With four young children, the Shermans did what most people did and set up carpools to get them to class and after-school events. Golf friends Anita Franklin and Dahlia Solomon had children who were roughly the same ages as the Shermans’ kids and recall how both Honey and Barry took part in carpooling. When it was Honey’s turn to drive, it automatically meant the children would be late for school. She was always running at least fifteen minutes, often thirty minutes, behind schedule. But the children loved it when Barry drove, because he would talk to them non-stop, drive right past the school, and take them off in a completely different direction, nattering all the way about one theory or another. When it came to involvement in the kids’ activities, Honey and Barry were the opposite of helicopter parents. Barry, in particular, rarely attended after-school events his children were involved in. A late riser, it was unusual for him to see them in the morning, and his late-night and weekend work schedule kept him from being very involved. Barry typically worked six days a week at the Apotex office. Sunday, he worked in his home office.
At the funeral, Jonathon—briefly removing his kippah in what onlookers took as quiet deference to his father’s atheism and asking others in the audience to do the same—said he could remember every single time Barry Sherman took part in father-son activities with him. “He would come and watch me play hockey or baseball every season or two. But those few games were my Stanley Cups and my World Series.”
It was difficult for those who did not know the family well to tell if Jonathon harbours a grudge against his distant father. In his eulogy, he acknowledged the reason his father could not always be there. “We clearly knew why our dad was not always present. He was a pretty busy guy.” The theme of Barry being overly preoccupied with work was raised a second and third time by Jonathon, who noted that Honey was his “first golf partner” and the witness to his only hole-in-one. “Well, Dad was there, but he was buried in his briefcase, I am sure.” And on one of the “three or four” times that Sherman played baseball with his son in the backyard, Barry hit the baseball over the fence and commented that as a boy his friends called him “slugger.” Jonathon, who had learned from his father’s friends that Barry lacked any athletic prowess, said this was an example of one of his father’s best attributes. “You were always so funny.”
One part of the children’s upbringing that Sherman did focus on was grammar and spelling, patiently but firmly correcting each error. In his eulogy, wiping tears from his eyes, Jonathon got a laugh from the crowd when he apologized to his absent father for any grammatical mistakes he might make. It was a running joke among Sherman friends and family that if you uttered something incorrectly, he would interrupt with the correct phrasing. A few months before he died, Sherman friend Senator Linda Frum sent an email to Barry Sherman and several others with the subject line “Barry’s ancestor?” The email read, “ ‘I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.’—last words of French aristocrat Marquis de Favras after reading his death sentence during the French Revolution.” Attached was an image of Favras, and Sherman responded, “I look a lot like him. Perhaps I am his reincarnation.”
Over time, Jonathon said, he figured out that his father was a “real-life superhero,” because he set an example of what a “great Canadian” was. He cited his father’s success in business and his philanthropic contributions as reasons to regard him as being as much a Canadian hero as hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky.
In later years, Barry Sherman became Jonathon’s business partner in several enterprises, and title records show at least $127 million in loans from a Barry Sherman-funded company registered against Jonathan’s venture into the self-storage business and a group of rental cottages on Chandos Lake, northeast of Toronto, where Jonathon and his business partner, Adam Paulin, had a cottage and owned a small marina. Jonathon believed Chandos Lake was ripe for development and he wanted to expand his holdings to eventually purchase cottages on one quarter of the lake. There were disagreements along the way, with Jonathon as recently as 2015 asking his father to consider investing an additional $250 million in those businesses. Jonathon, who studied civil engineering at Columbia University in New York, wanted his father to listen seriously to his plans. As one person who worked closely with Barry Sherman for years said, “Jonathon wanted to prove he was just as astute a business person as his father. Prove to the world.” Barry, in a 2015 email exchange with his son, does not appear overly receptive to the pitch, particularly because Jonathon was criticizing Barry’s decisions over the years to back certain businesses, most notably those run by Barry’s good friend Frank D’Angelo. At one point in the email chain, the 32-year-old Jonathon tells his 73-year-old father that he understands business concepts because he has “studied accounting and finance.” Barry, who is balking at providing his son more money, shoots back, “Please also remember that I have been making business judgments for many decades, often making decisions with which others disagree. The result has been some big losses, but also some even bigger gains. As a result of my decisions, you will likely be a multi-billionaire.”
