GREED, GOLD AND THE HOOSEGOW
One by one, time runs out for The Stopwatch Gang
The phone in the airport warehouse rang at 11:14 p.m. The guard on duty, 24-year-old David Braham, answered it and listened as a gruff voice on the other end asked if his man had arrived there yet.
“His man,” the caller explained, was an Air Canada employee who had been sent to pick up some deicing fluid from the freight shed. Without it, flights would be delayed; there would be hell to pay.
The two were still on the phone when Braham heard a knock at the warehouse door. He set the phone down and went to the door, where he was met by a man wearing an Air Canada uniform. Your boss is looking for you, Braham told the man as he motioned to the phone.
That’s when the man pulled out a gun. “This is a robbery,” he said.
The April 17, 1974, heist at the Ottawa airport was the largest gold theft in Canada’s history with Paddy Mitchell, Stephen Reid and Lionel Wright making off with six bars weighing 5,100 ounces and worth more than $750,000, the equivalent today of about $4 million. The robbery ignited the criminal careers of the three, lifting them from small-time petty thieves to international bank robbers and, eventually, drug traffickers. Their quick and efficient robberies, with one of the trio — usually Reid — often wearing a stopwatch around his neck, earned them the nickname The Stopwatch Gang. They had a reputation for politeness during their robberies and for not hurting anyone.
Following the gold heist, they robbed about 100 banks, most in the U.S., of close to $15 million. They were occasionally incarcerated and sometimes escaped. Their stories have been retold in numerous books and on TV documentaries.
Mitchell, the ringleader, grew up on Preston Street in Ottawa. “The further you went down Preston Street,” his older brother Pinky once remarked, “the tougher it got. We lived in the last house in the basement.”
Wright worked as a night clerk at a trucking firm and had met Mitchell at the smoke shop where Wright bought his girlie magazines. The two eventually entered a partnership in which Wright routinely pilfered all manner of cigarettes, booze, candy and other goods from his work, covering his tracks with doctored paperwork, while Mitchell fenced the stolen property.
Reid, meanwhile, was a drug addict and bank robber, originally from Massey, Ont., just west of Sudbury. On a day pass from Kingston Penitentiary once, he managed to elude his counsellor by crawling out of a restaurant bathroom window. He fled to Ottawa, where he was introduced to Mitchell, whom he later described as “the unofficial mayor of the local underworld.”
The three embarked on a yearlong crime spree until, in a pool hall one day, Mitchell and Reid met Gary Coutanche, an Air Canada baggage handler who was selling electronic calculators he’d stolen from work. Coutanche told Mitchell of the monthly shipment of gold that passed through the airport on its way to the Mint. Mitchell offered him $100,000 to let him know when the next shipment was arriving. On April 17, Coutanche told him, the gold would arrive from Red Lake Gold Mines. It was Mitchell who made the phone call to security guard Braham and Reid who knocked at the warehouse door brandishing a gun. Wright was in the getaway van outside.
Police immediately suspected an inside job and Coutanche, who was conspicuous by his lavish spending after Mitchell fronted him $10,000, was not difficult to find or flip. Ten months after the heist, Mitchell asked Coutanche to let a bag pass through customs unchecked. When police intercepted it, they found it was filled with cocaine.
Mitchell and Wright were each sentenced to 17 years for trafficking with Mitchell getting three more years for possession of the gold. Reid, who had moved to the U.S. after the airport robbery, was arrested following his return to Kingston, where he spoke too freely about his role in the heist. He was arrested and sentenced to 10 years for the armed robbery on top of the time he still owed.
Wright, meanwhile, escaped from the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre and fled to Florida. Mitchell and Reid were sent to Millhaven Institution, where the latter took up classes in hairstyling, theorizing — accurately — if he acted like a model prisoner he might be transferred to a less-secure facility. In 1978, he was sent to medium-security Joyceville. Mitchell, also displaying “exemplary behaviour,” followed six months later. Reid made good his escape in August 1979, when he was allowed to make a day trip with just one guard to a hair salon in Kingston. While at a restaurant at lunch, he (again) crawled out the bathroom window. Exactly three months later, he helped Mitchell escape when the latter feigned a heart attack that got him in an ambulance to the hospital, where Reid and an accomplice were waiting in green scrubs and surgical masks. Reid also had a revolver. He cuffed the guards together in the ambulance, then carried Mitchell to his van and the three sped off.
They eventually arrived in Florida, where they again hooked up with Wright. Many more robberies — mostly carefully planned bank heists — followed with the gang migrating to San Diego and later Sedona, Ariz. Their Bank of America robbery in San Diego in September 1980 was their biggest, netting US$283,000 or about $1 million Cdn today.
According to Mitchell, it was an associate of theirs, former Ottawa Rough Riders halfback Donny Hollingsworth, who ultimately turned them in. “Big John,” as he was known, had helped the gang fence the airport gold and had supplied them with guns and other supplies for many of their bank jobs. Hollingsworth had become involved in a crystal meth operation outside San Diego and a witness had seen him dumping the body of a man who’d died sampling their wares. He needed $80,000 for bail and turned to Reid for help, promising to pay it back within 60 days with interest. He then cut a deal with the FBI to give them The Stopwatch Gang in exchange for leniency.
Reid and Wright were arrested and eventually given 20-year sentences for the Bank of America robbery. Mitchell was out of town when his colleagues were arrested. Upon hearing the news, he emptied their safe-deposit box of its remaining $300,000 and went on the lam, turning to solo armed robberies. He was eventually caught and sentenced to 48 years on top of the 20 he still owed for the gold heist. Four years later, he escaped from the maximum-security penitentiary in Florence, Ariz., and fled to the Philippines.
In 1993, neighbours of his saw an America’s Most Wanted show about him and called the FBI. Mitchell again went on the run, returning to the U.S., where he was caught robbing a bank in Southaven, Miss. Thirty more years were added to his sentence and he was shipped to Leavenworth in Kansas. Less than two weeks later, he tried again to escape and had five more years added to his time.
In 2006, Mitchell was diagnosed with cancer and sent to Federal Correction Complex in Butner, N.C., where many U.S. prisoners with health issues are incarcerated. He died on Jan. 14, 2007, at 64. He ended his last letter to Reid, written around Christmas, with “We’ve had a life, haven’t we?”
Reid, who wrote the novel Jackrabbit Parole, married Canadian poet Susan Musgrave in prison in 1986 and was released the following year. A dozen years later, he robbed another bank and was sentence to 18 years in jail. In 2008, after serving half his sentence, he was released on day parole. Soon after, he violated his parole conditions by one day ordering a beer with lunch. He was sentenced to 47 months at William Head Institution on Vancouver Island. He was released in early 2014. Reid died June 12 in a Haida Gwaii hospital at the age of 68.
Wright, the introvert nicknamed the Ghost for his ability to simply blend in with a crowd and disappear, was released from prison in 1994. His whereabouts remain unknown.
This story was brought to you by the letter G, for Greed and Gold, and is part of a series of stories about Ottawa, one for each letter of the alphabet. Check out today’s Observer section on page D1 for the next in the series: H is for Holland. Not the country, but the war hero with burns on his hands.