Duty: The Life of a Cop: Chapter One

The Killing of Michael Sweet

“We lost him.”

With those three words my world just stopped. The doctor stepped out of the operating room at Toronto General Hospital and met us in the hallway. He had a somber look on his face. He shook his head and said they did all they could. The brass of the city’s police department was there. Waiting. Waiting for the news about Michael Sweet, the young police officer who had been shot during a holdup at a downtown tavern called George’s. Suddenly the noise that had been building over the last few hours was gone. It was like a switch had been turned off. The whole place went dead. Nothing but silence. Michael Sweet, thirty years old, the father of three little girls, had just died on the operating table with two bullets in him. It was shortly past six in the morning of March 14, 1980, and it had been a long night. A very long night. Sweet had been shot just before 2:30 a.m. and lay bleeding to death on the kitchen floor of George’s for almost an hour and a half by the time they got him into an ambulance. The Munro brothers, a pair of small-time hoods who had bungled a robbery at a popular jazz club where gunplay was anything but common, had refused to let him go. They had refused despite his pleas and despite the attempts of two other police officers who had been negotiating with them for Sweet’s release. With the news, I felt like bursting into tears. The nurses were crying openly. All of them broke down right in front of us. It was a horrible scene. The doctor’s head hung low. The nurses sobbing. And a lot of senior officers from the Toronto Police Department standing around in numb silence, feeling so powerless that it hurt. I was there along with my fellow detective David Boothby. He had been planning to go away for the weekend with his wife, but at 4:30 that morning he got a call. Just like I did. We were both wanted at the hospital. Immediately. A police officer had been shot and Dave and I were the two investigators. I was thirty-eight years old and had been a cop for eleven years. My job that night was to interview everyone who was even remotely involved in what had happened. It meant trying to piece together all the dots – all the confusion – that culminated in a policeman getting shot. I had my notebook out and was busy talking to people. Finding out who had arrived at George’s and when. To the very minute. Car numbers. Police badges with the customary Date of Birth, as well as when each officer joined the force. In Michael Sweet’s case, it was DOB 02-12-49 and 15-01-74. He was a six-year man. Thirty years of age. Three little girls at home. I felt sick.

Police Chief Harold Adamson was there, too. He was a man who had a reputation for being tough but fair. Tall and always courteous, he wasn’t one to be taken lightly. He had been chief for ten years and just the day before had announced that he’d be stepping down. The feeling at headquarters was that we would all go to hell and back for this man if we had to. He was that kind of leader but was on the way out now. It was time. But Chief Adamson was also deeply concerned about his son Eddy. That night Sergeant Eddy Adamson had been in charge of the Emergency Task Force. The ETF. He had been overcome with tear gas when he and two other officers – Gary Leuin of the ETF and Barry Doyle of 52 Division – stormed the entrance of George’s to take down the Munro brothers. And they did take them down. Eddy was being treated in this very same hospital, but unlike Michael Sweet he would be all right. Eddy was one tough guy. Jack Ackroyd, the man who would be the next chief, was standing at Chief Adamson’s side. Stout and bald-headed, he was called Kojak by everyone and did look like the TV character played by actor Telly Savalas. Also at the hospital were Michael Sweet’s partner, Ron Crossley, and Doug Ramsey, the officer who was with Sweet when he was shot, and John Latto and Dave Moss, who were both involved in the events at George’s. Dan Hayes, too. Dan Hayes wasn’t part of what happened, but he was a close friend of Sweet ’s and had gone out in the middle of the miserable snowstorm that night to pick up Sweet’s wife Karen and bring her to the hospital. It was like a beehive in there with all those cops. A din that just seemed to keep escalating. People forever shuffling and milling about. Cigarettes. Coffee. And more than anything else waiting. A lot of waiting. It wasn’t long after Karen Sweet was rushed into the operating room to be with her husband that the announcement nobody wanted to hear was made. “We lost him.”

I’ll never forget those words.

