Jericho by George Fetherling Page A

bonanza to the neighbourhood as the rooms were rented out to whores by the hour. The morality cops especially made prostitution raids, but the business was so spread out and so tied up with the gambling that it couldn’t be separated out nicely. There was a lot of jockeying for power, if you’ll pardon my play on words. Cappy Smith, a former beer-runner and one-time boxer (though he was just a short guy), was an example. He was a muscle type that would put the squeeze on some of the pimps—you know, for a rake-off—while also making book. As the investigation developed, it came to look like bigger fry were putting the squeeze on him in return. This is his story as best I can remember it, and I think I remember it pretty clearly.
    Like I was telling you, when Cappy went in the Frigidaire it was big news. There were gangsters in Canada but Canada was also a place where American gangsters liked to come to play or hide out. There were reliable witnesses that saw no less than Al Capone in Windsor briefly, about the time he was having his tax troubles in Chicago, where more than five hundred hoodlums got killed by other gangsters during the fourteen years that the Volstead Act was in force. (Five hundred killings, a few arrests, no convictions.) It’s a wonder that it took twenty years from the start of American Prohibition for this particular form of public entertainment, what the papers called the gangland slaying, to arrive in Canada, which is what was happening in the Cappy Smithcase if you believed what you read, which nobody in their right mind did in those days. I saved the clippings.
    [Lonnie picked up an old scrapbook. The paste had shrunk, making the pages curl.]
    It says here that “the murder of Smith was swiftly followed by one of the greatest manhunts in Canada’s criminal annals.” This meant they were rounding up all the rounders they knew and throwing them in the tank overnight on vagrancy charges. The cops were told to bring in Eyetalians especially. (That’s how the word was pronounced back then—and Cappy’s real name wasn’t Smith, needless to say, it was something like Cappy Vermicelli.) Cappy’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend and her family had told the investigating officers that the gang that burst into the house “looked like Eyetalians.” When they finally broke the case, the two suspects were Scots, the MacLeod brothers—Donald, who was about thirty and was always called Mickey, and Sandy, who was only nineteen. To tell their story I’ve got to tell you more about how things were run in those days.
    Gangs looked to gambling and girls and were always trying to figure some way to control the whole pot in both rackets. But this was hard to do because of how everything was divided up not just according to neighbourhoods but street corner by street corner. You’d never see the Lebanese down around the Dempster here. He may have
been
here, but you’d never see him. He was the big cheese, but he had I don’t know how many little cheeses working for him all over downtown. Cappy was one of them. Cappy also owned a little roadhouse of his own outside the city (it was famous for its barbecue), but he made his public appearances, conducted his real business, at the Prince Eddy coffee shop, agreat place in those days, run by a husband and wife. The wife personally made all the desserts and pastries, including a wonderful pineapple pie. I think she invented it. I’ve never seen it on any other menu and I never pass that corner even now without tasting it.
    As late as noon on the day before he was killed, Cappy came into the Prince Eddy like a banker and six or eight runners took their turn going up to his table and giving him the betting slips they’d collected. He’d pay them their ten percent—that’s why they were called commission men—and then he’d phone in the bets and settle up what he had to pay out. He was a very powerful person in about a one-block radius of where he sat drinking the