Two legacies, one dark mystery
Toronto’s establishment is reeling after the violent deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman. The question remains: How did this happen?
Before the speeches started at Thursday’s funeral service, before Barry and Honey Sherman’s family took the stage, there was a recital: Each of Us has a Name, by the Israeli poet Zelda.
“Each of us has a name,” read Eli Rubenstein, the religious leader of a small Toronto synagogue, “given by our sins and given by our longing. Each of us has a name given by our enemies and given by our love. Each of us has a name given by our celebrations and given by our work.”
The memorial service, packed with 6,000 people — including some of the most powerful business leaders and politicians in the country, and broadcast live on television — gave the family an opportunity to present the version of their parents’ legacy they want people to remember when they hear their names. Those eulogizing them painted a picture of the couple as generous souls who loved giving their wealth away, Barry concealing a heart full of warmth and love beneath a gruff exterior.
On full display at the Toronto convention centre that hosted the ceremony, in the eulogies from friends and family and in the whispers and demeanour of the mourners, were the grief, anger, fear and confusion that remain in the wake of the Shermans’ sudden, violent deaths.
On stage, the Shermans’ son Jonathon threw barbs at the media for reporting an early theory offered by police sources that the deaths had been either a double suicide or a murder-suicide. The family’s apparent dissatisfaction with the police has led them to embark on their own quest for answers, organizing a parallel private investigation.
The National Post has learned that a second set of autopsies was conducted by a private pathologist before the couple’s burial. The results have not been released, not even to the coroner’s office.
The family has retained a lawyer and a private investigation firm, and family members have taken steps to enhance their personal security.
Members of the elite social circles in which the Shermans travelled, meanwhile, have been tight- lipped, with many tersely declining repeated media requests for comment. But the circumstances of their deaths have been the source of constant chatter among the Toronto establishment, a mystery that has possessed the city’s business and cultural elite unlike any in recent memory.
Like the f amily, most friends of the Shermans dismiss the notion of murdersuicide. Murray Rubin, one of those family friends, told the Post, Barry’s strength was intellectual, not physical.
“He used to belong to my tennis club. It was a joke,” said Rubin. "He couldn’t move around. He moved around with his brain. ... He tried. He isn’t athletic physically at all.
“That’s why when they said it was a murder-suicide, it’s so impossible. It’s like when a duck and a pussycat get together in the same cage and the pussycat dies, you say the duck killed the pussycat. He didn’t have the physical strength to do it or the inclination. He was a very gentle person.”
Gentle perhaps, b ut friends and family readily acknowledge the sharp edges of Barry’s personality. At the funeral, each mention of Sherman’s extreme devotion to his work or lack of social graces brought laughs rather than awkward silence among the crowd of mourners.
“As has already been mentioned, he would correct your grammar no matter who you were,” said Jack Kay, Sherman’s longtime associate at Apotex, “He pretty well thought he was smarter than everyone else, and he wasn’t wrong about that.”
“But he was also humble and he was incapable of putting on airs. With Barry, it was no bullshit pretty much all the time.”
The anxiety, grief and anger are understandable, as is the desire to present the warmer, softer version of the Shermans’ legacy to the public in the aftermath of their gruesome demise. Many, though, remember the other side of Barry, one marked by a love for picking fights with adversaries large and small and a willingness to go further across ethical lines than his competitors. Just as Honey’s charm and the Shermans’ money made him friends, his prickly personality and business dealings made him enemies.
Through Apotex, the company he founded in 1974, Barry became a trailblazer in the business of generic pharmaceuticals, putting drugs on the market at prices that undercut their brand- name equivalents. He also became wildly wealthy — the 15 th richest person in the country, according to Canadian Business magazine, with a fortune of $4.77 billion.
In the boardroom and the courts Sherman was a streetfighter, but while alive his thoughts were often occupied by the inevitability of his own demise. “I have always been very conscious of my personal mortality,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir.
In a series of interviews with American author Jeff rey Robinson i n March 2000, Sherman was more specific — and darker. He had made many enemies during a lifetime of legal scraps with the pharmaceutical industry and wondered why one of them hadn’t yet hired someone to kill him.
