The Billionaire Murders

by Kevin Donovan

  Once the children were adults, contact was sparse at times between some of the children and their parents, with Alex being the closest to her parents, particularly her father as they shared a similar approach to money and philanthropy. Something that bothered Barry was that none of them wanted to enter the generic drug industry, something he believed was necessary if they wanted to become part of an Apotex succession plan. Barry was disappointed, particularly as he saw the children of successful businessmen like Fred Steiner and Morris Goodman working happily in their fathers’ ventures. Steiner’s and Goodman’s sons eventually took leadership roles in those businesses. Of all the Sherman children, their youngest, Kaelen, seemed the most emotionally needy. She frequently called her father during the workday, and friends and business associates who were present during those calls say Sherman always answered and provided whatever assistance Kaelen required. In the year leading up to her parents’ murders, people close to Kaelen say she seemed more grounded, which they attribute to her engagement to the young man she had met on a dating site in 2015. At a dinner in the fall of 2017 to celebrate the engagement, the young man’s father said Barry took him aside and said, “I have never seen Kaelen happier.” The couple would marry in April 2018 and separate three months later, divorcing in 2019.

  The child Barry seemed to work hardest to become close to was Jonathon, though the two also had frequent arguments about how Barry should spend the money he had made. At one point, perhaps to curry favour, Sherman took the craft beer business and other holdings, including a Mississauga soft drink manufacturing and bottling plant he had in partnership with Frank D’Angelo, away from D’Angelo and gave them to Jonathon.

  Later, Sherman sold off the beer-making machinery and returned the Mississauga plant to D’Angelo, who now produces a range of products there. Though Sherman was at times not close with his adult children, friends say he remained closely involved and interested in his still very young grandchildren: Lauren’s son and Alex’s two children. Photos taken the week before the murders show Barry and Honey at Alex and Brad’s house posing with their one-month-old granddaughter. There is also a sweet picture of Barry, lying back on a couch, looking into the little girl’s eyes. Still, Jack Kay, who maintains close contact with his own children, told me, “I think Barry really missed out.”

  Honey, who always wanted to be the centre of attention, liked to go out at night. Barry preferred to work until 8 or 9 P.M. most nights. The majority of the Shermans’ outings were related to philanthropy. Honey would triple-book herself on some evenings. If Barry could not join her, her sister, Mary, was his stand-in. When Apotex had a box at the Air Canada Centre (as it was called at the time), and Barbra Streisand was performing, Honey insisted that Barry invite friends and business associates. Jack Kay recalls that everyone but Barry was mesmerized. Barry was sitting on a couch near the bar area, working on his BlackBerry. Kay sat down to keep his friend company.

  The Shermans, their friends say, did not sit at home and watch movies or TV together. For starters, the television in their room did not work for many years, because neither wanted to hire someone to hook it up. Honey did like the occasional show on Netflix, with the show Scandal, about a Washington-based crisis-management firm, being one of her favourites. Joel Ulster’s teenaged granddaughter remembers Honey sitting down with her to go over the latest plot twist when Honey came to visit.

  The couple, particularly Barry, maintained a close relationship with many of the children of their closest friends, providing financial assistance to some, business mentoring to others. All of the Ulster children, for example, received some form of help from Sherman over the years, all given with no strings attached. In the months before the Shermans died, Barry was coaching Jeff Ulster on his first foray into the business world. Jeff had until recently been the director of digital talk content for CBC Radio and had decided to leave the CBC to start a business with a partner that aimed to link advertisers with podcasters, something that was flourishing in the United States but not in Canada. When Barry heard that his oldest friend’s son was going to abandon the comfort of a salaried position for a start-up, he got in touch and they began regular chats. Their email exchanges show that Sherman, though busy at Apotex, took time and care to assist Jeff.

  “Many businesses fail, despite being potentially successful, because the owners run out of money before cash flow turns positive,” Sherman told Jeff in October 2017. “When I started Apotex, Honey kept telling me to close it down before I lost everything, and I nearly did lose everything.” Sherman’s advice was to “accelerate revenues while minimizing cost, as much as possible, until you reach break even, or are at least confident that profitability lies ahead.”

  Sherman offered on several occasions to provide seed capital for the new business. “Starting a business is not easy,” he wrote to Jeff. He suggested he could provide a substantial interest-free loan for eighteen months, getting shares in the company in return. But Sherman said that, “in reality, I would give you a personal confidential option to buy my shares for $1.” Jeff was not comfortable with having Sherman invest or partner in the business, fearing it would complicate his relationship with his business partner. Having just left the security of a salaried job, he did relent and gratefully accept some financial support on a monthly basis to cover his family’s expenses in the first few months of the new business. Their dialogue continued until just a few weeks before Sherman died. In all the correspondence, Sherman shows a strong interest in helping Ulster make the right decisions. His questions were on point and helpful. Sherman reminded him in one exchange about the drafting of an agreement: there can be “a devil in the details.”

