Lawyers Gone Bad

by Philip Slayton

  Other lawyers would fly in and out on the court plane. Not Michael. I think he could work for the Aboriginals again. Being gay is difficult. There is a sizeable homosexual Aboriginal community—but it’s underground. By the way, we never knew he was gay. I was stunned when the story came out.

  Goodman was also amazed: “I had no idea he was gay. Even after Beatrice left him, he dated women.”

  After a final meeting with Bomek over breakfast at Tim Hortons, I left Prince Albert and drove west along the Yellowhead Highway to North Battleford, to see Dennis Cann, the Crown attorney who handled his case. Cann is in his early fifties and has been a prosecutor for most of his professional life. He is calm, measured, and purposeful. A plaque on his office wall announces a recent hole-in-one on the golf course. “Bomek is a psychopath,” Cann said.

  Bomek is out for Bomek. He is only interested in self-gratification. He uses people. He has no moral sense. He abused his authority and privilege. All that matters to him is not getting caught. He just doesn’t get it. There’s no more to be said.

  After talking with Cann, I headed for Pelican Narrows, 550 kilometres by highway from North Battleford, northeast across the plains of Saskatchewan, a place written about so dramatically by Maggie Siggins in Bitter Embrace. As you drive beyond Prince Albert, there are few towns and little traffic. The last 45 kilometres of the trip is on a bleak and depressing gravel side road. The occasional truck heading in the opposite direction throws up blinding dust and you must stop the car until the dust settles.

  At the entrance to Pelican Narrows is Mista Nosayew Outfitters (mista nosayew means “big fish” in Cree). Arthur Bear runs the place. It includes a tiny restaurant where you can get coffee and have a chat. Someone asks me, “Are there trees in Toronto like here?” I ask Arthur Bear if business is good, and he says, “No. I need to publicize my business, but I don’t know how to do that and I have no money.” The town, population about one thousand, is the centre of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation. (Peter Ballantyne was the first chief of the band, elected in 1900.) The town’s Cree name is Wapowikoscikan, which means “Narrows of Fear.” The nearest places to buy supplies are the mining towns of Creighton and Flin Flon, both about 120 kilometres away.

  Government underfunding and poor money management by the Native band has created a housing crisis in Pelican Narrows. Living conditions have been compared to those in Afghanistan. Litter is everywhere. There are few private facilities—a general store, a taxi service, a church—and little sign of commercial or community life. Visual bleakness signals poverty, depression, and inability to deal effectively with the outside world. Only large buildings provided by government—schools, the health centre, and a community arena—are modern and well maintained, gleaming like giant spaceships that have arrived from another world. The RCMP detachment is the best-looking building of all, clean and neat, with a well-tended lawn in front and the Canadian flag snapping in the breeze.

  WHEN HE GOT OUT OF JAIL, Michael Bomek was for a time the proprietor of a hot dog stand on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River. Then, on September 28, 2005, the Prince Albert Police Service issued a press release:

  On the 27 September 2005 at approx. 11:30 a.m. the Joint Forces Unit comprised of members of the Prince Albert City Police and RCMP entered into a Drug Investigation which resulted in the arrest of a 56 year old male from Prince Albert. He is charged with Possession for the Purpose of Trafficking (Marihuana) under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and Breach of Probation.

  A further search was conducted at a residence in the 1000 Blk 1st Ave. W. Police seized approximately 171 marihuana cigarettes and approximately 33 grams of loose marihuana worth an approximate street value of $1360.00.

  In addition, police also seized an undisclosed amount of cash as proceeds of crime and a hotdog vending cart as offence related property to the drug trafficking.

  Charged with Possession for the Purpose of Trafficking in a controlled substance is James Michael Bomek Dob: 11 February 1949. Bomek has been held in custody and will be appearing in Provincial Court this morning.

  The police had seized Michael Bomek’s hot dog stand.

