Cooper had told the 2002 disciplinary panel that he hoped to be employed “within a sizable law firm or as in-house counsel to a corporation in the technological field.” Neither turned out to be the case. An advertisement in the July 25, 2003, Ontario Reports announced the opening, by Dan Cooper and Judy Kingston, of Cooper Kingston LLP, of a new law firm specializing in information technology and e-business. In 2006, the Canada Law List has him as a sole practitioner. Cooper’s listing—which he would have supplied to the publisher—gives his year of call to the bar as 1971, not 2002 when he was readmitted more than ten years after being disbarred. Nothing hints at the lost decade.
FOUR
A KID WHO’S BEEN BEAT UP BAD
Ingrid Chen
Ingrid Chen is a person of high energy and great folly. She has enthusiastically made one mistake after another, destroying her career as a lawyer. Police, prosecutors, courts, and law society officials have seemed baffled by her conduct, responding in a slow, timorous, and confused way. Official institutions have creaked and groaned, offering further evidence (were any necessary) that it can be very difficult for officialdom to handle irrational attacks on its fabric.
LATE AT NIGHT, on January 11, 1999, Kris Swedlo, a twenty-seven-year-old Winnipeg car salesman, picked up Ferdinand “Dean” Gutierrez at his parents’ house and drove him to a doughnut shop in Winnipeg’s south end. Swedlo dropped Gutierrez off, and then kept on going, headed out of town, driving south.
At the doughnut shop, Gutierrez was met by Emilio Guevarra, a local realtor, and by a friend of Guevarra’s, Glenn Gee. The three had coffee and then got into Guevarra’s Lexus and, like Swedlo, drove south. They went fifty miles or so, down sleepy Highway 59, past the Fort Garry campus of the University of Manitoba, through the small Manitoba towns of La Rochelle, St. Malo, Rosa, and Tolstoi, to the Canada–United States border at Pembina. The immigration offices at Pembina were closed, as they always were at night in those peaceful days before September 11, 2001. Gutierrez and Gee got out of the Lexus and walked across the unpoliced border. Swedlo was waiting on the other side in his car. Swedlo drove Gutierrez to Fargo, North Dakota. From there, Gutierrez flew to Chicago. In Chicago, he changed planes and headed home, to California.
Dean Gutierrez was 32 when he made his covert nighttime crossing of the Canada–United States border. He and his family—parents and two siblings—had immigrated to Canada from the Philippines in 1991. Dean got a degree in computer science from the University of Manitoba and went to California, on a temporary work visa, to be a computer programmer. In 1998, he came back to Winnipeg to visit his family for Christmas. At Winnipeg airport on January 6, 1999, there to catch a flight back to California, he told Patrick Rodgers, a U.S. immigration officer, that he was going to the United States to attend a cousin’s wedding. “I didn’t want to tell him about all my business activities down there,” Gutierrez later said. “I was just trying to make a long story short.” Rodgers was suspicious. Gutierrez had suitcases full of winter clothes. He had a California driver’s licence. “I felt like he was lying about where he was going, and for what reason,” Rodgers said later. He denied Gutierrez entry to the United States. Gutierrez left the airport, lugging his suitcases full of the wrong clothes back to his parents’ house.
Gutierrez decided that he needed an immigration lawyer. He looked in the Winnipeg Yellow Pages. He saw the name Ingrid Chen. The next day, he went to her office. She suggested he apply for a green card, but Gutierrez explained that he had a job to get back to and couldn’t go through a lengthy process. “Couldn’t I just drive across the border and fly home from North Dakota?” he asked. Chen thought this was a good idea. She said she knew people who could get him across without running the risk of going through a checkpoint and being turned back. She said she had a 100 percent success rate in getting people across this way. The fee was $3,850, which Gutierrez handed over to Chen a few days later.
The people Ingrid Chen knew, who could get Gutierrez across the border, were Emilio Guevarra and Kris Swedlo. Guevarra was Chen’s friend (he was also an acquaintance of Dean Gutierrez’s father). Swedlo was her live-in lover. Perhaps thinking that the scheme was more than Guevarra and Swedlo could pull off by themselves, Chen promised Glen Gee $800 if he would help out. (Chen never paid Gee. An angry Gee later said he planned “on hiring someone to go after Chen.” Chen says she only got Gee involved because she felt sorry for him.)
