BARRY SHERMAN, SPORTING A BROWN checked suit with a diagonally striped tie, sits beside his wife, Honey, both of them perched on director’s chairs in a studio. It is October 11, 2017, two months before they will be found dead. A clean white background puts the focus on the power couple. A video camera rolls. As part of an effort to celebrate volunteers and donors, the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto (UJA) is preparing a tribute to two of its most generous supporters: Honey Sherman and her husband, Barry. Honey, wearing a crisp white shirt with a big collar, a black jacket, and a pearl choker, begins by explaining to donors and volunteers how her family, having survived unimaginable conditions during the Holocaust, ended up in Halifax, on Canada’s east coast. After some Maritime hospitality, Honey Reich and her family, along with other Jews who had been living in displaced persons camps in Austria and Germany before making the ocean crossing to Canada, boarded a train to Winnipeg. In Toronto, there was a change of plans for the Reichs. A Jewish Immigrant Aid Service leader came on board and offered lodging and jobs to those who wished to disembark. The Reichs got off the train. The memory of that generosity, from people her family did not know, stuck with Honey. She goes on to explain how it was not until years later, when she was newly married to Barry, that she received her first request for a donation to a Jewish cause: just $100. Honey says she told the fundraiser, a friend from childhood, that she would give it her consideration, but she did not donate on the spot: “I disappointed her grossly. I said, ‘Let me go home and think about it and get back to you.’ ”
Honey then describes how she went home, discussed it with Barry, and the next day made an anonymous gift of $1,000. The friend, Honey says, likely never knew she had made such a deep impact. And as stories of Barry Sherman’s success in the generic pharmaceuticals world spread, requests for donations intensified. “That’s how it started. People started to ask, and we were able to do it.”
Barry is watching Honey tell her story. He smiles. His gaze does not waver from his wife. Honey’s right hand is lying comfortably on the armrest of her husband’s chair, their wrists touching. Now it’s her turn to watch Barry speak. The message he delivers is one he has repeated many times to people who have been targets of his often aggressive fundraising requests.
“I don’t think any person can be a happy person if he is successful in life and doesn’t give back to the communities,” Sherman says, smiling. “I would encourage all youngsters to get involved and always make it the focus of their lives and participate in society and to give back, because that is a source of great satisfaction.” As Barry speaks, Honey reaches over and makes an adjustment to his tie, which is poking out of his buttoned suit jacket a bit too much for her liking. That small gesture is typical of one part of their relationship. Honey wanted to make sure her Chuck was presentable to the public.
Later in the video, the couple is laughing at a story of the origin of their first large donation. It was to assist in the international Operation Exodus campaign to help Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrate to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A well-known man in Toronto’s Jewish community telephoned the forty-six-year-old Barry Sherman in 1989 and said, “Barry, this is an emergency campaign….Would I be crazy to ask you for a million dollars?” In those days, at the start of Apotex’s success, “that was a lot of money,” Sherman recalls. He hung up, he says, and talked to Honey. Then he called the man back a few minutes later to say he would write a cheque for the requested amount. The two burst into laughter on camera when Honey reminds her husband that the fundraiser on the Exodus campaign was kicking himself afterwards, saying, “Dammit, I didn’t ask for enough!”
The story finished, Honey gives her husband a playful nudge. His suit jacket is riding up at the shoulders. “Now, you’ve got to sit up straight and pull down your jacket,” she tells him. He does.
Over the years, Honey encouraged Barry to break out from his normal wardrobe—“Barry’s uniform,” Apotex colleagues called it—of white shirt and grey slacks. Barry, by all accounts, cared as much for nice clothes as he did for nice cars. Which is to say, not at all. At one point, in exasperation, Honey even enlisted their friends Fred and Bryna Steiner to take Barry to the high-end menswear shop Harry Rosen to see if the clothiers there could make an impact. The effort met with limited success. Barry Sherman did not think that clothes made the man; rather, it was intellect, drive, and how much you gave back to your community.
The UJA video filmed two months before their deaths was eventually shown the following year as part of a tribute to the Shermans. At the event, on June 8, 2018, organizers announced they were posthumously giving Honey the Ben Sadowski Award of Merit to acknowledge her “outstanding leadership qualities and years of involvement in the Jewish and general communities.” Though seen as a high-powered couple—friends dubbed them the “king and queen” of Jewish fundraising—it was their individual and very different achievements that were remembered. Barry Sherman, the leader of a generic drug powerhouse who gave away hundreds of millions of dollars. Honey Sherman, the tireless charity volunteer who sat on boards and asked tough questions to ensure that the family money was well spent.
At the end of the video, Barry describes his take on the couple’s separation of duties: “We decided to divide up the responsibilities. She does all the community service work—she has been chair of just about everything—and my time is better spent doing what I can to earn money so I can write the cheques. That’s how we have divided it.”
Honey nods and looks serious for a moment. It appears, at least to a casual viewer, that she has never heard her husband articulate the arrangement this way, at least not in so public a forum. She nods again, decisively this time. “Fair and equitable,” she says.
It’s difficult to quantify how much the Shermans gave to charity in their lifetimes. At times, it was done anonymously. Dr. Michael Spino, the ApoPharma president who was involved in the thalassemia and deferiprone research, says that when he first arrived at the company, “We had to force Barry to at least acknowledge Apotex. Barry did not want to be set up as some sort of super person. Honey felt a little bit differently, but Barry just did it because it was right.”
Sherman told people, and Spino was one of them, that he believed people should give 20 percent of what they earned to the community. He insisted that all people who were able should make significant financial contributions.
