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The Current Transcript for July 13, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

Some of the concerns we've been hearing have been questions about fertility, future fertility, menstruation, getting the vaccine while pregnant or while breastfeeding, there have been many questions that have come up in terms of reproductive health.

MARK KELLEY: Have you had any of those questions? Dr. Talli boggler has answers. She's been fielding queries from her own patients about the covid-19 vaccine and fertility. And we'll talk us through the science and the fiction. That's in 30 minutes. And later:

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These are baseball guys. They can tell they know when the batter's really comfortable and knows what's coming. What they couldn't figure out and no one could quite figure out for a couple of years, how.

MK: Well the rest of the league did eventually figure out how the Houston Astros were cheating at baseball. And it was more low tech than you might think. We'll dig into the long history of slippery schemes involved in the old ball game, but we'll start this morning in Cuba with a call for freedom. Good morning. I'm Mark Kelley. You're listening to The Current.

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Cubans line up for hours for something to eat, but government isn't listening: activist

Guests: Tania Bruguera, Karen Dubinsky, Mark Entwistle

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PROTESTORS: Libertad... Libertad...

MK: Liberty, they are yelling. It's a rallying cry familiar around the world, but what is really surprising is where this protest took place in the streets of Havana, Cuba. Cubans were in the streets in the thousands on Sunday and some on Monday, defying a long standing ban on unauthorised gatherings. There were similar scenes in smaller cities and towns right across Cuba, and there are reports of dozens of people arrested. Joining me now is Tania Bruguera, an artist and political dissident in Havana. Good morning.

TANIA BRUGUERA: Good morning, Mark. How are you doing?

MK: I'm doing well. I'm more curious about you, though. We saw the scenes of these protests, the biggest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union. Why now, Tania? Why are these protests happening? Well, what has sparked all this

TANIA BRUGUERA: that people have had enough and the government has been for the last few years demanding only sacrifices to the people without hearing the demands they have.

MK: What kind of sacrifices?

TANIA BRUGUERA: Sacrifices, for example, economically, they're doing a very, very erratic policy. They are asking the people to deposit hard currency like dollars or euros, and they are giving them pesos. And at the same time, the stores where you can buy the food are only in dollars. The other thing they are doing also is that the Cubans have been doing line of eight hours to get that piece of meat or a piece of whatever to eat and they're not hearing. They keep saying, 'It's the embargo, it's the embargo, it's not our fault, it's not our fault,'". But if you see them, If you see the people in power, they're all super well-fed and they have no problems. The disparity between the classes in Cuba, the class that is in power is completely privileged and protected and the people are completely unprotected and vulnerable. The other thing that is happening is the activists in Cuba have been harassed and abused and mistreated for many, many months. The government has seen the people as the enemy and this has happened for the last years. Every time something happens is the fault of the people. But the government never takes responsibility for anything that happens. And the people had enough. The people had enough. I have to say that at the moment we are extremely vulnerable because the telephone company, which belongs to the government, is working with the government and they have cut the Internet. This is completely unacceptable because everyone is very vulnerable. Nobody knows what is happening. The people in Cuba have not seen the videos, have not been able to upload their own stories about what happened because the government is trying to establish their own narrative against reality. This time is not going to be successful.

MK: How risky is it for you to be, and others, to be protesting and speaking out against the government now?

TANIA BRUGUERA: Well, we have seen, we have heard, we have seen before, but also we have heard through several friends and activists that it is extreme that the government do not care for the people at the moment. If they have to shoot, they shoot. And as you might see, which I haven't seen but I heard friends in other provinces who call us, and other activists who call us to let us know, that the government was without any doubt put the troops, the military troops there in the streets and they shoot the Cubans. This is unacceptable and this is unheard of. I have to say to our Canadian friends who love our country that the idea they had of Cuba died the 11th of July. This is now a normal country that is not a paradise. It is a dictatorship that has taken their mask off.

MK: What is happening on the streets now? Have the protest being beaten down by the government, by the soldiers. Are the protests dead now?

TANIA BRUGUERA: At the moment, yesterday, for example, we heard from different friends and colleagues that they were lining up outside the police stations of families of the people who are detained and who are missing. There are many, many people that are missing. And part of this is because there is no Internet, there is no telephone service, you know, the cell phone. So people are not able to communicate with their families. And many people yesterday I heard that, at least in Havana, there were people in the street still protesting. And in some provinces, they also protesting, who never, who did not protest the day before, they have come out to the streets to protest. I don't know what is going to happen, but what is for sure is that the people had enough. And nobody can say that this is because this is the narrative that the government wants to create. This is not created by any foreign country. This is not the work of any secret agency or anything like that. Nobody has the capacity. And I tell you this because I'm an activist and I work many years here.

MK: Your president is saying that Miguel Diaz Canel calling these protests a manipulation by by the U.S. government, U.S. sponsored groups. But you say that that's not the case.

TANIA BRUGUERA: That is not the case. I have never seen anyone or any organisation in Cuba or any dissident or any opposition group that had the capacity of doing what happened the 11th of July. What happened was a spontaneous and he was the rage of the people in the street. The government keeps being unapologetic and irresponsible. The president of Cuba, in the middle of the situation, where the whole country was on the street protesting and demanding the removal of him and the change of government, he went on TV and he said the order is given, go to the street and defend the revolution. This is extremely irresponsible because this is a call to civil war. A process should go on TV and say, come down, people, let's see if we can hear you. Let's see if we find... No. What he did was calling to a civil war. This is unacceptable.

MK: So because of that, Tanya, what do you think is going to happen next? Do you do you see more protests? Do you see more conflict? How will this end?

TANIA BRUGUERA: Predicting is difficult, but what is clear is that hundreds of thousands of Cubans have woken and now they know what being free is and feels. And this is impossible to remove from their from their bodies and their conscience.

MK: I appreciate you speaking with us. And and I hope you stay safe.

TANIA BRUGUERA: Thank you so much. And thank you for following the situation, I think is very important to the people in the world stay with Cubans and not with their government.

MK: Tania Bruguera is an artist and activist. We reached her this morning in Havana. So what's next for Cuba, its government, its people? Joining us to discuss that, Mark Entwistle served as Canada's ambassador to Cuba from 1993 to 1997. And Karen Dubinsky is a professor in the Global Development and History Department at Queen's University and organises academic exchanges between Canada and Cuba. Good morning to you both.

KAREN DUBINSKY: Hi, Mark.

MARK ENTWISTLE: Good morning.

MK: Karen, let me start with you. I thought a powerful statement from Tania where she said to Canadians, you know, the idea of Cuba died the 11th of July, put these protests into perspective for this. Is this a significant tipping point for Cuba?

