Toronto Star reporter Dale Brazao had a knack for finding people that didn’t want to be found: people on the run, people police can’t find, people thought to be dead. After four decades chasing stories at Toronto Star, Brazao has earned his retirement. But he’s spun a final few yarns about how he got those stories.

How a notorious bank robber turned into Mother Teresa

Edwin Alonzo Boyd, tracked down by Star reporter Dale Brazao, spent the last 35 years of his life caring for two disabled women.

“Where’s Edwin Alonzo Boyd?”

The lanky city editor, Dave Ellis, hovered over my desk. “How should I know?” I shrugged. “And who the hell is Edwin Alonzo Boyd?”

It was the summer of 1996, and the cops had just unearthed a trove of rusty guns in Lake Wilcox, north of Richmond Hill, and suspected they might belong to the notorious Boyd Gang that had terrorized Toronto banks throughout the ’50s.

Boyd had not been seen since 1966, when he was paroled from Kingston Pen after serving part of his eight life sentences — one for every bank he admitted to robbing. Perhaps more than his crime spree, he had cemented his name in Canadian crime lore with not one but two sensational escapes from the Don Jail.

“It would be a great story if you could find him,” my editor said.

Boyd’s Hollywood good looks and bravado captivated Toronto. He would jump on bank counters waving the Luger he had taken from a dead German soldier in the war, ordering the tellers to hand over the dough. His robberies dominated the pages of the Daily Star and the Telegram, and women crowded into courtrooms to get a glimpse of the famous bandit.

But Toronto’s love affair with the Boyd Gang came to an end in early 1952, when two gang members, Steve Suchan and Lennie Jackson, fatally shot a police detective. The men were later hanged back-to-back at the Don Jail, on Dec. 16, 1952.

The courts found Boyd had nothing to do with the detective’s murder. Boyd was given eight life sentences, one for each bank robbery he admitted to pulling, for a total take of $115,000 — more than $1,000,000 in today’s dollars.

The microfiche files in the Star’s library were filled with clippings of Boyd’s exploits, but nary a clue as to his current whereabouts.

I tracked down someone who had been close to Boyd. After we chatted for the better part of a day, she agreed to give me the new identity imposed on him by the parole board along with the instructions to relocate out of Ontario. I headed for the airport.

When I first laid eyes on Boyd, he was coming out of a bank in Sidney, B.C., squinting in the sunlight as he counted a handful of $10 and $20 bills. He had just cashed his old-age pension cheque.

If this had happened 45 years earlier, Boyd would not have bothered to stop and count. He would’ve been too busy dodging bullets. Tellers in those days kept pistols in their money drawers.

After getting out of prison in 1966, Boyd headed west with his new identity and $1,700 he had earned in prison pay. He took a job transporting people in wheelchairs on their daily routines. That’s how he met Marjorie, whom he later married.

He invited me to his home, where I shared a can of Lipton’s tomato soup with the aged pistolero.

What I saw in that house choked me up.

Canada’s most notorious bank robber had spent the past 35 years of his life looking after two paraplegic women — his second wife, Marjorie, and their friend and housemate, Pearl. The only one of the three who could walk, Boyd did all the housework, cooking and cleaning and driving them to shopping and medical appointments in a van modified to handle the wheelchairs.

He had rigged the small bungalow they shared with fishing line running from their bedrooms to different sounding bells in the kitchen. A ring of a bell would send him hurrying to their bedsides, ready to pour a cup of tea, fluff a pillow, or settle a blanket.

Boyd, a war veteran and son of a Toronto policeman, says he embarked on his bank-robbing career reading a newspaper story about how a teenager had made off with $64,000 in a bank robbery.

“After that, I said, ‘What am I doing working?’”

Despite the lengthy criminal record, contrition was not a word in Boyd’s vocabulary. He relished the fame his bank-robbing days brought him. Regrets, he said, he had just one.

“I should’ve stayed on my own,” he said, lamenting that he had picked “a bunch of idiots” as partners. “I was doing quite well on my own. The first time I took a partner I got caught.”

Edwin Alonzo Boyd died on May 17, 2002, after being hospitalized with pneumonia. He was 88.

