Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  Not surprisingly, the airport authority no longer had much use for Millardair. Officials wanted the old hangars torn down. They also informed Wayne that they did not intend to renew the twenty-five-year lease, expiring in 2011, on the newer hangar Carl had built on airport land in 1986. Given that Wayne was almost seventy and Dellen had never expressed any interest in the family aviation business, it would have made sense to wind the company down, but Wayne was a romantic with a love of flying, planes, and Millardair. He didn’t want to let things go. In the years between his father’s death and the lease expiry, he tried hard to convince several other airport businesses to collaborate on an aircraft maintenance operation at Pearson Airport. While none of the possible ventures panned out, Wayne’s lawyers did succeed in negotiating a $2 million payment from airport authorities, who originally hadn’t wanted to give him a cent in compensation for the terminated lease.

  At the same time, there was interest in Millardair from the Region of Waterloo International Airport in Ontario’s booming Technology Triangle. Waterloo Airport “practically begged us to build a hangar at an area of their airport they want to develop and offered unheard-of conditions for a lease—which we are signing onto this month,” Wayne wrote in an email to a friend sent in August 2011. He explained that he was partnering with three top maintenance people he knew from his flying days with the discount airline Canada 3000 to open an MRO (maintenance, repair, and overhaul) facility to do heavy maintenance on small airliners. Wayne included in the email a picture of the land being prepared for the new hangar, on which construction was about to begin that month. He expressed his hope that it would be finished over the winter. “It’s going to be 50,000 square feet—212 x 243’ with a 60’ high taildoor, good for 2 [Airbus] 320s or [Boeing] 737s, or 1 [Boeing] 757 or [Airbus] 310.”

  This was a huge, multimillion-dollar project, unlike anything Wayne had ever done. Although he had worked for Millardair off and on over the decades—flying cargo, training junior pilots, and handling some administrative tasks, mostly on a part-time basis—the company had always been Carl Millard’s baby. Carl had been reluctant to give more control of Millardair to his son, which aggravated an already difficult personal relationship. Wayne had never forgiven his father for separating from his mother, Della, when he was a teenager; meanwhile, Carl didn’t know how to cope with his son’s drinking. At one point, the pair didn’t speak for years.

  Carl did not learn that Wayne had married or that Madeleine was having a baby until he got a call at his Toronto airport office. A former employee recalls that he hurried straight to the hospital to meet his first and only grandchild. While the birth helped Carl smooth things over with Wayne temporarily, he never warmed to his new daughter-in-law, who, according to friends and employees, he regarded as a gold digger.

  While the Millard family was always very private, Millardair pilots gossiped among themselves about where its money had originated. A popular theory was that Della had some family money that she had invested wisely in real estate and stocks, and that the wealth likely wasn’t generated solely by Millardair’s operations. Former Millardair employees always stress that much of the credit for running the business should go to Della Millard, who continued to work with Carl long after the two split up.

  When Carl died, Wayne bought a full page in The Globe and Mail for his obituary, illustrated with photos of his mother, father, and planes, to tell the story of Carl’s life. His father’s birth, on November 28, 1913, “was only 10 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight,” Wayne wrote. “Their invention of the ‘flying machine’ and Carl’s path through life were going to intersect.” The sight one day of a big red monoplane thundering overhead inspired the fifteen-year-old Carl to fly, a goal he pursued steadfastly in the decade to come. Despite the onset of the Great Depression and the fact that he had dropped out of school in Grade 8, Carl succeeded in rebuilding an abandoned gristmill and earning enough money to buy a wrecked 26-horsepower Aeronca C-2, which he refurbished in his father’s barn. It was an extension of the skills he had learned changing the main bearings in the Model T Ford he had used to drive milk cans from the family farm to the cheese factory.

