As about fifty journalists looked on, she then delivered the news of the day. “We believe now, after six weeks of work review, we have sufficient evidence to describe this as a double homicide investigation and that both Barry and Honey Sherman were targeted.”
Gomes then detailed what the officers under her command had done to date. They had executed twenty search warrants; seized Barry Sherman’s computer at Apotex; forensically examined the Sherman home; seized 150 “bulk or packaged items” from 50 Old Colony Road and the Sherman condominium in Florida; and taken 127 witness statements. The neighbourhood had been extensively canvassed, and police had obtained about two thousand hours of video surveillance from commercial and residential surveillance cameras. Thousands of person hours had been spent on the case, Gomes told reporters. As to what they had discovered, Gomes refused to answer any questions.
With the police search over, Gomes said, her team had that morning returned the home to the Sherman family. Over at Old Colony Road, Greenspan’s team of investigators were already moving through the house. For the Sherman family and friends, the conversation would now turn from questions about how the police could ever have believed it was murder-suicide to an ongoing debate about who would have wanted them dead. A wide range of theories were bandied about: it was a hit team from the Mossad in Israel; it was an aggrieved business party. More than a year later, in a conversation I had with Greenspan, I asked him how, in his experience, a murder investigation should develop. Greenspan replied, “The classic investigation is you start at the centre and move outwards, eliminating suspects as you go.” Whether the police were doing that in the first few months is unknown as, at time of writing, police would not say who they had cleared as suspects and who was still on the list.
Back at the Star, after police reporter Wendy Gillis and I had filed the story, I was going over notes in my little office that served as a sort of war room and that a colleague had nicknamed the Caper Room. Lawyer Bert Bruser walked in. Bruser and I met when I was a summer intern and had made what at the time seemed like a grave error. I had given a statement to police in a homicide investigation where the victim was a Toronto Star employee in our circulation department. Through my reporting on her murder, I had interviewed the man eventually charged with killing her. As I learned the day I met Bruser, I should not have spoken to police without his permission and guidance. Thirty-four years later, he still regularly told journalism students that story as a cautionary tale. Since then, he had been my lawyer, mentor, friend, and quite often antagonist. He sat down in my guest chair and flipped through emails on his iPhone. Bruser never does anything quickly. I put down my notes, looked at his deeply lined face, and waited.
“Good story. Stories, I guess.”
Again, I waited. One of the things he taught me was the power of silence.
“But that was the easy part. Now the real work starts. Find out who killed them.”
EIGHT
MAKE A BIT OF MONEY
“I CAN’T DIE, JACK,” BARRY SHERMAN CALLED out from his office. “The world can’t get along without me.”
“Barry, you’re full of shit,” Jack Kay, second-in-command at Apotex, yelled back through the open door of the office next to Sherman’s.
“I still have so much to do,” said Sherman. “I can’t die.”
“You’re still full of shit,” his friend replied.
As would be the case no matter how big the generic firm became in years to come, Sherman and Kay were never physically far from each other, just as it was with Sherman and Ulster at the Empire office years before. It was the mid-1980s now, and Apotex was growing. Even when they constructed bigger offices in a new building, the connecting door between them would always be open, albeit separated by a small experimentation room, where Sherman tried new formulations. A low table held a small incubator, test tubes, and devices to analyze his pill experiments.
“No man in my family has lived past forty-seven, not my dad, not my uncle,” Sherman called out. He added thoughtfully, “Then again, Moses lived to be one hundred and twenty.”
Once, in the 1970s, Joel Ulster recalls, Sherman smoked a marijuana joint, back when Sherman and Ulster were still partners in the generic drug business. Stoned, out of control for the first and only time in his life, Sherman grabbed a notepad and, as Ulster’s eyes widened, began writing numerical formulas, pages and pages, which he pronounced were the secret to immortality. His theory, which had some grounding in science, was that as people age, their cells break down. Sherman’s formula would alter the DNA in a human body and reverse the process. He grew more and more excited as he scribbled, as did Ulster. The next morning, Ulster asked his now sober best friend about the formula. “It’s complete nonsense, none of it makes any sense,” Sherman said. Though he would years later begin working on a plan to make marijuana pills, Sherman never used the drug again.