For Ingrid Chen, the timing of the plan to get Gutierrez across the border was unfortunate. On January 4, only three days before Gutierrez walked into her office, just before she lined up Emilio Guevarra to help with the illegal scheme, a judge gave the RCMP authorization to tap Guevarra’s telephone as part of a major drug trafficking investigation called Project Devise. On March 4, Chen’s own name was added to the list of people whose telephone could be tapped. Chen’s conversations with Guevarra about Gutierrez were recorded by the police.
INGRID YIN-YU CHEN was born in Taiwan in 1968. She was an infant when she came to Canada with her parents. She had three siblings. In 2001 her brother, Dr. Justin Chi-Han Chen, died in his sleep at the age of twenty-nine. Justin Chen had both medical and law degrees, and was planning to study for a master’s degree in business administration. Montreal’s Gazette, in a July 20, 2001, article about Justin’s death,1 said the Chen parents told their four children the best way they could contribute to their new country was by studying. The father, Tieng-Min Chen, said, “When these kids were young in Winnipeg it was cold in the wintertime, so we would all go to the library to study.”
Ingrid studied hard, as her father wanted. She went to the University of Manitoba and then won a Canadian Bar Association scholarship to attend the University of Alberta law school. She graduated with a bachelor of laws degree in 1995, and was admitted to the Manitoba bar in June 1996. Until February 1, 1999, she practised law with a variety of partners, and as a sole practitioner. Then Chen joined the well-known Winnipeg law firm of Walsh Micay as an associate lawyer. It seemed like an immigrant success story.
Chen’s relationship with Walsh Micay didn’t last long. On June 15, 1999, she gave notice that she would be leaving at the end of the month, and removed a number of files from the firm’s offices. Walsh Micay insisted that the files be returned. Then, on June 29, Chen was arrested by the RCMP. Her home and the offices of Walsh Micay were searched. The wiretaps had given away the Gutierrez scheme. They had picked up possible evidence of a drug trafficking plan. Chen was charged with conspiracy to bring an alien into the United States, and conspiracy to buy a kilogram of cocaine. Swedlo and Guevarra were arrested and charged with drug and immigration offences.
The three of them were kept in prison overnight. The next morning, June 30, Guevarra and Swedlo were released on bail with the consent of the Crown, but bail for Chen was opposed. At a hearing before Judge Lismer of the Provincial Court, Chris Mainella for the Crown said, “It is a situation where there is a risk of flight with Ms. Chen and there is a risk of interference with the administration of justice if Ms. Chen is released from custody.”2 Mainella systematically reviewed the wiretaps on the telephones of Guevarra and Chen. He placed considerable emphasis on intercepted statements by Chen that she didn’t like practising law and was going to give it up and move to Asia. Chen’s counsel, Amanda Sansregret, replied, “God forbid I should ever be arrested because daily I talk about quitting the practice of law and moving to the Turks and Caicos and selling cocktails in a cabana.”3 Judge Lismer released Chen on $100,000 bail.
The Law Society of Manitoba, paying close attention, moved quickly. On July 6, the complaints investigation committee demanded that Chen meet with it on July 8. The committee’s inquiry went beyond the drug and immigration charges. It had seen the extensive wiretap evidence put forward by the Crown at Chen’s bail hearing. Reading the transcripts, the committee became particularly interested in what had happened to a retainer Chen had received from a client called Mei Ding, and in a recorded telephone conversation bet
ween Chen and someone called Patrick Armstrong about “Dr. L.,” another former client of Chen’s.