Since Apotex is a private company, there is no way to know what Sherman earned annually, but the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his personal net worth at $4.7 billion at time of death, a calculation largely based on his Apotex holdings. One highly placed insider with knowledge of Sherman’s family holding company told me that Sherman had numerous investments outside of Apotex and that his real net worth was closer to $10 billion. A UJA official said that Sherman gave that organization at least $150 million over the years. The public record of press releases and news stories reveals that a series of multi-million dollar donations were made over the years beginning with a donation of $60 million in the late 1990s, to what was eventually named the Sherman Campus, a Jewish recreation and cultural centre built in the north end of Toronto. Sherman friend Leslie Gales explains that this was a very important project for Barry, who grew up at a time when Jewish people were not accepted in other health clubs. Out of that was born the concept of the Jewish Community Centre (JCC), recreational and cultural clubs built in the 1950s and 1960s. Sherman wanted to build new infrastructure on the existing site of an outdated JCC, and friends convinced him to attach his family name to it. After their deaths, a two-acre park in a corner of the campus was named the Honey and Barry Community Park in recognition of their service and contributions.
As noted in the UJA video, both the Shermans volunteered as well as providing funding, Honey much more than Barry. She was on numerous boards, including that of the Baycrest Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, the York University Foundation, the Mount Sinai Women’s Auxiliary, and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. She was also chair of Toronto’s Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre. Those who sat with Honey Sherman on boards and travelled with her to Israel to see where some of the donated money was being spent recall that she would ask probing questions. Recently, the mayor of Sderot, a town on the border of the Gaza Strip, commented to a Canadian charity official that he would miss Honey Sherman, both as a regular visitor to his town and as someone who was clearly invested in making sure donated dollars were well spent. The mayor told the Canadian charity official that “nobody asked more or better questions than Honey Sherman.” Friends and colleagues also recall how, in addition to asking tough questions, Honey found it important to make a tangible connection to the difficult past of her family. Friend Karen Simpson Radomski, herself a veteran volunteer in Jewish charities and the wife of lawyer Harry Radomski, recalls the trip she took with Honey to Poland, where they joined in the annual March of the Living, a silent walk on foot that traces the journey from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, where the gas chambers were located. “It was so important to her to learn first-hand about this part of her family’s history,” says Simpson Radomski. “I think, for her, there was some element of survivor’s guilt. She knew how fortunate she was, and I think that is why she always tried to help others.”
Barry Sherman was much less hands-on than his wife, but he did hold various fundraising posts over the years, and as a graduate of the University of Toronto he had a continuing commitment to providing guidance and advice (in addition to donations) to the university’s Entrepreneurship Leadership Council. The Sherman philanthropy included major donations to Baycrest Apotex Home for the Aged, and also non-Jewish charities, with significant gifts to the United Way and Mount Sinai Hospital. Alex Sherman told me that “one of the amazing things my parents did was envision the Baycrest Apotex Home for the Aged….They often thought big-picture but also paid attention to the little details that brought comfort and joy in the spaces they created.”
The Shermans have also sponsored pharmacy research at the University of Toronto with about $12 million in donations, primarily to the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, named for Sherman’s greatest rival, the founder of Novopharm. Internationally, Sherman’s Apotex Foundation has donated an estimated $50 million in pharmaceutical products to relief groups coping with natural disasters and epidemics.
But what kind of couple were the Shermans? Did they travel together? Read the same books? Gossip about their friends and neighbours? Watch the same Netflix shows? Could they be relied on if you were in trouble? What kind of parents were they? Were they a loving and close couple or a distant one, living a marriage of convenience?
The Shermans’ marriage of forty-six years began not long after Cindy Ulster introduced her candystriper friend Honey Reich to Dr. Barry Sherman in 1970. Over the years, the running joke was that Barry was not an especially attractive catch, because Honey’s parents had always hoped their daughter would marry a medical doctor. When it turned out that Barry had a PhD but not an MD, Honey told her parents and girlfriends she had decided that was fine. “Close enough,” she said. The couple married the next year. Fred and Bryna Steiner, who wed two days later, were the closest “couple” friends the Shermans had. Dinners, parties, and trips to Florida were done together. No matter where they were, laughter dominated their table, with each person holding their own in the lively conversation. Fred and Barry did discuss their business interests and how much they both had to pay to the Canadian government in taxes. Barry, in particular, hated to pay taxes and over the years would engage in a variety of schemes designed to lower the amounts he owed. But Steiner also recalls free-ranging discussions among the four of them about the issues of the day.
When their orders were given and the food arrived, the Shermans’ plates were never filled with anything particularly healthy. Fried food was their favourite, the more batter on fish the better. Vegetables were tolerated if the zucchini was fried in a thick batter, served crispy brown. Sherman had diabetes, but he wasn’t keen to follow the diet prescribed by his doctors. He had also had prostate cancer and various other ailments. Years later, Joanne Mauro would make an effort to ensure that her boss ate well at least at lunch. She would pick up a healthy takeout meal or, when Apotex was big enough to have a chef and a cafeteria, make sure something green and leafy showed up on his desk. That did not stop Sherman at odd hours figuring out the best route to take through the Apotex building to find the choicest assortment of cookies and chocolate sitting out on employees’ desks. Out at a restaurant, away from the eyes of Barry’s assistant, the Shermans were freer to indulge in whatever they thought was tasty. And Honey always seemed to home in with laser focus on the plate beside or across from her, particularly if it held french fries.
Neither Barry nor Honey was a big drinker. Barry could barely tolerate half a glass of wine, and Honey was only marginally more interested. If there was a dance floor, Honey would drag Barry onto it, though he did not like to dance or in fact like anything at all about music. He told people music was “pointless,” that “it all sounds the same.” But if Honey wanted to dance, he danced. Barry also had a mischievous side to him, and he liked to get a rise out of the Steiners. At a certain point in a dinner, he would look at Honey with a sly narrowing of his eyes behind his thick glasses. Then he’d look at the Steiners, then back at Honey. Pushing his chair back from the table, he would nod to his wife and say, “Let’s go get laid.”
