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Her voice, travelling softly down the telephone line, is fluid but fragile. From time to time, she sobs quietly, then regains control and continues.
"I've got a fighter," says Tracy Kapoustin, describing her husband Michael. "He's a very loving husband, a great father, an excellent human being. Nothing gets him down -- as far as I can tell."
She says it with quiet conviction. Believes it -- must believe it. Canadian Michael Kapoustin, a Canadian citizen, is imprisoned in Bulgaria. He's been held there since 1996 and his family and supporters say he's been subjected to torture, abuse of his legal rights and years of inhumane conditions.
Canada's federal government, recently under fire for not doing enough to bring home other citizens imprisoned abroad, has tried doggedly to repatriate Michael Kapoustin. It has even gone so far as to convince the Council of Europe to arrange mediation talks with Bulgaria to resolve Kapoustin's fate, all to no avail.
Bulgarian officials recently invited Canada to apply, for a third time, to transfer the 55-year-old businessman to a Canadian prison. No one knows if the invitation is serious.
The Canadian government "has made a helluva lot of progress" on Kapoustin's plight, according to his lawyer, Dean Peroff, "but it's starting to get bogged down again ... it's difficult for a government to focus on a case for a sustained period of time."
Michael Kapoustin, serving a 17-year sentence for a single count of embezzlement, including time in Bulgaria's grimmest prison, can't afford to wait much longer.
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His surreal saga begins in the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, when the Vancouver-area entrepreneur decided to invest in Bulgaria.
According to Tracy Kapoustin, now 50, her husband got involved in everything from an oil-recycling plant to pharmaceuticals, restaurants, an import/export business and even a shipping/ferry service. "He worked 24 hours a day," she recalls. The couple had a baby boy, Nicolas.
Then the Bulgarian economy crumpled. Suddenly a loaf of bread cost $100.
"The whole country turned upside down," Tracy says.
Financial uncertainty rocked investors, including those in LifeChoice International, Kapoustin's company.
The dissolving economy brought serious trouble, including anonymous threats to kidnap Tracy and baby Nick, to blow up Kapoustin's office, even to bomb vehicles if he did not stop doing business.
The family was so frightened that "we didn't start our cars," Tracy recounts. She fled with Nick to Greece. "We were terrified the whole time."
Michael Kapoustin's supporters believe the threats were linked to a competing business with ties to organized crime. They say the Bulgarian news media, prodded by the state, began reporting that Kapoustin was a fraudster and a sexual predator.
Soon after, police charged him with counts ranging from money laundering to fraud to embezzlement. His assets were seized, his company shut down. In late 1995, while in Germany en route to Canada, he was arrested. Despite a hunger strike, Kapoustin was extradited to Bulgaria.
"They took him from a (German) hospital prison on a stretcher to an airplane, right to a Sophia prison hospital," says Tracy Kapoustin. Normally a strapping man of 230 to 240 lbs., Kapoustin was down to about 160.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
It took 16 months to get him before a judge. According to what Kapoustin has told his family and lawyer, he spent two years in solitary confinement in a cell with no windows and no toilet and only a bucket for waste.
He would later recount that on at least one occasion, guards stormed in with black masks and rubber hoses and "beat the heck out of him ... they would just go at him," says Tracy. He believes that on another occasion, he was drugged before he was beaten. In yet another instance, an investigator showed up in his cell with a case of whisky and wine, offering him cigarettes, in order to obtain information.
"He said it was just a circus the way they would interrogate him," says Tracy Kapoustin. According to his family, attempts were also made to extort money. His company's assets disappeared. At one point one of his cellmates was a person convicted of killing a businessman.
The original charges against Kapoustin were eventually dropped. New ones were levelled, then altered. Kapoustin, in a harsh, maximum-security prison throughout the legal tangle, was convicted of fraud and embezzlement, and acquitted on appeal.
In 2002, however, he was sentenced by Bulgaria's Supreme Court to 17 years for embezzlement. He declined to appeal, on the understanding that he could apply for a transfer to Canada only after his legal actions had finished.
The Byzantine path to bringing him home has been frustrating, according to lawyer Peroff. Canada first requested that Kapoustin be transferred to a Canadian prison in 2002, under terms of an international treaty to which both countries are party. Bulgaria denied the transfer request in 2004. The Bulgarian prosecutor general invited another request in 2006, which Bulgaria also turned down.
BELOW THE RADAR
In recent days, Canada has been invited to apply once more for a transfer of Kapoustin to custody in Canada. "One has to wonder about the sincerity of the invitation," cautions Peroff. "Do you trust Bulgaria after all the terrible things they've done to Michael and his family?"
In some respects, Kapoustin's case has followed standard consular procedure: Let governments proceed quietly, below the radar of publicity, to resolve the individual's plight.
Tracy Kapoustin, now back in British Columbia where she struggles to raise her young, diabetic son with the help of her parents, went along with that strategy. It got her nowhere.
So the Kapoustin family went public. Peroff also approached the Canadian government for help, and Jason Kenney, acting as a special envoy for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, visited Bulgaria. Canada also petitioned the Council of Europe for mediation with Bulgaria, an unusual step in a consular case.
Twelve years after Michael Kapoustin was first imprisoned in Bulgaria, his wife has seen him only twice; his son, now a teenager, only once. Both prison visits were tough but Tracy describes the one that occurred between Michael and Nick as "special ... so good for my son and for Mike.
"To have a son without a father around was my worst nightmare," she whispers down the phone line, "... but it happened."