Page 26 - Bloomberg Businessweek-October 29, 2018

Bloomberg Businessweek October 29, 2018

“WHEN I SUED HIM, I BROKE HIS F---ING HEART”

substantial: According to court filings, Kerry alone received putting “bracelets on me and charging me for a double mur-
about C$8 million in help over the years. der.” When emphasizing what he viewed as a lightning-bolt
Sherman became a sort of substitute father, Winter said, moment of insight, he had an arresting habit of snapping his
filling the void left by Louis’s death. Eventually, though, fingers, pointing ahead, and raising his voice into falsetto.
he and his siblings grew suspicious of Sherman’s motives. But despite Winter’s grassy-knoll tendencies, he did have
They began seeking documentation from the sale of Empire a point. It was difficult to understand how evidence that
and became convinced that he owed them far more. “Barry appeared obvious to a team of retired detectives hadn’t imme-
Sherman was bribing me,” Winter recalled. “I grew to hate diately been viewed the same way by active ones. And the
him.” The Winters first sued Sherman in 2007. Sherman Sherman family undoubtedly enjoyed greater-than-average
fought back hard, cutting off his cousins financially and access to top officials. Shortly after the couple’s death, the
countersuing to recover the funds he’d provided. “When I mayor, Tory, had been criticized for relaying the children’s
sued him,” Winter said, “I broke his f---ing heart.” (He and his complaints about leaks of the murder-suicide possibility to
siblings continue to press their claims against the Sherman police brass, whose subordinates duly clammed up.
estate, though their legal options are narrowing. An appeal Still, it was hard to credit Winter’s essential argument:
was thrown out in August.) that to spare a dead billionaire’s reputation, a busy big-
“I had plenty of opportunity—and motive—to kill Barry,” city police department was essentially simulating a major
Winter acknowledged. He’d been working as a supervisor on murder inquiry. Mistakes, not malice, were a much more
building sites, where “nobody’s watching me. I don’t punch plausible explanation for the police’s reversal.
in, I don’t punch out. I start my day when I want, I leave when

54 I want. I take lunch when I want. … But I didn’t do it. It’s the VI. COMPANY MEN
truth.” On the night of Dec. 13, he said, “I watched Peaky
Blinders. I like Netflix. I went to a Cocaine Anonymous meet- Sherman spent most of his waking hours at Apotex headquar-
ing, every Wednesday I go.” The fact that Winter was still free ters. His parking space was immediately next to the entrance,
suggested the police, who’d interviewed him at length earlier a double door framed by an oversize letter “A,” rendered
this year, accepted this alibi. in gunmetal gray steel. When I visited in June, the spot was
He was convinced the true culprit was obvious: Sherman still empty, blocked off with a metal crowd-control barrier
himself. His first reaction when he heard the news, he said, and decorated with fresh bouquets of bright flowers. Across
was, “I can’t believe it. He finally snapped.” In Winter’s tell- from the receptionist’s desk inside, at the base of a narrow
ing, the Shermans’ marriage was rocky, and his cousin’s out- atrium, there was a tall, vertical banner printed with a pic-
ward kindnesses masked a capacity for wrath. “When he lost ture of Sherman, wearing a monogrammed lab coat and a
his temper, the ceiling would shake,” Winter said. proud grin.
He repeated to me a claim he’d made to Canadian media— I was there to see Jack Kay, Sherman’s right-hand man of
that in the 1990s, Sherman, supposedly miserable with his more than 30 years, who’d been named chief executive offi-
home life, had asked him to help kill Honey. “Could you find cer in January. He was working out of Sherman’s old office,
somebody to get rid of her?” Winter said Sherman had asked. just a few steps from reception. The Apotex founder rarely
His reaction, he said, was incredulous: “F---! Barry’s asking me discarded a document, and it had taken a team of lawyers to
to arrange a f---ing whack job on his wife!” Yet Winter claimed sift through the towering piles of legal pleadings, patent fil-
he’d gone as far as asking an underworld-connected friend ings, and scrawled notes that once covered every surface.
to help set up a hit before Sherman changed his mind. (In a Now it was clean and corporate, with a few neat rows of files
statement, the Shermans’ children said they were “deeply and a shelf of souvenir pill bottles.
hurt, shocked, and angered” by Winter’s claims, which they Eager to report this story the way I would any other, I was
called “outrageous and baseless.”) careful not to mention my background when I requested an
The police, Winter argued, had been pressured by the interview with Kay. He knew it anyway. “You’re Barry’s son,”
Shermans’ heirs and their allies into abandoning their initial he said as I entered. “I know your father.”
murder-suicide theory, embarking on a sham investigation to At 77 years old, Kay is slight, with a thin fuzz of white DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR/GETTY IMAGES
preserve the memory of a well-connected philanthropist owed hair—Sherman’s physical and temperamental opposite. As
favors even in death. He spoke at times with the quiet inten- Apotex grew, he enjoyed its material fruits more enthusias-
sity of a conspiracy theorist, telling me he was worried that tically than his self-denying partner: His car, parked in the
“they” were going to stop him from talking to me, perhaps by spot next to Sherman’s, was a late-model Mercedes roadster