One story the Steiners chuckle over was a visit to Amsterdam’s red light district in the 1970s. Honey could not believe what the “women were doing,” recalls Bryna. In fact, both of the Shermans delighted in showing they had a bawdy side. On one of their Florida trips in the early days, Honey announced to Bryna, “I want to go to that male strip club, the Crazy Horse Saloon.” Bryna shook her head. “Honey, you’re being crazy.” Honey insisted, and the two couples got in a car and headed to the Crazy Horse. Six men, all dressed like the Village People, danced onto the stage and the show began. Barry kept marvelling at their “equipment” as, one by one, the dancers stripped down to nothing. Bryna, who had been coaxed by Honey many times to step out of her comfort zone, tried desperately and unsuccessfully to convince Honey to approach the stage and tuck a $20 bill into one dancer’s skimpy waistband. Another time, when Honey found out that some of Barry’s male friends would occasionally exchange emails containing photos of naked women and dirty jokes, Honey insisted that the men forward them to her. As Bryna says, “Honey did not want to miss out on anything.”
The couples certainly had fun together, but they made a point of being there for each other if help was needed, including a shoulder to lean on. The Shermans also took care of their own parents. Honey’s mother and father, for example, had a nice condo in Florida courtesy of the Shermans. Barry and Honey each had a sister, and both were well cared for by their wealthy siblings. In particular, Honey invited her sister, Mary Shechtman, to work on designing and decorating the homes the Sherman couple owned over the years. Mary, according to Sherman holding company insiders, was also given significant financial assistance to purchase real estate, including numerous houses sub-divided as rental apartments and her Forest Hill home where she and her husband, Allen, live. Allen’s foray into the retail jewellery business, helped by at least $32 million in Barry Sherman money, ended in bankruptcy. With the death of the Shermans, and the rift that developed between Mary and her nephew and nieces, the Shechtmans were cut off. “My family (Allen and my children) and I have struggled desperately since the incident,” she wrote in a May 2019 email to me. “We have never had the luxury of healing properly. We were left on our own and had to put all our energies into surviving. We lost more than we could ever imagine and more than Honey & Barry would ever have wanted for us. They would be horrified, angry and devastated by the pain we have had to suffer and the losses we have had to endure….hopefully we are finally on the road to recovery from the devastation we have had to deal with emotionally, financially and physically.” At time of writing, Mary was telling her friends that Allen is driving an Uber and she is planning to start work as a tour guide to make ends meet.
From his early teenage days, Barry knew he wanted to have children. In high school, he made pocket money by babysitting neighbourhood kids. He told his friend Joel Ulster, who married before Barry did and quickly started a family, that he looked forward to having his own. With the Ulster and Steiner households brimming with kids, it would often be Barry sitting on the carpeted floor, amusing the children with toys and games. A standard opening line from Uncle Barry, once the children were old enough to have a conversation, was, “Tell me what’s going on.” Friends have mused that his affinity with children, particularly when they were babies, grew out of the notion that children were blank slates, filled with promise and potential, which appealed to his entrepreneurial spirit. Adults frequently disappointed Barry Sherman, but young children never did. As future parents often do, the Shermans “test drove” other people’s children. To give Fred and Bryna a break, Barry and Honey would sometimes pick up their three children on a Friday and take them for dinner. “Our kids became his kids,” Fred Steiner recalls. It was yet another odd part of Barry Sherman’s personality that though he spoke so often of wanting children, when he had his own, he saw very little of them.
Having their own children proved more difficult than the Shermans expected. After Honey first miscarried in 1972, it happened several more times before Lauren was born in 1975. Joanne Mauro, who began working as Barry’s executive assistant not long after, recalls that Barry or Honey would bring toddler Lauren, a “real cutie,” to the Apotex offices. Lauren remained an only child until she was eight. Honey was continuing to have miscarriages, and finally, in the early 1980s, the couple decided to try surrogacy. In the 1980s, paying a woman to use her eggs and her womb to carry a child to term was not common practice in Canada, and it was only just becoming popular in the United States. An American lawyer provided the Shermans with books that described the physical characteristics and education of potential mothers. In each case, Barry’s sperm was used, and each of the three surrogates they would engage came from a different US state. The lawyer had the women sign what Sherman told friends was an “iron-clad contract” that would prevent them from ever having a claim on the child or the Sherman fortune. In each case, the mother was flown to Canada for the birth so that the children would be Canadian citizens. Jonathon was born in 1983, Alex in 1986, and Kaelen in 1990.
The funeral for Barry and Honey Sherman on December 21, 2017 was the first time anyone but the closest of family members and friends had seen the Sherman children in public since their parents’ deaths the week before. None had spoken publicly and the only communication was the brief statement they had issued decrying the murder-suicide theory. The four Sherman children came on stage together after Rabbi Eli Rubenstein read the poem “Each of Us Has a Name” by Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky. Jonathon stepped to the podium first and encouraged those in the audience to take a moment to “breathe and reflect” and to consider the “enormous impact that this is having on everyone gathered here today.” Before her brother delivered the first eulogy, Alex Sherman sang a Hebrew song—“Eli Eli (My God, My God),” a hopeful song written by Hanna Senesh, a young Hungarian poet and paratrooper who in 1944, as part of the British Army, jumped into Nazi-occupied Europe and was later caught and executed. She is considered a national heroine in Israel and the story of how, at age 23, she refused a blindfold and faced the firing squad head on, is a powerful tale of bravery. Kaelen, the youngest Sherman, recited the words to the song “You Are My Sunshine,” which she said their father, returning home late from work each night, used to sing to them as children. “I would like to take this time to sing it back to him.” Lauren, the eldest Sherman child, did not speak.
In the audience were thousands of mourners, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynn and Toronto Mayor John Tory, along with hundreds of Apotex employees in blue company T-shirts. Jonathon began by describing his family ordeal. “These last few days have been really fucked up for my family,” he told mourners. When his parents were alive, he said they would always take charge and provide comfort in difficult situations. While Barry focused on his work and supporting the family, Honey handled all the organizational details of the children’s lives, including parent-teacher interviews, after-school events, and summer camp. “Our mother always had everything taken care of,” he recalled. While she was organized on her kids’ behalf, Honey was often forgetful of her own things. On a family trip to Israel, Jonathon told the mourners, the family had to retrace their steps after each stop to look for his mother’s left-behind wallet, keys, or other items. Her funny ways aside, Jonathon said he and his siblings marvelled at how “stoic” their mother was, displaying so much energy in making sure her children’s needs were met while struggling physically. Knowing how difficult it was for his mother to get around on some days due to various infirmities, Jonathon said, it was a significant accomplishment that she was able to train for, take part in, and win a Dancing with the Stars–style competition to raise money for a charity.