The retainer issue seemed straightforward enough. Mei Ding had paid US$3,400 to Chen on June 14 or 15, 1999, in her last days at Walsh Micay. The money should have gone into a trust account, but didn’t. It was alleged that Chen used it to pay her personal Visa bill and settle other debts. Chen maintains that the retainer issue was trumped up. “I still had the cash in an envelope when the RCMP raided my house on June 29,” she says. “Later I asked my parents to return it to the client, and they did, and they got a receipt.”4
The matter of Dr. L. was much more exciting. In 1995, Dr. L. and his wife were living in China and wanted to come to Canada. They hired Chen to help. Chen made representations on their behalf to Immigration Canada. Dr. and Mrs. L. ended up moving to Canada and living in Brandon, Manitoba. But there was trouble between Dr. L. and Chen over her fees, and Dr. L. complained to the law society. What happened then was described later by Justice Shulman of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench:5
In March and May 1999, Ms. Chen had telephone conversations with one Patrick Armstrong, a known associate of members of the Los Bravos motorcycle gang. Mr. Armstrong has a lengthy criminal record. In the March conversation, Ms. Chen told Mr. Armstrong about “a bunch of assholes stalking me”. Mr. Armstrong told her that he had three to six Bravos and they knew how to handle it without getting anyone in trouble. Mr. Armstrong offered to break legs for $1,000.00. Ms. Chen stated that she had a list of about four people whom she was considering engaging Mr. Armstrong to deal with. Mr. Armstrong asked for a retainer of $100.00 prior to performing work. In the May conversation, Ms. Chen and Mr. Armstrong discussed a man in Brandon with whom Ms. Chen was having some difficulties. Ms. Chen called him “a fucking little weasel”. She stated that this man owed her money for getting him into the country and that he was suing a client of hers for $1,000.00. Mr. Armstrong suggested that “they should kill him”. Ms. Chen replied, “he has money”. Mr. Armstrong replied, “he’ll run to the cops right away so that’s one we’ll have to sit down and discuss”. Ms. Chen stated, “no it has to be one shot and then gone”. The evidence indicates that the person referred to in the conversation is likely Dr. L.…6
Immediately after the July 8, 1999, hearing, the law society suspended Chen from legal practice “in the public interest.” It charged her with nineteen counts of professional misconduct or conduct unbecoming a lawyer. A further appeal from the suspension was unsuccessful.7 In the name of fairness, the law society settled in to wait for Chen’s many trials to be over before considering whether she should be disbarred. The wait was to last almost seven years. In 2002, to pass the time, Chen wrote a self-published book, with left-wing freelance journalist Rod Graham, astonishingly called Protect Yourself from Your Lawyer.8 The dust jacket describes Chen as a “successful entrepreneur.” It describes Graham as a freelance journalist who “writes extensively about injustice, inequity and corruption.”
In November 2003, Chen and Guevarra were in court, facing forgery and immigration offences, but it had nothing to do with the Dean Gutierrez affair. In a March 1999 conversation between Chen and Guevarra, one of many the RCMP recorded, Chen asked Guevarra to give one of her clients a job offer and told him, “I’ll pay you money.” “No problem,” said Guevarra. The client was Manli Wong, a resident of Hong Kong who graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1999 and wanted to stay in Canada. Wong asked Chen for help, and paid her $5,000. Chen told Wong that the first thing for her to do was find a job in Canada. Wong followed Chen’s advice and tried to get a job, but no one would hire her until she had a work permit. Mike McIntyre of the Winnipeg Free Press,9 reporting on the trial, described the evidence of what happened next:10
Wong went back to Chen and told her the job search was fruitless. Chen then pulled out a stack of blank documents, asking her to sign and initial her name.…
“She would just point out to me where I should sign,” Wong said yesterday.
Weeks later, a work permit arrived in the mail from Canadian immigration officials.
The document indicated she had found a job at Green Hills Realty as a junior office manager. Her boss was Guevarra.
“When I saw it I was very surprised,” Wong said yesterday.
In the courtroom, Wong studied Emilio Guevarra. She told Justice Albert Clearwater that she had never seen Guevarra before. She had never heard of Green Hills Realty. But, on cross-examination, Wong conceded that Chen might have said that she would find her a job. Chen’s lawyer said the March 1999 conversations between Chen and Guevarra were just “chatter between two friends.” The Crown attorney argued that they revealed a plot to create bogus legal documents. Justice Clearwater, although suspicious of Guevarra’s job offer to Manli Wong, decided that the Crown had not proved Chen and Guevarra’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They were acquitted.
