Dead Ends (8 page)

The pressure on Moore-Stewart and Blakely was fierce.

McLelland hired a high-profile lawyer, who told Moore-Stewart—wrongly, as it turned out—that McLelland's testimony would be damaging to Blakely. (Segarty's subpoena was quashed, as he had only breakfasted with McLelland that morning, long before the Top Hat call. He was unfairly maligned by Moore-Stewart.)

And the attention on the trial was just as intense.
TV
camera crews and news photographers staked out the courthouse steps.

Blakely hardly looked the part of a madam or pimp. She was a strapping woman with short, brown, permed hair and a friendly smile, little or no makeup, dressed more like a suburban mom many days, in red fleece jacket, dark slacks, and white shirt.

Moore-Stewart did his best to put the police and prosecutors on trial.

A police officer faced tough questions about the decision to rent a motel room next to one occupied by an escort, drill a hole in the wall, and set up a video camera. When wiretaps indicated a client visit was scheduled, the police started filming.

The senior officer testified it was a first for him, but prosecutors told him no search warrant was needed—as long as the sound was turned off. Prosecutors exploited a loophole in the law, which didn't contemplate cheap and easy video spying.

McLelland's day in court came on November 27, a snowy Wednesday. He arrived alone, collar turned up on his black coat, looking, one reporter noted, “glum.” How else would a married politician look on the way into court to admit hiring a prostitute?

McLelland said he made the call to Top Hat and asked for a woman. “I'd had a fair amount of drink that evening,” he testified. “I would say it would have been late.”

Moore-Stewart tried to ask more questions about the encounter, the Crown objected, and—because McLelland bought sex outside the one-week window specified by the prosecutors—the judge would not allow the questions.

But McLelland did confirm he had never discussed sex or what he expected when he arranged the $130-an-hour encounter in the phone call with Blakely.

Then he walked back to the legislature through the snow, refusing to answer questions from the pack of reporters.

Embarrassing, even humiliating, especially as the Socreds claimed the moral high ground. But Premier Bill Bennett, while agreeing McLelland had hardly set a good example, didn't drop him from cabinet. His fellow
MLAS
and Langley politicians also supported him.

“I don't think it's my business to poke into other people's business, particularly gossipy, junky stuff,” said Cliff Michael, chair of the Socred caucus.

Which, implicitly, raised questions about what the
RCMP
, Victoria police, and Crown prosecutors were doing poking into the business of Top Hat, the women who worked there, and the men who paid for services.

The trial ended. The jury—five men, seven women—found Blakely guilty of ten counts.

But Judge Robert Hutchison—ex-Olympic athlete, son of pre-eminent British Columbia journalist and writer Bruce Hutchison—imposed a token penalty. Blakely was sentenced
to the one day in jail she had already served, a $900 fine, six months' probation, and community service.

When society is willing to let people pay for sex with credit cards, he asked, can we really say we consider prostitution a serious offence?

McLelland didn't run in the next election. Segarty did, lost, and blamed the unfair bad publicity from the trial.

Blakely paid her fine and did community service.

At least one of the sex workers attempted suicide when she learned lawyers wanted to use her name in court.

Police and prosecutors faced tough questions about the costly investigation and the dubious secret videotapes. The provincial government ordered an inquiry and called for controls on police spying without warrants.

Moore-Stewart paid the highest price. He went too far in getting the subpoena for Segarty, but he also successfully put the system on trial and exposed the legal hypocrisy that saw McLelland go uncharged while Blakely faced jail time for answering the phone.

But his aggressive tactics got him into trouble with the Law Society of British Columbia, which regulates lawyers. After a legal battle that he took up all the way up to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, Moore-Stewart ended up paying a fine and went on to a career of representing outsider clients.

And escort agencies kept on fielding late-night calls from customers in upscale hotels.

B
ill Miner rode across the Canadian border in the fall of 1903, one step ahead of the Pinkerton men and the police, a price on his head.

He was fifty-six. Old for an outlaw. San Quentin prison was the closest thing he ever had to a home. Robbing was his only real trade.

