But was it really greed that drove Cooper? He stole $234,000 over about four years. During those same years, he legitimately earned close to $2 million from his law practice. Perhaps Donaldson and Cooper have more in common than might first appear: The stolen money didn’t make much difference to either of them. Perhaps there are also resemblances between Cooper and Pilzmaker. Pilzmaker was an outsider, anxious to move from a one-man immigration law practice to a corner office in a reputable Bay Street firm, determined to breach the walls of the establishment in whatever way he could. Cooper was an immigrant who came to Canada from Israel when he was twelve years old, and craved the success that immigrants crave. In American Mania, the psychiatrist Peter Whybrow writes that the typical behavioural profile of the migrant is that of someone who is socially competitive, restless, impulsive in decision making, and driven to succeed, and who, if an internal sense of control is lacking, may be driven to aggression and self-destructive risk taking.3
To make it more complicated, the story of Dan Cooper may be more about love and sex than money and greed. A senior lawyer told me about an International Bar Association computer law conference he and Cooper attended in September 1987 at the Garden House Hotel in Cambridge, England. It was there, he said, that Cooper met an attractive German lawyer and began a torrid, long-distance affair, one with high financial demands. Those who knew about the affair wondered later if Cooper, to conceal what was going on from his wife and others, needed cash on the side, a secret source of money, and that was why he began to steal.
Part of lawyers’ self-policing is deciding who should be expelled from the profession, and then deciding who among those expelled should be readmitted. About ten years after condemning his behaviour and throwing him out, the law society of Ontario let Dan Cooper back in, apparently believing him to be a “changed man.” Was this the right thing to do? Was what Cooper did an “aberration,” as his character witnesses claimed, or was it the result of ingrained and immutable weakness? Was he really a changed man?
I FIRST MET Dan Cooper in 1986. We were both partners in blue-chip law firms, across Toronto’s Bay Street from each other. The meeting where we met, in a bank tower boardroom, was one of hundreds dealing with the Dome Petroleum insolvency, a massive corporate collapse that played out during the eighties, cost feckless lenders and duped shareholders billions of dollars, and enriched many members of the Canadian corporate bar who, like me, were able for years to bill relentlessly at exorbitant rates.4 Cooper, as it turned out, was to use an additional technique in the pursuit of personal wealth—stealing from clients.
There was no way anyone at that 1986 meeting could have known that Cooper would become a crook. He was just another high-billing lawyer sitting at a conference table, representing (as I did) one of many banks owed a fortune by Dome. In addition to his expensive suit, Cooper wore the cloak of respectability given him by nineteen years at McCarthy Tétrault, an establishment law firm of great repute, founded in 1855.5 He was particularly known as an expert in the new field of computer law.6 In 1986, Dan Cooper was forty-two years old.
In those years, Cooper appeared the epitome of solid citizen and top-flight professional. He was married to Dr. Deborah Chesnie Cooper, a well-known child psychologist, and they were parents of three apparently accomplished children. He was in demand as a lawyer, and frequently flew to European capitals and other exotic places to represent clients or speak at conferences on computer law. Cooper was culturally sophisticated, a talented musician, erudite, and intellectual, if (in the opinion of some) a trifle arrogant and moody. All seemed well. But then something extraordinary happened.
In October 1990, the McCarthy Tétrault credit committee, chaired by Chris Montague (who later became general counsel of the Toronto-Dominion Bank), conducted one of its periodic “billing drives”—an attempt to get partners to bill hitherto unbilled work-in-progress and disbursements, an exercise familiar to anyone who has worked in a large law firm. During the billing drive, some of Dan Cooper’s accounts caught the credit committee’s attention, and Chris Montague, together with McCarthy’s business manager, started looking at them carefully. On Wednesday, November 7, the business manager went to see Arthur Scace, McCarthy Tétrault’s managing partner.7 He told Scace that expenses billed to several of Cooper’s files, expenses paid by McCarthy’s and then in turn charged to clients, had been billed by numbered companies owned by Cooper.8 Over more than four years, these numbered companies had sent twenty-eight bills for false disbursements or fictitious services to clients and McCarthy Tétrault had paid them all, for a total of about $234,000 (the last phoney disbursement had been billed just days before, on November 2). After listening to the business manager, Scace started a file on Dan Cooper and made this entry: “It stinks. We have fraud.” He called Cooper and asked him to come and see him the next morning, Thursday, November 8, 1990.
