Toronto bank robber and folk hero

It was an operation weeks in the making. The four occupants of “death row” — supposedly the most secure section of the Don — had spent days meticulously crafting a makeshift key to escape their cells.

From there, they’d painstakingly filed away the bars of a window, working in 30-minute intervals in the early morning. You’d think they’d done this before. And you’d be right.

They were the infamous Boyd Gang, a quartet of serial bank robbers whose exploits have dominated headlines ever since three of their members escaped from that very same jail less than a year prior in 1951.

But this time, there was a problem. They’d only managed to saw through two bars, and no one could fit. In a moment of desperation, Edwin Alonzo Boyd, the gang’s ruggedly handsome namesake, deployed the butter gambit.

“So there’s Willie, bare naked, and …  we’re rubbing butter on his hips,” Boyd would tell authors Marjorie Lamb and Barry Pearson years later. “We tried to shove him through and he wouldn’t go through.”

As the 37-year-old strained to push the naked, buttery rear of his accomplice out the window, he might have asked himself how he landed in this predicament.

Just two years prior, in 1949, Boyd was despondent. He’d been drifting from dead-end job to dead-end job for years — he couldn’t handle being told what to do, journalist Brian Vallée recounted in his book “Edwin Alonzo Boyd.”

Boyd had had enough of authority after years spent in the penitentiary and the army. But when he returned from the Second World War, he brought home a British wife and three kids. He had a family to feed.

Then one day, he read a shocking article. A teenager had walked into a bank, demanded money — and walked out with $69,000, Boyd told the CBC. “Right away, that sparks a thought in my mind. If it’s so easy to rob a bank like that, what the hell am I working for?”

That’s how he wound up stumbling toward the Armour Heights branch of the Bank of Montreal one September morning, smelling of cheap whiskey. In the pocket of his suit jacket was a white cotton sack and the Luger he’d looted off a dead German in France.

Boyd had grown a new moustache, stuffed his mouth and nostrils with cotton and dabbed on makeup. He looked, hopefully, unrecognizable.

Once inside, Boyd handed the manager a check, Vallée reported. Instead of a signature, there were the words “HOLD-UP” in large print. Below was written: “If you don’t want to be a dead hero, fill this sack with money.”

“Are you kidding?” the manager asked.

By now, he was really feeling the half quart of whiskey he’d drunk earlier. Boyd stood swaying, both hands on the pistol, blacking in and out of consciousness as a rattled clerk slowly filled the sack. Unbeknownst to him, staff had already triggered the silent alarm.

Finally, Boyd gathered enough lucidity to realize she was stalling for time and began waving his gun around: “There are going to be a lot of dead people around here if you don’t hurry up,” he said. Fearing another blackout, Boyd snatched up the bag and scrambled.

The bank manager immediately gave chase, brandishing his own revolver and fired five shots out onto the street. Out of bullets, the manager rushed back inside to reload — but by then, Boyd was gone.

“He came incredibly close to getting captured or killed,” Nate Hendley, a journalist who wrote a book on Boyd’s life, told the Star. “Even he was somewhat amazed that he managed to get away with it.”

As Boyd counted up more than $2,000 in the bag, a smile crept across his face. He could actually rob a bank and get away with it.

The easy money was addictive.

Over the next two years, Boyd committed at least six more bank robberies, honing his craft. He’d finally found something he was good at, author Lorna Poplak, who wrote about the Boyd Gang in her book on the Don Jail, told the Star.

But it all went wrong after a bungled bank robbery in 1951. It was his first time pulling a heist with a buddy, and his friend ratted him out. Boyd found himself hauled off to the Don Jail for the first time.

There, he became close with two other inmates — the violent, one-legged Leonard “Tough Lennie” Jackson; and the wise-cracking Willie “The Clown” Jackson (no relation).