In his eulogy at the funeral some two and a half years later, Jonathon made no reference to any acrimony between them, saying his father was a proud partner in his “little” business, a venture called Green Storage (named “Green” because, according to its website, it has sites powered by solar energy, with electric vehicle charging stations and low flush toilets). Jonathon told mourners that when he and Barry began their partnership, they had the shortest shareholder meeting ever. It boiled down to his father offering “anything, anytime.”
Despite Barry’s attempts in later years to rein in his son, the elder Sherman was a soft touch for money, and it started at an early age. Friends have recalled how one Friday morning when Jonathon was in Grade 1 at the United Synagogue Day School (now Robbins Hebrew Academy), he went up to his parents’ room because he needed a weekly donation for a Jewish charity. Barry was still in bed, but he mumbled from under the covers that his wallet was on the bureau and Jonathon could take what he needed. Later, as the children lined up to drop their donations at the front of the class, little Jonathon stuffed a fistful of bills into the collection jar. Several hours later, a teacher called the Sherman home and told Honey that Jonathon had put nine $100 bills into the jar. Honey told the teacher to hang on to the money, and later she retrieved most of it.
The relationship to money in the Sherman household was intriguing and likely can be traced to Honey’s and Barry’s upbringing, though each parent ended up with a different approach. Both had parents who at various times struggled financially. As described earlier, Barry grew up in a home where his father, Herbert, was president and part owner of a zipper manufacturing company, and in those days the family was quite comfortable. But Herbert died when Barry and his sister were young, and their mother had to take in boarders to pay the bills. Honey was a first-generation immigrant whose parents had survived the Holocaust and then lived in a displaced persons camp in Austria before coming to Canada and starting their small shoe store. Honey was consequently careful with money, and at times she seemed to invent scarcity and need where there was none. That resulted in some oddly controlling behaviour. When Lauren, their oldest, was a little girl, she had a birthday party. Thirty friends came, and it was a big event. After the party, according to other parents who were there, Honey told Lauren she was not ready for her daughter to open the presents. It may be, friends speculate, that she feared Lauren would be spoiled by having so many gifts at once and wanted to appoint a time to open them later when Lauren would appreciate each present individually. The wrapped presents remained set aside at their home for weeks before they were opened.
Unlike most of their well-to-do friends, the Shermans employed very few people to help run their home and daily lives. Whereas some had full-time staff working at their homes, the Shermans only hired someone to water the plants and a cleaning lady once a week. Barry in particular seemed uncomfortable
with the notion of employing people of lesser means to do domestic tasks. At an overnight dinner party at the Muskoka cottage of Linda Frum and her husband, Howard Sokolowski, the summer before the Shermans died, Frum was in the dining room clearing the table while her two housekeepers, who had helped serve dinner, were tidying the kitchen. Barry, who had lingered beside the table, looked uncomfortable. “Don’t you think it’s unfair?” he said, nodding towards the women in the kitchen. “We have so much. We have so many beautiful things, and other people do not. Why should we be served and they do the serving? Who decided that some people have to serve and some people get served?”
Frum was put off by the comment and wasn’t sure how to respond. She wondered if he’d had a bad time. She tried to convey to Sherman that her housekeepers were well paid, that she treated them like family and did her best to help them if they needed something. “We ended up having a social justice conversation. I think he was struggling with the idea that the whole evening had been a cosmic injustice.”
