BY KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

When Muhammad Ali emerged from a white limousine to enter a federal courthouse in Houston on Aug. 16, it wasn’t to revisit the place in which he’d been convicted of draft dodging 34 years earlier. The unlikely purpose of his appearance: to offer moral support to a Canadian businessman on trial in Texas. It was hardly a typical courtroom scene, but then again, Yank Barry, the Montreal-born president and majority owner of VitaPro Foods Inc., which makes and sells a soy-powder meat replacement, isn’t your typical Canadian CEO. Barry was facing charges of bribery, fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to bribe James Anthum “Andy” Collins, the former executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), with US$20,000. What did Barry allegedly get in return? A US$33.7-million, five-year contract to supply VitaPro’s meat replacement powder to Texas prisons in 1995.

When the two-week trial wound up a few days later, it appeared at first that Ali’s visit had had the desired effect, as the six men and six women of the jury returned after a mere 53 minutes of deliberation. “I was concerned,” says Assistant US Attorney Gary Cobe, whoprosecuted the case. “When it’s a real quick verdict in a complicated trial, it’s ordinarily because they’re returning with a not-guilty verdict.” But although the greatest boxer of all time might have floated in like a butterfly, it was Barry who was stung like a bee. Both he and Collins were convicted on all charges, and each now faces up to 70 years in prison and fines of up to US$2 million. At press time, sentencing had already been postponed twice and is not likely to occur until sometime in 2002.

The verdict was a serious blow to the colorful Barry, who, thanks to his high-profile charity work conducted through Global Village Market, his “charitable distribution company,” has rubbed elbows

  with the likes of singer Céline Dion, gold-medalist runner Michael Johnson and aging rocker Gary “US” Bonds. When he’s not visiting the developing world to make donations of his meat replacement powder, Barry spends time at his mansion in the Bahamas (he abandoned his upscale digs in Montreal two years ago), where he socializes with a range of celebrities, from New York Yankees star-pitcher Roger Clemens to Canadian-born bombshell Pamela Anderson.

Despite his cachet among the rich and famous, Barry’s being treated as somewhat of a pariah by the state of 

Texas, where he was indicted together with Collins in March 1998. At the time, Barry was embroiled in a long-standing legal dispute with the state’s authorities, a brouhaha that erupted in 1995 after George W. Bush succeeded Ann Richards as governor. VitaPro had become the subject of much complaining among prisoners, eight of whom filed suits against the state because, they claimed, the Canadian-produced meat replacement was making them physically ill. (The suits failed.)

Despite this grousing, state corrections officials initially supported and even praised VitaPro, but suddenly changed tack and sued to cancel the contract in February 1996. “Bush comes into power backed heavily by one of Texas’s biggest lobbies—the Cattle-men’s Association,” Barry says from Nassau, where he’s been awaiting sentencing, free on a US$200,000 bond. “Why would they want the prisons to have a $33.7-million contract for a meat substitute?”

He launched a countersuit for breach of contract, and it seemed for a time to be making healthy progress: two lower-court judges sided with VitaPro’s claims that Texas should pay the $33.7 million. The Supreme Court of Texas ruled against him in December 1999, and Barry was preparing to take

his case to the US Supreme Court, but by that time things had gone terribly wrong: because the TDCJ is a government institution that receives federal funds, his ties (and “consultancy” payments) to Collins attracted the attention of the FBI.

According to Barry, the cancellation of the contract and the bad press have cost VitaPro US$75 million to US$100 million in lost sales. “As a result of the suit, they destroyed our corrections business,” he says. “We lost every account except for the Solicitor General of Ontario, which is worth maybe $20,000 or $30,000 a year.” Many feel that Barry was simply the victim of bigger interests—interests that, in the end, ran right over him. As Mike Ramsey, Barry’s lawyer, puts it, “Something happened. I just don’t know that it was a neutral trial.”

The story of VitaPro took shape back in the days when Yank Barry worked as a sports agent. As he tells it, in January 1988, while attending a golf tournament in Sun City, South Africa, with golf guru Phil Ritson, a local mad-scientist type named Chummy Von Lempke approached Barry. “He said, ‘Do you want to make a billion dollars?’”

Barry recounts. Von Lempke explained that he had developed a meat replacement powder with what he claimed was a “new elasticity and texture in soy,” though it did have some meat in it. Von Lempke said he’d enjoyed moderate success selling the product to prisons and schools in South Africa, but was unable to expand abroad due to the apartheid-era embargo. After a demo tasting, Barry put down a deposit, with an option to buy the North American rights for US$250,000.

