[國際新聞] Merciful Injustice Day 6: across, stand, store, dress

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Merciful Injustice Day 6: A life-changing moment

The echoes of shots fired in a Vancouver confectionary store in 1942 reverberated across country



Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Merciful+Injustice+life+changing+moment/8964637/story.html#ixzz2g6Z3a73o
Oiyo Uno, 51, wore a neat dress in pearl grey with a light straw hat for her day on the witness stand. She was the first family member to testify at the second trial of the Hughes gang.
Speaking through a Japanese interpreter, the Methodist shopkeeper swore on a Bible before recounting what she had said one year before: the shot that killed her son Yoshi was fired during a close struggle — an accident.
Then Yuki told his story. It too was intact, and it still contradicted his mother’s story. From Yuki’s vantage point, the third bullet Bob Hughes fired into Yuki’s brother was a deliberate shot, taken from across the store after the struggle.
Jurors wanted to see the crime scene for themselves. As the trial opened on April 12, 1943, they were brought first to the nearby, white-run confectionary store south of 7th on Columbia where the gang had begun its fateful spree.
Then they went north into the now-transformed neighbourhood that had been a Japanese colony since at least 1910. Jurors spent all of five minutes at the vacated Uno shop.
Familiar characters were called to the witness stand. Hughes — now described as a “tall, good-looking Canadian soldier” — watched as “attractive, brown-eyed and smartly dressed” Jackie Doidge told her story. If there was still romance between the two, it was not in evidence this time around.
Defence lawyer Angelo Branca’s legal strategy would be based on a twofold defence: (1) drunkenness and (2) accident.
Doidge testified she had never seen her fiancé as drunk as he was that night — a total contradiction of her testimony a year before, when she described Hughes as merely excited.
Rosella Gorovenko, Doidge’s romantic rival and Hughes co-conspirator turned star prosecution witness, was brought from prison — she was there for an unrelated offence — to testify.
If Doidge had blossomed from pretty girl to attractive woman over the past year, it was a different story for Gorovenko.
The 17-year-old single mother and prostitute who ratted out her lover Hughes had no cheeky testimony this time to bring the house down and fill newspaper columns.
In two hours on the stand, she was attacked savagely by the defence lawyers.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” said one of them, suggesting romantic revenge as her motivation.
Gorovenko, said Branca, knew the “book of iniquity from start to finish.”
“Rosella planned this whole thing and by the grace of God she isn’t sitting in that prisoner’s dock today, because Hughes told her she couldn’t go on the job.”
Gorovenko was so intimidated that her testimony was barely audible. She cowered in the witness stand as she testified in a whisper with one hand covering her face. Finally she broke down altogether. The judge dismissed her and she was sent back to prison.
Branca focused on the beer and rum the gang had drunk, saying if a youth drank as little as five ounces of neat rum on an empty stomach he could easily be drunk — a claim disputed by the Crown.
Branca asked the jury not to be prejudiced by the fact the slain man was Japanese: “People of all races and all creeds living under our laws are entitled to the protection of these laws,” he said.
The jury faced a more complex job than a year before thanks to the conditions laid down by the Supreme Court. In the first trial, if Hughes was guilty all the men were; if he wasn’t, all were free.
More options for jury
The new trial meant the jury had more options: the gang could be guilty or not of murder, or of manslaughter. And unlike the first trial, the fate of the accomplices was not necessarily tied to that of Hughes. If the decision was that the ringleader was guilty of murder, the jury could either acquit the rest of the gang or find them guilty of murder or manslaughter.
Taking the focus off forensic evidence that showed the exact opposite, Branca boldly asserted that Oiyo Uno’s statement pointing to an accident was more credible than Yuki’s description of a deliberate fatal shot. And if the jury agreed that the shot was not fired as a voluntary act, they could not possibly return a verdict of murder.
It was Saturday night when the jury reached a verdict, after nearly three hours of deliberation.
Tired and solemn-faced, jurors filed into the crowded and hushed courtroom.
Hughes went deathly pale as the clerk of the court asked the 12 men: “Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?”
His father and a sister crouched forward in their chairs and examined the jury with strained, anxious faces.
Defence lawyers listened in grim silence.
A newspaper reporter wrote it was like everyone in the court had stopped breathing.
The jury foreman, who had fallen ill halfway through the trial, read the verdict with trembling hands: “We find Robert Hughes, Floyd Berrigan, William George Billamy and John Petryk guilty of manslaughter.”
Robert Hughes leaned forward in the dock and whistled softly to himself.
A loud gasp went up from the crowded courtroom benches. A woman started sobbing. Many others present appeared close to tears.

