourgeois, who was on his way to do some after-hours work at his office. Before he knew what was happening, both doors flew open and someone shouted, “Grab him!”

1952 police photo of Lucien Rivard, the career criminal whose escape from jail almost brought down a government.
The Encyclopedia of Canadian Organized Crime.

Bourgeois reached for the keys in the ignition, but was too late. Two men jumped in and forced him to the centre of the seat between them. A moment later, the car was racing down the street.

The stockily built, middle-aged man with the crew-cut hair who had seized the steering wheel seemed to be out of breath as he gasped, “Keep quiet! Don’t get excited! We’re armed, but we won’t touch you.” The next day, sitting in his home just two blocks from Bordeaux Jail, Bourgeois told reporters about his encounter with the jail breakers.

The car-jacker at the wheel asked him, “Do you know me?”

“I said I didn’t know him and I didn’t want to know him,” said Bourgeois. “Then he said he was Lucien Rivard and he had just jumped the wall and escaped from Bordeaux. I looked at him again and then I remembered the pictures in the papers.”

Bourgeois said that Rivard slowed down after putting some distance between himself and the jail. He actually seemed relaxed as he navigated the streets of Montreal, smoking a cigarette and offering one to Bourgeois. The frightened accountant, on the other hand, was anything but relaxed.

“I asked them several times to let me off,” Bourgeois said, “but they replied each time not to worry. They would let me off in good time. I was more worried about the other fellow than about Rivard. He’s the one who shouted, ‘Grab him!’ … He looked like a pretty rough customer.”

Bourgeois reported that Rivard told him why he had escaped. “He said he was fifty years old and that he was expecting a pretty long sentence. He said he preferred to take a chance at breaking out rather than face the prospect of staying in jail until the age of sixty-five or seventy.”

Bourgeois still feared for his life, even though Rivard had told him he wouldn’t be harmed. He told the jail-breakers they could have the fifty dollars in his wallet. Rivard quietly replied, “We don’t need your money.”

Then, to Bourgeois’s astonishment, Rivard gave him two dollars for taxi fare so he could get to his office. He even had a pencil and paper in his pocket so he could write down Bourgeois’s office phone number. Rivard promised to call Bourgeois and let him know where he could find his car. Twenty minutes after jumping into his car, Rivard and Durocher dropped Bourgeois on Crémazie Boulevard at Montée St. Michel, and then drove away.

Bourgeois took a cab to his office. He arrived just in time to receive Rivard’s phone call — fifteen minutes after the escapees had released him. Rivard told him his car was in the parking lot of a shopping centre at Montée St. Michel and Fleury Street. Bourgeois phoned the police and told them about his encounter with criminals. Officers found the car just where Rivard had said it would be. Inside were two pairs of jail-issue trousers. Rivard and Durocher had brought along a change of clothes. They had planned the escape down to the last detail. The fact that Bourgeois’s car had been abandoned only a mile from the Pie IX Bridge suggested to police that the fugitives might already have escaped from Montreal Island. Considering Rivard’s underworld connections, they could be almost anywhere and might even be out of the country within hours. Because of the “Great Escape,”
Rivard
quickly became a household name, even to Canadians who might have paid only passing attention to the political controversy in which he was embroiled.

Lucien Rivard was born in Montreal on June 16, 1914. He was a high-school dropout, and spent some time working in Quebec’s bush camps. Rivard’s name first appeared in police records in 1933 when, at the age of nineteen, he received a suspended sentence for breaking into a storage shed. Two years later he was fined for loitering. In 1938, Rivard did his first stint in jail when he was sentenced to a year for attempting to break into a store and receiving stolen goods. He was back in prison again in 1943, starting a three-year stretch for burglary.

After that, Rivard managed to stay out of jail, but it wasn’t because he had decided to go straight. He had been learning the ropes of living on the wrong side of the law and had made friends with influential people in the Montreal underworld. He’d found that there was more money to be made dealing drugs than in petty burglaries, and less chance of going to jail.

Rivard, known to his friends as “Moose,” became associated with organized-crime figures like Giuseppi “Pep” Cotroni and “Monseigneur” Paul Mandolini. He started off in the illicit narcotics trade pushing “goof balls” (made from a variety of drugs including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and barbituates) in bars and pool halls. Over time he rose in the ranks to become a major figure in an international drug ring dealing mainly in heroin. Rivard was suspected of being an important player in dealings involving Montreal gangsters and the Corsican drug-smuggling organization known as the “French Connection.”