At the Thursday morning meeting, Scace confronted Cooper. Were the disbursements billed to McCarthy clients genuine, or were they fraudulent? What services, if any, had been provided by the numbered companies? At first Cooper denied the allegations. He had brought with him to Scace’s office a “consultant,” who claimed he had provided services for Cooper’s clients through the numbered companies and had legitimately billed for the disbursements that were in issue. Scace told the consultant that he would have to supply an affidavit, and that if any part of the affidavit turned out to be wrong he would be in very serious trouble. The consultant, flustered, got up and left Scace’s office, and was never seen or heard from again. Cooper seemed numb.
Later in the meeting Cooper broke down, admitted everything, asked for mercy, and offered his resignation from McCarthy Tétrault. Scace quickly accepted Cooper’s resignation, and told him to clear out his office immediately and leave the building. Then Scace, mindful of the recent Lang Michener affair (just like Ted Donegan in the Bob Donaldson scandal),9 telephoned the law society and gave an initial report of what had happened. Later in the day, Scace went to Cooper’s office. Cooper, busy packing up his things, embraced Scace, cried, and said he had let Scace down. Cooper asked, “Will I go to jail?” “I hope not,” replied Scace.
The following day Cooper asked Scace to speak to his father, Bernard Cooper, on the telephone, and Scace agreed to do so. Cooper’s father was distraught. Dan was the golden boy of the family. Bernard Cooper, who by all accounts had made a lot of money in real estate, suggested that perhaps he could make restitution, if that would help. (Almost complete restitution was eventually made, but not by Cooper’s father. In due course, McCarthy’s simply applied Cooper’s capital in the firm against the money he had stolen.) Bernard Cooper died on New Year’s Day, 1994. At his father’s funeral, Dan delivered the eulogy. One account says that Dan talked of the high ethical standards his father had set and his own failure to live up to them.
Somebody picking up the newspaper on Tuesday, November 13, 1990, might have seen a Canadian Press wire story that began, “A partner in the Toronto-based law firm of McCarthy Tétrault has resigned after allegations that about $200,000 was diverted to a company he controlled. The partner, Daniel Cooper, a leading computer law expert, quit Thursday after 19 years at the firm, Canada’s largest.…” The story quoted Arthur Scace, who described Cooper as “a very successful lawyer.” Scace said that McCarthy’s had paid Cooper’s company for fictitious consulting services. “It has come as a shock to us,” Scace added.10 In The Globe and Mail’s story the same day, Scace was quoted as saying, “It is a tragic situation for a man who had established an enviable reputation as one of Canada’s leading computer law experts.”11 Some years later, in an interview, Scace offered a somewhat different point of view. “Cooper was cocky,” he said. “He wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.”12
On November 16, 1990, Cooper made a voluntary assignment in bankruptcy listing approximately $600,000 in debts. He began working as claims manager for a car rental agency. He was quickly charged with one count of fraud over $1,000 under s. 380(1
)(a) of the Criminal Code, and on April 24, 1991, pleaded guilty. The Crown prosecutor, Jim Atkinson, told the court that Cooper’s fraud was driven by “greed to support a lifestyle far beyond his means.” “The simple motivation,” said Atkinson, “was greed.” In a March 1991 letter, Arthur Scace wrote to the lawyer representing Cooper at his criminal proceedings: “His professional and personal life are in ruins. He has been disgraced publicly and privately.”13 Cooper was sent to the correctional centre in Mimico, Ontario, for twenty-one months. The sentence, said Justice Hugh Locke, was required to express the disgust of both the legal profession and the public at large. After less than two months in prison, Cooper was transferred to Bunton Lodge, a downtown Toronto halfway house, and he was granted full parole after serving a third of his sentence.
