Barry & Honey Sherman (Part Two: Close Enough)

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This episode contains graphic content that may not be suitable
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for all ages. Listener discretion is advised. If you or
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someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available.
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Call or text 988 or chat with someone at 988lifeline. org.
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Those outside of the U.S., reach out to someone at
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your local crisis center or hotline. Please do not suffer
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in silence. On Monday, January 15th, 2018, a month to
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the day after the bodies of Barry and Honey Sherman
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were found in their home, two Toronto homicide detectives walk
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into the head office of Apotex on Signet Drive. Detective
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Brandon Price and Detective Constable Christy Devine had a search warrant,
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granted by a judge that same day. It covered two rooms,
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the office of the company's late founder and chairman, Bernard Sherman,
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and the small laboratory right next to it. where, even
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at 75, he still liked to work out drug formulations himself.
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Standing with them were lawyers from Goodman's LLP, the firm
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representing Apotex and the Sherman Estates, who had spent the
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past four weeks making sure that the police did not
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read anything they weren't supposed to. The affidavit the detectives
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swore to get this warrant is very clear about what
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they're hoping to find. A month in, suicide is still,
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in the words of one of those affidavits, a significant possibility.
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So they're looking for a note, a journal, medical records,
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anything that might show a man who was sick or
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depressed or planning something. There, in those two rooms, they
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take photographs. They take documents. Two and a half weeks later,
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Detective Constable Dennis Yim sits down with the pictures of
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everything that they seized that day, and he writes up
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what they found in an affidavit of his own. There
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were old medical documents belonging to Barry. There was an
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Air Canada itinerary and a receipt for a plane ticket.
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Toronto Pearson to Fort Lauderdale, December 24th, 2017, departing 2.50pm.
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There was a photograph of Barry and Honey standing with
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Detective Constable Yim wrote, No suicide
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note was located, and none of the medical records located
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in the office relate to mental health or indicate anything
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in regards to suicide. And there was one more thing.
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Yim listed it right in the middle of the rest,
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as if it were just another piece of paper. Excerpts
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of what appeared to be an autobiography by Bernard. The
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affidavit doesn't say which pages the detectives found in that office,
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but there's only one autobiography that Barry Sherman is known
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to have written, and I've read all of it. It's
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47 typed pages long. He started it by hand on
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December 27th, 1996, on the eighth day of a two-week
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family safari in the Serengeti. And when he got home,
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he handed the pages to his executive assistant of 20 years,
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Joanne Morrow, who could read his handwriting better than anyone,
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and she typed them up. He titled it, A Legacy
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of Thoughts. It opens with this line, I admit to
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being a workaholic. On vacations, Barry explains, he always brought
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his files and stayed in constant contact with the office.
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This time, for once, he hadn't. So he decided to
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finally write down some thoughts that had been forming in
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his mind for a while. He wrote, I have always
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been very conscious of my personal mortality. I have enjoyed
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considerable success in building the Apotex group of companies, which
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probably will survive me. However, memories are brief. and even
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should there survive some physical manifestation of my existence, my
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thoughts will be forever lost unless I commit them to paper.
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21 years later, the detectives who found those pages were
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looking for Barry's last words, hoping it would provide an
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easier answer to at least some of their questions. What
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they had found was a backstory that complicated things even further.
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This is the story of Barry and Honey Sherman. Part 2.
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Close enough. Welcome back to Unresolved. I'm your host, Michael Whelan.
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This is part two of our five-part series on the
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deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman, so if you have
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not yet listened to part one, I would recommend starting there.
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In it, we followed the discovery of the couple beside
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their indoor pool in December of 2017, the anonymous police
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sources who told the world that it was a murder-suicide,
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and the four children who hired one of the country's
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top criminal lawyers to prove it wasn't. We'll return to
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that investigation in part four, for the most part. Over
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the next two episodes, we're going back to the beginning
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to tell you who Barry and Honey Sherman actually were.
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Because the more that I learned about this case, the
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clearer it became that you can't actually make sense of
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what happened in that pool room without knowing the two
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people in it. One of our guides is going to
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be Barry's own unfinished memoir, which is blunt and kind
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of funny, and also arrogant. Sometimes all of that in
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the same sentence. Though... It is worth mentioning that it's
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just one man's version of his own life, and not
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everyone agrees with it. We'll also be drawing on Kevin
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Donovan's 2019 book, The Billionaire Murders, as well as some
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court records and police affidavits. Before we get going though,
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a quick thank you. Unresolved is a completely independent show,
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and it's made possible by the people who support it
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over on Patreon. If you would like to join them,
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head over to patreon.com slash unresolvedpod, where you can find
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bonus episodes, exclusive podcasts, and even producer credits. And if
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supporting the show financially isn't in the cards right now,
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that is completely fine. One of the best things you
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can do is leave this show a nice rating and
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review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Preferably something with five
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stars and kind words. It takes about 30 seconds, and
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it genuinely helps new listeners find the show. Now though,
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without any further ado, let's go back to the beginning.
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Bernard Charles Sherman was born in Toronto on February 25th, 1942,
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to Herbert and Sarah Sherman. Both of his parents had
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been born in Toronto, Herbert in 1906 and Sarah in 1910.
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Their own parents had arrived in Canada at around the
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turn of the century, fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe.
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Herbert's family was from Russia, and Sarah's from Poland. Herbert
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was the president and senior partner of a small zipper
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manufacturer in downtown Toronto called the American Trimming Company. Sarah,
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before she married, had worked as an occupational therapist. Her
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maiden name was Winter, and that name is going to
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come up again. Bernard had one older sister, Sandra, 18
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months his senior, who everyone called Sandy. His legal name
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was Bernard, but as he later explained it, he was
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always called Barry. His mother preferred Barry, though she thought
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Bernard sounded more distinguished, and would serve him better as
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a legal name later in life. The family lived in
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a modest home in Forest Hill, a leafy, winding neighborhood
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north of downtown Toronto, that in the 1940s and 50s
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was home to a lot of upwardly mobile Jewish families.
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It was a pretty comfortable life. By Barry's own account,
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it wasn't an especially interesting one. Decades later, in his
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unfinished memoir that he titled A Legacy of Thoughts, he
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wrote that his first ten years were unremarkable. That line,
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and much of what follows about Barry's early life, comes
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from the memoir that the detectives found pieces of in
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his office. And lines like that kind of do make
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me chuckle. But there's one story from those unremarkable years
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that Barry clearly never forgot. When Barry was ten, his
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father brought him to work one Saturday morning. The boy
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asked what he could do to help while his father
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worked in his office. So Herbert sat him down at
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a table with a pile of zippers and told him
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to count them into boxes of 20. Barry later wrote,
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When his father came back, he seemed surprised by how
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many boxes the boy had filled. Apparently more than any
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of his paid staff could have done in the same
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amount of time. Then Herbert picked a few boxes at
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random and checked the counts. Barry wrote, I was extremely
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offended that he doubted that my counts would be accurate.
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That's one of the only clear memories that Barry had
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of his father, because just a few weeks later, on Monday,
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November 17th, 1916, Herbert Sherman went to work and never
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came home. He had a massive heart attack at his
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office and died instantly. The family learned afterward that he
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had had a congenital heart defect and had never told
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his wife. Perhaps, as his son later guessed, because he
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did not believe the prognosis and did not want to
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burden her with worry. His son's verdict, written 44 years later, was, obviously,
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he should have told her. He was quick to add
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a line later that he was sure his father was
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a loving parent, as was my mother. Herbert Sherman's share
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of the zipper business sold for very little, so Sarah
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Sherman went back to work as an occupational therapist to
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support her two children. and she began renting out rooms
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in the house to boarders. One upstairs, one downstairs. The
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family's summer cottage near Barry, north of the city, was
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sold the following spring, and from then on, Barry was
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sent off to summer camp every year. He hated it.
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He wrote, I felt imprisoned rather than on vacation. Barry
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did not think that his father's death affected him much.
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He wrote that he did not recall feeling any great
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sense of loss. and that's about his father dying when
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he was 10 years old. But a few weeks after
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the funeral, a teacher was scolding him for daydreaming in class,
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and his homeroom teacher happened to walk in and defended him,
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explaining that he had suffered a recent family tragedy. The
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boy was surprised that the teacher even knew, and later
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in life, looking back, he allowed himself a rare moment
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of self-analysis. A psychologist, he wrote, would likely suggest that
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the drive to achieve what I later exhibited was caused,
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at least in part, by a resulting insecurity. At school,
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Barry had nicknames. And when he was nine, the year
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before his father died, his grade five teacher started calling
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him Grandpa because he always seemed tired. That fatigue never
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really went away. In 1996, at age 54, he wrote
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that he had been continuously aware of chronic lethargy and
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fatigue for his entire life, which has made it all
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the more difficult for me to fulfill that drive to achieve.
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By the time he got to Forest Hill Collegiate Institute,
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his new nickname was Butterball. After all, he was a round,
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doughy kid in black-framed glasses, with few friends, and his
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teachers regularly described him as sluggish. He struggled with insomnia
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his entire life. According to the people who knew him best,
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it was because his mind never shut off. He would
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lie in bed for hours just thinking. When sleep finally came,
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it came hard. And in the mornings, he could barely
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drag himself to school. He didn't play sports. He didn't
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have a girlfriend. He had a regular gig babysitting a
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neighbor's kid, and when he got the chance, he watched
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westerns on TV. But for most of high school, Barry
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was a pretty middling student. Then, in his senior year,
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two things happened. According to Kevin Donovan, who interviewed dozens
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of Sherman's friends and associates for his 2019 book, The
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Billionaire Murders, the first thing was that Barry developed a
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conviction that would stay with him for the rest of
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his life. That he was right about everything. The second
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thing was that he met Joel Ulster in the 1950s.
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The Toronto Daily Star ran a recurring contest in which
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readers could solve a series of brain teasers and mail
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in their answers. Barry, once he saw it, was convinced
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that he and his new friend, Joel, could win. The
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two teenagers clipped out the puzzles, worked through them together,
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and mailed in their answers to the old star building
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on King Street. They made it all the way to
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the tiebreaker, which they lost. But Barry was convinced they
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had actually won. From that point on, the two were inseparable.
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and Joel Ulster saw something in his friend that nobody
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else did. He later told Kevin Donovan, Barry was smart,
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really smart. Nobody else saw it at the time, but
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I did. He was the smartest person I ever met
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in my life. Barry and Kevin bonded over a shared
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belief that there was no God, which in a community
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built so firmly around the synagogue was not a popular position.
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The first chapter of Barry's memoir, titled The Meaning of Life,
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literally opens up with his thoughts on the matter. From
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my earliest years, I have been an atheist. He found
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it incomprehensible, he wrote, that people, including some of apparent intelligence,
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believed in what he called seemingly preposterous mythologies. He laid
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out his worldview as a numbered list of what he
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called self-evident truths. This included the truth that there was
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no God, that the universe exists, that we are here
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because of evolution, that physics governs everything. that free will
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is an illusion. And then there's the last one, life
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has no meaning or purpose. It's a pretty bleak list,
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I'll give you that. But in the very next chapter,
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he tried to explain why he did not find it
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bleak at all. He wrote, I find no inconsistency in
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holding intellectually that life has no meaning, while at the
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same time being highly motivated to survive and to achieve.
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For the rest of his life, if someone said thank
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God in Barry's presence, he was liable to interrupt and
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correct them. Man, he would have loved being a Reddit moderator. Anyways,
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Barry spent a lot of time at the Ulster house,
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which was calmer than his own, where the boarders were
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coming and going. Joel Ulster's father, Ben, owned several movie
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theaters around Toronto, and he took an immediate liking to
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his son's odd, yet brilliant friend. According to Joel, his
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00:15:42.279 --> 00:15:45.500
father used to say, He, as in Barry, will win
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00:15:45.559 --> 00:15:48.000
the Nobel Peace Prize one day, and I'm going to
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fly all of us over there to see him accept it.