So now we had a homicide on our hands. Strangely enough, further down the hallway in another operating room were the Munros. Craig and Jamie. Both of them had been wounded in the hail of gunfire unleashed by Eddy Adamson, Gary Leuin, and Barry Doyle. Craig, the older brother, had a hole behind his right ear that could have been fatal but wasn’t. He also had wounds to his nose and his hand. Nothing life-threatening though. Jamie was another story. He had been hit by countless pieces of shrapnel. Enough to l evel a truck. The shrapnel had ricocheted off pots and pans and countertops in the kitchen at George’s where the two had been keeping Michael Sweet. Jamie had been hit in the middle of his back. In his kidney. In his diaphragm. In his stomach. That was the worst. His stomach. Three-quarters of it got blown away. But somehow, both the Munros would survive. Why they would live and Michael Sweet would die, I will never know. It’s a question I’ve asked myself a thousand times.

It all began an hour before midnight on March 13, 1980, when Sweet and his partner Crossley climbed into cruiser 5209 and left 52 Division to begin their routine, eight-hour shift. It was cold and a light dusting of snow was whipping along the city streets courtesy of the strong wind outside. A Thursday night. They had been assigned to patrol the downtown area of Toronto from Lake Ontario in the south to King Street in the north, and from University Avenue in the east to Spadina Avenue in the west. It wasn’ t a big area, but there were lots of bars and taverns so a few things were bound to be on the go. For no particular reason, the two men strayed north beyond their zone of patrol up to Queen Street. They had been partners for two years and were known in police circles as The Pickering Express because Crossley lived in Pickering, a satellite community immediately east of Toronto, while Sweet lived in Ajax, the town next to Pickering. The whole region was solid city right through those towns and further east into Oshawa and all the way west to Hamilton. You had millions of people packed into the biggest urban centre in Canada – the Greater Toronto Area or GTA as the traffic reporters called it. That night the usual number of drunks had to be driven to detoxification centres and the regular parade of cars had to be stopped for moving violations but, all things considered, it was shaping up like a slow evening. The worst thing that had ever happened to Sweet as a police officer was getting jumped by a guy in the back of his cruiser. Crossley, however, had seen much worse. In 1973, his partner Jimmy Lothian was gunned down after chasing a car through city streets, and he died later in hospital. Anot her partner of Crossley’s had also been shot – in the kneecap – but survived and there was a joke among police that being Crossley’s partner was a bad omen. On this night Crossley and Sweet wanted to get some coffee. The coffee would warm them up and help erase the smell of the last drunk who had been in the back of their cruiser. Crossley opened the window and let the air in. It was approaching two o’clock in the morning.

Nearby on Queen Street was George’s Bourbon Street. It was the city’s top venue for jazz that often featured big-name artists. That night it had been singer Helen Humes. A jazz master from Louisville, Kentucky, she had been a regular with the Count Basie Orchestra and had sung with the likes of Nat King Cole. She and her band of musicians, all of them locals, had finished their last number on the ground-floor bar of George’s and then left. The club was on the north side of Queen, in the middle of the downtown core two blocks west of City Hall, an area known for bright red streetcars that passed in both directions, even into the wee hours. It was only a few steps from historic Campbell House, which back in the 1820s had been the home of Sir William Campbell, Sixth Chief Justice of Upper Canada. The stately neoclassical building that boasted four white columns out front was the last remaining brick residence from the Town of York, the predeces sor of Toronto, and had been moved to Queen Street and restored to its original elegance. A plaque on the lawn said this magnificent edifice was maintained by the Advocates’ Society, a group of lawyers with an interest in history. George’s was at 180 Queen West and was the place to be if you liked jazz and good food. A number of restaurants, bars, and boutiques flourished on both sides of the street in this part of town. After the club had emptied for the night, three of the staff decided it was time to celebrate. Barman Bill Bambrough had just announced that he and his girlfriend were going to be married, so he and Tom Grindlay, manager of the Basin Street bar on the upper level of George’s, and bartender Jim Kita opened a bottle o f champagne. They were polishing it off just as a waiter was trying to usher two drunken customers out the front door. At the same time, assistant manager Erminio Guerieri was busy gathering the day’s take – $25,000 in cash – into a brown paper bag. The champagne done, Kita excused himself to go to the washroom while the soon-to-be-married Bambrough ventured off to the cloakroom for his backpack. The cloakroom was downstairs on the main level. The stairs were at the front of the club and another set of stairs was at the back. At ten minutes past two that morning, Craig and Jamie Munro burst through the front door of George’s with stocking masks on their faces. Craig, the bigger of the pair, went in first flashing a .32 Colt semi-automatic. His younger brother Jamie followed right behind brandishing a sawed-off shotgun. “Through the glass of the cloakroom I saw the figures of two guys come in the front door and pull something over their heads,” Bill Bambrough later told a Toronto Star reporter. “They pointed their guns at Cindy Shanks, the hat-check girl, and I heard one say, ‘This is a stick-up. This is for real’.” Craig was the one in charge.

