CHAPTER 3: The End of a Presidency
After the Kamloops Blazers had confronted office manager Maxine Patrick over missing funds, Barry Carter, their legal counsel from the Kamloops firm Mair Jensen Blair, called an extraordinary meeting of the WHL team’s board of directors.
One of the board members was Loy Hoffbeck, who had already decided to sell his five shares and end his second stint on the board.
Hoffbeck was one of the original directors of the Kamloops Junior Oilers. Previously the New Westminster Bruins, the Junior Oilers moved to Kamloops in time for the 1981-82 season. They morphed into the Blazers prior to 1984-85. Hoffbeck took ill in 1983-84 and resigned from the board in 1985 “because of my health problems.” He also started spending five months of the year in Arizona. “I couldn’t be at a lot of meetings,” he said, “although I supported them monetarily and otherwise.”
In 2000, Blazers vice-president Andy Clovechok, a long-time board member who was a friend of president Colin Day and Hoffbeck, asked Hoffbeck if he was interested in returning to the board.
“I said I wouldn’t mind but told him to keep in mind that I’m not here that much. I’m only in Kamloops for seven months a year,” said Hoffbeck, who now resides in Osoyoos, B.C. “He said, ‘That doesn’t make any difference. . . . We need you on there because there are some things that just aren’t right anymore.”
“I said, ‘I don’t know what I can do but we’ll find out.’ ”
The extraordinary meeting, Hoffbeck said, was attended by all nine board members – Day, Rick Harris, Frank McRae, Frank Rossi, Norio Sakaki, Ted Smigielski, Case van Diemen, Clovechok and Hoffbeck – as well as Paul Mumford, then a KPMG accountant.
As the meeting was about to break up, Hoffbeck recalls saying: “Colin . . . I understand you’ve written some personal cheques from the Blazers.”
His face just about bounced off the table,” Hoffbeck said. “(Day) said, ‘A couple of $2,500 ones. I needed some money. But I paid it all back.’ ”
“I said, ‘I understand it was a little more than that.’ ”
According to Hoffbeck, he asked Mumford for clarification and was told there had been “two for $2,500, two for $5,000 and a couple of $8,000.”
Hoffbeck said he asked Mumford if all of the money had been repaid. The reply, Hoffbeck recalled, was: “I’m quite sure.”
Mumford would later decline comment, saying if that’s Hoffbeck’s recollection then that’s his recollection.
Hoffbeck added: “I turned right to Colin. I said, ‘Colin, I’m asking you for your immediate resignation. Right now.’ He said, ‘No god damn way am I resigning. I’m the president of this club. I can just about do what I want to do.”
“I said, ‘Used to be. You ain’t anymore.‘ ”
“As Colin got up that day to leave,” Hoffbeck said, “he looked me right square in the face and said, ‘This is the thanks I get for my 20 years of service to this hockey club. This is all I get. I’m not going to take this shit.’ And he walked out the door.”
Hoffbeck said there ensued a brief discussion before the board voted on Day’s future.
“There were a couple of guys who said, ‘Maybe we had better think about this for a little bit.’ I said, ‘I’ll give you about three seconds to think about it . . . if you guys haven’t got the balls to raise your hands that you want him terminated why don’t you follow him out the door?‘ ”
The vote was 8-0.
According to Hoffbeck, Carter suggested Day be given ‘another chance to resign . . . maybe we should let him try to safe face a little bit.”
Late on the afternoon of Sept. 24, 2003, the Blazers issued a four-paragraph press release that began:
“Long-time president of the Kamloops Blazers’ Board of Directors, Colin W. Day, has resigned his office with the hockey club. Mr. Day will remain as a director of the hockey club and will maintain his position as the president of the Kamloops Blazers Sports Foundation.”
“I’m tired,” Day told the Kamloops Daily News, adding that his resignation had nothing to do with Patrick’s departure. “There’s too much crap going on. I can’t take (it). Between what’s happened with me and the relationship with (The Daily News) and the fans complaining . . . it gets tiring.
“I’ve had one heart attack and I don’t want any more. I just want to take it easy.”