Jonathon spent part of his eulogy talking about his sisters. He gave the eldest, Lauren, “amazing credit for paving the way” in the family and lauded her “free spirit and your ability to love life.” To his sister Alex, he said she was the “heart of the family” and said he will always recall the gruelling, 250-kilometre race in the Gobi desert in 2007 to raise money for an AIDS charity when she gave her walking stick to a villager who she said needed it more than she did. Alex finished the race, but her brother did not as his partner at the time had to pull out. To Kaelen, the youngest, Jonathon said their parents were “teeming with excitement for your wedding” and he vowed she would still have a wedding when she was ready because “that is what mom and dad would want.” Later, Fred Steiner would put his hand on Jonathon’s shoulder and congratulate him for how he was taking a leadership role in the wake of his parents’ deaths. “Your dad would be proud of you taking charge.” There was also an edge to some of Jonathon’s comments, which upset other members of the family, including Honey’s sister, Mary. In describing a family ski trip to Vermont, Jonathon said his mother let him choose a more difficult run for her after a series of easier trips down the mountain. “When I picked the black run, directly below the chair lift, you were reluctantly gung ho,” Jonathon said, addressing his deceased mother before the thousands of mourners. “I’ll never forget watching you wipe out on the first turn and slide down the entire run for everyone to see. It was effing hilarious. Until you made me march up and collect all your gear.” Mary, and many of the Shermans’ friends were taken aback by Jonathon’s words, given Honey’s infirmities. It was a poorly kept secret in the circles the Shermans travelled in that Jonathon and his mother did not get along. People who knew both Jonathon and Honey said they “hated” each other. In fact, the relationship between Honey and her children was, on many occasions, strained. Lauren, the eldest, confided to one close friend of Honey’s that her mother’s controlling behaviour amounted to “psychological abuse.” Kaelen complained to people she was close to that her mother often told her, “You’re fat. You need to lose weight.” Some friends of Honey said she, in turn, did not like to speak about her children and, as odd as it may seem given her background, called them “the Nazis” to her sister and close friends—an apparent reference to how she felt they controlled her with constant demands. Barry, friends say, was caught in the middle. He maintained a stronger connection to their children by doing two things: listening and giving them money, although he gave significantly less to the younger two than to Jonathon and Lauren.
With four young children, the Shermans did what most people did and set up carpools to get them to class and after-school events. Golf friends Anita Franklin and Dahlia Solomon had children who were roughly the same ages as the Shermans’ kids and recall how both Honey and Barry took part in carpooling. When it was Honey’s turn to drive, it automatically meant the children would be late for school. She was always running at least fifteen minutes, often thirty minutes, behind schedule. But the children loved it when Barry drove, because he would talk to them non-stop, drive right past the school, and take them off in a completely different direction, nattering all the way about one theory or another. When it came to involvement in the kids’ activities, Honey and Barry were the opposite of helicopter parents. Barry, in particular, rarely attended after-school events his children were involved in. A late riser, it was unusual for him to see them in the morning, and his late-night and weekend work schedule kept him from being very involved. Barry typically worked six days a week at the Apotex office. Sunday, he worked in his home office.
At the funeral, Jonathon—briefly removing his kippah in what onlookers took as quiet deference to his father’s atheism and asking others in the audience to do the same—said he could remember every single time Barry Sherman took part in father-son activities with him. “He would come and watch me play hockey or baseball every season or two. But those few games were my Stanley Cups and my World Series.”
It was difficult for those who did not know the family well to tell if Jonathon harbours a grudge against his distant father. In his eulogy, he acknowledged the reason his father could not always be there. “We clearly knew why our dad was not always present. He was a pretty busy guy.” The theme of Barry being overly preoccupied with work was raised a second and third time by Jonathon, who noted that Honey was his “first golf partner” and the witness to his only hole-in-one. “Well, Dad was there, but he was buried in his briefcase, I am sure.” And on one of the “three or four” times that Sherman played baseball with his son in the backyard, Barry hit the baseball over the fence and commented that as a boy his friends called him “slugger.” Jonathon, who had learned from his father’s friends that Barry lacked any athletic prowess, said this was an example of one of his father’s best attributes. “You were always so funny.”
One part of the children’s upbringing that Sherman did focus on was grammar and spelling, patiently but firmly correcting each error. In his eulogy, wiping tears from his eyes, Jonathon got a laugh from the crowd when he apologized to his absent father for any grammatical mistakes he might make. It was a running joke among Sherman friends and family that if you uttered something incorrectly, he would interrupt with the correct phrasing. A few months before he died, Sherman friend Senator Linda Frum sent an email to Barry Sherman and several others with the subject line “Barry’s ancestor?” The email read, “ ‘I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.’—last words of French aristocrat Marquis de Favras after reading his death sentence during the French Revolution.” Attached was an image of Favras, and Sherman responded, “I look a lot like him. Perhaps I am his reincarnation.”
Over time, Jonathon said, he figured out that his father was a “real-life superhero,” because he set an example of what a “great Canadian” was. He cited his father’s success in business and his philanthropic contributions as reasons to regard him as being as much a Canadian hero as hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky.