  Some weeks later, the story took another and ominous twist. CBC Radio aired this report on November 9, 2005:

  A former lawyer from Flin Flon, Man. accused of possessing child pornography, sexual touching of a minor and drug dealing has been denied bail and remains behind bars in Prince Albert. James Michael Bomek, who is in is mid-50s, faces a total of 18 charges. Many of the charges are alleged to have occurred while Bomek was on parole or probation.17

  Jonathon Naylor reported on November 21 in The Reminder, Flin Flon’s daily newspaper, that the charges stemmed from incidents that allegedly occurred in and around Prince Albert between August 2004 and September 2005.18 The new alleged offences included one charge of sexual touching of a minor under the age of fourteen; two charges of inviting, counselling or inciting a person under fourteen to engage in sexual touching; one charge of sexually touching a minor under eighteen; and one charge of obtaining for consideration the sexual services of a person under eighteen. There were also two charges each of possessing child pornography and making child pornography, and two charges of sexually assaulting a male.

  Naylor has covered the Bomek story from the beginning. In several conversations with him, I had expressed sympathy for Bomek and an expectation that his life would now improve. After the new charges were laid, Naylor sent me an email and asked, “Do you feel Bomek suckered you with an act?”19 Perhaps he did sucker me. Naylor says that these days it is hard to find anybody in Flin Flon with a good word for Michael Bomek. Early in April 2006 he pleaded guilty in Prince Albert provincial court to trafficking in marijuana, possession for the purpose of trafficking, and breach of probation; in May he was sentenced to a year in jail. His trial on the sex charges took place in December 2006, in Prince Albert. Bomek pleaded not guilty. On January 10, 2007, he was found guilty of six offences, including sexual assault and making and possessing child pornography. On January 19, Justice Grant Currie sentenced him to three and a half years in prison. Bomek’s own lawyer described the sentence as “fair.”

  TEN

  COAL MINER’S SON AND ROCK SOLID GUY

  Reeves Matheson

  Acoal miner’s son from Cape Breton married his high school sweetheart, became a lawyer, and was elected to the provincial legislature. He gave a maiden speech of unusual eloquence and power. Four days before he gave that speech, he had been disbarred. Later he was convicted of theft and fraud. It all happened he told the judge, because he suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

  REEVES MATHESON WAS BORN in 1952, in the hardscrabble coal mining town of Glace Bay, on the beautiful Nova Scotia island of Cape Breton, where “the wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.”1 He was a miner’s son, the fifteenth of seventeen children. His father, Murdoch Matheson, had to buy a second house on Sixth Street, next door to the original home, to accommodate his huge family. Murdoch, who died of lung cancer in 1979, was a prominent figure in Glace Bay left-wing politics.

  After high school, Reeves Matheson went to study in Halifax, first at Saint Mary’s University, and then at Dalhousie law school where he graduated in 1976. When his studies in the city were finished, Matheson, a true Cape Bretoner, returned home. Michael Greenberg, the New York author who spends his summers in Cape Breton, has written that “those who never forsake Cape Breton enjoy a special reverence. They are … uncorrupted.”2 Or, as a very senior Nova Scotia politician put it to me when we started chatting about Matheson, “once you cross the Canso Causeway into Cape Breton, you’re in a different world.” (Perhaps my politician acquaintance had a somewhat different point in mind than Michael Greenberg.)

  Matheson became a respected lawyer in Glace Bay, and was town solicitor for ten years. He coached junior hockey and taught religion in the Catholic parish church of St. Anne’s. He married his high school sweetheart, Valerie Turnbull
, and had four children. He bought a house on South Street, where the “mucky mucks” lived, paying $100,000, a lot of money in Glace Bay. He lived in the fancy part of town, but, like his father, Reeves Matheson was a hard-working member of the New Democratic Party. He was regarded as a “rock solid guy” with ideal working-class credentials. Matheson reached the apex of his career on March 24, 1998, when, representing the NDP, he was elected to the Nova Scotia legislature by the voters of Cape Breton East.

