At the end of the video, Barry describes his take on the couple’s separation of duties: “We decided to divide up the responsibilities. She does all the community service work—she has been chair of just about everything—and my time is better spent doing what I can to earn money so I can write the cheques. That’s how we have divided it.”
Honey nods and looks serious for a moment. It appears, at least to a casual viewer, that she has never heard her husband articulate the arrangement this way, at least not in so public a forum. She nods again, decisively this time. “Fair and equitable,” she says.
It’s difficult to quantify how much the Shermans gave to charity in their lifetimes. At times, it was done anonymously. Dr. Michael Spino, the ApoPharma president who was involved in the thalassemia and deferiprone research, says that when he first arrived at the company, “We had to force Barry to at least acknowledge Apotex. Barry did not want to be set up as some sort of super person. Honey felt a little bit differently, but Barry just did it because it was right.”
Sherman told people, and Spino was one of them, that he believed people should give 20 percent of what they earned to the community. He insisted that all people who were able should make significant financial contributions.
Since Apotex is a private company, there is no way to know what Sherman earned annually, but the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his personal net worth at $4.7 billion at time of death, a calculation largely based on his Apotex holdings. One highly placed insider with knowledge of Sherman’s family holding company told me that Sherman had numerous investments outside of Apotex and that his real net worth was closer to $10 billion. A UJA official said that Sherman gave that organization at least $150 million over the years. The public record of press releases and news stories reveals that a series of multi-million dollar donations were made over the years beginning with a donation of $60 million in the late 1990s, to what was eventually named the Sherman Campus, a Jewish recreation and cultural centre built in the north end of Toronto. Sherman friend Leslie Gales explains that this was a very important project for Barry, who grew up at a time when Jewish people were not accepted in other health clubs. Out of that was born the concept of the Jewish Community Centre (JCC), recreational and cultural clubs built in the 1950s and 1960s. Sherman wanted to build new infrastructure on the existing site of an outdated JCC, and friends convinced him to attach his family name to it. After their deaths, a two-acre park in a corner of the campus was named the Honey and Barry Community Park in recognition of their service and contributions.
As noted in the UJA video, both the Shermans volunteered as well as providing funding, Honey much more than Barry. She was on numerous boards, including that of the Baycrest Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, the York University Foundation, the Mount Sinai Women’s Auxiliary, and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. She was also chair of Toronto’s Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre. Those who sat with Honey Sherman on boards and travelled with her to Israel to see where some of the donated money was being spent recall that she would ask probing questions. Recently, the mayor of Sderot, a town on the border of the Gaza Strip, commented to a Canadian charity official that he would miss Honey Sherman, both as a regular visitor to his town and as someone who was clearly invested in making sure donated dollars were well spent. The mayor told the Canadian charity official that “nobody asked more or better questions than Honey Sherman.” Friends and colleagues also recall how, in addition to asking tough questions, Honey found it important to make a tangible connection to the difficult past of her family. Friend Karen Simpson Radomski, herself a veteran volunteer in Jewish charities and the wife of lawyer Harry Radomski, recalls the trip she took with Honey to Poland, where they joined in the annual March of the Living, a silent walk on foot that traces the journey from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, where the gas chambers were located. “It was so important to her to learn first-hand about this part of her family’s history,” says Simpson Radomski. “I think, for her, there was some element of survivor’s guilt. She knew how fortunate she was, and I think that is why she always tried to help others.”
Barry Sherman was much less hands-on than his wife, but he did hold various fundraising posts over the years, and as a graduate of the University of Toronto he had a continuing commitment to providing guidance and advice (in addition to donations) to the university’s Entrepreneurship Leadership Council. The Sherman philanthropy included major donations to Baycrest Apotex Home for the Aged, and also non-Jewish charities, with significant gifts to the United Way and Mount Sinai Hospital. Alex Sherman told me that “one of the amazing things my parents did was envision the Baycrest Apotex Home for the Aged….They often thought big-picture but also paid attention to the little details that brought comfort and joy in the spaces they created.”
