Wrong Side of the Law (6 page)

Left to right, Willis and Joe Newton, Texas bandits who shot it out with bank messengers in downtown Toronto.
Claude Stanush and David Middleton.

As the messengers made their way along Melinda Street, the mauve Studebaker drove past them and pulled over to the curb on the other side of Jordan. It was facing south, toward Wellington Street. Willis, Jess, and Doc got out, leaving Joe at the wheel with the motor running.

Wielding his sawed-off shotgun, Willis confronted James Brown and William Duck of the Union Bank. “Give me that bag!” he ordered. The startled messengers refused. Willis fired a blast into a telephone pole to show them he meant business. Brown let go of his bag and backed off. But Duck, a veteran of the Great War, held on to his and struck at Willis with his fist.

Willis tried to shoot at Duck’s feet, but the shotgun jammed, so he used it to club Duck to the ground. Then Willis went for the pistol in his coat pocket. It got caught in the lining, and he had to drop the shotgun so he could use both hands to free it. Brown grabbed the money bag he had dropped and raced for a doorway. Duck got up and followed, leaving his bag, but attempting to draw his revolver as he ran. Before Duck reached the shelter of the doorway, he turned and faced the bandit. Willis shot him. The bullet struck him in the left side above the heart and tore right through his body. Duck staggered and fell to the pavement.

Overview of the scene of the bank-messenger robbery. Some of this area is now the site of Commerce Court Plaza
The Globe and Mail.

At the same time, David Campbell of the Sterling Bank refused to hand his bag over to Doc. Like William Duck, he tried to put up a fight. According to Willis, “He was coming out with his gun and Doc had to shoot him, but he didn’t shoot to kill him. Just shot to hurt him.” Actually, Campbell was unarmed. Doc shot him at almost point-blank range, and Campbell went down with a bullet in his left lung.

Jess had seen Doc struggling with Campbell and thought his brother was in trouble. He started to run to his assistance. That left the way clear for a couple of messengers to dash for safety. Meanwhile, the men in the two bank cars had seen the attacks on the foot messengers. The driver of the Molson’s Bank car pulled into a lane beside the Toronto
Globe
building. The Standard Bank car stopped partway into the intersection, and guards Peter Robb and James Harris jumped out. Robb crouched beside the car and fired at the bandits with his revolver. Harris, another Great War veteran, ran to Campbell’s aid with his gun drawn. Doc shot him in the shoulder. Harris fell to his knees and returned fire. Jess fired a shotgun blast at him and some of the buckshot struck Harris in the stomach. He sank to the pavement, but fired the last rounds in his gun at the bandits’ car.

A street corner that had been quiet just a minute earlier was now chaotic. The echo of gunfire rang off buildings. Passersby ducked for cover as people poured out of buildings to see what all the commotion was about. Bandits shouted at people to get out of the way if they didn’t want to get blown to hell. Bullets smacked into telephone poles, walls, and the windshield and door of the Standard Bank car. A Bank of Nova Scotia messenger named A. Smith handed over his bag when ordered to do so because he was looking down the muzzle of a shotgun. Even after he’d handed over the money, a bandit shot the hat off his head.

A Sterling Bank guard named R. Davis was at the rear of the messenger group when he saw the bandits leap out of their car and attack. Seeing another bandit at the wheel of the car, Davis advanced on it with his gun blazing. Joe got out and fired back. He later claimed that he wasn’t trying to hit the guard; just scare him off. Davis had to back off when he ran out of ammunition. Guards like Robb and Davis were at a disadvantage; they had to take care not to accidentally shoot innocent bystanders.

An unlikely participant in the melee was Alan Lord, an elevator operator in the McKinnon Building on Melinda Street. He’d been drawn outside by the racket. Lord saw Duck struck down, and rushed to his aid. It’s possible that because of his work uniform, the bandits mistook Lord for a guard or a policeman. He later told a Toronto
Star
reporter:

I grabbed at the bandit and another man struck me over the back and shoulders with the stock of a large new shotgun. He was swearing terribly and telling me he’d knock my brains out if I didn’t let go. I did let go, but they fired four shots at me. One of them got me in the leg. I thought it was all over as I fell like a ton of lead, but that is probably what saved me. I crawled underneath an auto standing close by. The buckshot simply riddled the body and windows of the car.

The Newtons managed to grab three money bags. They threw them into the Studebaker and then piled in. Guards fired at the back of the car as it roared down Jordan Street. Eighteen-year-old William Young, driving a Salvation Army truck, had turned onto Jordan in time to witness almost the whole event. He tried to chase the bandit car, but his truck couldn’t keep up with the fast Studebaker.