  A poignant note in the chain of emails between Sherman and Jeff Ulster comes when Sherman tells Jeff he has realized he hasn’t had an update on the other five Ulster siblings. “If they too are in need of any assistance, I would like to know and would be more than happy to help. You are family, and I love you all,” Sherman wrote.

  As to the strength of the Shermans’ marriage, friends say it was shaky at times, with Barry working long hours and Honey wanting more of a social life. In that way, they were incompatible. At one point, about six years before he died, Barry told some of his friends that he was considering leaving Honey. There was no specific reason, friends said, just that they were spending so little time together that he thought living separately might make more sense. Honey’s friends told me they were unaware of this, and that as the years passed, Barry and Honey seemed closer than ever.

  With the children grown, and with more time to travel, Honey wanted to see the world. Barry told Honey that with his intense work schedule, he could not take the number of trips she wanted. As a result, Honey began travelling several times a year with girlfriends Dahlia Solomon and Anita Franklin and others, including realtor Judi Gottlieb, who joined Honey on some major international journeys. On their trips, each woman was given a job: Gottlieb was the “negotiator”; another woman was the “poet laureate,” who would write poems about the trip; another was “quality control.” Honey was the “drug dealer,” since she travelled with a bag of Apotex samples that included painkillers and antibiotics. As she did in Toronto, Honey also insisted on travelling with a big green box of Nature Valley granola bars. Her plan, which some of her friends felt was culturally insensitive, was to hand them out to beggars instead of money, explaining to her girlfriends, “They need to eat.”

  Those who travelled with Honey say she had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Judi Gottlieb credits Honey with providing her, on a trip to India, with one of the most memorable nights of her life. It was in the northern city of Varanasi, which is on the Ganges and is regarded as the spiritual capital of India. There are well over two thousand temples in the city. When Honey, Judi, and four other girlfriends arrived on a trip in 2006, most of the group were bracing themselves for a typical tourist experience. “Honey always kept us honest,” Gottlieb recalls. “A lot of the g
irls just wanted to shop.”

  It was late in the afternoon when they got there, and the six travellers from Canada were exhausted. The guide who met them at their hotel laid out the plan: they would get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning he would take them to the bank of the Ganges, where they would board a boat and see the sights along the riverbank from the water.

  “No,” Honey said to the guide, “we want to go tonight.”

  Gottlieb says the guide sized up the six women from North America and shook his head. “You will not like it. It is much better in the morning.”

  Honey’s eyes narrowed, a look her girlfriends had seen before. They knew where this was going. Honey got her way. That night, as the guide took them in a wooden boat along the riverbank they saw families carting their deceased loved ones to funeral pyres, lighting the bodies on fire, and later emptying the grey ash in the sacred river. “It turned out to be the most important thing we did on the trip,” Gottlieb says. “Honey had researched and read about it and pushed the guide.” The next morning, the guide took them on a boat ride and they watched in amazement as mourners came to the river and bathed themselves in the ash-thickened water. “It meant so much more to us.”

  Many of the women who took these trips with Honey also attended an annual weekend in Muskoka at Nancy Pencer’s cottage. Videos from the events show a Honey Sherman so relaxed that she, with the others in attendance, dressed up with full make-up for the yearly themed costume event (From Russia with Love, Moulin Rouge, and Memoirs of a Geisha) and belted out karaoke show tunes.

  The one passion Barry and Honey Sherman did share was philanthropy. They were relentless and sometimes annoying in their pursuit of donations. In addition to all the major charities they supported and raised funds for, Barry made annual requests to his friends and business associates on behalf of a small orphanage in Israel. It was run by a rabbi who had encountered Sherman and somehow persuaded him to be his lead, and possibly only, fundraiser. At the same time each year, Sherman would telephone Ed Sonshine, Leslie Gales, and others to arrange their annual donation to the small charity. Sonshine said it had gone on for so many years that Sherman would simply email a request for $10,000 and say, “Maybe you can do $15,000 this year.”

  Gales and Sonshine both asked Sherman why he didn’t simply make the entire donation. Asking friends for money takes a certain kind of disposition, and Sonshine says he has done it in the past but now finds it distasteful; he is happy to give but does not like asking. Gales says Sherman said to her, “Leslie, no one gift is as significant as the gifts from a community.” With Sherman dead, that charity has lost both its biggest benefactor and fundraiser. A Toronto rabbi who acts as the local contact contacted me in June 2019, after having read of my efforts to unseal the Sherman estate files. “Would you know if our charity is mentioned in the will?” the rabbi asked me. I told him that I did not think any charity had been listed in the Sherman will and that, to the best of my knowledge, the estate was divided equally among the four children, with some discretion for the trustees to give money to other family members if they desired. No charity had been designated.

