A Toronto Heist

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

My name’s Max, Max Crewe, and I’m a movie producer and director. Like so many in the film business these days, I’m forced to do a lot of mindless commercial junk, just to keep in business and keep the bills paid. But, if truth be told, what I’d like to do is a modern take on one of the classic ‘who done its.’ As a result, I’m always reading the police reports in the papers and trying to second-guess them.

However, even with the kind of work I’m forced to do, I’m rather fussy about what I produce. As I result, I’m pretty wound up, pretty antsy, in the days leading up to a shoot. (My crew would label me ‘paranoid’ and perhaps I am, but it’s all for a good reason. For me, it has to be the best, if has my name on it!)

It would come as no surprise then that, while driving through Toronto, I ‘happened’ to pass the location of an upcoming shoot for my movie production team. It was a series of older storefronts in Cabbagetown, which we had modified to look like something from the 1800s. (One of these was a Tim Horton’s, which was one of the busiest locations in the GTA, but they had agreed to the make-over and to the shoot, as long as we would carry it out at a less busy time of day.)

I was greatly surprised to find a construction worker outside at the sidewalk, busy with a jack-hammer. “Whoa. Who authorized this?” I wondered. This would badly interrupt filming, which was due to start in just a couple days. When I asked inside, I was perplexed when the manager knew absolutely nothing about it. She supposed it to be something to do with the City. I asked the worker, but he knew next to nothing. All he could say is that when he reported to the office this morning, he was ordered to come and tear up this patch of sidewalk. I asked where his boss was. He pointed up to a nearby building. Wanting to find out some answers, I laboriously clambered up there. His boss knew nothing either. After many enquiries and much shuffling back between one department and another, it turned out that the City knew nothing. I double-checked with the worker and the office. It turned out that it was a new gal, one that he had never seen before, a girl Friday he figured, who had given him the instructions. But then the plot thickened. It so happened that no one in the office had never heard of her, much less hired her. All of this was very perplexing, and frankly, very frustrating. I was beginning to wonder whether my shoot would ever take place.

Nothing seemed to make sense. I examined the area carefully. The patch of sidewalk seemed perfectly fine: it had no cracks or imperfections and no obvious reasons for it being torn up. Furthermore, there was no utility valve and no leak or anything like it in the adjoining pavement.

It was as if my own ‘who done it’ had landed in my lap. Only in this case, there was as yet no identifiable victim or crime.

I was mightily perplexed and my mind simply could not rest. I went back to the location and decided to scout further afield. As I walked away from the Tim Horton’s I noticed a distinct change in the sound of the sidewalk—almost as if it was hollow. And then, two or three doors down, I noted that the sidewalk was no longer cement, but blue—blue because it was composed of large blue glass blocks. So, was there (or had there) been something below the sidewalk? A tunnel? This was rather interesting and I simply had to check further. Walking back to Tim Horton’s I discovered that the patch of cement in front of it was the one new piece in the entire block. Very suspicious.

Of course, I thought, I could go to the management of the Tim Horton’s and ask why their piece was different. Like as it they would tell me, a total stranger—even if they knew. And knowing the franchise system, it was quite possible that they wouldn’t anyway.

So where could I get the information I needed. (As yet, I didn’t even know what it was.) Well, Alex in City Archives owed me one, big time, so I went over to see him. Quite innocently, and without divulging my reason for wanting to know, I asked if there had ever been subsurface tunnels in the older part of downtown. He brightened up immediately and said, “Oh, of course. In fact, in the 500 Block of Spadina there had been just this very thing.” (Bingo. That was my block.) He continued, “It had been used extensively in the last century to move large items into the basements of those store fronts but had not been used for years and years.” But then he paused, “The funny thing is that it was used only a couple of years ago, to move a massive safe into a new Tim Horton’s location. Their rationale was that an underground, totally inaccessible site was the most secure location possible. As a result, all the monies from the entire Golden Triangle are deposited there. Pretty nifty idea, eh? So, was that what you were wanting to know?” I hesitated, rather shuffling off the question, before answering noncommittally. “Well, who would have even known it. Pretty incredible city, this city of ours, eh?”

Well, I thought, “deep underground, at the edge of the property line over toward the street, right over where the worker was jack hammering. Exactly beneath it, in fact.’ So it appeared that there was a heist about to happen. My own ‘who done it.’

But then a niggling thought arose: “why in the world was this take place right now, right when my film shoot was to take place? Was this a weird coincidence, a mere fluke?” But then, it was pretty well known that there was going to be a movie shot here.

Immediately, however, a series of other questions flooded into my mind. “How in the world could someone move a safe of this size and weight?” (I was presuming that they would be moving it rather than busting it open; otherwise, why would they be digging it up rather than accessing it through a neighbouring part of the tunnel?)

And, even more to the point, how would they ever pull this off without arousing someone’s suspicion? (After all, a safe is a pretty bulky and noticeable item.)

I decided to tackle the first question first. I phoned up the premium safe manufacturer in America and, posing as a construction engineer, asked him how their large safes are installed. He mentioned a certain type of crane, one of those massive things. I then asked, not really expecting to hear anything very specific, where one finds that kind of crane. He answered that there is presently one at work right in Metro Toronto, right in the centre of the city, and it is due to be finished and moved out of there in just a few days. (The address? Yes, he gave the address. It was one short block away from my movie shoot.)

Then he added, “Those sort of things are usually moved out in the middle of the night when there is less traffic and the police have the streets blocked off.” Sounded exactly like the conditions for the movie shoot itself. It might not have been a coincidence after all.

Then it hit me. Two nights into the shoot, we were supposed to be filming at the other end of the street from the Tim Horton’s, with large screens partitioning it off the store, and the noise of vehicles and equipment and the concession truck creating pure bedlam. Enough noise, I suspected, to mask even the sound of a crane. And given the craziness of the shoot, even if someone did see or hear it, they might take no notice, but write it off as part of the whole deal.

Crazy, crazy, as if I didn’t have enough to do: I couldn’t spring for a bunch of proper professional cameras, but I roped in some of my media friends to come along to shoot some extra footage. Footage that to them seemed absolutely weird: footage of the jack hammering worker and the sidewalk, the giant crane and the storefronts. And, asking them to be available in several nights’ time I tipped off a member of the local constabulary. I monitored the progress of the sidewalk work and on the night when he had broken up the sidewalk and dug a ways beneath, I had every one at the ready—with myself poised at a camera. We were there all night—or so it seemed—with nothing happening. Then, as dawn was breaking, and we were about to give up, we heard the massive sound of the crane on the move. And sure enough, it could neither be heard nor seen on account of the movie action. A few minutes later, as the crane arrived on location and was just about to dig, an officer climbed unseen into the cab of the crane with a drawn gun, and arrested the culprit. It was all on film, my film. My first ‘who done it.’