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When Joel did not want to go on a family
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ski trip, his parents paid for Barry to come along
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00:15:56.330 --> 00:15:59.809
and keep him company. The loyalty ran both ways, and
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00:15:59.870 --> 00:16:04.190
sometimes it ran in slightly unethical directions. In their final
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00:16:04.230 --> 00:16:06.980
year of high school, Joel had a failing grade in
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00:16:07.009 --> 00:16:10.509
gym class, which would have kept him from graduating. Barry
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00:16:10.610 --> 00:16:13.590
found his teacher's gradebook when nobody was around and gave
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00:16:13.629 --> 00:16:16.710
his friend a passing mark. In Ontario at the time,
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00:16:17.070 --> 00:16:20.840
students in their final year wrote a battery of provincial exams,
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00:16:21.340 --> 00:16:25.460
and any mark above 75 counted as a first. That year,
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00:16:25.779 --> 00:16:29.139
Barry also won first place in a national physics contest
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00:16:29.200 --> 00:16:32.220
for high school students. When the exam results came out
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00:16:32.259 --> 00:16:36.080
in the summer of 1960, Joel was traveling over in Europe,
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and his father sent him a telegram with his marks.
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00:16:39.240 --> 00:16:42.000
It opened before getting to Joel's own grades with news
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00:16:42.039 --> 00:16:44.669
about his friend. Joel recalled, On August 23rd, 1960, the
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00:16:44.690 --> 00:16:47.269
Toronto Daily Star ran with the headline, Barry, for what
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00:16:47.289 --> 00:16:48.769
it's worth, remembered it as 13. And in his memoir,
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00:16:49.009 --> 00:17:07.950
he downplayed it. His marks, he pointed out, weren't necessarily
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the highest in the province, so that the number of
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00:17:10.670 --> 00:17:13.839
firsts may have been more an indication of motivation rather
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00:17:13.880 --> 00:17:18.000
than of intelligence. Either way, the kid that was once
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00:17:18.059 --> 00:17:24.519
called Butterball had topped the province. Before that, Barry had
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00:17:24.599 --> 00:17:28.779
spent a couple of summers doing odd jobs. At 16
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00:17:28.779 --> 00:17:31.640
in 1958, for lack of anything better, he joined a
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student militia with the Royal Canadian Artillery. He hated the
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00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:39.099
physical drills, but what he remembered most were his sessions
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00:17:39.160 --> 00:17:43.339
with the regiment's chaplain, who preached Christianity. Barry, as he
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00:17:43.380 --> 00:17:47.859
put it, engaged him, persistently in aggressive and disrespectful debate,
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00:17:48.309 --> 00:17:52.670
much to the amazement of my fellow recruits. The following summer,
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00:17:52.769 --> 00:17:56.490
he worked for the Ontario government, in his words, processing
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00:17:56.690 --> 00:17:59.849
useless information in an obscure office in the basement of
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00:17:59.930 --> 00:18:04.920
Queen's Park. Then, in the summer of 1960, 18-year-old Barry
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00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:08.720
Sherman went to go work for his uncle. Louis Winter,
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00:18:09.099 --> 00:18:13.519
known to everyone as Lou, was Barry's mother's younger brother.
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00:18:14.079 --> 00:18:18.140
He was 36 years old, energetic, and prone to going
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00:18:18.240 --> 00:18:20.440
red in the face when an employee did something that
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00:18:20.480 --> 00:18:24.180
he did not like. Lou had a degree in biochemistry
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00:18:24.440 --> 00:18:27.569
and was running two businesses out of Toronto's West End.
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00:18:28.319 --> 00:18:32.119
One was Winter Laboratories, a medical testing lab on Barton
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00:18:32.160 --> 00:18:36.680
Street that mostly processed pregnancy tests. This was years before
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00:18:36.809 --> 00:18:40.450
home pregnancy tests existed, so women would drop off urine
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00:18:40.470 --> 00:18:43.430
samples at their local pharmacy and the lab would collect them.
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The other business, a newer one, was called Empire Laboratories.
285
00:18:48.410 --> 00:18:51.470
It operated out of a converted house on Ossington Avenue,
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00:18:51.950 --> 00:18:55.450
repackaging tablets and capsules that Lou bought in bulk from
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00:18:55.509 --> 00:19:01.450
American manufacturers. Empire made generic drugs. A generic drug is
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00:19:01.509 --> 00:19:04.730
a copy of a brand-name drug, containing the same active
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00:19:04.769 --> 00:19:08.019
ingredient which is typically sold at a fraction of the price.
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00:19:08.599 --> 00:19:11.559
The company that invents a drug, which today we would
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00:19:11.599 --> 00:19:15.640
call Big Pharma, spends years and enormous sums of money
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00:19:15.720 --> 00:19:19.900
on research and clinical trials. A generic company comes along
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00:19:20.009 --> 00:19:23.730
afterward and makes its own version. The legal and ethical
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00:19:23.839 --> 00:19:26.960
questions around that arrangement would define the better part of
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00:19:27.000 --> 00:19:31.240
Barry Sherman's life. But in 1960, the industry was still
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00:19:31.319 --> 00:19:35.819
in its infancy. Blue Winter gave his nephew a hybrid
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00:19:35.900 --> 00:19:39.369
summer job. Barry drove around the city picking up urine
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00:19:39.400 --> 00:19:44.230
samples from pharmacies for the lab, and delivering Empire Laboratories-packaged
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00:19:44.490 --> 00:19:48.430
generic drugs to many of those same pharmacies. Lou's temper
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00:19:48.549 --> 00:19:51.359
did not bother him. In fact, the two got along
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00:19:51.430 --> 00:19:55.200
pretty well. Barry had lost his father nearly a decade prior,
302
00:19:55.579 --> 00:19:59.000
and while Lou was never necessarily a father figure, he
303
00:19:59.039 --> 00:20:02.339
was definitely someone that Barry looked up to. At that time,
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00:20:02.720 --> 00:20:05.259
Lou and his wife Beverly were starting a family of
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00:20:05.299 --> 00:20:08.380
their own. They had just recently adopted a baby boy
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00:20:08.460 --> 00:20:12.960
named Tim, and soon afterward, Beverly became pregnant. Three more
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00:20:13.019 --> 00:20:17.259
boys arrived, one a year. There was Jeffrey in 1960,
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00:20:17.259 --> 00:20:22.460
Carrie in 1961, and Dana in 1962. The Winters were
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00:20:22.500 --> 00:20:26.140
doing pretty well. They had a stone house on the Kingsway,
310
00:20:26.380 --> 00:20:30.029
one of Toronto's wealthiest streets, along with a Rolls Royce
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00:20:30.230 --> 00:20:33.569
and a small yacht. That fall, Barry enrolled at the
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00:20:33.670 --> 00:20:37.920
University of Toronto. His best friend Joel Ulster did too.
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00:20:38.500 --> 00:20:46.440
Berry chose engineering physics because, as he wrote in his memoir,
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00:20:47.059 --> 00:20:52.480
it was The university published every student's average each year,
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00:20:52.759 --> 00:20:56.470
and among everyone in the entire faculty of engineering, Berry
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00:20:56.589 --> 00:20:59.849
ranked fourth in his first year. He was third in
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00:20:59.890 --> 00:21:03.690
his second, and second in his third. In his final year,
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00:21:03.829 --> 00:21:07.980
he finished first. winning both the Wilson Medal for Engineering
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00:21:08.049 --> 00:21:11.210
Physics and the Gold Medal of the Association of Professional
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00:21:11.289 --> 00:21:16.029
Engineers for standing first in the whole faculty. He wrote,
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00:21:16.190 --> 00:21:22.660
At the time, Barry told his friends that his long-term
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00:21:22.700 --> 00:21:25.799
goal was to go work for NASA, and for a moment,
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00:21:26.000 --> 00:21:29.619
it looked like he might. In 1963, during his third year,
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00:21:30.059 --> 00:21:33.000
he was one of two Canadian students selected for a
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00:21:33.099 --> 00:21:37.619
NASA summer program for promising undergraduates. He spent several weeks
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00:21:37.660 --> 00:21:41.470
taking classes at Columbia University in New York, followed by
327
00:21:41.569 --> 00:21:45.430
a tour of NASA installations across the United States, including
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00:21:45.490 --> 00:21:53.980
the launch facility at Cape Canaveral. The year prior, 1962,
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00:21:53.980 --> 00:21:58.450
Beverly Winter was diagnosed with leukemia. After her first round
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00:21:58.490 --> 00:22:01.910
of treatment, she and her husband Lou flew to Bermuda
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00:22:01.950 --> 00:22:04.569
for a few weeks of rest, leaving their four boys
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00:22:04.650 --> 00:22:08.390
at home, two of them still in diapers. That same year,
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00:22:08.789 --> 00:22:12.900
Lou had opened up Empire's first real manufacturing plant at
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00:22:12.900 --> 00:22:16.819
77 Florence Street, and Barry spent the summer helping to
335
00:22:16.859 --> 00:22:20.390
set it up. While Lou was away on vacation, something
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00:22:20.430 --> 00:22:23.410
happened that Barry would remember fondly for the rest of
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00:22:23.450 --> 00:22:27.430
his life. According to Barry, Lou had left nobody in
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00:22:27.509 --> 00:22:30.970
particular in charge, and he could not be reached by telephone.
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00:22:31.519 --> 00:22:34.640
Just before he left, Empire had landed a contract to
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00:22:34.700 --> 00:22:38.839
make Generic Aspirin, or ASA, under the private label of
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00:22:38.900 --> 00:22:42.279
a new department store chain called Towers. A few days
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00:22:42.339 --> 00:22:46.619
into Lou's vacation, Towers called. The cheaper pills were flying
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00:22:46.660 --> 00:22:49.569
off the shelves and they needed a lot more. So,
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00:22:49.589 --> 00:22:53.549
20-year-old Barry took it upon himself to call Empire's supplier
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00:22:53.650 --> 00:22:59.089
of bulk ASA, and he negotiated a substantially increased quantity
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00:22:59.210 --> 00:23:05.059
at a substantially lowered price. Then, he organized around-the-clock production
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00:23:05.140 --> 00:23:08.559
to fill the orders. He wrote, Uncle Lou was very
348
00:23:08.660 --> 00:23:11.019
pleased with what I had done. Although I did not
349
00:23:11.099 --> 00:23:14.059
know it at the time, these summers at Empire Laboratories
350
00:23:14.099 --> 00:23:16.500
would later prove to be of critical importance to my
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00:23:16.559 --> 00:23:22.099
future career. Lou and Beverly Winters came home refreshed. Beverly's
352
00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:25.819
leukemia was in remission. There are family photos from the
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00:23:25.859 --> 00:23:28.400
next few years of the four little winter boys in
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00:23:28.480 --> 00:23:32.180
matching velour jackets, sitting on a dock in cottage country,
355
00:23:32.519 --> 00:23:37.089
or snuggled up against their mother on a beach. In 1964,
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00:23:37.089 --> 00:23:39.930
Barry graduated from U of T, and he spent the
357
00:23:39.990 --> 00:23:43.849
summer at the Spar Aerospace Division of De Havilland Aircraft,
358
00:23:44.170 --> 00:23:49.130
analyzing the vibrational dynamics of a Canadian research satellite called ISIS,
359
00:23:49.430 --> 00:23:53.119
which was then being designed. That September, on a fellowship
360
00:23:53.160 --> 00:23:56.240
that covered his tuition and living costs, he moved to
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00:23:56.279 --> 00:24:00.359
Boston to begin graduate studies in aeronautics and astronautics at
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00:24:00.400 --> 00:24:04.609
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had expected MIT to
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00:24:04.650 --> 00:24:08.269
be much harder than U of T, with much tougher competition.
