THE ROAD TO REDEMPTION
Book tells tale of lawyer Tait
When journalist Veronique Mandal started hunting for missing Windsor criminal lawyer Don Tait, she never imagined it would lead 17 years later to writing a biography about his redemption and battle with terminal cancer.
It all started in 2000 when Tait fled Windsor after being accused of assaulting his girlfriend. He left behind clients scrambling for a defence lawyer and Revenue Canada anxious to chat with him. The Windsor Star’s editor-in-chief at the time, Marty Beneteau, put out a challenge to his reporters: Find Tait and you can interview him wherever he is living.
“Something in my brain said, ‘I’m going to find Don Tait,’ ” she said. “I started to do some old-fashioned journalism and hit the street looking for people who were on the more seedy side of (the group) who might know something.”
She found him in Costa Rica and within days, she flew out to interview him. She was amazed at how bad the once prominent, flamboyant lawyer looked. His face, torso and legs were bloated from the excessive use of alcohol and drugs.
“For the first time in my life I felt sorry for Don Tait,” she said. “Up until that point I had thought he brought this on himself. He was the one who was drinking, doing drugs and he was the one who got in a brawl with his girlfriend. But looking at him, I thought this is really a sad caricature of a man. I didn’t know what his story was going to be, but I knew there was a lot we didn’t know.”
Mandal’s book, Getting Off: A Criminal Lawyer’s Road to Redemption, tells the story of Tait’s fall from grace after years of abusing alcohol, drugs and his dealings with clients who included bikers and people involved in organized crime. She started the book 10 years ago after Tait called her from South Africa and asked if she would be interested in penning his biography.
“The book is Tait before Africa and Tait in Africa,” she said. “Tait in Africa, that’s the redemption. He had a heart attack that just about killed him. All of his arteries have been replaced and then he was diagnosed with throat cancer. That’s the road to redemption: every time he had a catastrophe it made him more spiritual and made him realize who he was.”
The book is filled with pages of stories of Tait’s high-swinging lifestyle as a prominent lawyer with nights fuelled by alcohol, drugs and sex.
It follows in detail his crashing fall and his numerous attempts to sneak back into Windsor avoiding police and other people looking to find him.
It wraps up with his new life in South Africa with his wife Johanna (the two were divorced and remarried after Tait’s recovery) and his job as a spiritual lecturer at The Cedars, a private addiction treatment centre in Scottburgh.
“He’s at peace with himself in many ways,” Mandal said. “He’s not had a drink since 2000 and he says the old Tait is in there and it’s a lifelong project to maintain a good life and not to yearn to go back to what he was.”
Getting Off is available for $20 at Juniper Books, Biblioasis, From the Heart Boutique and online at Amazon.ca.