On April 25, 1991, at age forty-eight, he was disbarred.14 The Law Society of Upper Canada discipline committee report said Cooper had “freely chosen the dishonest course that was his downfall and had appreciated that his behaviour was wrong. He had exploited the high degree of trust in which he was held to facilitate his fraudulent transactions.” It pronounced “its condemnation of the Solicitor’s conduct in the strongest possible terms.” The committee agreed with the Crown prosecutor, who told the court that greed was at the bottom of the matter. It said Cooper and his wife “lived extremely well enjoying a comfortable home, expensive cars, furnishing and clothing. They entertained and dined out frequently. They spent $50,000 on a bat mitzvah. They traveled extensively and their children attended private schools.” In an extraordinary passage, the committee noted the solicitor “ceased his wrongful activity for a period of 16 months at a time that coincided with an increase in his partnership earnings and a fulfilling extramarital relationship. When he recommenced the misappropriation, he was building up an art collection.” One of the character references submitted to the law society discipline committee said, “I am convinced that he did not freely choose such a course. Rather, he has been taken there; perhaps by illness, or coercion or some other horrible tormenting thing.”
Dr. Deborah Chesnie Cooper, Cooper’s first wife and mother of his three children, now runs Toronto’s Chesnie Cooper Educational Centre. She has developed what she calls the “childpathing system,” designed to test the learning potential of very young children so that they can be appropriately placed in a school—a school for the gifted, or more likely, given the kind of practice she has developed, a school for children with severe learning difficulties. Debbie and Dan Cooper separated (for the second time) in 1989 and were divorced in October 1991.
“I’ll never forget November 8, 1990,” she told me.15 “It was a Thursday. Dan and I were already separated. In the morning, I rang him at his office from my car to arrange to go to a parents-teacher meeting that night. His secretary said he wasn’t at the office, he was at home, and so I called him there. He sounded odd. I asked, what’s the matter. He wouldn’t say. Finally, he said: ‘I’m no longer at McCarthy’s. I stole money. We’ve lost everything.’ I pulled over, got out of the car and vomited. That evening we went to the parents-teacher meeting together and acted as if everything was okay.” Debbie went on: “I was attracted to Daniel in the first place because he was a European, not just another Toronto Jewish man. He was twelve years old when he came to Canada from Israel in 1955. He was intelligent, cosmopolitan. He was different. Later I discovered what he really was. He was a kid who had never grown up.”
Why did he steal? “He was addicted to money,” Debbie said. Where did the money go? “Not to me, not to the family,” she insisted in a declaration at odds with the Crown prosecutor’s description of the expensive home, furniture, cars, clothes, dining out, travel, private schools for the children, and lavish bat mitzvah. “He was a poor provider. It went on women.” Dan was a womanizer, she said. “That was why we separated the first time. He had an affair with a German woman, from Munich.” Debbie said that after everything fell apart, she had to pay off bank loans that she had co-signed with Dan. And according to Debbie, Cooper never honoured the financial provisions of the divorce settlement, even though Cooper’s father, who died in 1994, left him a “lot of money.” “The lawyers told me I should go after him, but I didn’t for the sake of the kids.”
In 2002, Cooper applied to the law society for readmission to the bar, arguing that he had become a “fundamentally different person.” The general principles for readmission are found in a hearing committee’s report to Convocation, of January 27, 1997, dealing with the readmission application of George Weisman.16 Weisman was disbarred in 1983 after misappropriations of client funds and other fraudulent acts over a period of eighteen months. The proceeds from his frauds went to support his family, and when the frauds were discovered Weisman and his wife mortgaged the matrimonial home and paid back all the money that had been taken.
In its report to Convocation, the Weisman committee set out a seven-part test for readmission to the bar:
• Readmission is the exception rather than the rule.
• Applicants must show by a long course of conduct that they are in every way fit to be lawyers.