The Shermans have also sponsored pharmacy research at the University of Toronto with about $12 million in donations, primarily to the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, named for Sherman’s greatest rival, the founder of Novopharm. Internationally, Sherman’s Apotex Foundation has donated an estimated $50 million in pharmaceutical products to relief groups coping with natural disasters and epidemics.
But what kind of couple were the Shermans? Did they travel together? Read the same books? Gossip about their friends and neighbours? Watch the same Netflix shows? Could they be relied on if you were in trouble? What kind of parents were they? Were they a loving and close couple or a distant one, living a marriage of convenience?
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The Shermans’ marriage of forty-six years began not long after Cindy Ulster introduced her candystriper friend Honey Reich to Dr. Barry Sherman in 1970. Over the years, the running joke was that Barry was not an especially attractive catch, because Honey’s parents had always hoped their daughter would marry a medical doctor. When it turned out that Barry had a PhD but not an MD, Honey told her parents and girlfriends she had decided that was fine. “Close enough,” she said. The couple married the next year. Fred and Bryna Steiner, who wed two days later, were the closest “couple” friends the Shermans had. Dinners, parties, and trips to Florida were done together. No matter where they were, laughter dominated their table, with each person holding their own in the lively conversation. Fred and Barry did discuss their business interests and how much they both had to pay to the Canadian government in taxes. Barry, in particular, hated to pay taxes and over the years would engage in a variety of schemes designed to lower the amounts he owed. But Steiner also recalls free-ranging discussions among the four of them about the issues of the day.
When their orders were given and the food arrived, the Shermans’ plates were never filled with anything particularly healthy. Fried food was their favourite, the more batter on fish the better. Vegetables were tolerated if the zucchini was fried in a thick batter, served crispy brown. Sherman had diabetes, but he wasn’t keen to follow the diet prescribed by his doctors. He had also had prostate cancer and various other ailments. Years later, Joanne Mauro would make an effort to ensure that her boss ate well at least at lunch. She would pick up a healthy takeout meal or, when Apotex was big enough to have a chef and a cafeteria, make sure something green and leafy showed up on his desk. That did not stop Sherman at odd hours figuring out the best route to take through the Apotex building to find the choicest assortment of cookies and chocolate sitting out on employees’ desks. Out at a restaurant, away from the eyes of Barry’s assistant, the Shermans were freer to indulge in whatever they thought was tasty. And Honey always seemed to home in with laser focus on the plate beside or across from her, particularly if it held french fries.
Neither Barry nor Honey was a big drinker. Barry could barely tolerate half a glass of wine, and Honey was only marginally more interested. If there was a dance floor, Honey would drag Barry onto it, though he did not like to dance or in fact like anything at all about music. He told people music was “pointless,” t
hat “it all sounds the same.” But if Honey wanted to dance, he danced. Barry also had a mischievous side to him, and he liked to get a rise out of the Steiners. At a certain point in a dinner, he would look at Honey with a sly narrowing of his eyes behind his thick glasses. Then he’d look at the Steiners, then back at Honey. Pushing his chair back from the table, he would nod to his wife and say, “Let’s go get laid.”
One story the Steiners chuckle over was a visit to Amsterdam’s red light district in the 1970s. Honey could not believe what the “women were doing,” recalls Bryna. In fact, both of the Shermans delighted in showing they had a bawdy side. On one of their Florida trips in the early days, Honey announced to Bryna, “I want to go to that male strip club, the Crazy Horse Saloon.” Bryna shook her head. “Honey, you’re being crazy.” Honey insisted, and the two couples got in a car and headed to the Crazy Horse. Six men, all dressed like the Village People, danced onto the stage and the show began. Barry kept marvelling at their “equipment” as, one by one, the dancers stripped down to nothing. Bryna, who had been coaxed by Honey many times to step out of her comfort zone, tried desperately and unsuccessfully to convince Honey to approach the stage and tuck a $20 bill into one dancer’s skimpy waistband. Another time, when Honey found out that some of Barry’s male friends would occasionally exchange emails containing photos of naked women and dirty jokes, Honey insisted that the men forward them to her. As Bryna says, “Honey did not want to miss out on anything.”
