Wrong Side of the Law (26 page)

To McArthur, “foolish” meant staying behind bars. Once again, he somehow obtained hacksaw blades. On the evening of February 22, 1977, McArthur and two other prisoners escaped. The other two were soon caught, but McArthur burglarized a car dealership and then fled all the way to Montreal.

McArthur now decided he would go straight and stay out of jail. He registered under an alias with an employment agency, and for a while supported himself as a labourer earning minimum wage. Then the work dried up and he found himself unemployed and broke. As McArthur put it, “I’d rather die with a gun in my hand than starve in the streets.”

McArthur fled Montreal after a shoplifting incident almost landed him back in jail. He went to Saskatchewan, where he helped a friend escape from the Prince Albert Penitentiary. All the while, he kept himself in funds through robbery. McArthur then went to Toronto where he paid a cosmetic surgeon the hefty price of $1,000 to alter his facial features.

Satisfied with the results of the surgery, McArthur returned to Saskatchewan. On November 2, he drove a stolen car to the little community of Hague, north of Saskatoon. The prairie town had a bank that he’d been wanting to rob for a long time. McArthur casually walked in, showed a pistol to the manager, single teller, and lone customer, and walked out with $7,000. After his unpleasant experience with the employment agency in Montreal, the ease with which he pulled the Hague robbery convinced McArthur once and for all that working was for fools. Nine days later, he was apprehended in Chapman Brothers Jewellers in Toronto.

McArthur spent the next six years behind bars. He generally behaved himself, though he made a suicide attempt by slashing the arteries in the crooks of his arms. He tried to alter his fingerprints through a painful self-
administered procedure involving a razor blade and drain cleaner. McArthur was shunted around from Millhaven, to Collins Bay, to the Frontenac Minimum Security Institution adjacent to Collins Bay, and to the Pittsburgh Farm Annex outside Joyceville. He participated in the Save the Youth Now Group (STYNG), a volunteer organization of inmates who spoke to young offenders about “the cruel realities of a criminal lifestyle or career.”

In 1983, McArthur became eligible for parole. As a reward for his good behaviour, he was released. McArthur was elated to be out of jail at last, and this time without having to constantly look over his shoulder or worry about a knock at the door. But past lessons didn’t seem to sink in with Micky McArthur.

By this time, McArthur’s sister Janet had been married to Steve Faust for several years, but the marriage had gone bad. Faust was unemployed and broke, and told McArthur he planned to rob the Royal Bank in Hepworth, near Sauble Beach. McArthur later claimed that he tried to talk Faust out of it, but to no avail. McArthur himself had been, in his own words “robbing banks like they were going out of style.” However, he didn’t think Faust had the competence to pull a bank robbery on his own, so he decided to go with him to make sure he didn’t get caught.

McArthur planned the holdup carefully, and told Faust to follow his instructions without question. No one was to get hurt, he said, as he gave Faust a 30-30 carbine. McArthur would be armed with a sawed-off shotgun. They stole a Datsun station wagon and a motorcycle. McArthur picked the morning of August 8, 1983, when the bank would have a shipment of cash ready for pick-up by a Brinks truck. Using theatrical make-up, McArthur disguised himself to look like a black man, and Faust to look like a “mutant.” They had a scanner that allowed them to pick up police radio communications so they’d be warned of approaching cops.

They entered the bank at 10:15. McArthur shouted, “This is a stick-up! This is the real thing! We’re here for the Brinks pick-up. Open the treasury. We’re not leaving without the money. If the police come, we’re taking hostages. We mean business.”

The head teller opened the vault, and McArthur made bank employees fill a backpack with bundles of money. While they were doing that, he heard over his scanner that police were already on the way. Either a bank employee had pressed a button, or someone outside had realized something was wrong in the bank. Faust, who was a bundle of nerves, cried, “Let’s go! We’re running out of time.”

With the backpack stuffed, the bandits fled from the bank and jumped into the Datsun. As they roared along Hepworth’s main street, they saw a pick-up truck in the wrong lane, coming straight at them. The driver was clearly trying to block their escape. McArthur swerved up onto the curb to get around the truck. Then he saw in his rear view mirror that the truck had turned and was following them. He jammed on the brakes and yelled to Faust, “Hit him!”