Sherman had a fatalistic quality. “I have always been very conscious of my personal mortality,” he wrote on the first page of his unfinished memoir. Death was a topic he often raised in jest. In an interview for Jeffrey Robinson’s 2001 book on the pharmaceutical industry, when asked about what he perceived as his many enemies, Sherman told the author that he was surprised someone had not collected a thousand dollars to “knock me off.”
At his desk, Kay smiled at Sherman’s gloomy assessment. He had heard all this before. “You have years to go, Barry.”
Joanne Mauro, the executive assistant Sherman hired in 1976 as a high school student, who would still be at Apotex after Sherman died, sat outside their offices. She chuckled. The way the two men carried on no longer surprised her, but it shocked newcomers. On more than one occasion, someone had come in for a meeting, overheard Sherman and Kay yelling back and forth about some deal, or God, or politics, and said to Mauro, “Maybe I should come back later?” She would just usher the person into the office.
Mauro, Kay, and the few others who truly knew Barry Sherman had long ago learned that their brainy boss had a dry wit. Anyone was fair game. Reaching over a pile of calculations on his desk one day, Sherman rummaged around and found a sheaf of brown envelopes and the telephone. He dialled his lawyer, Harry Radomski, who worked at a Bay Street law firm in downtown Toronto.
“Harry? We have a problem.”
At the other end of the line, Radomski held his breath. Sherman was rapidly becoming his best client, and complaints were rare. In fact, he could not remember a complaint. They worked side by side on cases as Sherman grew his business and battled government, brand name pharmaceutical companies, and other generic firms, using the courts as a cudgel.
“Barry, to begin with, I am sorry. How can I help?” asked Radomski. So closely did they work together that Sherman, though he had no formal legal training, routinely helped Radomski devise strategies to be used in court and sometimes even draft documents for the case.
“It’s your accounts,” said Sherman. “You just sent me ten accounts.”
Radomski took another breath. He did a lot of work for Sherman and was well paid, and he was careful not to charge too much. But he had recently sent quite a few bills, or “accounts.”
“Barry, I did. Were they in order? Do you want to go over them?”
Silence. Then Sherman cleared his throat. “You sent ten accounts. In ten envelopes. Next time, if you send them in one envelope, you will save the price of nine stamps.”
Radomski exhaled. “Thanks, Barry.”
It was a lively office with a mix of veteran employees and young people. Sherman enjoyed giving young people a start in life and a pay cheque, even if they were not going to make the generic drug business their life’s work. One of the young people he helped was Joel Ulster’s son Mark. He had struggled out of high school, and Sherman had blamed his good friend Joel’s bohemian lifestyle for the boy’s wayward attitude. At one point, Joel recalls, Sherman took him aside and asked if he could intervene. “
You are not doing a good job as a father,” Sherman said. To help his friend’s son get going in life, Sherman had given him a job at age seventeen. For some time, he had tried to convince Mark to learn the ropes at Apotex and one day take over from Sherman. It would be many years before any of Barry and Honey’s children would be old enough to even suggest they should be part of the Apotex succession plan. Mark, not yet twenty years old when the subject of his future at Apotex was raised, and with little interest in pharmaceuticals, said thanks but no thanks to Uncle Barry. He was happy to continue working for a few years at Apotex with Mauro and the other women who made up the office staff, but he did not want to be part of Barry Sherman’s plans for the future. “I was a moralistic kid, and I think, looking back to those days, I did not want to sell out,” Mark says.
Sherman called Mark into his office one day. As he sometimes did in those early days before automated payroll, Sherman handed Mark a stack of two hundred payroll cheques and asked him to sign the “Barry Sherman” signature. He had neither the time nor the interest to do it himself. Mark went into a closet-sized office off the corridor outside Sherman’s office. It was an odd request, but he was used to Sherman and appreciated the trust. In later years, he would realize he was just one of many youngsters who received both trust and help from the Apotex billionaire.
