Sexual assault is an offence under s. 271 of the Criminal Code. For sex to be an assault, the complainant must not have consented to what occurred. There is no consent, says the Criminal Code, if it can be proven that the accused induced the complainant to have sex by abusing a position of trust, power, or authority. And that, said the prosecutor, is what lawyer Bomek did when he had sex with his clients.
When Bomek was arrested, the RCMP found a one-way ticket from Minneapolis to Amsterdam in his house. Considered a flight risk as a result, he was denied bail. (Bomek says he was just planning a long visit to friends in Europe.) He was sent to Prince Albert’s Community Training Residence, a halfway house for provincial inmates. Further charges were laid, bringing the total to forty-seven, involving twenty people. On July 14, 2003, he pleaded guilty to six counts of sexual assault, one count of communicating for the purpose of obtaining sexual services, and one count of obstructing justice, and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison (with credit against that sentence for the nearly ten months already spent in custody). In court the Crown prosecutor, Dennis Cann, described what led to the various charges. Count number five, as described by Cann, was typical of the rest:
[X] was before the court in police custody. The accused had represented him on criminal matters before the court. The accused took him to—they used the washroom I guess on that particular location as an interview room, to discuss matters. The accused told the victim that if the accused, if he got the victim out of custody he could go home with him and he also told the victim that he didn’t have to pay the accused’s legal bill, he could go home with him and “experiment” and party with the two of them.
The remaining thirty-nine counts were stayed as part of an agreement between Bomek and the Crown. Cann wanted to involve as few of the Aboriginal complainants as possible. “They were horribly embarrassed,” he said, “and many had never even been south before and were frightened to come.”2 Bomek told me, “Do you think anyone who had sex with me really would want to admit it in front of a crowd of people? It would have been long and arduous and I would no doubt have prevailed with some success but I chose not to hurt some of the people I cared about.”3 Cornelius Ballantyne, a spokesman for the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation (a Cree band of about six thousand, approximately half of whom live in Pelican Narrows), has a different point of view. He has said that staying the charges denied closure to the victims and is another example of the justice system failing Aboriginal people.
Maggie Siggins, in Bitter Embrace: White Society’s Assault on the Woodland Cree,4 describes the Michael Bomek story in almost apocalyptic terms. She sees it as a case study of white-Cree relations and part of a historical pattern. In her prologue, she writes about the impact of Bomek on the people of Pelican Narrows: “Once again a white authority figure had infiltrated their community, full of promises, bloated with best intentions, only to despoil and debauch. I began to see reflected in the Bomek case the entire sad history of white-Indian relations.”5
I WENT TO SEE Michael Bomek in the spring of 2004, a few days after he was let out of prison on parole. He was living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in the windowless basement of an electronics store owned by a friend. The store is in a low-rise red brick building constructed as law offices in 1911. Next door is a Metis drop-in centre, and on the next block is a down-at-the-heels hotel favoured by Aboriginal people. As I drove up to the building, Bomek, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, was picking up trash from the sidewalk in front. He was fifty-five years old, of medium height, a little paunchy, clean-shaven with short hair, an earring in his left ear.
Bomek invited me into the store for coffee. He showed me an office he had set up for himself in a spare room. It looked like a lawyer’s office. Shelves along one wall were lined with law books. Framed certificates and citations filled another. There were pictures of his two daughters by his first wife (he has been married twice). One daughter is a doctor, the other, a physiotherapist. A computer sat on a modern desk.
“I knew Lord Denning,” he said suddenly, for no apparent reason. (Lord Denning, now dead, headed England’s Court of Appeal and was a cult figure, particularly among law students, in the seventies and eighties. He was famous for his eccentric and path-breaking judgments, and for homespun wisdom.) “I have four of Denning’s books, autographed, and he sent me a twelve-page letter,” Bomek told me.
I asked him what he was doing these days. “Not much,” he said. “It’s hard to get a job when you’re gay, bankrupt, and just got out of jail. See that?” He pointed to a bicycle propped against the wall. “That’s how I get around. I have a motorcycle in the shop, but I can’t get it out because I don’t have $390 to pay the repair bill.”
