Tag: Prohibition

By Gregory Clark, February 23, 1924.

Ask any senior police official of Toronto what he considers the one greatest performance of the police in the history of the city and he will surely reply – the elimination of the gang in Toronto.

The biggest crime problem of the American city to this day is the gang. There is not a city on the continent of the size of Toronto that does not support one or more gangs of highly organized and specialized crooks, who, employing the gun and the automobile, terrorize their communities but are immune from complete obliteration by the police because of their organization which includes political and well-paid legal protection.

Toronto has no gangs.

The first reason is the foresight of the police officials of the past thirty years. They beheld, in the most casual gang of street corner loafers, the potentialities of the criminal gang.

The second reason is the ruthless and implacable methods used by the Toronto police in pursuing the smallest crime committed by a gang, playing a lone hand against the offenders, giving no quarter, using no stool pigeons, allowing no Immunity for information received, but bending every effort to break up, scatter and subdue every gang that broke the law in the smallest degree.

For Toronto had its gangs. Plenty of them. Bome of them rose to some celebrity as house breakers and robbers. At one period, about twenty years ago, no fewer than five strong gangs, each numbering from a dozen to a score of members, were doing their utmost to survive the relentless attacks of the police. The Stanley Park gang, the Gay Cats of York street, the Gas House gang, the Ward gang, the Park Rovers of the Don and the St. Lawrence Market gang are names that will be familiar to older citizens of Toronto.

“Those gangs” said Inspector of Detectives George Guthrie, “were not gangsters as we know gangsters to-day. They were gangs of roughs whose commonest crimes were such clumsy stupid offences as robbing drunks, waylaying people on dark streets and robbing them, only occasionally breaking in and robbing stores or houses. They rarely employed guns, for the police were death on guns. To have a gun was fatal. And they had not the automobile.

“But they were the forebears of the modern gang. The gangsters of other cities at that period were no different. We destroyed the gangs. We broke up their memberships with convictions. We scattered their boozing dens and haunts. We drove them with continual pressure on little charges, if we could not secure big ones, from the slum districts where they sought to foregather.

No Political Protection Here

“The American cities failed to break up their old gangs. The modern gangs are simply the sons of those tough gangs of yesterday. The tradition of the old tough gangsters has been refined by the automobile and by the general refinement of everything, into the modern gang with its cars, its political connections, its lawyers and its funds.”

Inspector of Detectives William Wallace adds this:

“One of the biggest factors in the elimination of the gang from Toronto has been the total absence of politics in control of the police force. There has never been, in my time, collusion between the police and the gangsters. The curse of the American system is that the aldermen and government officials control the police force. Gangs control votes. And there you have the impossible situation of the police being interfered with by petty politics.

“Toronto’s police always having been under the control of a board of police commissioners beyond the reach of politics, and politics, whether it desired it or not, could not preserve the gang – a voting power -in the face of the determined assaults of the police.”

Those who may have felt in the past that Col. George T. Denison wielded a somewhat autocratic power over the policing of Toronto can now credit him with a large share in the elimination of the crime factor that is setting the rest of the American continent by the ears.

“Those old gangs – the Stanley Park, the Market gang, the Park Rovers – operated in a very haphazard manner,” said Inspector Wallace. “They had their rendezvous in certain disorderly houses and dives, where they congregated daily and nightly. Whenever any member of the gang turned a trick such as rolling a drunk or holding up a pedestrian on a dark street, the gang boozed and celebrated until the proceeds were used up. There was no pride of craft in them. If times were bad, the gangsters would even stoop to begging money on the streets after dark – a form of terrorization, because their tough appearance was enough to intimidate anybody. Being drunkards and wastrels as a class, their efforts at housebreaking and serious crime were clumsy and lacking in intelligence. Their crimes were largely the cowardly, sneaking crimes of drunken bullies.

Yet these gangs gave strong resistance to the police, who offered them no respite. If the “cops” were not busy digging out some crime, they were raiding their dens, busting up gambling meetings, even dispersing gangs on street corners, which were the most inglorious and offensive tactics of all.

