The tragedy of Vic Savino

was born to Myrtle and Victor in Timmins on Jan. His dad was a Manulife employee. His mom tended to the family.

They were average folks, worked hard, made comfortable lives for themselves and had reasonable expectations. Vic's sisters, Sandi and Judy, grew up just fine. Sandi, now Sandi Robertson, is 62 and still lives in Timmins.

Judy Vedova, the younger sister, lives in Ormond Beach, Fla. They are sincerely nice women who seem bewildered by the life and death of their only brother. There's a reluctance to speak much about Vic.

They're afraid of speaking ill of the dead. "We knew Vic was in trouble," Sandi Robertson says on the day of the memorial service. "We just didn't know how bad it was.

" Vic was the professional in the family, the lawyer who got his education, articled with the best, set up his own practice and became known for his commitment to aboriginal legal issues. He raised his boys alone, a caring dad who worked long hours but still found the time to coach his son's hockey team, take the kids to the lake and muck about on a small farm he owned near Steinbach. His son Joseph, now 21, remembers the good years.

"I was really close with him," says the handsome young man. "He was a really good hockey coach. Hockey was our father-son time.

" Joseph remembers trips he and his dad would take, jaunts to Cuba and weekends at their cottage in Kenora. His dad was a Shania Twain fan, thrilled to be at her 1999 concert in their shared hometown. "The concert was Timmins' Canada Day celebration and fireworks show," Vic recounted in an online article.

"Literally, half the town was there. She donated all of the net proceeds of the concert to four local charities, one of which is the Mattagami First Nation. "And this is the woman, you may remember, who, at age 21, interrupted her study of music at the University of Toronto to go home to care for her younger siblings when her parents were tragically killed in a car accident.

" Kindness was a quality Vic prized. His eldest son says his dad's open heart led him to be taken advantage of, that people recognized he'd give anyone a hand up. In the early years, after his common-law relationship ended and he became a single father, in the years when he was building a practice, he developed a reputation as a caring but very private man.

Vic raised the boys (younger son Victor is now 17) on a friendly block on McMillan Avenue and, when his practice took off, bought a home in Tuxedo. Ironically, that marked the beginning of the bad years. "I've been exposed to a lot more than most people my age," says Joseph Savino.

"Most of it was good." The good ended when Vic began drinking and experimenting with drugs. He started with marijuana and ended with hard drugs, reputedly crack.

He lost the house in Tuxedo, was arrested for drug possession and eventually disbarred. He was charged with assault on at least one of his common-law partners. It seemed the downward spiral couldn't happen quickly enough.

"He lost his way," says Joseph. "I think it started as a mid-life crisis and he lost his way." Vic's sister Judy is blunt in her assessment.

"They went from having everything you wanted in life to having nothing," she says, her lips a thin white line. "At the end he didn't even have a roof over his head." Roland Penner, Manitoba's former attorney-general, first encountered Vic Savino in 1972.

Penner had been commissioned by the federal government's Health and Welfare Department to evaluate university-based legal aid clinics. One of them was Halifax's Dalhousie Clinic. Savino was working on his master's degree at Dalhousie University with his thesis and practicum based on the clinic.

"And so we met," Penner explains in an e-mail interview. "I interviewed him at some length and we hit it off both personally and ideologically." Before Penner left Halifax, he asked Savino to consider moving to Manitoba and either working with him at Legal Aid Manitoba or joining the law firm of Zuken Penner and Larsen.

Vic agreed to move and articled with Penner's firm for a year. He was called to the bar and asked to stay on with the firm as an associate. Soon after, he became a partner.

"Vic was a hard-working, indeed driven-to-a-fault, professional who, although soft-spoken, was all-too often uncompromising when, as is frequently the case, compromise is the only solution," Penner says. "Early on he developed a particular interest in aboriginal law and eventually that became the centre of his professional life as it did with respect to his personal life." In 1979, Savino, who was an active member of the Fort Rouge NDP, wanted to earn the nomination in a byelection made necessary when Lloyd Axworthy decided to run federally.

He asked for Penner's support. Penner wasn't then an NDP member, so Savino signed him up. In the end, Penner became the candidate -- and MLA and attorney-general -- with Savino as his official agent in the election.

"Vic was a very intelligent, hard working, committed professional who, in the end was destroyed by personal demons," said Penner. "Although I admired his dedication to the poor and disenfranchised, towards the end of our professional relationship I found him very difficult to work with." When Vic Savino and his boys lived on McMillan, they became close with their neighbours.

