A Hart in ThaiA Hart in Thai –We searched the forest for Al Capone’s Secret Last Hide Out in Canada. After talking to a few locals of the where about, then to go here and there getting lost but after 2 hours driving in circles we found it! Its on Private Property and we did get caught. But after got permission to video and photograph the outside and interior. We didn’t venture into the basement as to dangerous. The cabin is huge many rooms and bedrooms and beautiful fireplace. Low escape windows and suppose to have secret tunnel in basement. Its in the forest no river and lakes near?
At 4:32 in the YouTube video the police show up so please realize that this is Private Property and it chould be respected. IT IS UNSAFE
March 30, 2016 ·
At 4:32 in the YouTube video the police show up so please realize that this is Private Property and it should be respected.
There has always been a rumor that has been circulated around the Ottawa Valley that Al Capone may just have had a secret hideaway deep within the Madawaska Valley. I knew that Al Capone spent some time in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and heck, they even spotted him in Kemptville! The rum runners created a tunnel system in Moose Jaw so the bad folks could shuffle from one building to the other without their derrieres freezing off off in the dead of winter. Of course there was a rumour that he did that in Carleton Place, Ontario at the Queen’s Hotel too.
Mike ToporowskyThe Moose Jaw story is probably correct. The only difference is that the tunnels existed already. They were created during a time when Chinese immigrants were charged a head tax. The Chinese community laboured to create these tunnels to stay out of sight, decades before Al Capone and crew arrived
The legend (and even has been advertised) that some local Lanark County residents have claimed they saw Capone and Jack Demsey frequenting Lake Park Lodge and even the Queen’s Hotel. Seeing the man sold tons of illegal liquour from Canada, there is probably some slight truth to the rumour.
The tunnels were used for gambling, prostitution and warehousing illegal booze. Some tunnels went right under your local CPR stations and opened into a shed in the rail yards. That way it was possible to load and unload rail cars without any risk of being seen by the police. Rotgut whisky was made locally, but all the good stuff came from the Bronfman distillery in Montreal.
So one day I saw a 2016 posting and photo’s about Capone’s Hideway on What’s Up Renfrew, Ontario and decided to share it in my local history groups. It’s not every day that you see things like that right? Five years later (2021) I received quite an angry email from a woman who thought I took the photos. She proceeded to tell me that she was going to call the police because I had been trespassing. She also insisted the log cabin had nothing to do with Al Capone and that I had must have jumped the fence as I seemed to be very close to the building in the photo, and I was in big trouble with her lawyers.
WTH?
Well the day she emailed me was my birthday and I had just turned 70. I have a weak right leg and use a cane. But don’t clock me out just yet, my cane is silver glitter but yes, my fence jumpin’ days are long over. I live through the rest of you, so keep those cards and letters coming as they say LOLOL. It took a couple of emails, but she finally realized I was just a writer, and not Nancy Drew. BUT, let this be a lesson in getting permission first please on unoccupied properties.
So yes, I believe that Capone was in Carleton Place and especially near Casey’s Hill (get this near Letterkenny Road) ( no, this not a typo). Even though these gangsters insisted they did not come to Canada, I am sure they did. Have you ever read about Billy the Boodler who showed up in Carleton Place? read-Billy the Boodler Comes to Carleton Place Or what about the cow shoes?? Read-Did The Bootleggers in Lanark County Wear Cow Shoes? I mean there has to be something there right?
Read-Did The Bootleggers in Lanark County Wear Cow Shoes?
For more than forty years, that reputation alone was enough to keep Capone’s Quadeville hideout a virtual secret from the rest of the world.
The secluded hideout was established in the 1930’s just north of Quadeville. Well hidden off Letterkenny Road, members of Capone’s gang sought sanctuary here from rival gangs and the police.
Quadeville is a short distance east of the small town of Combermere. This secret hideout has become a fascinating story over the years for many local residents and visitors to the area.
A long, sturdy, log building was built by local carpenters to the specifications laid down by Capone’s second-in-command; one of Capone’s star gunmen. The building no longer looks like the fortress it once was when Capone’s gang was there. It has since been converted and furnished as a summer home. At one time, it was owned by Harvey and Rene Mesdag of Toronto.
The building and property has since been sold several times. It is presently owned by someone of Pembroke. It’s windows and doors boarded up from the present day vandals. Carved initials can be seen on the log exterior. Anything of value left inside the building is now pretty much ruined.
According to the Mission House Museum, it is also rumored that a former property owner, who also provided the pine logs for the structure, became uneasy over non-payment. He decided to go to Toledo and presented himself at the gangsters’ headquarters. Unexpectedly, he was met by a ‘front’ man.
Once there, the Canadian was grilled by one of Capone’s lieutenants, who happened to be wearing a holstered handgun. “Now we can settle this matter between ourselves in the back office or you can come and take it up directly with the big boss at 10 o’clock sharp.” These were the two choices he was given. The words were loaded with menace. The Canadian replied that he would return and talk to the boss.
Next, he walked quickly to his waiting cab where the nervous driver warned him to get back to Canada as fast as he could. And so he did just that. That Canadian was August Quade and the amount of money owing to him was $1,500 which was a pile of money in the 30’s. It is interesting to note that no one ever saw Capone at the hideaway or in stores in the area. Read the rest here CLICK
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National Post
Toronto, Ontario, Canada25 Oct 2001, Thu • Page 6
Canada’s allure as safe haven made famous by Capone Roy MacGregor north of Quadeville, Ont. It’s not hard to see the attraction if you happen to be on the run. The fortress chalet sits on the side of a difficult hill, surrounded below by impossible swamp and beyond by impenetrable bush. The windows now either broken or partially covered by plywood afford a perfect view of the winding laneway and, beyond the Private Property sign, the narrow road that heads south toward the sleepy little village and north to nowhere. The basement windows are kicked in, and the hidden tunnel that some locals claim exits at a secret spot far back in the deep woods may be home now to a family of raccoons.
