Page 7 of An Irresistible Force (Vancouver Vice)

“I don’t know how that’s possible since her office is in a dingy basement below sea level. They don’t even have windows.” I didn’t really care about what my office looked like, but the idea of trading my suite with a view of the city for a cell in a cement bunker was not very appealing.

We got into his Lexus sedan. Swanny started it up and pulled out of the parking lot.

“Okay, calm down. Maybe you don’t like it, but hear me out. You can tell that neither one of them is interested in selling the team—right now. But if we have someone on the scene, sussing out the situation, we will know when the time is right.”

“I’m supposed to be learning the business,” I protested. But the truth was that I hadn’t been learning that much. Still, stuck out here in the boonies, I wasn’t going to learn anything at all.

“You’re going to be learning the art of persuasion. Gregory Richardson is already a huge fan. All you need to do is turn around his sister, and the team will be ours.”

“Turn around his sister? Like that’s going to happen. She’s already got a hate-on for me.”

“Yeah, I caught that vibe. What’s that all about? Usually you’ve got all the ladies eating out of your hand with your hockey rep and humble act.”

I shrugged. Maybe mistaking her for a secretary was a bad thing, but she walked in the room with doughnuts, for fuck’s sake.

Swanny turned onto Hastings Street. “I wasn’t expecting Amanda Richardson to be there. See if you can find anything about her.”

A quick search on my phone revealed a ton of Amanda Richardsons. Thanks to the photos on LinkedIn, I finally found the right one. “It says here that she has a Bachelor of Arts from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and an MBA from the Rotman School of Management in Toronto.”

He whistled. “Okay. Well, it’s not a huge surprise that she’s been to prestigious, expensive schools—her family’s loaded. Still, it’s weird she didn’t go to U.B.C.; I’m pretty sure there are a couple of buildings named after the family there.”

“Her work experience is mainly teaching English at these Asian schools I can’t pronounce. But according to this, she lives in Toronto. She’s an intern at Ethical Advertising.”

Swanny laughed. “That’s an oxymoron.”

“Really? She seemed pretty smart.”

“What? Oh. Jesus, Lucky, sometimes I can’t believe you. You graduated high school, right?”

“Of course.” But my junior coach wasn’t big on academics and he’d encouraged us to take the easiest courses possible. It was one of those things I did without thinking that I kind of regretted now. But who knew? Back then I did everything with one goal in mind: making the NHL. Too bad that thinking didn’t equip me for life after the NHL. I Googled “oxymoron” but I couldn’t even understand the definition. It didn’t mean what I had thought though.

I put away my phone. “So, what exactly do you see me doing with the Vice?”

“Well, first off, you’ll be helping them. You may not know how to run a hockey team, but you’re going to know more than they will. Thomas ran the team, while Gregory’s been working in the marketing department. The kid’s been there less than a year. Amanda hasn’t ever worked with the team; I’m still not sure how she got pulled in. She’s clearly the brains of that family, takes after her old man.”

“But what do I have to do to make them sell the team to us?”

“Well, the team ownership is split 60:40. Vince’s family—Amanda, Gregory, and his widow, Jean—are the majority owners. Thomas has the remaining 40 percent. We know he’ll never sell, but if the rest of the family decides to sell, we’d have control.” The sudden smile on Swanny’s face made me realize how important that was to the team.

I rubbed my chin. “Okay. So exactly why do we want control?”

“Long story short, all the teams in the Pacific Division were moving their AHL affiliates to the west coast at once. Unfortunately, our owner was in a cash bind at that time and needed help.”

“How could that be? Rusty Cooper is loaded.” Our owner was in the mining business. Every year he held a Christmas party for the team in his huge mansion in South Vancouver. The place was full of expensive art and brand new furniture.

Swanny shrugged. “It’s a matter of cash flow. The mining business goes in cycles, and his net worth fluctuates. If he’s got big projects coming on stream, he may not have access to his money right at that moment.”

Whatever that meant. He was speaking English, but I had no clue what he was saying and there was no dictionary of business lingo.

“Anyway, he called on his good friend, Vince Richardson. They had just sold Rich-Witty, so Vince had money and time on his hands. He agreed to buy the team and run it in consultation with us.”

“Sorry, can you back it up? What’s Rich-Witty?”

Swanny frowned. “You’ve lived in Vancouver for years, and you’ve never heard of the biggest forest products company in the city—no, in all of Canada? Richardson-Whittaker. The Richardson family started it about a hundred years ago. It was kind of a sad day when they sold it. The end of a dynasty.”

I nodded. Swanny got as excited about business history as most guys did about hockey history.

“So what happened to Vince? He died suddenly, right?”

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