Roses Can Wait: Iconic Journalist Victor Malarek is Ramping Up in Retirement
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“I never thought that I was going to retire and smell roses.”
Most people slow down in their golden years. At 75, legendary journalist and FriesenPress author, Victor Malarek, is ramping up.
It’s been nearly a decade since we last spoke with Victor; back then, in 2014, he was busy promoting his first FriesenPress novel, Orphanage 41. The intervening period has been as eventful as you’d expect for a famously relentless reporter.
After retiring from CTV’s W5 news program in 2017, Malarek wrote and published his second and third novels with FriesenPress (2021’s Wheat$haft and 2024’s Putin’s Assassin), a new series of mystery thrillers based on experiences he had as an investigative journalist.
He also returned to the silver screen, being portrayed by Josh Hartnett in 2020’s Target Number One (titled Most Wanted in the United States). Target Number One is the Hollywood dramatization of Malarek’s 1980s investigation into fellow FriesenPress author Alain Olivier’s harrowing journey to and from death row in Thailand’s infamous Bang Kwang prison — a film Malarek cameos in.
For the final installment of our 15th anniversary celebration, we are pleased to present a fittingly epic, career-spanning interview with the award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author, Victor Malarek.
Since retiring from W5 in 2017, it doesn’t seem like you’ve stopped creating. Do you consider yourself to be retired?
No, not really. I never thought that I was going to retire and smell roses. I can smell ’em when I’m walking by, but I’ve got to do things. I’m a guy who’s always thinking and always wanting to do something, and one of the ways that I feel good is to be able to write something that someone will appreciate when they read it.
I’ve lived a really interesting life in my almost 50 years of journalism, and most of it has been investigative. Now, when I’m thinking I’m going to write a few things, a lot of what I write has a connection to something I covered in the past, which gives me a path of where to go.
Where does your impulse to tell stories come from?
I think a lot of it came from my experiences in my childhood. I didn’t have a very good childhood; in fact, I had actually quite an abusive one in the institutions that I went into — the boys’ homes and the foster homes. No one ever spoke out, and I used to wonder why certain things were happening. I started to question, at a very young age, why is this happening? Why is that happening? And never did I ever think that I was going to be a journalist — that was not on the plate of the things I wanted to do.
I did want to be a detective. I wanted to be a detective where I would investigate things and find out why someone was murdered or why this crime was committed and undo it. Just by happenstance, I was working in electronics and I couldn’t stand all the wiring and the diodes and the resistors and the transistors. It was driving me crazy. I answered an ad for an office boy bringing coffee, and it turned out to be Weekend Magazine in Montreal, the national magazine, in 1968.
While I was walking around bringing coffee to writers, I would read their stuff and go, “man, why did they write this?” I walked up to one of the editors and I said I would like to try my hand at a story. And, I’m not kidding you, they laughed. And I said, “well, yeah, but I got an idea.” And the idea was this advent of suicide centres — phone hotline centres for kids. So they let me try my hand at it, and it went national. They liked it, because I really went into it with this kind of commitment that you’ve got to tell this story and there’s a reason why you have to tell this story.
I loved asking questions — and tough questions. That is what made my reputation as a good investigative reporter because I never just sat there and listened to a politician spew out something without challenging where it was coming from. Will what you’re saying actually do anything or are you just handing us another bunch of garbage that we write about and then walk away from? That [impulse] is a good thing.
We last interviewed you in 2014; in that time, self-publishing has gone from something of a dirty word to the first choice for many writers. As an early adopter who has continued down the self-publishing path, what continues to appeal to you about this publishing model?
I had six books with different publishers and they did well — two of them had movies made from them. The Natashas and The Johns were both international books. I had a lot of dealings with publishers that I thought, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. Much of the time I didn’t feel like I was part of something. I’m the kind of guy who likes to go out and do something on his own. It’s my project. I want to see it through from beginning to end.
I started to read about self-publishing, and I also discovered that there were several big name authors who started to go that route. I read what they were saying and why. And I had the same kind of feelings, like to keep more control and that you’re really part of the entire process, whether it’s the cover or whether it’s the interior, or the way it’s all set up. Sometimes it gets frustrating — I get frustrated, the other side gets frustrated — but I’m in control of my project.
