by DAVE PINK
Arlan Galbraith, charged with defrauding the investors in his Pigeon King International business of millions of dollars, defended himself Monday as “an entrepreneur, a risk-taker and a visionary.”
His real motivation, he said during his closing remarks to the jury at his Kitchener Superior Court trial, “was putting smiles on people’s faces.”
Galbraith has chosen not to hire a lawyer and is representing himself. “I’m here defending myself against charges that should never have been laid in the first place,” he said.
Since 2001, Galbraith was in the business of selling breeding pairs of pigeons to people, most of them farmers, and buying back the offspring at a set price. He told the buyers the birds were to be sold to pigeon enthusiasts and hobbyists for racing and shows. But the business collapsed under its financial commitments to its investors and went bankrupt in June 2008.
Galbraith told the jury he can understand the anger and the desire for revenge from those who lost thousands of dollars. But, “it is impossible to have a bankruptcy where no one is hurt financially,” he said.
“I am not a criminal,” Galbraith said. “I was doing the opposite of what a criminal would do. A criminal would have packed up as much as possible and left the country to hide out.”
He told the jury of his visit to an Amish farm, and of a nine-year-old girl who took care of the pigeons to help out her family, “her face just beaming with pride.” He told of standing outside with the family at the end of the day looking out on their home “watching thousands of fireflies.”
“At that moment I felt totally blessed, and this is what I miss about my business,” said Galbraith, whose voice, moments later, weakened and quavered as he spoke about naming a related company after his first grandson.
However, Crown Attorney Lynn Robinson told the jury that Galbraith’s business was based on a long pattern of “deceit, falsehoods and fraudulent means.”
“It’s a scam,” she said, drawing the jury’s attention to a parade of witnesses who appeared in court over the past month to tell how they were assured by Galbraith that there was a good future in raising pigeons, even though he knew better. He needed the constant infusion of cash from new investors to keep the business afloat, she said.
And he was warned the business could not sustain itself, said Robinson, first by one of his sales agents, Bill Top, and later the by the man who worked for him briefly as the company’s chief financial officer, Darryl Diefenbacher. “This was not a mistake,” she said. “He had warnings.”
Still, he accepted more and more money from more and more investors, paying off the old investors with the money paid by the new investors.
More than 600 investors took heavy losses.
Galbraith knew there was no market for racing and show pigeons, Robinson said, and when he suddenly shifted gears and announced in 2007 that he would now be breeding pigeons for human consumption, as squabs, “it was an act of desperation.” He needed to attract more investors.
And because Galbraith kept all of the company’s financial records to himself, even from Diefenbacher, he had to be aware of his dire situation, said Robinson. “The only person who had all the information was Arlan Galbraith,” she said. “He kept everything secret.
“He couldn’t let his employees know the truth,” she said.
“This isn’t an accident. This isn’t a business gone bad. It is a cycling of money that repeats and repeats and repeats.”
Justice G. E. Taylor will give instructions to the 14-member jury Tuesday morning, then a lottery will be held to determine which two jurors will be excused. A 12-member jury will then retire to deliberate. BF
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