Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

“Your memory then was much better than it is today?”

  “Yes and no. When detective called me and they came, second person disappeared,” he says, referring to Bosma. “You become a little bit nervous.”

  Sachak is using Tumanenko’s original police statement to try to make the point that the witness is embellishing and dramatizing what occurred. He points out to Tumanenko that all he said in his statement was that after the Israeli army comment, the two guys exchanged looks—“a glance” is how the lawyer characterizes it. Sachak says there’s nothing in the statement about the events Tumanenko has just described in court—no mention of a temperature change in the truck or concern about an accident. The statement doesn’t say anything about the driver adjusting his seat or moving like a mouse, another one of Tumanenko’s memorable animal figures of speech.

  Today is “the first time you mention anything about moving like a mouse,” says Sachak.

  Tumanenko answers that just because he didn’t include every single detail in his original statement, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. He concedes, though, that to say the tall guy was moving in his seat like a mouse “maybe is too much.”

  When Sachak cuts him off at one point, Tumanenko asks, “Can I just say something?”

  “No,” Sachak says. “He didn’t move like a mouse, and that was an exaggeration when you communicated it to the jury. Fair?”

  “Fair. I said it was a kind of a pause.”

  A few questions later, the “ambition” tattoo comes up. Tumanenko, who has already started to catch on to lawyers and their tactics, says, “I don’t remember the conversation.”

  “Do you recall him showing you his wrist?” asks Sachak.

  “You need to understand where I come from. Tattoo language in my country is criminal language. You would no more ask someone about a tattoo than their underwear.”

  In certain neighbourhoods, Tumanenko adds, you could get killed over a tattoo like that. Earlier, he said that when he first spotted it, he remembered thinking, “It’s very ambition to have ‘ambition’ on your arm.”

  Sachak asks Tumanenko to draw the tattoo as he remembers it. Tumanenko writes Ambition, capital A, the rest lowercase, with a rectangle around it. His drawing is shown to the jury.

  “You’ve got a rectangle around the word ambition. It’s what you saw, right?”

  “What I think I saw,” Tumanenko answers cautiously. It’s a good response, given that Millard’s tattoo, although inked in a boxy font, has no frame, and Sachak would have probably leapt on this had the witness given him an opening. Instead, Sachak asks as his final question whether Tumanenko remembers any other tattoos. He says he doesn’t.

  The podium is turned over to Mark Smich’s lawyer, Thomas Dungey, who always cross-examines second due to the fact that his client’s name is listed after Millard’s on the indictment. At the beginning of Tumanenko’s testimony, Dungey filed an admission, or, as it’s known in legal terms, an agreed statement of facts. On behalf of his client, he admitted that Smich was present in the rear passenger seat for the May 5 test drive. He also conceded that Smich was the passenger Tumanenko had picked out of a photo lineup shown to him by Hamilton Police on May 15. As a result, Dungey has no need to hammer the witness as Sachak did. Instead, he can be nice to him and take his side. And Dungey does just that, suggesting to Tumanenko that his presence at the courthouse and the act of rereading his police statement have brought back distinct memories of the test drive in a “flash,” just as he has described it. That’s part of why he remembers the driver turning his head so sharply that it looked like he might have hurt his neck, isn’t it? Tumanenko is happy to agree.

  Smich’s lawyer then asks a series of questions about whether the taller guy had tried to bargain down the price of the truck, which Tumanenko says he didn’t. Dungey wants to undermine the impression Sachak tried to create that his client, Millard, was a serious potential buyer while Smich was once again the sketchy guy in the hoodie. Dungey’s version is that Millard had no interest in buying a truck, just stealing one. He winds up by asking the witness if the taller man has a big ego.

  “Yes,” says Tumanenko, as Millard’s lead lawyer, Ravin Pillay, immediately objects. The judge instructs the jury to ignore the question. Dungey thanks the witness and Tumanenko is told he is free to go. Somehow, unlike any of the other witnesses before him, he makes it out of the building without being caught on camera by any of the photographers stationed at the different sets of courthouse doors.

