Lawyers Gone Bad

by Philip Slayton

  At the end of 2006, the Vancouver police and RCMP were apparently still investigating, although at a glacial pace. Wirick reported that he was anxious to cooperate, but, he said, the police officers who started the investigation had retired, and the new people on the file didn’t understand the complex facts. As well, computer systems have crashed and data has been lost. It’s not clear whether charges will be laid. Wirick says he is prepared to go to jail, if he must. “I’m ready,” he says, “but I’m not hearing anything from the police. I’ve even telephoned them, and asked if they want me to come in, but they say, not yet. They seem to have lost interest.”19 In November 2005, he reported, “Everything has been quiet.”20

  Trying to explain what happened, Wirick now says, “It was laziness. I just didn’t care. I didn’t do it for money. I didn’t get any money. I did it because I didn’t care. The worst thing for me was not complying with my undertakings, the betrayal of trust.” Then he added, “I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Four or five years before all the trouble, I said to Karen, I want to do something else, quit law, write a book or something. She said no. She wouldn’t let me quit.”

  As for Tarsem Singh Gill, Jim Matkin suggests that there was a “Robin Hood” element to his behaviour.21 Matkin says, “Gill’s business plan was, to say the least, faulty. He was selling houses at less than it cost him to build them. Some purchasers, who realized what was happening, thought of him as a hero.” Gill was quickly back in the property development business. On August 29, 2003, The Province reported:22

  Tarsem Gill, the developer at the centre of Vancouver’s largest ongoing commercial-crime probe, appears to be back in business.

  Gill is popping up at construction sites in east Vancouver and Surrey, including a row of four new homes in the 2500-block East 40th Avenue, where The Province photographed him meeting with work crews one July morning.

  He has also been seen all summer long applying for permits at city hall. … Contacted by phone this week, Gill said none of the projects are his own.

  “I’m not doing anything right now, because I was forced into the bankruptcy. I’m just working for somebody, that’s all.”

  Gill says he works sporadically for a number of friends.

  “One month I work for this guy, one month I work for another guy. If somebody asks me, ‘Could you help me to go to city hall?’ I go there.”

  Local developers were amazed to see Gill at building sites.

  Wirick started a new job in June 2002, working as a manager at Koko’s Gourmet Pet Foods in North Vancouver for $12 an hour. “I used to take my dog there,” he says. “They offered me a job when all the trouble happened. I like running a small business. That was the only thing I liked about my legal practice, running a small business. There’s good potential in gourmet dog food.” In October 2005, Wirick remarried, to a “wonderful lady” who had worked as a bookkeeper at various Vancouver law firms for twenty years.

  Early in December 2005, Wirick’s new wife was fired by the law firm where she had worked for the past two years, without warning and with no reason given. She was told to turn off her computer and was escorted off the premises by two senior partners. Wirick often bumps into lawyers, some who know him already, and some who realize who he is when they hear his name; he used to say that they all treated him well. Wirick’s new wife has suggested that he change his last name, but so far he has resisted.

  Lawyer Jim Matkin, the executive director of the law society who steered the society through the Wirick affair and the Berge embarrassment, became embroiled in controversy himself and resigned his position at the end of 2004. The intrepid David Baines of The Vancouver Sun revealed that Matkin, while executive director, also served as president and chairman of a company associated with persons who had been sanctioned for serious securities offences.23 The law society launched an investigation and, on November 25, Matkin was placed on paid leave. By December 6, Matkin had had enough; he quit and the law society called off its inquiry. A formal complaint of Matkin’s conduct was made to the society by a member; in April 2005, the discipline committee resolved to take no further action. Matkin says, “I feel a victim of a rotten system. It’s as if I was walking down the street and a lump of ice fell off a building and hit me on the head.”24

  THIRTEEN

  BELLETRISTIC THEORETICIAN

  Marvin Singleton

  Marvin Singleton is a gifted man. He is a graduate of Yale and Berkeley law school. He wrote a good book about the U.S. journalist H.L. Mencken. He is intelligent and intellectually sophisticated. In 2006 he was in a U.S. maximum security prison fighting extradition to Canada.

