At Forest Hill Collegiate, Barry Sherman did not take part in athletics of any sort. He was a middling student at best until his senior years. There were no girlfriends. He had a regular gig babysitting a next door neighbour’s child in the afternoon and evenings, and that was how he spent his time, watching Western movies on television whenever he got the chance. By his senior years, two things happened. First, Sherman began to manifest a belief that would stay with him his whole life: that he was right about everything. Second, he met Joel Ulster.
It was a contest in the Toronto Daily Star in the late 1950s that drew Sherman and Ulster together. The newspaper ran a series of brainteasers every few days and invited readers to figure them out and mail their answers to the paper. Memories dimmed over the years, and it’s not clear who spotted the contest first in the pages of the Star, but Ulster recalls that Sherman, once aware of it, was convinced that the two would win. They got busy, clipping out the puzzles, answering the questions, and sending their answers off by post to the old Toronto Star Building on King Street, east of Toronto’s financial district. They made it to the tiebreaker and lost, though Sherman was convinced that they were in fact the winners. This was the same student who, on more than a few occasions in Grade 13, challenged a teacher about a statement in a textbook, and was right. Newspaper contest over, they became fast friends.
Ulster was no dummy; he had a better than average memory and was adept with language. “But Barry was smart. Really smart. Nobody else saw it at that time, but I did,” Ulster recalls. “He was the smartest person I ever met in my life. He could go through layers and layers of information and stay focused on it. He had a different kind of intelligence.”
In his final year of high school, Sherman discovered his aptitude for math and science. He entered a Canada-wide physics contest in addition to his class studies and placed first. A photographic memory was part of it. Norman Paul, a Toronto entrepreneur and pharmacist who knew Sherman well in later years, tells a story of presenting the Apotex founder with a lengthy legal document when he was seeking his advice. “Barry picked it up, quickly scanned each page, close to his eyes, like he was a scanner, and after said, ‘Norm, it’s fine, but there is a spelling mistake on page forty-two.’ And he was right.”
Sherman and Ulster’s friendship was built on some fundamental beliefs. One of them was that there was no God, not the most popular belief in a community with religion so stoutly at its centre. Over the years, if someone said “thank God” in his presence, Sherman would rail against the notion, telling anyone who would listen, “There is no God!” He opened his memoir by announcing to the reader, “From my earliest years I have been an atheist. I find it incomprehensible that countless persons, including some of apparent intelligence, believe not only in [the] existence of a Supreme Being, but in very specific and seemingly preposterous mythologies.”
Joel Ulster, and later friends and business partners like Fred Steiner, would just shake their heads at the comments that came out of Sherman’s mouth. Sherman used to tell people he had no emotions, but Ulster saw through that. The two would have long talks while studying, something Sherman undertook in earnest in his last year of school. Ulster, who was not studious, hit the books just to be close to his good friend. Ulster had girlfriends in those days and credits himself with getting his friend interested in girls; Sherman started going on the occasional date. And though neither Sherman nor Ulster was sporty, Sherman particularly not, the two young men played a weekly game of tennis.
Sherman became a regular fixture at the Ulster family home. It was calmer and less chaotic there than at his own house, where his mother had taken in boarders, one upstairs and one downstairs, to support the family. Joel’s father, Ben, was an entrepreneur who owned several movie theatres in Toronto, so-called “grindhouses” that showed back-to-back movies all day, including some racy films. Ben Ulster took an instant liking to Barry. “He will win the Nobel Peace Prize one day, and I am going to fly all of us over there to see him accept it,” Ulster’s father would say. When Joel balked at going with his family on a holiday ski trip to the Catskills in New York State, his parents paid for Barry to come and keep Joel company.