The Penner family (no relation to Roland) were nice working-class people whose kids played together and shared the dangerous and foolish adventures boys tend to find like moths find flames. Kathy Penner, her son Randall and daughter Elizabeth Klassen gather early one evening to remember Vic and to express their worries for the sons he has left behind. Joey and Randall did everything together from learning to ride bikes to almost burning down a trailer at the Savino cottage.

Randall, now 22, wants the best of Vic Savino remembered. In a carefully written note, he characterizes his friend's late dad as "a very professional character who kept his family and work life separated. "Although his life was cut short by unfortunate circumstances, we will all remember him with fondness for his convictions, accomplishments, the wonderful lives he brought into this world, the way he lived, not the way he died.

" Kathy Penner, a gregarious woman who is clearly concerned about the future of the Savino boys, remembers Vic Savino as a father who gave his kids everything they wanted. There's a hint of disapproval in her recital, the suggestion that the boys might have been better off if they'd had more attention and less stuff. "He had the latest model of cars, he did the drinking.

...

" "I just worry so much about those boys." "By the end Vic was living on the streets," says Randall Penner. "I was driving down Maryland one day and I saw him picking up cigarette butts.

" "When the house got taken from them they lost a lot of personal stuff," Randall says. Joe, he says, is still angry. Justice Murray Sinclair met Vic Savino when they were young lawyers.

They would work together for about 18 months until the ambitious Sinclair left for a larger firm where he could gain more litigation experience. "We were members of the left-leaning lawyers group," laughs Sinclair. "We were just a bunch of lawyers who had a social conscience.

" He remembers the younger Savino as a smart, standup guy, "Vic was a very solid guy. He was energetic as hell and very, very bright," says Sinclair. "He had a big picture of himself and his career and where he wanted to be.

" Savino wanted to develop a boutique legal practice. He saw aboriginal law as his ticket to a successful practice. "I think Vic saw that the aboriginal community was in the very early stages of its growth," says Sinclair.

"In the early '80s this was a tremendous growth area." Savino's liberal ideas, big heart and recognition that this specialty could put him on the legal map spurred him on. He took on pro bono cases, examined land claim issues and began to work in the area of aboriginal treaty rights.

His interest in aboriginal affairs actually began in the '70s, says Sinclair, when he taught what was then called native law at the University of Saskatchewan. The six-week summer course helped aboriginal students make a smoother transition to law school. Sinclair says Savino sometimes thumbed his nose at what he saw as the archaic conventions of the legal community.

"He had a resistance to authority," Sinclair says dryly. The two men kept in touch after Sinclair became a judge. They'd have lunch every couple of months, usually at Savino's instigation.

"He would always have a cause he wanted to talk about," Eventually, the phone calls stopped. Sinclair didn't think much of it until he started to hear rumours that Savino had lost his house, might have moved to the West Coast, was heavily into drugs. He had no idea where his former associate was.

There's true sadness in Sinclair's voice when he talks about Savino. "I suspect Vic saw injustice everywhere and it just finally got to him," he says. "I think he just wasn't meeting his own expectations.

" The downward trajectory of Vic Savino's life is marked in headlines. In the early '80s, the Law Society of Manitoba fined him $600 for professional misconduct relating to advertising. In 1985, he was convicted of assaulting a former common-law wife.

In 1994, the town of Kenora sued him for comments he made about Kenora police in connection with the death of an aboriginal man in custody. He was forced to apologize. In 2003, he was charged with possession of crack cocaine and marijuana when Kenora police, acting on a tip, pulled over a pickup truck.

In 2005, Savino was disbarred. The Law Society of Manitoba's discipline case digest listed seven counts of professional misconduct, one of conduct unbecoming and a breach of the society's code for his criminal conviction. On April 26, 2005, Vic Savino's legal career was officially over.

Many of Savino's former colleagues refuse to discuss him or their relationship with him. Graham Campbell is an exception, although he's still cautious about what he says. Campbell, who knew Savino for 20 years, is not a lawyer.

He's a business broker and Savino invested with him. The men had lunch a couple of times a month. Although he says he knew next to nothing about his late friend's personal life, he was asked to deliver the eulogy.

"The situation was, when he passed away, that I called his mother. She was virtually lost. I sort of took over to help her.

" Campbell remembers Savino as a "very, very quick study." "He was a voracious reader. Say I went to him with a prospectus.

Where many clients would not read the details, he would. I respected his brain. He was a very, very bright guy.

" Savino just lost his way, says Campbell, echoing so many others who knew him. "It really was a situation where he kind of lost touch with people for awhile. The feeling I had was he really kind of treasured his two sons but he was having so many personal problems.

"I think he did the best he could." Lindor Reynolds blogs at www.winnipegfreepress.

com was born to Myrtle and Victor in Timmins on Jan.