The hard life was etched on his face. A bushy white moustache almost covered his wide mouth, beneath a long nose and penetrating dark eyes. Usually, a wide-brimmed stetson hid his swept-back hair. He looked tired.

The wanted posters put him at five foot nine and about 145 pounds, and noted the tattooed dancing girl on his right forearm.

Miner, the gentleman bandit, was on the run again. And he was on the way to becoming a Canadian legend.

*
  
*
  
*

Miner lied the way other men breathed, so it's hard to separate myth from reality. He was born in Michigan, and his family moved to a California gold town after his father died.

Miner signed on with the California Cavalry Volunteers in 1864, on the side of the north in the bloody Civil War. He deserted after three months.

And he took to crime. It was a good time to be a criminal in the West. Lawmen were few and communication was slow. A robber could take what he wanted and be in any other county, using a different name, before the victim found a sheriff.

Miner had style. At nineteen, he rode to a nearby town on a stolen horse, picked out a fine suit, and asked the clerk to come with him while he fetched the money to pay for it. Once in an alley, Miner pulled a pistol and told the clerk he was taking the suit, and his watch. Stand there for twenty minutes, and everything would be fine, he said. The clerk, “overpowered by the robber's chivalrous bearing … stood there shivering … until the 20 minutes had expired,” reported the local paper.

His life of crime was under way. He stole money and horses, and eventually tried a stagecoach robbery with an accomplice.

But they were tracked and caught, sleeping in a hotel room. It was one of a long series of captures.

Still nineteen, Miner started his first stretch in San Quentin, treating the sentence as an inconvenience at worst, a badge of honour at best.

San Quentin was grim and violent, a three-storey stone building with two inmates sharing each four-foot-by-nine-foot cell. Prisoners were whipped and tortured for breaking the rules.

It should have been a powerful deterrent. But as soon as Miner was free, he went back to stealing. And didn't get much better at it.

Miner teamed up with “Alkali Jim” Harrington, a contact from San Quentin, on a string of burglaries and, with an accomplice named Charlie Cooper, a stagecoach robbery that earned them some $2,600 in gold. But Harrington and Miner betrayed Cooper, taking off with the money. When Cooper was caught, he was quick to implicate them.

Miner and Harrington dodged capture in one shootout with police in San Jose. It wan't like the movies. The outlaws' guns didn't work, they ran away, and no one on either side got hurt.

But the law caught up with Miner in San Francisco in February 1871. He was sent back to San Quentin for another nine years.

When he got out, Miner was thirty-three. He was likeable and polite, and his letters seeking early release are articulate and persuasive. He had been a criminal for about fifteen years,
and spent thirteen of them behind bars. Another man might have decided on a career change.

But Miner went right back to robbing, heading to southern Colorado and hooking up with a new, older partner who called himself Billy LeRoy. They robbed at least three stagecoaches in 1880—without violence—finally hitting a $4,000 jackpot.

Miner headed east with his share. LeRoy, with his brother, kept on robbing, until they were lynched a year later by the “People's Committee for Safety” in Del Norte, Colorado.

Miner's eastern break was short. By the spring of 1881, he was back in the West, staging robberies and thefts in Colorado and California. He was more skilful, and the legend of the gentleman bandit grew. Newspapers reported his courteous banter with the coach drivers and passengers. A wanted poster described a charming, fashionable felon—“a good fluent talker, fond of women,” who had spent $85 of the loot on black beaver pants, a “silk plush vest, quite flashy,” and a dark chinchilla coat.

He didn't get to wear them long. On December 7, 1881, Miner was captured by a Wells Fargo detective. Ten days later, he was on his way back to San Quentin. It was an eventful stay—he was shot and wounded in an escape attempt, stabbed by another inmate, and pleaded his case for release.

In 1901, Miner once again walked through the prison gate a free man. He was older—fifty-four—but not much wiser despite twenty-three years in prison.