364
00:24:08.769 --> 00:24:12.230
But he wrote, I was surprised to find otherwise. When
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00:24:12.250 --> 00:24:15.269
he returned to Boston for his second year at MIT,
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00:24:15.630 --> 00:24:18.799
he knew that his Aunt Beverly's leukemia had come back.
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00:24:19.339 --> 00:24:22.559
She was being treated at St. Joseph's Hospital in Toronto,
368
00:24:22.799 --> 00:24:25.140
and it did not look good. In the first week
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00:24:25.180 --> 00:24:27.680
of November, his phone rang in the middle of the night.
370
00:24:28.240 --> 00:24:31.039
He assumed it was news that Aunt Beverly had died.
371
00:24:31.559 --> 00:24:35.579
but it was his sister Sandy. She said, it's Uncle Lou.
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00:24:36.599 --> 00:24:41.069
Barry was, in his words, astounded. On the afternoon of
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00:24:41.150 --> 00:24:45.230
November 5th, 1965, Lou Winter had been working at the
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00:24:45.349 --> 00:24:49.769
Empire Laboratory offices when he suddenly collapsed. An aneurysm had
375
00:24:49.849 --> 00:24:53.329
burst in his brain. He was rushed to St. Joseph's,
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00:24:53.650 --> 00:24:56.750
the same hospital where his wife was dying, and he
377
00:24:56.809 --> 00:25:01.269
died shortly after he arrived. He was 41 years old
378
00:25:01.329 --> 00:25:04.890
at the time. Barry flew home for the funeral. He
379
00:25:04.930 --> 00:25:07.670
still did not believe in God, but he understood what
380
00:25:07.710 --> 00:25:11.569
a funeral meant to family. Afterward, he went back to Boston.
381
00:25:12.089 --> 00:25:16.130
Just 17 days after Lou Winter died, Beverly Winter died
382
00:25:16.190 --> 00:25:19.869
as well. Barry flew home again for a second funeral.
383
00:25:20.589 --> 00:25:25.410
His nephews, Tim, Jeffrey, Carrie, and Dana Winter, were 7, 5, 4,
384
00:25:25.410 --> 00:25:30.140
and 3 years old. and they were all now orphans.
385
00:25:30.720 --> 00:25:34.460
The obvious question was who would raise them. According to
386
00:25:34.920 --> 00:25:39.130
a 2008 Toronto Life article, Beverly had converted to Judaism
387
00:25:39.190 --> 00:25:41.710
when she married Lou Winter, and she did not want
388
00:25:41.750 --> 00:25:45.829
her own family raising the boys. She wanted them raised Jewish.
389
00:25:46.410 --> 00:25:48.690
Kerry Winter would later say that his mother on her
390
00:25:48.750 --> 00:25:51.700
deathbed added to her will stating that she did not
391
00:25:51.779 --> 00:25:54.740
want relatives from either side of the family adopting them.
392
00:25:55.319 --> 00:25:57.859
there doesn't seem to have been any discussion about whether
393
00:25:57.960 --> 00:26:01.359
Barry or Sandy, both in their early 20s, might take
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00:26:01.400 --> 00:26:05.460
the boys. In testimony decades later, Barry was pretty blunt
395
00:26:05.519 --> 00:26:13.539
about his own opinion. He said, A Toronto couple named Dr.
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00:26:13.660 --> 00:26:16.660
Martin Barkin and his wife Carol took the four winter
397
00:26:16.700 --> 00:26:20.240
boys in, and eventually adopted them. Martin Barkin was a
398
00:26:20.329 --> 00:26:24.589
well-known urologist who would later become Ontario's Deputy Minister of Health.
399
00:26:25.210 --> 00:26:29.750
Beverly's rabbi had helped find them. The boys' inheritance, including
400
00:26:29.789 --> 00:26:32.890
their father's businesses, was left in the hands of the
401
00:26:32.990 --> 00:26:37.339
estate's executors, the Royal Trust Company, along with two lawyers
402
00:26:37.420 --> 00:26:41.619
named David Ward and Martin O'Brien. Barry had no interest
403
00:26:41.680 --> 00:26:44.680
in becoming a father at 23 years old, but he
404
00:26:44.819 --> 00:26:49.200
did have an interest in Empire Laboratories. Three days after
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00:26:49.349 --> 00:26:53.019
Beverly died, he wrote a letter to Royal Trust, He
406
00:26:53.079 --> 00:26:56.819
proposed buying all of his late uncle's business assets. He
407
00:26:56.880 --> 00:26:58.559
said that he would put his studies on hold and
408
00:26:58.599 --> 00:27:02.099
take over as general manager immediately, and that he was,
409
00:27:02.319 --> 00:27:05.490
in his words, anxious to protect the value of said
410
00:27:05.630 --> 00:27:07.910
assets for the benefit of the children of Lewis and
411
00:27:07.970 --> 00:27:13.029
Beverly Winter. He gave Royal Trust 24 hours to consider
412
00:27:13.069 --> 00:27:17.650
his offer. Royal Trust said no, so Barry went back
413
00:27:17.730 --> 00:27:21.269
to MIT. And in a little over two years, he
414
00:27:21.349 --> 00:27:25.150
earned both a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and
415
00:27:25.269 --> 00:27:30.349
in January of 1967, a PhD in systems engineering, with
416
00:27:30.390 --> 00:27:33.849
what he would later describe as a perfect 5.0 grade
417
00:27:33.890 --> 00:27:38.549
point average. My dumbass didn't even know 5.0 existed. His
418
00:27:38.670 --> 00:27:43.369
doctoral thesis was about controlling the orientation of satellites using gravity,
419
00:27:43.670 --> 00:27:46.299
and he eventually received a US patent for the work.
420
00:27:46.920 --> 00:27:50.140
Years later, whenever his lawyer walked him through his credentials
421
00:27:50.200 --> 00:27:52.539
in court, Berry would pause at the end and say
422
00:27:52.559 --> 00:27:54.779
to the judge, I guess you could say I am
423
00:27:54.819 --> 00:27:58.579
a rocket scientist. But then, to the surprise of just
424
00:27:58.640 --> 00:28:02.660
about everyone who knew him, he walked away from rockets entirely.
425
00:28:02.680 --> 00:28:05.740
He wrote, I had decided that I did not want
426
00:28:05.809 --> 00:28:09.769
to seek employment as an astronautical engineer. I was interested
427
00:28:09.829 --> 00:28:12.490
in both science and business and I also wanted to
428
00:28:12.549 --> 00:28:16.680
return to Toronto to live. There was another reason, and
429
00:28:16.700 --> 00:28:19.839
he had spelled it out while describing that miserable summer
430
00:28:19.940 --> 00:28:22.960
in the militia. He wrote, Barry Sherman was not going
431
00:28:22.980 --> 00:28:25.269
to work for anybody. He was going to be his
432
00:28:25.289 --> 00:28:56.579
own boss. In January of 1967, with his doctorate now
433
00:28:56.630 --> 00:28:59.980
in hand, Barry Sherman came home to Toronto looking for,
434
00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:03.380
as he put it, an opportunity in a scientific business.
435
00:29:04.119 --> 00:29:07.039
He called his friend Joel Ulster, who had by then
436
00:29:07.099 --> 00:29:09.579
given up on law school and was training as a
437
00:29:09.680 --> 00:29:13.440
chartered accountant. Joel was married to a nurse named Cindy,
438
00:29:13.720 --> 00:29:15.920
and they already had three young kids with a fourth
439
00:29:15.960 --> 00:29:19.089
on the way. Back in high school, Barry and Joel
440
00:29:19.130 --> 00:29:23.140
had fantasized about running a business together, even inventing company
441
00:29:23.180 --> 00:29:27.180
names out of the first letters of their names. Joba Enterprises.
442
00:29:27.799 --> 00:29:31.980
Bajo Limited. Now they had an understanding. If Barry could
443
00:29:32.019 --> 00:29:34.279
find the right company and the money to buy it,
444
00:29:34.589 --> 00:29:38.089
Joel would quit accounting and join him. The obvious target
445
00:29:38.269 --> 00:29:43.400
was Empire Laboratories. Barry phoned Royal Trust again. They told
446
00:29:43.460 --> 00:29:46.400
him that they weren't interested in selling yet. So he
447
00:29:46.460 --> 00:29:49.690
went to Empire, which had since moved into a five-story
448
00:29:49.710 --> 00:29:53.869
building at 301 Lansdowne Avenue, and started talking to the staff.
449
00:29:54.450 --> 00:29:57.859
What he heard by his account was grim. Royal Trust
450
00:29:57.900 --> 00:30:01.940
had installed a University of Toronto chemistry professor named George
451
00:30:02.019 --> 00:30:05.819
Wright as part-time president. The staff, Barry wrote, considered him
452
00:30:05.900 --> 00:30:09.660
incompetent to run a business. Sales had fallen from over
453
00:30:09.720 --> 00:30:15.279
a million dollars a year when Lou died to about $ 800, 000,
454
00:30:13.240 --> 00:30:16.500
and the company was on track to go insolvent. In
455
00:30:16.539 --> 00:30:20.000
a deposition decades later, Barry said that Wright's plan to
456
00:30:20.059 --> 00:30:23.180
save the company was to make oral contraceptives for sale
457
00:30:23.259 --> 00:30:27.380
in India. He described this as a completely off-the-wall idea
458
00:30:27.420 --> 00:30:31.220
that made no sense whatsoever. So Barry picked up the
459
00:30:31.259 --> 00:30:35.279
phone again, this time to the two lawyers serving as executors,
460
00:30:35.720 --> 00:30:39.369
David Ward and Martin O'Brien. In his memoir, he describes
461
00:30:39.430 --> 00:30:42.049
telling them that Royal Trust might be more interested in
462
00:30:42.109 --> 00:30:45.630
collecting fees for managing Empire than in making a prudent sale.
463
00:30:46.170 --> 00:30:48.970
And then he made a pointed observation, that if the
464
00:30:49.019 --> 00:30:53.349
company went insolvent, Lou's children might someday hold them liable
465
00:30:53.390 --> 00:30:58.819
for negligence as executors and trustees. Within days, Royal Trust
466
00:30:58.880 --> 00:31:02.380
called back. They were now ready to talk. Now, this
467
00:31:02.460 --> 00:31:06.480
version of events comes with an asterisk. Literally. The copy
468
00:31:06.519 --> 00:31:09.339
of the memoir that was filed in court, and later
469
00:31:09.380 --> 00:31:12.880
published by the Globe and Mail, has handwritten notes scrawled
470
00:31:12.920 --> 00:31:15.839
in the margins by someone who clearly disagreed with Barry's
471
00:31:15.940 --> 00:31:20.299
telling of events. Next to Barry's description of Empire's collapsing sales,
472
00:31:20.579 --> 00:31:24.099
someone wrote in capital letters, Not true. The same words
473
00:31:24.140 --> 00:31:27.789
appear again beside his account of firing George Wright, and
474
00:31:27.880 --> 00:31:30.769
beside a story about the old management selling products at
475
00:31:30.829 --> 00:31:34.349
suspiciously low prices to a competitor. We don't know who
476
00:31:34.390 --> 00:31:37.029
wrote these notes, but we do know that the Winter
477
00:31:37.089 --> 00:31:40.930
brothers would later dispute this picture in court. Empire's old
478
00:31:41.029 --> 00:31:44.680
sales manager, James Church, swore an affidavit on their behalf
479
00:31:44.740 --> 00:31:47.559
saying that he had never been aware of any financial troubles.