Joe drove down Jordan and turned right on Wellington. Willis later recalled:

How we ever got away, I don’t know. Then we hit a main street going to the right. I said, ‘Turn right in there,’ and we got room to cut in.… We was coming up on the main street (probably Bay Street) and they had a policeman standing there directing traffic. Just as we run up there and I was fixing to jump out and throw my pistol down on him, he stuck out his hand to stop the other cars and told us to come on … the policeman didn’t know what had happened back there.

After hiding the car and the money bags in their rented garage, Willis and Jess returned to their hotel while Joe and Doc went to a movie. They knew there would be a dragnet and roadblocks, so they decided to lay low for a couple of days and act like tourists. They hadn’t been masked, but they were confident that nobody would have gotten good descriptions in all the excitement.

The Newtons had escaped from the scene of the crime, but they were shaken. They hadn’t expected a shootout. Willis admitted years later that the Toronto bank-messenger robbery was one of the few times in his life that he’d been “boogered” (frightened).

The whole drama at the intersection of Jordan and Melinda had played out in less than two minutes. Toronto police arrived on the scene about a minute after the gang drove off. Duck, Harris, Campbell, and Lord were rushed to hospitals. Only Campbell, with his punctured lung, had a life-threatening injury. His wife and son stayed at his bedside while he lay in critical condition. “I hope they get those blackguards,” Mrs. Campbell told the press. “They are beasts and have no conscience whatever.” Happily, Campbell recovered.

Artist’s sketch of the Newton Gang’s bank-messenger robbery in Toronto on July 23, 1923. This crime was dramatized in the 1998 film
The Newton Boys
, starring Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke.
The Globe and Mail.

The gang had pulled off what was, up to that date, the biggest robbery in Toronto history. The swag was about $84,000. The violence shocked the citizenry. After all, this was Toronto the Good, not Chicago. The
Star
reported, “It seemed less like a scene in orderly Toronto than like a climax in a sensational moving picture show.”

The robbers left confusion in their wake. Witnesses thought there had been as many as six or seven bandits. They also thought that one of the bandits had been shot. One witness was sure that the driver of the getaway car had been a “coloured man.” In Willis and Joe’s account, only the brothers were in on the job and none of them were injured.

The only potential clue the bandits left behind was the shotgun Willis dropped, and police had no way of even tracing where it came from.
The press speculated that the bandits were “U.S. Jailbirds.” The day after the robbery, police found the burned-out hulk of the Studebaker near Fort Erie. It seemed that the robbers had fled across the border with the loot.

Willis, Jess, and Joe Newton in court with Doc (foreground) who had been wounded during a train robbery.
Claude Stanush and David Middleton.

Actually, the Newtons had buried most of the money in what Willis called “sandy country” about thirty miles from Toronto. Then they went to Niagara Falls and took a ferry to the American side. Each brother had about five thousand dollars under his shirt, sewn into a vest made of “ducking material.” They took a train to Chicago and stayed there a week. Then they went back to Canada to recover the loot. The gang drove across the border at Niagara Falls in a car that had money stuffed under all the seats. Then, through connections in the Detroit underworld, Willis exchanged the Canadian money for American greenbacks.

Years later, Willis claimed that the Newtons returned to Toronto, thinking of pulling another robbery. They were disappointed to see that the foot messengers were gone. All of the money was now transferred by car and there were even well-armed policemen on horseback. That killed any plans of a repeat raid. They went back to Chicago, but still hadn’t given up on the idea of another heist in Canada. Willis and Jess went to Winnipeg, which also had a currency clearing house. But the situation was the same as in Toronto. The money was too heavily guarded to be easy pickings. Willis said, “And I think it was because of what we’d done in Toronto.”

In spite of their long string of successes, Willis wanted the Newtons to make one big haul that would set them all up for life and enable them to get out of the outlaw “business” for good. On June 12, 1924, the Newton boys and a partner named Brent Glasscock robbed a train at Rondout, Illinois. They plundered the mail cars for more than 3 million dollars in cash and bonds, making it the biggest train robbery in American history. However, in the course of the holdup, Glasscock panicked and shot Doc by mistake. The gang made a clean getaway with the loot, but their subsequent search for a doctor to tend to Doc put the police on their trail. Soon they were all in jail.

Through plea-bargaining and helping the police recover much of the stolen money, the Newton brothers received amazingly light sentences. None of them spent more than a few years in prison for the Rondout robbery. Nor were any of them ever charged with the robbery of the Toronto bank messengers. Not until the 1994 publication of
The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang
, a book based on extensive interviews with Willis and Joe in their later years, did people know that the Texas outlaws were responsible for the morning on which, in the words of the Toronto
Globe
, “Cold-blooded and calculated villainy stalked abroad in the streets of Toronto.”