• There must be evidence of trustworthy persons that an applicant’s conduct is unimpeached and unimpeachable.
• A sufficient period of time must have elapsed before an application for readmission will be granted.
• Applicants must show that it is extremely unlikely that they will misconduct themselves in the future.
• Applicants must show that they have entirely purged their guilt.
• Applicants must show that they have remained, or can become, current in the law.
The committee held that Weisman failed to meet several of these tests, particularly the third (“evidence of trustworthy persons …”), and his application for readmission was denied. The committee said, “With the exception of members of the profession who have had contact with him in a social and family context, the committee has received no evidence from anyone with whom the applicant has been associated since his disbarment.” There was an “absence of evidence from persons who are able to attest to the applicant’s good character in a business or professional context since his disbarment.”
Cooper’s readmission submission to the law society addressed the Weisman criteria. Cooper, said his written submission, “has demonstrated that he is a person to be trusted and that that [sic] he is, in every way fit to be a lawyer.” The submission described praiseworthy conduct by Cooper since his crimes were committed. He had run a technology consulting business. He had been active in charitable enterprises. He lived a balanced life with involvement in business, the community, and the music world. He had remarried and enjoyed a loving and supportive family environment. He had demonstrated remorse. He had admitted his misdeeds. He had not been charged with any other criminal offence. He had worked diligently to rebuild his reputation. Cooper, argued his submission, was rehabilitated: “Changes in his life substantially and satisfactorily demonstrate that it is extremely unlikely that he will misconduct himself in the future. In the eleven-and-a-half years since his disbarment the applicant gained insight from his misconduct and he has become a fundamentally different person.”
Cooper supplied twenty-six letters in support of his application for readmission. He was careful to avoid the mistake that George Weisman made, making sure that many of his letters were from people that he had worked with since his disbarment. The reinstatement letters are heavy with his praise. Phrases liberally used include “highest integrity,” “intelligent,” “extremely intelligent,” “compassion,” “courteous,” “honesty and integrity” (almost every letter contains these words), “highest degree of honesty and integrity,” “a nobility of grace and goodness” (this from David Cooper, his son), and “role model” (from his stepson).
Almost none of these letters question why Dan Cooper did what he did or explain why and how he had become a fundamentally different man (although some contain general comments such as “I see a very different pers
on than the one who was disbarred”). One letter comments that Cooper took full responsibility for his fraud, but “never sought to explain away or justify what he did.” One referred to a “sudden aberration from his normal behaviour” (the word “aberration” appears in several letters); another, to a “real deviation from his normal self.” A doctor wrote that “a peculiar concatenation of circumstance had led to a unique and tragic moment.” The most interesting comment came from a friend of Cooper’s who had himself been sent to jail for fraud. This referee believed that Cooper, at the time he committed fraud, was suffering from “a kind of dysfunctional moral blindness or numbness.” But, for the most part, Cooper’s referees say his criminal conduct was an “aberration” (a much-used word in cases like these), throw up their hands at the mystery, and then stress what a fine person Cooper really is and always was. A psychiatric report revealed no mental disorder, other than depression, which was predictable under the circumstances.
During the 1991 discipline hearing that led to Cooper’s disbarment, Cooper and his then counsel (John I. Laskin, now a judge of the Ontario Court of Appeal) supplied a collection of support letters. The adjectives used to describe Dan Cooper in the 1991 letters are much the same as those used in the 2002 letters. Said the discipline committee’s 1991 report, “The letters of character reference from impressive authors are unanimous in their praise of Mr. Cooper. They resonate with words like ‘integrity,’ ‘trustworthy,’ ‘compassionate,’ ‘kind,’ ‘intelligent,’ ‘polite,’ ‘personable’ and ‘the best.’” Dan Cooper seemed as impressive to his referees in 1991, when he was disbarred, as he was in 2002, when he was readmitted. And yet in 2002, in the eyes of the law society, he was a fundamentally different man. Following a hearing on November 14, 2002, the hearing panel recommended Cooper’s readmission, subject to minimal conditions.17
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