480
00:31:48.160 --> 00:31:50.640
So keep in mind as we go that Barry's version
481
00:31:50.680 --> 00:31:55.319
of these events is exactly that. His version. Meanwhile, word
482
00:31:55.359 --> 00:31:58.119
got around that two young men were trying to buy
483
00:31:58.279 --> 00:32:02.109
Empire Laboratories, and some of the industry's veterans tried to
484
00:32:02.140 --> 00:32:05.150
talk them out of it. A man named Jules Gilbert,
485
00:32:05.369 --> 00:32:07.950
whom Barry described as one of the fathers, if not
486
00:32:08.170 --> 00:32:12.369
the father, of Canada's generic drug industry. He invited Barry
487
00:32:12.390 --> 00:32:14.970
to his factory and warned him that buying Empire would
488
00:32:14.990 --> 00:32:18.460
be a great mistake. Gilbert had a secret plan, he said,
489
00:32:18.680 --> 00:32:22.099
that would put Empire Laboratories out of business within months,
490
00:32:22.440 --> 00:32:25.740
and he suggested that Barry invest in his company instead.
491
00:32:26.200 --> 00:32:28.789
Gilbert told him as Barry recalled it, Barry heard the
492
00:32:28.809 --> 00:32:37.900
plan out and decided it was impractical. A few days later,
493
00:32:38.200 --> 00:32:41.339
another industry veteran took Barry and Joel out to lunch
494
00:32:41.420 --> 00:32:44.000
to tell them that the generic business was a cutthroat
495
00:32:44.059 --> 00:32:47.009
commodity game, that he was glad to be out of it,
496
00:32:47.480 --> 00:32:50.329
and that if they bought Empire, they would inevitably fail
497
00:32:50.470 --> 00:32:54.289
and lose their investment. They decided to go ahead anyway,
498
00:32:54.750 --> 00:32:59.930
as Barry put it, although not without substantial trepidation. According
499
00:33:00.029 --> 00:33:03.849
to court records cited by author Kevin Donovan, Barry's offer
500
00:33:03.920 --> 00:33:07.150
came with what a senior Ontario judge would describe 50
501
00:33:07.150 --> 00:33:10.630
years later as a sweetener. It was a short document
502
00:33:10.710 --> 00:33:13.730
known as the Option Agreement. It said that if the
503
00:33:13.809 --> 00:33:16.690
four Winter Boys wanted to, they could come work at
504
00:33:16.769 --> 00:33:20.170
Empire Labs when they turned 21. And after two years
505
00:33:20.210 --> 00:33:22.529
of employment, each of them would have the option to
506
00:33:22.569 --> 00:33:26.359
buy 5% of the company's shares. There was a catch, though.
507
00:33:26.970 --> 00:33:29.980
The option only applied as long as Barry and Joel
508
00:33:30.119 --> 00:33:35.279
still owned Empire. If they sold it, the option went away. Intriguingly,
509
00:33:35.579 --> 00:33:39.630
in the 40-some pages of his memoir, Barry never mentions that.
510
00:33:40.430 --> 00:33:43.690
When it came to the sale, Royal Trust took its time.
511
00:33:44.250 --> 00:33:46.990
Barry wrote that it kept putting them off day after day,
512
00:33:47.269 --> 00:33:50.069
even though there was no other buyer in sight. So
513
00:33:50.109 --> 00:33:52.549
he called the executors one more time and gave them
514
00:33:52.569 --> 00:33:55.769
an ultimatum. Accept the offer within two days or it
515
00:33:55.849 --> 00:34:00.200
would be withdrawn. Within those two days, Royal Trust said yes.
516
00:34:00.769 --> 00:34:04.549
According to author Kevin Donovan, the purchase price for Empire
517
00:34:04.609 --> 00:34:06.950
Laboratories was about $ 450, 000. Barry and Joel would take on
518
00:34:06.970 --> 00:34:09.070
about $ 200, 000 of Empire's debts and pay roughly $ 250, 000 in cash. Now,
519
00:34:09.099 --> 00:34:10.639
they did not have $ 250, 000, of course. They were in
520
00:34:10.659 --> 00:34:19.340
their mid-twenties. Barry's mother, Sarah, had investments worth about $ 100, 000.
521
00:34:26.420 --> 00:34:28.960
and she put up every dollar of it as security
522
00:34:29.039 --> 00:34:31.460
so the Bank of Montreal would lend her son the money.
523
00:34:31.980 --> 00:34:35.579
Barry later wrote, Joel's father, Ben, put up the remaining $ 150, 000
524
00:34:35.480 --> 00:34:37.500
and arranged a line of credit. In the late summer
525
00:34:37.719 --> 00:34:41.010
of 1967, the deal closed. Barry Sherman and Joel Ulster
526
00:34:41.030 --> 00:34:58.030
now owned Empire Laboratories. According to author Kevin Donovan, the
527
00:34:58.070 --> 00:35:00.190
two young men looked around at the four walls of
528
00:35:00.230 --> 00:35:03.710
their new business, and Barry's eyes went wide behind his glasses.
529
00:35:04.329 --> 00:35:07.489
He said, we're going to be millionaires. The next day,
530
00:35:07.730 --> 00:35:10.929
after combing through the company's documents and its product line,
531
00:35:11.190 --> 00:35:13.590
he sat back in his chair and looked across at Joel.
532
00:35:14.110 --> 00:35:17.559
This time, his calculation was different. We're going to be bankrupt.
533
00:35:20.139 --> 00:35:24.420
The new young business partners incorporated a company called Sherman
534
00:35:24.489 --> 00:35:28.269
& Ulster Ltd. and Empire Laboratories became a division of it.
535
00:35:28.769 --> 00:35:32.670
Barry was president, and Joel was vice president. Barry would
536
00:35:32.710 --> 00:35:37.280
handle production, quality control, and product development, and Joel would
537
00:35:37.320 --> 00:35:42.119
handle sales, accounting, staff, and administration. According to Barry, the
538
00:35:42.159 --> 00:35:44.960
very day they took control, they let George Wright go.
539
00:35:45.519 --> 00:35:49.079
There was one small problem, though. By his own admission,
540
00:35:49.380 --> 00:35:52.960
Barry knew virtually nothing about how to formulate a tablet
541
00:35:53.079 --> 00:35:56.679
or a capsule. He had a doctorate in satellite dynamics.
542
00:35:57.280 --> 00:36:01.059
So their first crisis was vitamin C. Empire made a
543
00:36:01.159 --> 00:36:05.039
simple line of ascorbic acid tablets, and customers kept returning
544
00:36:05.079 --> 00:36:08.219
them because the pills were crumbling in the bottle. Barry
545
00:36:08.239 --> 00:36:10.550
went up to the third floor to ask the production
546
00:36:10.590 --> 00:36:13.610
manager about it. The production manager told him there was
547
00:36:13.690 --> 00:36:16.849
nothing wrong with the tablets, that he formulated them himself,
548
00:36:16.929 --> 00:36:19.570
and that every product formulated by him was the best
549
00:36:19.710 --> 00:36:23.010
that could be made. So, Barry walked down to the
550
00:36:23.090 --> 00:36:27.090
second floor and asked the packaging supervisor, who told him that, yes,
551
00:36:27.230 --> 00:36:30.639
there was still a big problem. Barry got samples of
552
00:36:30.760 --> 00:36:34.980
other companies' vitamin C tablets and compared them. Empire's broke
553
00:36:35.300 --> 00:36:38.760
far more easily. In his memoir, he concluded that the
554
00:36:38.840 --> 00:36:42.469
production manager was both incompetent and arrogant, which is a
555
00:36:42.570 --> 00:36:46.139
potent combination. A few days later, the man came to
556
00:36:46.179 --> 00:36:49.719
Barry saying he'd been offered a vice president's job elsewhere
557
00:36:49.840 --> 00:36:52.659
and would resign unless Empire made him a vice president
558
00:36:52.679 --> 00:36:56.179
with a big raise. Barry accepted his resignation on the
559
00:36:56.239 --> 00:36:59.449
spot and asked him to leave that day. In his place,
560
00:36:59.619 --> 00:37:03.949
Barry promoted a young Australian production supervisor named Chris Retchford,
561
00:37:04.190 --> 00:37:07.449
who had studied two years of pharmacy back home. Barry
562
00:37:07.489 --> 00:37:10.610
admitted that neither of them knew what the eight inactive
563
00:37:10.650 --> 00:37:14.789
ingredients in the vitamin C formula actually did. So Barry
564
00:37:14.829 --> 00:37:18.050
did what an engineer does. He had Ratchford run a
565
00:37:18.150 --> 00:37:22.010
series of small trials, pressing tablets over and over, leaving
566
00:37:22.070 --> 00:37:24.889
out one ingredient at a time. It turned out that
567
00:37:24.969 --> 00:37:28.150
leaving out any of them except two made a better tablet.
568
00:37:28.590 --> 00:37:31.289
Within hours, they had a hard, stable pill made of
569
00:37:31.349 --> 00:37:37.550
just three things. Vitamin C, microcrystalline cellulose, and magnesium stearate.
570
00:37:38.030 --> 00:37:40.329
It was better, and it was now cheaper to make.
571
00:37:40.849 --> 00:37:43.679
Barry wrote, Barry loved it. Everyone who knew him agrees
572
00:37:43.900 --> 00:37:45.780
on this point. Barry Sherman loved to work. He would
573
00:37:45.800 --> 00:37:47.599
work at Empire deep into the night, and he would
574
00:37:47.619 --> 00:38:08.409
keep working that way for the next 50 years. The
575
00:38:08.449 --> 00:38:11.289
rules of the game were also changing in Empire's favor
576
00:38:11.329 --> 00:38:14.960
as well. Under a section of Canada's Patent Act, a
577
00:38:15.039 --> 00:38:18.099
company could apply for what was called a compulsory license
578
00:38:18.219 --> 00:38:21.280
to make a patented drug, in exchange for paying the
579
00:38:21.400 --> 00:38:24.940
patent holder a royalty. Barry and Joel struck a deal
580
00:38:24.980 --> 00:38:28.380
with a small Ontario chemical company that held licenses for
581
00:38:28.460 --> 00:38:33.139
two patented drugs. The tranquilizer sold as Librium, and the
582
00:38:33.260 --> 00:38:37.469
antipsychotic sold as Stelazine. And within a few months, Empire
583
00:38:37.530 --> 00:38:41.590
was selling its own generic versions. The company became profitable.
584
00:38:42.320 --> 00:38:47.659
In 1968, Ontario began allowing pharmacists to substitute approved generic
585
00:38:47.699 --> 00:38:51.599
drugs for brand names. In the following year, Pierre Trudeau's
586
00:38:51.739 --> 00:38:56.550
federal government expanded compulsory licensing to cover imported drugs. Barry
587
00:38:56.590 --> 00:39:00.010
and Joel immediately set up a subsidiary and started applying
588
00:39:00.050 --> 00:39:04.670
for licenses. In 1970... Empire became the first company in
589
00:39:04.710 --> 00:39:09.610
Canada to launch generic ampicillin, a widely used antibiotic. And
590
00:39:09.630 --> 00:39:12.969
that's when Barry discovered his second great tool. A few
591
00:39:12.989 --> 00:39:16.030
months after the launch, by Barry's account, an inspector from
592
00:39:16.070 --> 00:39:19.329
the Federal Food and Drug Directorate came by. One of
593
00:39:19.369 --> 00:39:23.630
the brand name manufacturers had bought Empire's ampicillin, tested it,
594
00:39:23.739 --> 00:39:26.820
and found one batch to be below the required potency.
595
00:39:27.400 --> 00:39:30.280
Empire retested it and found it was fine. But the
596
00:39:30.320 --> 00:39:34.360
inspectors suggested they recall the batch anyway, given how politically
597
00:39:34.460 --> 00:39:37.929
sensitive the product was, and assured them, verbally, that there
598
00:39:37.949 --> 00:39:40.530
would be no action against them if they did. So
599
00:39:40.550 --> 00:39:44.110
they did the recall. A few weeks later, a RCMP
600
00:39:44.230 --> 00:39:48.170
officer served them with a summons. Empire was being charged
601
00:39:48.250 --> 00:39:58.400
with a criminal offense for selling a sub-potent drug. Berry wrote,
602
00:39:59.300 --> 00:40:03.239
Berry hired a prominent lawyer named Willard, or Bud, Esty,
603
00:40:03.699 --> 00:40:06.000
who would later sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.