Honey herself exhibited what could be taken as hypocrisy in her relationship to money. She drove her ten-year-old SUV, which she frequently had repaired instead of buying the latest version, yet on shopping trips with girlfriends she’d buy three or even ten of something, including pricey Louis Vuitton or Jimmy Choo purses, if she was convinced she was getting a good deal. The purses, or perhaps three identical versions of a designer jacket, would be stored in her closets and never used. Yet small, inexpensive items could hold great meaning for her. On a trip to Ottawa a few weeks before she was killed, Honey was awarded a Senate medal in recognition of her, and Barry’s, philanthropic contributions. Her friend Senator Linda Frum was with her to make the presentation. Afterwards, Honey misplaced her scarf and spent several hours retracing her steps to recover it. Frum and Leslie Gales, a fellow attendee at the event, assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that Honey was scouring Ottawa not to find an expensive Loro Piana scarf from Italy but rather a $40 scarf from Banana Republic. Several cab trips later, the scarf retrieved, Honey explained to her two bewildered girlfriends, “I love that scarf.”
Both Honey and Barry always carried a lot of cash with them. Honey, who never went to a bank, would get spending money from a drawer that Barry kept stocked with $50 and $100 bills. But stories of the Shermans’ unwillingness to spend their cash on certain things are legion. Fellow philanthropist Leslie Gales recalls how her young son asked Barry Sherman one day why he was wearing a cheap watch and not a Rolex. Sherman replied, “I buy my watches at a flea market, and for an extra few dollars I get one with the date on it. Why spend money on something you don’t need?” When the Shermans were heading out to a restaurant and parking was difficult to find, Barry would do his best to find a free spot. Fred Steiner, who would happily leave his car in a No Parking zone and pay a fine as long as it was not a tow zone, said trying to save a buck was just one of the quirks of his friend. Another was his single-minded focus on his job. One day, at the private Oakdale Golf and Country Club, where the Shermans and Steiners were members, Toronto businessman and philanthropist Lou Bregman asked Fred Steiner to introduce him to Sherman. The two men met and chatted. Sherman did not like small talk, and Bregman was trying to find an opening so that he could get to know Sherman.
“Barry, I never see you around here. Do you golf?” Bregman asked.
“No,” replied Sherman.
“Do you play cards?”
“No,” said Sherman.
“Do you run around with broads?” Bregman asked, now completely at a loss as to how to get the conversation started.
“No,” said Sherman.”
“What do you do for fun?”
“I work,” Sherman said.
Bregman laughed. “I work too, but what do you do for fun?”
Sherman said what he said to Steiner and others who had posed the same question over the years. “I like to give away money.”
RioCan founder and CEO Ed Sonshine says that Sherman’s lack of interest in spending his money on himself made him very different from other successful businessmen. One day, Sonshine and Sherman and their wives were at the exclusive Magna Golf Club, in Aurora, Ontario, for a charity dinner and Sherman remarked on the beauty of the place. Sonshine agreed and said he was a member. Sherman knew that Sonshine was a member at Oakdale as well.
“You belong to two golf courses? You’re insane,” Sherman said, his eyes wide.
Taken aback, Sonshine said he had worked hard all his life. He was a big supporter of Jewish and other charities, and, yes, he also enjoyed some of the fruits of his labours. “Barry, I didn’t steal any money. I didn’t inherit any money. I am going to spend it the way I want to spend it.”
“You must be insane. That’s crazy,” Sherman said.
Sonshine asked Sherman what he enjoyed in life. He says Sherman paused and appeared to be giving it serious thought.
“I enjoy work. And giving away money,” said Sherman, repeating what he’d told Bregman.
Barry Sherman had a reputation as a workaholic, and it was deserved. But he did join the family on some holidays, including the 1996 trip to Tanzania for a safari. In his memoir, which would years later be entered into evidence as part of his legal battle with his cousins because it contained his version of how he came to launch Apotex, Sherman noted that he did not bring any work with him to Africa and was perhaps for the first time “incommunicado.” In his eulogy, Jonathon Sherman recalls their father on that holiday “acting like a lion” to amuse his sisters as they drove around in a jeep on dirt tracks that wound through the open plain, passing giraffes, wildebeest, warthogs, and antelope. There were also many winter excursions with their friends and their children to Florida and to US ski destinations. Sometimes, though, it would just be Honey as the lone Sherman parent. In 1994, the family, minus Barry, took a trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to ski. Dahlia Solomon recalls that Tropicana orange juice was not in Canada yet, and Honey saw it in a grocery store they stopped at on the way to the mountain. “She was always excited with whatever was not sold here. She had to try it,” Solomon says.
