The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (66 page)

Hotel Newfoundland, New York, 1920

The San, St. John’s, 1922

Twelve Mile House, June 1923

Revelations

L
IKE THE CARPETBAGGER
Yankees who, after the American civil war, went south to cash in on reconstruction, their ilk, after Confederation, came to Newfoundland.

In the year following our trip abroad, they came from England, from France, from Lichtenstein and Luxembourg, from Switzerland and Sweden, from Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain and especially from Germany. They came to stake their claims to a piece of Newfoundland, to loans, to licences, to grants, to exploration rights and tender contracts, to mineral rights, water rights and real estate.

It was mostly Germans who were successful in securing deals with us.

Valdmanis and I were forever announcing agreements between the Newfoundland government and Herr Someone or Other: Herr Grube of Hamburg, Herr Moaser of Hamburg, Herr Hohlbrock of Hamelin, Herr Braun-Wogan of Berlin. In her column, Fielding called them all collectively Herr Humbug of Hamburg.

Frauds, shady businessmen, scam artists, shysters, impostors, opportunists, eccentrics, mountebanks, they proposed, and were given government grants for, the most unlikely, far-fetched, bizarre
schemes for the economic development of Newfoundland, almost all of which flopped or never got off the ground.

It was enough for me that they came from far away; this to me was their collateral, their foreign-sounding names were their credentials. I was exasperated with, I dismissed as provincial, ignorant, bigoted and small-minded, anyone who wanted to know who these people were or where they came from.

I cited as a reason to give a character named Dr. Luther Sennewalde a hundred thousand dollars the fact that he had “nearly” won the Nobel Prize for physics. Sennewalde’s proposal? To set up in Newfoundland a factory that, he said, would employ a “secret optical process” to manufacture, per year, several hundred thousand pairs of eye glasses.

“There is a guaranteed market,” I said, parroting Valdmanis, “one in every five Canadians wears glasses.” Far from cornering the eye-glasses market, Sennewalde, who was found to have shipped to Newfoundland, not secret optical equipment, but scrap metal and rocks, made off with his hundred thousand dollars to Montreal, where he was caught and found to have in his possession a one-way ticket to South America.

A. Adler and Sons of London, England, received from me a “loan” of half a million dollars to make chocolate, chocolate of which I said at a press conference: “It is the genuine thing. It is real English chocolate. You can be the most bigoted, the most prejudiced person alive on earth, but if you eat Adler’s chocolate, you must say that it is good.” In spite of my pitch, opinion in Newfoundland was almost unanimous that it was bad. Adler’s went under two years later.

Herr Grube of Hamburg convinced me to invest in a plant that would import natural rubber from the Far East to make rubber boots and seamen’s clothing. I described him to the legislature as a man of “dynamism, energy, push and ability.” I did not know until he arrived in Newfoundland that he was also a man who spoke not a word of English.

Within a year highlighted by a bizarre series of miscommunications, he was gone, but by that time I was on to a Herr Braun-Wogan, in whom I professed a confidence that turned out to be as justified as that which I had placed in Herr Grube.

Valdmanis-negotiated, Newfoundland-funded, German-owned businesses were forever starting up and shutting down, their German owners disappearing overnight, leaving us to dispose of their enterprises.

I rose one day and told the legislature we had sold an abandoned cement mill for nearly $4.5 million. A company bought it with, as the auditor-general put it in his annual report, “money that was advanced to them by the government of Newfoundland.” In other words, we gave them the money so they could give it back to us to “buy” our plant.

Valdmanis did not seem especially distressed by these debacles, nor did he seem to feel responsible for them or worried that I might place the blame on him.

“Germany is still our best bet,” he kept assuring me. “This is how it is with economic development,” as if he saw in me signs that I was beginning to doubt, not his abilities, but my own, and as if, contrary to how it might seem to an economic neophyte like me, things were going exactly as they ought to have been at this point in what he called the program.

In December 1953, with most of the $45 million surplus we had carried with us into Confederation gone, and with the embarrassing failures mounting day by day, Valdmanis came to me and told me his wife had insisted that he return to Montreal.

“She does not want me to live here all the time,” he said. “I cannot convince her. She thinks the weather here is worse than it was in Latvia. I cannot reason with her. But there is no reason why I cannot do my job just as well from there for a while, better in fact, for I will be within easier reach of investors and promoters.”

I thought he was just suffering a temporary loss of nerve, and it actually seemed plausible to me—such was my own frantic state at
the time—that he would do his job better if he was not under such close scrutiny as he had to endure in Newfoundland. And so Valdmanis left for Montreal.

Not long after he left, I realized that he had no intention of coming back and would go on collecting his exorbitant salary for doing next to nothing as long as I allowed him to. I decided to fire him, using as my excuse the supposed “revelation” that he had padded his expense account, which he had, although so had everyone who worked for me. But I was determined to get rid of him, hoping that by doing so, I would convince the Opposition party that I had at last come to my senses.

I fired him on one of the rare visits he made to Newfoundland, fired him face to face. I called him to my office, and he came in as he always did, smiling broadly, with his hand outstretched.

“You’re going to resign,” I said. “And you’re going to do it right away. You’re going to say it’s because of pressures in your private life and that’s all you’re going to say.”

Only days later, a Latvian engineer who lived in Newfoundland came to see me. He told me, on condition of anonymity, that each time Valdmanis negotiated a contract with a German company, he charged them what he told them was a “standard 10 per cent commission,” which he said would go to the Newfoundland Liberal Party, though he insisted that my name would be kept out of it. Such arrangements and stipulations were, it seemed, nothing new to the Germans, who readily agreed to them.

