The care of senior citizens is a sacred trust. Families leave a valuable member in the care of nursing home staff and management, sometimes at a significant financial cost. Provincial governments also place trust in these facilities, investing millions of dollars so homes can care for their elderly residents.

In a period of over 10 years, the Ontario government poured nearly $400 million into one such company -- Royal Crest, a chain of 17 nursing and retirement homes, which was run by brothers John and Aldo Martino. But it appears the words "sacred" and "trust" had little to do with their operations.

Les and Theresa Stanley describe the horrible neglect Les' mother, Evelyne, faced at one Royal Crest home. At Yorkview Lifecare Centre, they say Evelyne wasn't fed and was left to sit in her own feces and urine for hours on end. After arranging to have her transferred to another home, the couple says Evelyne was sent in out in the autumn cold wearing only a backless hospital gown and no undergarments. Several years after her brief stay at Yorkview, Evelyne is still reduced to tears when she recalls that horrible time.

Though nursing homes accept residents under the assurance that they will provide care to elderly loved ones, it appears Evelyne's experience wasn't unusual at Royal Crest homes. A confidential source provided W-FIVE with reports from a decade of inspections at Royal Crest homes. The documents show more than 2,000 violations, including a cockroach infestation at Yorkview; a resident who hadn't had their hair washed or been bathed in two weeks; and "intense noxious odour" from a resident's gangrenous leg.

"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."

And while the deaths of some elderly patients in long-term care are to be expected, Jones-Ottaway says she sometimes felt the coroner should come to investigate whether the conditions at Stoney Creek had been a factor.

"The Ministry of Health should have walked in there and taken a damn good look at the place and said this needs to be fixed," she says.

On the surface, it would seem that there just wasn't enough money coming into the Royal Crest homes to run them properly. The Martino brothers hadn't paid food suppliers; bills for heat, gas and electricity were stacking up; even the garbage collection company hadn't been paid. As well, money meant for staff benefits wasn't ending up where it should have.

"My union dues were being taken off my pay stubs and not submitted," says Jones-Ottaway, going on to add that her RSP contributions also were not submitted.

Michael Kainer, a lawyer who represented the Royal Crest workers' unions, says such problems were happening on a wide scale. "Royal Crest was deducting money from employee wages and failing to remit it to the pension plan. It was also failing to remit its own contributions to the pension plan, so there was a significant amount of money that was being deducted and not remitted," he says, going on to include vacation pay and health insurance premiums among the unpaid fees.

But with taxpayer money rolling in at a rate of over $30 million a year on top of fees the Martinos were collecting from residents' families, the question is, why wasn't there enough cash to pay the bills? "Either (the Martinos) were very bad business people or there were some improper practices that were going on," says Kainer. "Those are the only two possible explanations for what was happening at Royal Crest."

Eventually, Royal Crest found itself staggering under a debt load of more than $179 million, and in November 2002, the chain went bankrupt. Today, the homes are operating under new management, and are turning a profit. So what happened to all the money that went into Royal Crest during the Martino years?

The answers should be found in the company's financial records, but according to Jones-Ottaway, before bankruptcy was declared, mobile shredding trucks turned up at Stoney Creek. "Papers, papers, papers, bags and bags of paper out of the basement, out of the attic. … Some of boxes were marked payroll," she says, when asked what was destroyed.

As well, when bankruptcy trustees went to Royal Crest's head office in Hamilton, Ont., the some computers had been removed, apparently in such a hurry that whomever took them couldn't even be bothered to unplug them – they just cut the cords. A couple of computers were recovered, but the financial records had been deleted the night before the bankruptcy trustee arrived.

"We had no ability to determine where (the money) went," says Kainer, who is on the board inspecting the Royal Crest bankruptcy. "It goes from the Ministry of Health to a bank account maintained by Royal Crest, and from there it gets dispersed."

But dispersed to whom? In Royal Crest's final year of business under the Martinos, John and Aldo each paid themselves $300,000. But right after Royal Crest went under, the brothers both declared personal bankruptcy, stating they were only worth $10,000 each. But for a couple of guys claiming to be almost broke, they are actually living pretty well. John Martino lives in a waterfront mansion in Burlington, Ontario and Aldo lives in a million dollar home in Ancaster. John has a fleet of expensive cars, including a Hummer and two Mercedes Benzes, and the whole family enjoyed Aldo's Prowler, a boat worth an estimated $300,000. But not one of those assets – or any of the brothers' other properties – is in either brother's name.

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.

W-FIVE also tried to go directly to the source and pose questions to the Martinos themselves, but after going to their Hamilton office to try to set up an interview, we were told John wasn't in the building. An hour later, our cameras caught him leaving the office.

And W-FIVE also discovered that the Martinos' history of nursing home bankruptcies goes far beyond Ontario. In Kansas, John Martino struck an agreement to purchase two nursing homes from Ted Brown and his wife, Mary.

Brown says he was told the brothers' Canadian nursing homes "were extremely successful. They had in the neighbourhood of 27 facilities (and) they were run so well that they had surplus monies, and they were just reinvesting the money back into the facilities."

Most importantly, Brown was willing to turn control of his homes over to the Martinos because he believed in their philosophy. "They said patient care was always number one with them," Brown says.

But almost immediately there were problems. Bills weren't getting paid and complaints about patient care started coming in. One couple sued one of the homes for wrongful death after their father died from complications from a broken ankle that wasn't treated properly. The home's insurance company settled the suit for $300,000.

Accounting records show a flow of hundreds of thousands of dollars between the Kansas homes and Skyco. But eventually, both homes were forced to declare bankruptcy. The Browns were left on the hook for about $3.1 million. Martino walked away.

And Kansas wasn't the only place where this happened. John owned another home in Nevada, and what happened there follows a similar pattern as Kansas and Ontario – after the purchase, the bills and questions started piling up. Finally, the Nevada home also declared bankruptcy, and once again, Martino walked away.

The brothers aren't the only members of the Martino family with this history. Annette Martino, John and Aldo's sister, ran a chain of nursing homes into the ground in Ontario and Florida – for a total of five bankruptcies between the siblings.

With taxpayer money on the line, one would think it would have been in the government of Ontario's interest to keep a close eye on Royal Crest – but it didn't.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, W-FIVE obtained documents that showed early on that Royal Crest wasn't paying the money it owed – and in fact, a judge ordered the Ministry of Health to pay some of the homes' debts. Ontario's acting auditor general, Jim McCarter, agrees the court actions should have been a warning.

"I would think if a nursing home had to be garnished three times, I would think from an auditor's perspective that would raise an alarm bell that this is a bit of an unusual situation," he says.

There were other signs as well. Two years before the Royal Crest collapse, officials at the Ministry of Health raised concerns about fraud and requested an audit, but an investigation never occurred.

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, 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.

But Ontario isn't the only government on the hook – Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation – a federal crown corporation – guaranteed almost $130 million in loans to the Martinos. Since the brothers declared bankruptcy, that bill now falls to taxpayers, but so far, the federal government has no plans to investigate.

Meanwhile, there is nothing to prevent the Martinos from re-entering the senior care business. Though John and Aldo don't currently own any senior care facilities, their sister, Celeste, and John's wife, Rose, do operate a series of retirement homes.

Perhaps it's the start of yet another Martino family affair.