“The money, assholes,” he said to the terrified staff. “Where’s the fuckin’ money?” He knocked Cindy Shanks to the floor and put the barrel of the Colt against her temple. “Tell us where the money is, little girl. This gun is big enough to blow your fuckin’ head clean off.” Cindy, tears streaming down her face, pointed in the direction of the office where the safe was kept. The Munros herded everyone into the room, but one guy was moving too slowly so Craig hit him with the barrel of his Colt. The man screamed, and Craig hit him again. The brothers threatened to shoot the whole bunch unless somebody gave them the combination to the safe. The Munros didn’t know it, but the safe was empty. Assistant manager Guerieri had heard what was going on. Before the Munros spotted him, he had dropped the brown paper bag containing the $25,000 onto the floor and then kicked it under a table where nobody could see it. When the brothers finally did notice him, they said to come and join the others. The manager of George’s was on holiday at the time and Guerieri had been taking his place. Impatient, tempers flaring, the Munros ordered their hostages to lie on the floor. Using nylon cord, they tied their hostages’ wrists behind their backs. One of the two drunken customers began pleading with them just then, saying he had nothing to do with this and had only come in for a couple drinks. They knocked him to the floor and kicked him in the ribs, before tieing his hands. That was when bus boy Bill Hoy app eared. He had just come down the stairs from the upper level only to see two men with masks and guns. He laughed, thinking it was all a joke. Two men in masks with guns doing a hold-up at a jazz club like George’s? He would later tell a reporter: “They grabbed my arm and told me to lie down and close my eyes and said, ‘Listen kid, you’d better cooperate. This is a powerful gun and we can blow your head off’.” It was no joke.

At that moment, Erminio Guerieri and Bill Bambrough thought about making a move for the two men. Said Bambrough: “Erminio and I looked at each other. I saw he was ready to go for one guy if I went for the other. I considered it, but I had that sixty-pound pack on my back. The one guy saw our eye signals and figured what we were up to. He knocked me down and gave me a couple of kicks. Then he tied my hands behind my back, but he wasn’t much good at it. I kept my wrists stiffened and a bit apart, so all I ha d to do was put them together when he was finished and slip out of the cord.”

