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PROLOGUE

BEHAVE YOURSELVES

Fred Hazel knew something had changed the moment he saw the front page.

Hazel had stepped outside his modest shingled house on Duchess Street, in Saint John’s west end, to pick up his copy of the Telegraph-Journal sitting on the doorstep. It was the morning of Wednesday, August 18, 1993; Hazel had retired from the newspaper the previous year after more than four decades as a reporter and editor, including twelve years as editor-in-chief. Still a newsman at heart, he unrolled the bundle of pages to see the big news of the day on page one.

In a lifetime spent in the Saint John newsroom, Fred Hazel had seen a lot of front pages, but this headline, the photos, the very subject matter were like nothing he had seen before. “I thought it was unusual,” he recalls now, with his typical softspoken understatement.

Hazel’s reaction was shared across Saint John—in fact, across the entire province of New Brunswick. The word sensational is used too often in the media business, but this story was sensational: rarely had a Telegraph-Journal article provoked such a unanimous reaction. “People were really shocked,” says one prominent community leader. “They were surprised.”

The newspaper had obtained the last will of K.C. Irving, the billionaire industrialist whose vast, diverse enterprises made up the single largest private-sector economic force in New Brunswick. His forestry mills kept entire towns alive; his oil refinery accounted for more than half the province’s exports. His power and influence were constant topics of conversation, especially in Saint John, the heart of his empire. Those who admired him and those who feared him agreed on one thing: K.C. Irving, once listed as Canada’s richest man, was a singular figure, endlessly fascinating and famously secretive.

Irving had died the previous December, at ninety-three, during a Christmas visit to Saint John. He had made Bermuda his primary residence in 1972 to protect himself from Canadian taxation. Now, the Telegraph-Journal was breaking the news that Irving had left control of his multi-billion-dollar empire not in the hands of his three sons, J.K., Arthur, and Jack, who still ran the various companies from Saint John, but under the ownership of an offshore trust in Bermuda, run by three non-Canadian trustees, including K.C.’s widow. His sons—“the Irving boys,” as they were still known in their sixties—were managing the enterprises, but could have no say in running the trust unless they, too, took up residence outside Canada. “Irving’s Last Will Bequeaths Foreign Exile for His 3 Sons,” blared the headline dominating the front page above photos of J.K., Arthur, and Jack. “Control of ‘Entire Estate’ Linked to Non-residency,” said a subhead. A small sidebar, placed next to a severe-looking photo of the dead patriarch himself, reproduced the text of the relevant section of the will so readers could peruse it for themselves. “Like Father, Like Sons?” the headline asked. “K.C.’s ‘Canada Clause.’”

In the coming days the Telegraph-Journal would run more stories on the will. One reporter quoted an economist comparing the offshore trust to tax-dodging cross-border shopping. Another profiled—without the benefit of an interview—Winnifred Irving, K.C.’s former secretary, whom he had married after the death of Harriet, his first wife and the mother of his three sons; Winnifred was now a trustee to an empire worth an estimated $8 billion. The most revealing piece, headlined “K.C.’s Will Tells Heirs to Behave Themselves,” suggested that by keeping the empire out of his sons’ Canadian hands, K.C. ensured it would not be taxed—a bill that might total $1.5 billion, according to one analysis. The trust would expire in thirty-five years, unless the trustees dissolved it sooner, but the will was silent on how its assets were to be divided; this suggested, one story noted, “that Irving did not want any of his descendants to take anything for granted.”

For the time being, family members could draw on the trust for funds, but only if the trustees approved. K.C. instructed them, through one clause, to act “as I might do with respect to such property if I were living”—a phrase that extended the patriarch’s extraordinary penchant for control beyond the ninety-three years of his mortal lifetime.

For three days the Telegraph-Journal’s journalists probed the document’s implications, relying on experts after the Irvings themselves rebuffed interview requests. The coverage, though often speculative, was compelling, even gripping. “These people are very prominent in New Brunswick and they’re bound to make news no matter what they do,” Hazel says now. “They employ so many people and they’re involved in so many industries. But I thought it was a little unusual to have that kind of story.”