How did an educated professional end up like this? That day and the next, we talked about his life. Bomek was born in Shoal Lake, a small town in northwestern Manitoba, and grew up in Brandon. Before becoming a lawyer, he owned a pizza business. He graduated from the University of Manitoba law school in 1985, articled in Winnipeg, but soon moved to Flin Flon where he built up a strong practice, mostly among the Cree of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Bomek told me that criminal law was his passion. Why? “Because it was easy. And I loved dealing with people.”
Bomek quickly achieved a high profile in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, particularly by acting as defence counsel in dramatic criminal cases. In 2000, for example, he represented Gerald Carter, an Aboriginal man described by the Saskatoon StarPhoenix as a “violent sexual predator” who had been on “a 15-year crime spree.”6 The Crown sought a dangerous offender designation for Carter, permitting an indefinite sentence. Saskatchewan Chief Justice Frank Gerein, presiding over Carter’s trial, found that he was a dangerous offender, but sentenced him to ten years rather than giving him an indefinite sentence. It was Chief Justice Gerein who, three years after the Carter trial, accepted Bomek’s own plea of guilty and sentenced him.
Many people in Flin Flon held Bomek in high regard, both as a lawyer and a person. Lois Burke runs the Greenstone Community Futures Development Corporation. Greenstone provides self-employment training and assistance for small businesses, administers loan funds, and assists the region in economic strategic planning. Bomek was Greenstone’s lawyer for several years, and Burke says his legal work was outstanding. “Michael had an excellent reputation as a lawyer, and he gave a lot of time to the community. He was a very good fund-raiser, for example, for the Crisis Centre. He presented himself well, and was very likeable.”7
Arnold Goodman, a lawyer who now practises in Watrous, Saskatchewan, worked for five years in Bomek’s Flin Flon office. Goodman said he liked Bomek:
He was a very good lawyer. People liked and trusted him; he had a lot of friends. He was a regular guy who went astray. It was stress-related. Stress pushed him over the edge, working too hard, financial pressures. But he never showed the stress. He was an upbeat guy—his point of view was that everything is okay, we’re moving ahead. He listened to inspirational tapes while he was driving around.8
Bomek first became interested in the law when he was sued by his parents in 1981. His father had a grade three education, could barely read, and worked as a labourer in Brandon. His mother had a grade nine education. Their modest home was their only significant asset. In 1977, Bomek’s pizza business was in financial difficulty, and the Dauphin Plains Credit Union was pressuring him to reduce his overdraft. With the connivance of the credit union, he arranged for his parents to mortgage their house with the proceeds being used to reduce the loan. Bomek took the mortgage papers to his parents who signed without reading them. He promised that he would make the mortgage payments, but didn’t honour his promise.
The courts found the Bomek mortgage unconscionable and set it aside.9 As Bomek puts it, “That’s when I decided I wanted to be the guy who sues rather than the guy who gets sued. That’s when I decided to become a lawyer.” The case, he says now, “did not in any way affect the relationship with my parents.” In an ironic twist, Bomek’s
lawyer in this litigation, Lawrence Greenberg, in a 1998 disciplinary hearing of the Law Society of Manitoba, pleaded guilty to thirty-seven counts of professional misconduct and was indefinitely suspended from the practice of law.10
By his own admission, Bomek was a very poor manager of money. On September 6, 2002, just days before he was arrested, he was declared bankrupt. His principal creditor was the Government of Canada, for unpaid income taxes of about $250,000. Where did the money go? “Well,” Bomek says, “I was building a house and I couldn’t afford to build the house and pay taxes at the same time.” When I asked him if he missed the status he used to have—once a prominent lawyer, now an ex-convict—he said, “I’ll tell you what I miss. Before, I’d go into a jewellery store, look at a watch, and say I’ll take that one, the one with the titanium bracelet. It didn’t matter how much it was. I wouldn’t even ask the price. I miss that.”