“They hate us. They have private investigators on us all the time, trying to investigate. The thought once came to my mind, why didn’t they just hire someone to knock me off," Robinson quoted Barry as saying in the book Prescription Games. “For a thousand bucks paid to the right person you can probably get someone killed. Perhaps I’m surprised that hasn’t happened."
It was clear from an early age that Barry Sherman relished a good fight. His grandparents had fled the anti-Semitic pogroms of Eastern Europe to settle in Toronto, where he was born in 1942, but Sher- man himself was a devoted atheist who revelled in insisting people of faith define God in terms he inevitably found inadequate.
In his memoir Sherman describes a grim and joyless childhood, marked by the death of his father — an event about which he did “not recall feeling any sense of great loss” — and five years of summer camp where he felt “imprisoned.” In his teens, he joined the student militia of the Royal Canadian Artillery, where he remembers shocking his fellow recruits by getting into “aggressive and disrespectful debate” with the regiment’s chaplain.
A couple of years later, Barry started working for his uncle, Louis Winter, who owned a generic prescription drugs distributor called Em- pire Laboratories. After Louis and his wife died in 1965, leaving behind four young children, Barry and his highschool friend Joel Ulster purchased the company.
In 1972, the pair received an offer for Empire from the Canadian branch of International Chemical and Nuclear of California (ICN). The buyers required a non- compete clause in the sale contract, preventing ICN shareholders from going into the drug business for five years.
Barry, however, was not a shareholder in his own name, only in the name of his holding company, Bernard C. Sherman Ltd. He withheld the schedule of shareholders until the last minute, hoping ICN wouldn’t spot this technicality. They didn’t, allowing Barry to sneak back into the same business and found Apotex the following year. This wrangling was a point of pride for him; as he boasted in his memoir, “This worked out exactly as I hoped.”
It was far from the last time Barry would outsmart his opponents by thinking farther ahead, recognizing and exploiting legal loopholes and being willing to take risks. Lawsuits are a cost of doing business in the generic drug industry, but Apotex went farther than its competitors in its willingness to challenge patents and to fight for the coveted six-month windows of exclusivity the U.S. grants to the first instance of a generic product to make it to market. A search of records at the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal alone shows more than 1,200 case files involving Apotex.
Apotex’s best-known legal maneuver might be its introduction of a generic version of the blood thinner Plavix. Patent owners Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol- Myers Squibb came to a settlement with Apotex in which in exchange for a sum of money, the generic drugmaker agreed not to sell its version of Plavix. But a clause in the deal allowed Apotex to bring its product to market if the U.S. Federal Trade Commission didn’t uphold the agreement. When, as Barry had predicted, the FTC did reject the settlement, Apotex had an opportunity to flood the market with its version of the drug.
Sherman liked to characterize his fights with the patented drugmakers as being in the interest of average people struggling to afford brandname drugs, going as far as accusing the multinational drug companies of “raping” Canada’s healthcare system. His paranoia about the lengths to which his competitors might go to undermine him wasn’t entirely irrational.
Paul Whybrow, a former undercover fraud detective with London’s famed Scotland Yard police who later worked as a private investigator, confirmed to the Post that a big pharma company had once hired him to target Sherman for investigation.
“I met Sherman a couple of times in the mid ‘ 90s, having worked my way up the Apotex management structure whilst posing undercover as an i nternational pharmaceutical procurement agent looking to buy product,” Whybrow said. “At this time the pharmaceutical i ndustry had some very dark corners, one of which was occupied by Sherman et al.”
Robinson’s book gives an account, which Whybrow would not deny, of a discreet meeting at a European pub in the ’ 90s between Whybrow, two other private investigators and a middleman for a Big Pharma company that was anxious to have the thorn- in- the- side Canadian out of the drug business.
Two of the investigators had just returned from Canada where they had staked out Apotex. To get up close, they had dressed as workers holding clipboards at the company’s loading bays and eating hotdogs with employees at picnic tables outside. The middleman was grasping for more.
“What’s his sexual preference?” he asked the investigators. “Could we get him hooked up with little girls, or even underaged boys?” Though there was never any i ndication Sherman was interested in such things, the man was eager to “take (Sherman) out of the game,” Whybrow recalled, “whatever it takes.” If there was no basis for a sex sting, the middleman mused about setting Sherman up with a halfkilo of cocaine in his trunk.