I don’t want to argue with publishers who say to me, “oh, listen, I really liked this book. It’ll be on our list in three years.” Three years? What if I’m not alive in three years? But [traditional publishers] already have their lists set for the next three years.
I know my agent got angry at me over Orphanage 41. He really liked it, and they had a couple of people really wanting it. And it turned out the date of when they wanted to publish it was two to three years away. But secondly, they wanted the control over the international rights, the national rights, and the movie rights. I don’t write a book to make a movie, but there are opportunities that happen. I mean, look, they made a movie out of my first book, and they made a movie out of another book. And these benefits came to me in terms of royalties. But when a publisher says to me, “I want everything, including international rights”...
What’s happened even more in the traditional publishing world is that I’m [now] doing everything. They don’t send me out anymore and say, okay, you’re going to do interviews here, there, and everywhere. They used to literally fly me across the country. When I did The Natashas, I was sent throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Norway, talking about the book all over the place and in various languages as well. It was great. And they gave me a huge advance. Now, there’s no advance (or a limited advance) and there’s no promotion. I have to do all the promotion; so if I have to do everything, then do I have to be there?
When I look at traditional publishing today, I see all of the roadblocks and nothing in place to really help you out. I’m out there on my own. And if I’m out there on my own, I’d rather publish the book on my own.
Both Wheat$haft and the upcoming Putin’s Assassin center on a character named Matt Kozar, a reporter for the fictional New York Tribune. Has writing from a character’s perspective been freeing for you after so much first-person journalism?
Yeah, it has been. Actually, it’s quite interesting. Matt Kozar has an interesting young life with a father who was abusive and a real strange guy. He’ll eventually come to the conclusion that his father has PTSD because he fought in Vietnam. I had a father who fought in the Second World War, was in Dieppe, was wounded, came back, and he had PTSD. I didn’t know what PTSD was. Neither does Matt. There’s another thing to Matt as well. His so-called ethnic background, and my ethnic background, is Ukrainian, but we’re both disconnected from the Ukrainian community. After his father dies and his mother leaves, he goes into foster care like it did. He has a good experience; I had a bad experience.
The one good thing if you’re a foreign correspondent is that you’re sent to a number of places. I’ve been sent to seven wars. My first war was Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in ’79/’80 with the Globe and Mail. I went to Iran during the hostage taking, I went up to Kurdistan in the mountains there. I went to Somalia twice for the war there, to Kosovo and to Bosnia for the wars there. Sometimes I used to think that my editors were sending me there with the hopes of, maybe this time he’ll get shot [laughs] — which is a comment that comes out about Matt in his second book, Putin’s Assassin. There’s so many experiences that I’ve had, where what you see is the [news] story, but what you don’t know is the reporter and what they’re going through.
At the time when I was in the Kurdish Mountains with the Kurdish guerrillas and almost got killed there, there were all kinds of things going on. “What happens if I die here?” You’re pretty scared… The experiences are there and they can make for good books. The young Matt is going to be coming through in things that I experienced in my thirties and my forties with being sent everywhere and anywhere that the Globe and Mail or CBC wanted to send me.
Tell us about the nonfiction project you’re working on that recently brought you to France for a month. What’s the focus?
Well, I’m now switching fields on it being a nonfiction book… I think I could bring Matt Kozar into this one in a very strong way. That happened when I was away. It was weird — I kept thinking, how would Matt have done this?
The topic’s going to be the kidnapping and abduction of thousands of children out of Ukraine by the Russians: what happens to them, how many escape, and how their mothers and sisters and family members who go and save and rescue some of them — a very small number out of the tens of thousands of disappeared kids — and the reality of what’s going on.
It’s also going to be about the reality of the international community, which says all of the right things but does nothing. I was talking with all these experts about the Geneva Conventions — you’ve got all of these conventions and humanitarian laws to protect people and children in times of war, and all these signatory countries have signed it – including Russia. These experts would say, “oh, well, we try to speak to [Russia] and tell them they have an obligation [to those laws].” An obligation. No. What’s the consequence of what they’re doing? Where’s the accountability?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was a Matt Kozar book here, because he’s going to get pissed off [laughs]. And I can’t do that in a nonfiction book. When you think of Putin and how vile his people are and what is really happening here… you’re going to see Matt get really involved in it. He will get into a couple of jackpots, because he has to get into a jackpot. I’m working on the outline right now but know a few chapters that are going to come very quickly.