Because the original product contained animal by-products, Agriculture Canada did not approve it as a vegetarian food, so a VitaPro

 scientist spent the next few months reformulating the recipe. The final product, Barry boasts, is the only powdered meat substitute that is both kosher and halal; it also comes in both beef and chicken flavors. “Now it’s not even close to Von Lempke’s recipe.”

In fact, Barry found Von Lempke’s go-for-the-big-guys marketing strategy more useful than his recipe. VitaPro’s first major contract came in 1992, when Barry signed on the Mexican prison system. He subsequently brokered deals with food companies like US chains Marriott Food Services and Cisco Food Services, along

with Versabec Inc., the Quebec division of Toronto-based VS Services Ltd. Barry’s main focus, like Von Lempke’s, was on winning large government contracts—something he proved to be adept at. At one point, VitaPro had contracts with 18 state correctional systems, including those of New York, California and Georgia, as well as the US Federal Bureau of Prisons.

VitaPro’s second major evolution occurred in 1994, when Barry visited Ali (the two were introduced by singer Gary “US” Bonds in the mid-’60s). Barry cooked him up a batch of VitaPro veggie burgers. “He’s a very finicky eater, but he loved it,” Barry says. “He wasn’t endorsing anything at the time, but agreed to do our product. When I told the people at our advertising agency I was signing him up as a spokesman, they laughed and told me he couldn’t speak [Ali suffers from Parkinson’s disease]. I said, ‘He doesn’t have to. He’s Muhammad Ali.’” Barry fired the agency soon after.

From that point on, Ali’s face adorned the plastic tubs containing the powder, which is a “textured vegetable protein” made from soybeans grown in Kansas and processed in Pointe-Claire, on Montreal’s West Island. It’s a combination of soya

flour, wheat flour, hydrolyzed soya protein and dehydrated vegetables.

These days, Barry is mum on most of the financial aspects of his business, which he owns with Montreal-based minority partners Michael Reznick and Rubin Fogel. However, in 1996, he told the Montreal Gazette that VitaPro was on track to sell US$50 million a year—boldly predicting that figure would rise to US$1 billion within a few years. Still, as guarded as he’s become about the company’s numbers, he can’t dodge his colorful—some would say tainted—past.

At 15, Barry, who was born Gerald Falovitch in 1948 in the Montreal suburb of Ville St-Laurent, suffered the loss of his 36-year-old father. A few months later, his five-year-old brother died after undergoing open-heart surgery. Within a year, Barry had embarked on a singing career, briefly touring with quintessential US party band the Kingsmen (remember “Louie Louie”?). He even claims to have shared a stage with Jimi Hendrix in New York before going on to produce commercials, including the “Two scoops of raisins” jingle for Kellogg’s. He also worked as a producer for pop stars like Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones.

Despite those successes, his past has been defined by an event that continues to dog him. It goes like this: in 1971, Barry was a partner in a small record company with John R. McConnell, whose father owned the now-defunct Montreal Star newspaper. “I was 22 years old, coked out of my head, infatuated with the Mafia, and I got involved with the Cotroni family,” he says. Barry introduced the younger McConnell to a prostitute, and later suggested to his partner that the woman was the wife of a Mafia kingpin who wanted “blood money” as compensation for the affront of having slept with her. McConnell ponied up $82,000 before the ruse was exposed. Barry

served 10 months of a six-year sentence for extortion.

Far from hiding his criminal past, Barry claims “It’s the first thing I tell people.” He says he’s reformed—and at least one high-profile friend concurs. “I’ve been around the world with him delivering food, medical supplies, clothes and toys for the needy,” Muhammad Ali told Canadian Business. “I never noticed any wrong dealings. I see him as a good, honest and decent businessman. He’s always been just and honest toward me. To me, he is a good man.”

Yet, in recent years, Barry’s headline-making rehab has been scrutinized in the media. Some have challenged his claims of giving away tens of millions of VitaPro meals each year, a program the company maintains has accounted for 260 million free meals since 1995 to food banks throughout North America and 40 countries ranging from North Korea to the Republic of Buryatia. There have also been highly publicized gripes from distributors who complained of a lack of profits due to VitaPro’s Amway-style distribution schemes, which have since been discontinued in favor of a network of professional brokers and sales staff.

