By: Daniel Deilgat
dandeilgat@yahoo.ca Toronto, Ontario
Here’s a headline that you will never see but only because it can’t be proven; Bruce Verchere was murdered; RCMP investigating claims that Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was involved.
In fact, the RCMP looked into that possibility however, even if Mulroney’s henchmen had threatened or coerced Verchere into blowing his head off, and asides from the fact that this would be impossible to prove since Vercheres cannot corroborate that fact, the bottom line is that it appears that Bruce Verchere pulled the trigger, twice.
Nevertheless, the RCMP re-visited the circumstances surrounding the death of Bruce Verchere if only because he was Mulroney’s tax attorney while Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister.
The RCMP faced a huge challenge in investigating the Airbus case.
First of all, the RCMP had to determine where the transactions took place, i.e., in or out of Canada, this is important because if they occurred outside of Canadian borders- which is likely, the RCMP might not be able to conduct a legitimate investigation. What I mean by that is that the RCMP would most certainly revert to investigative resources that they cannot admit being part of and/or have commissioned through third parties. For example when they asked Kroll Canada- a private consulting firm whose New York parent is one of the most prominent investigative firm in the world, to obtain information pertaining to overseas companies and bank accounts, the RCMP did that because they could not have convinced another government to seize that information so, they hired a private sector firm. The reasoning behind the RCMP decision was simple, maybe we can’t get the information legally but at least we get the information and then we’ll go shake down the proverbial trees.
For example; if the RCMP had found that Verchere indeed had handled the Airbus funds to be paid to Mulroney, they could have gone to him and pressure him to admit to his role and, testify against Mulroney. However there was a problem, Verchere died two years earlier.
As plans usually go, something somewhere will go wrong however in this particular case, things seemed to take a turn for the better for the RCMP, a second witness was emerging, Verchere’s wife.
Verchere dutifully spent a lot of his wife’s money because he figured that in marriage, half the assets were his anyway. But in 1993, Verchere’s financial situation took a strange twist, his wife threatened to release information about Bruce Verchere’s involvement in schemes to defraud the Canadian government. In her cross hair was Brian Mulroney, a man she utterly despised if only for the fact that the Mulroney’s liked Bruce Verchere’s mistress more than her, the wife. A much younger woman and the daughter of a prominent international author-who also happened to be a client of Verchere, she was pregnant with twins, the father, Bruce Verchere.
Verchere didn’t have all of the wife’s money and that, he hoped, could be negotiated with his wife since he should be entitled to half of the family’s wealth but, the wife wasn’t finished with her requests and Verchere was put in a corner by his wife.
Although he had cheated on her in the past and that now he had this other family friend pregnant, Lynne Walters-Verchere wanted her money and her husband back. She wanted him to come back home to be the father to his sons and resume their family life, she didn’t want her twenty something sons to be hurt….
What was strange about that request was that the sons were in their early twenties and well on their way out of the house, which would have left Bruce and Lynne alone, with the sons gone to forge their mark on the world. So why want the husband back? What family? Why want him back?
Lynne Walters-Verchere just didn’t want her money back she wanted to punish her husband; she wanted him to see her very morning and night to remind him, to torture him mentally.
When she realized that more than three million dollars was missing, she was pissed. She wanted every single penny back or she would expose the transactions between Airbus and Mulroney, she wanted a close eye on her husband and home was as close as it gets.
Another strange and unusual twist in the matter-perhaps a conflict of interests, was that Bruce Verchere’s lawyer in the divorce proceeding and settlement between him and his wife, was the same lawyer that interrogated Brian Mulroney on behalf of the Canadian government during the trial whereas Mulroney had sued the Canadian government. Bruce Verchere’s lawyer was well aware of the wife’s claims and threats of revealing publicly the involvement of her husband on behalf of clients, knowing that Mulroney was a client of Verchere and that Mulroney was suspected of receiving kickbacks from Airbus.
Allegations that Brian Mulroney was bribed millions of dollars and that Bruce Verchere had hid the money through offshore companies, were not lost on Mr. Sheppard. Funds, we found out later, were in the Isle of Man and handled there by a certain Peter Michael Bond of then Riggs-Valmet. Bond became a witness for the American government after he agreed to testify in an unrelated bankruptcy case and where he almost disclosed Brian Mulroney’s name. However, in reaching his deal with the Justice Department in the United States, Bond represented to American government officials that he had declared that he handled funds for several political leaders, including Brian Mulroney.
The government of George W. Bush granted Peter Michael Bond full immunity against any crimes he might have committed in the Unites States in return for his testimony in the Brennan case and further disclosure related to any other cases that the Justice Department might want to look at. One of those cases was the now defunct Riggs-Bank in Washington. Long looked at as the CIA’s bank, Riggs specialized in handling accounts for international dignitaries.
Eventually an investigation was launched against Riggs and it was fined a record twenty five million dollars for money laundering.
For Claude Armand Sheppard however, defending an action brought by Mulroney against the RCMP and the Canadian government, seemed, the right place to be at, Sheppard had an advantage, he knew that Mulroney wasn’t squeaky clean, but he also knew that Lynne Verchere had given back the file of her husband that contained the evidence against Mulroney, to Mulroney. He knew that he wasn’t going to win unless, the evidence reappeared…
It didn’t apparently.