The couples certainly had fun together, but they made a point of being there for each other if help was needed, including a shoulder to lean on. The Shermans also took care of their own parents. Honey’s mother and father, for example, had a nice condo in Florida courtesy of the Shermans. Barry and Honey each had a sister, and both were well cared for by their wealthy siblings. In particular, Honey invited her sister, Mary Shechtman, to work on designing and decorating the homes the Sherman couple owned over the years. Mary, according to Sherman holding company insiders, was also given significant financial assistance to purchase real estate, including numerous houses sub-divided as rental apartments and her Forest Hill home where she and her husband, Allen, live. Allen’s foray into the retail jewellery business, helped by at least $32 million in Barry Sherman money, ended in bankruptcy. With the death of the Shermans, and the rift that developed between Mary and her nephew and nieces, the Shechtmans were cut off. “My family (Allen and my children) and I have struggled desperately since the incident,” she wrote in a May 2019 email to me. “We have never had the luxury of healing properly. We were left on our own and had to put all our energies into surviving. We lost more than we could ever imagine and more than Honey & Barry would ever have wanted for us. They would be horrified, angry and devastated by the pain we have had to suffer and the losses we have had to endure….hopefully we are finally on the road to recovery from the devastation we have had to deal with emotionally, financially and physically.” At time of writing, Mary was telling her friends that Allen is driving an Uber and she is planning to start work as a tour guide to make ends meet.
From his early teenage days, Barry knew he wanted to have children. In high school, he made pocket money by babysitting neighbourhood kids. He told his friend Joel Ulster, who married before Barry did and quickly started a family, that he looked forward to having his own. With the Ulster and Steiner households brimming with kids, it would often be Barry sitting on the carpeted floor, amusing the children with toys and games. A standard opening line from Uncle Barry, once the children were old enough to have a conversation, was, “Tell me what’s going on.” Friends have mused that his affinity with children, particularly when they were babies, grew out of the notion that children were blank slates, filled with promise and potential, which appealed to his entrepreneurial spirit. Adults frequently disappointed Barry Sherman, but young children never did. As future parents often do, the Shermans “test drove” other people’s children. To give Fred and Bryna a break, Barry and Honey would sometimes pick up their three children on a Friday and take them for dinner. “Our kids became his kids,” Fred Steiner recalls. It was yet another odd part of Barry Sherman’s personality that though he spoke so often of wanting children, when he had his own, he saw very little of them.
Having their own children proved more difficult than the Shermans expected. After Honey first miscarried in 1972, it happened several more times before Lauren was born in 1975. Joanne Mauro, who began working as Barry’s executive assistant not long after, recalls that Barry or Honey would bring toddler Lauren, a “real cutie,” to the Apotex offices. Lauren remained an only child until she was eight. Honey was continuing to have miscarriages, and finally, in the early 1980s, the couple decided to try surrogacy. In the 1980s, paying a woman to use her eggs and her womb to carry a child to term was not common practice in Canada, and it was only just becoming popular in the United States. An American lawyer provided the Shermans with books that described the physical characteristics and education of potential mothers. In each case, Barry’s sperm was used, and each of the three surrogates they would engage came from a different US state. The lawyer had the women sign what Sherman told friends was an “iron-clad contract” that would prevent them from ever having a claim on the child or the Sherman fortune. In each case, the mother was flown to Canada for the birth so that the children would be Canadian citizens. Jonathon was born in 1983, Alex in 1986, and Kaelen in 1990.