Meanwhile, bartender Jim Kita was feeling a bit of a buzz from the champagne he had had with his friends. He was coming down the stairs from the washroom at the back of the club and wondered what all the commotion was about. He listened, then peeked around a corner to see one of the staff with his hands on the dial of the office safe, and another man he didn’t know standing over him. It looked like the man had a gun. There was another man standing too. With a sawed-off shotgun pointed at the crowd of peopl e. Kita knew the layout of George’s like his own home. He slipped off his shoes, tiptoed back up the stairs, and went down the fire escape at the side of the building. Outside in the parking lot he saw his boss Tom Grindlay sitting in his car warming up the engine. Kita told Grindlay what was going on and said to call the police. Grindlay didn’t waste any time. He drove his car out of the lot and headed for 52 Division. On the way there, he saw a police cruiser, so he flashed his headlights and honked his horn. Ron Crossley was behind the wheel and rolled down the window. A few seconds later the car was on its way to George’s and Crossley’s partner Sweet was on his police radio. “Dispatch, this is five-two-zero-nine. We have a possible armed robbery one-eight-zero Queen Street West. Request immediate back-up. That’s a possible armed robbery. One-eight-zero Queen Street West. Request immediate assistance. Confirm please.” Their cruiser, which was the second one to arrive on the scene, pulled up in front of George’s. Sweet and Crossley got out and drew their service revolvers. Jamie Munro saw them first. His hostages were lying on the floor and, when he saw the police, he jumped clear over the group of them. His brother Craig realized right away something was up. One glance and he hit the floor. But that move gave his hostages the split second they needed. They got to their feet and rushed out the door. By now four police officers were inside – Sweet and his partner Crossley, and the two from the first cruiser to arrive on the scene – Doug Ramsey and Dave Moss. There was a lot o f screaming with tables and chairs going all over the place.

“Police officers!” Sweet said. “Drop the guns. Now!”

Three members of the staff were near the back door, unprotected. Craig shoved his Colt in their faces, then he and Jamie pushed them into the kitchen and shut the door behind them. “Back off, you fuckers!” Craig shouted through the door to the police. “We’ve got people in here and we’ll kill them all!” Somehow in all the screaming and bustling the three workers from George’s managed to open the back door and get out. So now it was just the two Munro brothers behind that door. There were no hostages. But then the police didn’t know that. “Jamie, watch those doors and kill anything that comes through them,” ordered Craig. “Those bastards. They’ll come up the back way. I’m gonna shut the basement door.” Craig ran from the kitchen and went down the stairs to the basement.

For some reason Tom Grindlay, the man who had first alerted the police about the robbery, decided to go back inside the club just then. Maybe he wanted to be sure in his own mind that Jim Kita’s story, which Grindlay had thought incredible, was true. He headed down the back stairs to where all the trouble was now taking place only to have a police officer frantically wave him away. “One of the robbers yelled ‘someone is coming down the stairs, get him’,” Grindlay said when interviewed later. “The cops heard the threat and had their pistols drawn, ready to fire. When I heard the robbers, I ran out of the door that was bolted and into the street. I thought I was going to get it in the back for sure.” By this time more police were on the scene. A few of them, all in uniform, took positions at the back of the building, while another group – Sweet and Ramsey were in this bunch – staked themselves at the front. Now the Munros were boxed in. Surrounded. All the entrances and exits to George’s were secure. The ETF was on its way.

“Did anyone check the basement?” Ramsey asked.

As the events of that night would be related by scores of Toronto police for years to come, Ramsey had urged Sweet not to go into the basement. “I’m just going to do a quick sweep,” he told Sweet, and said he’d go in alone. But Sweet insisted on coming, too. Just why, no one will ever know. Later it was said that Sweet may have been after the pinch and “a 159.” A 159 was a commendation that would have gone on his record if he had been able to arrest the two suspects. It was helpful for a promotion. “He was never worried about dying in the line of duty,” Nick Tatone would tell a reporter. Tatone had been Sweet’s next-door neighbour before the Sweet family had moved to Ajax. “He’d quote me all the statistics about what a safe job it really was. He said the worst thing that ever happened to him was that he got jumped by a drunk in the back of his cruiser.” Tatone said Sweet was a good neighbour and friend. “I have to travel a lot in my job and I remembered how I always felt my wife and kids were safe be cause Mike was next door. When I was away, he’d always be around to check on them.”

