The Howe Street mysteries
Stock promoting has always been a risky business. But recently on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, it's turned into something lethal
BY MARGARET CANNON
"There is no shortage...of lucrative opportunities that exist for a fast-talking psychopath with a head for numbers and the social skills to move easily in financial circles....If I were unable to study psychopaths in prison, my next choice would very likely be a place like the Vancouver Stock Exchange."
Dr. Robert D. Hare, in Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
On Saturday, Feb. 22, 1997, John Hampton Hickman III, the former chairman of software firm Motion Works Group Ltd. went into the garage of his Vancouver home, climbed into his wife's Rolls-Royce, turned on the gas and died. Once a flashy member of the Vancouver social elite, Hickman was facing personal ruin after being ousted from his company and the collapse of his marriage. His suicide was the latest-but certainly not the last-death of a Howe Street hotshot.
Hickman's suicide followed hard on the heels of the Jan. 14 murder of disgraced former stock promoter David Ward, who, along with partner Ed Carter, engineered one of the Vancouver Stock Exchange's most notorious scams. Since his 1989 release from jail, Ward had been adrift. His death, in his white Nissan Pathfinder on a residential street in East Van, had all the hallmarks of a mob hit from the movies: single bullet to the brain, no witnesses or clues, engine left running, money and jewelry left on the body. "It's clear that finding the killer isn't going to be easy," said police media liaison officer Constable Anne Drennan, a week after Ward's murder. "Our primary, most obvious angle is the stock-promotion scandal." But the stock
promotion was old news. In his recent life, Ward had been a shady figure on the Alberta Stock Exchange, operating businesses out of Mexico and Miami that were rumoured to be operating at the edges of the international drug trade.
The odds are that the cops may never know who murdered Ward or on whose orders. In recent years, the VSE has seen two high-profile suicides, two murders similar to Ward's and one very mysterious disappearance. Two reporters who document the VSE scene have had death threats. In recent years, police and government officials have discovered that the VSE, long a home to freebooters, pirates and financial finaglers, has become the laundry for cash from a variety of illicit sources, including arms dealers, drug czars and even organized crime. As Sergeant Peter Montague, head of media relations for the RCMP in British Columbia, puts it, "Any time you have a large flow of capital [as in a stock exchange], it attracts people who want to launder cash." The consequences of this can be grim. You always had to worry about losing your shirt on Howe Street. Now, you have to worry about losing your life.
Highly publicized attempts to clean up the VSE have gone nowhere. A case in point: the 1994 report of the legislative inquiry on the regulation of the stock market chaired by lawyer James Matkin, which was sharply critical of VSE practices. The report described the VSE as a culture that "revolves around the assumption that success or failure is serendipitous rather than the product of hard work, acumen or other conventional means building a business." The late David Ward was the child of this culture. He rose to prominence in the early 1980s, promoting a series of minor stocks working with Vagn Anderson, who was later convicted of stock manipulation. Then, in 1984, he and his partner, Ed Carter, cut a deal with a San Antonio, Tex., mutual fund manager named Carl Lazzell. The team bought up shell companies on the VSE, then created artificial markets to run up the price. Ordinary investors, spotting shooting stars, pumped more cash into the companies, boosting prices still further. The scam went undetected for more than a year and, eventually, involved more than 140 brokerage accounts controlled by Ward and Carter. During this time, Lazzell pumped $26 million belonging to his mutual fund into the scheme, netting himself payoffs totalling $1.4 million. No one knows for certain how much Carter and Ward pocketed but, by 1988, when Ward was convicted of stock manipulation and making secret commission payments, estimates totalled more than $15 million. Ward served eight months of a three-year sentence, and then returned to Howe Street and, reputedly through a series of fronts, business.
Most recently, in December, 1996, Ward was in a fishing business with Senji Ikari, convicted in 1991 of fraud and using forged documents-specifically, federal fisheries department tickets issued for fish caught. Fishing had long been Ward's hobby, and he was supposed to be off the Mexican coast trolling for octopus for the Japanese market, but he wasn't much of a success. Ikari said Ward travelled about, often to Miami, Fla., when he wasn't fishing. As for other dealings, "He didn't have any enemies here," says Ikari, when told of Ward's death. "Everybody liked him." Ward's bartender also remembers him as "a nice guy with a good heart." No one mentions that Ward's marriage had collapsed, that he had a drinking problem and that there were rumours that he was involved in the drug trade.
Ward did seem to be a man with many friends, at least in the high-flying days. Peter Brown, now chairman of Canaccord Capital Corp., one of the largest firms on Howe Street, was a close associate and the man who eventually blew the whistle on Ward to the Texas mutual fund though not to the Canadian authorities. At the time of his death, Ward was raising money for Reeflex Petroleum Technologies, Inc., a speculative energy stock. Another Ward chum and Reeflex promoter was former Vancouver lawyer Martin Chambers, who, in 1987, was convicted of conspiracy to import cocaine from Miami to Vancouver. The decision was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1990 and the charges were stayed. In recent years, Chambers was involved with companies planning to sell Russian helicopters to Americans and auto emission reduction devices to the Chinese. Neither project came to fruition. Along with Senji Ikari, Chambers was also involved in the management or ownership of four large oceangoing vessels.
Ward's death has many similarities to the murders of two other Howe Street promoters. Terrance Watts was a former broker who tried to buy $731,000 worth of hashish from an RCMP detective posing as a drug dealer. The case against him was dismissed but still, in August, 1996, he was found dead in Chinatown. He had been shot and his body stuffed into the trunk of his car. Ray Ginnetti was gunned down in his posh West Van home on May 9, 1990. His body was stuffed into a closet, to be found by his wife. Ginnetti had worked for 10 years as a stock promoter, including a stint at Peter Brown's Canarim Investment Corp., but had found he could make more profits selling B.C. lottery tickets worldwide. Ginnetti was also involved in running a boiler-room operation selling stock for Genesis Resources Corp., a mineral exploration play, and was reputed to have had some gang ties. At the funeral, attended by more than 400 people, a contingent of Hell's Angels appeared alongside the suits: "He had friends from all walks of life," says long-time friend Ralph Lanzell. |