In later years, Barry Sherman became Jonathon’s business partner in several enterprises, and title records show at least $127 million in loans from a Barry Sherman-funded company registered against Jonathan’s venture into the self-storage business and a group of rental cottages on Chandos Lake, northeast of Toronto, where Jonathon and his business partner, Adam Paulin, had a cottage and owned a small marina. Jonathon believed Chandos Lake was ripe for development and he wanted to expand his holdings to eventually purchase cottages on one quarter of the lake. There were disagreements along the way, with Jonathon as recently as 2015 asking his father to consider investing an additional $250 million in those businesses. Jonathon, who studied civil engineering at Columbia University in New York, wanted his father to listen seriously to his plans. As one person who worked closely with Barry Sherman for years said, “Jonathon wanted to prove he was just as astute a business person as his father. Prove to the world.” Barry, in a 2015 email exchange with his son, does not appear overly receptive to the pitch, particularly because Jonathon was criticizing Barry’s decisions over the years to back certain businesses, most notably those run by Barry’s good friend Frank D’Angelo. At one point in the email chain, the 32-year-old Jonathon tells his 73-year-old father that he understands business concepts because he has “studied accounting and finance.” Barry, who is balking at providing his son more money, shoots back, “Please also remember that I have been making business judgments for many decades, often making decisions with which others disagree. The result has been some big losses, but also some even bigger gains. As a result of my decisions, you will likely be a multi-billionaire.”
In his eulogy at the funeral some two and a half years later, Jonathon made no reference to any acrimony between them, saying his father was a proud partner in his “little” business, a venture called Green Storage (named “Green” because, according to its website, it has sites powered by solar energy, with electric vehicle charging stations and low flush toilets). Jonathon told mourners that when he and Barry began their partnership, they had the shortest shareholder meeting ever. It boiled down to his father offering “anything, anytime.”
Despite Barry’s attempts in later years to rein in his son, the elder Sherman was a soft touch for money, and it started at an early age. Friends have recalled how one Friday morning when Jonathon was in Grade 1 at the United Synagogue Day School (now Robbins Hebrew Academy), he went up to his parents’ room because he needed a weekly donation for a Jewish charity. Barry was still in bed, but he mumbled from under the covers that his wallet was on the bureau and Jonathon could take what he needed. Later, as the children lined up to drop their donations at the front of the class, little Jonathon stuffed a fistful of bills into the collection jar. Several hours later, a teacher called the Sherman home and told Honey that Jonathon had put nine $100 bills into the jar. Honey told the teacher to hang on to the money, and later she retrieved most of it.
The relationship to money in the Sherman household was intriguing and likely can be traced to Honey’s and Barry’s upbringing, though each parent ended up with a different approach. Both had parents who at various times struggled financially. As described earlier, Barry grew up in a home where his father, Herbert, was president and part owner of a zipper manufacturing company, and in those days the family was quite comfortable. But Herbert died when Barry and his sister were young, and their mother had to take in boarders to pay the bills. Honey was a first-generation immigrant whose parents had survived the Holocaust and then lived in a displaced persons camp in Austria before coming to Canada and starting their small shoe store. Honey was consequently careful with money, and at times she seemed to invent scarcity and need where there was none. That resulted in some oddly controlling behaviour. When Lauren, their oldest, was a little girl, she had a birthday party. Thirty friends came, and it was a big event. After the party, according to other parents who were there, Honey told Lauren she was not ready for her daughter to open the presents. It may be, friends speculate, that she feared Lauren would be spoiled by having so many gifts at once and wanted to appoint a time to open them later when Lauren would appreciate each present individually. The wrapped presents remained set aside at their home for weeks before they were opened.
Unlike most of their well-to-do friends, the Shermans employed very few people to help run their home and daily lives. Whereas some had full-time staff working at their homes, the Shermans only hired someone to water the plants and a cleaning lady once a week. Barry in particular seemed uncomfortable with the notion of employing people of lesser means to do domestic tasks. At an overnight dinner party at the Muskoka cottage of Linda Frum and her husband, Howard Sokolowski, the summer before the Shermans died, Frum was in the dining room clearing the table while her two housekeepers, who had helped serve dinner, were tidying the kitchen. Barry, who had lingered beside the table, looked uncomfortable. “Don’t you think it’s unfair?” he said, nodding towards the women in the kitchen. “We have so much. We have so many beautiful things, and other people do not. Why should we be served and they do the serving? Who decided that some people have to serve and some people get served?”
Frum was put off by the comment and wasn’t sure how to respond. She wondered if he’d had a bad time. She tried to convey to Sherman that her housekeepers were well paid, that she treated them like family and did her best to help them if they needed something. “We ended up having a social justice conversation. I think he was struggling with the idea that the whole evening had been a cosmic injustice.”
Honey herself exhibited what could be taken as hypocrisy in her relationship to money. She drove her ten-year-old SUV, which she frequently had repaired instead of buying the latest version, yet on shopping trips with girlfriends she’d buy three or even ten of something, including pricey Louis Vuitton or Jimmy Choo purses, if she was convinced she was getting a good deal. The purses, or perhaps three identical versions of a designer jacket, would be stored in her closets and never used. Yet small, inexpensive items could hold great meaning for her. On a trip to Ottawa a few weeks before she was killed, Honey was awarded a Senate medal in recognition of her, and Barry’s, philanthropic contributions. Her friend Senator Linda Frum was with her to make the presentation. Afterwards, Honey misplaced her scarf and spent several hours retracing her steps to recover it. Frum and Leslie Gales, a fellow attendee at the event, assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that Honey was scouring Ottawa not to find an expensive Loro Piana scarf from Italy but rather a $40 scarf from Banana Republic. Several cab trips later, the scarf retrieved, Honey explained to her two bewildered girlfriends, “I love that scarf.”