Whatever further ideas t he middleman had f or dirty tricks, Whybrow said it didn’t include him, although he retains an image of Sherman as a troublesome and aggressive businessman.
“As a businessman I bel i eve t hat Sherman was ruthless in pursuit of fame and indeed fortune. Without doubt, in those days, he made enemies and was not the philanthropic all- round good guy that he is now being painted. He was always politically connected, but I believe he saw this as a form of, perhaps, protection.”
Sherman’s litigiousness and combative style were at the fore even when the line blurred between business and family. In September, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against Sherman by his cousins. Orphaned following the 1965 death of the uncle who founded Empire, they argued Sherman owed them an interest in Apotex, which he had purchased with the proceeds of the sale of their late father’s business. The cousins appealed the decision.
AS HAS ALREADY BEEN MENTIONED, HE WOULD CORRECT YOUR GRAMMAR NO MATTER WHO YOU WERE. HE PRETTY WELL THOUGHT HE WAS SMARTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE, AND HE WASN’T WRONG ABOUT THAT. — JACK KAY, SHERMAN’S LONGTIME ASSOCIATE AT APOTEX HE WAS HUMBLE... AND HE WAS INCAPABLE OF PUTTING ON AIRS.
In response to his cousins’ contention, Sherman withdrew millions of dollars in financial assistance he had been providing them. Their statement of claim contended he had offered the financial assistance in the first place in order to make the cousins dependent on him, and to keep them from learning about their rights to the business — a contention Sherman’s counsel denied in a response filed with the court. A representative of cousin Kerry Winter told the Post they had no comment at this time, “other than to express ( their) sincere condolences to t he Sherman family.”
His highest- profile and most controversial opponent, however, was neither a family member nor a rival executive. It was Nancy Olivieri, a researcher at SickKids hospital in Toronto who was working on an Apotex- funded clinical trial into the effectiveness of the drug deferiprone in treating people with a blood disorder called thalassaemia.
Olivieri became concerned about evidence suggesting the drug wasn’t effective for some patients, telling Apotex and the research ethics board monitoring the study she wanted to inform the patients about the risk. Apotex threatened to sue her if she did. Olivieri informed the patients and published her findings regardless.
In 1999, reporter Lesley Stahl interviewed Sherman about the controversy for the television show 60 Minutes. Sherman denied Apotex had told Olivieri not to inform her patients about her concerns about the drug, but Stahl presented him with a letter from the company’s vice- president that contradicted him.
At one point in the testy interview, Sherman muttered under his breath, "She’s nuts,” a reference to Olivieri. Stahl challenged him to repeat the statement.
“I’ ll say certain things to you off the record,” Barry replied.
“We’re reporters, we’re not your pals,” Stahl shot back.
Arthur Schafer, the founding director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba and former ethics advisor to Olivieri, said the legal battles took an extraordinary toll on the researcher.
“The full power of Barry Sherman’s immense wealth was launched against Olivieri,” he said. “She withstood it and emerged ultimately victorious, but my oh my, what a struggle and what an emotional burden to be under these crushing lawsuits.”
It’s remarkable that despite such high- profile controversies, the Shermans’ public image was only burnished over the years — in no small part because while Barry was collecting enemies, Honey was charming Toronto society, extending the couple’s philanthropic reach and making the family friends in high places.
Honey Reich was born in a displaced persons c a mp to t wo Holocaust survivors from Poland before the family immigrated to Canada.
Sporty and athletic in school, she graduated from the University of Toronto and at the urging of her mother, she once told a magazine writer, she volunteered at Mount Sinai hospital to meet a nice Jewish doctor.
In August 1970 a friend arranged for her to meet Barry. They were married on July 2, 1971, by a judge at York County Courthouse. Their first child, a daughter, named Lauren, was born in 1975. After several miscarriages the couple turned to surrogacy, giving them a son and two more daughters: Jonathon in 1983, Alexandra in 1986, and Kaelen in 1990.