KAREN DUBINSKY: Yeah, I think it is a tremendously significant moment. I don't think Cuba ever was a paradise. I don't think it was considered a paradise. But it's certainly for many Canadians is considered a kind of a tourist fantasy. And, you know, tourism is about fantasy. It's about removing from reality as about going somewhere and and relaxing. It's easy to do that on a beach. And this clearly gives Canadians who are looking at this as a huge and important other perspective on people's lives in Cuba. This comes on the heels of some really severe, repressive, economically repressive policies initiated by the Trump government that haven't been undone. So it's things are really, really tough there. And I agree with Tanya Bruguera that the response of of the The Current government in Cuba saying, you know, get out of the way, the revolutionaries are taking over the streets. That is a really frightening call as well. There's no space for for common ground, for dialogue, for peaceful solutions.

MK: Mark, you were you were an ambassador at a very, you know, momentous time in Cuba's history with the fall of the Soviet Union. How do you compare these protests then to what's happening now?

MARK ENTWISTLE: Well, I wouldn't get overly carried away. I think I agree completely that they are important. They're important for a number and differentiated from the past for a number of reasons. And number one, they're across the country. There tend to be spontaneous. They're not led by kind of intellectual or cultural elites. And for the first time, they're calling for on the streets the removal of the government. And that's a very different kind of narrative in Cuba we're seeing. But, you know, I think it's really what we are seeing, though, is a reflection of the fact that the Cuban people are, you know, absolutely exhausted. So this is kind of an eruption of fatigue and and angst and and people go out on the street and in Cuba for as elsewhere, for very different reasons. And in some cases, especially amongst the urban youth, the kind of this is an extension of a protest about personal freedoms and cultural freedoms. But my opinion for the overwhelming majority of Cubans, they are just tired and exhausted from the strain of coping with a very serious economic situation, which has been talked up by covid and food security, fuel shortages, you know, power and electricity outages. So a lot of the strains in the Cuban economy, which were present, have now been exacerbated by-- has been hammered. And it's it's a combination brew, if you will, of all kinds of grievance and anger and frustration.

MK: Karen. And certainly the pandemic has played a role. It's crippled the economy and certainly it's crippled the number of tourists who come to this country which are critical to the Cuban economy. I read somewhere down 90 percent from this year as compared to last year. So I'm wondering once that the economy starts to tourists are trickling back. Do you think that that will bring some sort of stability back to Cuba?

KAREN DUBINSKY: Well, I think sure, I think, you know, economic stability, you know, that I'm putting scarecrow's around stability, economic security, i.e. where it was before will return. Where it was before was also difficult. But this is definitely a far more intensified lining up for hours and hours for food, the way in which the currency changes have really exacerbated the difference between those who have, you know, foreign currency, hard currency, usually from family and those who don't. I mean, now nobody has- there's nothing in the stores for anybody but the differential. I guess that's the question, one of the questions, is when stability returns, the kind of claims that Cuba, the Cuban government has always made in terms of, you know, this being a much more equal society, a society that puts its energy into and funds into things like impressive rates of health care and education. What's going to happen? Those have been praying for a really long time. That's what we see exploding on the street, I think is the frustration at the way those inequalities have just been gone through the roof. What's going to happen? What kind of policies are going to be put into place once there is, assuming that there will be some money returning to the country in the form of at least in the form of tourist dollars?

MK: Well, let's talk about that, Mark,let's talk about the role, too, of the U.S. embargo, because, of course, that's been pointed to as being really the catalyst in the in the eyes of the Cuban government. Just a few weeks ago, the U.N. voted 184 to two, to condemn the U.S. embargo, that 29 straight years that they've been voting, calling this a cruel legacy of the Cold War. What, in your opinion, what role is this U.S. embargo playing in the economic instability in Cuba?

MARK ENTWISTLE: Well, Cuba's been hit by a kind of a trifecta, I like to say, or a perfect storm of challenges. And one of those challenges, of course, are decisions to give the government makes itself. And the other challenge has been the overlay of covid. But the third is is real and it is the impact of U.S. trade and investment embargo, which was quite egregiously and aggressively expanded in the Trump years. And I do you know, I've been around Cuban business for a long time, and the U.S. embargo has a real extraterritorial reach to it and it puts a chill on investment in Cuba. The Cubans, of course, the Cuban government will deploy the argument about the damage caused by the embargo for its own domestic political purposes. But that still can't mask the fact that it's true the U.S. embargo has done great harm to the Cuban people and their welfare. It's simply a fact.

MK: Karen, in the U.S., especially in Florida right now, there are plenty of people who were cheering on the instability there, even calling for U.S. intervention. What role do you think the U.S. should or should not play in what's happening right now in Cuba?

KAREN DUBINSKY: I think the U.S. should lift the embargo as the U.N. has demanded, as many people all over the world have demanded, not just in Cuba. Other than that, I think this is something for the Cuban people to figure out themselves. There's a huge Cuban diaspora in the U.S. There's a Cuban diaspora in Canada that's also been active. I think Cubans clearly need to talk to each other and they need to talk to each other with, you know, with the kind of security that comes from having had a meal and knowing that your kids are going to continue to be educated, but they need to be able to talk to each other without foreign interference of any kind.

MK: But is that is that realistic? I mean, the with the legacy of the Cold War, Cuba's been all about foreign interference.

KAREN DUBINSKY: Well, I mean, sure, it's realistic. Look what happened not too long ago between Barack Obama and Raul Castro. You know, they sat down together, you know, even in Canada, facilitating, nothing to facilitate those talks. Of course, it's possible for governments to to talk to each other and to set some parameters on their areas of of influence. I think maybe the Cold War is over.

MK: Mark, how do you see that? I mean, especially with the calls on the streets for the removal of the Cuban president, for the removal of the government, how realistic is that, that there will be any kind of significant political change in Cuba right now?

MARK ENTWISTLE: Well, you know, the Cuban government is planning to go anywhere, obviously, but I will say that there has been a slow and perhaps from the outside imperceptible revolution in Cuba towards different ways of doing things and change for the future. I believe that there has to be a civil dialogue in Cuba between the government and broadly, let's say that the Cuban people. There are many different kinds of Cuban people, of course, and different constituencies and, you know, if there was a sort of Gallup public opinion polling, you would probably be surprised that there's a, you know, a relative constituency that supports the state. But still, those people, lots of people who would be net supportive of the Cuban government are also fatigued in part by the economic issues. So there's a lot of kind of outreach and dialogue that has to take place. And certainly I agree completely. This is a matter for Cubans between themselves. They have more than enough capacity to engage in such dialogue and to and to govern themselves. But I think there has to be a more structured conversation between those constituencies in Cuban society that are aggrieved right now and the state.

MK: But, Karen, when you hear talk from the Cuban president, who says they'll have to walk over our dead bodies, we will be on the streets battling. When you hear talk like that, we've only got about 30 seconds left here. Are you concerned that there will be more violence in the streets?

