S32 E4: The Day of Reckoning | Sea of Lies
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Who is Albert Walker and why is he significant?
I tell this story often in various bits and pieces, forms and layers. How many rabbit holes do you want to go down? I was pretty much ground zero for the whole nonsense.
That's Andy Staley. Talking with Andy, I learned quickly that whenever he references the intersection of his family's life and Albert Walker's life, he calls it broadly the nonsense. Andy's in his 60s now. He outclasses me by wearing a sharp blazer for our audio-only interview, as if we're doing it on camera. As I set up, he uncorks a bottle of red. Where we're going, he's going to need it.
What is Andy Staley's connection to Albert Walker?
Hey, I mean, how much do you want me to tell you? All of it. I wanted to know all of it. I first read the Staley family name in an old newspaper clipping when I was learning about Albert's life in Canada and the people left in his wake. I cold emailed Andy Staley telling him what I was trying to piece together. How did this man I'd been hearing about called David Davis and Ronald Platt come to be hunted by authorities across the globe? How did a middle-aged family man from small town Ontario come to be an international fugitive? and he responded by saying that he had something to show me, something that might help. The box. To say I was intrigued is an understatement. When I walked into his place right away, I see it. Spread out on the dining room table are piles and piles of papers stacked high. Notepads, duotangs, folders, handwritten notes scrawled on post-its. As I set up my microphones, I see one of the file folders has written in Sharpie, the Walker file. Let's start. Why don't you tell me what we're looking at?
I guess what we're looking at is, so this came out of a big box. It was, like I say, my mother put a lot of it together.
Andy's mother curated the box, but when she passed away, none of her adult children wanted to take it because they knew what was in there, vaguely at least, and they knew it wasn't good. As I sit down across from Andy and I see on the wall behind him, dusty portraits of his ancestors, men in uniform, family shields. It makes sense to me that he's the one in the family who wound up with this box, this decade of his mother's work.
And I really don't know. I mean, I just, I pulled it out two nights ago for the first time in 30 years.
Just last year, a friend of his recommended that he should just burn it all. Take the box to the family cottage and throw it in the fire pit in an act of catharsis. I remember going to, a couple of times going to burn it.
And I looked, something would catch my eye. I go, no, no. My mother saved this. I'm not going to burn it now.
When he couldn't bring himself to do it, he just left the box by the wood pile for months. But I never moved it from the burning pile either, but it never got burnt. And there it sat, unprotected from the elements, until a journalist from Toronto emailed him out of the blue.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Who is Albert Walker and why is he significant?
1:23–2:06
2
What is Andy Staley's connection to Albert Walker?
2:06–11:47
3
How did Albert Walker start his financial career?
11:47–20:22
4
How did Albert Walker gain the Staley family's trust?
20:22–35:00
5
What led to the Staley family's financial transformation?
35:00–35:16
6
Why did Albert Walker focus on the Staley family?
35:16–40:02
7
How did Albert Walker's actions affect the Staley family?
40:02–47:16