Unusual, shocking—for one important reason: the newspaper breaking the story that morning, the Saint John–based Telegraph-Journal, was part of the very empire it was reporting on. Like all the English-language daily newspapers in New Brunswick, it was owned by the Irving family, and had a reputation for not digging too deeply into the family’s business. Long before the creation of Bell Globemedia and Quebecor, New Brunswickers had grasped the concept of the concentration of media ownership.

“We didn’t have instructions, written or verbal, that I was ever aware of, on how to handle Irving stories, or not to do this or not to do that,” Fred Hazel says. Yet the papers rarely went beyond the most superficial reporting on their owners. Yes, as Hazel points out, they covered stories like smog from an Irving smokestack becoming trapped over Saint John, or dust from an Irving mill settling on hundreds of cars across the city. These stories did not reflect well on the family, but these were highly visible events that could not be credibly ignored. Investigating what lay under the surface, the stories that required time and effort and courage to expose, like the provisions of a will: that was rare.

However, a new editor had arrived at the Telegraph-Journal and its sister newspaper, the Evening Times-Globe. Neil Reynolds, a man with a track record of award-winning investigative journalism, had been promised—by J.K. Irving himself—the freedom to turn the two publications into great newspapers. His arrival was not widely known outside the Telegraph building over on Crown Street, but that front page was a signal that a new editorial posture was in place, one that would scrutinize even the newspaper’s proprietors—who happened to be the most powerful family in the province. “No editor ever put his head into a toothier lion’s mouth,” a Halifax columnist would later write admiringly. “There was a lot of excitement,” Philip Lee, a reporter at the time, remembers of that day. “People were talking about the paper again, so that was good. There was a lot of buzz.”

In the newsroom that morning, Gerry Childs, an old-school veteran who oversaw the editorial page, “was visibly shaken” by the will coverage, Lee says. Reynolds had not made a splash since his arrival in the spring, “and then suddenly he comes in and says, ‘We’re doing this.’” Childs, Lee, and other editors gathered with Reynolds in a glassed-in little office in the corner of the old wood-panelled newsroom for the regular morning story meeting. “Before we get started,” Childs said to Reynolds, “I just need to know: where did you get this document? Where did it come from?”

There was a long pause. Reynolds had hired a freelancer in Bermuda to pick up the document at the probate court and mail it to him, a routine transaction. He sensed, though, as he sat back in his chair, the tips of the fingers of one hand resting in his trademark fashion behind the buckle of his belt, that the moment called for a touch of the drama he favoured in his journalism.

Reynolds leaned forward. He slapped his hand palm-down on the desk with a theatrical thump and declared, “I bought it!”

Then, to break the tension, he gave a laugh—a deep laugh punctuated with a toothy smile—and the meeting moved on. “He was clearly in charge,” Lee says. “He was very clear that newsrooms are not democracies, and the best you hope for is a philosopher-king, and you had one with him. He was definitely going to be in charge. And I was so happy at that moment. I knew my life was going to change.”

Many lives began to change that summer, including the owners’. “It was news, I guess. That’s the way it works,” J.K. Irving says of the coverage of his father’s will. “Did I like it? Not really. But that’s the business.”

That front page is still electric to look at twenty years later, because it opened a window into the Irvings’ world. The public glimpsed what J.K. and his brothers already knew: their empire was facing great transformation as they set out to manage their holdings for the first time without their father’s counsel. Reynolds’s scoop marked the beginning of two decades of upheaval for the family—a new chapter in one of the most remarkable stories of Canadian entrepreneurship.

The newspapers would eventually falter in telling that story, because they were inextricably part of it. Next to the other Irving operations—pulp mills, the oil refinery, logging operations, trucking, shipbuilding—the papers were tiny. But K.C.’s death, Reynolds’s arrival, and the popularization of the internet would transform them, to the point that they would prove contentious themselves when the empire began to fracture. As rivalries and resentments grew among the next generation of Irvings, one of their own—a great-grandchild of K.C.—would take direct control of the news business for the first time. This in turn would revive the debate about editorial control, even as a rift in the family grew wider.

By 2013, it was clear that K.C. had failed, with his will, to impose unity and harmony on his family—that he had failed, as the 1993 had headline put it, to make them “behave themselves.”

By then, the front page that so shocked Fred Hazel was a distant memory. The window had closed again, and the story of the Irving split—the tale of one of Canada’s richest families divided by jealousy, discord, and competing visions—was a story no Irving newspaper would tell.