Honey loaded their shopping cart with ten big cartons of orange juice, plus a monster amount of sliced cheese and white bread. “The kids had canker sores by the end of the week,” Solomon says. That’s because Honey did not like to waste food, and she insisted on having an “orange juice party” at least once a day. On the final day, Honey saw there was still a fair bit of bread and cheese left, and they had to leave for the airport. “She made cheese sandwiches for everyone. She just did not like to leave anything behind.”
At the end of that trip, when they had taken a break from skiing to go trail riding on horseback, Honey’s wit was on full display. The ride camp featured some big horses with long hair. Honey climbed aboard one of them and asked the guide the name of her horse.
“Adolf,” the guide replied.
Without a pause, Honey asked her friend, “You think he’s going to ask for my papers?”
Honey’s sister Mary, her friends say, was a big part of the Sherman family’s life when the children were little, and that is likely one reason the eventual rift cut so deep. Before she was married and had her own children, friends say “Aunt Mary” helped with carpooling, taking the Sherman children to lessons and play dates, and helping with homework. Once Mary and Allen became parents, there were times when some of the Sherman children joined their family on trips that included golfing in Arizona and Disney World in Florida.
The Sherman home on Old Colony Road was the gathering place for big Passover and Rosh Hashanah dinners. A long banquet table that stretched from the rarely opened front door to the staircase at the rear of the house was set for extended family and close friends. In his eulogy, Jonathon described his mother wearing her “cow” apron and cooking chicken noodle soup with carrots and what he described as “those little illegal eggy things.” Eyerlekh, Yiddish for “little
eggs,” refers to not-fully-developed eggs found inside just-slaughtered hens and sold by Jewish delis, against health regulations, to knowing customers like Honey Sherman in a little brown bag.
As the children grew to adulthood, Barry Sherman lavished them with millions of dollars to buy houses, cottages and cars. Friends say Honey did not approve, but it was Barry’s way of showing affection. In some cases, he provided them with money to buy income properties in the hope that they would learn from running a business. Friends of the Shermans say that Barry told them that the first two children, Lauren and Jonathon, were given $100 million each at an early age to invest in businesses and real estate. Whether that is true or an exaggeration is not clear. Public records indicate early examples of Jonathon’s involvement in real estate. He purchased a large wooded property north of Toronto at a cost of $2 million in 2006 when he was just twenty-three, and developed it relatively recently with the help of a $5-million mortgage from a Bahamas company sources say is connected to Barry Sherman. It is now the principal residence of Jonathon and husband, Fred. It was not just the Sherman children who benefited from Barry’s generosity. Before Fred, Jonathon was dating a young Toronto man named Andrew Liss and in 2011 Sherman insiders say Jonathon convinced his father to fund the $4-million purchase of a Forest Hill home on Warren Rd. for Liss. The numbered company that purchased the house is headquartered at Apotex, and Liss is listed as company president and sole director. Over the next few years, as renovations progressed on what became a lavish home, land title records reveal $14 million in mortgages registered on the property, held by a Barry Sherman company. Sherman sources say that in addition to the extensive renovations, there was also major damage from frequent parties at the home. Eventually, in 2015, a buyer paid $11.5 million for the house. That Barry Sherman, who was funding those real estate dealings, would allow this raised the eyebrows of Sherman’s friends. “Barry did so many unusual things with real estate,” said one. “Offshore companies, putting unexpected people on title. That was Barry.” In contrast, the younger Sherman children, Alex and Kaelen, were initially given $1 million each, with instructions to invest the money wisely. Each also received considerable financial help in purchasing a home, but as to bulk payouts, Kaelen and Alex received far less than their older siblings. Whether that decision to provide significantly less money was in response to pressure on Barry from Honey, friends did not know.
The Billionaire Murders Page 20
