The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Tempted by Timmins' Gold

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

In 1911, a northern Ontario boomtown that had sprung up around massive new gold mines was incorporated into a bedroom community called Timmins. In the years that followed, those mines, and the people who worked in them, drove the local economy in more ways than one. And not all of them on the level. According to our guest, theft was so common, it created a booming black market in illicit gold. Well, Timmins' once-thriving underground economy and the people who populated it - the villainous and virtuous alike - are the subjects of a new book, ,City of Thieves,, written by veteran northern reporter Kevin Vincent. While the book is fiction, it's based on real events that he has researched and documented since 1984.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In the years that followed, those mines and the people who worked in them drove the local economy in more ways than one, and not all of them on the level. In fact, theft was so common it created a booming black market in illicit gold. Theft was so common, it created a booming black market in illicit gold. Well, the once thriving underground economy and the people who populated Timmins, the villainous and the virtuous alike, are the subjects of a new book. It's called City of Thieves, written by veteran Northern reporter Kevin Vincent. While the book is fiction, it's based on real events that he has researched and documented since 1984. And Kevin Vincent joins us now from Timmins, Ontario.

And Kevin, it's great to meet you. How are you doing tonight? Steve, I'm doing fantastic. It's a real thrill and an honor to be on the agenda with you to talk about this. It's a pleasure to have you. Now, let's go way back here. Let's go back to 1909. Give us a sense of how much gold there actually was in Timmins at that time.

Well, the dome mine was discovered at that point and they had what they called the golden sidewalk. It was literally a two foot wide vein of gold that was absolutely staggering. And of course, it created the biggest gold rush, I think, in Canadian history. And if you think about the pioneer wagon culture that started in the 1800s and moved its way across the United States and up to the Yukon and Alaska, well, that wagon train pioneer culture ended up in Cobalt, and it literally ended in Timmins. The wagon trains were still coming here in 1909 and 1910 and 1911 to chase gold. And do you still think of Timmins as one of the sort of last frontier towns in North America? Well, I think Pierre Burton got it wrong.

He called the Klondike, you know, the last great frontier. I like to think of Timmins as Canada's or North America's last great frontier, mostly because this is where that frontier culture came to a conclusion. Well, let's talk about something that I suspect a lot of people watching or listening have never heard of before. So I'll get you to define it. What is high grading? So high grade refers to visible gold, high grade gold. And when you engage in stealing it, you become a high grader. And a high grader can be anybody from a miner to a shift boss, to a mine manager, to a contractor, or even it can be somebody that is a business person or a business

owner out in the community that is accepting the high-grade gold as a form of payment in exchange for goods and services. How exactly do you steal gold out of a mine? It's really limited by your imagination, Steve. Uh, it's, it's not particularly easy to walk out with some of it in your pocket, uh, but it's bought and sold, uh, underground and so-called trusted employees, uh, who are not subject to search every time they go underground or having to strip down, uh down naked to go through the showers. They called it the dry, where you leave your work clothes on one side and you pick up your street clothes on the other to prevent theft.

That's what the dry was supposed to do back in the 1930s when it was created. It was supposed to stamp out hydrating. Well, all it really did was create more innovative ways to remove the gold from the gold mines. And by the way, it's not just Timmins. It's Kirkland Lake. It's Red Lake. It's Ruan-Noranda. It's Val d'Or. It's all the gold mining communities of northwestern Quebec and northeastern and northwestern Ontario. And was basically everybody in on it? northeastern and northwestern ontario and was basically everybody in on it that's why the book is called city of thieves uh everybody was in on it uh everyone from the uh the politicians there were crooked cops uh there were crooked lawyers there were crooked judges

there were crooked politicians everybody was in on on it. And very few people went to prison. A few people got jail sentences, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and some fines. But very few people were ever sent to prison for long terms. And besides Timmons, where else did the gold end up? Well, the gold would find its way across the border it would end up in detroit or buffalo montreal toronto uh new york a lot of it would end up overseas uh during the war a lot of it ended up in the hands of uh of the germans and uh and the italians during the second world war so wherever as as one high grader put it to me, if you have gold, it doesn't matter where you go. You're considered a gentleman because there's a

way there's a way to get rid of it. A gentleman thief, though. Correct. What were the creative ways in which you could smuggle gold out of Timmons back then? Muggle gold out of Timmons back then? Well, I can tell you that the newspapers used to have society columns, and those society columns tracked everybody. If you were taking the train, you told your neighbor that you were going to visit your sister down in Kitchener or your brother in Hamilton. And so the high graders, the people that were the organizers, the organized crime syndicate, they would scan the newspapers and see, oh, well, Steve Paikin's sister is going to visit him down in Hamilton. Let's talk to Steve's sister and let's get her car serviced in Timmins. So you would bring your car to a service station. They'd take care of it for you, make sure it was well taken care of. And

then they'd say to you something like, well, why don't you stop and get a car wash in Barry? And when you go to that particular car wash, just leave your car there. Oh, by the way, here's half of a hundred dollar bill. And when you get your car washed and come out the other side, you're going to have the other half of that hundred dollar bill attached to it. So you could claim, you know, as a school teacher or a bank teller that all you did was you took your car for a car wash. I don't know how the gold got in there. So people were knowingly used as transporters for this stolen gold. And that's true, by the way, of Kirkland Lake and Red Lake and Timmins. It's endemic. So these were gold mules, as the expression goes today. Is that right? That is correct. And some of it was quite substantial. Some of it was in the hundreds and hundreds and even thousands of ounces.

