One night last week, returning home from a Passover Seder, Nelson Thall -- a talk-show host, media analyst and former Torstar Corp. director -- was surprised to find members of the Toronto police force prowling around his Forest Hill home. Then, they arrested him.
How the police came to be there is not precisely clear. Staff Sergeant Jim Muscat acknowledges that a search warrant was executed after Mr. Thall's arrest, but he says the police had grounds for entering the home. Mr. Thall's lawyer, Edward Greenspan, contends otherwise.
What the police might have found is also in dispute. About 64 charges were subsequently laid, largely weapons-related: unlawful possession, inappropriate storage. Mr. Thall, a serious gun collector -- he says he has never fired them -- insists that every weapon was stored behind triple locks, in cabinets containing full registration papers and documents of purchase. Two drug-related charges were also laid; Mr. Thall says he has a doctor's prescription for marijuana.
What is clear is that Mr. Thall, 51, was carried off to jail, booked and strip-searched. Opposing his bail application on grounds that he was a threat to society, the police kept him locked up for two days. That Mr. Thall, scion of a prominent Toronto family -- the Thalls are one of the five families that own the Toronto Star -- should have been accorded such treatment is considered unusual. Or, as Mr. Greenspan puts it: "There's a strong subtext here that I don't understand."
Mr. Thall himself believes that the affair has nothing to with his gun collection or marijuana, but with free speech. In democratic societies, he says, "free speech has a glass ceiling. You don't see it until you actually hit it. I hit it."
If Mr. Thall is right, he hit the ceiling with Cloak and Dagger, his late-night conspiracy talk-radio show. For 18 months, the show was a fixture on Toronto's MOJO Radio, 640 AM. In February, it was axed. At the time, station managers blamed poor ratings, but the rationale made no sense: Among MOJO's target audience, Cloak and Dagger was the highest-rated program in its weekly time slot from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.
A home for conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the show went beyond the familiar fogs that still swirl around the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
On Cloak and Dagger, for example, you would hear that U.S. President George W. Bush and what the show called "the Bush crime family" knew about the events of 9/11 long before they occurred; that Canada's still-unelected prime minister, Paul Martin, used his personal fortune to help finance them; that no airplanes actually struck the World Trade Center on that day -- what witnesses saw was simply a high-tech hologram; that the buildings were brought down by explosives, prewired inside; that top-secret departments of the U.S. government manufactured the AIDS, SARS and other viruses as part of biological warfare research; and that a de facto civil war has broken out among those who control America's political oligarchy.
Fantastical though such material may seem, the show on occasion may have struck a nerve. Not long after it claimed that the Toronto police force was riddled with corruption, the force itself arrested a number of its drug-squad officers. And a few months before a Toronto-bound El Al plane was diverted to Hamilton after detecting a security threat, Cloak and Dagger reported that al-Qaeda agents had smuggled shoulder-fired missiles into Ontario intending to shoot one down. Mr. Thall believes that one such missile was actually fired at the Israeli jet.
"What we are doing," he explains, "is studying cover-ups. What are cover-ups? They're hidden history, the news that never gets reported. And there's a lot that's hidden, because history is written by the winners. Our mission is to go to the losers and find out what their story is. So we weren't harassed because we were off-base; they harassed us because we were on-base."
Since MOJO took him off the air, Mr. Thall has been broadcasting to a potentially much larger audience via the Internet. His Cloak and Dagger website (cloakanddagger.ca), which is still active, contains logs of all the shows. Listen to only one of these and it is not hard to grasp why powerful interests might have been offended. Mr. Thall says he has recently edited the site, removing articles that might have antagonized some groups, including Toronto police.
A married father of two teenaged sons, Mr. Thall has a BA Honours degree in arts from the University of Toronto, worked as an archivist for Marshall McLuhan, and was president of the Marshall McLuhan Centre on Global Communications, a private consulting firm. For a period in the 1970s, he also flew planes for the Ontario Provincial Police -- he owns a commercial pilot's licence -- and occasionally for the Metro Toronto undercover squad. At the time, Mr. Thall recalled the other day, the Metro force considered him trustworthy enough to be given a permit few private citizens are granted: giving him the right to carry a service pistol while driving from his home to the airport. In addition to his radio show, he now sits on the board of directors of Peace Arch Entertainment, a film and television production company.
Mr. Thall may not be the only radio broadcaster pushing the free-speech envelope. Shock jock Howard Stern has recently run afoul of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and been taken off the air in six cities. And this week, amid a welter of charges and countercharges, comedian Al Franken's fortnight-old left-wing radio enterprise, Air America, was shut down in Chicago and Los Angeles.
On the advice of his lawyer, Mr. Thall declined to discuss the specifics of his case. But he insists on the validity of the broader argument: that North American society is smothered in a "propaganda blanket so thick that most people can't penetrate it. All I'm doing is trying to wake people up. But perhaps free speech is free only when spoken by the uninformed to the uninformed."
A hearing on the Thall case is set for this month. Mr. Greenspan said this week that he expects the charges will be "withdrawn with full vindication."