Both Honey and Barry always carried a lot of cash with them. Honey, who never went to a bank, would get spending money from a drawer that Barry kept stocked with $50 and $100 bills. But stories of the Shermans’ unwillingness to spend their cash on certain things are legion. Fellow philanthropist Leslie Gales recalls how her young son asked Barry Sherman one day why he was wearing a cheap watch and not a Rolex. Sherman replied, “I buy my watches at a flea market, and for an extra few dollars I get one with the date on it. Why spend money on something you don’t need?” When the Shermans were heading out to a restaurant and parking was difficult to find, Barry would do his best to find a free spot. Fred Steiner, who would happily leave his car in a No Parking zone and pay a fine as long as it was not a tow zone, said trying to save a buck was just one of the quirks of his friend. Another was his single-minded focus on his job. One day, at the private Oakdale Golf and Country Club, where the Shermans and Steiners were members, Toronto businessman and philanthropist Lou Bregman asked Fred Steiner to introduce him to Sherman. The two men met and chatted. Sherman did not like small talk, and Bregman was trying to find an opening so that he could get to know Sherman.
“Barry, I never see you around here. Do you golf?” Bregman asked.
“No,” replied Sherman.
“Do you play cards?”
“No,” said Sherman.
“Do you run around with broads?” Bregman asked, now completely at a loss as to how to get the conversation started.
“No,” said Sherman.”
“What do you do for fun?”
“I work,” Sherman said.
Bregman laughed. “I work too, but what do you do for fun?”
Sherman said what he said to Steiner and others who had posed the same question over the years. “I like to give away money.”
RioCan founder and CEO Ed Sonshine says that Sherman’s lack of interest in spending his money on himself made him very different from other successful businessmen. One day, Sonshine and Sherman and their wives were at the exclusive Magna Golf Club, in Aurora, Ontario, for a charity dinner and Sherman remarked on the beauty of the place. Sonshine agreed and said he was a member. Sherman knew that Sonshine was a member at Oakdale as well.
“You belong to two golf courses? You’re insane,” Sherman said, his eyes wide.
Taken aback, Sonshine said he had worked hard all his life. He was a big supporter of Jewish and other charities, and, yes, he also enjoyed some of the fruits of his labours. “Barry, I didn’t steal any money. I didn’t inherit any money. I am going to spend it the way I want to spend it.”
“You must be insane. That’s crazy,” Sherman said.
Sonshine asked Sherman what he enjoyed in life. He says Sherman paused and appeared to be giving it serious thought.
“I enjoy work. And giving away money,” said Sherman, repeating what he’d told Bregman.
Barry Sherman had a reputation as a workaholic, and it was deserved. But he did join the family on some holidays, including the 1996 trip to Tanzania for a safari. In his memoir, which would years later be entered into evidence as part of his legal battle with his cousins because it contained his version of how he came to launch Apotex, Sherman noted that he did not bring any work with him to Africa and was perhaps for the first time “incommunicado.” In his eulogy, Jonathon Sherman recalls their father on that holiday “acting like a lion” to amuse his sisters as they drove around in a jeep on dirt tracks that wound through the open plain, passing giraffes, wildebeest, warthogs, and antelope. There were also many winter excursions with their friends and their children to Florida and to US ski destinations. Sometimes, though, it would just be Honey as the lone Sherman parent. In 1994, the family, minus Barry, took a trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to ski. Dahlia Solomon recalls that Tropicana orange juice was not in Canada yet, and Honey saw it in a grocery store they stopped at on the way to the mountain. “She was always excited with whatever was not sold here. She had to try it,” Solomon says.
Honey loaded their shopping cart with ten big cartons of orange juice, plus a monster amount of sliced cheese and white bread. “The kids had canker sores by the end of the week,” Solomon says. That’s because Honey did not like to waste food, and she insisted on having an “orange juice party” at least once a day. On the final day, Honey saw there was still a fair bit of bread and cheese left, and they had to leave for the airport. “She made cheese sandwiches for everyone. She just did not like to leave anything behind.”
At the end of that trip, when they had taken a break from skiing to go trail riding on horseback, Honey’s wit was on full display. The ride camp featured some big horses with long hair. Honey climbed aboard one of them and asked the guide the name of her horse.
“Adolf,” the guide replied.
Without a pause, Honey asked her friend, “You think he’s going to ask for my papers?”
Honey’s sister Mary, her friends say, was a big part of the Sherman family’s life when the children were little, and that is likely one reason the eventual rift cut so deep. Before she was married and had her own children, friends say “Aunt Mary” helped with carpooling, taking the Sherman children to lessons and play dates, and helping with homework. Once Mary and Allen became parents, there were times when some of the Sherman children joined their family on trips that included golfing in Arizona and Disney World in Florida.
The Sherman home on Old Colony Road was the gathering place for big Passover and Rosh Hashanah dinners. A long banquet table that stretched from the rarely opened front door to the staircase at the rear of the house was set for extended family and close friends. In his eulogy, Jonathon described his mother wearing her “cow” apron and cooking chicken noodle soup with carrots and what he described as “those little illegal eggy things.” Eyerlekh, Yiddish for “little eggs,” refers to not-fully-developed eggs found inside just-slaughtered hens and sold by Jewish delis, against health regulations, to knowing customers like Honey Sherman in a little brown bag.
As the children grew to adulthood, Barry Sherman lavished them with millions of dollars to buy houses, cottages and cars. Friends say Honey did not approve, but it was Barry’s way of showing affection. In some cases, he provided them with money to buy income properties in the hope that they would learn from running a business. Friends of the Shermans say that Barry told them that the first two children, Lauren and Jonathon, were given $100 million each at an early age to invest in businesses and real estate. Whether that is true or an exaggeration is not clear. Public records indicate early examples of Jonathon’s involvement in real estate. He purchased a large wooded property north of Toronto at a cost of $2 million in 2006 when he was just twenty-three, and developed it relatively recently with the help of a $5-million mortgage from a Bahamas company sources say is connected to Barry Sherman. It is now the principal residence of Jonathon and husband, Fred. It was not just the Sherman children who benefited from Barry’s generosity. Before Fred, Jonathon was dating a young Toronto man named Andrew Liss and in 2011 Sherman insiders say Jonathon convinced his father to fund the $4-million purchase of a Forest Hill home on Warren Rd. for Liss. The numbered company that purchased the house is headquartered at Apotex, and Liss is listed as company president and sole director. Over the next few years, as renovations progressed on what became a lavish home, land title records reveal $14 million in mortgages registered on the property, held by a Barry Sherman company. Sherman sources say that in addition to the extensive renovations, there was also major damage from frequent parties at the home. Eventually, in 2015, a buyer paid $11.5 million for the house. That Barry Sherman, who was funding those real estate dealings, would allow this raised the eyebrows of Sherman’s friends. “Barry did so many unusual things with real estate,” said one. “Offshore companies, putting unexpected people on title. That was Barry.” In contrast, the younger Sherman children, Alex and Kaelen, were initially given $1 million each, with instructions to invest the money wisely. Each also received considerable financial help in purchasing a home, but as to bulk payouts, Kaelen and Alex received far less than their older siblings. Whether that decision to provide significantly less money was in response to pressure on Barry from Honey, friends did not know.