  MARVIN KENNETH SINGLETON, once a lawyer in Nelson, British Columbia, later became an English teacher in Wichita, Kansas. He taught introductory composition courses at Wichita’s Butler Community College, and was a part-time librarian at nearby Rose Hill High School. On the evening of Monday, August 30, 2004, after a busy day in the classroom, Singleton was watching television in his modest basement apartment in a house on Wichita’s west side. There was a knock at the door. It was Deputy U.S. Marshal Logan Kline and his partner, come to arrest him.

  The Government of Canada had requested Singleton’s extradition from the United States in a diplomatic note dated July 9, 2004. In the eyes of Canadian officials, Singleton, charged with theft and fraud, had been a fugitive from justice since 1993. On August 26, 2004, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas, acting on behalf of Canada, obtained a warrant for Singleton’s arrest. “He was pretty surprised when we arrested him,” Deputy Kline said, “but he was a real gentlemen. He was no problem. We let him get dressed properly, and get his vitamins. It seems like he took a lot of vitamins.”1 Singleton, denied bail, was put in the Sedgwick County Jail. He began a long and mysterious fight against extradition to Canada. He hasn’t been back to his apartment on the west side of Wichita since the night he was arrested.

  Singleton is a tall man, slim and fit, now largely bald, with intense eyes.2 When he was young, he was, by all accounts, handsome, with dark and wavy hair. Those who know him well say he is articulate, witty, and fond of plays on words. He has a big vocabulary. He once put up a sign on his office door that said “belletristic theoretician.” He has a high opinion of himself. He is described as an intuitive, rather than a linear, thinker. Friends say he has a quick temper, bad judgment about people, and takes opposition very personally. He loathes those in authority, and instinctively sides with the underdog. Some suggest he exhibits the classic symptoms of manic depression. Singleton has always preferred the company of women to men, and is sometimes referred to as a “ladies’ man.” A long-time friend and admirer, a woman who lives in Nelson, describes him as “an intelligent and wise man, brilliant.” He has been married twice. He separated from his first wife in the mid-eighties. His second marriage was brief.

  Marvin was born in Kansas, on February 4, 1933, to Kenneth and Bessie Singleton. The Singletons have been described as a large and poor Depression-era farm family, very careful about saving and spending. (Marvin says that his father once worked for the U.S. Department of Defense as an early computer specialist.) Singleton got a bachelor of arts degree from Yale University (“certainly the first boy from these parts to go to Yale,” somebody said), and then a master’s degree and doctorate in English at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His doctoral thesis, on H.L. Mencken, the famous Baltimore journalist, writer and editor of the magazine American Mercury, was published in 1962.3 He then went to the University of California at Berkeley law school.4 Someone who knows Singleton well says he wanted a law degree “because of some paranoid thing about needing to defend himself.” While at Berkeley, Singleton protested against the Vietnam war, and was an outspoken critic of the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President Kennedy. He still believes that the FBI and CIA were implicated in the plot to kill Kennedy. Today he refers to himself as “a law/humanities person.” He describes research he has conducted over
the years as showing “unsurpassed, advanced law/humanities reflection … interdisciplinary ability unmatched conceptually.”5

  In 1967/68, Singleton was Fulbright Professor at the University of Oslo in Norway. He then immigrated to Canada (as part of the “Norwegian quota,” he says), not wanting to return to a United States still embroiled in Vietnam. His first Canadian job was teaching history at the University of Manitoba. Then, in 1971, Singleton took a job teaching English at Notre Dame University in the small city of Nelson, in British Columbia (population about ten thousand). Nelson is in the Selkirk Mountains on the extreme west arm of Kootenay Lake and is generally regarded as a particularly charming town. It is home to a number of erstwhile Americans, some of whom came to Canada as draft dodgers. Singleton describes Nelson as “a rather resplendent little city.”6

  In 1977, the B.C. government closed Notre Dame University. Singleton was passionately opposed to the closure and fought it for years, earning the enmity (he believes) of many powerful government figures. He wanted to stay in Nelson: He liked it there, and cut something of a figure around town, known as both a serious ladies’ man and a genuine eccentric. He turned to the best thing that seemed available to him—the practice of law. He passed a handful of exams required by the Law Society of British Columbia for those with foreign law degrees, and articled for the Nelson law firm of Ferguson and Ferguson. In 1978, Singleton was admitted to the B.C. bar. He describes himself as having been an “edgy litigator,” someone who “occasionally tested the edges in litigation because of my California (Berkeley) cultural background, including my research into the late San Francisco tort activist Melvin Belli’s career.” He adds that his stance was flagged by the Law Society of British Columbia as “too American,” and that the law society was bitter toward him because he had a role in uncovering serious professional negligence of a large Vancouver firm.

