  Garth Drabinsky (QMI Agency file photo) |
TORONTO - The show that never ends is hitting the road and heading for a last-ditch performance before the Supreme Court of Canada.
For this long-running white-collar crime drama, all you need are very deep pockets, a dream team of lawyers, an aversion to jail time and a steadfast belief in your innocence -- no matter what two lower courts have already had to say.
And Garth Drabinsky, the star of this show, has all of the above.
Just three weeks after being shipped off to finally begin serving his sentence for crimes more than 13 years old, the former Broadway impresario is seeking his release on bail Friday while his lawyers launch an appeal of his fraud convictions to the country's highest court.
Drabinsky, 61, has been behind bars since surrendering into custody Sept. 12, the day before the Ontario Court of Appeal announced it would uphold the 2009 convictions against him and Myron Gottlieb, the co-founder of the now-bankrupt Livent Inc. After a short time at the notoriously tough Don Jail, he was packed off to Millhaven Institution, where he was being assessed as to which minimum-security prison would be his next home.
But not for long, if his lawyers have their way.
In his bail application to be heard before Justice David Doherty, lawyer Edward Greenspan argues Drabinsky should be released pending his appeal because their case is "not frivolous" and his client is "not a flight risk and his release would not be contrary to the public interest."
Greenspan could not be reached for comment.
As for the 68-year-old Gottlieb, there is no word on whether he, too, will be hoping to argue his case in Ottawa. There is currently no bail application for him before the Ontario Court of Appeal.
To recap this very long plotline for those of you who have long lost your program: The drama begins in 1998 when Drabinsky brought in a team led by former Walt Disney executive Michael Ovitz to assume control of their floundering live theatre company. Within weeks, its two founders were fired, a forensic accounting team was rifling through the books and a four-year RCMP investigation was launched.
After a decade of legal wrangling, Drabinsky and Gottlieb finally went to trial in May 2008 on charges of fraud and forgery. During the 65-day trial, their attorneys -- Eddie Greenspan for Drabinsky and brother Brian Greenspan for Gottlieb -- argued the theatre moguls had been framed by the company's accountants.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto found otherwise. While heaping praise on their achievements, she nevertheless convicted the pair in 2009 on two counts of fraud and one of forgery. She found they had manipulated financial statements between 1993 and '98 so unwitting investors and major banks would pour more than $500 million into the struggling production company behind Ragtime and The Phantom of the Opera.
"No one is above the law," she said. "No one gets to write his own rules."
The Crown sought a tough sentence of eight to 10 years in prison. The defence thought house arrest and a university lecture tour was appropriate penance for their clients' multimillion-dollar fraud.
Instead, Benotto surprised many legal observers by sentencing them to a relatively harsh term for white collar crime: seven years for Drabinsky and six for Gottlieb.
Not surprisingly, they appealed and were almost immediately released on $350,000 bail. That took another two years to wind its way through the justice system -- with a hearing in May and a decision in September to uphold the guilty verdicts, but reduce their sentences by two years.
So much for getting tough on white collar crime.
Now, as expected, Drabinsky is hoping to get out of jail while he seeks an audience with the country's top court. It's the last judicial resort for the disgraced producer, but this final performance is hardly guaranteed: Of 500 applications a year, the Supreme Court only agrees to hear about 80 appeals and they usually involve questions of public importance or important issues of law.
And so, at long last, this could finally be the end of the show.
