First, Royal Crest Lifecare of Burlington, Ontario, managed a chain of 17 nursing homes in Ontario. In 2002, the chain folded:

There was barely a ripple of media coverage, yet the Hamilton-based company owed $179 million when its sole owners, Aldo and John Martino, quietly filed affidavits declaring personal assets of only $10,000 each.

The 5,329 Royal Crest creditors still don't know where all the money went. They include major banks, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders owed $156 million for dozens of defaulted loans on 17 southern Ontario properties. The facilities have a book value of only $53 million.

Taxpayers also took a big hit. Ontario's finance and health ministries are owed $15.5 million and the province's worker's safety insurance agency $3.2 million. Canada Customs and Revenue is owed $7.4 million for taxes Royal Crest deducted from employees, but never paid to the federal government.

Pension money, fees for lawyers, money for landscapers -- nothing was paid. The Martino brothers disappeared from the largest nursing home bankruptcy in Ontario history into their million-dollar estates, their mansions and Bentley's and swimming pools. None of these were not held in their names, of course, putting their luxurious lifestyle beyond the reach of creditors.

It's a Martino family tradition:

The second biggest [nursing home bankruptcy] occurred a decade earlier, when sister Annette Martino walked away from her own chain of Ontario nursing and retirement homes -- and $43 million in debts owed to banks, suppliers, government agencies and union pension funds. Also missing were monies taken without authority from accounts of seniors in some of her Ultra-Care homes.

Never lacking panache, Annette Martino almost persuaded her creditors to accept an eleventh-hour deal to avert bankruptcy in 1991. A numbered company offered to pay a few cents on each dollar of the millions owed, pay $3 million for a 49 per cent interest, and leave Annette Martino the majority owner of her faltering Ultra-Care chain in Ontario. The deal was rejected when the court-appointed receiver discovered the owners of the "white knight" company were her brothers, Aldo and John.

I suppose it's nice to see family taking care of each other.

The Martinos have operated nurding homes in the United States as well. They also went bankrupt, after millions in state and private funds disappeared.

So, in Canada, when millions of taxpayers' dollars are spent on taking care of the elderly, what do you get? A nurse recalls:

"I have seen someone in the bathtub and somebody being showered at the same time, with the door wide open and no partitions between. I have seen another resident placed on the commode and restrained in a four-bed ward with no privacy curtains pulled … I have seen bruises and so-called skin tears on people that are not documented," says Megan Jones-Ottaway, a registered nurse who worked at Stoney Creek Lifecare Centre, another Royal Crest home.

But Jones-Ottaway, who has worked with elderly patients in long term care for seven years, blames some of the neglect in the home on what she says was the Martino brothers' failure to provide many of the supplies essential for providing adequate care.

"There was no laundry, there was no soap, there were no kitchen supplies," she says. "The staff was bringing in the essentials, whether it be food, whether it be soap, laundry. We never could find enough laundry to change the diapers."

Official inspections concurred:

The firm [Royal Crest Lifecare] owned 11 nursing homes and six retirement homes in Southwestern Ontario, housing 1,000-plus people. In mid-August, 2002, inspectors at an Oakville home found improperly administered medicines, inadequate nutrition, urine-saturated mattresses, patients with festering pressure sores, soiled wheelchairs and "unbearable" odours.

I've skipped the more detailed descriptions -- they are harrowing.

Inspections were infrequent, essentially "too little, too late":

Nine of those homes were allowed to operate unchecked for at least four years, while the ministry collected 630 complaints and at least 186 violations for terrible care and living conditions. The government finally cracked down on three of the homes just weeks before Royal Crest was petitioned into bankruptcy last October.

The money seems to have disappeared:

As well, W-FIVE discovered that in the period preceding Royal Crest's bankruptcy, payments were made to some associates, including $300,000 to the wife of the brothers' business partner, Stan Blair, and about $600,000 a year for "services" rendered by companies owned by another associate, Dan Beechey and his wife. Neither Blair nor Beechey agreed to be interviewed despite requests.

W-FIVE discovered that the most interesting part of the money trail led to a Six Nations reserve about an hours' drive west of Hamilton. There, in the middle of a nondescript plaza is the headquarters of Skyco, a company run by Donald Skye, another Martino associate.

Skye also refused to be interviewed, but in the year preceding Royal Crest's bankruptcy, his company received $12 million from the Martinos, allegedly a payback for bridge financing. And according to police, any money that goes to a company based on a reserve is virtually untraceable, because law enforcement officials are reluctant to go onto reserves.

This mess has prompted action:

Now, as part of a "revolution in long-term care," Ontario's new minister of health, George Smitherman, is promising a forensic audit. The problems at Royal Crest didn't occur during Smitherman's term as minister, but he says "hard questions need to be asked and at the end of the day, people need to be held accountable."

Though many of Royal Crest's financial records no longer exist [they were destroyed by the Martinos], Smitherman says a forensic auditor will be able to tell whether any illegal actions occurred, and says he's prepared to bring in the police to investigate if necessary.

"There's a new sheriff in town, and with respect to the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, I'm the accountable party," says Smitherman.

Well, that was in 2003, when George Smitherman took over as minister of health.

I have been in touch with a source close to the events. This person has been interviewed as part of the audit, and also by the RCMP. The audit was completed some time ago, I am told, by the firm Porter Hetu. No information has been released as far as I can tell.

This is a story of suffering and death, funded by you and me. Maybe I'm being impatient, but I think it's high-time we know some details about how our money has been spent, who authorized those expenditures, and what actions are being taken. The State has replaced the family as the primary providers for the elderly -- all we have to do is sign some papers and pay our taxes. But in doing so, it has become easy to abandon even the most basic level of involvement, dismissing the issue of the quality of care being provided as being someone else's problem. And indeed it is somebody else's problem, thanks to the interference of the State. Unfortunately, those other somebodies have no vested interest in performing a good service. The State is concerned only that moeny is spent to justify the level of taxation and the continuance of the bureaucracy. The nursing home operators are concerned only with profit. Despite what the socialists will tell you, private health care is far more humane, if only because the people directly involved in receiving the benefits of that health care are also footing all or some of the bill. Those are the people motivated by concerns that go far beyond money.

In our current system, only a public crisis and the potential for political and financial scandal prompts action.

So put aside the emotions evoked by the horror stories. For now, public money is the concern, and we in Ontario have to depend on the one half of the problem, the government, to investigate the other half of the problem, the nursing home providers, and hope balanced conclusions are delivered. On the other hand, the government is interested in minimizing damage to it and the institutions it runs (and for which taxes are justified), so you have to worry about the blame being shifted entirely away from the government. With what might be a delay in releasing the forensic audit, you couldn't be faulted for wondering if the Liberal government in Queen's Park is focused on the allocation of blame, and not on nursing home horror stories.