Kay smiled at the activity going on around him and allowed himself a moment’s reverie before the next plan or proposal came out of his “brother” Barry’s mouth. This was a typical day at Apotex.
The two men shared a brotherly affection for one another, but they could not be mistaken for siblings. Kay was a bull, short of stature but muscular. When I first shook his hand, in 2018, I tensed, bracing myself as men sometimes do, seeing the swell of the seventy-seven-year-old man’s biceps. For his entire adult life, Kay has watched his diet and worked out in a gym every second day at 6 A.M. Sherman had different habits, and his body was accordingly soft. But from the moment they met, their brains clicked.
Kay did not begin his career in the generic pharmaceutical world. After university, he trained as a psychiatric nurse at a hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. His specialty in the years he practised was developing an understanding of psychotropic drugs, pharmaceuticals that affect a person’s mental state. A brand name pharmaceutical company hired him to be a “detail man,” a salesman who travelled around visiting doctors with samples and information, trying to persuade them to prescribe a particular medicine. “Pretty boring after a while,” Kay recalls. With a partner, he started his own company, Sabra Pharmaceuticals, which he sold in 1972 to ICN and Morris Goodman, the generic pioneer, who around the same time purchased Sherman and Ulster’s Empire Laboratories. Kay moved his wife and family to Montreal and worked closely with Goodman as director of government sales. As one of Goodman’s top executives, Kay was put in charge of integrating Empire Laboratories into the ICN portfolio.
Kay was aware of Sherman and knew the story Goodman liked to tell about how he had fired him, but he had only met the Toronto man in passing. In 1982, Sherman was looking for a new director of sales, and he knew of Kay from an industry association. He drove to Montreal to make a pitch, visiting Kay at his townhouse. Money was not discussed. Life and God were. Both men were atheists, though they enjoyed the social and family aspects of the Jewish culture. But Sherman became visibly angry at the notion that a person would believe in God, which he told Kay was “stupid.” In his memoir, Sherman wrote that the whole concept of organized religion annoyed him: “I have always felt disdain for organized religion and for the foolishness or hypocrisy of clergymen who sell religion as a source of morality or everlasting life.” One of his many observations was that he believed there was a “reverse correlation” when it came to generosity and faith. “Atheists often are enormously more generous than persons obsessively committed to seemingly absurd religious rituals,” he wrote. Kay tried, and kept trying for all the years they knew each other, to convince Sherman to be tolerant of people who had a belief in a deity, explaining that it was most likely because they had been raised with that notion.
“Barry, just as you believe there is not a God, there are people who believe there is a God,” he said.
“It’s an impossibility,” Sherman replied.
Their freewheeling conversation moved to the generic business, Apotex, and the job offer at hand. Kay had a good position at ICN, but he was restless. He and his wife had separated, there was some uncertainty over the future of the American company, and he was looking for a change. But would Apotex be the right move? Sherman said that his company would grow and be profitable, because he was devising new techniques to manufacture pharmaceuticals and do it more cheaply than competitors. Margins were very important in the business. At the time, Canada had a system called compulsory licensing, which allowed generic firms to receive a licence from a brand name company to manufacture one of its patented drugs as long as they could prove they were making the identical product. In return for this licence, the generic company, which charged customers less for the drug, would pay 4 percent of its revenues from the generic version’s sales to the brand company. It was a kind of symbiotic relationship, and though rocky at times it had generally worked well for many years. In fact, compulsory licensing was a huge boost to the generic industry when it was introduced. As long as they could prove they were making a safe and effective copy of the brand name drug, they could manufacture their own version, sell it for cheaper than the brand, and pay only a small portion of their sales revenues. Eventually, the brand name companies would grow tired of these “pirates” legally poaching from their profit share. They would get the ear of a new government and convince it that compulsory licensing was detrimental to research and development. But for the moment, the system allowed Sherman to develop a profitable game plan, provided he kept his production costs down.