There was a deep loyalty between the two of them, and Sherman and Ulster made it clear that each would always stand by the other, no matter what. Though Ulster was the more athletic of the two, to the extent that either was athletic, he had a failing mark in gym class in his final year, which would have stopped him from graduating. Sherman found the grade book when no one was around and gave Ulster a passing grade. At the end of Grade 13, while Joel was travelling in Europe during the summer break, he received a telegram with his school marks from his father. He worried for hours before opening it. Both had done well, but Joel’s father began his message with the news of the Sherman boy’s results. “ ‘Barry leads Ontario with 14 firsts.’ That was my father writing to me,” says Ulster. “I loved that!”
In the 1950s in Ontario, Canada’s biggest province, students wrote a series of exam papers at the end of the year and were graded against the standard of “firsts.” A first was a mark of over 75 percent, considered an A grade, at a time when that sort of mark meant much more than it does today. A headline in the Toronto Daily Star from August 23, 1960, read, “Forest Hill Boy Gets 14 Firsts,” and the story described how Bernard Sherman “topped” all Grade 13 students who wrote the tests. Two other boys from Forest Hill Collegiate received twelve firsts. Ulster got eight. He was happy with that and delighted for his friend, who, if plans hatched over long study sessions in high school came to fruition, would be his future business partner.
Sherman was particularly interested in flexing his entrepreneurial muscles after an experience working for the provincial government during his Grade 12 summer “processing useless information in an obscure office” in the basement of the Ontario legislature. But what sort of business would be the right fit?
The answer, or at least the start of the answer, came from Uncle Lou. Lou Winter, the younger brother of Sherman’s mother, was an energetic though mercurial man who had graduated from university with a degree in biochemistry. Today, pharmaceutical companies and medical laboratories are commonplace; in 1960, they were not. Lou Winter ran two companies. One was Winter Laboratories, a medical testing lab that mainly performed pregnancy tests on urine samples dropped off by women at pharmacies. This was years before the arrival of home pregnancy tests. The other business, a new venture when Sherman graduated high school, was Empire Laboratories, a distributor of generic prescription drugs purchased from American manufacturers. Generics are copies of brand name pharmaceuticals, sold at a fraction of the cost.
Sherman went to work for Uncle Lou for the summer. Sherman was eighteen; Lou Winter was thirty-six. Despite his temper—Winter was prone to rages and would get red in the face when an employee did something he did not like—they got along well, and Winter gave his nephew Barry a hybrid job, picking up urine samples from pharmacies for testing by the lab and delivering Empire’s packaged generic drugs to many of those same pharmacies.
Lou and his wife, Beverley, were starting a family. By 1960, the year Sherman started working summers at Empire, they had two-year-old Tim, who had been adopted, and Jeffrey, a newborn. Two more baby boys, Kerry and Dana, would be born in the next two years. Barry Sherman was just out of his teenage years when his Winter cousins were toddlers. It was a busy household, and Lou worked long hours at his two businesses. There were obvious signs that the Winters were doing well, including a stately stone house on The Kingsway, one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, a Rolls Royce, and a small yacht.
Internationally, the concept of the generic drug was taking hold, and it was clear to anyone who followed the industry that there was money to be made. The manufacturers of the original drug—called Big Pharma now, a term not yet coined in 1960—did the lengthy and expensive clinical testing and product development. The generic firms copied the drug
, but there were legal issues that had to be resolved. A company could not just steal another company’s intellectual property. Some compensation had to be provided. Morris Goodman, a Canadian pharmacist and one of the fathers of Canada’s generic industry, notes that brand pharmaceutical companies called him a pirate. He never considered himself a pirate. In fact, the feeling he had from governments was often the opposite. “I was acting legally in conjunction with the Canadian law,” he says. Canadian governments told him, “ ‘Go after it, because we want lower prices. We want people to be able to afford more drugs.’ ” Years later, Goodman would have the distinction of being the “only person to ever fire Barry Sherman.”
Working in favour of people like Morris Goodman, Lou Winter, and, eventually, Barry Sherman was that, in a system where governments and private companies paid for a big proportion of the cost of drugs people were prescribed, lower cost was a good thing. The question—and it was a question governments would wrestle with and make decisions about that would both propel Sherman forward and infuriate him—was how to achieve that without destroying the innovation efforts of the brand name companies.