The cache of guns in Lake Wilcox turned out not to belong to his gang after all.

How the Star found a disgraced CSIS mole in the neo-Nazi movement

Reporter Dale Brazao remembers how a fence, a post and a smokestack led him to alleged agent provocateur Grant Bristow in 1995.

Find the fence. Follow the fence. Find the spy.

That’s not terribly sexy work in the world of investigative journalism, but it is, in this stranger-than-fiction episode, the truth of how in 1995 I tracked down Grant Bristow, a government agent who had infiltrated the Canadian neo-Nazi group, the Heritage Front.

Bristow was now in hiding after allegations surfaced that the CSIS mole had instigated and funded many of the criminal acts he was supposed to be monitoring. He co-founded the hate-mongering Heritage Front and allegedly drew up lists of targets for the group, encouraging its members to spy on and harass prominent Jewish leaders, all while on the government payroll.

After he was outed, the government took its spy in from the cold and hid him, allegedly for his protection. Finding Bristow had become an obsession among the ultra-competitive Toronto media.

Now, courtesy of a source, I had a photograph of the disgraced spy, sitting in the backyard of his new house somewhere in Canada. Beside him, by a pinkish-white stucco post, a pair of crutches to one side.

If I could find that fence, I could find Bristow.

I had worked on the Bristow case for months, chasing multiple, fruitless sightings. I had compiled quite a bit of information on Bristow’s time inside the Heritage Front, even his visit to Libya as a guest of Moammar Gadhafi, but I had drawn a complete blank as to his current whereabouts.

Then came the lucky break.

A man walked into the Star newsroom carrying photographs of Bristow, his wife and son, which he claimed had been taken at their new hideout, somewhere out west, possibly Calgary or Edmonton. CSIS had given Bristow a new identity, a new home and two brand-new cars, he said.

One piece of information that would prove invaluable in my search for Bristow was that he was getting treatment at a hospital very near his home, after breaking his leg while learning to ice skate. The source said he thought the facility was called Sturgeon or some other big fish.

The most important of the photos was one that showed Bristow, who had been careful not to pose in front of his new house, sitting in front of that unmistakable pinkish stucco post.

I asked the Star darkroom technicians to enlarge the photos, focusing on the stucco post and a large smokestack in the distance. I would use these as my landmarks.

At the World’s Biggest Bookstore on Edward St. (this was before the Internet), I bought detailed street maps for both Calgary and Edmonton. The map of Edmonton contained the neighboring town of St. Albert. Sturgeon General Hospital was listed there.

I was on my way to Edmonton that afternoon.

Thinking that I might need to stake out this spy, I asked the rental company for a van with dark tinted windows. The only one they had was a bright cherry red minivan. No tinted windows. I took it.

I put the enlarged photos of the fence, the post and the smokestack beside me on the passenger seat and charted the quickest route to Sturgeon Hospital. As I neared the facility I noticed that the fence surrounding a new subdivision looked a lot like the one in the Bristow photograph.

I followed the fence into the Evergreens of Erin Ridge subdivision and I spotted it, two houses in from the corner: the pinkish stucco post.

Barely 40 minutes out of the Edmonton airport and I had found Bristow.

Driving past the front of the house, I saw two brand-new Fords in the garage bearing near-identical licence plates.

The next morning, I was staking out the house when a red Aerostar pulled out. I kept down and saw a man that looked like Bristow. I gave chase. Unaware that I was tailing him, Bristow stopped briefly at a convenience store to pick up a newspaper and a coffee, then drove to the Sturgeon General Hospital and disappeared inside.

When Bristow walked out the front door an hour later I quickly snapped a dozen frames. Then I jumped out.

“Hi, Mr. Bristow. Dale Brazao, Toronto Star.”

Bristow instinctively covered his face with the newspaper, said nothing, and then limped as fast as he could back into the protection of the hospital.

My exclusive on Bristow would share the front page of the Star the next day with the horrific bombing of an Oklahoma City government building that left 168 dead. Years later, Bristow called me at the Star saying he was writing a book and wanted to know how I had found him.

I told him I was saving that information for my own book.

