Working the Dead Beat (45 page)

Anna Maria de Souza

Fundraiser

1941? – September 18, 2007

T
HERE WERE TWO
secrets that Anna Maria de Souza, the much­-married creator of the fabulously successful Brazilian Carnival Ball, kept closely guarded: her age and the nature of her final and catastrophic illness. Italian and Brazilian in ancestry, she heated up the staid fundraising climate in Toronto with an annual fancy-dress ball that for decades was one of the most significant philanthropic galas on the Canadian social calendar. A warm-blooded, energetic outsider, she had the entrepreneurial zeal, organizing skills, and shrewd ambition of a self-made
CEO
. Instead of starting a company or a launching a hedge fund, she camouflaged her business skills under the patina of a society hostess. Using old-fashioned influence rather than naked power, she forged alliances with charitable foundations in campaigns that raised their profiles, her status, and close to $45 million for Toronto hospitals, universities, and arts and culture organizations for more than forty years.

For all her flamboyance, de Souza was intensely private. Nobody knew her real age — not even her husband, Ivan, as she loved to boast. “I've known her for thirty-five years and it never occurred to me to wonder. She was one of those people who was ageless,” said her friend Catherine Nugent after de Souza's death from an undisclosed form of cancer on September 18, 2007. The best guess is that she was sixty-six.

Along with de Souza's success came complaints about her management style. She was unapologetic in response to criticisms that she was territorial and a micro-manager who autocratically chose the event's annual beneficiary. “This is big business, and the organization requires that we have a good board to sell the ball, a recipient who will pay for our computers, our secretarial staff,” she told
Maclean's
magazine in 2006. “This work requires a huge infrastructure.”

Even knowing how much work was involved, “there was absolutely no reason to say no,” said Paul Alofs, president of the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, if de Souza asked if you wanted to be beneficiary of the
BCB
, “because it is such a massive fundraising and awareness-generating opportunity for a not-for-profit.”

Although the ball was her biggest activity, it wasn't her only one. She also volunteered on the Women's Committee of the Canadian Opera Company and was curator of the Henry Birks Collection of antique Canadian silver in the late 1970s. A passionate gardener and a keen tennis player, she loved to entertain and to cook for her guests. “She was the most generous, vivacious person I know,” said Nugent. “She loved to introduce people to each other and to grow her circle of friends, but she was also shy.”

ANNA MARIA DE
Souza, the daughter of Amadeu Guidi and his wife, Honorica (née Marcolini), was born probably in 1941 — or at least in the early 1940s — in São Sebastião do Paraíso, in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais in the interior of Brazil. She grew up in a family of four brothers and one sister. Her grandfather on her mother's side had emigrated from Genoa, Italy, as a teenager and found a job as a construction worker building homes for plantation workers.

When money was scarce, her grandfather was paid in land. Eventually he accumulated enough acreage to start his own plantation and enough wealth to take his family back to Genoa on a trip. There he bought a villa. For the rest of his life he spent half the year in Italy and the other half in Brazil. When his daughter Honorica married, Marcolini handed over control of his Brazilian plantation to her husband, Amadeu Guidi. That's where his granddaughter, Anna Maria, grew up, in what she later compared to paradise. It was a time in which life “was gracious and slow and everything was looked after.” She was educated at the Colégio Paula Frassinetti, where she earned a teaching degree, before attending the Escola Técnica de Comércio.

At eighteen she married William John Griffiths, an English mining engineer for Wimpey Construction, a British firm that had a contract to build a dam in Brazil. Anna Maria went into labour with their first child on Good Friday, a holiday in Brazil. Her doctor was away, the birth was arduous, and the baby, a daughter, lived for only twenty-three days. Anna Maria survived but was unable to bear more children. To compound the tragedy, her husband died in a work-related accident ten months later.

Widowed and still in her teens, Anna Maria went to live with her grandmother in Italy, where she attended finishing school. Afterwards, sailing back to Brazil on a cruise ship, she met a Brazilian plantation owner who recognized her marketing skills and urged her to get into the coffee exporting business. As chance would have it, at a party in Rio de Janeiro on New Year's Eve in 1964, Anna Maria met a man named John Marston who said he imported bulk foods into Canada. If she had products to sell, he was interested in seeing them.

With an insouciant entrepreneurship, she gathered some samples from the family coffee plantation and set out for Canada, arriving in gloomiest Toronto in February 1965. She looked up Marston — and married him three months later in a Protestant ceremony, which her mother, a Catholic, boycotted. “I fell in love with Toronto and the only thing I could do to stay was to get married,” she once confided. By 1974 the Marstons had divorced, with Anna Maria complaining later that her husband was a workaholic who had little interest in married life.