Perhaps most damning of all, Barry has been linked to Sidney Lallouz, a convicted con man involved in a scheme to defraud Canada’s federal Small Business Loans Administration in 1994. Barry admits to having met Lallouz in a Montreal jail cell, but insists his subsequent involvement with the grifter was peripheral. He claims that media reports on the subject were fueled by a disgruntled former bookkeeper, whom Barry angrily denounces.

Despite his murky past, Barry’s prosecution in the Lone Star State is fraught with questions.

Former Texas prison chief Andy Collins, who may end up on the wrong side of the bars

The Texas 12 who judged him this fall were not sequestered during the two-week trial and, although they weren’t supposed to have any knowledge of his criminal past, Barry’s backers suggest that some prejudice might have seeped into their thinking. “I was absolutely stunned by the verdict,” says former US treasurer Azie Taylor Morton, who met Barry a decade ago and worked for two years as a consultant to VitaPro.

Taylor Morton, who introduced Barry to the Texas prison authorities, disputes the prosecution’s central thesis that prison chief Collins was on the state payroll when he accepted Barry’s payments for consultation work. (In court, Barry testified that he paid Collins in December for work that was to be performed in January.) “If anybody dares to do any research on people leaving state jobs and going to some other job, they’ll find that what this guy did was perfectly legal—there was nothing improper,” says Taylor Morton, who speculates that the cancellation of VitaPro’s contract with the Texas prison system was a case of a foreigner being victimized by state politics.

The prosecution’s case does little to contradict her assertion. Its star witness: Patrick Graham, a VitaPro distributor who was planning to set up a private juvenile detention facility for which Collins was to have served as director after leaving his Texas post. Graham was convicted of theft in June 2000 and is now serving a 10-year sentence for attempting to swindle $150,000 from a woman in exchange for a false promise to break her husband out of prison. “Pat Graham is a liar, a cheater and a convicted felon known to have made deals with the FBI to roll people over, and all of a sudden he’s a credible witness?” says Mike Ramsey.

Oliver “Buck” Revell, a former associate deputy director for investigations and counterintelligence at the FBI

 who appeared as a defence witness in the trial, was also shocked by the verdict. “The government’s case depended entirely on an informant [Graham] who proved to be utterly unreliable. That bothered me because it involved my former agency and it was completely contrary to our operational procedures and requirements,” says Revell, who retired from the FBI in 1994 and was part of a study group monitoring conditions in Texas jails in 1995. “This witness in particular had proved to be unreliable, yet that didn’t seem to deter the prosecution whatsoever.”

Revell says he testified that Barry publicly announced his intention to hire Collins as a VitaPro consultant after the latter retired. “None of the usual modus operandi for a bribery case were present,” he says. “I was absolutely astounded that the judge let it go to the jury, and even more astounded that after 53 minutes they came back with a guilty verdict. I spent 35 years in criminal justice and never saw anything like that.”

Naturally, the prosecutor disagrees. “I’m not singing Pat Graham’s praises,” says Gary Cobe. “However, as I said to the jury in my closing argument, they could find those defendants guilty without ever hearing from Graham.”

Before the verdict was announced, Barry appeared confident to the point of cockiness, musing publicly that he might launch a suit against the state for malicious prosecution. Revell says the prosecution’s behavior supports such an accusation, and points to the fraud charge Barry faced, which concerns an allegedly improper use of identification to obtain entry into a prison. Barry explains: “They gave me an identity badge to wear while visiting the prison, and there was a space for the social security number. I’m Canadian, so the clerk wrote my social insurance number and added a zero on the end to round the number out.” What’s more, Barry claims that, prior to the trial, prosecutors offered him immunity in return for testimony against Collins. “I couldn’t even consider it. There was nothing to testify against him with,” he says. Cobe denies that such a deal was offered.

Barry still holds out hope that US District Judge Lynn Hughes will overturn the decision. But whatever happens, he believes that VitaPro will survive: “Had the charges included drugs or racketeering, my clients would run.” VitaPro vice-president Taite says negotiations are ongoing with the governments of the Russian Federation and Venezuela.

Barring a reversal of the verdict, Barry will seek an appeal while he works on a book about his Texas legal odyssey. But if he ends up behind bars, he won’t be chowing down on VitaPro: the prisons have already fed their supplies to eager hordes of Texas hogs.