604
00:40:06.500 --> 00:40:09.860
According to Berry, the Crown's case rested on a single
605
00:40:09.949 --> 00:40:14.030
test run by a junior chemist, who under cross-examination turned
606
00:40:14.090 --> 00:40:18.510
out to have made several errors. Empire was ultimately acquitted. Then,
607
00:40:18.630 --> 00:40:24.909
on January 25th, 1971, a letter arrived from Ottawa. Dr. G. Showalter,
608
00:40:25.210 --> 00:40:28.050
the chairman of a federal board that approved drug suppliers
609
00:40:28.090 --> 00:40:31.389
for the government, informed Empire that, based on about 15
610
00:40:31.389 --> 00:40:35.610
complaints and some unspecified other reasons, the company had been
611
00:40:35.690 --> 00:40:39.250
struck from the list of approved suppliers. Notice had already
612
00:40:39.269 --> 00:40:42.260
gone out to everyone who used the list. Being on
613
00:40:42.280 --> 00:40:46.010
that list was a prerequisite for supplying most hospitals, and
614
00:40:46.050 --> 00:40:50.230
for staying on Ontario's formulary. It would have effectively killed
615
00:40:50.269 --> 00:40:55.510
the business. Barry wrote, The official had already left his
616
00:40:55.570 --> 00:40:58.349
office for the day. So Barry got his home number
617
00:40:58.449 --> 00:41:01.590
from directory assistants and called them at home. He told
618
00:41:01.630 --> 00:41:04.969
the man that his board's decision was outrageously unfair and
619
00:41:05.190 --> 00:41:08.909
therefore unlawful, because Empire hadn't been told about the complaints
620
00:41:08.969 --> 00:41:11.650
or given a chance to respond. He said that unless
621
00:41:11.710 --> 00:41:15.510
it was reversed, he would hold him personally responsible. According
622
00:41:15.530 --> 00:41:17.570
to Barry, the man told him the decision would not
623
00:41:17.610 --> 00:41:20.690
be changed by threats and hung up. The next day,
624
00:41:21.010 --> 00:41:24.730
Barry had SD take the board to court. Within two weeks,
625
00:41:24.849 --> 00:41:27.510
before the case could even be heard, the board backed
626
00:41:27.550 --> 00:41:31.369
down and put Empire Laboratories back on the list. Dr.
627
00:41:31.489 --> 00:41:34.659
Showalter and the board did not bother us again thereafter,
628
00:41:35.070 --> 00:41:39.250
Barry wrote with evident satisfaction. He continued, That was the
629
00:41:39.329 --> 00:41:41.719
first time in my career that I found it necessary
630
00:41:41.780 --> 00:41:45.139
to initiate legal action. It was to be the first
631
00:41:45.260 --> 00:42:05.150
of many. Now, we need to go back a few years,
632
00:42:05.530 --> 00:42:08.969
and across town, to meet the other half of the story.
633
00:42:09.550 --> 00:42:13.599
Anna Reich was born in 1947, in a displaced persons
634
00:42:13.659 --> 00:42:17.280
camp in Austria. In the years after the Second World War,
635
00:42:17.659 --> 00:42:21.320
the Allied powers set up camps across Germany, Austria, and
636
00:42:21.480 --> 00:42:23.820
Italy to house the millions of people that the war
637
00:42:23.860 --> 00:42:27.440
had uprooted. Among them were tens of thousands of Jewish
638
00:42:27.500 --> 00:42:30.550
survivors of the Holocaust, who had nowhere to go home to.
639
00:42:31.199 --> 00:42:35.420
Anna's parents, Naftali and Helen Reich, were Polish Jews that
640
00:42:35.460 --> 00:42:38.570
had been freed by Allied forces from a Nazi work camp.
641
00:42:39.110 --> 00:42:41.929
After the war, they were among the thousands living in
642
00:42:42.010 --> 00:42:44.710
one of these camps, which were overseen by the US
643
00:42:44.789 --> 00:42:49.650
Army and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. While
644
00:42:49.889 --> 00:42:54.829
her name was officially Anna, everyone called Naftali and Helen's daughter, Honey.
645
00:42:55.860 --> 00:42:58.900
About two months before she died, Honey Sherman sat in
646
00:42:58.940 --> 00:43:01.699
front of a camera for a tribute video being produced
647
00:43:01.780 --> 00:43:05.719
by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto. She
648
00:43:05.780 --> 00:43:09.559
described how her family eventually crossed the Atlantic, arriving in
649
00:43:09.599 --> 00:43:13.059
Halifax on Canada's east coast, and then boarded a train
650
00:43:13.159 --> 00:43:16.860
heading west for Winnipeg with other Jewish refugees. When the
651
00:43:16.909 --> 00:43:20.610
train stopped in Toronto, a representative of the Jewish Immigrant
652
00:43:20.750 --> 00:43:24.050
Aid Society came aboard and offered lodging and jobs to
653
00:43:24.110 --> 00:43:27.440
anyone who wanted to get off. The Reichs decided to
654
00:43:27.480 --> 00:43:30.199
get off the train. Honey never forgot that a group
655
00:43:30.239 --> 00:43:33.320
of strangers had done that for her family. It would
656
00:43:33.360 --> 00:43:36.500
shape the rest of her life. The Reichs settled in
657
00:43:36.559 --> 00:43:40.199
Bothurst Manor, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in North York that
658
00:43:40.239 --> 00:43:43.519
had been developed in the 1950s for families just like hers.
659
00:43:44.139 --> 00:43:47.739
They opened a small shoe store, Reich Shoes, down near
660
00:43:47.880 --> 00:43:51.659
Kiel and Dundas on the West End. Honey's younger sister, Mary,
661
00:43:51.820 --> 00:43:55.170
was born in Toronto. The family was comfortable there, but
662
00:43:55.389 --> 00:43:59.550
far from wealthy. Like Sarah Sherman did across town. The
663
00:43:59.610 --> 00:44:02.260
Rikes rented out parts of their house to make ends meet.
664
00:44:02.739 --> 00:44:06.219
Years later, Mary would describe it with a laugh. She said,
665
00:44:06.960 --> 00:44:12.739
There was a front room with a piano in it,
666
00:44:13.019 --> 00:44:16.000
which she later realized was actually a hallway, and then
667
00:44:16.019 --> 00:44:19.159
there was their bedroom. But we didn't know it was
668
00:44:19.219 --> 00:44:23.619
a hallway with two fold-up cots. Honey looked after her
669
00:44:23.659 --> 00:44:27.420
younger sister, according to author Kevin Donovan, who wrote The
670
00:44:27.460 --> 00:44:32.500
Billionaire Murders. Honey protected Mary from their stern and unpredictable mother,
671
00:44:32.960 --> 00:44:35.820
and the two would remain extraordinarily close for the rest
672
00:44:35.860 --> 00:44:42.489
of Honey's life. At the University of Toronto, Honey studied psychology,
673
00:44:42.869 --> 00:44:45.510
and there she met a young woman named Brenna Fishman.
674
00:44:45.969 --> 00:44:49.090
They became best friends almost immediately, and they would stay
675
00:44:49.130 --> 00:44:52.090
best friends for the next 50 years. If there's one
676
00:44:52.150 --> 00:44:54.150
person who can tell you what Honey was like at
677
00:44:54.150 --> 00:44:58.050
19 years old, it's Brynna. Honey was never on time.
678
00:44:58.610 --> 00:45:00.940
She was not what you would call a morning person.
679
00:45:01.460 --> 00:45:05.059
In the summer of 1967, Brynna arrived to pick her
680
00:45:05.119 --> 00:45:08.159
up at around noon and learned from Honey's mother that
681
00:45:08.199 --> 00:45:11.849
her daughter was still in bed. When Honey finally came downstairs,
682
00:45:12.150 --> 00:45:15.130
she went through what Brynna described as her morning ritual.
683
00:45:15.650 --> 00:45:18.090
She boiled the kettle, made a cup of tea, and
684
00:45:18.130 --> 00:45:21.369
then slowly dunked two turtle's chocolates in and out of
685
00:45:21.389 --> 00:45:24.690
the tea, letting the caramel and pecan soften before she
686
00:45:24.769 --> 00:45:27.659
ate them. Only then was she ready to go upstairs
687
00:45:27.679 --> 00:45:30.579
and get dressed. But apparently once she was up, she
688
00:45:30.619 --> 00:45:33.420
was unstoppable. On a trip to New York in the
689
00:45:33.440 --> 00:45:36.739
late 1960s, a group of young men in their hotel
690
00:45:36.800 --> 00:45:40.739
lobby invited Honey and Brinna to a party. Brinna refused.
691
00:45:41.460 --> 00:45:43.789
After all, they had no idea who these guys were.
692
00:45:44.349 --> 00:45:47.469
We could wind up dead, she told Honey. But Honey
693
00:45:47.489 --> 00:45:51.550
just grabbed her arm and said, We're going. They went and, surprisingly,
694
00:45:51.630 --> 00:45:55.420
lived to tell the tale. Brenna, now Brenna Steiner, told
695
00:45:55.519 --> 00:45:59.300
author Kevin Donovan 50 years later, Honey was fearless. I
696
00:45:59.320 --> 00:46:01.480
loved her for it. She was not afraid of anything.
697
00:46:01.860 --> 00:46:04.389
They could be mass murderers, and she would have gone.
698
00:46:05.590 --> 00:46:08.389
On another trip to Chicago, a cousin set the two
699
00:46:08.429 --> 00:46:10.329
of them up on a dinner date with two young
700
00:46:10.389 --> 00:46:13.250
American men. At some point, one of the men asked
701
00:46:13.309 --> 00:46:17.130
if Canadians lived in igloos. Honey shot Brenna a sideways
702
00:46:17.170 --> 00:46:20.389
look and muttered, Is this what we're stuck with? Then
703
00:46:20.489 --> 00:46:24.030
she started speaking French. Brenna caught on and joined in.
704
00:46:24.530 --> 00:46:27.090
Neither of them knew more than a handful of French words,
705
00:46:27.369 --> 00:46:30.010
so they made up most of the conversation. The date
706
00:46:30.130 --> 00:46:33.369
ended early, and they left the whole way back. After
707
00:46:33.449 --> 00:46:37.280
finishing up their degrees, both young women enrolled in teacher's college.
708
00:46:37.880 --> 00:46:41.059
Three days in, Honey announced she was dropping out. She
709
00:46:41.099 --> 00:46:45.119
told Brenna, They're talking to us like we're five-year-olds. She
710
00:46:45.159 --> 00:46:48.480
talked Brenna into switching programs with her, to the Ontario
711
00:46:48.519 --> 00:46:52.239
College of Education at the University of Toronto. They finished there,
712
00:46:52.340 --> 00:46:54.500
and Honey went on to teach grade 5 at a
713
00:46:54.559 --> 00:46:58.030
school just west of Toronto. Honey's mother kept telling her
714
00:46:58.070 --> 00:47:01.650
that she should marry a nice doctor. Honey wanted to teach,
715
00:47:01.929 --> 00:47:04.150
and she was in no hurry to get married. But
716
00:47:04.250 --> 00:47:07.369
she did need something to do in the summers. So,
717
00:47:07.769 --> 00:47:11.539
as she told Toronto Life years later, At her mother's suggestion,
718
00:47:11.760 --> 00:47:15.630
she began volunteering as a candy striper at Mount Sinai Hospital.
719
00:47:16.269 --> 00:47:19.090
It wasn't the worst way to meet a nice Jewish doctor.