Not being aware of the Verchere circumstances in 1996-7, I advised the RCMP independently of claims made to us in the Isle of Man. In fact, we had inadvertedly provided part of the evidence to the RCMP in a 1994 complaint with the Vancouver detachment of the RCMP.
However, the RCMP’s Peter German refused to consider the evidence and that was a mistake.
The RCMP could have easily requested the information from the FBI in the United States after we had advised of the relationship between Bond and Mulroney’s assets. Still to this day, there exists many ways to verify the information, interview witness and get the testimony of individuals directly involved in the Mulroney-Airbus transactions yet, the RCMP seemed to be rejecting the Airbus case.
A book written by Canadian author Stevie Cameron was brought to my attention over two years ago. In fact several books by Ms. Cameron were suggested to me but I resisted the temptation to read them in order to be able to better define the validity of our own information. In the last couple of days however I picked up Blue Trust and began to read.
The feeling I got from reading her book was one of satisfaction. I came out of it knowing that it can be proven just how Mulroney was suppose to get the money and if, indeed he actually had the chance to use it.
I realized for the first time just how coincidental our paths have crossed. On behalf of my clients I received information from the Registrar of companies in the Isle of Man that gives the investigators the other end of the Airbus transactions. Karlheinz Schreiber provides the insight on how the deal was initially structured and, Stevie Cameron gives us insight on the personal issues between Mulroney, his lawyers and the women Verchere just couldn’t get enough of. Cameron gave all of us involved in the Airbus case, the structure of the dynamics that enables us to finally paint a picture of truth.
Unlike Stevie Cameron and Arthur Haley however, I am not yet ready to leap to the conclusion that Mulroney might have had something to do with Verchere’s suicide although, in Montreal, police officials and sources seem to be less skeptical.
I don’t have an opinion as to if Mulroney would actually go to the level of having someone killed just because they stole a couple of millions from him, but then again, his is a life of money and destruction for profits.
I knew a man once that was very much like Bruce Verchere however that man was loyal to his wife. But would he have been in the same predicament as Verchere, I have no doubt that he would have done the right thing and face his wife and told her that he had spent most of their money. He wouldn’t have returned home and he wouldn’t have intended to steal the money of his clients that was entrusted with him, but I’m sure he would have used some of it if he was in a bind.
In the description of events in Blue Trust there are some disturbing revelations on how Bruce Verchere lived his last days that are not consistent with the behavior of individuals that are about to kill themselves. Again, just before his death there are a few hours of time spent with his wife, in bed, whereas there could have been conversation, what did they talk about? The book simply tells us that the couple was reading the newspaper from the time they woke up to approximately ten O’clock that strange morning, only going downstairs to make coffee and breakfast to eat back in bed, upstairs.
Bruce Verchere was naked when he went to the washroom to kill himself. Perhaps he always went to the washroom naked; however I don’t think he would have gone downstairs and prepared breakfast naked when neighbors had a clear view of the kitchen. I wonder if there was ever a search for a bath robe. Were there any kind of fibers on his body. If these fibers on his body would have been matched with, say, fiber traces picked up from the crime scene perhaps investigators would have been able to determine if the scene was wiped with that bathrobe. Investigators back then had a special chemical called Luminol. On tile grout, Luminol is a wonderful tool. Once the tiles and joints sprayed, all you have to do is close the lights and block the windows and light up a black light. If there was any blood that was not apparent to the eye or that was wiped, the forensic technicians would have found it.
But then again, the body was whisked from the scene way too early which indicates that the investigators did deem it necessary to conduct a thorough investigation of the crime scene, a chronic problem with the Montreal Police in those years.
The book doesn’t provide any details of the crime scene. For example it was intriguing to read that the wife and son heard not one but two shots fired. Where did the first shot end and where did the second shot go? What kind of shotgun was it. Double barrel? Split triggers? Was there any trigger device to fire the two shots? Why did the son remove the shot gun from the body? A shot gun’s recoil force, most of the time, falls at a distance from the body.
I read somewhere that Verchere might have written his suicide note the night before. Yet that it was found neatly in the middle of his desk surface right after the tragedy? Was the note dusted for prints? Why would he wait until the morning? Did he take any calls from Mulroney that morning? The night before?
If he did write the note the night before why not follow through with the deed while his sons were out of the house? The note clearly states that he didn’t want to traumatize his family any further, yet everybody was at the house the next morning…
I understand that Ms. Cameron’s research affiliate for the book was also a lawyer yet, they offer no technical legal explanations. I found this as disturbing as the thought that Mulroney could have had anything to do with the death of Bruce Verchere.
Another concern that was not addressed in the Cameron book was if Verchere or his wife, were privy to any information pertaining to the interests of Canada that he wasn’t suppose to be familiar with.
Certainly Arthur Hailey believes that Verchere killed himself because he was threatened by Mulroney’s Florida associates which ironically, are Quebeckers. Local thugs that migrated to the warm coast of Florida.
In the end it is clear that Mulroney, being who he is and what he was involved in, would impose on his friends, and professional affiliates, pressures that most of us cannot phantom. Let’s face it, Mulroney entrusted illicit funds with his lawyer whom seemingly was forced to use them in order to protect his client from his own wife.
In the end it killed him and no matter how you cut it, Brian Mulroney had something to do with Verchere’s apparent suicide.
The book never investigated Verchere’s firm for any liability insurance claims it might have filed to repay Mulroney.
Then again, the authors never though that my clients would come up with the other side of the equation.