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Dolores Holmes, teenage daughter of Branca and a future lawyer and judge, threw her arms around her father’s neck and wept on his shoulder. A crush of congratulatory onlookers surged in and David Hughes, anxious father of the gunman, seized Branca’s hand and poured out thanks.

By taking the focus off the damning forensic evidence and highlighting the conflicting Uno testimony, Branca and his legal colleagues had saved their clients.

Criminal Code amended

Parliament would, as a result of the Supreme Court decision requiring the second trial, amend the Criminal Code so that culpable homicide committed without intent during a crime, in certain circumstances, was returned to the category of murder, not manslaughter.

“I was absolutely dumbfounded that I was in the same room with these people,” Holmes recalled recently, talking about the lawyers whose work had paid off.

Though the details of the moment have long faded for her, it is her father’s strict legal principles that remain her most lasting memory. “My Dad wanted to keep the sympathies out of it.”

The Uno family made a life in Lemon Creek for another two years.

Son Bobby, 21, who had frantically wished in 1942 to trade his own life to get back his beloved eldest brother’s, now entered the sanatorium, where he died in December.

“My mother had six of us and now she just had three,” Haruko (Uno) Funamoto said in a recent interview. “It was very sad.”

After the war, Kosaburo Uno carefully considered Canada’s cash offer of $200 per family member (including the Canadian-born) to “return” to Japan — the exact outcome advocated in January 1942 by many prominent B.C. voices.

To many Japanese-Canadians, it was this final, unnecessary act that rankles most to this day — that Canada tried to rid itself of a displaced, dispossessed citizens who happened to belong to the wrong ethnic group, long after the negligible security risk they posed had vanished.

Kosaburo came close to signing. Half the Japanese population initially went for the deal, though in the end only 4,000 chose to move to the ruined nation.

Ultimately, there was too much at stake. “Decide to stay in Canada to prevent huge losses from the company co-owned with Tanaka,” he wrote in his memoir, a reference to the Advance Furniture Company where Yoshi and Yuki had worked.

The family reunited with Yuki in Montreal, where he had begun a pro baseball career with the Kik Cola team.

“Jewish people were very kind and helped us out a lot,” recalled Haruko Uno. “They gave us jobs because they knew what it was to be discriminated against.”

Soon the family found its niche, moving into a solid stone house in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal and embarking on a new life in a place where they found their economic ascent was not checked by their ethnic origins.

Salvaging some of what they had built on the west coast, they rebuilt their lives. The children married and new generations were born. The family is still based there today.

The Sun became Vancouver’s dominant newspaper after the war. In his 1961 book Vancouver: From Milltown to Metropolis, author Alan Morley — a Sun reporter in 1942 and on staff as an editorial writer by the 1960s — reflected the city’s unsentimental views about the internment period.

He implied that the ethnic Japanese brought their wartime fate upon themselves by failing to be Canadian enough, living in colonies that made them “an object of doubt and suspicion.”

He was echoing a widely held belief at the time that it was an immigrant’s job to assimilate quickly into white Canadian society.

Morley’s generation seemed unable to see that new immigrants withdrew into enclaves that were safety zones against the hostility of a racist society — not because they rejected the Canadian way of life.

Japanese immigrants’ children saw themselves as thoroughly Canadian. They were eager to establish themselves in white society. Yet in B.C., racism meant that in practice they had few job choices. Professions refused them and they had no political power.

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For the second generation, as for the first, there was no choice but to look to each other for security and opportunity, which meant living closely together. After the war, however, this changed.

In Montreal and other places where the B.C. Japanese resettled, there would not be a new Little Tokyo or Kawamuko. In his memoir, Kosaburo took pains to point out that he lived close, but not too close, to old family friends who back in Fairview lived on the same block.

Hughes served less than six years of his sentence before being released into the care of his father in 1949. He stayed in Vancouver and got married, though not to Jackie Doidge or her rival Rosella Gorovenko.

