Money doesn’t buy everything, but it helps.
For a long time, Robert Miller bought sex with young women and, according to the shock report ofInvestigationminors.
Then, when he got in trouble with the police, he bought his way out without charge.
I have heard since Thursday evening jump to conclusions of corruption. Did he pay the police? Did he pay the state attorneys?
Of course not. That’s not how these things are done. Finally, nothing suggests it. In this case, the investigators were seasoned police officers with excellent reputations, genuinely frustrated that their target had never been charged. The prosecutor in charge of the case, later appointed judge, also enjoyed an excellent reputation. None of them would have been party to a criminal act of corruption or obstruction of justice.
Why then were there no criminal charges against Robert Miller?
Having sex with underage girls for pay is child prostitution, and according to the Criminal Code, it is sexual assault. The testimonies heard in the report ofInvestigation are those of women who were underage when they had sex with Miller.
Why then has there never been any accusation? The police at the time say that the prosecutors were too cautious. The prosecutor says the evidence would not have held up in court.
Testimony on camera is not testimony in court. It is not contradicted. It is not compared to other versions given by the same witness.
However, even according to the report, the young women were for the most part very reluctant, if not totally resistant, to collaborating with the police. So that in the end, the police file was deemed too thin. He did not hold a reasonable prospect of conviction in the eyes of prosecutors – which is the norm before charging someone.
If I talk about money, it is not to insinuate corruption. It’s much more subtle than that. Actually no, sorry, it’s not subtle at all. I’m talking about massive and legal watering.
The money intervenes avant the court process. The money serves to neutralize the action of the police.
Example number 1: young women said they had been summoned to the police station, accompanied by a lawyer whom they did not pay. They were going to deny the allegations, say that they were major, in short, contradict the thesis of the police – and of the private investigators who had alerted the police.
Guess who paid the lawyer?
The generous version: if Miller paid the lawyer, it was only the continuation of a relationship of “sugar daddy” for his “friends” who were worried about being summoned to the position.
The adult version: it was also a famous way to control what they would say.
Example number 2, even better: private investigators John Westlake and André Savard, who discovered Miller’s practices (they had been hired by his ex-wife), say that they were each offered $300,000 to “buy” their investigation report, their evidence and, ultimately, shut up.
Who offered them this sum? Two Miller security officials. Two men, like them, former Montreal police investigators. Ex-colleagues running after the same bandits!
Unless they were idiots, these ex-cops would never have offered Miller’s money to serving police officers. It would have been a criminal act.
But buying a report… It’s ambiguous.
Westlake and Savard flatly refused.
In the report, one of the victims recounts being treated “like shit” by police investigators. These, she says, told her that if she had helped recruit girls for Miller, she was complicit in a criminal act. A classic way to put pressure on a recalcitrant witness: you better cooperate, because we have evidence against you…
We do not know how it happened exactly or how far this young woman was ready to collaborate. What we do know is that she felt like shit.
But Miller’s security people wouldn’t have done their job if they hadn’t “informed” the young women who might testify against their boss of the risks of collaborating with the justice system. Recruiting underage girlfriends for sex with a businessman is indeed a crime…
There are ways to make these things understood without even shouting.
Add to that all the affective and financial manipulation which is at the very basis of these practices, and you have witnesses mixed up, hesitant, hostile, frightened in front of police investigators.
Clever (and well-paid) lawyers, on the other hand, don’t wait twiddling their thumbs for charges to be laid, the way one waits for the winning numbers in a draw. They are “proactive”.
They will preventively plead the weakness of the police case to the prosecutor’s office, underline all the pitfalls, show the client’s determination to fight until the end.
I was still a reporter at the courthouse more than 20 years ago when Miller hired the best lawyers in Montreal to fight a search of the offices of Future Electronics for an FBI tax investigation. He went to the Supreme Court and had the seizure quashed. The investigation failed.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you buy the “diversion” of your cases in this country, when you can afford it. Not by bribes. But no. Superbly legal.
Does this mean that when one is sufficiently rich, one is above the law? Let’s say rather that they reach you with infinitely more gentleness.
Does this mean that there is nothing to do for justice? No. On the contrary, there is much to do. Too much, sometimes, to overcome. So the case is dropped.
Then all of a sudden, when the suspect thought he was safe from justice, all the repressed past rises like a reflux of the sewer.
Everything was settled, paid for, sealed, cleared.
And, out of nowhere, a very small witness comes to bring down the empire of an all-powerful.
In the end, yes, a witness is enough. Like the proverbial extra twig of straw, the one that breaks the back of the invincible camel.