Said Constable Dan Hayes in a newspaper interview: “He was the kind of guy that was always in the background – a quiet guy and a steadying influence in the department. Not the kind of guy that would try to further his career with a one-fifty-nine. He did what he could to help anybody at any time and he went in there to help a fellow police officer because he felt it necessary.” According to Hayes, Sweet and a second officer went inside to check the basement to see if anyone else had to be rescued. They didn’t know that no other civilians were down there. Sweet had entered George’s at 2:18 a.m. and now it was 2:20. He had been in the place for two minutes, and the Munros had been inside for ten. With Ramsey guarding the door, Sweet edged to the top of the stairs leading to the basement. He said more people might be in the basement. Ramsey started down the stairs with Sweet right behind him.

The basement of George’s had a long narrow hallway with a single line of naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The walls were whitewashed. A warren of rooms led off both sides from the hallway. It was a rat’s nest if you didn’t know the place. Sweet and Ramsey began checking the rooms, doing a quick sweep to see if any employees were there. Slowly. Carefully. They got to the end of the hallway and heard the Munros yelling and another officer, Nelson Lee Train, screaming at them through the back door from the laneway outside the building. Then a shot rang out. Craig had fired a blast clear through that closed door and Train let out a cry. He grabbed his arm. He knew right away how lucky he was; his watch had deflected the bullet and shattered. The Munros had just upped the ante to attempted murder. But they weren’t finished. After the shot, Jamie ran down the stairs to the basement to join Craig. Sweet and Ramsey heard the footsteps. Now the two officers knew no civilians were in the basement and the building was surrounded. A split-second decision had to be made. Either they move out to the hallway with the whitewashed walls and expose their backs to these men, who were obviously not afraid to shoot, or step into the dark room at the very end o f the hallway. They chose the latter. They entered the room. It was the prep kitchen with a lot of tables piled one on top of the other. Nose-high, Ramsey would say. He was the first one in and could barely see Jamie crouching with his brother Craig half a dozen steps behind him. “We’ve got six-shot, thirty-eight specials with very little firepower,” Ramsey would say later. “They wouldn’t even go through a windshield and this guy’s got a sawed-off shotgun. A twelve-gauge. We didn’t have vests either. There was no body armour. I realized I was out-gunned.” Craig must have heard something because he didn’t waste a second. He fired his gun. Then he fired again. And again. And he kept right on firing that little Colt of his. Seven shots in all. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

One after the other. It was a semi-automatic. It didn’t take long. Two bullets hit Sweet. The first got him in the chin and lodged in his right shoulder. It was a serious wound but not fatal. But the second bullet entered his chest under his left armpit and went through a lung. He fell. Ramsey saw him lying on the floor face down. “Mike! Mike!” he cried.

Craig hollered back. “Get out of here! I’ve got your man! I’ve got a gun!” Ramsey broke for the stairs and got himself out. Outside on the street the ETF was in full battle gear with Sergeant Eddy Adamson in charge. Ramsey, still out of breath from his narrow escape, described for Eddy the layout of the basement. Eddy wanted to go in right then and there, but an inspector showed up. He asked Ramsey if Sweet was alive or dead and Ramsey said he didn’t know. A decision was made to wait for the Deputy Chief. Back inside, Craig had grabbed the fallen Sweet by his jacket and dragged him up the stairs to the kitchen at the back. One step at a time. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Sweet was bleeding badly.

Plainclothes officer John Latto was a few blocks away on patrol when he had heard the emergency call for help on his police radio. A thirteen-year veteran, he was working out of the detective office and would play a key role in the drama to unfold over the next hour and fifteen minutes as he would negotiate with the Munros for Sweet’s release. Shots rang out from the basement immediately after he had arrived and there was no mistaking the screaming and yelling from down below. “I was near the front and heard them coming through the kitchen door,” Latto said later. “Then they stopped and stayed there.” As the downed Sweet lay bleeding on the floor, screaming and writhing in agony, Latto began a dialogue with the Munros through the two walls that separated them. His gun drawn, he told the brothers they should give themselves up, so Sweet could be taken to hospital. “We’ve got one of your guys here and we’re gonna kill him!” the Munros hollered back.

