726 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 5 SEPTEMBER 2021
where we were going for lunch. I said I would be eating a sandwich at my
desk as usual. He said we couldn’t do that because we had to go out so that
we would appear to be successful. I said, “But we aren’t successful.” He said
he knew that, but unless we looked successful, we never would be. We went
to Hy’s Encore. After that I rarely ate lunch in the office. Gerry was right—
he had better business instincts than I did, and somehow things began to
improve. Within a couple of years, our business began to be successful.
By the mid-’80s, Gerry was doing a lot of cases for important people from
Asia, which led to many adventurous trips to exotic destinations. He would
travel to Hong Kong four times a year to deal with business class applications
from people wanting to get out before Hong Kong was returned to
China in 1997. I recall a trip he made to Guangzhou in the early ’80s and
how amazed I was when he told me how things were changing and that
China was becoming a capitalist country. I also recall a trip he made to the
Philippines near the end of the Marcos regime. We were so concerned about
what might happen to him that I had the phone numbers of two prominent
lawyers in the Philippines, one pro-Marcos and the other anti-Marcos; if he
disappeared, I would phone one or the other depending on whether Marcos
was still in power or had been overthrown. On another occasion, when
Gerry was departing from Manila Airport to return to Hong Kong, the military
police stopped the plane from leaving and took him off to be interrogated.
The plane was held and after an hour they put him back on it and
they departed. He told me they wanted to know to whom he had been talking
and he said he couldn’t remember any last names, just their first names:
Eduardo, Juan, Pedro, etc. When necessary, Gerry was very good at feigning
ignorance, but I always knew that inside he was carefully calculating every
move. On that occasion he was traveling with Albert, his Chinese assistant
and interpreter. The police had left Albert on the plane, but Albert had been
absolutely terrified.
As time passed and Gerry became more successful, he began to invest in
property in Asia. It was always mysterious, and I never knew the details
except that he owned a home in Phuket, a beach resort in Thailand where
he liked to vacation.
In the mid-’80s, he made an important trip to West Germany. At that
time, many Germans wanted to immigrate to Canada because they were
afraid of a Soviet invasion.
As Gerry’s reputation grew, he started to get assignments from substantial
businesses. On one occasion, a well-known luxury hotel in Vancouver
wanted to hire the assistant manager at another Vancouver hotel as its new
general manager. The man in question was from the Philippines and was in