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Barry Sherman’s father had died when Barry was just ten years old. Lou Winter was not a surrogate father, but he was someone Sherman looked up to. As time passed, Winter gave his protégé more and more responsibilities, though mindful that Sherman was still a student. Sherman and Ulster both had enrolled at the University of Toronto. In his “Legacy” memoir, Sherman recalled, “I specifically chose Engineering Physics [now called engineering science] because it was reputed to be the most difficult of programs related to mathematics and the physical sciences.” He ranked fourth in the program in first year, third in second year, second in third year. In his final year, he graduated top of the class and was awarded the Wilson Medal, the highest honour in that discipline. “It seems that the tougher the going got, the better I did,” Sherman wrote. In these early years, Sherman told friends that his long-term goal was to work at NASA.
Meanwhile, Ulster enrolled in the honours arts program, spent a year studying law, then accounting, looking for something that would click. The friendship of the two young men continued to strengthen. One of the criteria in the courses they both chose was that they had to pursue a university sport. Neither had any interest in football, hockey, or basketball. Then they discovered that table tennis was an approved sport on the university’s compulsory list. They signed up. “It was perfect for Barry. You know, I never saw him run once. Just not his nature. Ping-Pong was the answer,” Ulster recalls.
There was a belief in the extended Sherman/Winter family, which Barry Sherman articulated on many occasions, that the men in the family had a short lifespan and nothing could alter that. A good diet, exercise, none of it signified in Sherman’s life. Breakfast for Barry was often a handful of Smarties and raisins. The fatalism didn’t apply to the women in the family, and so it was a shock when, in 1962, Lou Winter’s wife, Beverley, was diagnosed with leukemia. Following her first round of treatment, and leaving behind four very young boys, two still in diapers, Beverley and Lou flew to Bermuda for a three-week rest and vacation. What happened in their absence would be a harbinger of what was to come in Sherman’s life. Opportunity. Risk. Reward.
Sherman had been working that summer at Empire, where the company was making its first attempt to manufacture its own pills. Previously, Empire had purchased generic pills wholesale from a US supplier and distributed them. The governments of the day were flexing regulatory muscles, swooping in on generic companies and running tests to see if their products were safe and effective copies of the brand product. Generic firms believed that the brand companies were putting government up to this. Barry Sherman’s job that summer was to help the full-time employees set up the manufacturing line. As Lou and Beverley relaxed in Bermuda, Empire was starting to manufacture a generic form of Aspirin under contract to the now defunct but then very large Towers department store chain. It was a big contract and one that was predicted to make Empire a lot of money. A call came in from the Towers buyer. Sales were larger than expected and the buyer predicted they would rise even higher. A great deal more of the ASA tablets (ASA, or acetylsalicylic acid, is the active ingredient) would be needed. Apparently, the lower-cost version was flying off the shelves. According to his memoir, Sherman took the initiative, contacted the company that supplied the bulk ASA to Empire, and “negotiated the purchase of a substantially increased quantity at a substantially lower price.”
“I also organized around-the-clock production to fill the orders,” Sherman wrote. When it came into the small Toronto factory, the ASA was mixed with fillers and compacted into tablets using a tabletting machine that used pressure to form powder into pills. The relatively slow-moving machine was archaic compared to the machines Sherman would have at his disposal in the future: computer-driven punches that would each turn out five thousand tablets a minute. Still, it got the job done and earned him praise.
“Uncle Lou was very pleased with what I had done,” Sherman wrote. “Although I did not know it at the time, these summers at Empire Laboratories would later prove to be of critical importance to my future career.”