  Singleton resigned from the Law Society of British Columbia, at age fifty-seven, in October 1990. The reason for this unusual step is unclear (he says he never planned to practise law for more than about ten years—it was all part of his education as a “law/humanities” person). Following his resignation he still maintained the office where he had practised law. He continued to exercise power of attorney over the affairs of Miss Haroldine Copp, an elderly lady living in a nursing home (Copp died in 1991 at age eighty-four, and Singleton became executor of her estate), and remained executor of the estate of a retired millionaire farmer from Alberta, called John George, who had lived with his mother north of Nelson in an $8,000 trailer. It was how he behaved in these two appointments that later led to charges of fraud and theft.

  In 1988, Singleton had what he calls a “bright idea.” He decided to develop an upscale residential compound near Nelson. Money was transferred from the Copp and George estates into the bank accounts of two companies incorporated by Singleton, 433 Winchester Management Corporation, and Silvertip 1000 Enterprises Ltd. These companies bought 140 acres of raw land, and, as Singleton proudly describes, a $90,000 D-8 Caterpillar with ripper and three blades to clear snow, build ponds, and improve roads. Singleton claims that “433 Winchester” and “Silvertip” were owned by the Copp and George estates when these purchases were made. At the very least, he says, the Copp and George estates clearly had equitable ownership of the assets that had been acquired. Others—including the police—said that Singleton owned the companies, and the Copp and George money had, in effect, been stolen. Singleton seems to have been the sole director and officer of both companies. His idea, or its execution, turned out to be not so bright after all, and the real estate venture failed. It is not clear what happened to the 140 acres.

  “Where’s the money, Marvin?” asked a Vancouver newspaper article in 1994.7 A local Nelson lawyer, Don Skogstad, who had replaced Singleton as executor of the Copps estate, decided that funds were missing.8 Allegations were made that Singleton had stolen about $80,000 from the Copp estate, and perhaps $400,000 or more from the George estate. It is unclear, but it seems that Singleton also lost his own money in the failed real estate venture. He speaks of his economic ruin, and the need to re-establish himself financially. The question was not only, where’s the money? It was also, where’s Marvin? In 1993, Singleton had disappeared (although he maintains that he was registered with the U.S. Social Security Administration and would have been easy to find at any time).

  After Skogstad’s discovery that funds were missing, Sergeant Doug Haddow of the Nelson City Police opened a file. Constable Marty Misner of the RCMP local commercial crimes unit was interested. After six weeks spent reviewing Singleton’s files, the two officers decided that his administration of the Copp and George estates had been fraudulent. Theft and fraud charges were laid under the Criminal Code.9 A Canada-wide warrant, and then an international warrant, were issued for his arrest. But where was Marvin? Later, the Nelson Daily News described what happened after the Canada-wide warrant was issued:10

  Despite his run from the law, the two officers managed to track Singleton down.

  “We had him pinned down in Texas, a place called Nocona.”

  The town’s sheriff was “keeping an eye” on Singleton on the local cops’ behalf.

  “Marvin at the time was living under a bridge,” Haddow recalls. “In a holiday trailer under a bridge that separated Texas and Oklahoma.”

  But by the time an international warrant was issued for the arrest, the Texas sheriff had retired and local police lost Singleton’s trail.