  Though generous to Jewish charities, Sherman made it clear that it had nothing to do with a belief in a deity. A few months before his death, he was approached by a rabbi seeking money for a cause. Sherman said he would help the man but suggested they meet at his Apotex office on a certain Saturday in October. “But Barry, that’s Yom Kippur,” the startled rabbi said. Sherman replied, “That’s fine with me. If you are hungry, I’ll bring some ham sandwiches.”

  Sherman had a name for those who did not donate. “He said they had a black heart,” Sonshine says. Sherman simply could not understand why a person who made money would not give according to their wealth, says Gales.

  Sherman was incredulous that people would refuse him. “You know what?” he said to one friend. “I call really wealthy people and ask them for ten thousand dollars and they say no. To me! Can you believe it?”

  As Honey’s friend Linda Frum recalls, Honey would not publicly criticize those who did not donate. Instead, she would bestow the title of “good boy” or “good girl” on a person who made a substantial donation to one of her causes.

  At the time of her death, Honey Sherman had been enlisted by the UJA’s Steven Shulman to create a campaign to convince Jewish real estate agents in Toronto’s red hot property market to give donations that corresponded with their growing wealth from commissions on big sales. Judi Gottlieb, the Sherman realtor, has taken over that cause and is working on a plan to get fellow real estate agents to step up their contributions.

  Jack Kay says Sherman told him on many occasions that there was no meaning to life but there was an obligation. “Life is what it is,” Kay recalls his friend saying. “As long as you leave the world a little bit better than when you came in, you have contributed to the betterment of society.”

  TWELVE

  RISKY BUSINESS

  THE BLACKJACK TABLE IN THE CASINO on the Las Vegas strip had an opening. Fred Steiner motioned for Barry Sherman to join him, and they squeezed in between two other gamblers. “Barry, let me show you this game.” Honey and Bryna were off wandering around the strip, and they had all planned to meet up later in the afternoon.

  Sherman put down a $10 bet and promptly lost. Steiner, who loved to wager on cards and was just getting started, saw his friend back away from the table.

  “Where are you going?”

  “That’s it,” Sherman said over his shoulder, walking off. “I gamble every day in business. What do I need this game for?”

  To Steiner’s knowledge, his friend never gambled again on that three-day trip to Vegas in 1982, nor did he ever bet on cards again. Sherman saw no point in risking a few dollars for a possible reward in a game of chance. Yet when it came to his business outside the pharmaceutical world, he would happily gamble millions of dollars if he had a hunch he was right. That pattern would continue for his entire life. In an email to his son Jonathon in April 2015 explaining why he chose some investments (money to Frank D’Angelo in particular) and not others, Sherman wrote, “I cannot debate this with you. There are no equations used for an analysis. It is simply a judgment call, implicitly based on intuition as to the expectations.”

  Close friends like Steiner, Jack Kay, and Ed Sonshine, and his entire family, were well aware that away from Apotex, Sherman carried on a high-stakes game with a cast of characters strikingly different from the buttoned-down scientists and bureaucrats he spent most of his life with. Many were larger-than-life individuals who, for one reason or another, had trouble finding more traditional backers. And among these characters, no one was more different from Sherman than Frank D’Angelo.

  Sherman once described D’Angelo as being similar to a worn version of a famous movie actor. That was on the occasion when one of his in-laws, who did not like D’Angelo, called him at Apotex to say that “Frank D’Angelo is at a store right now buying a hundred-thousand-dollar Breitling watch with your money.” At the time, D’Angelo happened to be sitting on the other side of Sherman’s desk at Apotex. Smiling at D’Angelo, Sherman leaned back in his chair and said to his in-law, “You mean the guy who looks like a bad version of John Travolta? Frank D’Angelo? You don’t have to worry. Frank is in my office and not buying a watch.”

  It is difficult for many of Sherman’s friends to fathom what the billionaire scientist saw in D’Angelo. He is a streetwise entrepreneur with Sicilian-Italian roots who purposefully puts on the air of a comic-book gangster but in reality is a singer, songwriter, talk-show host, actor, movie producer, restaurateur, former beer baron, hockey goalie, and apple juice maker, to name a few of his activities. Since he started out in the fruit and vegetable business with his father out of high school, D’Angelo has ridden a financial rollercoaster for his entire life. While he may not have the Midas touch, he has made a great deal of luck over the years simply by working h
ard and being in the right place at the right time. As a hockey-crazed kid, he was at a game in the Boston Garden when Bruins captain Phil Esposito spotted him outside the dressing room, freezing in the cold of the arena and hoping for an autograph. Esposito, who would later become friends with D’Angelo, took the eleven-year-old into the dressing room to meet Bobby Orr and Derek Sanderson. The movies D’Angelo makes, which Sherman bankrolled and executive produced, all feature different but equally rumpled versions of D’Angelo, who, of course, stars in each movie. He’s the everyman, the tough guy, the guy with the whole world against him who comes through in the end.