And as one old reporter put it to me many years ago, he said, listen, with thousands and thousands of miners out there involved in high grading and the stealing of gold, it's virtually impossible to put an end to it or to put a stop to it. The OPP tried. They created a high grade squad or a gold squad back in the late 30s that lasted probably 20 years. They've restarted it a couple of times, but they've never really put a dent in this industry. Well, let's just try to figure out more about how endemic this really was, because I guess there was the sort of regular above ground economy that took place in Timmins back in the day. And then there's this sort of part of the underground economy, which is deeply

entrenched, which everybody's sort of in on, but nobody really wants to acknowledge. What kind of stories can you tell us about how much a fabric of the underground economy this really was? My favorite story when I'm asked that question, Steve, is to refer to Greg Evans. Greg Evans was a lawyer in Timmins in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, he eventually became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario. He also sat on the, he was the lead justice on the Donald Marshall inquiry. He defended hundreds of high graders across Northern Ontario. And at one point, he gave a speech to the Chamber of Commerce in Timmins. And he said, you know, we have a great secondary industry here in Timmins, if they just leave it alone. And, and so there are stories

when a when a miner would die, and his house would be put up for sale, or perhaps that house was about to be torn down, you would literally have volunteers from the community who would go to help tear down that house because they would be looking for gold. They would be looking for stashes of gold. There are suggestions that the safety deposit boxes of all the banks in Timmins, that if you had the opportunity to go through the safety deposit boxes, whether it's the Bank of Montreal or Scotank or CIBC, you would find significant stashes of gold,

rainy day gold that people have collected over the years. Now, you mentioned the Ontario Provincial Police did take efforts to sort of get to the bottom of this, but I don't know if you can put a percentage on it, but what percentage of the cops do you think were sort of in on it? And what percentage were genuinely trying to put it to an end? Bear with me on a quick story. The in the 1980s, there was a

huge fire in downtown Timmins. And the fire marshal that investigated that particular that particular fire was the son of the original Gold Squad investigator, a sergeant by the name of John Braney, of Bert Braney, rather. His son, John Braney, was a fire marshal. He told me a story about this fire investigation into a fire in the 1980s in downtown Timmins. And the building was owned by two people that were suspected of being involved in the high grading or gold smuggling world. They became very large real estate owners as well, by the way. And when this fire marshal's father died in the 1990s, the funeral director in his father's wallet found a business card. And on that business card, it said one free ride.

And it had some initials on it. And so when the fire marshal was investigating the fire, he had to interview the two owners of the building, one of which was known as the godfather of gold smuggling and high grading in Timmins. And he confronted him after the interview. And he said, listen, he says, Do you know who I am? And he said, No. He said, My name is john brainy. I'm the son of Bert brainy. My dad was the head of the gold squad back in the 1930s and 40s. And he said, Bert brainy. Wow. He says he was such a good cop. He says, bribe everybody else but we couldn't get your dad where did you find that card and he said it was in my dad's wallet he says well what was it for can you tell me and he said well i can tell you it wasn't for a ride at the circus

and i said it was for it was a ticket that they had given to him for a night of pleasure at a local brothel in Timmins. Oh, my gosh. He never cashed it in. Now, Steve, that's a true story. I do not have I tell people all the time. I do not have a vivid enough imagination to make that up. That is great. What a great story. Now, somebody else that people would have heard of is a guy by the name of Jimmy Hoffa. And my hunch is he was not the same as the guy you just mentioned in terms of succumbing to the temptations of crime. There is a relationship, apparently, between Timmons and the former Teamsters head. What's that relationship? The brothel that I just mentioned was a famous brothel in Timmons on 6th Avenue. And there was a gentleman that ran that.

