By Kenneth Jackson and Jorge Barrera
APTN National News
Before he met 22-year-old Michele McPherson, Bruce Carson was in love with another escort.
Carson met Barbara Lynn Khan as she walked the downtown streets of Ottawa looking for the address of another man.
She had just been deported from the United States on a felony conviction stemming from her involvement with escorting in Charlotte, North Carolina.
She asked Carson for directions. They chatted on his front porch for a bit and he offered her a glass of wine. She told him she’d like a glass of water instead. He later asked her how much it would cost for her stay the night, Khan said, in an exclusive interview with APTN.
It sparked a four-year relationship that lasted while Carson, 65, worked in the Prime Minister’s Office as senior advisor to Harper.
Carson was in the PMO from 2006 until 2008. He returned for a brief stint in 2009.
“He made me feel very loved and very safe,” Khan, 43, said of their time together. Khan continues to live in an Ottawa condo she and Carson purchased in 2009.
Khan would rub elbows with everyone in Carson’s political circle. She even followed Carson to Calgary when he took a job as the executive director of the Canadian School of Energy and Environment in 2008.
She never worked as an escort in Calgary.
But soon their love would sour after Carson met someone else last March.
That someone was Michelle McPherson, another escort in Ottawa.
Carson quickly fell for the young blond and now finds himself the subject of an RCMP probe triggered by an APTN investigation into his lobbying activities for an Ottawa-based water company that had a financial arrangement with McPherson.
Carson loved McPherson to the point of asking her to marry him, but he did so while still engaged to Khan and also married to his second wife Janet Treasure who lives in Toronto. He had been separated from Treasure for a number of years.
It’s the latest in the long list of stories in the growing scandal for Harper who has been dogged by the Carson issue recently in the election campaign.
The prime minister has faced questions as to how Carson could obtain Secret-level security clearance while working in the PMO despite having five fraud convictions and two bankruptcies on his record.
According to the Privy Council Office, Carson’s security clearance was processed and approved by the mid-level, director of security services in its office. The Privy Council is essentially the prime minister’s department.
A recent Toronto Star report alleged that Carson was put onto the Afghanistan file while working in the PMO and came into contact with Top Secret information despite only having a Secret-level clearance.
The PMO would not directly comment on the allegation, saying only that “we don’t discuss security matters.”
The PMO has said they will have no further contact with Carson and asked the Mounties to investigate his activities.
The Department of National Defence also wouldn’t comment and referred queries to the PMO.
Carson claims to have close connections to the Harper government and expressed as much in an interview with APTN during its investigation. Leading up to March Carson said he was in regular contact with Harper and his ministers.
He said Harper was one of his “closest friends” and that the two had known each other for “20 years.”
Harper said recently on the campaign trail had he known about Carson’s additional fraud charges he wouldn’t have hired his old pal.
But that raised further questions as to how he couldn’t know.
Khan said when she met Carson it was a vulnerable time and she was reeling from being deported to Canada. She was forced to leave her three daughters behind.
She had little money, living in her car and working as an escort to get by.
Khan said it was also hard times that drove her and her husband to the U.S. from Canada in 1999.
Khan and her family moved to North Carolina where there was promise of work and a better life that didn’t materialize, she said. She went to work as an escort in the fall of 1999 to care for her family and said it was supposed to be a “means to an end.”
By the spring of 2001 Khan opened her own escort service, but on Oct. 11, at 4 a.m. police kicked her door down. She was indicted on a list of felonies linked to the time she worked for the previous escort service.
She was held in a county jail for six months until those felonies were eventually dismissed.
During that time she was stripped of parental rights of her three girls and custody was awarded to her parents.
“There were never allegations that we were unfit parents, just that my work was morally wrong,” she said.
After a three year custody battle, Khan regained her parental rights. But her parents testified against her before a Federal Grand Jury and she once again lost her children.
Khan said she was among seven people, including her husband, indicted in the summer of 2004 on allegations of running a prostitution ring.
She was indicted on 53 counts conspiracy to launder the proceeds of prostitution. One count for each bank deposit made, she said. She was held without bond for 22 months.
The indictment alleged that Khan had run the prostitution ring from houses and hotel rooms. It also said Khan placed advertisements in magazines and used suggestive photos to lure prospective customers.
She also used terms like Intimate Encounters, All That U Want, Honey’s Hot Sport, The Dungeon, Baby’s Bunnies and X Dreams in advertisements.
Khan pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to launder the proceeds of prostitution and was sentenced one year less a day, or time served.
Khan said the money laundering conviction dealt with the fact that her escort agency took payments by credit cards and the transactions were done online with a company in California.
“That was moving money across state lines and that was considered money laundering,” she said. “That’s what they got me on.”
Khan added she was never convicted of any other crime in Canada or the U.S. She also said her husband was convicted of the same crime but was actually never involved in the escort agency.
To this day she said she feels terrible for him.
After her conviction, she was deported without her children who were back in the custody of her parents.
Two of her daughters left before they turned 18, Khan said. One lives in Canada and the other attends university in the U.S.
“I still have a daughter (16) I have only seen once in eight years,” she said.
Khan said she learned about McPherson late last year, but at the time didn’t know the extent of Carson’s relationship with the woman.
During APTN’s investigation emails were written by Carson where he promoted the Ottawa water company to Indian Affairs officials and claimed to have inside knowledge of government operations.
The water company, H2O Pros, was trying to sell filtration systems to
First Nations suffering from dirty water. The company created another company called H2O Global Group to handle the prospective deals.
The company signed two contracts with McPherson. One guaranteed her 20 per cent of gross revenue from sales, but it was replaced by a second agreement giving her between 15 to 20 per cent of revenues from the sales of each filtration system.
Carson and McPherson’s names are on a nearly $400,000 house about 60 kilometres south of Ottawa which was bought this past December.
He also bought her a black Mercedes SUV.