The methods used by the police in those days seem primitive today. There were no end of personal combats between policemen and gangsters. They had not the police equipment they have nowadays, telephones, autos, and rapid communication. When the “cop” set out for his beat in the heart of the ward or the Stanley Park district or Cabbagetown, he never knew what was in store for him. “Cops” had to have some mettle in those days. For in the dark streets and lanes of the Stanley Park region, the gang would be lying in wait for that “cop” who was particularly active in doing his duty, and they would pounce on him and he would have to fight for his good looks if not for his life. There were instances of policemen being beaten unconscious and left lying in lanes. As it was in the dark, the constable could not always identify his enemies, and they would prove alibis and all would go unpunished. But there are also instances of constables performing tremendous feats, beating the life half out of their assailants and securing identifications that resulted in the stiffest penalties the court would impose.

One of these stories is the tale of Constable Tom Sullivan, now a detective, going down into one of the streets below King near Stanley Park and, expecting trouble, met and defeated a whole gang after a battle royal, and when the ambulance for which he sent – not the patrol wagon – arrived on the scene, they found Sullivan sitting happily if somewhat exhausted out in the middle of the street upon the inanimate bodies of four of the toughest gangsters of the district.

Those fights between police and gangs were before the days of Hydro lighted streets. And there was no way of avoiding them. The ability to fight was one of the requirements of a good constable.

Behind Burns’ ice house, in a little crooked street that was only a lane off Water street, was a corner known throughout the district by the name of “Cop Killer’s Corner.” The policeman who ventured to investigate that corner of his beat at night did so at the risk of being beaten up. Any number of the bloodiest fights have occurred at that historic corner. No concession was made by the police in the matter of sending two policemen together into the tough districts. That would have been American methods. Instead, the constable went alone and took what came and gave what he could. The Cabbagetown gang, known as the “Cop Killer’s Corner” gang, were finally disposed of by the most unrelenting attention. Whenever a constable was assaulted he made every effort to mark his enemies with some tremendous whack. Then the district was immediately combed by other police and the injured men, hidden away, were dug out and arrested, to prove where they got the marks. Those were simple remedies, but it took men to stand up to them, and gangsters are not, as a rule, men.

It is a wonder murder was not done in those old gangster days, but there is not one instance of murder in the whole history of the period.

The Stanley park gang fell before a final clean-up campaign on houses, dives and personnel. The Market gang was so broken up by arrests that it never got together again. The Park Rovers in the Don district did their best to graduate into the modern gangster type, but their first efforts at serious crime were detected, and a number of them went to Kingston on long sentences of differing lengths that broke them up.

The Ward gang and the Gay Cats of York street persisted longest. These drunk-rollers and footpads, most of whom are dead now, though they would be only in their forties’ if they had lived less brutally, fled in the face of the cleanup regime of Deputy-Chief Robert Geddes when he was Inspector of the Ward district. One of the leaders of the Gay Cats is still living and hanging around his old haunts, but he is a broken and pathetic character of no danger to anybody, his pals dead and gone, a figure to be pointed out to new constables as a sample of an order that has changed.

When Deputy-Chief Geddes went into the Ward, a giant of a man as active on his feet as a cat, he had with him a squad of giants that struck terror into the hearts of the gangsters. Some pretty strenuous methods were used in the clean-up of the Ward, for even in its present harmless condition one can imagine what a rabbit warren of dives and holes in the wall it was for the gangster. They “vagged” them – which is the charge of vagrancy which can be laid against anybody of a suspicious character – they pinched them as inmates of disorderly houses, they took them in as drunks on every opportunity, they pressed every serious charge to the bitter end, they forced dive keepers to move away, they made the district so utterly unpleasant for the gangsters in every respect, big and small, that the last stronghold of the gangs, the Ward, was rid of its toughs.