  —

  ALONG WITH LEADING THEM to Igor Tumanenko, without whom this case might have remained unsolved, the Lucas Bate phone also provided valuable cell tower information. The phone, a Huawei flip model, was purchased with cash at a small tech store in the west end of Toronto on March 11, 2013. The store’s security video footage went back only as far as April 1. The address the buyer had provided was that of a nearby high school, Lakeshore Collegiate, in Etobicoke. There was no Lucas Bate registered there and none to be found anywhere else. Police concluded it was a bogus name.

  Tracing the other calls made from what came to be known as the Bate phone, investigators reached Omar Palmili, who also had a Dodge Ram truck for sale and had been supposed to go for a test drive right after Tumanenko’s. Fortunately for him, the potential buyers were late and he decided to take a nap. He slept through a call from the Bate phone and never met the man he remembers identifying himself as Ethan or Evan when they spoke.

  In court, Brett Moodie asks Palmili how he feels about missing that phone call. “Back then I had my daughter, and it was shocking for me,” he says and then is cut off by an objection from Ravin Pillay, which the judge upholds.

  A minute or two later, Sachak walks over to the witness box to hand Palmili a copy of the police statement he made almost three years earlier. Just like Tumanenko, Palmili has told the court about details that weren’t in his original statement: that the caller mumbled when he said his name and that he lowered his voice. But in contrast to Tumanenko, Palmili doesn’t protest when Sachak takes him to task for these inconsistencies. From the moment he arrived in the witness box and was asked by the registrar to spit out his gum in front of the entire courtroom, things have been awkward for Palmili, who is a slim, fit-looking man wearing a grey suit and an open-collared pink shirt. It’s a relief when Thomas Dungey stands up for his cross-examination and plays good cop.

  “I take it you’ve never been involved in anything like this before,” he begins.

  “No,” answers Palmili. He definitely hasn’t.

  “The reason you remember about this person mumbling, lowering his voice, is you asked him twice what his name was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Prior to this, you had no problem.”

  “Correct.”

  “One of the reasons you remember is because you asked him his name again?”

  “Yes.”

  “He never said to you in clear, loud English, ‘My name is Dellen, my name is Millard’?”

  “No.”

  “That’s the only time he mumbles?”

  “Yes, right.”

  Palmili is dismissed.

  —

  ON FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2013, shortly after noon, Detective Constable John Tselepakis and Detective Sergeant Paul Hamilton headed to the Waterloo area to talk to Dennis Araujo, another man with a Dodge Ram truck for sale who had been contacted with the Lucas Bate phone. Unlike Palmili and Tumanenko, Araujo never even spoke to the caller. They played telephone tag. But the police still needed an audio statement from him as a formality.

  When the detectives were done and on their way back to Hamilton, they got a call from Sergeant Greg Jackson, who was finally getting results from the queries he had sent earlier that week to other police forces about the “ambition” tattoo. From two reliable police sources in Peel and Toronto, he had learned that a man by the name of Dellen Millard had a tattoo matching that description on his left forearm, carried a satchel, and lived in an area of Toronto close to a
cell phone tower pinged on several occasions by the Lucas Bate phone. Jackson wanted Tselepakis and Hamilton to visit the nearby Waterloo International Airport, where Millard’s family business, Millardair, had a hangar, and try to talk to the suspect.

  As they entered the brand-new, red-roofed hangar, which lies far from the airport’s main areas, the detectives found two men sitting in an office behind the empty reception area. “One identified himself as Mr. Millard,” said Hamilton. “He made a comment to the effect of ‘The suits are here.’ ”

  Hamilton overheard Millard tell the other man in the office, “Let me put this on pause,” then Millard closed the office door and came out to speak to the detectives. At one point during their conversation, Millard took a satchel out of the desk in the reception area and put it over his shoulder. “He asked us what would bring us to that particular location,” said Hamilton, who answered that it was just another tip, one of many they were investigating. “I asked him if it was okay if we had a look around. He said, ‘I thought you were going to say that.’ ”

  When Hamilton inquired as to Millard’s address, he gave them the address of his farm in Ayr, twenty-five kilometres southwest of the airport. As soon as they left the hangar, Hamilton reported back to the officers in charge. Then he and Tselepakis parked down the road while they waited for Waterloo Police to bring out their surveillance team.