  Unfortunately, having spent all his money on the plane itself, Carl had nothing left over for flying lessons. He had to practise taxiing, at ever-higher speeds, in the family cow pasture. His father, Earl, who didn’t have the aviation bug, yelled at him during one session: “Why don’t you keep going? Can’t it fly?” Carl accepted the challenge, and soon the C-2 was airborne. Returning to earth, however, proved more difficult. The airplane landed in a nose-over that resulted in a broken prop. Flying lessons couldn’t be avoided any longer. Carl signed up with Captain Tom Williams, a First World War ace, who lived nearby. “The way to afford the enormous expense of advance lessons leading to the commercial license was found by rebuilding another aircraft, a Reid Rambler open-cockpit biplane, and using it for barnstorming at country fairs, aerobatic displays and passenger hopping,” Wayne wrote. Even Earl eventually agreed to go up with Carl for a bird’s-eye view of his farm.

  In 1937, while delivering a load of feed to the Tavistock Mills, Carl met Della Mitchell, who ran the accounting and bookkeeping office for the firm. They married in 1939, and not long after, Carl became the forty-sixth pilot to be hired by Trans-Canada Airlines (the predecessor to Air Canada), where he would work for fifteen years before he and Della started their first aviation company, Millard Auto Aero Marine Ltd. The business distributed Steelcraft boats as well as Beech, Fleet, and Bellanca aircraft, and was run out of the Millards’ tiny bungalow in the Yonge and Eglinton neighbourhood of Toronto.

  Millardair, the company for which Carl is best known, was formed in 1963 and gradually grew to a fleet of twenty aircraft and forty employees dedicated to charter flying, both passengers and freight. Aircraft included various Pipers and Beeches, Douglas DC-3, Douglas C-117, Douglas DC-4, Cessna Citation, and Hansa Jet. “Millardair was known to be a good place for beginning pilots and apprentice mechanics to start a career, as Carl was known to have lots of faith and interest in seeing the next generation come along,” wrote Wayne. “Literally hundreds of pilots and mechanics started their career at Millardair. Many regularly dropped in to chat with Carl about the good old days, and let him know they appreciated the confidence he put in them.”

  While Wayne was correct that Carl was deeply admired by many pilots who began their careers at Millardair before moving on to bigger and better things, like any larger-than-life figure, he also had his detractors. Some pilots bitterly resented how he had charged them for training while they built up the flying hours they needed to move on. And as much as Carl was admired for challenging some of the sillier aspects of the federal government’s transportation bureaucracy, in other cases he was seen as needlessly obstreperous.

  According to Wayne’s obituary, this ornery streak is what caused his father to leave his one-room schoolhouse in Grade 8, when the “school marm” took a dislike to young Carl. “Another boy, the school prankster, had loaded all the students’ bench seats with cap pistol sparkers so that when the seats were slammed down to start the morning class there erupted a halluva lot of noise and smoke,” Wayne wrote. “Carl’s delight at the incident annoyed the school marm, and she tried to threaten Carl into revealing the culprit, but she ran up against a boy with principles whose attitude was, ‘If you want to catch somebody, do it yourself, you’re not going to use me.’ ”

  Carl was determined to give his son some of the advantages in life that he himself had lacked. Wayne was sent to board at Upper Canada College, a private school in Toronto known for turning out captains of industry, financiers, lawyers, and politicians. Its alumni include four mayors of Toronto, four Ontario premiers, and seven provincial chief justices, as well as assorted Rhodes scholars, Olympic medallists, and recipients of the Order of Canada. Although Wayne didn’t remember his alma mater fondly enough to send his own son there, for a while at least, regular updates of his progre
ss through life appeared in Old Times, the school’s alumni magazine. In 1964, Old Times reported that Wayne Millard, a member of the class of 1961, had been named chief pilot at Millardair. Two years later, it announced, “Wayne Millard has passed the examinations of the Airline Transport Board in London and is now authorized to fly chartered British Airlines.” A few months after that, it reported Wayne had been hired by Air Canada, where he worked until he was fired from his first officer’s job for wearing his hair below his shirt collar in 1973.