He meant for Faust to get out of the car and put a bullet into the truck’s engine block or a front tire. Instead, in his panic, Faust turned in his seat and fired a shot that blew out the Datsun’s back window. Exasperated, McArthur stepped out from behind the wheel and pumped three shotgun blasts into the front of the pickup.

Rae Patterson, the truck driver, later reported, “I hit the floor of the truck, and by the time I crawled out the passenger door, they were gone.” His windshield was smashed, and the front of the truck’s body was peppered with buckshot marks. “I feel pretty stupid now, “ Patterson said. “A guy could get killed doing that. The next time I’ll think twice. I now know what a target feels like.”

Four miles from Hepworth, McArthur and Faust ditched the car and retrieved the motorcycle from a hiding place in the bush. They wiped off the makeup, changed clothes, and made a successful getaway. Their take was $80,000.

McArthur buried most of the loot. He allowed himself and Faust $5,000 each to live on for a few months until things cooled down. His plan was to use the money to open a couple of salons in Western Canada so they both could go straight. He advised Faust to lay low and not make himself conspicuous by spending a lot of money.

But in an attempt to save his crumbling marriage, Faust blew his $5,000 buying Janet expensive gifts, like a fur coat. Of course, the police wondered where an unemployed parolee got the money. One night they picked a drunken Faust up in Toronto’s Union Station. It didn’t take them long to get a confession out of him. Faust told them where the money from the Hepworth robbery was hidden, and that he had pulled the job with his brother-in-law, Micky McArthur. Bitter over this betrayal, McArthur later wrote, “When he (Faust) was arrested, the police had to slap him twice: once to get him talking and once to shut him up.” On October 13, 1983, McArthur was back in Millhaven. He had barely set foot inside his cell when he began to plan another escape.

McArthur spent a year studying every aspect of the prison’s security systems. He learned the guards’ routines. He exercised and ran to get into top physical shape. He quietly collected equipment he’d need, like a pair of cleated soccer shoes. On October 13, 1984, one year after his return to Millhaven, a heavy fog provided McArthur with the opportunity for which he’d been preparing.

Using a device he’d made from blocks of wood, mop handles, and nylon ropes, McArthur bent two of the bars on his cell window to create a space he could squeeze his wiry frame through. Then he armoured his torso, shins, and wrists with hard coverings made from layers of newspapers and glue. These would protect him from razor wire. Over them he wore olive coloured pajamas that would blend in with the grass in the prison yard.

McArthur dropped to the ground from his second storey window. Everything was enveloped in thick fog. He made his way to a place he’d already chosen at the inner fence. “I hit the chain links at full speed and scrambled for the top as if I were on fire,” McArthur wrote later. “Counting on a little finesse and a lot of speed, I scaled the second fence for all I was worth.”

There was a moment of panic when McArthur’s pants snagged on the wire, but he tore loose and dropped to the other side. He ditched the homemade armour, and then he ran. The alert went out the next day for “an extremely violent cop hater who won’t give up.” Once again, slippery Micky eluded the posses, dogs, and helicopters.

For a while, McArthur made his base in Portland, Oregon, crossing the border occasionally to rob a bank in Canada when he needed money. But he didn’t limit himself to Canadian banks. On April 29, 1985, he and a partner raided a bank in Mobridge, South Dakota, for $76,000 U.S. Soon after, the FBI arrested McArthur’s partner for a bank robbery in Montana. They connected him to McArthur, and Micky had to high-tail it from Portland back to Canada. He allegedly attempted to break his pal out of the jail in Miles City, Montana, but the plot didn’t work out.

Just after Christmas 1985, McArthur robbed a Toronto Dominion bank in Edmonton. Then on January 2, 1986, he drove to a farm outside Delisle, Saskatchewan, to dig up $81,000 in stolen negotiable bonds he’d buried there. The RCMP had been closing in on him, and had the place staked out. Two years and three months after his escape from Millhaven, McArthur was back in jail, this time the Edmonton Maximum Security Prison in Alberta.