  As he finishes recounting these events, Hamilton is asked by Tony Leitch if he sees the man he met at the hangar in the court. “He’s sitting at the last table in the courtroom with the white shirt on,” the detective replies, as Millard raises his right hand in greeting. Hamilton appears taken aback by the gesture, as does almost everyone else, including a few members of the jury. It is one of the rare occasions they display emotion.

  —

  DETECTIVE CONSTABLE STEVE GRIFFIN of the Waterloo Police was part of the team that took over from Hamilton and Tselepakis at 3:35 P.M. that afternoon. Shortly before 4 P.M., Griffin saw a red truck with a lone white male driver, whom he described as having a thin build, exit the hangar. It was followed by a black Dodge Caravan. The vehicles drove to a bungalow-style house on nearby Maple Grove Road. The red truck went around to the back of the house and was left there. Two white males returned to the hangar in the Dodge van. The surveillance team couldn’t get close enough to confirm whether Dellen Millard was one of the men. At 4:12 the Caravan drove into the hangar.

  At 4:41 P.M. a blue Yukon exited the hangar and was followed by Griffin and another officer to a TD Canada Trust branch in nearby Kitchener while two more surveillance officers remained at the hangar. “The vehicle did not leave our sight,” Griffin tells the court, adding that they did not know Millard was the driver until they got to the bank. “I looked in through the glass panel and saw him at the teller.” The officers snapped photos of Millard returning to the Yukon while putting something in his back left pocket.

  Detective Constable George Higgins of the Hamilton Police intelligence unit was headed to the hangar to take over from the Waterloo surveillance team when he got word that the target was on the move, he tells the court. He picked up his tail travelling eastbound on Highway 401 at 5:08 P.M., just before Millard turned south on Highway 6. Millard then pulled into a Petro-Canada station near Waterdown before hitting the 403 and travelling east again in the direction of Toronto. In Oakville, he stopped at a block of three high-rise apartment buildings on Speers Road, where it was later determined Mark Smich’s girlfriend, Marlena Meneses, was staying with her sister. The surveillance team didn’t see Millard go into the building, but they saw him come out at 7:19 P.M., after he had been out of their sight for fifty minutes. He then made his way east once more on the Queen Elizabeth Way, exiting the highway at Cawthra Road, near his Etobicoke home.

  By that time, the order had come down from Detective Kavanagh to arrest Millard. At 7:30 P.M., the surveillance team boxed him in at a stop sign, surrounded his car with guns drawn, and ordered him out. He was handcuffed and searched. In his right front pocket were three black nitrile gloves and a bundle of cash totalling $350. Millard was also found to be in possession of a TD Canada Trust bank envelope containing $3,000 in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. He was taken to Hamilton for questioning. Higgins and another officer stayed with the Yukon to wait for a tow truck. They then escorted it back to Hamilton, one officer driving in front of the tow truck and one behind. Once at their destination, they placed forensic seals on all the doors and waited for a search warrant for the vehicle.

  The keys to Tim Bosma’s truck were later found on Millard’s key chain in the ignition.

  THREE

  MOTHER’S DAY

  At the news briefing where they announced the arrest of Dellen Millard, Hamilton Police chief Glenn De Caire and Superintendent Dan Kinsella made no mention of a fact that would become one of the key talking points over the next few days: Dellen Millard was rich. In the media, he was variously described in breathless journalese as the wealthy heir to an aviation empire, the scion of a flying dynasty, and the well-educated CEO of Millardair, the family business.

  While the money part was true, the description of Millard as well-educated was something of a stretch. He had dropped out of the Toronto French School, an exclusive private school where tuition and other expenses add up to more than $35,000 a year. At his parents’ insistence, he eventually graduated from Subway Academy, which, despite its somewhat sketchy name, is an official alternative school under the auspices of the Toronto District School Board. Millard’s formal academic education had stopped there.