In 1956, Rivard went to Cuba to manage a casino for Mondolini. He allegedly ran guns to the rebel forces of Fidel Castro, who was fighting to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Rivard was arrested in 1958, imprisoned, and then expelled from Cuba.

Rivard returned to Montreal, none the worse for his Cuban adventure. He opened up a luxurious beach resort called Plage Ideal (Ideal Beach) on Île Jésus, north of Montreal. According to the Toronto
Globe and Mail
, it was a place much favoured by men “with strong appetites for wenching and drinking.” Among the resort’s patrons were Rivard’s associates in the drug- and gun-trafficking business.

For a few years, Rivard lived the high life. He had a townhouse in a working-class neighbourhood in Montreal’s north end, as well as a cottage on Île Jésus. He sported expensive suits and shoes and mixed with celebrities and high-profile gangsters, just like a figure from the Roaring Twenties. He always had a thick wad of cash from which he could peel off fifty- and hundred -dollar notes to impress his friends.

Rivard and his beautiful wife, Marie, thirty-two, were devoted to each other. They had no children, but Rivard was nonetheless a man to whom family ties were important. He supported a sister and gave her husband a part-time job as a gatekeeper at the resort.

Ties of a different nature were not only making Rivard wealthy, but also keeping him out of the clutches of the law. Not long after Rivard returned to Montreal from Cuba, he was arrested for possession of an unregistered handgun. A few words were spoken to the right people and the charge was quietly dropped. Sometime later, Rivard was charged with robbing a contractor of $5,000. When the case went to trial, Rivard’s three accusers were suddenly stricken with loss of memory. Among law-enforcement agencies, Rivard became known as “The Brains.”

However, Rivard’s impunity was about to take a major blow. On October 10, 1963, a Montreal hoodlum named Michel Caron and his wife were crossing the border from Mexico into Laredo, Texas. An American customs agent thought Caron was acting in a suspicious manner and had the car searched. Hidden in the door panels were thirty-five kilograms of pure heroin. With the dope having an estimated value of more than $12 million once it had been cut and sold on the streets, the bust was one of the biggest in American history up to that time.

Mrs. Caron claimed to know nothing about the heroin. Her husband refused to talk to police. “I don’t say nothing,” he told them. “If I do, I’m dead.” But the Texas police found a note in Caron’s pocket in handwriting that was eventually identified as that of Lucien Rivard. They had also arrested another drug courier named Roger Beauchemin who admitted he’d been working for Rivard and who said Rivard ran a multi-million-dollar narcotics operation out of the resort.

Under police interrogation, Caron finally agreed to a deal. He would “sing” in return for a relatively light sentence of ten years and the promise of protection for his family in Montreal. Caron came to this decision even though a Montreal lawyer had flown to Texas to warn him of dire consequences if he “blabbed” to the police.

Caron said he earned his living as a “salesman and gambler.” The address he gave as his place of residence was a house with which Montreal police were familiar. Officers had been called there for a variety of reasons and had sometimes been assaulted. Caron said that periodically he and other couriers working for Rivard went to Mexico on “holiday trips.” They picked up shipments of heroin that had been transported from the Middle East via France and South America and smuggled it into the United States. Caron said that Rivard paid $3,000 for each trip a courier like him made.

Sometimes the couriers went to Paris, taking their cars with them. On the return voyage, the panels of the cars would be stuffed with heroin. On one occasion, according to Caron, a car that had just been unloaded from a transatlantic liner had caught fire on a downtown Montreal street. Rivard had coolly stood by and watched firemen put out the blaze, then called for a tow truck to haul the car away.

Caron’s information led the RCMP to four of Rivard’s criminal associates in Montreal. They were also looking for Mandolino, who was believed to have made a sudden trip to Italy. In the months to come, a joint investigation by the FBI and the RCMP would result in the cracking of a major international drug ring in which Rivard was connected to Carlo Gambino, head of one of the powerful Mafia crime families in the United States. A police raid on a Montreal bus terminal would turn up sixty-one kilograms of pure heroin hidden in a locker. Among those caught in the police net were a man who claimed to be an employee of the Uruguayan foreign ministry in Montreal, a French citizen who had previously been deported from the United States on drug charges and had then re-entered the country illegally, and the Mexican ambassador to Bolivia.