KAREN DUBINSKY: I'm really concerned when any country's leader, in the midst of a popular uprising like this, clearly is engaged in such, you know, hawk like posturing from the beginning. Maybe that's his opening gambit. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. The answer to your question is, yes, that is extremely concerning.

MK: OK, it's a story we will and so many Canadians will continue to watch. Thank you both for joining us this morning. Mark Entwistle served as Canada's ambassador to Cuba from 1993 to 1997. And Karen Dubinsky is a professor in the Global Development and History Department at Queen's University and organises academic exchanges between Canada and Cuba. The CBC's news is next then.

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We've seen this play out when it came to the whooping cough or the tetanus vaccine or the HPV vaccine. Fears around fertility being used as a common force by anti vaccine groups as sort of fear mongering.

MK: With every new vaccine comes new myths about fertility. We will set the record straight with Dr Tali Bogler in six minutes. I'm Mark Kelley. Stay close. You're listening to The Current.

Dispelling myths about fertility and COVID-19 vaccines

Guests: Dr. Tali Bogler, Andy Martino

MK: Hello, I'm Mark Kelley in this week for Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

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MK: Still to come, here's my question for you, is it really baseball if nobody's cheating? From sticky stuff to sign stealing, if you have any illusions that a ball game is a fair fight, don't worry, we will dispel few of those. But first, myth busting science and statistics from a doctor about the covid-19 vaccine.

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MK: 78 percent of eligible Canadians have had their first shot of the covid-19 vaccine and just over 50 percent of those eligible, about 16 million people are fully vaccinated. These are reassuringly high numbers. However, some are still on the fence about getting their shots. One reason is a concern around reproductive health and fertility. Tali Bogler is a family doctor and chair of the Family Medicine Obstetrics at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. She's also the co-founder of the Pandemic Pregnancy Guide. Good morning.

DR. TALI BOGLER: Hi. Thanks for having me.

MK: Well, let's talk about this. Tell me about some of the concerns that you hear that are making the rounds from your patients or perhaps others about the decision not to get vaccinated.

DR. TALI BOGLER: So when it comes to reproductive health and young women, some of the concerns we've been hearing have been questions about fertility, future fertility, menstruation, getting the vaccine while pregnant or trying to conceive or while breastfeeding. There have been many questions that have come up in terms of reproductive health for a couple reasons. And the first reason is because the vaccine wasn't studied in the pregnant population or those who are breastfeeding. And so it paved the way, I guess, or left room for the anti vaccine groups to come out and basically claim fertility concerns about the vaccine or concerns around getting the vaccine and pregnancy. And because of the anti vaccine forces and the lack of data at the beginning, there have been concerns about reproductive health in the vaccine

MK: and our women at this at that age. Or do you find that they're particularly vulnerable to that that anti vaccine message?

DR. TALI BOGLER: Well, yes, and I think that's because we've seen fears around fertility in terms of vaccines being used by anti vaccine forces for quite some time, and not just about the 19 vaccine. We've seen this play out when it came to the whooping cough or the vaccine or the HPV vaccine against human papilloma virus, we saw concerns, anti vaccine forces claiming concerns around future fertility. And so we've seen sort of fears around fertility being used as a common theme and has a common force by anti vaccine groups as sort of fear mongering in the reproductive age, young adolescent women.

MK: So what evidence is there that getting vaccinated could actually affect fertility?

DR. TALI BOGLER: Zero. Actually, there's no biological plausible reason why this would make any sense. Also, we now have really good studies that have looked at pregnancy rates before and after vaccination, that have looked at ovarian function, that have looked at all of these fertility parameters and have looked and studied and have found that there has been no impact on ovarian function or future fertility in those that have been vaccinated.

MK: So take me into your doctor's office, if you will. If I could be a fly on the wall. And if you have a patient coming in and expressing some of these concerns and concerns are normal. But when they're expressing concerns that you would say are based on misinformation, how do you approach that conversation?

DR. TALI BOGLER: First and foremost, I validate it. I think when people receive misinformation or have fears about the vaccine, it doesn't always come from a place of complete ignorance or misunderstanding. I think it is normal to have these fears. And I start by saying that in validating what they've heard and validated what they're feeling and then truthfully going through the science. And I think the thing that I find is the most helpful. And when I think about my pregnant population, who have been quite hesitant at the beginning to get the vaccine, I think talking about the sheer number of reproductive age women or pregnant women who have received the vaccine and there have been no red flags to date is really reassuring. I'm not trying to say that just a numbers game is really the way to convince people, but I think there is comfort in knowing how many people at this point have received the vaccine, what the data now shows, and that there have been no red flags to date. You know, we're not in the same position as we were back in January 2021. We have a lot of data now.

MK: You know, there's been such that this is great debate that seems to be going on across Canada between Moderna versus AstraZeneca versus Pfizer. Does that debate also exist within women who have these fertility concerns?

DR. TALI BOGLER: It now with AstraZeneca not being as readily available, it's less of a concern. We did have lots of questions about that at the beginning. And to be honest, especially in those who are trying to conceive, who are thinking of fertility. Thinking about pregnancy and all of those things, you know, we now have lots of safety data on and a vaccine specifically in terms of ovarian function, those trying to conceive or in pregnancy and breastfeeding. And I can say confidently that we feel quite safe in terms of recommending the MRNA vaccine, specifically in reproductive age, women who are trying to conceive or who are pregnant. And because of that data and the abundance of safety and efficacy data that we have in this population, I think there is a conversation to be had that probably I would recommend that MRNA vaccine over and add a viral vector vaccine simply because of the abundance of safety data in this population.

MK: But the bottom line, certainly at this point in the pandemic, should people be waiting to get vaccinated, especially in that age group?

DR. TALI BOGLER: Yeah, well, everyone should get vaccinated and doubly vaccinated as soon as possible. But I think right now in Canada, we have an abundance of MRNA a vaccine we don't have as much access to, I don't know, viral vector vaccines, especially in a young age group. That's number one. And number two, specifically with those trying to conceive in pregnancy, the National Advisory Committee on Immunisations has make it has made it quite clear that they would recommend an MRI and a vaccine over an unknown viral vector vaccine simply again, because of the abundance of safety data that we have now in pregnancy and in those trying to conceive. So I think there is something to say about how much safety data we have from our new vaccines and that we would strongly recommend it at this point.

MK: Dr. Bogler, you said at the outset that there are some concerns for women as well that their menstrual cycles have changed after vaccination. Why could that be?

DR. TALI BOGLER: Hmm. This has been anecdotal reports that have surfaced online where women have come forward and say they've noticed a change in their menstrual cycles after getting the vaccine, specifically the month after, getting the vaccine to very short term changes and then resolve. And we're not quite sure whether or not this is certainly related to the vaccine. It might not be related at all. There might be a missed association that women are having with changes in menstrual cycle and attributed to the vaccine. And it might not be because of the vaccine whatsoever. There are actually studies out of the UK and the United States that are collecting this data right now to see if there's a link between any menstrual cycle changes in the vaccine. The other reason, if it is truly related to the vaccine, we think that it might be related to the immune system sort of revving up right after getting the vaccine. But again, this is short lived and would not impact future menstrual cycles for future fertility whatsoever.