  An arbitration board eventually ruled that the regulation was not legally enforceable and ordered that Wayne, who had inherited his father’s penchant for challenging authority, be reinstated with $20,000 in back pay. But he quickly went looking for another battle, which he found in the airline’s rules about long versus short shirtsleeves. “He just liked getting up management’s nose,” a fellow pilot wrote on an airline message board in 2010. “I don’t think CALPA [Canadian Air Line Pilots Association] was willing to go to bat for that one. Anyway, he resigned shortly afterward. As he said, ‘I couldn’t see the point in staying.’ I know how that feels.”

  In Carl’s obituary, Wayne described and his father and mother as “alpha personalities” and “perfectionists” whose vibrant business partnership made for a lively marriage. The aviation community referred to them as Carl and Dell, the Dynamic Duo,” he wrote, ignoring the fact that his parents’ marriage had broken up decades before Della’s death.

  This ability to shut his eyes to reality also manifested itself in Wayne’s relationship with his son. He seemed unable to accept that Dellen had no interest in the family company, telling the Toronto Star after Carl died that his son might revive Millardair as a helicopter business. For some reason, Wayne was determined that Dellen should do what he had not—take over and run a revitalized Millardair—while Wayne would continue to go about his eccentric pursuits. These included Skyping about saving elephants with an African woman who liked to be addressed as “Your Royal Highness,” trying to learn multiple foreign languages, and tracing his family’s genealogy to see if he could confirm Carl’s claim that the Millards were descended from the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant.

  Just before the demolition of the old hangars at Pearson Airport began, Wayne invited former colleagues to stop one last time and take any mementos they might want. He spoke of the new venture in Waterloo as Dellen’s project, something that would both ensure his son’s future and allow the Millardair name to live on. While Wayne was far from blind to the risk involved—noting in an email to a friend in August 2011 that “the unknown in all this downwind sailing is whether we will get the customers we need”—he also believed that fate was on his side.

  He may well have been inspired by the gamble his father had taken in 1960, when Carl had bought the old hangars and transported them in one piece to another part of the airfield. “Most said it couldn’t be done, that it would all come apart and collapse like a bunch of toothpicks,” wrote Wayne. No one would insure the move, which was necessitated by the construction of the airport’s new Terminal One. According to Wayne, it put the Millard family’s entire life savings at risk.

  Like his father, Dellen had a sentimental attachment to the old hangar facilities—just not for aviation purposes. He liked to invite friends there to party, work on cars, and ogle his helicopter and his family’s planes. When Dellen got engaged, just before the hangars were torn down, he arranged for the engagement photo shoot to take place there. Among other things, the photos show Dellen and his fiancée, Jennifer Spafford, kissing in the hangar rafters, posing with his grandfather’s classic white Thunderbird, which leaves a trail of special effects fog, and making faces through the window of his Bell helicopter. Spafford, a ballet teacher, sports a variety of hairstyles and at least six different outfits, including pink satin toe shoes as she poses atop a Jeep. Millard has his hair gelled into a slight mohawk (brown, not red), a few days’ worth of stubble, and several changes of clothes. The photo shoot was orchestrated by Millard, down to every last detail. He even carved up a pair of brand-new jeans with a large knife to get the ripped jean look he wanted.

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  BY THE TIME MILLARD collected the CD of the engagement photos from the photographer, just a few weeks later, however, the wedding had been called off. According to a police source, Spafford discovered that Millard had been cheating on her with eighteen-year-old Christina Noudga. Distraught, she moved out of the Oakville house they had bought together in her name and into a condo owned by Millard near his mother’s house, where she said she paid rent.

  The break-up was one of a number of events that make 2011 a key year in Dellen Millard’s life. It was the year that Noudga became his girlfriend, the year that Mark Smich began to play a major role, and the year that Wayne Millard decided it was time for his twenty-five-year-old son to do something he had never done before and get an actual job.