But once, so they claim, the legendary Chicago gangster Al Capone, hid out here in the deep Canadian forest 180 kilometres east of Ottawa, having fled America until it was safe to go home again. Many Americans honest, law-abiding Americans are said to be looking north once again for safe refuge from everything from hijacked airliners last month to anthrax this month to fears, even, from nuclear terrorism in an increasingly uncertain future. Last week, CBC Radio reported that there has been a significant rise in U.S. inquiries coming into Toronto-area real estate offices, most from large city dwellers looking for condominiums with low-risk addresses. Marinas in the New York City area are besieged by buyers looking for used boats in which they might, if necessary, escape north to the Maritimes.
The Ottawa Citizen reported this past weekend on a new “survival” trend: small-centre Americans making sure they have money and food cached in fully tanked cars, ready to flee for the Canadian border at the first sign of new trouble. “I feel very safe there,” Rhode Island banker Georgina Cormier told the newspaper. “There is a sense of safety and security when I go to Canada. If I had to go somewhere, that’s where I would want to be.” Al Capone may have felt the same even if Old Scarface did once tell a reporter, “I don’t even know what street Canada’s on.” Some Saskatchewan oldtimers have long maintained that, in fact, Capone knew River Street in downtown Moose Jaw as well as he knew the back alleys around Chicago’s infamous Lexington Hotel. According to Moose Jaw leg end, Ca pone’s gangsters moved into an underground maze of tun nels originally built by Chinese immigrants hiding out to avoid pay ing Canada’s notorious “head tax.” Capone is said to have liked Moose Jaw’s proximity to the U.S. border, and with prohibition ending there nine years earlier than it would in the States, the little Prairie city made an excellent centre out of which to run his expanding bootlegging operations.
Laurence Moon Mulhn, an el derly Moose Jaw resident, claimed several years ago that he used to earn 200 tips running errands for the gangsters, and another local said her barber father used to be called down into the tunnels to cut Capone’s hair. Those tunnels, excavated, cleaned up and lighted, are now called “Little Chicago,” and are Moose Jaw’s top tourism draw. There has, however, never been any documented proof that this happened, or even that the notori ous gangster ever visited any part of Canada. Capone, however, despite the best efforts of a 300-man special detective unit to find him, went missing for three months in the summer of 1926. Some said he was in Wisconsin. Others thought Michigan. A few even claimed he’d fled to Italy.
There are people around Quadeville who think he came here but not until the early 1940s when Capone was finally released from the prison where he’d been serving time for income tax invasion. According to local legend, the cabin on the side of the hill was built, to specifications, out of huge squared pine timber in 1942. The man who built it travelled to the States to collect on an outstanding construction bill for $1,500, only to be threatened by a gun-carrying henchman and told that “Da Boss” would deal directly with him later, in the day. The builder turned tail, ran back to Quadeville, and the outstanding account was never again mentioned.
Madawaska Valley historian Harry Walker wrote about the cabin and the Capone connection decades ago, but could quote no sources, since area oldtimers refused to speak on the record about what they’d seen and heard of the cabin. They did talk to him, however even when Walker showed up with a former county warden to serve as witness and he came to believe that there was indeed something to the Capone legend. “Even today,” Walker wrote in the early 1970s, “the memory of the event instills fear in those who came in contact with the gangsters.” But other investigations by the Eganville Leader and The Toronto Star not surprisingly produced no concrete evidence. After his release from prison, Capone was seriously debilitated by the effects of syphilis and was often hospitalized.
He died after a long illness in 1947. It is hard to imagine him roughing it in the Canadian bush during those years, far from the comforts of electricity and running water. But historical fact seems to matter little to those who say they remember big limousines heading out Letterkenny Road, beautiful women, big men in fancy suits and a particular man the local kids were told to call “Uncle Al.” A few kilometres down Highway 15 at Latchford Bridge, the nearest village to Quadeville, 79-year-old Leonard Moysey stops raking his leaves and offers a unique perspective on it all.
Moysey grew up in Moose Jaw and would have been a youngster there in the very years Capone was supposedly hiding out in the tunnels beneath River Street “When we were kids,” he says, “we never knew anything about that. Never heard a word about Al Capone. It was all talk that developed later, way after the war.” Moysey believes that the stories of Moose Jaw and Quadeville are both seriously flawed, made up by wishful thinkers and over-extended imaginations. The abandoned cabin may merely be a northern version of the infamous “Secret Vault” of Capone’s that was found during a Chicago excavation 15 years ago and ceremoniously opened by Geraldo Rivera on national television only to discover there was nothing inside.
Back in Quadeville, the men gathered over morning coffee at Kauffeldt’s little rural post office are more interested in talking about the current state of the world the news on television, the moose hunt than they are in going on the record about any possibility that Al Capone ever lived up the road. “We used to go up there when we were young lads,” says one coffee drinker, “but we never saw nothin’. “Once the rumours started about it being Al Capone’s place, people started breaking in. But I don’t know what they thought they might find there’s nothing there.” But that, of course, in fall of 2001, is precisely the attraction. National Post
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All Photos by Stace Bottema
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