I had not the slightest doubt, even before I had the RCMP investigate them, that these allegations were true. Valdmanis alone of those of us who, at various times, had gone to Europe had been able to speak German and understand the engineering technicalities that were involved in proposed development projects. And so he had always done the negotiating, the presence at the table of people like me who would not have understood a word of what was going on having been deemed, by me, to be superfluous.

I assured the RCMP that any crimes had been committed without my knowledge and implored them to trace down the missing money, since, if every cent was not accounted for, it would be assumed to have gone not only into Valdmanis’s pocket, but also into mine, or into the coffers of the Liberal Party, and in either case I would be ruined.

The money, $470,000, though never recovered, was eventually traced to bank accounts in New York City that were held in the name of Valdmanis’s sister-in-law. Most of it Valdmanis had paid out to a pair of refugees, a Latvian and a Rumanian who were living in New York. In exchange, they had signed over to him a fish plant in New Brunswick, which he must have known was worthless. It was suspected that this was just a paper transaction, and that Valdmanis, in paying the refugees, had in fact been paying himself. Valdmanis later claimed he had given the money to blackmailers, but refused to elaborate.

He was arrested and brought back to Newfoundland to stand trial. He had been in St. John’s two days, awaiting his preliminary hearing, when one of his lawyers hand-delivered a note to me that read:

“It is urgent that I see you. I have information regarding Fielding which I am sure you will find very interesting—more interesting than you can possibly imagine!”

It was out of the question that I visit him, for word of it was sure to get out no matter how circumspect I was. Suspicions and allegations that I had been in collusion with Valdmanis were rampant enough. But I could foresee no harm in speaking to him on the telephone and had Prowse arrange for him to call me at my home at eight in the evening.

I was sitting alone in my study when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear, but said nothing. “Hello, my premier,” Valdmanis said in a cravenly jaunty way that made me feel embarrassed for him, but I said nothing. When next he
spoke, his voice was weak and quavering. I wished I could see his face to see if he was acting. I wondered if even then I would have known.

“I have information,” he said. “While we were in Europe, I had some my of associates procure some things from Miss Fielding’s room. I only did it thinking I could help you—”

“What information do you have?” I said.”

“I know who wrote that letter,” Valdmanis said, his voice formal now as if he had gathered strength from the coldness of my tone. “I also know some other things about Fielding. Everything you could ever want. And more.” I did not, until that moment, even know that he had heard about the letter, but I did my best not to sound surprised.

“And what do
you
want?” I said.

“Complete immunity from prosecution,” Valdmanis said, though it was a plea, almost a question.

I hung up and sat there at my desk, thinking, waiting for the phone to ring again, which it soon did. I let it ring until it stopped. Again I waited, again the phone rang, again I let it ring. This went on for about an hour until at last I picked up the receiver.

“My premier,” Valdmanis said, weeping freely now. “I must get
something
in return.”

“If you plead guilty,” I said, “and spare me the embarrassment of having to testify against you in open court, I will do what I can to get you a reduced sentence.”

There was a long pause, complete silence from the other end as if Valdmanis had his hand over the receiver and was consulting with someone. Finally he spoke again.

“My premier,” he said, “there are two main charges of fraud against me. If I plead guilty to one, could you see to it that the other charge is dropped?”

“I’m not promising anything,” I said, “until I hear what you have to say about Fielding.”

“I have nothing to say,” Valdmanis said. “A package will be delivered to your house just after midnight tonight. Do we have an agreement?”

“That,” I said, “depends on how satisfied I am with the package.”

“You will be satisfied,” Valdmanis said.

“If I am, you will not hear from me, ever again,” I said. “If I’m not, you will.” I hung up.

The doorbell rang just after midnight, not a sufficiently unusual time to rouse my wife and children from their beds. I went to the front door, opened it. On the step was a large package wrapped in brown paper. There was no sign of anyone, no sound of a car pulling away. I picked up the package and went inside.

I testified,
in camera
, at the preliminary hearing in August 1954, as did half a dozen German businessmen.

Valdmanis was escorted into the courtroom by two policemen, who flanked him as he stood before the bar. He had Bradley-like black dewlaps beneath his eyes, as if he had not slept since his arrest, but he at least was well-dressed and so, I hoped, might seem to be deserving of the diminished sentence I had arranged for him to get — or rather, to not be so obviously undeserving of it that it would be impossible for us to pretend that no deal involving me had been made.

He pleaded guilty to one charge of fraud and the other charge was dropped. He was sentenced to four years at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary, the only structure in Newfoundland named after her. He was released after serving sixteen months. Who he really was, what he had been through and what he had put other people through during the occupation of his homeland by the Nazis none of us would ever know.

I had been taken in by him, as I would be by a succession of other men who followed him and his example, men who wound up
much as he did, all but destroying the country I had sought them out to save.

I drove to Fielding’s boarding-house, parked my car around the corner, got out, duffel bag in hand, and hurried up the steps, up two flights of stairs, then down to the end of the hallway to her room. The day’s papers were, as usual, piled up outside her door, the last-to-be-delivered
Telegram
on top. I knocked. There was the customary frantic commotion from within, which I no longer suspected might be done just for effect, for now I knew what she was hiding.

Finally, unconcernedly, as if it was not unusual for someone to come knocking on her door after midnight, she said, “Who is it?”