It's easy to be fooled by appearances when you want to

Twenty-four years later, Al Vandekerkhove still remembers the sudden noontime summons to the Union Club. "Big problem," was all his lawyer said.

Some local heavyweights were waiting with the bad news: Frank Hertel, darling of the Victoria business world, was going down.

Of immediate concern to this group was that Hertel's International Electronics Corp. was bailing on its sponsorship of the Victoria stop on the Canadian pro-golf tour. It would be a major embarrassment to the city if the tournament imploded. The event had already suffered a near-death experience when its previous sponsor, Murray Pezim -- The Pez -- had walked away licking a $160,000 wound in 1984. Someone had to step up to rescue the day in 1985.

That someone was Vandekerkhove, owner of the Payless Gas chain.

"I said 'but I don't play golf,' " Vandekerkhove recalled yesterday. Never mind, they said, and that's how the Payless Open came to be. It cost Vandekerkhove $157,000 that year. The Times Colonist hailed him as a saviour (though we also managed to spell his name wrong).

The description was borne out by Vandekerkhove's long record of community service, but sometimes we in the media can be too quick to stick the hero label on people, particularly those whose flashy suits speak of financial wizardry -- right up until they get brought down by financial scandal. It happened with Pezim. I was among those who cheered the purported philanthropy of Ian Thow. As for Hertel, he was CFAX citizen of the year, a high-tech visionary whose IEC heralded a bright future in Victoria, where no one wanted wanted to abide a negative word about him (not until he skipped town for Venezuela, anyway).

That's what former CHEK news reporter Harry Maunu remembers about chasing the Hertel story. Few were keen to hear bad news. "Frank was the toast of the town. Everyone thought that Victoria was going to be the Silicon Valley of the north."

Maunu was doing a series of pieces on builders' liens when he first got an indication that Hertel's world wasn't as rosy as it seemed. A plumber told him: "I just put a $30,000 builder's lien on Frank Hertel's Wang building." Maunu went to the land titles office and found a bunch of other contractors had done the same thing with the Carey Road structure then known as the Wang building.

Just having a cash-flow problem -- it will be straightened out in a couple of weeks, Hertel told Maunu. Better have your facts right, he added, which Maunu took as a threat of a lawsuit. Some subcontractors were also urging Maunu to hold off. "They were afraid Frank Hertel's kingdom would fall like a house of cards and nobody would get paid."

So Maunu sat on the tale for a couple of weeks -- only to hear Alan Perry break the builder's lien story on CFAX. Aarrgh.

It took a while for the story to play out. Hertel wasn't charged until 1986, managing to actually avoid arrest until plucked from a plane at Heathrow Airport last week. Former CHEK cameraman Dennis Moore recalls being with Maunu on the top floor of the Carey Road building, where Hertel and friends spoke German among themselves while smiling pleasantly at the TV crew. They didn't know Moore had lived in Germany and knew a bit of the language. "They said, 'Be careful what you say. This could be very dangerous to us.' "

At the heart of Hertel's success was the use of scientific research tax credits. He wasn't alone in taking advantage of a practice that made paupers rich, Maunu said. "Overnight, virtual nobodies became millionaires." One guy went from riding through Oak Bay on a bicycle to driving a powder blue Mercedes, Maunu recalls. A Vancouver parking lot attendant ended up living on Beach Drive, just a few doors from Hertel's own Humber Road home. The Hertel house itself was a stunner. "I remember him telling me that he had the windows brought in from Germany," Maunu said.

The house was so impressive that it could only be filmed properly from the water. It was also cleaned out by sheriffs acting on behalf of the taxman in 1985. Turned out that Hertel's mansion really was a house of cards -- a reminder, yet again, of how easy it is to be fooled by appearances, particularly when we're willfully blind.