Once the children were adults, contact was sparse at times between some of the children and their parents, with Alex being the closest to her parents, particularly her father as they shared a similar approach to money and philanthropy. Something that bothered Barry was that none of them wanted to enter the generic drug industry, something he believed was necessary if they wanted to become part of an Apotex succession plan. Barry was disappointed, particularly as he saw the children of successful businessmen like Fred Steiner and Morris Goodman working happily in their fathers’ ventures. Steiner’s and Goodman’s sons eventually took leadership roles in those businesses. Of all the Sherman children, their youngest, Kaelen, seemed the most emotionally needy. She frequently called her father during the workday, and friends and business associates who were present during those calls say Sherman always answered and provided whatever assistance Kaelen required. In the year leading up to her parents’ murders, people close to Kaelen say she seemed more grounded, which they attribute to her engagement to the young man she had met on a dating site in 2015. At a dinner in the fall of 2017 to celebrate the engagement, the young man’s father said Barry took him aside and said, “I have never seen Kaelen happier.” The couple would marry in April 2018 and separate three months later, divorcing in 2019.
The child Barry seemed to work hardest to become close to was Jonathon, though the two also had frequent arguments about how Barry should spend the money he had made. At one point, perhaps to curry favour, Sherman took the craft beer business and other holdings, including a Mississauga soft drink manufacturing and bottling plant he had in partnership with Frank D’Angelo, away from D’Angelo and gave them to Jonathon.
Later, Sherman sold off the beer-making machinery and returned the Mississauga plant to D’Angelo, who now produces a range of products there. Though Sherman was at times not close with his adult children, friends say he remained closely involved and interested in his still very young grandchildren: Lauren’s son and Alex’s two children. Photos taken the week before the murders show Barry and Honey at Alex and Brad’s house posing with their one-month-old granddaughter. There is also a sweet picture of Barry, lying back on a couch, looking into the little girl’s eyes. Still, Jack Kay, who maintains close contact with his own children, told me, “I think Barry really missed out.”
Honey, who always wanted to be the centre of attention, liked to go out at night. Barry preferred to work until 8 or 9 P.M. most nights. The majority of the Shermans’ outings were related to philanthropy. Honey would triple-book herself on some evenings. If Barry could not join her, her sister, Mary, was his stand-in. When Apotex had a box at the Air Canada Centre (as it was called at the time), and Barbra Streisand was performing, Honey insisted that Barry invite friends and business associates. Jack Kay recalls that everyone but Barry was mesmerized. Barry was sitting on a couch near the bar area, working on his BlackBerry. Kay sat down to keep his friend company.
The Shermans, their friends say, did not sit at home and watch movies or TV together. For starters, the television in their room did not work for many years, because neither wanted to hire someone to hook it up. Honey did like the occasional show on Netflix, with the show Scandal, about a Washington-based crisis-management firm, being one of her favourites. Joel Ulster’s teenaged granddaughter remembers Honey sitting down with her to go over the latest plot twist when Honey came to visit.
The couple, particularly Barry, maintained a close relationship with many of the children of their closest friends, providing financial assistance to some, business mentoring to others. All of the Ulster children, for example, received some form of help from Sherman over the years, all given with no strings attached. In the months before the Shermans died, Barry was coaching Jeff Ulster on his first foray into the business world. Jeff had until recently been the director of digital talk content for CBC Radio and had decided to leave the CBC to start a business with a partner that aimed to link advertisers with podcasters, something that was flourishing in the United States but not in Canada. When Barry heard that his oldest friend’s son was going to abandon the comfort of a salaried position for a start-up, he got in touch and they began regular chats. Their email exchanges show that Sherman, though busy at Apotex, took time and care to assist Jeff.
“Many businesses fail, despite being potentially successful, because the owners run out of money before cash flow turns positive,” Sherman told Jeff in October 2017. “When I started Apotex, Honey kept telling me to close it down before I lost everything, and I nearly did lose everything.” Sherman’s advice was to “accelerate revenues while minimizing cost, as much as possible, until you reach break even, or are at least confident that profitability lies ahead.”
Sherman offered on several occasions to provide seed capital for the new business. “Starting a business is not easy,” he wrote to Jeff. He suggested he could provide a substantial interest-free loan for eighteen months, getting shares in the company in return. But Sherman said that, “in reality, I would give you a personal confidential option to buy my shares for $1.” Jeff was not comfortable with having Sherman invest or partner in the business, fearing it would complicate his relationship with his business partner. Having just left the security of a salaried job, he did relent and gratefully accept some financial support on a monthly basis to cover his family’s expenses in the first few months of the new business. Their dialogue continued until just a few weeks before Sherman died. In all the correspondence, Sherman shows a strong interest in helping Ulster make the right decisions. His questions were on point and helpful. Sherman reminded him in one exchange about the drafting of an agreement: there can be “a devil in the details.”
A poignant note in the chain of emails between Sherman and Jeff Ulster comes when Sherman tells Jeff he has realized he hasn’t had an update on the other five Ulster siblings. “If they too are in need of any assistance, I would like to know and would be more than happy to help. You are family, and I love you all,” Sherman wrote.