Lennie approached him with a plan. He managed to hide a couple hacksaw blades inside his fake leg. Lennie thought the three could saw through the prison window and escape while the other inmates distracted the guards, Poplak wrote in her book. Their buddy Steve Suchan, another bank robber, would then pick them up on the outside.

After days spent sawing through the iron bars, the trio was ready to go. In early November, while the other inmates answered evening roll call, the three wriggled out the window. Using a rope made of tied-together bedsheets, the men rappelled 12 metres to the ground, scaled the 5.5-metre-tall prison wall and fled into the wilderness.

But Suchan was nowhere to be found, saying later that he’d simply forgotten. They were forced to flee on foot.

Despite the hiccups, the gang thought they worked pretty well together. They even shared the same hobbies — bank heists and hold-ups. Boyd, the two Jacksons and even the forgetful Suchan would begin working together from then on. The Boyd Gang was born.

Over the next 15 weeks, the gang committed a string of brazen bank heists. The same month as their jailbreak, they stole $46,000 from the Royal Bank of Canada — the “biggest bank hold-up in (the) history of Toronto,” the Star reported at the time.

Boyd became a media darling, with his Errol Flynn-esque looks and flamboyant style. He’d often jump on the bank counter with a pistol in each hand, calling to the crowd: “Attention everyone, robbery in progress!” Hendley said.

It helped that Boyd reportedly never hurt anyone during his heists, Hendley said. “But I would question that, because having a gun waved in your face is not particularly pleasant.”

But all that goodwill vanished the night Detective Edmund Tong died.

Tong had been hunting Lennie since he first raided his lodgings in 1951. But it was a coincidence that Tong would end up pulling over Suchan and Lennie in March one year later. The gangsters immediately opened fire on Tong and his partner, shooting the detective in the chest. He would die 17 days later.

Now branded cop-killers, Suchan and Lennie would be gunned down and captured by police within days. Willie had already been arrested in Montreal, and Boyd was ambushed while asleep in his Toronto hideout.

For the second time in less than a year, the Boyd Gang was going back to the Don.

This time, authorities made the questionable decision of locking all four of them up in the same area.  Officials thought it would help them better monitor the gang. But it didn’t take them long to realize no one watched their corridor from 5 to 7 a.m.

With the help of a file, hacksaw and bit of steel reportedly smuggled in by Willie’s lawyer, they soon had a plan.

Over several days, Boyd managed to file the steel down into a replica master key. He told Vallée he grabbed the real key off a guards belt and, after gripping it hard, somehow managed to trace the impression it made on his palm.

Using this replica, the gang snuck out of their cells each morning. Two members sawed away at the window bars while the others held a pillow to the ceiling-mounted microphone.

Finally, in late August, they were ready to make their move — but it only ended in the disastrous butter incident.

To their dismay, they needed to saw through another two bars to fit. Boyd replaced the two bars and prayed no guards would notice the damage. Remarkably, no one did in the two nailbiting weeks it took to file away the last two bars.

Finally, in early September, the quartet made their escape. They shimmied through the window, sneaked along a boundary wall and dropped down more than five metres into freedom once again.

Unfortunately, Willie would be spotted in North York just days later. Police tracked him to an abandoned farm where the gang was hiding, said Susan Goldenberg, a historian and membership director of the North York Historical Society.

“The police went out to this farm and the gang was just sort of lazing around, picking apples, relaxing in the barn,” Goldenberg said. “The police went up, guns drawn, and captured them without a fight.”

The gang was back in the Don for the third time that year — and this time, it was the end of the line for cop killers Suchan and Lennie Jackson. Both were hanged before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Boyd ended up with eight life sentences and Willie with thirty years. But both were paroled after serving 14 years.

Boyd settled down in B.C., where he would re-marry before dying of pneumonia in 2002. He was portrayed as a gentleman thief in the papers — but he might have taken some dark secrets to the grave.

“There are interviews where he comes pretty close to admitting (he committed) an unsolved double homicide in High Park,” Hendley said. “That only came (out) after his death… But it was never proven whether he did it.”