Initially Champagne was dismissed, not for stealing money, but for approving transactions for which he had no authority. But he knew that as soon as he was out of the building, the audits would turn up trouble. Champagne flew to the Turks to be with his family, and to wait for the mess to hit the fan. It didn’t take long. The RCMP launched a criminal investigation and searched his Ottawa-area home. The government demanded full repayment from Hewlett-Packard of all the fraudulent contracts that had flowed through the company and its predecessors over the past decade. H-P initially balked, saying that it too had been victimized. But soon it gave the government a cheque for $146 million, and launched a series of lawsuits against Champagne and others implicated in the scheme, to recover its losses.
At this point, Champagne faced a fateful decision. He was sitting in a tropical paradise, with no extradition treaty, with millions in his bank account. “I’ve got tons and tons and money, and if worse comes to worst I could have lawyers fight this for me forever,” he remembers thinking. “I can pay the lawyers ’til the day I die and, you know, there’s very little Canada can do about it.” But that is when Champagne’s story takes its final surprising twist: he had an attack of conscience. He knew that, over the years, many innocent bureaucrats at DND had unknowingly attached their signatures to his fraudulent invoices. He knew that as the scandal exploded, those people would be grilled by police. Careers would certainly be destroyed. It was entirely possible, he thought, that innocent people could end up doing jail time for his crimes, even though they had been duped. “Everything kind of fell on me,” he says. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this, I just can’t, and I can’t have this burden over my family.’ Because if I deal with it, it’ll go away eventually. Whatever sentence they give me will eventually end. You can only take so much money away from me, you can only give me so much time. So I came back.”
Then came the difficult conversation with his wife: explaining the extent of his troubles, and the fact that he would likely have to go to jail. “She was devastated at that point . . . stunned,” he admits. Telling his three kids, who were teenagers by then, wasn’t much easier.
By the time he landed back in Ottawa in the summer of 2004, Champagne was a minor media celebrity and his scheme, as he predicted, had become a political scandal. It took until February 2006 before he was charged.
He co-operated with police, took full responsibility, pleaded guilty, and in April of last year was sentenced to seven years in prison. He reached a settlement with H-P, and though the details are confidential, Champagne gave up his homes and the shares he held in various companies. He was left with enough money that his family could move to a modest home in the Ottawa area and live comfortably while Champagne went to prison.
Like most federal prisoners in Ontario, he spent three months at Millhaven maximum security penitentiary outside Kingston, being assessed and processed. There, he learned to keep to himself, mind his own business, and laugh off the jokes at his expense.
Last summer he was transferred to the minimum security Pittsburgh Institution, where prisoners live in townhouses and cook their own meals. Across the parking lot looms the hulking, medium-security Joyceville Institution. Champagne rose by six o’clock each morning to get to his job in the prison grocery store (he was manager of dry goods) by 6:30. He was paid $6.35 per day. The toughest part, he says, was knowing that his family was suffering more than he.
“I missed my [twin] children’s 18th birthday; I missed their high school graduation; I missed my son’s 21st birthday. My father-in-law broke his hip; he’s now had to be put into a nursing home. My mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. I missed my 50th birthday, my wife’s birthday, my 25th anniversary, and my mother died—all within this year,” he says. “I’m in a place where they feed you, they take care of you, you’re warm. My wife’s had to deal with all this by herself.” Still, she stuck by him, and on June 3, 14 months after entering prison, he was granted early release after serving one-sixth of his sentence. Currently, he’s at an Ottawa-area halfway house pondering the big question: what now?
In his optimistic moments, Champagne imagines he might create a happy ending for himself, like Frank Abagnale Jr., the former con man who became an expert on investigating fraud. Leonardo DiCaprio played him in the biopic Catch Me If You Can. But mostly, his hopes are modest and largely undefined. “I’m 51 years old, and I’m high profile,” he says. “But I gotta get back working.” He never misses a chance to remind you that he’s sorry. Sorry for what he did, and sorry for what he lost too.
“I certainly miss the job, and I miss the respect that came with that job,” he says. “Is it a lot better being rich than not rich? Oh, absolutely. Whoever says it isn’t, is probably rich. And I have to realize I’ll always be seen in a different light. I certainly have extreme guilt over the other people who were affected . . . and my family.”
And, because he knows the world will always wonder, he states categorically that there is “no pot of gold waiting out there,” no secret stash of money to be scooped up when no one is looking. On that point, like so many others, you just have to take Paul Champagne’s word for it.