Day, who told The Daily News that he wanted to spend more time with his family and grandchildren, had suffered a heart attack Sept. 2, 2002, two days before his 63rd birthday. That resulted in triple-bypass and valve-replacement surgery.
It was obvious, however, that there was more to Day’s leaving than a desire to be with family.
On Nov, 17, 2003, The Daily News, quoting Hoffbeck and Clovechok, reported that Day’s departure had been forced “because he used Blazers funds without authorization.”
To which Day responded: “That’s a bunch of crap. It is getting a little crazy. Everyone is trying to cover their own little butts.”
Later that same day, Day admitted to The Daily News that he had, indeed, used Blazers money but, he said, it all was authorized by the society.
“When I was in the hospital,” Day said, “I needed some things taken care of . . . so I borrowed some money and it was all paid back. It was all authorized by the general manager and the office manager, who had the authority at the time. The board knew about it.”
Not only did the board not know Day was writing cheques to himself, Clovechok said, but the board wasn’t even aware that general manager Mike Moore didn’t have signing authority.
“We as a board did not know that Mike Moore was not signing cheques,” Clovechok said. “Colin said, ‘Well, he didn’t want to sign cheques.‘ ”
“(Day) did it,” Hoffbeck said, “without the knowledge of the board of directors.”
“He never told us too much of anything,” Clovechok added. “We’ve been together a long time. I told him, ‘Colin, that is unethical. It’s against the constitution.’ He never came to us. He did it on his own. What do you think? Do you think we would have approved it?
“I liked (Day). I defended him for the17 years he was the president. I have a hard time believing it. I didn’t think he would do that.”
Day responded that day by saying: “I am pursuing legal action against Andy Clovechok and Loy Hoffbeck for these comments because it’s not fair anymore.”
No legal action was taken.
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Three weeks after Patrick left their employ, the Blazers turned the matter over to the RCMP.
“We believe that (Maxine) Patrick embezzled a very significant sum of money from the organization over a period of 10 or more years” read a press release presented by Carter, the Blazers’ legal counsel, during an Oct. 1, 2003, news conference.
Carter made it clear that “the resignation of Colin Day and the events and investigation of Maxine Patrick are two separate matters . . . not connected.”
Reached at his home, Day said: “We’ve had 10 years of accountants and 10 years of general managers looking at the books. I’m not an accountant and don’t profess to know anything about that, but somewhere along the line I would have thought somebody would have noticed some changes.”
On June 3, 1998, one day before Moore was hired to replace general manager Stu MacGregor, who had left to scout for the NHL’s Dallas Stars, Day had changed the signing authority, switching it from president and general manager to president and office manager.
Prior to Patrick receiving signing authority, court was told during Patrick’s sentencing hearing on Aug. 15, 2006, a rubber stamp bearing the signatures of the president and general manager was available in the Blazers’ office.
Patrick had access to that stamp.
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As it turned out, no one noticed anything out of the ordinary . . . until late in the summer of September 2003. And it wasn’t as though Patrick was involved in some complicated scheme.
At Patrick’s sentencing hearing in August of 2006, Crown counsel Joel Gold said he wasn’t “submitting that she had a grand plan here . . . but for whatever reason she kept doing it.”
In a letter dated July 21, 2006, that was entered into court records, Patrick explained her “work environment with the Blazers” to defence lawyer Peter Jensen.
She would, she wrote, make several trips a week to the bank “for cash to cover team expenses, bonuses, petty cash, money for staff members and players.”
In fact, she wrote, one of the organization’s favourite expressions was: “Just get Maxine to get the money.”
In her trips to the bank, she said, she would pick up anything from $200 to $9,000, always in cash. She went to the bank so often, she wrote, that the people there “never noticed anything wrong.”
As Gold told the court, Patrick was “entrusted with all of the (Blazers‘) funds on a day-to-day basis with very little auditing.” And, Gold said, she wrote “hundreds of cheques to herself and cashed them, with the ledger reflecting lower totals.”
“It was,” Patrick wrote in her letter to Jensen, “simply that easy.”
NEXT (Jan. 21): Trying to Take Care of Business
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