  In the dramatic general election of 1998, the NDP won nineteen seats, the same number as the governing Liberals led by Premier Russell MacLellan, another lawyer from Cape Breton. Every seat was vital, and so it was startling when, only six weeks after being elected, Reeves Matheson, the rock solid guy, resigned from the NDP caucus and announced that he would sit as an independent. It had suddenly become public knowledge that he was being investigated by the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society for stealing money from a client’s trust fund. The investigation had started the previous November, long before the election, and his licence to practise law had been suspended a few weeks after that. The Cape Breton regional police were interested in the matter, looking into possible theft and fraud. Matheson was the only NDP candidate who had not filed a party form that asked nominees to declare any criminal or professional investigations that might prove embarrassing. It is not clear how much the NDP knew about his trouble when Matheson was running for the legislature.

  On June 1, 1998, Matheson was disbarred.3 In an agreed statement of facts, he admitted that, between November 1995 and April 1998, he had deposited cheques into his personal account that were payable only to his lawyer’s trust account. He admitted that he had misappropriated other client funds. Similar problems in his earlier legal career in Glace Bay now came to light. In 1981, he had been “severely reprimanded” by the barristers’ society. (Also in 1981, his then law partner, Martin Kennedy, had been disbarred and was sent to prison for two years for misappropriation of trust funds.) In 1991, the barristers’ society had fined him $5,000 plus costs for professional misconduct. That was because Matheson hadn’t paid money owed to Mickey Ludlow, a client. Mickey, who couldn’t read or write, wasn’t just a client; he was also one of Matheson’s oldest friends. Halifax’s Daily News reported that “the young Matheson played cowboys and Indians with Mickey Ludlow, who lived down the street; they would stop playing at about 4 p.m., when Matheson’s parents called him inside to say the rosary.”4

  On June 5, Reeves Matheson rose in the Nova Scotia legislature to give his maiden speech. His wife, Valerie, looked on from the visitors’ gallery. The circumstances were extraordinary. He had resigned from his party; his political career was over. Four days earlier, he had been disbarred; his career as a lawyer was finished. He faced the possibility of jail. But Matheson gave an eloquent and lengthy speech of considerable substance:

  Glace Bay is a proud mining community. There are no mines there now but I can assure you that growing up and coming home from school I can remember bare-faced miners, their faces blackened, coming from No. 26 Colliery and from No. 20 Colliery and walking down the roads of New Aberdeen to their houses, with their children coming from school. I can remember a time when despite tough, economic conditions, there was a spirit of pride, a spirit of hope and a real promise of a future for my community. Those men, those miners, were the symbol of that hope and the hopes and aspirations of all of the people in the community in which I lived.

  Things have never been easy in Glace Bay, at least not in my experience. We have and the community has always existed and functioned under the spectre of systemic unemployment that seemed to defy every reasonable attempt to come up with some solution to make it go away. We have had unemployment rates of 25 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent and indeed, Mr. Speaker, if you can believe it, at times quoted to be as high as 50 per cent in a community of approximately 20,000 people.

  As a result, we have had to watch year after year, month after month, every day, our young people leave because there is no work, to go away because there is no reasonable prospect for them to raise a family and to live out their lives in the town with some degree of economic certainty and some degree of reasonable expectation for the families that I am sure they all wished and wanted to raise in Glace Bay.

  He went on at great length to attack government policy with respect to Cape Breton, particularly federal government policy. Then, at the end of his speech, Matheson turned to personal matters:

  Mr. Speaker, I want to conclude by just briefly addressing those circumstances that you are, I am sure, all aware of in relation to my personal affairs. I want to assure this House that in due course, I will do the honourable thing but I also want to assure this House that the in honour [sic]—and its very definition—covers a broad range of responsibilities. You can do one thing and be dishonourable and do something else and be honourable. I know and I feel in my heart that I was elected by the people of Glace Bay to bring a message to this House on their behalf and there are significant questions in the next few weeks that this House will have to address that very much embody the type of message that they asked me to send. So I intend to stay here long enough to ensure that the voice of my constituents, at least, on those issues is heard and I intend to stay, as hobbled as I am by my personal situation, to vote in the interests of and on behalf of the people who sent me here to deliver that message.