How the Star helped a hit-and-run driver do the right thing

Jose Castro, who struck a girl and killed her, returned to face justice after reporter Dale Brazao tracked him down in Portugal.

Kara Parman lay dying in the road.

The 7-year-old Toronto girl was crossing the street to buy some candy when she was struck by a car. The driver sped off. The date was Nov. 22, 1993.

Kara, a Grade 3 student, died after lingering in a coma for five days. Police set up a special squad and launched a massive dragnet to catch the driver.

I was searching for him, too. I worked day and night, following a tip that he might have been a Portuguese immigrant. I knocked on doors across the Toronto’s Portuguese community: body shops, cafés, neighbourhood parties. Like the police, I was coming up with nothing. The trail went cold for more than a year.

Thanks to a source, I ended up checking out a tip on Rogers Rd., just a few blocks from where the collision happened.

One of the dozens of people I had canvassed thought the driver may have rented a basement apartment there. They knew him as Jose Fernandes.

The landlady was stunned when I told her that her quiet, hard-working tenant might be the hit-and-run driver police had been searching for more than a year. She knew him as Jose Castro.

She recalled an agitated Castro arriving home one day, saying his father had suffered a stroke and he had to leave for Portugal immediately. He asked if he could store his car in their garage. A month later, he called, saying he was not coming back, and she was free to sell off his belongings.

A friend came by to pick up his car, a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, and the television. When a yard sale failed to move the microwave stand Castro had recently purchased at IKEA, his landlady, who was Portuguese, kept it for herself. Feeling she owed him for the microwave stand, she had visited him while on vacation in Portugal and paid him $50. He was living in a medieval town in the northern hills.

She drew me a map on a paper napkin.

Don’t bother asking for the names he used in Canada, she said. Nobody would know him by Jose Castro or Jose Fernandes. Ask instead for his father, “Jose the tractor man.”

I was on a plane the next day.

After getting lost in the hills, and being given directions by a prostitute plying her trade at the side of the highway, I was knocking on the door of a centuries-old house. Jose the Tractor Man answered, showing no ill effects of a supposed stroke. Neither he nor his wife was aware of the real reason their son had returned home. A young man sat upstairs on the edge of a loft bed. He jumped down and came to speak to me.

After initially denying any involvement in the accident, Castro broke down and confessed: He had been grocery shopping and was heading north on Dufferin St. At the lights near Hope Ave., he saw a little blonde girl dash across the street. He tried to avoid her, he said. He panicked and fled the scene.

Two days after Kara died, the 25-year-old who had been working illegally in Canada for five years, as a security guard and cleaner, flew home.

I knew the consequences of the story I just heard. As I prepared to leave, I offered the young man some advice.

“You can stay in Portugal and nobody can touch you. Portugal does not extradite its nationals. But I’m writing the story, and from this moment on you will be a fugitive for the rest of your life. Is that the life you want?”

Two weeks later I got a call from his mother. Her son wanted to turn himself in but was scared. She asked me to extend her condolences to Kara’s mother. “As a mother I feel her pain. My son will do the right thing.”

I went back to Portugal and accompanied Jose Fernandes Castro to Canada. When we arrived at Pearson airport on March 2, 1995, two RCMP officers came aboard and arrested him. He was carrying a letter from his priest and a letter from his mother to Kara’s mom.

Castro was sentenced to a year in jail, but was released after serving eight months and immediately deported to Portugal.

The story garnered international headlines and praise from my employer, colleagues, the police and Kara’s mother, Karen, who went on radio and television to personally thank me for bringing closure to her horrific nightmare.

But segments of the Portuguese community felt the story portrayed them in a bad light, that by finding Castro I was airing family laundry in public. Castro came back because he was a decent human being who made a horrible mistake. By running, he turned an accident into a crime.

When I found him, he was a deeply wounded man, depressed, and haunted by what he had done. By finding him, I gave him the opportunity to do the right thing.

Every so often I toy with the idea of trying to find out what happened to him. Did he marry? Did he have kids of his own? How did things turn out for him after he went back?

Someday, I might just try to find out.

Finding the woman who faked her own death

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Vera Tugwell was desperate to escape a life she felt was hopeless

Vera Tugwell will always hold a special place in my heart.