As to the strength of the Shermans’ marriage, friends say it was shaky at times, with Barry working long hours and Honey wanting more of a social life. In that way, they were incompatible. At one point, about six years before he died, Barry told some of his friends that he was considering leaving Honey. There was no specific reason, friends said, just that they were spending so little time together that he thought living separately might make more sense. Honey’s friends told me they were unaware of this, and that as the years passed, Barry and Honey seemed closer than ever.
With the children grown, and with more time to travel, Honey wanted to see the world. Barry told Honey that with his intense work schedule, he could not take the number of trips she wanted. As a result, Honey began travelling several times a year with girlfriends Dahlia Solomon and Anita Franklin and others, including realtor Judi Gottlieb, who joined Honey on some major international journeys. On their trips, each woman was given a job: Gottlieb was the “negotiator”; another woman was the “poet laureate,” who would write poems about the trip; another was “quality control.” Honey was the “drug dealer,” since she travelled with a bag of Apotex samples that included painkillers and antibiotics. As she did in Toronto, Honey also insisted on travelling with a big green box of Nature Valley granola bars. Her plan, which some of her friends felt was culturally insensitive, was to hand them out to beggars instead of money, explaining to her girlfriends, “They need to eat.”
Those who travelled with Honey say she had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Judi Gottlieb credits Honey with providing her, on a trip to India, with one of the most memorable nights of her life. It was in the northern city of Varanasi, which is on the Ganges and is regarded as the spiritual capital of India. There are well over two thousand temples in the city. When Honey, Judi, and four other girlfriends arrived on a trip in 2006, most of the group were bracing themselves for a typical tourist experience. “Honey always kept us honest,” Gottlieb recalls. “A lot of the girls just wanted to shop.”
It was late in the afternoon when they got there, and the six travellers from Canada were exhausted. The guide who met them at their hotel laid out the plan: they would get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning he would take them to the bank of the Ganges, where they would board a boat and see the sights along the riverbank from the water.
“No,” Honey said to the guide, “we want to go tonight.”
Gottlieb says the guide sized up the six women from North America and shook his head. “You will not like it. It is much better in the morning.”
Honey’s eyes narrowed, a look her girlfriends had seen before. They knew where this was going. Honey got her way. That night, as the guide took them in a wooden boat along the riverbank they saw families carting their deceased loved ones to funeral pyres, lighting the bodies on fire, and later emptying the grey ash in the sacred river. “It turned out to be the most important thing we did on the trip,” Gottlieb says. “Honey had researched and read about it and pushed the guide.” The next morning, the guide took them on a boat ride and they watched in amazement as mourners came to the river and bathed themselves in the ash-thickened water. “It meant so much more to us.”
Many of the women who took these trips with Honey also attended an annual weekend in Muskoka at Nancy Pencer’s cottage. Videos from the events show a Honey Sherman so relaxed that she, with the others in attendance, dressed up with full make-up for the yearly themed costume event (From Russia with Love, Moulin Rouge, and Memoirs of a Geisha) and belted out karaoke show tunes.
The one passion Barry and Honey Sherman did share was philanthropy. They were relentless and sometimes annoying in their pursuit of donations. In addition to all the major charities they supported and raised funds for, Barry made annual requests to his friends and business associates on behalf of a small orphanage in Israel. It was run by a rabbi who had encountered Sherman and somehow persuaded him to be his lead, and possibly only, fundraiser. At the same time each year, Sherman would telephone Ed Sonshine, Leslie Gales, and others to arrange their annual donation to the small charity. Sonshine said it had gone on for so many years that Sherman would simply email a request for $10,000 and say, “Maybe you can do $15,000 this year.”
Gales and Sonshine both asked Sherman why he didn’t simply make the entire donation. Asking friends for money takes a certain kind of disposition, and Sonshine says he has done it in the past but now finds it distasteful; he is happy to give but does not like asking. Gales says Sherman said to her, “Leslie, no one gift is as significant as the gifts from a community.” With Sherman dead, that charity has lost both its biggest benefactor and fundraiser. A Toronto rabbi who acts as the local contact contacted me in June 2019, after having read of my efforts to unseal the Sherman estate files. “Would you know if our charity is mentioned in the will?” the rabbi asked me. I told him that I did not think any charity had been listed in the Sherman will and that, to the best of my knowledge, the estate was divided equally among the four children, with some discretion for the trustees to give money to other family members if they desired. No charity had been designated.
Though generous to Jewish charities, Sherman made it clear that it had nothing to do with a belief in a deity. A few months before his death, he was approached by a rabbi seeking money for a cause. Sherman said he would help the man but suggested they meet at his Apotex office on a certain Saturday in October. “But Barry, that’s Yom Kippur,” the startled rabbi said. Sherman replied, “That’s fine with me. If you are hungry, I’ll bring some ham sandwiches.”
Sherman had a name for those who did not donate. “He said they had a black heart,” Sonshine says. Sherman simply could not understand why a person who made money would not give according to their wealth, says Gales.
Sherman was incredulous that people would refuse him. “You know what?” he said to one friend. “I call really wealthy people and ask them for ten thousand dollars and they say no. To me! Can you believe it?”
As Honey’s friend Linda Frum recalls, Honey would not publicly criticize those who did not donate. Instead, she would bestow the title of “good boy” or “good girl” on a person who made a substantial donation to one of her causes.
At the time of her death, Honey Sherman had been enlisted by the UJA’s Steven Shulman to create a campaign to convince Jewish real estate agents in Toronto’s red hot property market to give donations that corresponded with their growing wealth from commissions on big sales. Judi Gottlieb, the Sherman realtor, has taken over that cause and is working on a plan to get fellow real estate agents to step up their contributions.
Jack Kay says Sherman told him on many occasions that there was no meaning to life but there was an obligation. “Life is what it is,” Kay recalls his friend saying. “As long as you leave the world a little bit better than when you came in, you have contributed to the betterment of society.”