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The funeral for Barry and Honey Sherman on December 21, 2017 was the first time anyone but the closest of family members and friends had seen the Sherman children in public since their parents’ deaths the week before. None had spoken publicly and the only communication was the brief statement they had issued decrying the murder-suicide theory. The four Sherman children came on stage together after Rabbi Eli Rubenstein read the poem “Each of Us Has a Name” by Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky. Jonathon stepped to the podium first and encouraged those in the audience to take a moment to “breathe and reflect” and to consider the “enormous impact that this is having on everyone gathered here today.” Before her brother delivered the first eulogy, Alex Sherman sang a Hebrew song—“Eli Eli (My God, My God),” a hopeful song written by Hanna Senesh, a young Hungarian poet and paratrooper who in 1944, as part of the British Army, jumped into Nazi-occupied Europe and was later caught and executed. She is considered a national heroine in Israel and the story of how, at age 23, she refused a blindfold and faced the firing squad head on, is a powerful tale of bravery. Kaelen, the youngest Sherman, recited the words to the song “You Are My Sunshine,” which she said their father, returning home late from work each night, used to sing to them as children. “I would like to take this time to sing it back to him.” Lauren, the eldest Sherman child, did not speak.
In the audience were thousands of mourners, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynn and Toronto Mayor John Tory, along with hundreds of Apotex employees in blue company T-shirts. Jonathon began by describing his family ordeal. “These last few days have been really fucked up for my family,” he told mourners. When his parents were alive, he said they would always take charge and provide comfort in difficult situations. While Barry focused on his work and supporting the family, Honey handled all the organizational details of the children’s lives, including parent-teacher interviews, after-school events, and summer camp. “Our mother always had everything taken care of,” he recalled. While she was organized on her kids’ behalf, Honey was often forgetful of her own things. On a family trip to Israel, Jonathon told the mourners, the family had to retrace their steps after each stop to look for his mother’s left-behind wallet, keys, or other items. Her funny ways aside, Jonathon said he and his siblings marvelled at how “stoic” their mother was, displaying so much energy in making sure her children’s needs were met while struggling physically. Knowing how difficult it was for his mother to get around on some days due to various infi
rmities, Jonathon said, it was a significant accomplishment that she was able to train for, take part in, and win a Dancing with the Stars–style competition to raise money for a charity.
Jonathon spent part of his eulogy talking about his sisters. He gave the eldest, Lauren, “amazing credit for paving the way” in the family and lauded her “free spirit and your ability to love life.” To his sister Alex, he said she was the “heart of the family” and said he will always recall the gruelling, 250-kilometre race in the Gobi desert in 2007 to raise money for an AIDS charity when she gave her walking stick to a villager who she said needed it more than she did. Alex finished the race, but her brother did not as his partner at the time had to pull out. To Kaelen, the youngest, Jonathon said their parents were “teeming with excitement for your wedding” and he vowed she would still have a wedding when she was ready because “that is what mom and dad would want.” Later, Fred Steiner would put his hand on Jonathon’s shoulder and congratulate him for how he was taking a leadership role in the wake of his parents’ deaths. “Your dad would be proud of you taking charge.” There was also an edge to some of Jonathon’s comments, which upset other members of the family, including Honey’s sister, Mary. In describing a family ski trip to Vermont, Jonathon said his mother let him choose a more difficult run for her after a series of easier trips down the mountain. “When I picked the black run, directly below the chair lift, you were reluctantly gung ho,” Jonathon said, addressing his deceased mother before the thousands of mourners. “I’ll never forget watching you wipe out on the first turn and slide down the entire run for everyone to see. It was effing hilarious. Until you made me march up and collect all your gear.” Mary, and many of the Shermans’ friends were taken aback by Jonathon’s words, given Honey’s infirmities. It was a poorly kept secret in the circles the Shermans travelled in that Jonathon and his mother did not get along. People who knew both Jonathon and Honey said they “hated” each other. In fact, the relationship between Honey and her children was, on many occasions, strained. Lauren, the eldest, confided to one close friend of Honey’s that her mother’s controlling behaviour amounted to “psychological abuse.” Kaelen complained to people she was close to that her mother often told her, “You’re fat. You need to lose weight.” Some friends of Honey said she, in turn, did not like to speak about her children and, as odd as it may seem given her background, called them “the Nazis” to her sister and close friends—an apparent reference to how she felt they controlled her with constant demands. Barry, friends say, was caught in the middle. He maintained a stronger connection to their children by doing two things: listening and giving them money, although he gave significantly less to the younger two than to Jonathon and Lauren.
The Billionaire Murders Page 19