I'm not going to share his name, but he started accepting gold as payment from the miners who were looking for a little night of pleasure. And he got so much of it that he decided that he was going to involve himself significantly in the gold smuggling syndicate. Well, this did not sit well with those that were running the gold smuggling rackets. And so he tried to smuggle some gold

across the border in Detroit. And he was immediately fingered at the border because the high graders paid off and had been for years, border agents in Buffalo and Fort Erie and Detroit and Northern Minnesota. And they had him arrested. He was thrown in jail. He became friends with Jimmy Hoffa, who happened to be in the jail cell next to him. Now, the reason I know that is that the brothel owner's best friend was the former newspaper editor, daily newspaper editor here. And he played pool with this guy in this guy's pool hall. And he said that there are pictures. And so this gentleman's eldest son became a lawyer. His second son was also a high grader. And his high grader showed me the picture one day of his father and Jimmy Hoffa together

because Jimmy Hoffa had invited this brothel owner to come down to the Teamsters annual convention every year in Detroit because they became such good friends. So fair to say that it wasn't just everyday citizens in Timmins who were involved in this. Organized crime was involved. Crooked unions were involved. The mafia was, everybody was involved. People, people have always asked me that question, you know, why, you know, are you going to name so-and-so? Are you going to name so-and-so? And at the end of the day, if I outed everyone that was involved, the entire city would be outed because everyone was involved. as a business owner, you simply weren't in business because you were not going to get the foot traffic from the miners who had gold to spend in the local shops and the local stores. Now, Kevin, you have written this book as a piece of fiction, even though the story you tell is true. And I want to ask you a couple of questions that emerge from that. Number one,

why did you take that approach? Why fiction as opposed to just doing it like a straight nonfiction book? Well, there are so many stories, Steve. The first two books that I did were called Bootleg Gold 1 and Bootleg Gold 2. Those books were nonfiction. And they were interesting, I think, stories in and of themselves,

but they really didn't have the depth that you can put together in fiction. And they always say that, you know, the fiction is closer to the truth anyway. Reynolds, who just passed away, who was a longtime editor of the Daily Newspaper, and many, many others, including Jack Atkinson, who I dedicate all my books to, who was a police officer that inspired my interest in this back in 1984. And so those stories are going to live forever, um, are going to live forever because if they're not told, uh, in, in a fictionalized, uh, version, they're just not going to get told at all. They're not going to, they're not going to be written about. And there's literally thousands of them. Now your sources for this book, uh, living dead people versus documents, lay that out for us. How did you figure all that out? All of the above, Steve. My wife and I go for a walk every night. And there was a particular group of individuals who were very prominent. Everybody in the city of 50,000 people knew that

they were the kingpins of the high grading industry. So my wife and I go out for a walk, and this is three or four weeks ago, and a gentleman comes across his lawn, and he says, Kevin, he says, I just want to say hello to you. He said, do you know who I am? And I said, no. He said, I'm so-and-so's son. And I recognized the name right away as being part of this high-grading or or gold smuggling syndicate, the very top of the food chain. And he said, I just want to tell you how much I enjoyed your book.

I said, thank you very much. I appreciate that. And he said, you know, I worked out west and I came back to Timmins and I ended up at the McIntyre mine. And one of the shifts that I was on, my shift boss introduced me to two old timers who had been working in the mine for 40 years. And they said to those two old timers, do you know who this is? And the old timer said, no. And then this guy gave his name and they said, wow, was so and so your father? Yes. And these two old-timers said we made more money with your old man than we made working in the mine for years just wanted to let you know that

now this is this is the son of the you know telling me this story so over the years i've i've been very fortunate ste Steve, that people have trusted me with these stories because they want them to be told because they know that they're fantastic stories. How important is gold to Timmons today? Well, Steve, you've been to Timmons multiple times over the years and done many events. And gold is still the centerpiece of our economy. It's still growing. There are still gold mines that are being explored at a terrific pace. Of course, the shift is now towards critical minerals, as you're well aware.

And Timmins, the economy, we just had a huge mining event here last week, record attendance. So the interest in mining is not waning. It's growing, quite frankly. And is high grading still happening? What do you think? I'm asked that question all the time. It's $3,000 an ounce. And if you can get an ounce onto the street, the going price is 50 cents on the dollar. So that's $1,500. You manage to get an ounce of gold per shift five days a week. That's a lot of money. It is. Kevin, let's finish up on this. You have sort of been following this story for four decades. And I wonder what have you found so compelling about all of this that you've dedicated so much of your life to it?

The fact that these are great stories. People are deeply interested, I think, in true crime. They're also deeply interested in the David and Goliath of true crime as well, the Robin Hood aspect. There are characters that are connected with the gold smuggling world that are not unlike robin hood rob from the rich and give to the poor and at one point back in the 1920s i was told that even the mines themselves would go into the bars at night and send an agent or a mine manager with a pocket full of money to buy back the gold that had been stolen from their mine that was now in the hands of the bartenders. And so everybody made money and the mines would buy back some of that stolen gold and

put it into the smelting process. Wow. The name of the book is City of Thieves. We are delighted that it has brought one of Ontario's great storytellers, Kevin Vincent, to our airwaves tonight. Kevin, good luck with the book and thanks for making time for us. Steve, thanks so much. It's a real privilege and an honor to be on the show. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.