720
00:47:19.690 --> 00:47:23.630
At Mount Sinai, Honey befriended a nurse named Cindy Olster.
721
00:47:24.159 --> 00:47:27.619
Cindy's husband, Joel, had just gone into business with his
722
00:47:27.679 --> 00:47:30.860
best friend, who happened to be a doctor. Sort of.
723
00:47:33.400 --> 00:47:37.329
Cindy Olster introduced Honey Reich to Dr. Barry Sherman in
724
00:47:37.489 --> 00:47:41.170
August of 1970. He was five years her senior, and
725
00:47:41.230 --> 00:47:44.050
he was not, of course, a medical doctor. He had
726
00:47:44.090 --> 00:47:47.849
a PhD in systems engineering and ran a pill factory.
727
00:47:48.409 --> 00:47:50.769
According to their friends, it became a running joke that
728
00:47:50.829 --> 00:47:54.989
Barry wasn't exactly the catch that Honey's parents had in mind. Honey,
729
00:47:55.170 --> 00:47:57.889
as author Kevin Donovan tells it, weighed that against her
730
00:47:57.929 --> 00:48:01.699
parents' expectation and reached a verdict of her own. Close enough.
731
00:48:02.659 --> 00:48:06.500
The two were kind of a study in contrast. Honey
732
00:48:06.579 --> 00:48:12.849
was loud. social, outgoing, fearless. Barry, meanwhile, was quiet, awkward,
733
00:48:13.250 --> 00:48:17.329
allergic to small talk, happiest when he was working. Honey
734
00:48:17.469 --> 00:48:20.429
couldn't be on time to save her life. Barry, when
735
00:48:20.449 --> 00:48:23.559
he wasn't at the office, was thinking about it. But
736
00:48:23.579 --> 00:48:27.039
there was something there. Honey called him Chuck after his
737
00:48:27.079 --> 00:48:29.440
middle name Charles, and she would call him that for
738
00:48:29.460 --> 00:48:42.309
the rest of their lives. By the end of 1972,
739
00:48:42.309 --> 00:48:45.150
Empire's sales had grown to a little under $ 2 million
740
00:48:45.349 --> 00:48:50.719
a year, and people were beginning to notice. In early 1973,
741
00:48:50.719 --> 00:48:55.400
a young acquisitions man called from ICN Pharmaceuticals, a publicly
742
00:48:55.500 --> 00:48:59.199
traded American company that was on a buying spree. ICN
743
00:48:59.239 --> 00:49:03.739
had recently bought Morris Goodman's Montreal Generic Company, and now
744
00:49:03.800 --> 00:49:07.690
it wanted Empire. Barry and Joel were torn. They had
745
00:49:07.750 --> 00:49:12.000
turned the company around, but the old five-story building was antiquated.
746
00:49:12.500 --> 00:49:15.519
Their margins were thin, and the federal regulator had started
747
00:49:15.579 --> 00:49:19.900
demanding expensive development work for every new generic product. When
748
00:49:20.039 --> 00:49:23.719
ICN offered them a little under $ 2 million, they decided
749
00:49:23.820 --> 00:49:26.820
to take it. There were, as Berry put it, two
750
00:49:26.940 --> 00:49:30.639
flies in the ointment, pun intended. The first was a
751
00:49:30.679 --> 00:49:35.139
clause in ICN's contract that said empires selling shareholders could
752
00:49:35.199 --> 00:49:38.139
not compete in the generic drug business for five years.
753
00:49:38.809 --> 00:49:41.469
Barry had no intention of staying out of the business
754
00:49:41.510 --> 00:49:44.269
for five years. So he looked closely at how the
755
00:49:44.309 --> 00:49:49.710
deal was structured, and he noticed something that ICN apparently hadn't. Technically,
756
00:49:50.050 --> 00:49:53.409
he wasn't a shareholder at all. His shares were held
757
00:49:53.510 --> 00:49:58.269
through a personal holding company, Bernard C. Sherman Limited. According
758
00:49:58.309 --> 00:50:01.880
to both Barry and Joel, Barry deliberately held back the
759
00:50:01.949 --> 00:50:06.159
document listing the shareholders until the last possible minute, hoping
760
00:50:06.199 --> 00:50:10.039
that nobody at ICN would notice. Barry wrote, I wanted
761
00:50:10.079 --> 00:50:12.280
to be free to go back into the same business.
762
00:50:12.800 --> 00:50:16.599
This worked out exactly as I hoped. The second fly
763
00:50:16.679 --> 00:50:20.289
was that ICN wasn't paying in cash. It was paying
764
00:50:20.329 --> 00:50:23.349
in ICN stock, which Barry and Joel would have to
765
00:50:23.409 --> 00:50:26.050
hold onto for up to six months before they could sell.
766
00:50:26.570 --> 00:50:30.030
Barry called the shares a hot potato. They were trading
767
00:50:30.070 --> 00:50:33.429
at about 20 US dollars, having shot up from a
768
00:50:33.469 --> 00:50:35.639
few dollars in a year or two on the strength
769
00:50:35.679 --> 00:50:38.559
of a string of acquisitions just like this one. The
770
00:50:38.579 --> 00:50:43.059
deal eventually closed in September of 1973. Over the next
771
00:50:43.119 --> 00:50:46.699
few months, the stock climbed to about $ 40, and as
772
00:50:46.739 --> 00:50:50.929
Barry wrote, we were of course ecstatic. Then it started
773
00:50:51.010 --> 00:50:54.170
falling just as fast. By the time they were allowed
774
00:50:54.210 --> 00:50:56.750
to sell, it was back down to $ 20, and they
775
00:50:56.789 --> 00:51:00.739
sold everything. The stock kept falling, all the way to
776
00:51:00.800 --> 00:51:05.139
about $ 2 a share. Barry wrote, we were very fortunate
777
00:51:05.219 --> 00:51:09.829
indeed to have gotten out in time. After debts and taxes,
778
00:51:10.289 --> 00:51:13.159
Barry and Joel each walked away with, in Barry's words,
779
00:51:13.699 --> 00:51:17.920
several hundred thousand dollars, which author Kevin Donovan puts at
780
00:51:17.940 --> 00:51:22.460
about $ 300, 000 apiece. Now, there's something important about this sale
781
00:51:22.500 --> 00:51:25.340
that nobody was thinking about at the time. Do you
782
00:51:25.429 --> 00:51:28.409
remember the Option Agreement? The one that said that the
783
00:51:28.489 --> 00:51:32.309
four Winter Boys could each buy 5% of Empire Laboratories
784
00:51:32.469 --> 00:51:34.789
once they were old enough, as long as Barry and
785
00:51:34.849 --> 00:51:39.030
Joel still owned it. Well, when Empire was sold to ICN,
786
00:51:39.369 --> 00:51:43.550
that option ceased to exist. The oldest winter boy, Tim,
787
00:51:43.809 --> 00:51:46.750
was 14 years old at the time. It would be
788
00:51:46.829 --> 00:51:52.000
decades before anyone started asking questions about that. Barry stayed
789
00:51:52.119 --> 00:51:56.380
on at Empire Laboratories as an executive under ICN, which
790
00:51:56.440 --> 00:51:59.719
put him under Morris Goodman, who was now running ICN's
791
00:51:59.820 --> 00:52:04.380
Canadian operations. That lasted until Goodman sent him to California
792
00:52:04.420 --> 00:52:08.280
to meet with the parent company's executives. Nobody told Goodman
793
00:52:08.320 --> 00:52:11.550
exactly what was said in that meeting, but Barry apparently
794
00:52:11.610 --> 00:52:14.150
spent it explaining to his new bosses how they could
795
00:52:14.170 --> 00:52:17.849
be doing their jobs better. Goodman later told author Kevin Donovan,
796
00:52:17.869 --> 00:52:21.030
A few weeks after the sale closed, Goodman drove to
797
00:52:21.050 --> 00:52:30.239
Toronto to deliver the news in person. Barry, by his
798
00:52:30.280 --> 00:52:41.969
own account, knew what was coming. He later wrote, After this,
799
00:52:42.239 --> 00:52:45.429
Barry went home, and thanks to his little trick with
800
00:52:45.469 --> 00:52:49.210
the paperwork, he was now free to start over. He
801
00:52:49.329 --> 00:52:52.650
asked Joel Ulster to join him again, but Joel said
802
00:52:52.730 --> 00:52:55.809
no this time. Back at Empire Labs, the two of
803
00:52:55.849 --> 00:52:58.170
them had shared a single office with a long table
804
00:52:58.210 --> 00:53:01.309
between their desks. And every morning, Joel would open his
805
00:53:01.389 --> 00:53:04.809
drawer to find a handwritten note from Barry with suggestions
806
00:53:04.869 --> 00:53:06.980
for what he should do that day, and what he
807
00:53:07.019 --> 00:53:16.260
should avoid doing. Joel said, Barry also took risks that
808
00:53:16.300 --> 00:53:20.769
made Joel, the cautious accountant, deeply uncomfortable. He said, I
809
00:53:20.829 --> 00:53:23.190
realized that I loved him, but it wasn't for me.
810
00:53:24.409 --> 00:53:27.769
They stayed partners in other ventures, and best friends for
811
00:53:27.809 --> 00:53:30.969
the rest of their lives. But Joel made one last
812
00:53:31.030 --> 00:53:34.949
contribution to Barry's new company before he stepped away. He
813
00:53:34.989 --> 00:53:39.639
helped name it. As teenagers, they had liked the suffix tex.
814
00:53:40.280 --> 00:53:43.860
The old word for a drugstore was apothecary. You put
815
00:53:43.900 --> 00:53:50.960
them together and you get apotex. Barry was, in his words,
816
00:53:51.360 --> 00:53:55.389
acutely aware of the possibility of failure. He did not
817
00:53:55.469 --> 00:53:58.570
want any new partners in this, so the only money
818
00:53:58.630 --> 00:54:01.190
he had was his few hundred thousand dollars from the
819
00:54:01.349 --> 00:54:04.969
ICN sale. His plan, which he laid out in his memoir,
820
00:54:05.210 --> 00:54:08.440
was a study in minimalism. The new company would make
821
00:54:08.639 --> 00:54:13.000
only one kind of product, tablets, made by the simplest
822
00:54:13.280 --> 00:54:16.780
dry mix process. It would buy exactly one of each
823
00:54:16.860 --> 00:54:21.340
machine it needed. One mixer, one granulator, one tablet press,
824
00:54:21.699 --> 00:54:29.940
one coating pan, one electronic tablet counter, all for under $ 100, 000.
825
00:54:28.380 --> 00:54:31.159
It would start with only the dozen or so older
826
00:54:31.199 --> 00:54:34.760
drugs that did not need new government approvals. It would
827
00:54:34.820 --> 00:54:38.309
sell by mail and telephone, and the entire staff would
828
00:54:38.349 --> 00:54:41.829
be no more than five people. Only once real sales
829
00:54:41.889 --> 00:54:45.130
came in would he start pouring every dollar back into growth.
830
00:54:45.949 --> 00:54:50.769
In 1974, Barry Sherman opened that small factory on Ormont Drive,
831
00:54:51.130 --> 00:54:54.510
off of Weston Road in an industrial area in Toronto's
832
00:54:54.590 --> 00:54:58.530
Northwest End. When it started, it had just two employees.
833
00:54:58.550 --> 00:55:02.239
He later wrote, We followed this plan and it worked.
834
00:55:05.460 --> 00:55:08.900
Barry and Honey Sherman wanted children, but it was a
835
00:55:08.980 --> 00:55:12.019
long and painful road to get there. Honey had her
836
00:55:12.099 --> 00:55:17.179
first miscarriage in 1972, and then Several more followed. Her
837
00:55:17.219 --> 00:55:19.780
best friend Brenna, who got pregnant at around the same
838
00:55:19.800 --> 00:55:22.139
time as Honey that first time, said that after the
839
00:55:22.199 --> 00:55:25.449
first loss, Honey stopped telling her when she was expecting.