MK: So if women do notice a change, how concerned should they be?

DR. TALI BOGLER: Well, if it's a little bit of earlier spotting and their next cycle goes back to normal, I don't think there's really too much to be concerned about. But I do think it's important that any changes in your menstrual cycle, you should report to your doctor, because perhaps it's related to something else, not actually a vaccine. There's so many things happening in the world right now, stress, anxiety, even stress about booking the vaccine and getting the vaccine. And that could all interact with our hormones and potentially interact with our menstrual cycles. But bottom line, this is short lived and will not impact future menstrual cycles or future fertility.

MK: Dr. Bogler, I appreciate your time.

DR. TALI BOGLER: Thank you for having me.

MK: Tali Bogler is a family doctor and chair of Family Medicine Obstetrics at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. She is also the co-founder of the Pandemic Pregnancy Guide. I'm Mark Kelley and this is The Current. The saying goes, The cheaters never prosper. Well, you can't tell the Houston Astros that they won the 2017 World Series using a sign stealing scheme that entire season to give their batters an illegal edge at the plate. And if you're looking for anyone in an Astros jersey at the MLB All-Star Game tonight, you won't see any all four all stars on the most hated team in baseball opted to stay home and out of the spotlight. Andy Martino is a baseball reporter and his new book is Cheated The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colourful History of Sign Stealing. Good morning, Andy.

ANDY MARTINO: Thanks for having me.

MK: Well, Sign Stealing has a pretty colourful history in baseball. What were some of the early ways the batters were tipped off to what pitch was coming?

ANDY MARTINO: That's right. This goes back as long as there have been pitches and signs. There have been, of course, players trying to gain an edge by stealing signs in some of the earlier methods. I was somewhat pleased to discover in my research are kind of funny and charming. The 1900 Phillies used a pair of opera glasses beyond the outfield wall. A backup catcher was using these opera glasses to zoom in on the opposing catcher's signs, would send an electric shock through a wire that they had wired up all the way to the third base coach's box. The third base coach, would find a shock in his leg and shake his leg and the batter would have the signs. Mid 20th century you'd have binoculars, spyglass evolving right into high speed cameras in the twenty first century. So it's always been that desire to figure out what the pitcher was going to throw.

MK: And you're talking about how it gives an edge. How does it give an edge to the hitter?

ANDY MARTINO: Simply put, hitting a baseball is one of the most difficult feats in all of sports. Really extraordinary feat of hand eye coordination that it's hard to believe that anyone can do it without against 100 mile an hour fastball. So if you know what pitch is coming in, can gear up for it. It just makes it so much easier. The former Blue Jays outfielder Shawn Green, who played in the 90s for the Jays, told me he had an ability to figure out what the best pitchers in baseball at that time were throwing. Somebody move their hand a certain way, was going to be a changeup. If somebody's glove lifted a certain way, it was going to be a slider. And he said that knowing what pitch was coming made it so exponentially easier to do that difficult feat of hitting the baseball. And he had unbelievable stats against the best pitchers in the game.

MK: I want to play one of the most famous moments in baseball history for you.

[sc].

[Sound: Game commentary]

MK: That, of course, was Bobby Thompson's pennant winning home run in 1951, the so-called shot heard around the world. But Andy, what should we know about that, Homer?

ANDY MARTINO: But it was almost certainly the result of a stolen sign, the the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants were in an historic pennant race that year. They're in a playoff series to determine the pennant. Bobby Thompson hits the shot heard around the world, which we just heard. That was announcer Russ Hodges with the iconic call in baseball history. But as Giants players later admitted, many, many, many years later, they had a sign stealing scheme involving binoculars involving someone in the bullpen, raising an arm to indicate to the batter what sign was coming. And Ralph Branca, the pitcher, later learnt that Thompson had his sign or likely had a sign. Thompson went to his grave denying it, but others on that team conceded that that was the case. And I use that story in my book to illustrate that legal signs dealing using methods outside the field of play like this has always been something that was regarded as morally and ethically wrong by the majority of players. Ralph Branca, who is by all accounts a wonderful man, was one of the more welcoming players to Jackie Robinson when Robinson was his team-mate broke the colour barrier in n1947, really was upset and bitter of in some ways for the rest of his life, 60 more years because he was defined by a failure, giving up a pennant winning home run, which was the result of cheating so well when the Astros were caught with what they were doing in 2017,18,19, there was some sentiment in the game of, oh, come on. Fifty one giants were doing it. And what I found was, yeah, that's true. But it ruined lives and hurt feelings and that those bad feelings lingered forever.

MK: So tell us about that. You know, as we fast forward getting beyond opera glasses or binoculars, how has modern technology changed sign stealing in the game?

ANDY MARTINO: Well, it's made it easier. Quite simply, you had over the past decade innovations like high speed cameras where pitchers and hitters could shoot themselves in a thousand frames a second, and they were in order to study their mechanics, revamped their swings, design new pitches. So the idea that you could see things closer due to this technology on the field, which was designed and used for legitimate purposes of improving players, I led into what else can we use this technology for. And then even more significantly, there was the advent over the past decade of the instant replay room in baseball, where baseball, of course, was one of the last sports to integrate a video replay into correct blown umpire calls, during the game, that resulted in a room often behind the dugout in which you had a live feed of the game, which the teams replay review. Official would determine whether to challenge a play. And hitters began using that room with the live feed of the game for legitimate purposes of looking at their swings, looking at pitchers, looking at their pitches, and then, OK, we can see the catcher. Let's figure out his sign and sign sequences from there. And that's really where the Astros started to go down this path, where they ended up a clear violation of the rules.

MK: Yeah, let's go right there to this is another moment, this one from the 2017 World Series.

SOUNDCLIP

[Game commentary]

H All right. Psychedelic the Houston Astros, are world champions for the first time in franchise history.

MK: The Houston Astros win the championship, a team that has acknowledged cheating. It won the championship and now will forever have that little asterisk beside it. How did their cheating scheme work?

ANDY MARTINO: A monitor was hung right behind the dugout, a television monitor with the live feed of the game. It's typically in the replay room. They tried a couple of different things when they first had that monitor up in May of 2017, tried a couple of different methods to get assigned to the batter, but they drilled a massage gun into the wall. They whistled, they clapped, and finally someone just dragged plastic garbage can over under the monitor and thought, hey, if we hit this thing with a baseball bat and it makes a loud thud on a change up, the batter is going to know. And of course, when you don't hear that thud, then you know it's not a change up or [unintelligible] pitch. It's a fastball. So in essence, that very simple for all the high tech that we're talking about, that low tech method of of a would bat banging into a plastic garbage can was able to tell Astros hitters every pitch that was coming.