Better Lighted Streets

The relics of those five great gangs, the Gay Cats, the Stanley Park, Gas House, Ward and Park Rovers, can be counted to-day on the ten fingers of a senior officer’s hand. They are men prematurely old, broken, harmless, occasionally picked up drunk, occasionally run in at their own request to be kept for the winter in jail.

They have not flourished and passed the tradition down to the young cake-eater, motoring, dancing, gunning tough of other American cities. There is no organization, no politics, no money funds for lawyers and bail. They were nipped in the bud.

Occasionally Toronto is visited by sections of American gangs, and more rarely still some little group of the tough element in the city tries to herd together in crime. But they have no underground organization to run to for hiding or advice or money. They play a lone hand and are soon bang up against the hard wall of the law.

In the leniency of the parole system, in the leniency of some judges and the willingness of the crown, on occasions, to abate a sentence, the police see a danger of losing the ground gained in twenty-five years of ruthless opposition to the gang idea. The law making one year the absolute minimum sentence for theft of a motor car is not being strictly observed by judges and the crown. Yet that law is the best deterrent upon gangsters there is – that if, In the very beginning of their mischief, to wit, the “borrowing” of a car, in which to do their job, they are facing if caught, a sure sentence of one year, without hope of less.

The parole system, admirable as it is from a humanitarian standpoint, is regarded by most of Toronto’s senior police officers with doubt and misgivings for this reason: the young gangsters discuss the merits of a job; they weigh the costs of being caught, and the costs of being caught are discounted by the knowledge that if they are caught there is always the parole system to be remembered – the parole system which, by good conduct, after the crime, can be relied upon to get them out of prison in a few months.

The lone criminal does not always weigh and measure the chances. The gangster does. The psychology of the gang, is to be very optimistic over the parole system.

Chief Constable Samuel Dickson, referring to the passing of the gangs in Toronto, concurs in what his Inspectors of detectives said, with this thought added:

“Street lighting, daylight saving and the transformation of countless corner lots of the city into playgrounds and recreation grounds has aided us in the elimination of the gangster more than is imagined. Where the gangs used to foregather there are ball grounds for the young fellows to play in to-day. Where there were long dark evenings in which to do nothing there are long, bright evenings in which to do much that is healthy and absorbing and clean.”

In conclusion, Inspector Wallace said:

“Toronto does not realize how free it is of crime. The police news which gets into the Toronto papers from day to day would not win two lines in any American dally in cities of the same size.

There are no gangs in Toronto.”

Editor’s Notes: This story was published during the period when the public was fascinated and concerned with the rise of organized crime in the United States, mainly due to Prohibition. The premise is also unlikely, perhaps written as reassurance for the public, as there were definitely gangs in Ontario dealing in illegal liquor as well.

George Taylor Denison was a Toronto police magistrate for 43 years, from 1877 to 1920. He was still alive when this article was written, having died in 1925 at the age of 85.

Nearly Everybody Around Yonge and Front Seems to Carry a Handbag.
Govt. Dispensary Sells Alcohol, Too
Far More Sick People Requiring Prescriptions on Saturday Than on Other Days.

By Gregory Clark, November 1, 1919.

Looking at the passersby at the corner of Yonge and Front streets, one would conclude that about seventy-five per cent of them were traveling salesmen. For they all carry some sort of a little hand-bag. The little square miniature suitcase is the favorite style. But the variety runs from the plain old family valise down to the homely sateen shopping bag.

The style of bag doesn’t matter, so long as it will contain one quart bottle of whiskey.

For this stream of apparent salesmen is nothing less than the eight hundred daily customers of Ontario Government Dispensary, No. 1, of 29 Front street east.

Eight hundred to a thousand customers a day is the average run on this, the leading Government liquor store in the Province. And one quart of whiskey is the average purchase. Saturday the customers average as high as 1,700 to 2,000. Thus we an arrive at the conclusion that Toronto consumes per day about one thousand one hundred quarts of liquor from this source.

The Government Dispensary on Front street is one of two in Toronto, the other being at the corner of Dundas and Dovercourt road. It is one of seven in Ontario, the others being one each in Ottawa, Kingston, Hamilton, London and Windsor.