840
00:55:25.949 --> 00:55:29.710
But Brenna could always tell, because Honey would quit smoking
841
00:55:29.769 --> 00:55:35.329
and stop playing tennis. In 1975, the Shermans' first daughter, Lauren,
842
00:55:35.389 --> 00:55:38.110
was born. She would be an only child for about
843
00:55:38.289 --> 00:55:44.210
eight years. The Shermans' only son, Jonathan, was born in 1983.
844
00:55:44.210 --> 00:55:47.630
A second daughter, Alexandra, who goes by Alex, followed in 1986.
845
00:55:47.630 --> 00:55:54.489
Their youngest, Kaylin, was born in 1990. In his unfinished memoir,
846
00:55:54.909 --> 00:55:58.409
Barry dedicates exactly one paragraph to his wife and children,
847
00:55:58.429 --> 00:56:02.500
their wedding date and each child's birthday, and then, as
848
00:56:02.579 --> 00:56:06.820
if anticipating how that might look, he adds a brief note, writing,
849
00:56:07.320 --> 00:56:09.579
The fact that I make little mention of my wife
850
00:56:09.619 --> 00:56:12.139
and children should not be taken as suggesting that they
851
00:56:12.179 --> 00:56:14.360
are not important to my life, as that would be
852
00:56:14.449 --> 00:56:17.670
anything but true. However, it seems to me that information
853
00:56:17.710 --> 00:56:20.150
about my family is likely to be of less interest
854
00:56:20.289 --> 00:56:24.570
to a reader than my observations relating to philosophy, Canadian politics,
855
00:56:24.630 --> 00:56:31.610
and the pharmaceutical industry. In 1982, Barry drove to Montreal
856
00:56:31.670 --> 00:56:34.989
to meet a man named Jack Kaye. Kay had started
857
00:56:35.030 --> 00:56:38.809
his career as a psychiatric nurse in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, then
858
00:56:38.849 --> 00:56:43.400
became a traveling pharmaceutical salesman, and eventually co-founded a generic
859
00:56:43.440 --> 00:56:46.639
company of his own, which he sold to ICN at
860
00:56:46.659 --> 00:56:49.639
around the same time that Barry sold Empire. In fact,
861
00:56:49.719 --> 00:56:51.940
it was Jack Kay who had been put in charge
862
00:56:52.000 --> 00:56:57.619
of absorbing Empire into ICN's portfolio. Now, years after starting Apotex,
863
00:56:58.000 --> 00:57:00.980
Barry was looking for a director of sales, and he
864
00:57:01.019 --> 00:57:03.960
had come to Montreal to make a pitch. The two
865
00:57:04.000 --> 00:57:06.920
men sat in Kay's townhouse and talked for two hours.
866
00:57:07.610 --> 00:57:11.110
According to Jack Kay, money never came up. They talked
867
00:57:11.150 --> 00:57:15.409
about life, and God. Both men were atheists, but Kay
868
00:57:15.469 --> 00:57:19.869
had a live-and-let-live attitude toward religion, while Barry got visibly
869
00:57:20.010 --> 00:57:22.380
angry at the very idea that someone could believe in
870
00:57:22.420 --> 00:57:25.880
a deity. He called the entire thing stupid. Kay would
871
00:57:25.920 --> 00:57:29.019
spend the next 35 years trying to convince his friend
872
00:57:29.139 --> 00:57:33.110
to be a little bit more tolerant. He never succeeded. Then,
873
00:57:33.449 --> 00:57:36.739
they talked about Apotex. Barry said that his company was
874
00:57:36.780 --> 00:57:39.119
going to grow because he was developing new ways to
875
00:57:39.179 --> 00:57:42.699
make drugs more cheaply than anyone else. Kay asked him,
876
00:57:43.139 --> 00:57:45.340
Why do you think you can be more successful when
877
00:57:45.400 --> 00:57:49.539
others have failed? Barry responded, At the end of the conversation,
878
00:57:49.599 --> 00:58:01.710
Barry stood up and said, Kay took the job. For
879
00:58:01.730 --> 00:58:04.170
the next three and a half decades, the two men
880
00:58:04.210 --> 00:58:07.510
would work side by side, in adjoining offices, with the
881
00:58:07.550 --> 00:58:11.820
connecting door always open. They were a strange pair. Jack
882
00:58:11.940 --> 00:58:16.059
Kay was short, muscular, disciplined. The kind of man who
883
00:58:16.099 --> 00:58:18.260
was in the gym at 6am every other day for
884
00:58:18.300 --> 00:58:22.679
his entire adult life. Barry, meanwhile, was soft. He lived
885
00:58:22.719 --> 00:58:26.949
a sedentary lifestyle. He ate Smarties and raisins for breakfast.
886
00:58:27.550 --> 00:58:30.750
They regularly shouted at each other through that open door
887
00:58:30.829 --> 00:58:35.269
about business, politics, and God, so loudly that visitors sometimes
888
00:58:35.429 --> 00:58:39.409
asked Barry's assistant if they should come back later. At
889
00:58:39.449 --> 00:58:44.340
the time Jack K. joined Apotex, Canada's generic drug industry
890
00:58:44.440 --> 00:58:48.320
ran on a system called compulsory licensing. In simple terms,
891
00:58:48.679 --> 00:58:51.079
a generic company could get a license to make a
892
00:58:51.139 --> 00:58:54.719
copy of a patented brand-name drug, as long as it
893
00:58:54.739 --> 00:58:58.510
could prove its version was identical. In exchange, it paid
894
00:58:58.550 --> 00:59:02.150
the brand name company a royalty of 4% of its sales.
895
00:59:02.750 --> 00:59:05.789
For a company like Apotex, it was a fantastic deal.
896
00:59:05.789 --> 00:59:10.860
4% was basically nothing. Barry and Jack went looking for
897
00:59:10.880 --> 00:59:15.039
the biggest target they could find. In 1982, the pharmaceutical
898
00:59:15.099 --> 00:59:19.320
company Glaxo had launched Zantac, a drug that treats acid
899
00:59:19.380 --> 00:59:22.960
reflux and ulcers, and it had quickly become the best-selling
900
00:59:23.000 --> 00:59:27.500
drug in Canada. Apotex spent five years formulating its own
901
00:59:27.559 --> 00:59:31.320
version and getting it approved. they found an Italian supplier
902
00:59:31.360 --> 00:59:36.820
for the active ingredient, a compound called retinidine, and in 1987,
903
00:59:36.820 --> 00:59:42.289
Apotec's generic Zantac hit pharmacy shelves. Their biggest domestic rival,
904
00:59:42.730 --> 00:59:47.070
a company called Novapharm, wasn't even close. Jack Kay told
905
00:59:47.170 --> 00:59:50.840
author Kevin Donovan, We were dancing. We finally did it.
906
00:59:51.219 --> 00:59:53.599
We are ahead of our competitors. We're going to make
907
00:59:53.619 --> 00:59:57.460
a lot of money. And with that they did. With
908
00:59:57.519 --> 01:00:02.110
their generic Zantac, Apotex became the largest generic drug company
909
01:00:02.150 --> 01:00:05.369
in Canada. And as the money came in, Berry and
910
01:00:05.429 --> 01:00:09.849
Honey began giving it away. In 1989, a prominent figure
911
01:00:09.949 --> 01:00:13.780
in Toronto's Jewish community called Berry about an emergency campaign
912
01:00:13.840 --> 01:00:17.800
called Operation Exodus, which was helping Jews from the collapsing
913
01:00:17.880 --> 01:00:22.599
Soviet Union emigrate to Israel. He asked, somewhat sheepishly, if
914
01:00:22.639 --> 01:00:25.110
he'd be crazy to ask Berry for a million dollars.
915
01:00:25.719 --> 01:00:28.179
Barry hung up, talked to Honey, and called the man
916
01:00:28.239 --> 01:00:30.250
back a few minutes later to tell him he'd write
917
01:00:30.289 --> 01:00:34.530
the check. Nearly 30 years later, filming that tribute video
918
01:00:34.570 --> 01:00:38.250
for UJA, the Shermans burst out laughing when Honey recalled
919
01:00:38.289 --> 01:00:44.840
what the fundraiser said afterward. He apparently said, Even in
920
01:00:44.880 --> 01:00:47.980
the lean early years, Barry had a habit of giving
921
01:00:48.079 --> 01:00:52.059
money away. One day in the 1970s, Fred Steiner was
922
01:00:52.119 --> 01:00:55.329
sitting in Barry's office when a rabbi called. A Hebrew
923
01:00:55.369 --> 01:00:59.159
school's bus for disabled children had broken down. Fred could
924
01:00:59.199 --> 01:01:02.800
hear the rabbi pleading his case through the receiver. Barry listened,
925
01:01:02.920 --> 01:01:05.300
and then asked how much it would cost. He said,
926
01:01:05.320 --> 01:01:07.239
In his unfinished 1996 memoir, Barry laid out his philosophy
927
01:01:07.320 --> 01:01:09.179
of wealth, and it's not what you might expect from
928
01:01:09.239 --> 01:01:21.389
one of the most generous men in Canada. He took
929
01:01:21.530 --> 01:01:24.369
aim at the old notion that with power and wealth
930
01:01:24.449 --> 01:01:37.590
comes obligation. He wrote, Because people are instinctively driven to
931
01:01:37.639 --> 01:01:41.420
help others, he argued, wealth gives you an opportunity to
932
01:01:41.480 --> 01:01:44.840
derive an extra measure of happiness by acting to help others,
933
01:01:45.340 --> 01:01:48.980
be it family, friends, members of our community, our country,
934
01:01:49.280 --> 01:01:53.369
or mankind at large. In other words, Barry did not
935
01:01:53.449 --> 01:01:55.510
give away his money because he thought he had to.
936
01:01:55.530 --> 01:01:58.260
He gave it away because it made him happy. He
937
01:01:58.840 --> 01:02:01.639
even had a theory, formed, he said, from years of
938
01:02:01.739 --> 01:02:06.179
charity fundraising, that atheists like him tended to be enormously
939
01:02:06.300 --> 01:02:11.679
more generous than people obsessively committed to seemingly absurd religious rituals.
940
01:02:12.780 --> 01:02:16.130
For Barry and Honey's four children, the Sherman House was
941
01:02:16.190 --> 01:02:19.210
a complicated place to grow up in. According to the
942
01:02:19.269 --> 01:02:22.840
people that author Kevin Donovan spoke with, Barry was, for
943
01:02:22.880 --> 01:02:26.280
most of his children's lives, an absent father. He worked
944
01:02:26.519 --> 01:02:28.989
six days a week at Apotex and worked from home
945
01:02:29.050 --> 01:02:32.030
on Sundays. He rarely saw his kids in the morning
946
01:02:32.090 --> 01:02:34.170
because he got up late, and he rarely saw them
947
01:02:34.210 --> 01:02:36.690
at night because he worked late. That's why, as we
948
01:02:36.730 --> 01:02:39.070
heard in Part 1, Jonathan could stand up at his
949
01:02:39.090 --> 01:02:42.250
parents' funeral and say that he remembered every single game
950
01:02:42.289 --> 01:02:45.510
that his father came to watch. There weren't many of them.
