What Happened to Mickey?: The Life and Death of Donald "Mickey" McDonald, Public Enemy No. 1, Issue 1

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Dundurn, Mar 2, 2013 - True Crime - 352 pages

From the mean streets of 1930s Depression-era Toronto comes the gripping tale of a man who became one of the nation’s most notorious criminals.

Until the age of 31, Donald McDonald was only "dirty little Mickey from The Corner," the notorious intersection of Toronto’s Jarvis and Dundas Streets in a neighbourhood known in the 1930s as "Gangland." After Mickey was charged with the January 1939 murder of bookmaker Jimmy Windsor, he became a national crime figure. What followed were two murder trials, a liquor-truck hijacking, a sensational three-man escape in 1947 from Kingston Penitentiary, and a $50,000 bank robbery.

According to police, as gleaned from underworld informants, Mickey was killed in the 1950s in the United States "by his own criminal associates." Author Peter McSherry presents several versions of McDonald’s demise, one of which he endorses, and tells why it happened, delivering a compelling denouement to the chronicle of a criminal readers will never forget.

 

Selected pages

Contents

A Word About Names
Jack Shea andthe Port Credit Bank
1939
In the DeathCell May 20September 26 1939
The Mad Dogof JarvisStreet
October 25 1945August 1947
A Jailhouse Pipedream January 1948 April 1948
Some Endings
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Peter McSherry's The Big Red Fox and Mean Streets: Confessions of a Nighttime Taxi Driver were nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award and the Edna Staebler Award, respectively. He lives and works in Toronto, where he has driven a taxi at night for nearly 40 years.

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