AMISH BREEDING PROGRAM TRIAL

The suit Galbraith wore was dark, and we know it was his only suit because one of the many outlandish questions he put to witnesses during the monthlong trial was this: “Do you believe that this suit is the only suit I own and that I bought it in 1997? Do you believe that?” He worked into the same rambling cross-examination the fact that he was now “homeless,” staying in a friend’s 16-square-foot cabin in the “remote bush of far northern Ontario” - a detail that, like his only suit, he felt undermined the idea that he could have stolen money from hundreds of people. “A very nice-looking, trusting face,” is how one woman, who invested $80,000 in his company, described him. It was December 2013, and Galbraith was being tried in Ontario Superior Court in Kitchener for engineering what a prosecutor described as “one of the biggest frauds in our history.” He was 66 and heavyset with graying hair, narrow eyes and a listless, nasal voice.

One of his former employees, who testified for the prosecution, speculated that he must have watched too much “Law & Order”: “I think he sat down one day and said, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’ ”

He seemed adrift but also supremely confident. He had abruptly fired his lawyer nearly two years earlier, during the long lead up to the trial, and then ignored the judges who advised him to hire another. His name was Arlan Galbraith, and he was representing himself. The Pigeon King delivered his closing statement to the jury dressed in his only suit.

Amish breeding program