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  AN OLD FRIEND OF Madeleine Burns’s family says young Dellen was like the cartoon character Dennis the Menace—spoiled, clever, and with a tendency to get himself into trouble. He remembers Dellen offering a bunch of tulips to his grandmother, Madge Burns, who wasn’t especially pleased that they had been picked without permission from her own garden. As a boy, he could take his bike apart and put it back together, and he always had plenty of money in his pocket. He was allowed to drive cars around the airport at a young age, and like his father before him he learned to fly as an adolescent. He took frequent vacations down south and had his own horse, which was kept on a property owned by Madeleine after she and Wayne split up.

  Although he’d been a skinny child, Dellen put on weight during his tweens and early teens. He was extremely sensitive about it and later blamed his father for feeding him too much pasta. His nickname during those years was Dellen the Melon. A former friend says that at one point he tried to destroy all the family photos of his pudgy past. In a letter from prison to an admirer asking Millard about his fashion preferences and hairstyles, he cites a photo of him that had appeared in the press: “You mention a V-neck and subtle mullet, which makes me think it was from my chubby years. (Just great).”

  After his headline-making solo flights, he managed to win some respect from his classmates, although by this time, he no longer seemed to crave it. He soon dropped out of the Toronto French School, claiming that only a few of his teachers interested him, and he tried his hand at a number of pursuits, all of which—apart from a stint at culinary school—were related to the entertainment industries.

  Millard took a 3D games animation course at Humber College but left after he got nabbed for plagiarism. (It’s not clear if his departure was his choice or the school’s.) He then moved on to makeup artistry, special effects, and photography, using his girlfriend at the time as his model in various softcore porno shoots. The most memorable of these, a photo series entitled “Cockpit,” appeared on the adult website Suicide Girls in 2005. Among other things, it features “Josie,” naked inside a Millardair plane, explaining that her “first official act as captain was to make the DC-4 a clothing-strictly-prohibited aircraft.” Eight years later, upon hearing that her ex-boyfriend was about to be charged with murder, Josie, which is not her real name, took to Twitter in a misguided attempt at humour. “Nothing like finding out your evil ex-boyfriend was arrested for potential murder,” she tweeted. “The only time it’s ever okay for your ex to be more popular than you on Twitter is if he’s suspected of murder is what I always say.” Apparently, she thought better of the tweets and soon removed them.

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  BY 2007, WAYNE HAD APPOINTED his son and, more surprisingly, his ex-wife, Madeleine Burns, as vice presidents at Millardair. Burns, who had gone back to school to study interior design, was trying not very successfully to make it as a designer. She was concerned about her personal finances and worried that Wayne and Dellen would fritter away the Millard fortune, estimated by family friends to be between $10 million and $20 million. After she moved out of the
Maple Gate house, she had acquired full ownership of a farm property she previously co-owned with Wayne. That should have been the end of her involvement, but she continued to play a financial role in the business. Wayne may well have encouraged her, either out of loneliness or a hope that they would get back together or both. He had never been as careful with money as Carl, who came of age during the Depression and had a reputation for being cheap. What’s more, Wayne allowed Dellen to spend large amounts of money, never making any demands on his son other than that he show up at the hangar office from time to time.

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  AL SHARIF, THE FOURTH man hired at the revamped Millardair, was the only person prepared to speak publicly about Wayne’s Waterloo venture after Dellen’s arrest. He attributes this to the fact that he is a Texan, not shy, and not worried about possible retaliation from any Dellen cronies. Sharif remembers being taken aback when he first met Wayne’s son. “Anyone that walks around with an orange mohawk, the elevator doesn’t go to the top floor,” he thought. As a consultant in an international air maintenance and overhaul business based in Austin, Texas, Sharif knew John Barnes, Wayne’s right-hand man in the new Millardair operation, from Barnes’s days at Toronto-based Skyservice Airlines. Back then, Barnes was a customer of Evergreen Air Center of Washington State, where Sharif worked bringing in commercial transport category aircraft for its MRO operation. Barnes suggested to Wayne that Sharif would be a good fit to line up clients for Millardair. The two hit it off instantly.