  Where had Singleton gone after Nocona? Mexico, some thought. But the trail went very cold. In January 1995, the Law Society of British Columbia announced that it had paid $559,878 to the George estate, the amount it concluded had been stolen by Singleton. In a press release, the law society said, “While acting as executor of the George estate, Mr. Singleton received approximately $1,070,000 of the estate’s assets, but paid only $500,000 of bequests. By the time an administrator was appointed, the estate account had been virtually emptied, and Mr. Singleton had left the country.” In August, $77,710 was paid to the Copp estate by the law society. That seemed the end of the matter. The files were put in a drawer. It was yesterday’s business.

  Singleton was destitute. For a time, he worked as a combine operator and trucker in the Kansas wheat harvest. From what he earned from the harvest, he bought a bright blue three-quarter-ton windowed 1978 Ford van. Parked first on the bank of the Red River near Nocona, Texas (where the local sherriff apparently kept an eye on him), and then on the streets of Wichita, Kansas, the van was his home. It had a camp stove, and a sleeping bag on the steel floor. Singleton’s only income was $292 a month from U.S. Social Security. While he lived in the van, says Singleton, he wrote two unpublished novels, what he describes as a “wheat” novel and a literary western (he is still polishing the western, which he hopes in due course will win a Golden Spur Award from the Western Writers of America). He says he has also written an unpublished trilogy called The Cyprian Epic.

  In 1998, Corporal Luc Quenneville of the RCMP’s commercial crime division was posted to Creston, British Columbia, about 125 kilometres from Nelson.11 Reviewing cold cases in the region, he came across the dusty Marvin Singleton file. He decided to look at it once a year, just in case something came up. In the late summer of 2004, browsing once more through the file, he noticed something he hadn’t noticed before—the name of Singleton’s estranged daughter, Solveig, his only surviving child (by his first wife).12 He searched “Solveig Singleton” on Google. He found a high-powered lawyer and right-wing lobbyist in Washington, D.C., with that name.13 He emailed her and asked if she was Marvin Singleton’s daughter. Yes, was the reply. He telephoned her and asked if she ever heard from her father. “Yes,” she said, “every two or three years. He’s in Wichita, Kansas.” Corporal Quenneville began filling in extradition papers. Soon, Deputy Marshal Kline was at the door of Singleton’s basement apartment.

  Singleton was denied bail. The Sedgwick county jail became his home. He decided to fight
extradition to Canada, acting as his own lawyer. Sometimes he says he is fighting extradition because the lengthy delay in his case, as well as the antagonism of the Law Society of British Columbia and many Canadian lawyers and high government officials, preclude effective legal representation and a fair trial in Canada. He says that the charges against him have been revived, and Canada is seeking extradition, because powerful forces in Canada harbour great hostility toward him. They are hostile because he is American, because there is prejudice against people from the B.C. “interior high country” that he regards as his real home, and because he was active in protesting the closure of Nelson’s university (which, he alleges, was closed partly because of the strong American presence in its faculty). He says of the Canadian attempt to extradite him that “here was a politically-charged opportunity to bait in Canada an individual perceived as an American, and two precarious Liberal governments—one Provincial and one Federal—decided in the late Spring of 2004 some advantage might accrue from publicity even a weak case [sic].” He also believes that U.S. authorities have political motivations in his case. He writes, referring to himself in the third person:

  A Portland, Oregon lawyer named Brandon Mayfield, wrongly charged as a principal in the Madrid Train bombing early in 2004, was thoroughly investigated. This investigation of Mayfield’s Kansas roots led through a cousin to the cousin’s girlfriend, who had a tenant … Singleton. That information alone, according to Singleton, might not have led American authorities to throw him up to be baited by Canadian nationalists. But there may have been more. By June, 2004, Singleton, at the request of a Kansas attorney representing a Florida man who was attempting to sue Henry Kissinger for War Crimes, provided the man with a number of books and articles.… These mailings by Singleton were known because the disabled Vietnam veteran seeking international law indictment of Kissinger … had his mail from Singleton opened and scrutinized. In any event, the State Department decided to draw Canada’s attention to a man Canada could have located in less than an hour for the past 8 years, if they had wanted to. Singleton believes the United States wants Canada to reciprocate by sending down Canadian nationals of near-Eastern origin for the United States to interrogate. The United States suddenly had a rare bargaining chip to throw to the previously-uncooperative Canadians.14