The rest of the gang fared about as well after prison as they had before. The three teenagers were cast-off kids of the Great Depression, born east of the Rockies and set adrift as youngsters. By January 1942, all three had suffered some common health complaints of the type that afflicted men who frequented city beer parlours.

John Petryk was the second of the Uno robbers to be released, five months after Hughes. Police had taken a dim view of him after the 1942 crime as “even more so than Hughes … the one most likely to terminate a holdup of this kind with gunplay.”

Possibly brain injured after a fall before 1942, he worked as a truck driver after prison but the life of crime lured him back. In 1953 he was imprisoned for armed robbery and served five years. His body lies in Alberta.

Hard-of-hearing George Billamy, foster son of Mission farmers, was “the stupid rather than the vicious type” in the eyes of police. He spent six months longer in prison than Hughes and Petryk.

The last to be released, just before Christmas 1949, was nervous little Floyd Berrigan, a reluctant, last-minute participant in Yoshi Uno’s murder who regretted having any part in the robbery even while it was in progress, according to investigators.

Deemed parentless when arrested in 1942, his mother had surfaced by the time he was imprisoned and gave an address on the Downtown Eastside. Berrigan married and worked as a camp cook. In 1974 he died, a 50-year-old pauper, of alcoholism.

After the Unos and their dozen years of stable occupancy of 305 West 4th, the store was never again a long-term home. Occupants with European names rotated through until 1946, when it was vacated. Many such homes were declared unfit for habitation. It may have gone into tax arrears and been sold off and by 1950 was again occupied briefly by what the city street directory called “Orientals” before another European name appeared.

Uno store in disrepair

By the 1960s the Uno store was in a neglected state, its storefront area hived off and a separate entrance created for the living quarters. A snapshot from this time shows newspapers lining the windows of a low-end used auto parts store. The old structure is rotting and sagging in places. Signs show both “For Rent” and “For Sale” signs (“Quick Possession”).

In February 1964, Bob Hughes had been working as a car salesman when he was arrested for a break-and-enter and possession of stolen goods.

Brought to court with his accomplice, Hughes was unprepared for the sight of the man in judge’s robes. He stared open-mouthed.

It was Angelo Branca, now a judge.

Hughes asked to have the matter held over. He failed to reappear and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

On the morning of Feb. 28, Hughes seemed depressed when he said goodbye to his wife, Margaret, and left his home near 41st and Main. He drove to a niece’s home in New Westminster. There he took a .303 rifle, held it to his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet destroyed his skull and he died instantly.

“Suicide Does What Gallows Couldn’t,” read the headline over a report in The Sun.

“So that’s the way it finished,” Branca commented years later. “I said to myself what a terrible ending to a life that might have been a good life.”

Hughes is said to have left a note. It has not surfaced.

In old age, Branca was conflicted over the true meaning of the Hughes case.

“Ever since,” he said, “anyone who goes out to commit a crime and takes a lethal weapon with him has to realize that the possible consequence may be murder even though he did not intend to kill.” He had exposed a loophole that was now closed again to lasting public benefit.

It was proof to him that a Canadian jury was quite capable, even in a moment of inflamed emotions, of delivering justice.

Yet, in one interview, Branca acknowledged that the times being what they were, there was no way the gang would have gone to the gallows in any event.

The case later became emblematic, to some, of the 1942 Japanese-Canadian experience.

Forty years after the Uno slaying, according to Branca’s biographer, a well-informed Vancouver citizen could say: “Angelo Branca has done a lot for the people of east Vancouver. But I’ll never, never forgive him for getting Hughes off.”

Haruko Funamoto, now 94 and living in Montreal, has not forgotten the evening of her brother’s murder.

“For the longest time, you know, I still had that feeling that somebody is always looking at us,” she said recently.

“I used to feel in my dreams that the robbers would be coming to that house at 4th and Alberta. I could still see the guys coming to the store

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In 2013, Haruko (Uno) Funamoto was interviewed in Montreal for a documentary by Greg Masuda and Stewart Muir. She rode in the ambulance with her dying brother Yoshi to Vancouver General Hospital on Jan. 16, 1942. Greg Masuda photo.



Uno family settled in Montreal after the war. Here patriarch Kosaburo celebrates a birthday with his wife Oiyo, his three surviving children and spouses. Sugie family photo.

Yuki Uno was the first in his family to leave B.C. for a new life in Montreal. He played professional ball for the Kik Cola team. Uno family photo