But the Front street shop, which is the liquor headquarters of the Province, does fifty per cent of all the business of the Province, or as much as the six other shops put together. This includes not only the large daily trade over the counter to Torontonians, but also an immense mail order trade, the liquor being shipped by express to all points in the Province.

Liquor Headquarters

But this liquor headquarters hath a mild and orderly appearance, for all its activity. The shop itself is no larger than the liquor shop of the bad old days. One wall is entirely covered with shelves full of liquor. The back of the shop is occupied by three little cages, labelled, “Censor” and “Cashier.” The main part of the room is nicely railed off with iron bars like the approach to the ticket booths at the Exhibition.

The customer on entering the shop is directed into the railed runway by a Provincial policeman, who keeps order to the shop. The runway leads to the censor’s cage.

The censors, much to the customer’s astonishment, are not fierce and skeptical old men, but demure and dainty young ladies.

The customer produces his “doctor’s prescription” for one of these fair young censors to look at. She gives it a once over and stamps it. The customer moves on to the cashier’s cage and pays the price of his liquor. Then he reaches the counter, where three busy salesmen are at work. One of these takes the customer’s prescription, skewers it on a file and hands out the quart of whiskey, gin, wine or pure alcohol, as called for.

Then the customer slips his bottle into the little hand-bag and emerges into the open with the keen expression of a stationery salesman looking for business.

It is amazing to watch the lineup of patients at Store No. 1. There are the elderly, dignified old business gentlemen and the poor draggled, old washerwomen; rakish, tilt-hatted toughs in their dancing clothes, and slim, cool-eyed young business men, who have been smoking cigarets for two years; rich, poor, old and young.

Here comes a furiously-bearded old foreigner in a frock coat.

“Vishnick!” he cries, hoarsely, to the Provincial Policeman.

Foreigners Get Alcohol

“Vishnick’s all gone,” says the young lady censor.

” Vishnick! Vishnick!” yells the old man, violently, waving his special prescription from the rabbi.

“All gone!”

“Fini” shouts one of the cashiers, who wears a returned soldier button.

“Napoo!”

And the prophetical-looking old man is ushered out, hoarsely roaring “Vishnick!”

Here comes a poor, seedy little old man with the marks of the demon on every part of his frail old form. And he assumes a jaunty and assured air that fits him ill.

He presents his prescription to the fair censor. She gives it the critical eye, apparently finds something amiss with it, and calls the Provincial Policeman over to look at it.

The little old man’s assurance begins to fail him, but he demands in a quavering voice, “What’s the matter wiff it?”

The moment the Policeman turns his back to go and telephone the doctor whose prescription this purports to be, the little old man wheels, and with remarkable agility, makes a lightning exit, and returns no more.

Here come two high-cheeked sandy mustached Russians, who each secure one quart of pure alcohol.

This mystery we later discuss with Assistant Deputy Chief of Police, Robert Geddes.

“Surely,” we protest. “It is as plain as day that those Russians get that pure alcohol for no other purpose than to manufacture more liquor in illicit stills!”

“Possibly, possibly!” replied the Assistant Deputy. “But you must also take into consideration the racial peculiarities of the Russians. They take a thimbleful of this pure alcohol and hold it in their mouths till their eyes pop from their sockets and their heads are bathed in sweat. That cures all their ills. Furthermore, the Russians mix alcohol with their porridge, soup, and other foods. Very nourishing, they say.”

From the above facts, the following truths appear to arise:

That one out of every five hundred men, women, and children in Toronto require one quart of whiskey per day for the relief or cure of disease, at a doctor’s order.

That on Saturday there are twice as many sick people who require whiskey as there are on other week days.

That Russians are a peculiarly constituted people, whose ailments are better treated with pure alcohol than by whiskey or gin. There were sixty-nine quarts of pure alcohol sold last Saturday, part of it to Russians.

These things we took to Chief License Commissioner J. D. Flavelle.