Fittingly for someone with her name, Honey was the sweetener to Barry’s combativeness. As the couple’s wealth grew, she took her place as his emissary in the community, attending fundraisers, sitting on boards and providing the warm conversations and social graces for which her husband seemingly had no patience.
She was involved with a long list of organizations — the Baycrest Foundation, the Mount Sinai Women’s Auxiliary, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Jewish Foundation of Greater Toronto, the Holocaust Education Centre and the board of governors of York University.
At the funeral, family friend Senator Linda Frum recalled Honey’s good spirits in the face of illnesses including cancer, a disease with which Barry had also had a bout a decade earlier.
“I don’t think Honey was ever in what could be called good health from the time I met her. And yet, between multiple back, hip, and shoulder surgeries for her crippling arthritis, to recently surviving throat cancer, Honey was the most fun- loving, energetic, and uncomplaining person I ever met,” Frum said.
“Recently, I asked Honey what motivated her in her life. Why did she live the way she did, so focused on others, so consistently engaged in acts of charity, rather than the usual selfish pursuits of billionaires? She answered that she was sure being the daughter of Holocaust survivors had much to do with it.”
The contrast between Honey and Barry’s personalities was on display when a writer for Toronto Life magazine was profiling the couple in 2008. Barry refused interview requests, but Honey agreed to speak.
When a maid l ed t he writer into the house for the appointment, Barry was standing in the kitchen in a bathrobe eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. “What are you doing here?” he asked, then returned to his reading until Honey arrived.
Barry replied on Honey for things as significant as maintaining social connections and as minor as laying out the outfits she thought he should wear to public events. Yet in his memoir, Sherman wrote little about his family life — an absence he acknowledged. Revealing his own disinterest in emotional subjects, he assumed people just wouldn’t care about his familial relationships.
“The fact that I make little mention of my wife and children should not be taken as suggesting that they are not important to my life, as that would be anything but true,” he wrote. “It seems to me that information about my family is likely to be of less interest to a reader than my observations relating to philosophy, Canadian politics, and the pharmaceutical industry.”
He did write at length about his philosophical views on the purpose of philanthropy, however, concluding that our compulsion to help others is rooted in an instinctive drive to nurture those closest to us, and is ultimately selfish.
“Power and wealth bring an opportunity to derive an extra measure of happiness by acting to help others, be it family, friends, members of our community, our country, or mankind at large,” he wrote. “Individuals who help others to an unusual extent are considered to be ‘ kind,’ ‘ moral’ or generous,’ although, if my thesis that everything is done in pursuit of happiness is correct, then there can be no such thing as ( altruism), kindness, generosity or morality.”
Consistent with this be- lief, Sherman was known to leverage his generosity to his own advantage. In 1999, with the Olivieri scandal still ongoing, Sherman asked then- University of Toronto president Robert Prichard to lobby the federal government against drug patent regulatory reform that would be bad for Apotex. Prichard wrote a letter to the prime minister saying the reform could put a proposed donation from Apotex for a new medical sciences centre at risk, an action for which he later apologized to the university.
Sherman also pushed rules to their limits when it came to political fundraising. In May, he filed a lawsuit to block the lobbying commissioner’s investigation into political fundraisers he held for Justin Trudeau in 2015 and 2016, calling it “an unanchored fishing expedition.”
And in 2006, then-Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe returned $ 27,000 in donations from five children of current and former Apotex executives after an outcry from the opposition. They included two $ 5,400 donations from a pair of 11- yearold twins.
There are two very different interpretations of Sherman’s legacy in Canadian healthcare. As the version on Apotex’s website has it, he is a hero. The company boasts that its litigation to bring drugs to market before patent expiry has saved the public almost $19 billion.
“Patients around t he world l i ve healthier and more fulfilled lives thanks to his life’s work,” the websi t e reads. “His si gnificant impact on healthcare and healthcare sustainability will have an enduring impact for many years to come.”
Aidan Hollis, an economics professor at t he University of Calgary who studies the pharmaceutical industry, said that impact stretches beyond Canada’s borders. Apotex was the only company to ever take advantage of a legal provision allowing Canadian drug companies to export important drugs to developing countries, sending an anti- retroviral HIV/AIDS medication to Rwanda.
