The power and privilege of money reveal a two-tiered police system.
Everybody has their price, I suppose. Only a precious few can afford to pay it, no holds barred.
The Sherman family can pay it.
A $10-million reward for information leading to the apprehension and prosecution of those responsible for the Dec. 15, 2017 murders of Barry and Honey Sherman, megarich couple, philanthropists, he the founder of Canada’s largest generic pharmaceutical company — he was a ruthless entrepreneur when he wasn’t being a bountiful billionaire, she a beloved member of the charitable social circuit.
What is so eye-catching is not just the extravagance of the reward, announced by family lawyer Brian Greenspan on Friday at the Apotex headquarters in north Toronto, for which reporters had to preregister, sign in and be escorted to the bathroom by a security official, lest anybody go poking about in what is a notoriously secret, intensely cutthroat business. The kind that just might attract, say, the services of a contract killer. And lord knows Barry Sherman had made an abundance of enemies during his spectacular career.
It’s the entitlement, the check-book command that some people enjoy because that’s all they’ve ever known. It’s the privilege of money. So, there at the table was a veritable Mount Rushmore of retired homicide dicks, with nearly a century of collective experience on the Toronto Police Service. Plus a civilian forensic expert with 28 years under his belt.
And they’re just the tip of the for-hire heap corralled to do the Sherman family’s bidding, to do — Greenspan asserted — what the cops haven’t done or did badly. Add to the panoply, pathologists and forensic psychiatrists and stud defence lawyers and call-takers for the tip line that launched operations yesterday, and the still to be named panel of adjudicators who will decide how the reward will be split depending on the value of the information.
Imagine, for a minute, how Canada would look without universal health care, without equality of need and access to resources.
This is the two-tier system, applied to policing, that the Sherman heirs have constructed to support their parallel investigation. Because they can. Pshaw, countered Greenspan.
“The antithesis is true. What private resources do is assist the community by enhancing investigations. Not to have a two-tiered system, but to ensure investigations are conducted thoroughly and comprehensively and to free the public purse from the burden of the investigation that we contemplate so that, in this year of overtaxed resources within Toronto homicide, we can alleviate part of the burden by providing private forensic assistance.”
It can take a year, Greenspan pointed out, for forensic evidence collected at a crime scene to be processed by the Centre for Forensic Science. But with their own elite professionals on the payroll, the Shermans can use private facilities.
Which is another way of jumping to the top of the list. Because they can. Greenspan wrapped the undertaking in altruistic sensibilities, as if everyone benefits. But there were 61 murders in Toronto last year — Barry and Honey Sherman but two of them — and 33 remain unsolved.
The families of those victims have to beg for investigative updates.
They’re not entitled to know what the cops know, to protect the “integrity” of an investigation.
The names of the slain don’t merit miles of media coverage.
They slip into the annals of the forgotten, cases still left open, maybe at some future date resurrected as cold case second looks.
In decades of covering crime, never once have I heard of a reward posted where anyone with information was not urged to take what they might know to the cops. Yet that’s what has been mounted here — come to us, we’ll take carriage.
“We believe that it provides the new initiative, the new opportunity to seek information,” said Greenspan. “It’s not as if leads have not poured into my office over the past 10 months. Every consideration is given to each of the calls, whether from a psychic or from someone who might otherwise prove to be untrustworthy.
“Many, many investigations are successfully concluded as a result of someone in either a criminal organization or someone who has been involved as an offender in the criminal community who is aware of information … and until and unless an incentive is provided to that person, either by leniency in a subsequent (court matter) or the offer of a significant award, they remain silent and remain committed to that silence within that community.
“This is the opportunity for those people to come forward. And as they become wealthy, their colleagues who are engaged in this crime become the subjects of a prosecution.”
Appeal to greed. Because it’s what these exceptionally advantaged seekers of justice understand.
And, of course, the Sherman clan has one critical axe to grind: the colossal blunder, by the family’s reckoning, of an early investigative theory, bruited around unsourced in media reports, that the deaths were a murder-suicide.
Police had noted last January that there were no signs of a forced entry at the Sherman Old Colony Rd. mansion and investigators were not looking for suspects.
The outraged family immediately hired private investigators and a pathologist to conduct a second, independent autopsy.
By last June, Det.-Sgt. Susan Gomes was publicly confirming that they were investigating a “target double homicide.”
Greenspan mentioned alleged lapses and sloppiness in the police investigation. “We have seen failings and deficiencies … which have prompted the family to take this action.”
On behalf of the family, he strongly advocated a publicprivate partnership between his gang of top-drawer investigators and the homicide squad, which has never been done before in North America.
He claimed the proposal had already been made, with no response. “We have certainly offered them what we know. But despite attempts to further the concept of privatepublic partnership, that has not been embraced in terms of sharing information with us.”
Of course, it is entirely possible, even likely, that police — they long stayed silent about the investigation, no updates — are playing their cards close to the vest because they’re loath to share information with family members who may still be viewed as suspects, although Greenspan dismissed that possibility out of hand.
Rewards don’t actually have a great history of success, anyway. And, despite what you’ve seen in the movies or on TV, or read in crime thrillers, private gumshoes rarely break open a case.
It must be agony for the Sherman family as the murders linger, unsolved, jammed in, with all the other homicide cases which haven’t been closed.
As if Barry and Honey Sherman were, you know, just like everybody else.
Imagine, for a minute, how Canada would look without universal health care, without equality of need and access to resources. This is the two-tier system, applied to policing.