The West had changed while Miner was behind bars. Law and order had come to the frontier. Stagecoaches had been replaced by trains. Telephones linked communities.

Miner headed to northwest Washington State, and stayed out of trouble for a time. But on September 23, 1903, Miner was part of a dynamite-waving gang that botched a train robbery outside Portland, Oregon. Within days, a $1,300 reward was being offered by the railway and the state.

It was time to head to Canada. Miner laid low around Princeton for a while, winning friends in the community. He hooked up with another San Quentin alumnus, “Cowboy” Jack Terry, and helped him in his smuggling business. Opium was
legal in Canada until 1908, but banned in the United States. Then, as now, there was money in the drug trade.

But less than a year after the Portland debacle, Miner decided to go back to robbing trains. This time, he got it right.

Miner and two accomplices travelled to Mission Junction and waited for the Vancouver-bound Canadian Pacific Railway train No. 1 on September 10, 1904. It was a foggy night; they had no trouble dropping from the water tower onto the baggage car during the train's brief stop.

Wearing masks and brandishing revolvers and a rifle, they made their way to the engine as the train pulled away and ordered the driver to stop just down the line. The raid on the express car was a huge success—some $6,000 in gold dust, $900 in cash, and $50,000 in United States bonds.

It wasn't just a big score. Miner's gang is credited with the first train robbery in Canada, and he—perhaps apocryphally—was said to have used the phrase “Hands up” for the first time in a heist.

The robbery could have paid for a nice retirement. Miner had friends at Princeton and was liked in the community, stepping in to help neighbours when needed. There was ranch work if he wanted it. He was fifty-seven.

But Miner had other plans. On May 8, 1906, he and two others clambered onto a westbound
CPR
express while it was stopped to take on water at Ducks, just outside Kamloops. The engineer soon found himself “staring down the barrel of a big revolver.”

The robbery was a fiasco. Miner told the engineer to stop the train, and the engine and mail car were disconnected and run a mile down the track. Unfortunately, the express car, most likely to hold valuables, was left behind. The robbers came up with almost nothing and, worse, missed packages containing about $40,000 in cash and gold.

Miner's age was showing. The
British Colonist
reported, “An old man was evidently in command of the robbery.” It was the same gang responsible for the 1904 train robbery, the paper reported.

“The mask fell off the old man's face … and Mail Clerk Thorburn, who was in the former hold-up, recognized him.”

It was Bill Miner, the paper said. And he maintained his trademark politeness. When he noticed one of the train staff was shivering, he apologized, adding “we won't keep you long.”

This time, the
CPR
wasn't going to let Miner get away. An $11,500 reward was quickly posted by the railway, Canada, and the province.

The money would be paid for any one of the robbers—“Dead or Alive.”

About 100 people set out from Kamloops to try to claim the reward. Fortunately for the outlaws, a team of Royal Northwest Mounted Police officers found them first. Shorty Dunn, one of the gang, fired on the officers and was wounded, but the three were ultimately taken into custody peacefully.

On June 1, 1906, Miner was sent to prison again—this time for life.

It didn't work out that way. A little over a year later, Miner escaped from the New Westminster Penitentiary. (There has been speculation that his escape was arranged, part of a deal to return the $50,000 in bonds stolen in 1904 to the
CPR
.)

By then, the legend was as big as the man. Miner had public sympathy. “Bill Miner's not so bad,” a joke went. “He only robs the
CPR
every two years, they rob us every day.”

The
Colonist
reported that citizens around Princeton cheered his getaway. “He is spoken of by all who knew him as a most amiable, open-hearted, kindly old fellow … who would go out of his way to do a good turn to his fellow man,” the paper said. “He is regarded as a Robin Hood of these later days of steam railways.”

Miner wasn't done yet. He made his way to Georgia, and in 1911, at sixty-five, robbed the Southern Railway express. Caught and sent to prison, he escaped twice more. He was captured quickly each time, but the legend grew. The newspapers compared him to Jesse James, celebrated his wit and cunning and courtesy, called him the last of the Western outlaws.