Indian & Cowboy Has Optioned the three book series “City of Thieves”
Main Street in the Porcupine (an early village that later grew into Timmins, ON) in 1910.
Most people think the Canadian North is a wilderness.
A quiet, empty space on a map they've never been to.
They're wrong.
Northern Ontario is an artery. A billion-dollar pipeline of gold and silver that has been feeding the underworld of this country, and other countries, for over a hundred years.
It is in the foundation and the DNA of Bay Street in downtown Toronto.
It is in the bones of the most recognizable institutions this country has ever built.
There is one problem with all of this.
The amount of theft, murder, and deception behind this history has been hiding in plain site for over 100 years.
Until now.
The Announcement
Indian & Cowboy Creative Media Inc. has optioned City of Thieves, a three-book series, by journalist Kevin Vincent, for development as a narrative podcast series, a documentary feature film, and a multi-season scripted series.
The Story
In 1909, a Scottish man with an affinity for the drink, burned every bridge in town, fled his wife and changed his name struck a vein of gold in a swamp in what would become Timmins, Ontario. Sandy McIntyre, born Alexander Oliphant, sold his stake again and again for whisky money. He died broke. The mine that bears his name produced more than $400 million in gold over its lifetime.
The man who took control of that mine was J.P. Bickell, a Toronto financier who in 1927 co-founded the Toronto Maple Leafs. In the depths of the Great Depression, Bickell raised the financing to build Maple Leaf Gardens. The Cathedral of Hockey was built with Northern gold.
In 1951, a 24-year-old defenceman from Timmins named Bill Barilko scored the most famous goal in Canadian sports history — the overtime winner that gave the Leafs their fourth Cup in five years. Four months later, Barilko boarded a fishing plane out of Timmins and disappeared. So did J.P. Bickell, who died four days before the plane went down.
The Leafs would not win another Stanley Cup until the wreck was found, eleven years later.
They have not won since 1967. The longest drought in major professional sports.
That is the door. Behind it is where the real story lives.
Because while the hockey world was watching the Cup drought, something else entirely was happening in the mines and back rooms and bush roads of Northern Ontario. High-grade gold ore was being stolen from the shafts — hidden in lunch pails, boot soles, coat linings — cooked into pure bullion buttons the size of hockey pucks, and driven south in cars with reinforced springs and chrome-plated hoods cast in solid gold.
This wasn't small-time theft. This was an industrial-scale operation spanning four decades. Millions of dollars a year. Brothels operating as banks. A Gold Squad that, in its entire history, made exactly six arrests. Six — in a town where you could trade stolen ore for groceries at the corner store using a hidden scale under the counter.
The gold went south to Toronto.
Then Montreal.
Then across the Atlantic to Marseilles to the labs that produced the heroin that fed the French Connection. Stolen Canadian gold paid for the opium. The opium became heroin. The heroin came back.
And nobody was looking at Timmins.
Kevin Vincent has spent over 30 years chasing this story. Thousands of pages of archive, photos, video — including 17,000 pages of classified OPP surveillance files and case records that had never been made public. The depth of research, the moral complexity, and the sheer cinematic scale of what he uncovered stopped me cold the first time I read it.
This is exactly the kind of story Indian & Cowboy was built to tell.
Graves after the 1911 fire in Timmins, ON.
Why Indian & Cowboy
"This project is a perfect example of how our creative studio is built. When we invest in a story, we don't start with format — we start with the world. City of Thieves is so rich and so layered that it demanded all three platforms. We're going to show people what we're capable of." — Ryan McMahon, CEO, Indian & Cowboy Creative Media Inc.
Kevin Vincent puts it this way:
"Great stories often come across as lifeless without great storytellers. Indian and Cowboy is an accomplished, committed and compelling team of storytellers and I'm honoured to be working with Ryan and his colleagues to bring City of Thieves stories to the world." — Kevin Vincent, Author, City of Thieves
A Note on the North
My entire career has been built on stories from home. I grew up in Treaty 3 territory in Northwestern Ontario, and the landscape, the people, and the histories of this region have never stopped inspiring me. That is not an accident. It is a commitment.
Northern and Northwestern Ontario are not backdrops. They are not settings. They are living, breathing worlds — full of stories that carry the weight of this country's oldest truths and its most carefully hidden secrets. From Treaty 3 to the far reaches of this province, the North is rich with stories that the world has not yet heard — stories that have the power to transform, to challenge, and to inspire far beyond the borders of this place we call home.
Indian & Cowboy is deeply committed to being a home for Northern stories. City of Thieves is not a detour from that commitment. It is the fullest expression of it. And I can promise you this: we will never stop telling stories from home.
What's Coming
The narrative podcast series comes first. Investigative, cinematic, and built from the ground up with access to Kevin's archive — this is the kind of audio journalism that built Indian & Cowboy's reputation, and it's what City of Thieves demands. The documentary feature and scripted series are in active development.
We're kicking off the project live and in public. City of Thieves will have its world premiere as a live podcast recording at the Indian & Cowboy Festival of Stories, presented at our Hamilton studio at 62 King St East, Studio 204 on Saturday, June 13th.
And we're not stopping there. A live Timmins taping of the City of Thieves podcast is in the works right now. The announcement is coming very soon. This story belongs to that community as much as anyone. We intend to be there.
This Is Day One
This story has been waiting on a shelf for over sixty years. The journalists who first chased it got their ribs cracked by a six-and-a-half foot man on the banks of the Mattagami River. The networks that could have aired it said it was too political. The archive sat in boxes.
Indian & Cowboy exists to tell the stories that the mainstream hasn't had the courage, the access, or the vision to tell. City of Thieves is exactly that.
We are back on the road, looking for the receipts.
We have more announcements to make, more partnerships to announce, and more stories to share.
The journey continues.
🎟 Festival tickets: ticketscene.ca/events/61910/