Anna Maria had long since found ways to make her own life more interesting. The winter after she arrived in Canada, in 1966, homesickness propelled her to “kill the longing” by organizing her first Brazilian Carnival Ball, in a church basement at Dundas and Grace Streets, a largely Portuguese area of Toronto. Tickets cost five dollars, the food for the fifty guests was prepared by Anna Maria and her friends, and the aim was merely to cover costs and bring a little Mardi Gras colour to the dreary Toronto winter. The ball quickly became a tradition.

By the early 1970s the ball, which had quickly moved above ground to the Sutton Place Hotel and then the Sheraton Centre, was making a small profit, with the proceeds going to a Brazilian orphanage. That tradition continued with 5 percent of the annual profits benefiting leper colonies, old-age homes, and other causes in or around her hometown. When Toronto charities began asking if they could reap the ball's annual largesse, Anna Maria astutely decided to bestow the fundraising benefits on a different cause every time, thereby hooking into a fresh network and set of volunteers annually.

Krystyne Griffin attended her first Brazilian Ball in 1977, the year she left Paris, married businessman, Griffin Poetry Prize founder, and benefactor Scott Griffin, and moved to Toronto. “Everybody told me this was the party to go to because it showed that Toronto could be fun.” They were correct. “A guy in drag dressed like Queen Alexandra walked up and smacked Scott right on the lips. That was my introduction to Anna Maria's parties,” said Griffin. “I liked her without knowing her well.”

The ball celebrated its fourteenth anniversary in 1980 at the Four Seasons Hotel on Avenue Road in Toronto and netted $50,000. It stayed in that location until 1988, when it moved to the yawning depths of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the only venue that could accommodate crowds upwards of a thousand.

Anna Maria met the late Montegu Black at the
BCB
in the early 1970s, when she was feeling disaffected with her globe-trotting, work-obsessed second husband, John Marston. Black thought she should meet his younger brother, Conrad, who was then plying his way as an aspiring tycoon and researching his biography of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. They dated for about two years after her 1974 divorce. “She was a delightful, refreshing, and enterprising person, and was a very popular and respected person in a community where she started as a stranger and, at first, hardly spoke the language,” Black wrote in an email message. “I saw her a lot at the time my parents died, ten days apart, in 1976, and she could not have been more supportive.”

Anna Maria's lasting love, however, was businessman Ivan de Souza. Introduced by Marvelle Koffler, wife of Murray Koffler of Shoppers Drug Mart, they had much in common, both being Portuguese-speaking and Catholic. They were married on December 22, 1982, and were devoted to each other.

More than the venue of the ball changed over the years. As it became more lavish and raised more money (much of it matched by government programs, with costs underwritten by corporate sponsors), so too did the entertainment. Instead of handmade decorations on a Carnival theme, de Souza began importing Carnival dancers from Brazil. That meant switching the date from Mardi Gras (the carnival on the eve of Lent, the forty-day period of penance preceding Easter in the Catholic calendar) to April or May, so that the dancers could travel to Toronto in their off-season. At the fortieth anniversary of the ball in 2006, the $2 million in net proceeds went to York University's Accolade Project, and the 1,600 guests were entertained by a thirty-minute samba parade from the Rio Carnival, including fifty dancers in feathered, beaded, and bejewelled costumes processing on foot or on wooden horses to the beat of a
batucada
rhythm supplied by the Cocktail Brazil Band.

That November, de Souza was diagnosed with rampaging cancer and underwent rigorous treatment, which included chemotherapy, at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. She looked frail but valiant at the 2007 ball, which raised $2.6 million (net) for the Arthritis and Autoimmunity Research Centre in Toronto. “She and the ball were a brand, and for a very small organization like us, she had a tremendous impact. She did a great job,” said Gerri Grant, executive director of the
AARC
.

In late summer 2007, de Souza went back into hospital for more treatment, but she was well enough to decide that oncology nursing, through the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, should be the focus and the beneficiary of the 2008 Brazilian Ball. Supported by her devoted husband, Ivan de Souza, she died while the ball was still in the planning stages — the first one that occurred without her dominant presence
.
Five years later the ball itself was gone after a final extravaganza in September 2012.

 

 

Donald Marshall

Torchbearer for Native Rights and the
Wrongfully Convicted

September 13, 1953 – August 6, 2009

L
IKE MANY TEENAGERS,
Donald Marshall drank, smoked, and hung around the local park with rowdy friends. He might have outgrown these habits and matured into a stalwart citizen, a Native leader, an entrepreneur. We will never know what his potential might have been, because he lost the chance to realize his dreams when he was convicted of murder at seventeen and imprisoned for eleven years for a crime he didn't commit.