With the Manli Wong matter out of the way, Chen and Guevarra—joined this time by Swedlo—could now face the charges arising from the midnight border crossing of Dean Gutierrez, and of smuggling cocaine. This trial was in February 2004. Gutierrez, given immunity in exchange for his testimony, told his story by satellite link from California. Gutierrez’s father testified that he didn’t know how Dean got into the United States, although he admitted having some telephone conversations with Guevarra after his son had arrived back in California, conversations the RCMP recorded. The hapless and unreliable Glen Gee testified that he was “stiffed” by Chen and Guevarra (the police agreed not to press charges against Gee in exchange for his testimony). Gee spun a tale about a trip the four of them took to Vancouver to buy drugs for resale in Winnipeg.
On May 14, Chen and Guevarra were found not guilty of conspiring to traffic in cocaine. Justice Nathan Nurgitz found Gee’s testimony about the trip to Vancouver to be unbelievable. But they were convicted of conspiring to break U.S. immigration laws, contrary to s. 465 of the Criminal Code. Chen was sentenced to house arrest for a year, and was allowed to leave her home only to work. Justice Nurgitz said that the fact Chen was a lawyer and profited from the crime were important factors in her sentence. Guevarra, who made nothing from the Gutierrez incident, was given a six-month conditional discharge. The Winnipeg Free Press described Chen as “visibly upset” when the sentence was imposed, reporting that she repeatedly berated her latest counsel during a courtroom recess.11 (Chen has changed lawyers frequently.) When asked about the story that she publicly berated her lawyer, she says that she was shocked by her conviction and was very emotional. In 2004, the Manitoba Court of Appeal dismissed her appeal.12 In June 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal. In August 2005, Chen, Guevarra, and Swedlo, who never give up, brought an action seeking damages for malicious prosecution from the Attorney General of Canada, Crown prosecutor Clyde Bond, and RCMP officer Margaret Gregory. The statement of claim accused the defendants of acting maliciously by allowing the press photo opportunities to embarrass the plaintiffs; exaggerating and sensationalizing the charges against them; communicating false, exaggerated, and sensationalized accounts to the Law Society of Manitoba to stop Ingrid Chen from earning a living; and furnishing confidential police and Crown reports to the law society before disclosure had been made to Chen.13
In February 2006, Chen was tried on extortion charges. The Crown alleged that Chen had paid Patrick Armstrong to visit two people and “slap them around.” One was the husband of a client who had been in a dispute with Chen over her bill; the other was a client who had not repaid a loan. The judge found that Armstrong did not assault or threaten either of them, and never intended to do so; as a result, there had been no actual extortion. But, based on wiretap evidence, the judge did find attempts at extortion, saying that “Chen believed Armstrong to be someone who would use force and threats to get what he came for and that she hired him for that reason.”14 In March 2007, Chen was sentenced to eighteen months in jail for this crime. A fourth trial is pending, on charges that Chen
made a false statement in order to obtain a Canadian passport. In a passport application, she gave as her “permanent address” the address of a house that she and Swedlo own, but rent out. Her lawyer points out that there is no formal definition of “permanent address” for passport purposes. For applying for a passport at all, she has been accused of breaching the conditions of her house arrest, which forbade such an application, and yet another trial is possible.15 Someone in the passport office saw her application, remembered who she was, and called the RCMP. Chen maintains that the Crown gave her informal permission to apply for a passport, and that she needed one as a qualification for her immigration business.
Before going to prison, Ingrid Chen worked as an internet-based immigration consultant. She conducted her business from an office in downtown Winnipeg (the business, which still exists, is called C & S Canadian Immigration Services Inc., but is more generally known as webimmigration.com). Her website offers immigration information and advice, and free assessments of immigration eligibility, but mostly solicits business from those who need help to come to Canada. The site offers a page of testimonials. One reads, “Ms. Chen—I just wanted to write you a little thank you note. My family is now in Canada. We are very happy to be here. Thank you for all your help you did for us. You were so kind answering all my questions so quickly. I would recommend your services to anyone.” Another says, “We sought the advise [sic] of a few lawyers, and they all said that they couldn’t guarantee our immigration. We are so happy to get our immigrant visas in 6 months with your assistance. A person can’t go wrong with your incredible service!!! Thank-you for helping us. We will be happy raising our children in Canada.”
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