  Mr. Speaker, I will in due course do the honourable thing and until that time I intend to lend my voice to the people who elected me to stay and speak on their behalf and to make sure that they are heard on those issues they sent me here to speak on. It may not be a long time, it may be a short time, but they have the right, they deserve to be heard and it is my intention to stay and vote on their behalf on those issues as they are presented over the next couple of weeks in this House.5

  The Halifax Daily News was not impressed. A June 8 editorial commented, “So far, the new MLA has represented constituents mostly in silence, sitting at a distance from the embarrassed NDP members, who wish he could be much further away—at least as far as Glace Bay.”6 His former NDP riding association demanded that he resign his seat. “I don’t have a response to that right now,” Matheson replied. There was speculation that he was hanging on because, deprived of his income as a lawyer, he desperately needed the $42,000 salary that went with his seat in the legislature. On June 17, Alexa McDonough, then national leader of the NDP, added her voice to those demanding his resignation. On June 21, The Daily News reported yet more reaction.7 Jeremy Ackerman, a former Cape Breton East MLA, said that Matheson “must have been driven to this by extreme circumstances.” Mary Hamood, who ran a store where Matheson used to “hang around” when he was a boy, and said she regarded him as a son, claimed she was overcharged by Matheson when he acted for her in a property transaction. Hamood said, ‘I’m very hurt he did turn out that way.… He came from a coal-mining family, and a very big family; he was probably trying to break the barrier.” The Daily News reported that Hamood wanted to encourage Matheson “to step down gracefully, and come home to his people.” People also came forward who, as it turned out, never had much time for Matheson. Russell MacKinnon, a surveyor from Sydney who was Nova Scotia’s Minister of Labour, said that he had had bad business dealings with Matheson early on, and that Matheson showed “greed, and the feeling that he was above the law, above reproach.” Other locals claimed that Matheson didn’t pay his bills.

  On June 29, Matheson gave an unusual response to those asking that he step down. He introduced a private member’s bill allowing for the recall of members of the legislative assembly. The bill gave voters the power to get rid of an MLA before the next election if he broke the law or failed to live up to promises. If 40 percent of voters in an MLA’s district signed a recall petition, a by-election would be called. The following day, the Halifax Daily News reported on the initiative: “Disgraced lawyer Reeves Matheson wants to make it easier to get rid of MLAs who are, well, like him.…‘If there’
s anything that is patently clear as the result of the debate with respect to my personal circumstances, it’s that there is not a very clear mechanism for an electorate to assess the conduct of an MLA,’ Matheson said with no trace of irony.” The Daily News described reporters covering this event as “dumbfounded.”8

  When the legislature resumed sitting in October, Matheson was still there. The pressure for him to resign increased. Reported The Daily News on October 16, “Matheson was under pressure to quit his seat throughout the spring session, and promised to consult his constituents during the summer. He said five or six constituents dropped by his office daily and not a single one wanted him to resign.”9

  In May 1999, Premier MacLellan’s government was defeated on a budget vote. On June 18, a general election was called for July 27. In Cape Breton East, Matheson’s childhood friend, Cecil Saccary, a worker at the Modern Co-op, was picked to replace him as the NDP candidate. The Liberal candidate was Dave Wilson, known as “Talk Back” because he once ran a phone-in show on the local radio station. Tera Camus wrote in Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald on July 10, “Home to traditional but dying industries such as coal mining and fishing, this blue-collar political hotbed is ripe for the picking.”10 On July 27, John Hamm’s Conservatives won a majority. Cecil Saccary got five votes more than Talk Back Wilson, but a judicial recount on August 17 reversed the result, giving Talk Back five votes more than Cecil. Cecil then petitioned the courts under the Nova Scotia Controverted Elections Act. In January 2001, Justice Merlin Nunn, finding voting irregularities but rejecting any suggestion of corrupt practices, threw out the election and ordered a by-election.11 In the new election, Talk Back won by several hundred votes. Just another Nova Scotia election, said some. Reeves Matheson was no longer a political figure.