In my 40 years at the Star, I’ve tracked down a lot of people who didn’t want to be found. Vera is the only one I brought back from the dead. The year was 1984.

The afternoon assignment editor handed me a two-paragraph wire story that said a Canadian woman was missing and believed murdered while visiting Orlando. The FBI was called in to help track down the killer, who had mailed investigators a bloody dress, a knife and note written in crayon.

“Executioner hear my song,” the note said. “This is not the first, she won’t be the last. Now find her, and the others if you can.”

My assignment editor sketched out the headline on the spot, steeped in a black humour that often permeates newsrooms. “The last steps of Vera Tugwell. A lovely Christmas story,” he said.

Tugwell, from Penetanguishine, had gone to Walt Disney World, ostensibly to study cartoon animation. The Star sent me to Florida to find out how she had met her untimely demise.

My first stop was a run-down, $45-a-week Christian hostel in downtown Orlando from where Vera had phoned her parents weeks earlier saying she had run out of money.

Here, I learned that Vera had befriended a recently-released convict who was upsetting residents at the hostel by pulling up his shirt to reveal what he said were bullet holes from a gunfight with police.

The next day, I was sitting inside the Orlando police station, interviewing the two homicide detectives in charge of the case, when an officer rapped on the office door. Someone resembling Vera had been spotted at a bus shelter.

The detectives ran out and I followed. They found the woman standing by a bus stop, a birthday cake and champagne bottle in hand, heading to a local hotel to meet the ex con from the hostel.

Once taken in for questioning, the woman was adamant police she was not Vera Tugwell. She was Cathy Hanson, from California, and was working as a $100-a-week domestic in Winter Haven, an affluent community outside Orlando.

She stuck to the story even after police put her on the phone with her father and wired her mug shot to him for identification.

Frustrated by her lack of cooperation, police charged the woman with giving false information and sent her to the Orange County Jail. The police said they were going to pursue deporting her for working in the United States illegally.

So I offered the cops and the prison warden a deal.

If I could get her to admit she was indeed Vera Tugwell, would they drop the charges, and let me take her back to Canada? No real harm had been done, I argued. It was just days to Christmas and the Star had this thing about happy holiday stories.

So they locked me in a tiny cell with the woman. When she began with her, “I’m Cathy Hanson from California” routine, I levelled with her: There was only one way to avoid deportation and a possible life-time ban from the United States.

“Or you can be Vera Tugwell — and you are — and we’ll be on the 4:30 flight to Toronto and I can write a nice happy Christmas story.”

“I’m Vera,” came the quick reply.

The police kept their part of the bargain.

They put us in a paddy wagon and gave us a police escort to the airport. Vera said she hatched the bizarre murder hoax “to get away from a life of hopelessness.”

She said she was completely unaware of the statewide manhunt for her purported killer.

She knew the report of her death would be hard on her parents at first but believed it was better than sentencing them to a life of anguish if she simply vanished. With more than 1,000 murders a year in Florida, who would care about one more?

So she purchased a knife for $6 at a flea market, cut her finger, and sprinkled the blood on the dress, bundled it all up and sent it to police. The note scrawled in crayon was supposed to make police believe it was the work of a psychopath.

We arrived in Toronto to a media circus. To keep other media from cashing in on our story, we snuck out a VIP exit at the airport and I put her up in a downtown hotel overnight while I wrote the story. I drove her home to Penatanguishine the next day. As I drove on to the property, and saw the tiny trailer and the outhouse in the yard, I realized why she had done what she did.

A couple of weeks later, when I called to see how she was doing, her father broke the news: “She’s gone again.”

The Mounties couldn’t find their man — but I did

Corrupt undercover cop sold RCMP information to Columbian drug cartel

If there was ever a story where I thought I might get a bullet in the head, this was it.

Jorge Leite, a former undercover officer with the RCMP’s drug squad in Montreal, vanished in May 1991 amid allegations he was on the take from a powerful Colombian cocaine cartel.

As a paid mole for the Cali cartel Leite was alleged to have taken some $500,000 in bribes, and jeopardizing several major drug investigations. The Mounties wanted badly to get their hands on him.