“Why do you think you can be successful when others have failed?” Kay asked.
“I am smarter than everyone else,” Sherman shot back.
At the end of a two-hour chat, Sherman stood up. “Jack, come work with me. We will build Apotex, and we will make a bit of money and have fun.”
Kay took the job. When he arrived at the Apotex building in Toronto for his first day, he had second thoughts. The operation, in a factory now six years old, was not as modern as Sherman had made it out to be. There was clearly work to do.
* * *
—
With pharmaceuticals so much a part of everyday life today—cold remedies, painkillers, antibiotics—it is hard to imagine a time when they were not. The concept of the medicine-dispensing “apothecary,” the word Sherman and Ulster took as inspiration for the company name Apotex, dates back thousands of years to ancient China, Egypt, and other parts of the world. Herbal remedies and some rudimentary chemical compounds were the staples of the early apothecary through the ages. Cures were promised for various ailments, headaches, and ill-defined maladies. Some of the biggest Big Pharma companies in the world today, including GlaxoSmithKline, trace their roots back to the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. At the time, there was a melding of apothecaries that were using flora like the poppy (for morphine) and the cinchona tree (for quinine) with dye and chemical companies whose scientists were discovering that the products they were making for one application also had a medicinal quality. With this development, particularly in Germany, the modern pharmaceutical industry was born. In probably the most recognizable example of a “wonder drug,” in 1897 a chemist at the German company Bayer developed Aspirin, formulating into tablets the salicylic acid found naturally in jasmine, clover, and willow and other trees. It was a marriage of modern nineteenth-century science with knowledge that was more than two thousand years old; the Greeks, most notably Hippocrates, knew about the pain-relieving qualities of willow leaves and bark, as did several other ancient cultures.
In the United States, the Pfizer drug giant was founded in 1849 wi
th a single product that was used to treat intestinal worms, which, the company’s historical records note, was “a common affliction in mid-19th-century America.” The German-American Charles Pfizer set up the company with his cousin and future brother-in-law Charles Erhart. Pfizer was a chemist; Erhart was a confectioner. Pfizer took the active pharmaceutical ingredient santonin and combined it with an almond-toffee flavouring Erhart had developed and shaped it into a candy cone for a sweeter delivery of the product. The company was instantly profitable. With the coming of the American Civil War between the northern and southern states, the demand for painkillers and disinfectants soared, and Pfizer’s profits rose with the demand.
At the heart of all pharmaceuticals are chemicals, something Sherman and Kay understood very well. “It’s a chemical business,” Kay says simply. Over time, pharmaceuticals, whether brand name or generic, became one of the largest industries in the world. Controversy dogs the business, as it has since the days of the travelling snake oil salesmen who would roam the American frontier offering potions with inflated cure potential.
Today, one controversy is whether drugs are over-prescribed. And there is much debate over the role of pharmaceutical companies in funding academic research. Sherman, particularly with one notable drug treatment he funded in later years, would step firmly into that murky discussion, ultimately with a surprisingly positive result for him shortly before he died. But beyond that, Sherman was uninterested in whether it was ethical to manufacture so many drugs. Was it appropriate for him to manufacture opiate-based drugs at Apotex for use in painkillers that, if used incorrectly, could kill someone? If it concerned him, he never said so publicly or to any of his colleagues interviewed for this book. Not long before his death, Sherman would spend $50 million to purchase a Florida facility to manufacture a generic fentanyl product for sale in the United States; he did it because the law prevented him from exporting Canadian-made controlled substances south of the border. It was a business for him, plain and simple. The doctors prescribed the drugs; Sherman just made them as cheaply as possible. Yet, with the people closest to him, he shared a deeper belief in what he saw as his role as a generic drug provider. His daughter Alex told me that when her father learned shortly before his death that he was to be awarded the Order of Canada, he was “very proud.” She said her father, who she has dubbed a “healing love warrior,” was committed to assisting others and “worked hard for Canada’s healthcare system in many ways for many decades.”
The Billionaire Murders Page 13