951
01:02:45.969 --> 01:02:49.360
What Barry did give his children was money. And Honey,
952
01:02:49.579 --> 01:02:52.809
according to friends, did not approve. She had grown up
953
01:02:52.849 --> 01:02:55.530
in a household where every square inch was rented out,
954
01:02:55.789 --> 01:02:57.750
and she was careful with money to a degree that
955
01:02:57.769 --> 01:03:02.000
her friends sometimes found baffling. Author Kevin Donovan describes an
956
01:03:02.039 --> 01:03:05.980
episode from Lauren's childhood, related by other parents, in which
957
01:03:05.980 --> 01:03:08.760
30 friends came to a birthday party and Honey had
958
01:03:08.780 --> 01:03:11.929
the wrapped presents set aside for weeks before Lauren was
959
01:03:11.969 --> 01:03:15.070
allowed to open them. When Jonathan was in grade one
960
01:03:15.289 --> 01:03:18.860
and needed a weekly donation for school, Barry mumbled from
961
01:03:18.909 --> 01:03:21.099
under the covers that his wallet was on the dresser
962
01:03:21.159 --> 01:03:24.179
and to take what he needed. That afternoon, the school
963
01:03:24.260 --> 01:03:28.440
called Honey. Jonathan had apparently put nine $ 100 bills into
964
01:03:28.460 --> 01:03:38.480
the collection jar. She went and got most of it back.
965
01:03:38.579 --> 01:03:42.750
In 1985, with Apotex growing fast and three children at home,
966
01:03:43.110 --> 01:03:46.139
and a fourth still to come, Barry and Honey bought
967
01:03:46.219 --> 01:03:49.340
a building lot on Old Colony Road in North York.
968
01:03:49.960 --> 01:03:52.579
It was a quiet, winding street of large houses set
969
01:03:52.619 --> 01:03:55.619
back from the road, a few minutes from Bayview Avenue,
970
01:03:55.980 --> 01:03:58.360
in a neighborhood that had been home to Jewish families
971
01:03:58.420 --> 01:04:01.659
for decades. And on it, the Shermans built what, in
972
01:04:01.699 --> 01:04:05.860
its day, was a spectacular house. The walls were poured concrete,
973
01:04:06.119 --> 01:04:08.269
and much of the light came in through panels of
974
01:04:08.409 --> 01:04:11.349
opaque glass block, which was very much the look of
975
01:04:11.389 --> 01:04:15.619
the 1980s. The main floor alone was 3,600 square feet,
976
01:04:16.079 --> 01:04:18.880
anchored by a grand foyer with a chandelier and a
977
01:04:18.929 --> 01:04:23.769
curved staircase. Upstairs, there were six bedrooms, marble bathrooms and
978
01:04:23.829 --> 01:04:27.070
jacuzzi tubs, and a master suite with its own sitting
979
01:04:27.150 --> 01:04:31.010
area and fireplace. In the backyard, there was an outdoor pool,
980
01:04:31.389 --> 01:04:34.690
two patios, and a tennis court. Counting the lower level,
981
01:04:34.969 --> 01:04:38.440
the whole thing was well over 12,000 square feet. And
982
01:04:38.460 --> 01:04:41.750
the lower level was where things got really ambitious. A
983
01:04:41.809 --> 01:04:45.199
ramp beside the driveway led down to a six-car underground
984
01:04:45.260 --> 01:04:49.000
garage tucked into the basement, with utility rooms and a
985
01:04:49.059 --> 01:04:52.460
recreation room at one end. At the other end, stretching
986
01:04:52.519 --> 01:04:55.880
north beneath the tennis court, was a second pool, a
987
01:04:55.960 --> 01:04:59.630
long indoor lap pool, lined with more glass block where
988
01:04:59.650 --> 01:05:02.309
you could swim year-round. To get to it, you went
989
01:05:02.349 --> 01:05:05.309
down a wide hallway lined with glass. At the end
990
01:05:05.349 --> 01:05:07.269
of the hallway, there was a glass door with a
991
01:05:07.349 --> 01:05:10.190
magnetic lock, and on the wall beside it, there was
992
01:05:10.230 --> 01:05:13.460
a button that released it. When the house was finished,
993
01:05:13.820 --> 01:05:16.710
Barry was not happy with it. He apparently called it
994
01:05:16.789 --> 01:05:20.650
a disaster. He believed the builders and contractors had done
995
01:05:20.769 --> 01:05:24.150
shoddy work, and so, of course, he sued them. It
996
01:05:24.190 --> 01:05:27.400
took six years. By the time the lawsuit was over,
997
01:05:27.699 --> 01:05:31.840
according to author Kevin Donovan, Barry had recouped about $ 2
998
01:05:31.400 --> 01:05:34.760
million of the roughly $ 2. 3 million that the house had
999
01:05:34.800 --> 01:05:37.449
cost to build. It wasn't even the first time he
1000
01:05:37.489 --> 01:05:40.210
had pulled that little maneuver. He had sued over an
1001
01:05:40.349 --> 01:05:44.070
earlier house built back in the 1970s, over a toilet
1002
01:05:44.190 --> 01:05:47.630
that wasn't installed on schedule. If Barry Sherman had a
1003
01:05:47.690 --> 01:05:50.849
contract for anything, and he believed you broke it in
1004
01:05:50.969 --> 01:05:54.429
any minor way, he would take you to court. Every time.
1005
01:05:54.949 --> 01:05:58.909
Despite the alleged shoddy work, the Shermans moved into the house.
1006
01:05:59.510 --> 01:06:02.909
They raised their four children there. Honey filled it with
1007
01:06:03.050 --> 01:06:07.530
orchids and people and noise. Barry mostly came home late
1008
01:06:07.769 --> 01:06:10.690
and worked in his home office on Sundays. The glass
1009
01:06:10.750 --> 01:06:13.090
block pool at the far end of the basement was
1010
01:06:13.170 --> 01:06:17.309
rarely used. By 2017, according to one of the people
1011
01:06:17.369 --> 01:06:20.670
closest to the family, the water in it had gone green.
1012
01:06:21.170 --> 01:06:23.409
They would live in that house for more than 30 years.
1013
01:06:37.699 --> 01:06:41.130
In 1996, when Barry sat down in the Serengeti to
1014
01:06:41.150 --> 01:06:43.769
write his memoir, he got as far as the founding
1015
01:06:43.809 --> 01:06:46.969
of Apotex. He laid out his plan for the new company.
1016
01:06:47.670 --> 01:06:51.690
One of every machine, five employees, tablets only, the dozen
1017
01:06:51.730 --> 01:06:54.329
drugs they could sell right away. And then he wrote
1018
01:06:54.449 --> 01:06:58.130
one short sentence. We followed this plan, and it worked.
1019
01:06:59.050 --> 01:07:01.929
Below that, in parentheses, is the last line that he
1020
01:07:01.989 --> 01:07:05.780
ever wrote in this unfinished manuscript. A lot more to come.
1021
01:07:06.809 --> 01:07:11.230
He had planned 13 chapters in total. He wrote only five.
1022
01:07:11.800 --> 01:07:14.030
The chapters he never got to were going to be
1023
01:07:14.070 --> 01:07:16.920
about the fights that defined the next 20 years of
1024
01:07:16.960 --> 01:07:20.219
his life, and he had already given them titles. Not
1025
01:07:20.239 --> 01:07:24.500
gonna lie, some of them are kinda bangers. The Insatiable Cartel,
1026
01:07:25.219 --> 01:07:29.659
Treason in Ottawa, Animal Farm, Going for the Kill, The
1027
01:07:29.760 --> 01:07:33.900
Enemy Within. In part three of the series, we're gonna
1028
01:07:33.960 --> 01:07:37.469
try and tell those chapters for Barry, We'll go over
1029
01:07:37.800 --> 01:07:40.920
his wars with the biggest drug companies on Earth, and
1030
01:07:40.980 --> 01:07:44.280
with his own government, and with his rivals. We'll talk
1031
01:07:44.320 --> 01:07:47.559
about the frugal billionaire who gave away a fortune, and
1032
01:07:47.579 --> 01:07:50.380
the people who came to him for it. Old friends
1033
01:07:50.579 --> 01:07:54.440
and new ones. Business partners. A beer baron and a
1034
01:07:54.480 --> 01:07:59.349
movie producer. His own children. And four orphaned cousins who
1035
01:07:59.389 --> 01:08:01.630
grew up and came back looking for what they believed
1036
01:08:01.690 --> 01:08:05.050
was theirs. and will try to follow Barry and Honey
1037
01:08:05.190 --> 01:08:08.889
all the way to a Wednesday in December of 2017,
1038
01:08:08.889 --> 01:08:10.460
when she told him that she would see him at
1039
01:08:10.500 --> 01:08:14.579
the office at 5. All that, on the next episode
1040
01:08:14.860 --> 01:08:54.930
of Unresolved. Thank you for listening to this episode of Unresolved.
1041
01:08:55.470 --> 01:08:57.569
Before we go, I want to thank the people who
1042
01:08:57.609 --> 01:09:01.770
make this show possible. The producers of Unresolved, who support
1043
01:09:01.789 --> 01:09:19.119
it every single month on Patreon. They are... Stacy Hauser,
1044
01:09:19.539 --> 01:09:26.000
Kevin Tweedy, Heather Fidler, Anna T, Cece, Tabitha Colvin, Donya Alchemist,
1045
01:09:26.539 --> 01:09:32.390
Trixie Fink, Beck Empress, Marcus Mitchell, Caroline Dijon, Catherine Rich,
1046
01:09:32.939 --> 01:09:40.350
Thomas Budkin, Sophie Wise, J-Law, Leticia Ortiz, Fractalman, Jamie Stevenson,
1047
01:09:40.710 --> 01:09:44.770
and Amy Haynes. Thank you all so much. Each and
1048
01:09:44.850 --> 01:09:47.010
every one of you keeps the lights on around here,
1049
01:09:47.270 --> 01:09:50.250
and I am so incredibly grateful. If you are listening
1050
01:09:50.270 --> 01:09:52.050
to this podcast and you would like to hear your
1051
01:09:52.149 --> 01:09:55.310
own name on that list, please head over to patreon.com
1052
01:09:55.350 --> 01:09:59.229
slash unresolvedpod. A dollar a month gets you every episode
1053
01:09:59.399 --> 01:10:04.920
early and ad-free. $ 2. 50 adds the unresolved bonus episodes. $ 5
1054
01:10:04.859 --> 01:10:07.859
gets you Resolved, the show we make just for Patreon.
1055
01:10:08.359 --> 01:10:11.060
And then higher tiers come with stuff like a producer credit.
1056
01:10:11.420 --> 01:10:13.119
which means that I'll read your name at the end
1057
01:10:13.140 --> 01:10:16.079
of episodes just like this one. If a monthly pledge
1058
01:10:16.220 --> 01:10:19.649
isn't doable right now, that is completely okay, because one
1059
01:10:19.689 --> 01:10:21.439
of the most valuable things you can do for this
1060
01:10:21.479 --> 01:10:24.489
show is completely free. You can leave us a rating
1061
01:10:24.550 --> 01:10:28.130
and a review for Unresolved on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or
1062
01:10:28.189 --> 01:10:31.689
wherever you happen to be listening. There's no network behind
1063
01:10:31.729 --> 01:10:34.710
this podcast. Never has been, never will be. We have
1064
01:10:34.750 --> 01:10:39.130
no investors, no celebrity endorsements, no board games, no cruises.
1065
01:10:39.829 --> 01:10:42.369
It's just me, the people you heard on that list,
1066
01:10:42.789 --> 01:10:46.619
and listeners like yourself, leaving reviews and telling friends about it.
1067
01:10:46.989 --> 01:10:49.149
For a show like this one, that's how new people
1068
01:10:49.189 --> 01:10:52.020
find us. And whatever help you can give means more
1069
01:10:52.060 --> 01:10:54.579
than I can say. Thank you all for what you do.
1070
01:10:55.159 --> 01:10:58.760
Next week, we will keep untangling the strange and sordid
1071
01:10:58.859 --> 01:11:02.140
history of Barry and Honey Sherman. But until then, please
1072
01:11:02.500 --> 01:11:06.659
stay safe, stay healthy, and take care of yourselves. Bye.