By the time he was finally released on parole in 1982, he was forever damaged by the miscarriage of justice and years of detention. Another eight years passed before he was exonerated by a royal commission that had been called in 1982, when Jean Chrétien was justice minister. The royal commission, which handed down its final report in 1990, recommended an overhaul of the entire provincial justice system in Nova Scotia and found that Marshall was a victim of the racism and incompetence of a criminal justice system that had failed him “at virtually every turn from his arrest and wrongful conviction for murder in 1971 up to and even beyond his acquittal by the Court of Appeal in 1983.”

And yet, despite the tragedies of his later life — addictions to alcohol and nicotine and a series of troubled romantic relationships — his name is synonymous with the struggle for fairness and equality in this country. A proud Mi'kmaq, Marshall was a leader in two essential legal campaigns: justice for the wrongfully convicted and recognition of the historic treaty rights of First Nations.

Marshall broke the trail for other innocent men, including David Milgaard, Guy Paul Morin, Thomas Sophonow, and William Mullins Johnson — all of whom eventually had their wrongful convictions overturned — but he was also a hero in the battle against racism towards aboriginals in this country. He spent six years challenging the federal government's denial of the treaty rights granted to his people by the British Crown during the Seven Years' War, a case that was argued successfully before the Supreme Court of Canada. “He had a huge potential for leadership, which was never crushed by his imprisonment and which enabled him to contribute to the native community in Canada,” said lawyer Clayton Ruby, a member of Marshall's legal team before the royal commission.

“He was a really shy person, but he was brave enough to go through the limelight a couple of times to change both the provincial systems and the federal ones and to make very significant changes,” said Terry Paul, chief of the Membertou First Nation, after Marshall's death in 2009. “It is a tragic loss not only for me, being a personal friend, but for the aboriginal people across the country. He did so much and a lot of people benefited from his difficulties.”

DONALD MARSHALL JR.
was born on September 13, 1953, on the Membertou reserve in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the eldest of thirteen children of Donald Marshall Sr., Grand Chief of the Mi'kmaq Nation, and his wife, Caroline. Called “Junior” by his family and friends, he was in line to inherit his father's honorary title.

A rebellious boy and a wild youth, he was expelled from school at fifteen for striking a teacher and sent to family court. Given the choice of working with his father as an apprentice plasterer or going to the Shelburne School for Boys, an infamous provincial reformatory, he quit school with barely a Grade 6 education. That gave him lots of free time to join the Shipyard Gang, a bunch of Mi'kmaq toughs who generally made nuisances of themselves around Sydney.

Tall for his age and physically more intimidating than some of the other gang members, Junior was the designated panhandler when money was short for rum and cigarettes. Although he shunned violence, Junior was not above petty thievery and was well-known to the law, having spent four months in the county jail when he was barely seventeen for giving liquor to minors.

Those skirmishes were negligible compared to the legal quagmire that was about to engulf him. Sandford (Sandy) Seale, a seventeen-year-old African-Canadian, was on his way home from a dance on May 28, 1971, when by chance he met Marshall in Wentworth Park, in the centre of Sydney. The two teenagers, who knew each other casually, were chatting when Roy Ebsary, fifty-nine, a former ship's cook who had been drinking that night with an unemployed companion, Jimmy MacNeil, age twenty-five, hailed them and asked for a light. Seale and Marshall approached. In the ensuing encounter, Ebsary, who was later described as “drunken and dangerous,” with a “fetish” for knives, fatally stabbed Seale in the stomach. The young man died of his wounds the next day.

Five days later Marshall was arrested and charged with murder. He was processed through the justice system with such haste that he was convicted, after a three-day trial, fewer than six months after his arrest. Even when the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal finally acquitted Marshall in 1983, the judgement was miserly, absolving the police of any responsibility and saying that the innocent man had contributed in large measure to his own conviction and that any miscarriage of justice was more apparent than real.

Eventually Ebsary was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison, a sentence that was reduced to one year by the Court of Appeal in 1986. He died two years later, having served less than one-tenth of the time Marshall had spent behind bars for the crime Ebsary had committed.

Marshall had to wait until January 26, 1990, to be completely exonerated. That's when the royal commission released its final report. The inquiry, which had been chaired by Alexander Hickman, then chief justice of the trial division of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador, concluded that, far from being a perpetrator, Marshall was the victim of racism and incompetence on the part of the police, judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats. After submitting the final report to the Nova Scotia Cabinet, Justice Hickman said: “I really hope that at long last one Donald Marshall Jr. will stand high in the eyes of Nova Scotians, where he deserves to stand.” Later that year the provincial government awarded Marshall, who by then was thirty-six years old, a mere $250,000 in cash and a small annual stipend in compensation for an ordeal that had lasted nearly two decades.