MK: Where other teams beginning to get suspicious, where they picking up on this before the story actually broke?

ANDY MARTINO: Immediately. They were, in fact, years before the story broke at the end of 2019. The Astros began this in a series home series against the Baltimore Orioles in late May of 2017n on a Friday night game. That's when this trash can bang method started. And the Orioles manager at the time, Buck Showalter, and the general manager, Dan Duquette, instantly knew that the Astros had their signs. Because these are baseball guys. They can tell. They know when a batter is really comfortable and knows what's coming, what they couldn't figure out and when no one could quite figure out for a couple of years was how. So teams are going to use it and say, we better button up our sign sequences, we better be extra careful because they have it. They have it somehow. We don't know how. It was always suspected. It was always known. And by 2018, the trashcan method from seventeen was known. And in addition to many other methods, it blossomed out of this additional cheating scheme. There were teams that were suspicious of the Astros, highly suspicious, complaining to MLB, insisting that something was going on. But in terms of getting to the specifics of what it was and proving it, that did take three years.

MK: So how did the story finally break open? How did it become public?

ANDY MARTINO: Well, it was gradual. In 2018, Yahoo! Sports published a story detailing the trash cans scheme, attributing it to anonymous sources. So that was out there. A year later, the publication The Athletic Famously was able to get former Astros pitcher modifiers on the record detailing it. And whenever, of course, you have somebody on the record putting their name to it, it's that much more powerful. And that's what compelled Major League Baseball to launch a formal investigation into the Astros, which, of course, ultimately resulted in penalties in the manager and general manager losing their jobs in two other major league managers, losing their jobs, and then really what became an historic scandal. So there was suspicion, there was reporting. And then finally there was misfires on the record.

MK: Nobody likes a cheater, especially in sports. So how how has that label really stuck to the Astros?

ANDY MARTINO: Well, we've seen the Astros players booed, viciously booed on the road, we've seen their former manager A J Hich who's now with the Tigers, booed fans, naturally having fans will take any excuse to boo an opposing player, although this has been particularly for throating enthusiastic, this booing. I think what's even more telling is the way that other teams and other players have spoken so harshly against the Astros and what they've done really since spring training of 2020 right after the commissioner's report, which was released about what the Astros had done in 2017-18, you had star players and the Yankees and Dodgers and other teams really coming out against the Astros players, which is very, very rare in baseball. These guys are all part of the same very strong union, which is a united union preparing for a labour fight on different issues. And it's very rare that they will have those kinds of intramural fights that will spill out in public. And that's what told me, frankly, as an outsider to the game, someone whose reports on it but didn't play. That's what told me that this was a big deal and wasn't just something that we were fabricating into. Some drama is when other athletes, other people in baseball are deeply offended in criticizing the Astros.

MK: What about players on the Astros? I mean, was there anyone on the team who was uncomfortable with this and thought this isn't right?

ANDY MARTINO: There were. There were pitchers that felt that way. One batter, Tony Kemp, who was briefly with the team, who felt it was wrong and didn't wind. A Jose [unintelligible], the star second baseman, who in many ways become unfairly the face for fans of this scandal. He did not want to sign. It's unclear if that's for ethical reasons or simply that he didn't want, you know, their hitters who just feel that it clutters their mind. They don't want to know. Let me just react to the pitch. And perhaps that was all too vague. But then the trash can with a bang during his at bats, you would glare into the dugout, like, cut that out and his team-mates would scramble and remind each other, oh, he doesn't want to, he hasn't want to. Oops. Sorry. So yeah, it wasn't that everyone wanted it. Josh Reddick, the outfielder, and Brian McCann, the catcher, also were not regular participants in this. Some opponents would argue that they still benefited because they won the championship and had all the money and glory attached because their team-mates are cheating. That's for others to judge the ethics of that, whether they should have spoken up or not. But no, not everyone wanted it, but most did.

MK: Well and there was plenty of judgement. I certainly I was following the story and especially on social media with baseball fans or plenty of people who didn't even care about baseball, urging that that that their World Series championship should be stripped from the Astros. What do you think about that?

ANDY MARTINO: I think that now when I can empathise with the tough position that Commissioner Rob Manfred was in, because the precedent there, which is completely unprecedented, of course, that hasn't happened in titles that have been vacated, then you can get back into, well, the 2009 Yankees won the World Series. We later found out that Alex Rodriguez was using performance enhancing drugs. Or the 1919 Reds that beat the Black Sox to the World Series. You can go down that rabbit hole and you could end up vacating a lot of championships. So I understand why that's a line that Major League Baseball didn't want to cross.

MK: You think there's going to be another hundred years of cheating from from what you've learnt as you were writing this book?

ANDY MARTINO: I think that in baseball in particular, maybe because of the intellectual challenge of some of this gamesmanship and in sport, generally, when you have people who are highly competitive, you're always people are always looking for an edge. There are players playing in Major League Baseball right now who are on performance enhancing drugs. There are pitchers who are now having to wean themselves off of sticky substances that were performance enhancing because of new enforcement. So absolutely, there will always be something. In terms of electronic signs dealing with the Astros, did the punishments, the shame, shame from their peers was so great that I would be surprised if this were going on right now. But as you mentioned, it's been going on 100 years. So perhaps another generation of players will forget how intense this scandal was and start trying whatever, using whatever technology is available in another 10 years to try to figure out how to get signed. That wouldn't surprise me at all. But I do think that it'll take a little while because this was such a big deal.

MK: Andy, great to talk to you today. Appreciate your time.

ANDY MARTINO: Thanks so much for having me.

MK: Andy Martino's new book is called Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colourful History of Sign Stealing. Well, coming up after your regional update, we'll be kicking off our summer of the best of CBC podcasts, starting with the story of a small town Canadian success story. And a mysterious death with millions of dollars on the line, A Death in Crypto Land coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Mark Kelley. This is The Current.

Episode 1 of A Death in Cryptoland

MK: I'm Mark Kelley and you're listening to The Current. This summer, we're bringing you a few of the best original CBC podcasts, and we're starting today with A Death in Cryptoland. When a young CEO of Canada's biggest cryptocurrency exchange is reported dead, it sets off a cataclysmic chain of events. More than 75,000 people were out more than a total of a quarter billion dollars. And it spawned a trail of conspiracy theories around whether the CEO, Gerald Cotten, is actually dead or alive. Here's chapter one with Tokara Small.