Now a decade into the fiction chapter of your writing career, are there any writing lessons you learned between Orphanage 41 and Putin’s Assassin that others might find helpful?
The only thing I always tell people is, “you have to have a focus.” You have to know where you’re going. If you don’t have an outline, your chances of being successful in writing whatever you want to write is going to be very close to zero because it’s going to be all over the place. It’s going to be haphazard.
And even in this new book, things happened to Matt that really surprised him. His girlfriend does certain things that both surprise him and piss him off; what happens is very fascinating and it was never [intended to be] part of the book. It comes out of the blue when he goes over to Ukraine, but it was never in the original outline.
You can go off on a tangent as long as it fits into the story. I’ve got a B-line and a C-line in every one of the fiction books that I’ve written, and that’s a good thing. You never know where a fiction book is going to go. But I’ve got to tell you: it’s quite liberating doing a fiction book as opposed to nonfiction. If you get something wrong in nonfiction, everybody’s going to focus on that. That’s why lawyers get involved.
Let’s talk about Target Number One, the feature film that was born out of your ’80s investigation of Alain Olivier’s harrowing experiences in a Bangkok prison, and his return to Canada. What was it like to see yourself portrayed on screen again — this time by Josh Hartnett?
It’s interesting because Josh Hartnett played me in this, and Elias Koteas played me in the Malarek movie. You see how they interpret me, and it’s quite fascinating. I met with Josh Hartnett, and one of the things he asked me is “what makes you?” And I said, “what makes me is that you have to have a burn. You have to have a burn in your gut and in your soul to believe that you’re going to go out and you’re going to do something.” And hopefully, [that burn will help] it come about.
Josh Hartnett and Victor Malarek
When I met Alain in prison in Thailand — I went there to investigate the death of a police officer who was shot in Thailand, in the bust that took place. I got to meet him in a prison, and he’s telling me this story, and he goes, “so what do you think?” And I’m like, “shit, man.”
Then I left. I’m on an airplane coming back and I’m going, “all of this stuff that he told me was so out there and it had a ring of truth.” The RCMP had put out a press release and they were saying, “this poor officer was killed. We got a kingpin heroin smuggler. We blocked a super big tunnel of heroin coming into the country, blah, blah, blah.” And I wrote that story. When I went to see [Alain] and he told me he brought in less than two kilos of heroin. In my book Merchants of Misery on the international drug trade, for which I spent time in Thailand — one and a half kilos is the equivalent of what I called “dust in the wind tonnage” in that book.
I called the RCMP and said that I’d really like to know a bit more about this. And they would tell me, “it’s before the courts.” And it was — in Thailand. The alarm bell went off: you’re hiding something. That’s when I started to dig, and when I started to dig, that’s when everything that Alain Olivier told me became a fact and not fiction. It wasn’t out of his crazy mind — because you’re meeting a guy in a Thai prison, that is hell. [What he said] turned out to be true. Then I took on the case saying, beyond everything else, the RCMP set him up.
I believed this guy, who had to plead guilty because he was told by the courts, “if you don’t plead guilty, we’re going to execute you.” So he got 99 years. I kept going at it and going at it and going at it every so often, peeling back the onion more and more until the Justice Minister called me up and said, “this is very strange.” We got him out, and he’s now living his life.
To watch Josh go after it in the movie was quite fascinating. I mean, I was threatened all over the place. But I don’t care about threats. Threats are just words, but I know when something’s going to come down. If it’s going to come down, I know how to deal with it.
We spoke with Alain in 2020 around the time Target Number One and his FriesenPress published book, Good Luck Frenchy, were released. Alain claims that your encouragement was a big reason his book was written in the first place. Can you speak a bit about your relationship with Alain?
I consider Alain a friend. I feel bad for him because he hasn’t gotten justice. What happened to him was a setup, and he’s a good guy. They knew before they went overseas that he was not a drug dealer. They knew that he was certainly no kingpin, and they knew that he didn’t have a criminal record, yet they painted him as this big kingpin for their own egos. And poor Alain — his mother died while he was in prison. He lost a lot of years of his life: seven tough years in a Thai prison. He’s lucky he lived; his body is wrecked because of it, and he has a good soul. He didn’t deserve this.