  Real estate databases revealed that Millard owned multiple properties in Toronto and its suburbs. There was his $1.2 million family home in Etobicoke; the condo in the Distillery District he had reportedly bought in cash for some $625,000, closing on the purchase the day after Tim Bosma went missing; another condo valued at half a million dollars; and a residential rental property worth more than two million. Millard’s hundred-acre farm in Ayr, Ontario, had been purchased in 2011 for almost $850,000, again in cash. It didn’t have any buildings on it other than a dilapidated barn, but Millard had told the real estate agent who sold it to him that he and his fiancée planned to build their dream home there. That made sense, given that the property was a convenient commute to the new Millardair hangar, which had cost an estimated eight to nine million dollars to construct and equip.

  Moving the family business from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport to Waterloo was a major shift in direction, an attempt to rebuild an “aviation empire” that had been dormant for years and, if the truth be known, hadn’t been all that imperial even in its prime. Dellen’s father, Wayne, had inherited the business from his father, Carl, when he died in 2006. At that point, Millardair planes hadn’t flown in more than a decade and almost all of the company’s revenues came from leasing a valuable hangar at Pearson Airport to Air Transat, a major charter carrier. Wayne wanted to reinvigorate the business to leave a legacy for his son. His idea was to open an aircraft maintenance and repair operation in Waterloo, at the centre of Canada’s so-called Technology Triangle and its booming economy.

  Millardair’s most lucrative years for flying had been in the 1960s and 1970s, when its planes delivered auto parts to and from Detroit. It benefited strongly from the 1965 Auto Pact struck between Canada and the United States, which greatly increased cross-border trade and boosted demand for transportation services. Less profitable were Millardair’s charter services, flying everyone from politicians out on the campaign trail and Toronto Symphony Orchestra musicians on a tour of the North, to racehorses and the occasional bottlenose dolphin in need of transport from Mexico to the Marine Wonderland theme park in Niagara Falls. At one time, the company experimented with providing scheduled passenger flights between Toronto and Sarnia, in Southwestern Ontario, but like everyone else in those small markets, it couldn’t make the route profitable. Yet another business was training aspiring pilots, allowing them to build up the flying hours needed to g
et a commercial certification for different types of aircraft.

  The business was founded in 1956 by Carl and Della Millard, the grandmother after whom Dellen was named. Della had died the year before he was born. She was reputed to be an astute businesswoman, while Carl was known as the colourful flying ace. By the time their only child, Wayne, was ten or eleven, he would take over piloting duties from his father while Carl wandered out of the cockpit to chat with astonished passengers. Decades later, Dellen, who was Carl’s only grandchild, got the same early flight training. A family photo shows him at age two or three, an adorable little boy sporting a devilish grin, seated on Wayne’s lap at the controls of a plane. By his teens, Dellen was driving cars and trucks around the airport. And on their son’s fourteenth birthday, the Millards invited the press to an airfield north of Toronto, where Dellen is said to have set a somewhat obscure world record. He supposedly became the youngest pilot ever to make solo flights in both a helicopter and a fixed-wing plane on the same day.

  Video footage and photos taken at the time show three generations of Millards. Carl, pushing ninety but well preserved, is beaming. Wayne, a big man with a barrel chest and ruddy face, is rushing around by the helicopter getting things organized. Dellen’s mother, Madeleine Burns, who helped set up the event, is in the background. As for Dellen himself, he is an awkward and overweight adolescent with a double chin, poufy hairdo, and a voice that hasn’t quite broken. He has not yet transformed himself into the slim and attractive twenty-something reporters found on Facebook in May 2013 when they went searching for information about Millard after his arrest.

  While Millard himself had no personal photos posted on Facebook—his account was under the name Dee Em, of Oakville, Ontario, and had a tiny fluffy kitten in a bowl as his profile picture—his friends and family displayed a number of photos in which they had tagged him. Millard could be seen at his cousin’s wedding in a suit and tie; mugging it up in headphones and a Union Jack T-shirt on a European vacation; and sporting a red mohawk while sipping a giant margarita in Mexico. The scant information on his account (he once told a friend of a friend looking to send him a Facebook invitation to a party that he had “gone off the grid”) included Millard’s favourite movies (American Beauty and Fight Club, among others), TV shows (Dexter, The Sopranos, and The Office were listed), and music (including Linkin Park, Audioslave, and a Glee cast album). Just two books were named—Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind, and The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon professor diagnosed with terminal cancer who gave the eponymous last lecture about achieving your childhood dreams.