SOUNDCLIP

TAKARA SMALL: On a warm, hazy December day in 2018, hotel staff for one of India's fanciest resorts make their way from the lush grounds of the Oberoi Regulus to the clogged streets of Jaipur to a hospital. The hotel has a request, kind of a big one, really. Well, the doctor, except a body for embalming. It's a man, a Canadian, he's died from a cardiac arrest, but they can't tell her much else. Doctors Sami Mira is weirded out by this. Why would a hotel bring me a body and not an ambulance? How come this corpse is not in the hands of the hospital where he died?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: And so she said, I think there's something fishy here.

TAKARA SMALL: This is Nathan Vanderklippe, the Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail newspaper.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: And then and then she starts talking about the fishy circumstances. And she used that word fishy quite a number of times. And so, yeah, you know, a very deeply strange.

TAKARA SMALL: The doctor refuses to embalm the body, try elsewhere, she says. And so they do, this time finding a doctor willing to do the job. What's not clear is how exactly this disease man gets from one facility to the next. Who moves it? But what we do know is the next hospital does not have the same concerns as Dr. Sami Mira. Neha Poonia is a journalist for the CBC in Delhi.

NEHA POONIA: All he said to me was we went ahead and embalmed his body without really telling me whether they identified him, saying that they had a death certificate, they had a police clearance, and that's all they needed.

TAKARA SMALL: The death would be reported around the globe.

NEWSCASTER: Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. Fans of the digital currency Bitcoin say they love it because it's secure. But investors in the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange are in a bind. They have this account worth 190 million U.S. dollars. Thousands of investors have money in there, but only one person had the password and he died.

TAKARA SMALL: The company's 30 year old founder, Gerald Cotten, died unexpectedly in December in India,

NEWSCASTER 2: [Unintelligible] left thousands of his customers with frozen accounts.

NEWSCASTER 3: no one can access them.

NEWSCASTER 4: [Foreing speech]

NEWSCASTER 5: [Foreing speech]

NEWSCASTER 6: Astonishing story raises all sorts of questions about cryptocurrency.

TAKARA SMALL: This is the peculiar story of Gerald Cotten. It's a strange and shifting tale about his sudden demise, his company and the disappearance of more than a quarter of a billion dollars. It's about a secret past hidden identities and shadowy associations.

NEHA POONIA: My God, he was just, like he was a kid playing a game. It just kind of spiralled out of control.

TAKARA SMALL: It's about a young man who touted a new kind of currency, digital, the future of money. He peddled the idea that Bitcoin would revolutionise how we live.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: The Bitcoin community is trying to move away from the traditional forms of currency and into this modern digital currency. And it's kind of like we the people for the people. Exactly. It's pretty much money by people for people.

[Music]

TAKARA SMALL: Over its short life, Quadriga CX would attract hundreds of thousands of customers from all over the world. It was a Canadian company, so people thought it was safe. We're about to take you down a virtual trail to see what really happened at Quadriga CX. The curious circumstances around its creation, its collapse and why more than two years later, conspiracy theories persist as to whether Gerry Cotten is dead or alive.

[Music]

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: There are deep oddities in this case. Does somebody who appears to be in reasonable health, who is young? Do they die that quickly?

VOICE 1: Examine the frikkin' body check the DNA after DNA. And let's go from there so we can all sit there and go, OK, yeah, he's dead. Well, he's not dead. Let's go find him.

[Music]

TAKARA SMALL: I'm Takara Small, and this is A Death in Cryptoland.

[Music]

TAKARA SMALL: Chapter one: The body.

[Music]

TAKARA SMALL: The first time the word Bitcoin came across my desk was around twenty thirteen. I was working as an online editor in a Toronto newsroom, and from the stories I was editing, I could see early adopters are making some pretty good cash from it. I wanted to know more, so I contacted Quadriga. It was an exchange which allowed people to trade money for digital currencies like Bitcoin. I wanted to open an account, but they asked for a lot of personal information, including two pieces of picture ID, and I didn't feel comfortable just handing that over. So I changed my mind. In the early days, Gerry Cotten appeared to be a Bitcoin nerd with a dream, he'd arrive in Vancouver with his co-founder, Michael Patrón, and launched Quadriga in late 2013. And over the next few months, Gerry was getting noticed around town.

HOST: And today, we are joined by Gerry Cottonmouth, the director of Bitcoin Co-op, the founder of Quadriga SCIEX Dotcom, and the owner of Second Bitcoin ATMs in Vancouver.

TAKARA SMALL: He even gets invited on this podcast called True Bromance.

HOST: So when did you start and what was happening then? How old are you?

GERALD COTTEN: I'm 25.

HOST: And let me paint the picture. Mr. Cotten looked probably exactly what you think an Internet genius would look like. A young, attractive man, he is exactly what you picture in your mind.

TAKARA SMALL: That's Michael Richards there. He was one of the three hosts. Gerry struck him as a good person.

MICHAEL RICHATDS: He seemed like a sweet guy, like I don't think I remember him being any sort of weird guy. I was doing some research because I knew you're coming this week. Bitcoin itself is, as was explained, the way I heard it explained was that it's basically like the Internet.

TAKARA SMALL: and the host is wondering if people are actually out there selling these crypto things. So Gerry patiently explains that Bitcoin itself isn't a physical thing.

GERALD COTTEN: We're kind of promoting a new way of thinking of how money works instead of using traditional currency, which is basically antiquated.

TAKARA SMALL: For a guy who drew on antiquity to name his company there's something kind of funny about Gerry stumbling on that word. Quadriga is a name for an ancient chariot pulled by four horses. It symbolises victory, triumph. Gerry described himself as a trader, as though it were the stock market, he told them he'd been doing quite a bit of arbitrage.

GERALD COTTEN: But nice arbitrage story. Arbitrage is basically a financial term where you buy something at a lower price, resell it at a higher price instantly. So you never actually have any chance of losing money.

MICHAEL RICHATDS: Right. OK. You exploit discrepancies in price.

GERALD COTTEN: Exactly.

TAKARA SMALL: My producer, Enza, asked Michael what kind of impression he'd been left with about Quadriga.

MICHAEL RICHATDS: They were doing weird things with computers and making money. I just remember thinking it was kind of hokey, the whole thing.

ENZA: Well, one of you was asking, I don't know about you, about who's your clientele? Who are your clients? Serbian hitmen, was that you?

MICHAEL RICHATDS: [Laughing] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that was our impression that it was all sort of shady and kind of back rooms and not something that necessarily I wanted to be involved in, obviously.

TAKARA SMALL: For lots of other folks in Vancouver, though, the arrival of Gerry and his business partner, Michael Patrón, signalled something quite different.

[Music]

TAKARA SMALL: Quadriga would help the community promote this new currency and get it into the mainstream. It was a thriving scene. Andrew Wagner was a big part of that community. Andrew describes himself as kind of a hippy dippy sort of libertarian who is helping run the local Bitcoin co-op when Gerry and Michael came to town. At the time, Andrew was trying to get as many businesses as possible to adopt Bitcoin as a form of payment. One merchant he convinced was a tattoo parlour.