Canada’s national police force, which according to folklore “always gets their man,” could not find Leite. The Star asked me to try.

As I’ve told generations of young reporters, the secret to finding someone who does not want to be found, is simple — Find the Car, Sit on the Car. Everybody goes to their car at some point.

Sometime after disappearing, Leite faxed his resignation with some information that led the RCMP to believe he might be in the Middle East. In the fax Leite also said he hoped his sudden departure would not affect his severance pay for his four years on the force.

The one key clue I had as I began my investigation was that Leite had air freighted a red Toyota Previa minivan to Portugal bearing Quebec licence plates.

After weeks of working sources in the Portuguese communities in Toronto, Montreal and Cambridge, I learned that Leite was headed in the Previa from his home near Lisbon to his father in law’s place in the countryside.

I flew to Lisbon, rented a compact Fiat Uno, and set out to find the elusive Mountie. After searching for days I ended up in Praia da Vieira, a fishing village some 150 kilometers north of the Portuguese capital.

I mingled with pensioners feeding the pigeons in the park, passing out my business cards and writing on the back of each one the name of the bed and breakfast where I was staying.

Hours later, as I’m using the phone at the front desk and lamenting to my editor about another failed day of searching, I got a tap on the shoulder. “You looking for Jorge Leite?” the old timer asked. “I’m his father in law.” He was carrying one of my business cards.

Leite, his wife and their two daughters were visiting the holy shrine at Fatima but would be back in the evening. Let’s grab a bite to eat, he said. As I watched the old man down a few glasses of the fine, inexpensive, Portuguese house wine, I kept thinking of that Latin saying: In Vino, Veritas. In wine, Truth.

“Patrao, mais vinho, por favor,’’ I bellowed. “Boss, more wine, please.”

And out came the truth.

Leite had arrived unannounced at his home two months earlier with his two young daughters in the van. His wife, Maria, had stayed behind in Montreal to pack up their belongings. He’d recently purchased a large mansion, with a pool near Lisbon, and a condo in the Algarve.

Life in Canada had been very good to him, the old man said.

Time wore on. The old timer left to get Leite. An hour later Maria arrived at the restaurant offering regrets. Leite was in no mood to talk. She launched into a spirited defence of her beleaguered husband.

Leite didn’t leave because he was on the take from Colombians drug barons. He left because he was fed up with being disrespected by his fellow horsemen. He had grown tired of being the brunt of jokes about his diminutive size. Leite, a former Portuguese marine, was only 5’4”.

“They called him the dwarf.”

Maria was incensed that the Mounties had suggested her husband was having an affair with Ines Barbosa, a convicted cocaine kingpin known as the “Godmother” of the Cali cartel in Montreal. “I just laughed. I told them that if my husband was going to have a lover he could do better then that.”

She refused to produce her husband for an interview. So I followed my own advice. After driving around the village for a couple of days, I found the red Previa parked near the ocean. Fearful that Leite might move it, I slept in my car, and staked out the van all night.

The next morning, as Leite came to move it, I took his picture. He sped off. No interview. After filing my story I flew home to Canada.

After a two year investigation the Mounties charged Leite with corruption, fraud and breach of trust, and then embarked on a long diplomatic effort — ultimately fruitless because Portugal does not extradite its nationals — to bring him back to Canada for trial.

Eight years after I found him, the Portuguese finally agreed to put Leite on trial. The Mounties flew to Portugal with a 500 page dossier of evidence, and I went to cover the trial.

Leite admitted he sold information to Barbosa’s gang on 49 different occasions, but did it on instructions from his supervisor, Inspector Claude Savoie, to infiltrate the drug cartel. He had turned over all the money to Savoie, but had kept the Previa van for himself, he told the three judge panel.

Leite, who faced a 14 years prison term, was sentenced to a three year suspended sentence, four years probation, and a meager $1,500 fine. Charges of credit card fraud were also thrown out.

Savoie killed himself with his service revolver as investigators arrived at his office to question him.

Ines Barbosa committed suicide with a prescription drug overdose.

All charges in Canada against Leite were dropped.

How to find Dale Brazao

Forget following the car, find this beach, and you’ll find Dale Brazao.