But Arnold Goodman says that Bomek wasn’t a high liver. “He drove a Ford Tempo. Sometimes when he was travelling he’d sleep in the car, at a campground. Mind you, in my view he was over-housed. He built this $400,000 house; it was for his wife Beatrice, we called her Queen Bea. And he ran a Cadillac office, the best photocopying machine, and all that.”
Bomek says he had had sex with both men and women beginning when he was about eighteen. He started sleeping with male Aboriginal clients after his second marriage collapsed in 1997. Bomek says that his second wife, Beatrice, ran off with her high school sweetheart without warning. He came home late at night from a business trip to Brandon to find her gone. Sex with clients began when Peter (not his real name), a young Aboriginal man appealing his sentence after being convicted of spousal assault and represented by Bomek, suddenly kissed him passionately in an interview room at the Pelican Narrows community hall that functioned as a courthouse when the judge was in town. “You’re gay, I can tell,” Peter told Bomek. Peter was twenty-five years old, had a grade ten education, was the father of five children, and lived on welfare.
Peter went to prison for nine months, but as soon as he got out he came to Bomek’s luxurious house on Lake Athapapuskow, and a sexual relationship began that lasted more than two years. “That relationship meant a lot to me,” said Bomek, “a lot more than either of my marriages.” Shortly after Bomek was arrested, Peter attempted suicide.
Meanwhile, said Bomek, the RCMP was gunning for him because he stood up for Aboriginal people. “I complained about conditions in the cells in Pelican Narrows. The food was bad, there weren’t any blankets, they wouldn’t let the Indians shower and clean up before court appearances. The cops called me ‘Indian lover.’”11 Back in the cells, after the kissing incident, Peter had told whoever would listen that he thought his lawyer was gay. “Because of that,” said Bomek when addressing the judge at his sentencing, “the RCMP asked all of my clients, male clients, if I ever traded sexual favours for legal services.” Aboriginal men started showing up at Bomek’s house. “They were all gay,” said Bomek. “They slept with me willingly. It was my private life. What was wrong with it? Where does my professional life end and my personal life begin?”
At his sentencing, Bomek’s lawyer said:
It doesn’t matter that in some cases, the victims themselves, at one time or another, made sexual advances to Mr Bomek. The fact of the matter is that Mr Bomek ought not to have had this kind of a relationship with his clients and that is what makes the whole thing wrong. Mr Bomek understands that now and admits that it is wrong.
Bomek himself, at the sentencing, described how “a number of people … would call me and say, look, I’m gay and I understand you might be; could we get together.” And then:
I forgot that just because it’s 9:30 at night and the doorbell rings and someone comes to my door, that he’s a client, that even though my lifestyle continues that my duty as a solicitor must continue as well.… I was so interested and so happy that someone rang my bell, it was a lonely time for me.
Friends and former colleagues of Bomek all say that he was devastated when Beatrice left him, and that he fell into a deep depression.
The story of Bomek’s troubled legal career goes beyond sexual transgression. In March 2004, he was disbarred by the Law Society of Manitoba in proceedings that, formally at least, had nothing to do with his criminal convictions. It was the conclusion of a long disciplinary history that, in the words of Kristen Dangerfield, senior general counsel of the law society, was “integrity related and not competency related.”12 Dangerfield described Bomek’s conduct over a seven-year period, involving dishonesty and failure to discharge his duties, as “disgraceful and dishonourable in every respect.” The chairman of the disciplinary panel commented, “Bomek should never have been a practising lawyer.” (He was disbarred in Saskatchewan in October 2003 following his criminal conviction.)
Bomek’s disciplinary problems in Manitoba began with a law society reprimand in 1988; he had admitted to swearing a false statutory declaration in connection with a compromise between himself and a creditor. In 1994, Bomek was disciplined three times: He was cautioned for failing to disclose to a client a potential conflict of interest; he was fined for failing to disclose to the vendor of a business (when acting for the prospective purchasers) that his client’s cheque for the balance due at closing was subject to conditions that probably could not be met; and he was fined again for placing himself in another conflict of interest position.13 In early 2002, Bomek was fined yet again for eight counts of professional misconduct involving five separate estate matters: The principal complaints were that he withdrew money from his trust account for payment of fees and disbursements prior to performing legal services, and charged fees in excess of the prevailing law society tariff.14 Later in 2002, the law society served Bomek with four new citations containing a total of twenty-six counts of professional misconduct. These new citations covered a wide range of disciplinary offences: Some were connected with Bomek’s borrowing money from three of his clients, and others had to do with various other transactions involving clients.