ANDREW WAGNER: Yeah. So I was kind of drunk that day and I kind of walked in there and I said, if you accept Bitcoin, I will get a Bitcoin tattoo and and I'll put you in the newspaper.

TAKARA SMALL: And that's pretty much how it went down. Andrew turned up on the front page of a local weekly. His sleeve pulled up, revealing that Bitcoin symbol inked on his left shoulder, a capital B with two lines coming out the top and two out the bottom, like a dollar sign set inside a padlock to represent how secure the system is. These were the heady days in Vancouver. It was a community of nerds, Andrew says, two kinds.

ANDREW WAGNER: There's the ideologically motivated nerds and the nerds who like mine.

TAKARA SMALL: Andrew is an ideologue, a true believer. He sees cryptocurrency as a way to help political causes. It cuts out the banks a kind of stick it to the man philosophy. Gerry's philosophy, though, was harder to read,

ANDREW WAGNER: Gerry tried to not let it be known whether he was an ideologue or just business minded. I often got a sense that he was business minded, because if someone said something in a meeting that was funny, like, oh yeah, that man doesn't know what he's talking about or like a funny, sly way of making money, Gerald was more likely to laugh at jokes like that, like he clearly had his head and thinking of ways to get rich.

TAKARA SMALL: Andrew thought Gerry and Michael made for an odd pair. Gerry was like the protege or like a little brother tagging along.

ANDREW WAGNER: Uh, I never chilled with him much. He seemed like he was intentionally trying to inflate Mike's ego all the time, laughing at his jokes, just being a yes man. And I found it icky.

TAKARA SMALL: In fact, a lot of people found them an unlikely duo. Gerry was the Smiley CEO and Michael was a serious guy with tattoos and an interest in martial arts. And you found Michael to be helpful. He shared what he knew about Bitcoin in trading.

ANDREW WAGNER: He was nice to all of us. I describe him as generous, although his generosity was kind of an ego thing. At times. He like to think of himself as an important person or a helper, but he was a complicated man.

TAKARA SMALL: Gerald Cotten and Michael Patton opened a small office in one of Vancouver's oldest neighbourhoods called Gas Town. From what people say, there wasn't a lot to it, just basic stuff, a few tables, those ubiquitous steel fold up chairs, some computer equipment. It was there that in early 2014, Quadriga launched a Bitcoin ATM machine. It would have been a big deal. But months before their arrival, the Bitcoin Yak's had unveiled the world's first, media from around the globe, turned out. For Quadriga, though, one of the Bitcoin nerds filmed it, Alex Sockeld,

ALEX SOCKELD: maybe it'd be cool if I put a little video up of you helping my kids use the ATM because I'm going to do it anyway, you know, make a little video. It's like, isn't this cool? Like Bitcoin so easy. Kids can do it. No, no checking your identity when you're a child, right? You know, jokes like that, like my kid can now send money across the world and she doesn't even know what money is and she's still in a diaper.

ALEX SOCKELD: [To daughter] OK, so first push start. Now put in, the money.

TAKARA SMALL: You can see her guiding a 100 dollar bill into the machine.

ALEX SOCKELD: Yeah, yeah. So the cutest kids ever using a Bitcoin ATM. You know, a few people watched it and Gerry was nice enough to walk them both through it. Yeah. Posted the video and it was it didn't really get catch on.

TAKARA SMALL: What Alex couldn't have known then was that in just a few years, that little video would get watched by people all over the world looking for a glimpse of the man who'd run Quadriga CX.

[Music]

TAKARA SMALL: Let's begin with your name and who you are.

AMY CASTOR: It's Amy Castor and I am an independent reporter. I do a lot of writing about cryptocurrency and block chain. In mid-December 2017, the price of Bitcoin was almost 20 thousand dollars. Nobody had ever seen that before. It was a spectacular run up. A lot of money was flowing into the exchange before then. Everybody was wanted to get into cryptocurrency, hoping they could make money for nothing. Right.

TAKARA SMALL: At this point, Gerri is spending money at a stunning rate.

AMY CASTOR: So here's what happened in October, 2018 got married to a woman called Jennifer Robertson. We just happened to be buying up a lot of properties with.

TAKARA SMALL: Starting in 2016, the two would purchase 16 properties, waterfront row houses, even an island off Canada's east coast.

AMY CASTOR: But I mean, he spent millions of dollars buying his own assets, cars, a yacht, an aeroplane, you know, going on these lavish vacations.

TAKARA SMALL: And Gerry wasn't very modest about it. In text, between him and a co-worker which were leaked online, Gerry bragged that he had travelled to a whole bunch of places. He says in total, I'm up to 56 countries that have been to, 37 with Jen. In that aeroplane Amy mentioned, it just sat parked at an airstrip near Halifax, Denny Sibley has been the manager there since late 2017.

DENNY SIBLEY: We had planes with leather seats, but his leather seat with nicer and, you know, his avionics was nicer. And I just remember always referring to it as the Cadillac of [unintelligible].

TAKARA SMALL: She was so smitten with this plane, she used to take pictures of it against the backdrop of a nice sunrise or sunset. But in all the time she worked at the club, she never once laid eyes on Gerry. So he became a figure of some fascination for her. I mean, who buys a plane and never flies it?

DENNY SIBLEY: He travelled all over the world. We just didn't know much about him. And then we kind of did the Google searches and we talked to people and figured out that he was into some kind of cryptocurrency thing.

TAKARA SMALL: It all seemed very mysterious. Now, bear in mind, Denise is a huge fan of true crime books, so a lot of things seem suspicious to her. Nevertheless, the intrigue was only heightened by the fact the jury was almost impossible to reach. He owed fees, not a lot, but enough that she wanted them.

DENNY SIBLEY: I had texted him and he didn't answer. And I called him and I said, I've been trying to get a hold of you. And he said, I don't answer numbers I don't know. I remember thinking, but you're a businessman. Like, if I didn't answer numbers I didn't know, at a flying club, I wouldn't have any students.

TAKARA SMALL: But he was polite and gracious, she says, and he paid up in subsequent months. They repeated that dance always about what he owed.

DENNY SIBLEY: In one conversation with me, he told me about his trip to India and I'm like, well, wow.

TAKARA SMALL: Gerry told her he was going for the opening of an orphanage he was sponsoring.

DENNY SIBLEY: I kind of was like gobsmacked by that because I thought, how cool is that?

TAKARA SMALL: He also seems to have shocked his operations manager, Erin Matthews, when at the beginning of a work week in late 2013, he greeted him in a text saying. Happy Monday, I've left and I'm on my honeymoon trip, I'm in India, it's 11:00 PM here. Jesus [unintelligible], I never knew was the response. The honeymoon seems to have begun well, it was the end of November, twenty eighteen and Gerry and Jennifer did what most tourists in India do. They made a beeline for the city of Agra, snapping a selfie in front of the Taj Mahal. A few days later, Gerry and Jennifer would arrive in Jaipur, and within 24 hours he'd be pronounced dead. Nathan Vanderklippe is with the Globe and Mail. He's based in Beijing. He went to India in the weeks after Gerry's death was announced.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: The cause for injury, the cause for interest in this story, I think is is, you know, there's abundant cost for these sorts of things.