With regard to the young lady censors, he said:

“They are supplied with copies of all doctors’ signatures. They can censor quite as well as any man could.”

With regard to the selling of liquor to doubtful-looking customers and of pure alcohol to foreigners, Mr. Flavelle said:

“We have no responsibilities whatever in that regard. We have simply to carry out what the doctor’s prescription calls for. The responsibility for the amount of liquor and for the sale of the liquor rests wholly upon the doctors of Ontario.”

Twice a month the Dispensary furnishes the Board of License Commissioners with a complete list of sales, showing the number of prescriptions issued by each doctor. These records are kept on file, and are open to the inspection of the Provincial Government.

Editor’s Notes: This article shows the craziness of early prohibition in Ontario. People would need doctor’s notes for purchasing alcohol for “medicinal” purposes, but obviously people were breaking the rules. Everybody knew it was nonsense, hence the mocking tone of Greg’s writing about the “patients”, and “sick people”, and how everyone wanted to hide from others that they were buying alcohol by carrying their little bags. It is also a little racist, pointing out that “foreigners” or “Russians” can buy pure alcohol, and the assumption is they are up to something illegal. I was also struck with how few stores initially existed, with the rest of the province having to rely on mail-order, not unlike the roll-out of legal cannabis in Ontario in 2019, 100 years later.

“Vishnick”, or Vishnyak is a cherry liqueur popular with Eastern European Jews at the time.

By Gregory Clark, September 15, 1923

Into the private office of the manager of a large wholesale establishment on Wellington street was admitted a middle-aged gentleman of refined appearance who told the information girl guarding the sanctum that he was an old friend of the manager.

The manager looked up as the visitor entered, stared at him with a look of puzzlement on his face, and smiled.

The visitor was smiling broadly.

“I have called,” he said, “to see if I could write you up for some insurance under a new plan my company offers men of your age.”

“Now, I’m pretty busy,” said the manager. Then, halting, he asked:

“Look here: I know your face well, but hanged if I can place you.”

Still smiling broadly, the visitor came closer to the manager’s desk. Laying his hat down, he snatched a newspaper off the desk, flicked it open, and, with a sudden movement, tucked it like an apron into his vest. Then, leaning both hands on the manager’s desk he leaned forward and said:

“What’s yours, sir?”

The effect was remarkable on the manager. He leaped to his feet and cried:

“Tim, you old scoundrel! Where have you been all these years?”

And the two set about shaking hands as if they were long-lost brothers.

But they were simply two old friends, a bartender and one of his pet customers, meeting for the first time after seven years of drought.

Tim was head bartender in the downtown bar regularly patronized by this business man for years. An intimacy had grown up between them such as few not habituated to drinking in bars can imagine. A formal intimacy like that between golfers and their old pro, or between a lady and her housekeeper of twenty years.

Making him seated and comfortable, the manager asked his old friend:

“What have you been doing?”

“Well,” said Tim, pulling on the cigar. “I have had some rough times. When the old establishment closed, in 1916, I had no plans, like all bartenders, and couldn’t believe it when the doors were really closed. The old boss offered me a job around the hotel as a sort of watchman. But I was deeply insulted. A soft drink bar was opened in the old bar, and I served exactly four days there, for some of the old boys came in, and to see the look on their faces as they drank a glass of pink pop was really more than I could bear. I felt fallen in the world. I felt unclassed. Without warning, for my kids were all grown up, I packed a valise and went over to the States. Not belonging to their union, I had a bad two years there. I was in several New York towns in succession, but getting further and further down in the mouth.

“When the States went dry, I hadn’t enough money to take me to Montreal, the last oasis. So I worked at odd jobs and darn near starved–“

“Poor old Tim,” stuck in the manager, with real sympathy.

“No, no. It was good for me,” said Tim. “While serving in a bar in Syracuse I made the acquaintance of an insurance man. Two years ago I met him on the street one day, and he gave me a job selling insurance.

“‘If a man who has listened to as many sad life stories as you can’t sell insurance,’ he said to me. ‘nobody can.'”

