Blazergate

Could Blazergate be grinding to an end? www.kamloopsnews.ca
by Gregg Drinnan

So this is how it ends.

On a Tuesday morning in a fifth-floor courtroom in the Kamloops Law Courts building on Columbia Street.

Not with a bang, or a whimper. But with a whispered guilty plea following a deer-caught-in-the-headlights glance at her lawyer.

Maxine Patrick, whose departure from the Kamloops Blazers signalled the beginning of a long toboggan ride to nowhere for the WHL franchise, pleaded guilty yesterday to fraud. She will be sentenced on Tuesday morning.

Almost three years have come and gone since Patrick, now 48, was relieved of her duties with the Blazers. An employee since 1986, she was the office manager when the end came.

Like the butterfly that flapped its wings in Australia and caused a windstorm in Chile, the events that resulted in Patrick’s departure continue to reverberate through every nook and cranny of the Blazers organization.

People lost their jobs in the reorganization that began when a new board of directors took over in the fall of 2003. Kym Fowles, who was fired as box office manager on April 5, 2004, was one of a dozen spectators when the sentencing hearing began at 10 a.m. She was one of five who returned after the lunch break.

“It’s been a long two years,” she said. “I had to be here.”

Also among the spectators were Blazers president Case van Diemen, whose victim impact statement on behalf of the club was entered into the record, and former Blazers director Andy Clovechok.

It was on Sept. 11, 2003, when Patrick was confronted by then-general manager Mike Moore; then-president Colin Day; Barry Carter, the Blazers’ legal counsel from the local firm Mair Jensen Blair; Bob Holden and Starr Carson, then partners at KPMG Kamloops; and, Paul Mumford, an accountant who was then with KPMG.

It was Mumford who got the ball rolling when he discovered what he felt were irregularities in a ledger prepared by Patrick.

As Crown counsel Joel Gold told B.C. Supreme Court yesterday, Patrick was involved in “a superbly simple system of fraud . . . remarkably simple.”

Over the time period involved, she wrote hundreds of cheques to herself, Gold said, and cashed them with “the ledger reflecting lower totals.”

According to an affidavit from Moore that was filed as part of a civil suit filed by the Blazers against Patrick and her husband, Charlie, she “readily admitted to taking money from the Kamloops Blazers.” Furthermore, Moore said, “her comments included the following statements:

“(a) It was a sickness;

“(b) No one else was involved;

“(c) She wanted a better life for her and her family;

“(d) She had used some of the money to pay her husband’s business payroll, and that he thought it had come from her mother;

“(e) No assets were purchased with the money she took;

“(f) She did not have a Swiss bank account;

“(g) They had some equity in their home and might be able to arrange for financing to repay some of the money;

“(h) She would have to get another job in order to repay the money;

“(i) She only took money from the one main account at RBC and did not take money from the U.S. account or the Store account;

“(k) That in the early years the amounts were small, but that they increased in the last couple of years;

“(l) She wasn’t sure of the exact amounts she took but conceded that it could have been $150,000 to $200,000 in the last year; and

“(m) She had been waiting for such a meeting to happen for four years.”

If you were looking for a reason why, well, it turns out it really was none of the above. Instead, defence lawyer Peter Jensen told the court, it was a combination of things, including cocaine, alcohol and an unfaithful husband.

Her husband, from whom she now is separated and seeking a divorce, began using cocaine in 1983, sometimes freebasing “for three or four days straight.” With a husband who was “severely addicted” and who would go into rehab “about 1991,” Jensen said, Patrick was “continually” borrowing, consolidating and remortgaging their home in an attempt to keep their finances above water.

In 1996, her husband started a log home business — “He wasn’t a good businessman,” Jensen told the court — and by 2001 their marriage was falling apart. The Patricks have two daughters, ages 24 and 23.

In 2001, Jensen said, Maxine began using cocaine. She also lost her father, stepfather and brother, and her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, in about a two-month period that summer. On top of all that, Jensen told the court, Patrick discovered that her husband was having an affair with “one of her best friends.”

Patrick would, Jensen said, numb herself with cocaine and alcohol. There were times, he told the court, when she was in a “drug-induced haze.”

However, as Gold pointed out, the offence with which Patrick was charged began “much earlier” than 2001. Gold’s calculations showed that Patrick had taken more than $270,000 prior to May 30, 2000.

Gold also told the court that the Crown’s case file contained “no indication” that Patrick’s drug use was in evidence to “anyone with whom she worked.”

And then came Sept. 11, 2003, the Blazers’ very own 9/11.

In the ensuing investigation, KPMG discovered that Patrick’s estimate of how much she had taken “in the last year” was out by about $100,000. In fact, Moore’s affidavit claimed, the Blazers “lost approximately $304,000 to this fraud in the 2002-03 fiscal year alone.” Gold told the court that an RCMP investigation put the loss for the period from June 1, 2002, through Sept. 9, 2003, at more than $373,000.

By the time Patrick was charged, the Blazers were claiming to have lost at least $1.3 million beginning in 1991. For the purposes of the charges Patrick faced, Gold said, the Crown and defence settled on $989,647.46 in losses, starting in 1994.

Patrick now lives in Williams Lake and works — two weeks in, one week out — for a catering company at a mining camp in northern B.C. Jensen told the court that she has been drug-free since the first week of March.

Patrick expressed remorse, to family and former co-workers and to the community, through a letter read into the record by Jensen.

“I am not in need of rehabilitation,” Patrick wrote in that letter, because “the hell I put my family through” was a life-altering experience. “I refuse to go down that road again.

“I am,” she wrote, “so, so sorry for what I have done.”

Through the civil suit, the Blazers received $150,000 in restitution, with the Patricks having to sell their home in order to pay that. But, Gold said, while there has been some restitution, “a lot is not going to happen” in that area.

And now, with the Crown asking for a jail sentence of between three and five years and Jensen asking for a conditional sentence, we are left to wonder if Patrick’s guilty plea means Blazergate is over.

We are left to wonder if the Blazers now can return to some sense of normalcy?

Or are the butterfly’s wings still flapping?

Unbelievable. What a ***** that chick is. I could careless about her drugged, burn out of a husband being on drugs and not being a good businessman. Who cares about your little sob story.

Fact is its disgusting that she took our money to help out her deadbeat husband. Throw her in jail and let her rot, your husband cheated on you with your best friend? booo hooooo. No excuse for stealing the money, disgraceful and disgusting.

Maxine Patrick got 3 and a half years for her troubles.

She should have got 10.

No kidding, but now the organization can heal now that that garbage has been picked up. Now we can truly move on, and who knows maybe things will go for the better now.