The most significant recommendation produced by the commission called for the establishment of an independent body to review cases of alleged wrongful conviction, something the federal government has never acted on. Instead, victims of the justice system still have to petition the courts for appeals and new trials, in a laborious and costly process. However, another key finding resulted in important changes in the way evidence is disclosed to the defence. At the time Marshall was prosecuted, in 1971, the Crown had to provide the defence only with evidence that the prosecution considered relevant. Now prosecutors are constitutionally obliged to make full disclosure of all evidence that might be relevant to the guilt or innocence of the accused.

In the mid-1990s Marshall was in trouble with the law once again. He was caught catching and selling eels with illegal nets, out of season and without a licence, in Pomquet Harbour, near Antigonish, Nova Scotia, in August 1996. When officials from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans told him and his companion to stop fishing, he didn't comply. Instead, Marshall, who had learned the hard way to be wary of authority, phoned his friend Chief Paul and asked his advice. “I told him to keep fishing,” Chief Paul said later. “I felt strongly that he had a right to be there and gain a livelihood.”

The real difficulty occurred when Marshall left the shore and sold his catch — 210 kilograms of eels — for $787.10. That exchange of money and goods led to his conviction for fishing out of season, fishing with illegal nets, and selling eels without a licence, but it also initiated a legal battle that lasted six years, involved three courts, and provoked learned discussions in the Supreme Court of Canada about the treaty rights that the Mi'kmaq had been granted in 1760 by the British to help secure their loyalty during the Seven Years' War with France. Eventually, for the second time in his short life, the proud Mi'kmaq with a Grade 6 education won a landmark legal victory.

In a decision that enshrined Native treaty rights, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1760 treaty allowed Native people to take fish and game and trade them for “necessaries” at a local trading post. The court wrote that recognizing those rights was important in order to uphold the honour of the Crown in its dealings with the Mi'kmaq people.

The decision was greeted with jubilation in Native communities. It instantly made Native fishermen big players in the East Coast commercial lobster fishery, which led to angry protests by non-Natives that coalesced around Burnt Church, New Brunswick. The unrest led to a second Marshall case at the Supreme Court in 1999, in which the court clarified that it had not created “open season in the fisheries” and that the Crown retained the right to limit the size of the catch if necessary.

Once again the man at the centre of a broader controversy, Marshall accepted the spotlight reluctantly, saying he hadn't gone to the Supreme Court for himself but “for my people. It was more touching than anything else.” After saying that he was too old to go fishing, he admitted that he had thought about giving up the fight, but kept going because “I knew that I had dealt with bigger problems.”

His past problems were compounded by serious addictions to drink and cigarettes. In 2003 he had a double lung transplant in an eight-hour operation in a Toronto hospital to try to overcome the ravages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a progressive and ultimately fatal lung condition whose symptoms are chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Marshall later said that the recovery was tougher than two trips to the Supreme Court.

He was feeling well enough in June 2007 to celebrate his marriage to non-Native Colleen D'Orsay, but the honeymoon was short-lived. Less than a year later she complained to the
Cape Breton Post
that her husband had received only $156,000 of the $2 million the thirty-three eastern Canadian chiefs of the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs Secretariat had pledged to pay him in 2001 in recognition of his long struggle on their behalf to establish their historic fishing and hunting rights. One of the exceptions was Chief Paul, who had given him at least $100,000. “All I can say is that when I make a commitment, I stand by it,” he told the
Cape Breton Post
, suggesting that Marshall was facing continuing health problems from his double lung transplant. “We felt it was the honourable thing to do, to be able to assist him.”

Then, in October 2008, Marshall appeared in a Sydney court accused of assaulting and threatening his wife and her former husband, lawyer Luke Wintermans. His wife was at Marshall's side when he pleaded not guilty in January 2009. His lawyer argued that there had been an abuse of process when a local Crown attorney telephoned a police sergeant seeking an update after some of the charges were laid.

Before the matter could be resolved, Marshall was admitted to hospital in Sydney, suffering from kidney failure, probably as a consequence of the anti-rejection drugs he had been taking since his lung transplant six years earlier. He died on August 6, 2009, at age fifty-five. His roller-coaster ride through the Canadian criminal justice system was finally over. “We pay the money, we have the public inquiry,” his former lawyer Clayton Ruby said at the time, “but we can't make them whole again.”