“So here I am looking up, one by one, all my old friends across the mahogany. Do you remember that sad story you told me one night–“

“Easy, Tim, easy!” implored the manager, a changed man after seven years.

“–about your fears for your poor family, and you feeling that your heart was in a delicate condition?”

“Tut, Tim I have a golf handicap of eight.”

At any rate, Tim drew forth, in the approved manner, his booklets and folders outlining in graphic style the proposition his company had to make to business men of fifty and over. And It was a good proposition, in spite of the sentimental appendages to the deal.

For Tim wrote his old friend policy for ten thousand.

Where are the four hundred and fifty bartenders who, up to seven years ago, were quenching Toronto’s thirst with beers, wines and liquors? Where are the skilful jugglers amongst them whom men traveled far to see, as they tossed a cocktail from glass to glass, a gleaming rainbow four feet long? Where are these repositories of the sad life stories of thousands of male citizens of this now happy city?

Their union is broken up. Thorough enquiries at the Toronto Labor Temple failed to discover Arthur O’Leary, former business agent of the Bartenders’ Union, in his heyday one of the most popular figures in the labor world.

Strange to relate, a good many of Toronto’s bartenders have stuck to bartending, even though the quality of the goods they sell is different.

In remnant of what used to be one of the longest bars in Toronto, now remodeled down to a mere fragment of its old glory, a bartender of twenty years’ experience admitted that he was too old to change his calling just because the law changed.

“Is there much difference between selling liquor and soft drinks?” he was asked.

“I feel,” he replied, “like a banker who has failed and has had to take up the grocery business for a livelihood. As a bartender, I was the friend and confidante of members of the business world, half the city hall staff knew me by name, city fathers took council with me, mayors have wept on my shoulder. In the old days, my customers were regular customers. But of that bunch–“

And he waved a contemptuous hand at a dozen people, mostly idle young men, lounging against the soda bar.

“–of that bunch I don’t know one. Never saw them before in my life.”

“What effect has prohibition had on your income?”

“I don’t get one-third the wages I used to make and I get no tips. My income is about a quarter what it was.”

“Prohibition has hit you hard?”

“Yes it has. But I still think the going of the bar is the best thing ever happened. I do, really. For one good bar, where men had a drink, there were three crooked bars where men got drunk. I never let a man get drunk off my bar in my life. Some bartenders considered their job was to rake over the coin. Some of us, however, figured our job was to serve refreshment to men. But we all got hit just the same.”

Most of the bartenders who are still serving drinks are serving them over the former bars of old hotels. Only a couple are in soda parlors.

A few of the bartenders have gone up in the world. One owns a good hotel near the centre of the city. Others have retail businesses, grocery, hardware and boot and shoe.

One very gifted bartender is now in charge of a gasoline station, and is serving up gas and oil without a hint, in the way he serves up a pint of “medium,” that he was in his day one of the most skilful drink slingers in the city.

But others, the older ones, have had a very poor time the last seven years. Some are jobless, some are janitors and handy men around old hostelries.

“It took prohibition,” said one old bartender, who has been out of a job four of the seven years since his profession quit him, “to show up how shallow was bar-room friendship. I had lived in it so long that I had begun to imagine it was genuine.”

“Men who called me affectionately by name when they ordered a drink, sports who got me to do favors for them, men I’ve cashed checks for, all turned me down when I called on them.”

“I wanted a job, recommendation. But a month after the bars were closed, most of them had forgotten who I was. Not three out of fifty of them held out the helping hand when I was in need.”

Perhaps the hardest part of prohibition to the bartender was not the loss of his calling, but the discovery of the fact that the bar-room affection that shed a glamor over his trade was as thin and unsubstantial as the beer fumes that induced it.

Editor’s Note: Prohibition went through all sorts of referendums and polls between 1916 and 1927 in Ontario when it was repealed. Greg was likely not in favour of prohibition, but his newspaper was. At the time of the article in 1923, Howard Ferguson had been elected Premier, and would move slowly and cautiously on limiting the restrictions.