Because of his reputation as an escape artist, McArthur spent a long time in solitary confinement in “Edmonton Max.” He eventually found himself back in his old lodgings in Millhaven. There, to “save my sanity,” as he put it, McArthur wrote his autobiography,
I’d Rather Be Wanted Than Had: The Memoirs of an Unrepentant Bank Robber
. McArthur’s story, written with pencil stubs on the backs of official complaint forms he scrounged from guards, was published as a 243-page book in 1990. Often poignant, sometimes funny, it gives the reader an eye-opening look into a life spent on the wrong side of the law. However, even though McArthur sometimes admits to having been a fool, more than anything else he seems to brag about his crimes. He dismisses most bank robbers as amateurs, while he sees himself as a professional. When it comes to prison escapes, he deems himself without equal. He says he wasn’t concerned about police chases, “because I was better equipped and trained than ninety-nine percent of all police officers.”

Some noteworthy points in McArthur’s criminal career didn’t make it into the book. He was suspected in the disappearance in the early 1980s of a Kingston drywaller named Tom Gencarelli. No trace of Gencarelli was ever found, and police believed he was murdered. Sometime after McArthur’s book was published, he was actually charged with the murder. However, a key witness for the Crown died before the case could go to court, and the charge was dropped. McArthur had also threatened to kill witnesses to the Hepworth bank robbery. When he escaped from Millhaven, those people were given special police protection out of concern that he might try to go after them. These and other instances belie McArthur’s claim in his book that he tried to avoid violence. In fact, McArthur’s single most violent moment of criminal behaviour was yet to come.

McArthur was let out of prison on a statutory release in June 1994, and took up residence in Kingston. At 7:30 pm on October 20, McArthur and an accomplice entered the Bank of Montreal on the Port Perry Plaza on Scugog Street in Port Perry, a small community on Lake Scugog, north of Whitby. One carried a pistol, and the other a high-powered hunting rifle. They ordered manager Alan Knight to open the safe. When Knight refused, one of them shot him in the knee. The injured man opened the vault.

A man outside heard the shot and summoned the police. When the bandits ran out with a pillow case stuffed with $50,000, they heard sirens. They ran through strip plaza’s parking lot, which was almost surrounded by buildings and fences. They’d almost reached the Canadian Tire store at the south end of the parking lot, when two police cars roared onto the scene. In one were constables Mark McConkey and Warren Ellis of the Durham Region Police. In the other, an unmarked car, was Detective Paul Mooy. McConkey and Ellis hadn’t even had a chance to get out of their cruiser when the bandits unleashed a fusillade. McConkey had his jaw smashed by a bullet. Fragments of bullet struck Ellis in the head. Both constables had their faces lacerated by glass from the shattered windshield. Mooy was just getting out of his car when a rifle bullet almost took his arm off. Two hundred metres away, on the other side of Scugog Street, real estate agent Debra-Ann Taylor was sitting at her typewriter when a stray rifle bullet pierced her office window and hit her in the back.

With three police officers down, the robbers dashed across the parking lot and between two buildings to a place where they’d left two stolen bicycles. They pedaled furiously to the home of an elderly couple, Harry and Marjorie Pearce. The bandits kicked the door in and ripped the telephone cord out of the wall. Then they forced seventy-five-year-old Harry to drive them away in his Volkswagen van. They released him, and then drove to a location where they had a getaway car parked. By the time police found Harry Pearce’s van, the bandits were long gone. But witnesses had seen the car in which they fled.

It would later be said that the robbers had turned quiet Port Perry into a “war zone.” Debra-Ann Taylor and Constable Ellis were airlifted to hospitals in Toronto; she to have a bullet removed from a lung, and he to undergo several hours of surgery for the removal of bullet fragments that were imbedded between his skull and his brain. Knight, Mooy, and McConkey were treated for serious but non-life threatening wounds in the Port Perry hospital.

Early the next morning, police acting on a tip arrested McArthur at his Kingston residence. Elsewhere in the city, officers arrested Micky’s brother Angus, 28, whom they believed was the accomplice. Both were taken to jail in Oshawa. When they were brought before a magistrate for a bail hearing, a reporter asked Micky what his next book would be called. “
Frame
!” he shouted. “We didn’t do these things. The police are lying. They are trying to frame us. They set us up — police set us up.”

The brothers were tried for armed robbery and five counts of attempted murder. Angus was acquitted, but Micky was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Before being led away, he smirked and fired imaginary guns at police officers in the courtroom. At the time of this writing, Micky McArthur is still in jail. He has not identified his accomplice in the Port Perry holdup. The $50,000 has never been recovered. Remarkably, a court action to have McArthur declared a dangerous offender failed.