Lou and Beverley came back from Bermuda refreshed. Beverley’s leukemia was in remission. Lou returned to his business and Beverley, feeling better, was busy with the children. Photos taken over the next few years captured numerous images of Tim, Jeff, Kerry, and Dana: on a dock in cottage country, all wearing short pants and matching velour jackets; on a beach, again with all of them wearing matching summer shorts and collared short-sleeved shirts; seated together in front of the large oak door of the Winter home in Toronto. A photo of Lou, wearing glasses reminiscent of the ones Barry Sherman wore and laughing with Beverley, is an indication that his infamous temper had settled as he aged. In the family albums, there are lots of photos of Lou and Beverley hugging and kissing, smiling. In one particularly nice picture, the boys, wearing the velour outfits again, are snuggled close to their mother at a beach.
Having graduated from the University of Toronto as an engineer in 1964, Sherman tried something different that summer. Instead of working at Empire, he took a job at the Spar Aerospace division of de Havilland Aircraft in Toronto. His knowledge and abilities with math landed him a plum summer assignment working on vibration issues encountered by satellites being developed in Canada. It was an exciting time in the world of space and aeronautics, with the moon landing plans under development in the United States, and Canada working in tandem with the Americans to develop satellites to study the atmosphere and create an orbiting communications network. At the end of that summer, Sherman travelled to Boston to begin studies in astronautics and aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For Sherman, it was both physically and mentally a great distance from pharmaceuticals and Toronto.
When he returned to Boston for his second year, he did so with the knowledge that his Aunt Beverley’s leukemia had returned. She was being treated at Toronto’s St. Joseph’s Hospital, but the situation was dire.
Just a few weeks into his sophomore year, in the middle of the night, when Sherman was asleep in his room at MIT, he heard his telephone ring. He feared it was news from Toronto that his aunt had died.
It was his sister. “It’s Uncle Lou,” Sandi said.
Lou Winter, aged forty-one, had been working that afternoon at the Empire offices in Toronto’s west end when he suddenly fell over. An aneurysm in his brain had burst. His employees called an ambulance and he was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital, a fifteen-minute drive further west, but Lou Winter died soon after arrival. Sherman flew home to attend his uncle’s funeral. He did not believe in God, but he understood the meaning to family of a funeral and knew it was important that he be there.
After the funeral, he visited his now terminally ill Aunt Beverley in hospital on the evening of November 9, 1965. He recalled in his memoir
how the lights in the hospital went out. Not being a superstitious man, Sherman was not worried but rather curious. Emergency systems clicked on. He began to ask questions, intrigued by what had happened. It turned out that an improperly set relay circuit on a transmission line from the Adam Beck II hydroelectric power station on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls had tripped, sending a power surge into the electrical grid that caused blackouts on the eastern seaboard of the United States—New York State, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island—and a big swath of Ontario. Power remained out for thirteen hours. Newspaper accounts describe traffic and public transit chaos, but there are also stories of people on the jammed streets of Toronto giving up on getting home and popping into bars for a drink by candlelight. A myth, eventually debunked, was that the Great Blackout of 1965 gave rise to a baby boom. Sherman returned to Boston and his classes, only to fly back three weeks later to attend Aunt Beverley’s funeral.
His little cousins were seven, five, four, and three years old when their parents died. In later years, whenever the boys’ uncertain future—some had troubles with substance abuse, some the law, and all had a hard time finding their place in the world—was discussed, the four boys would always be referred to as the “orphaned cousins” or the “Winter orphans.” The immediate question after the deaths of their parents was who would raise the boys. According to a 2008 Toronto Life article, Beverley’s brother (now deceased) was under the impression that she did not want any of her own family involved. There also appears to have been no discussion about whether Barry or Sandi, who were both in their early to mid-twenties, could look after the children, though some people interviewed for this book have suggested they should have. In testimony as part of the lawsuit the cousins eventually brought against him, seeking a $1-billion share in his wealth, Barry Sherman said there was “nothing” he could have done at the time. “I couldn’t adopt them myself. I was a kid myself.” In reality, it would have been highly impractical. Sherman was twenty-three years old, single, and living in Boston, working simultaneously on a master’s degree and a doctorate. Sandi was also just starting out.
The Billionaire Murders Page 3