Another officer who was there that night said to a reporter: “They knew that Mike Sweet was hurt bad but they feared if they went in the gunmen would go berserk, so it was a difficult decision.” It was also felt that the Munros might kill themselves. For the next hour and fifteen minutes, Sweet himself talked with the Munros. Pleading for his life. Telling them over and over about his three kids. He was talking about his kids when they dragged him into the kitchen. According to one eyewitness, Sweet said, “Please guys, I’m dying. Let me get to hospital. If I die then you know your lives aren’t worth a nickel. Think of my wife and three young kids at home.” He was on his back on the kitchen floor, the blood seeping from his body. He knew he was dying.

There was a mess on the floor with his blood everywhere. For the second time, Craig picked up Sweet by his jacket and dragged him across the room. “I’ve been in ’Nam, pig,” he told him, bending down low. “Put your hand over the holes and you won’t bleed to death. Take it better, will you. You’re getting on my nerves.” Then he dropped Sweet on the floor like a bag of potatoes and looked into the eyes of his younger brother Jamie. Jamie was worried. “We’re gonna stand the fuckers off,” Craig reassured him. “We’re gonna get us a car and get the fuck out of here. Don’t you sweat it, kid. They’ll never fuck with us! We’ve got one of them in here with us. You think they’re gonna come in here blasting away if there’s a chance the cop’ll buy it?” The Munro brothers were a brazen pair. When they had needs those needs had to be met, no matter the consequences. Consequences never figured in their scheme of things. Once in the early stages of the drama Jamie had even exposed himself to go to the bar for some booze, but no one would take him down because Craig was still with Sweet. Eddy Adamson, the son of Chief Harold Adamson, was getting antsy. He and the others who made up the ETF stalked around the front and back entrances of George’s. Eddy had a shotgun and the others had semi-automatic AR15s fully loaded and ready to go if only the order would come. Eddy knew a cop had been shot and these two scumbags weren’t releasing him and time was wasting. He was getting angrier by the minute. He paced. Negotiations were taking place and one member of the negotiating team was busy dialing the kitchen phone of the bar. The kitchen where Michael Sweet was with the Munros. Eddy wanted to go in. He wanted to go in now and a senior officer kept telling him not yet. Not yet. Eddy couldn’t wait much longer.

At 3 a.m. Jamie Munro of all people showed his face outside the front door of George’s. Right there on the street. He was walking out of the building with John Latto at his side and he didn’t even have a gun on him. Said Latto: “Jamie wanted to make a deal so he could go to his car. I walked him across the street. Craig had been yelling that if Jamie doesn’t come back he’d kill Sweet.” Neither Latto nor Jamie could see a single police officer, but cops were everywhere. They were hiding, kneeling by their cruisers, the cruisers with the red lights flashing, and there were press people all over the place, too. As Eddy got word that Jamie was making an appearance, he wondered if the Munros were finally giving themselves up. Did that mean they could go in and rescue Sweet? But no. Jamie, accompanied by Latto, headed for his car parked in a lot across the road. Literally dozens of guns were o n him, but no one was going to shoot him. Much as they all wanted to. Were even itching to. Jamie yanked the car door and fumbled around before taking out a small bag. Then he returned to the club and went back inside. With his heroin. The negotiations had been going on for more than half an hour and nobody on the street knew what kind of shape Sweet was in. But Latto kept hearing Sweet crying out, “Help me. Help me.” At 3:34 a.m. the still pacing Eddy Adamson made his decision. For too long he had heard with his own ears what was going on, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He could hear Craig hitting Sweet and mocking him, and he could hear Craig and his brother Jamie both taunting the young cop about his wounds and about his wife and kids and telling him he’d never see them again. Eddie had had enough. He told the negotiating team he was going in whether they liked it or not. By this time Michael Sweet had been bleeding on the kitchen floor, dying a slow death, for an hour and fifteen minutes.