Business on the Rocks

The Bronfmans have long occupied a larger-than-life place in the Canadian imagination. The lore surrounding the late whiskey merchant Sam Bronfman and his rough-hewn ways inspired Mordecai Richler to write perhaps his most ambitious novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here. The family’s mystique was such that journalist Peter C. Newman once labelled them “The Rothschilds of the New World.”

Canadians regarded the wealthy and powerful Bronfmans with a mixture of fascination and disapproval. As University of Toronto historian Michael Marrus put it in his 1995 biography of Mr. Sam: “Although we are endlessly curious about the rich and famous, we do not overflow with good will when it comes to understanding or attributing motives to them.” After all, Sam made his fortune in the grubby business of selling booze to U.S. bootleggers. The brutal facts about how he manoeuvred his brother Allan out of the picture and excluded nephews Peter and Edward from the Seagram empire...