TAKARA SMALL: But as far as Nathan spent time tracking down people and obtaining documents connected to those final hours, he was able to get surprising details.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Why would a police commissioner send me by WhatsApp copies of emails and copies of hotel check in records? You know, why would they send me a detailed hospital report on the death? I mean, India is kind of a remarkable place where it can be kind of a remarkable place for journalists.

TAKARA SMALL: On December 8th, 2018, Gerry and Jennifer landed in Jaipur. They're picked up from the airport and taken to the Oberoi Regulus Hotel, which sits on the ominously named Gonner Road. The room Gerry and Jennifer had booked costs more than 900 dollars Canadian per night. The plan was to spend a few days there before heading south to a small village called Venkata Poram for the grand opening of the orphanage they were sponsoring, the pair would never get to see it in person. Almost immediately after checking in, Gary says he's not feeling so good.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: He says that he has some stomach pain and a hotel doctor comes to see him, decides that there's not much that can be done for him at the hotel. And so he gets taken off to a place called the Fordice Escort's Hospital.

TAKARA SMALL: It's a private hospital, one of the best in the city. And Gerry's admitted just before 10:00 p.m., the Dr. Jayant Sharma also took note that Gerry had a history of Crohn's disease.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: He said he had vomited 10 times, feverish.

TAKARA SMALL: And initially Gerry and Jennifer thought it was food poisoning. But then things change.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: His health seems to take quite a quick turn.

TAKARA SMALL: He said, to be suffering from septic shock. And Gerry was taken to the intensive care unit, according to the hospital, in the mid-afternoon, Gerry goes into cardiac arrest, but they're able to resuscitate him. Then the hospital said there is a second cardiac arrest at six thirty p.m. and that this time Gerry couldn't be revived.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: He was struck by how quickly this gad all gone down and he found the whole thing deeply unusual, the suddenness with which Gerry Cotten's situation turned.

TAKARA SMALL: And so just before seven thirty pm on December 9th, 2013, Gerald Cotten at the age of 30 was declared dead. Which brings us back to where we started with hotel staff looking for an embalmer and remember, one doctor refuses to embalm because she's suspicious of taking a corpse from a hotel, but another goes ahead because there's a death certificate, one that misspells Gerry's name Cotten within an A rather than with an E. which is the proper spelling, a slip of the hand? Probably. An oddity, though, that would feed conspiracy theories. Jennifer checked out of the Oberoi that same day, December 10th,

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Jennifer sent an email to the orphanage saying that he had passed away from cardiac arrest. And Jennifer said, I'm bringing his body home to Canada.

TAKARA SMALL: Jennifer flew back to Canada on December 11th. And it was around this time that Denise, the manager at the Flying Club, was trying to reach Gerry again. This time it wasn't about fees. Someone was interested in purchasing his plane. She got a call back, but it wasn't from Gerry.

DENNY SIBLEY: And I said hello. And the person said somebody was asking about Gerry Cotten's plane. And I go, Oh, yeah, me. Well, you know, this is Jennifer Roberts and I'm his wife.

TAKARA SMALL: Denise was momentarily confused. Why was she hearing from Gerry's wife?

DENNY SIBLEY: And I said, how'd it go with the orphanage? You know, and is he back sort of thing? And she goes, Well, can I tell you something? Share something? And I'm like, of course. And she goes, she's very soft spoken. And she's like, Gerry passed away. And I'm like, what?

TAKARA SMALL: The company had not yet announced the death, and Jennifer asked her to keep it quiet. Denise Sibley used to work as a broadcaster at a local radio station. So keeping silent was going to be a tough ask, especially because she and one of her co-workers used to get around about how Gerry's life seemed to have all the makings of a thriller. What if something were to happen to this wildly wealthy young man.

DENNY SIBLEY: So Hannah and I thought. This is weird. This is really weird, so I immediately called my chief flight instructor, who we had talked about how, you know, Gerry went away somewhere and he died. Like we always, I told you, we always kind of joked about it, but didn't really ever want anything to happen to anybody, obviously. And so I called him up. He couldn't quite remember all the things he talked about Gerry dead. And he goes. That's crazy, and I said, I know, and then he goes, what if he's not really dead? And I said, I know.

TAKARA SMALL: And as far as the public's concerned, Gerry won't really be dead for another month. Quadriga doesn't share the news of his passing until mid-January. Weeks earlier on December 14th, on a cool, crisp day in Halifax, a group of friends, co-workers and family gathered for Gerry's funeral. We're told it was a closed casket service. We know some of the people who were there, but they won't do a taped interview with us. And then when it's all done, Quadriga carries on, business as usual. Looking at its Facebook page, no one would have guessed that the company's CEO was gone. But behind the scenes, nothing would have been particularly normal. It was right around this time that a bizarre email landed in the inbox of the newsroom where Nick Day works. He's a tech reporter in New York working for CoinDesk, a publication that specialises in digital currencies.

NICK DAY: CoinDesk received an email from a anonymous third party saying, you know, Gerry Cotten had died, [unintelligible] had been to Cotten's funeral. We were like, OK, well, this is like a crazy story, but we can't, like, completely ignore it.

TAKARA SMALL: Without any real details to go on, it was impossible to confirm, but Nick gave it his all.

NICK DAY: I emailed cotton's address. I emailed his lawyer, you know, just trying to say, like, hey, we got this weird email and we would like to verify it. We're not sure how to phrase this, but it says you passed away. And obviously we got no response.

TAKARA SMALL: Then on January 14th, twenty nineteen, a message goes up on Quadriga's Facebook page. It's a post from Jennifer and she says: "It is with a heavy heart that we announced the sudden passing of Gerald Cotton, co-founder and CEO of Quadriga CX".

NICK DAY: No, it was just like, holy cow, look, this is legit, you know, does that mean that all the other stuff that was in email is also legit? You know, [unintelligible]said that no one who worked at Quadriga had access to, you know, the exchanges funds, they couldn't access his laptop. Is Quadriga suddenly, you know, unable to access its funds? Does that mean people are out? You know, people no longer have access to their money?

TAKARA SMALL: At that moment, Quadriga is holding customers' funds worth 290 million dollars.

NICK DAY: It was like, but what happened, but what happened?

MK: We'll find out what happened, or at least some theories tomorrow when we continue with Chapter two of the CBC podcast, A Death in Cryptoland. That's our programme for today. Stay tuned to Radio one for Q. I'm Mark Kelley. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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