“He really led the way, with some other companies, in making a competitive Canadian generic industry,” Hollis said. “It clearly led to much lower prices than otherwise, having generic manufacturers competing in the market.”
Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor who has studied generic drug pricing in Canada, disagrees. Canada has the most expensive generic drugs in the developed world, Attaran noted, for which he believes aggressive lobbying — led by Apotex — is responsible.
“That lobbying has succeeded at keeping Canadian drug prices for generics artificially high,” Attaran said. “Our generic drug prices are really, really, really ripping us off. And this was Mr. Sherman’s life’s work.”
Leslie Dan, a fierce longtime competitor of Sherman’s who founded the generic drug company Novopharm, disputed that characterization of his rival’s legacy. Dan said he’s confident the Canadian generic drug industry the two helped create has had a positive effect on people’s lives.
“It became a concern of our governments to make medication accessible at a moderate price. In that respect he was a pioneer, without a doubt. And I dare say, so was I,” Dan said.“We were the two major forces to make available many, expansive brandname products available to the public at a moderate, low price, once they became genericized. That’s a definite contribution of both companies in terms of public health.”
Asked to comment on what Sherman was like as a competitor, Dan would say little beyond observing that the two took different approaches to conducting business. Dan said he preferred sorting out problems with people face- to- face, while Sherman revelled in leveraging the full force of the legal system.
“He does things his way, I do things my way,” Dan said. “Our relationship was as expected. He did a lot of good for the community. You have to look at the good side.” eyond Barry’s business accomplishments and the c ouple’s philanthropic largesse, the mystery and manner of the Shermans’ death leaves troubling questions. While police investigators have declared the deaths suspicious, by week’s end they had not declared them homicides, and had not made any public statement to counter earlier reports they were not seeking suspects.
Every action Toronto police take in their investigation will be scrutinized — by family, with their parallel investigation, and by some of the country’s most powerful, who counted the Shermans as friends.
In a year- end interview with the Post this week, Toronto Police Service chief Mark Saunders flatly refused to answer any question related to the investigation or to the pressure inherent in probing the deaths of two enormously wealthy people whose friends include the mayor of the city and the Prime Minister of Canada. “I’m not talking on it right now,” Saunders said. “My condolences to the family.” Pressed on the matter, he appeared to grow frustrated.
While police must always be careful about their public statements about high- profile investigations on the record, Saunders isn’t the only one who has decided it’s best not to comment. For such a high-profile case, there have so far been remarkably few leaks, and even those outside law enforcement are choosing their words carefully, if they’re commenting at all.
“No one wants to talk about it right now,” a high-ranking member of the city’s medical community told the Post.
“I am not able to speak,” said a lawyer who worked closely with Sherman on his patent fights.
Aviva Rubin, daughter of Murray Rubin, said there’s an anxiety that comes when the lives of two very wealthy Jewish people are scrutinized in the media. Despite the Shermans’ well-documented generosity, the worry is that mention of their multimilliondollar home and legal battles will be used to fuel horrible old stereotypes, she said. “For a community that, in a lot of ways, often braces itself for hatred, there is kind of a fear that it’s going to get picked up and somehow twisted into something that feels antiSemitic in nature,” Rubin said.
Barry Sherman, the culturally Jewish atheist, would likely have scoffed at the idea of looking down at the chaos his death created from the great beyond. But if he is, comments he made before his death suggest he might be preoccupied with all the work that’s going undone without him.
“Barry would often say that he expected to die at an early age as his father did before him,” said Kay, the Apotex vice- chairman. “As the years went by, Barry’s tune changed and we would tell each other that we would live to 120 … which we later amended to 150. In his words, there was too much to be done.”
“Barry would say, ‘ I have to live forever because the universe cannot get along without me.’ ”
BARRY WOULD OFTEN SAY THAT HE EXPECTED TO DIE AT AN EARLY AGE AS HIS FATHER DID BEFORE HIM. AS THE YEARS WENT BY, BARRY’S TUNE CHANGED AND WE WOULD TELL EACH OTHER THAT WE WOULD LIVE TO 120 … WHICH WE LATER AMENDED TO 150. — APOTEX VICE- CHAIRMAN