Shortly before his arrest on September 17, 2002, Bomek struck a deal with the Law Society of Manitoba. He agreed to turn over his practice to Lore Mirwaldt and Scott Gray, partners in a respected legal practice at The Pas, Manitoba (and married to each other); to take a year away from the practice of law; and on his return to practise only criminal law, subject to the supervision of Mirwaldt and Gray. But his arrest overtook this arrangement, and disbarment, ostensibly for reasons unconnected with the arrest, followed.
Gavin Wood represented Bomek at his Manitoba disbarment proceedings. Wood is a senior and well-respected Winnipeg litigator and former bencher of the Law Society of Manitoba. He has had a relationship with Michael Bomek for many years, as co-counsel on Bomek files from time to time, and as a friend. Wood has a generous view of Bomek’s history. “I believe Michael was genuinely interested in giving service in the north,” he told me.15 Wood continued:
It’s not fair to describe him as manipulative, as some people have done. Complex, multidimensional, but not manipulative. In the legal community, there are two very different views of Michael. Not everyone thinks he is a bad man. And by the way, he was a very hard worker. Sometimes on the way from one small town to another, he would sleep at night in his car, by the side of some lonely road.…
I think Michael was fighting demons. I’ve often thought about it, but I don’t know exactly what the demons were. Maybe, for a time at least, he felt guilty about his homosexuality. I knew him for years, and he never told me he was gay.
Wood paused. “Michael’s a strange guy. He sent me a birthday card from jail.”
Lore Mirwaldt and Scott Gray, who were supposed to take over Bomek’s practice, are sympathetic to him. (They represented Bomek in his divorce from Beatrice, his second wife.) Mirwaldt told me this:
It’s true that Michael was a bit of a wheeler-dealer, and had a tendency to get into strange predicaments. But he went to the mat for his clients. And he was capable of gre
at acts of kindness. Michael would give his last $20 to a man begging in the street.16
I told Mirwaldt and Gray that Bomek attributed a lot of his disciplinary problems to political infighting in the Flin Flon legal community, and particularly to his rivalry with the other criminal lawyer in town. Gray thought there was a lot of truth to this: “Flin Flon is a boiling pot. It’s a hard mining town, it’s abandoned. We would never open up an office there.”
Arnold Goodman told much the same story. He said that Bomek and the other lawyer arranged for complaints about each other to be made to the law society. “It was tit for tat,” said Goodman. “Also, Bomek was regarded as an interloper.”
I asked Mirwaldt and Gray about Bomek’s relationship with the RCMP. Gray replied:
In a criminal practice you’re bound to butt heads with the cops. You can’t give them even a toehold to question your integrity. And this is not the big city: you can’t hide up here. But, that said, at the time, I questioned the validity of the charges against him.
Mirwaldt added:
The number one thing that bugs me is the way they arrested Michael. They should have rung his office and said, we have a warrant for your arrest and want to make arrangements for you to turn yourself in. But they arrested him as he walked out of the courtroom and then they put him on the same RCMP plane as some of the people he had just been representing. They gave him no dignity.
In his sentencing submissions, Dennis Cann suggested that a probation order prohibit Bomek from going to northern Saskatchewan for his own good: “Mr. Bomek, to put it lightly, would not be welcome back in that area … as I’ve expressed to his counsel and the police have advised me, should he attend to that area his personal safety would in all likelihood be in danger.” The judge declined to restrict Bomek in this way. Bomek’s defence lawyer said, “He knows that it would be unhealthy for him to be wandering about certain communities in northern Saskatchewan.” I asked Mirwaldt and Gray what the Aboriginal people thought of Michael. They said that they didn’t hate him at all. “Michael used to take groceries to families on the reserve,” Mirwaldt told me.
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