Target Number One Writer/director Daniel Roby (Left) with Victor Malarek and Alain Olivier (right)
The federal government, whether it’s Trudeau or before that, did not want to go after the RCMP for what the RCMP did to Alain Olivier, and his book shows it. And my book Gut Instinct showed it, and all the articles I did for the Globe and Mail showed it. He was set up from day one. They should never have done this. He was never a criminal. They brought him over pretending they were like Hell’s Angels with guns to his head so that they could belly up to the bar and say, “I did a bust in the infamous Golden Triangle.” But you used a kid who was nothing but a junkie at the time, and you almost got him killed and you got a Mountie — one of your own — killed. For what? For dust in the wind and your egos. And that was the story in the end.
When I’ve looked at the kind of stories that I’ve always liked to do, a lot are the social stories about human tragedy and human tragedy caused by people in power that should have known better. Look: the penitentiaries are filled with bastards who deserve to be there, but there are some in there who don’t deserve to be there because they didn’t commit the crime. They got framed by a cop who said, “I need to solve this.”
The FP15 project is a bit of a retrospective for us, but we’re also looking forward to the future. With that in mind, what do you hope the future holds for Victor Malarek — in writing or otherwise?
I’m going to continue writing. Matt Kozar is in my brain right now, and we’ll probably dig up something else in a different form after maybe two more Matt Kozar books. But I have to keep doing things; I don’t want to go around giving more speeches on the various issues that I’ve covered, whether it’s environmental or the trafficking of women or various childcare systems.
I spent this last month in the Luberon area of France driving through idyllic little villages and eating great French food, being very quiet and looking at the mountains and walking on trails. And it’s nice to try to get away from the craziness in a crazy, crazy, crazy time.
I do want to write a book on where the media has gone. It has gone into a dark and deep abyss and is no longer what it was when I was there. Newspapers are failing. And when you’re watching, there’s so many errors and so much bias — and you can see the bias, especially American networks and even the BBC. When you start picking sides and giving out misinformation based on the side that you’re on — it’s really dangerous stuff. You have to hold people accountable and let the people who are listening and watching understand what’s going on out there. I’d really like to do a very critical book on where journalism has gone today and the dangers of what’s happened in the last little while.
And all you’ve got to do is look down south of the 40th parallel and realize that man, the media there is really bad and gone completely insane. It can replay and replay and replay a lie and not even challenge it. In my day, if you were lying, we would say, “well, that’s a lie.” And we were not going to print it. You don’t broadcast lies because after a while, those lies get into someone’s head and they start to think, “well, maybe it is the truth.” No, it’s a lie. A lie is a lie is a lie.
What are you most proud of over the course of your writing journey?
When I really help somebody, I feel like I’ve really done something. One of these adages that I live for is that if you can help somebody, just one person, you’ve done something good in your life. From my childhood and all the kind of stuff that happened to me, I could have been really an angry bastard and just gone on with my life being really pissed off. But I came to a conclusion very early that I can do things to help. And in every one of my books, it’s to help somebody or to get them to understand something.
In every one of my documentaries, it was the same thing. In every one of my investigations for the Globe and Mail, it was the same thing. I just wanted to hold the bad guys accountable and give a voice to somebody who doesn’t have a voice or to create a character that people can identify with. I can’t believe that I was given this opportunity in this skin, in this life, to do these things. I can’t pick one story. I can’t pick one book.
I can always say that the person who gave me my strength was my mother. And despite all of his foibles and problems and issues, the person who taught me to stand up and fight was my father. Those two messages came through. It took a while for them to sink in because I was really angry after the boys’ home and the foster homes. But there was this light that suddenly shone that led me into this business — I never thought I would write a book. And yet these ideas flow. Now in my “retirement,” I want to write more books. I’m right now quite crazy about Matt Kozar and his ability to tell stories because the stories come from things that I’d seen and I can meld them into realities of today, because very little has changed.
To be able to say, what is my proudest achievement? I’ve won all kinds of awards. I’ve been around the world on speaking engagements with The Natashas, The Johns, and other books, and had two movies and a TV series. I always think, wow, this is a strange dream or something.
And yet the guys from the boys’ home, they have an online website and a lot of them say, “man, we’re really proud of Malarek. He’s one of the brothers who made it.” That makes me feel good.
