JUSTICE / SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026
The Real Estate Mogul Who Burned Down His Rival’s Offices
Christophe Folla ran one of Quebec’s biggest brokerages. A grudge fuelled a seven-year campaign of revenge
BY CAITLIN WALSH MILLER
ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM MAIDA
Published 6:30, JULY 15, 2026
Just after 7 p.m. on a crisp February night in 2021, a man and a woman were seen on surveillance cameras in front of a real estate office. It was a franchise of industry giant Remax, and the building was imposing—two handsome storeys of timber and glass on the main street of Saint-Sauveur, a ski town in the Laurentians, the lake-and-chalet country north of Montreal.
The woman, dressed in a black hoodie, brandished a hammer and smashed the glass front door. Her acquaintance then dropped a metal container through the opening and lit a fuse. The two walked off as a blaze took hold.
One of the building’s owners found out about the fire as it was happening. André Chesnay, a local real estate investor and landlord, was having dinner with his family at home when his phone rang—it was a Remax broker, in tears. He’d just driven by the office and seen the inferno. Chesnay bundled up, got in the car, and went to watch his building burn. It took forty firefighters, including three teams called in from neighbouring villages, to extinguish the flames.
On his way back to work early the next morning, Chesnay drove back to the site of the fire. The metal frame had held, but the roof was gone—disintegrated—the blackened shell of the interior open to the winter sky.
There, standing in the street, was a man he’d known for over twenty years: Christophe Folla.
He wasn’t someone Chesnay expected to see on foot. Folla was always sealed inside his black Mercedes. Yet here he was, hatless in the February cold, staring at the wreckage like he was taking inventory.
On a friday afternoon four and a half years later, Folla appeared via videoconference before a Quebec parole board, which I also attended virtually. The seventy-two-year-old was neatly dressed in a dark-blue button-up, but he looked weak and weary, and his posture was all askew. One of his shoulders was pitched inches higher than the other, maybe from a surgery six months earlier when doctors dug several cancer-eaten vertebrae out of his spine and replaced them with metal.
When he spoke, his voice cracked. “I become emotional in these situations,” he said and gestured to a glass of orange juice in front of him. “If I take a sip, please don’t be offended.”
Commissioner Jacqueline Schoepfer asked if he felt able to continue. He said he did, so she turned to the matter at hand: the crimes he’d committed. For decades, she noted, Folla had lived without incident. He had co-founded and presided over Sutton Québec, building it into one of the province’s major real estate agencies. By all outward measures, things were going well. Then—“out of nowhere,” said Schoepfer—he instigated an arson campaign that lasted seven years, paying co-conspirators $120,000, causing $6 million in damage. “Today, we’d like to hear from you. What drove you,” she asked, “to commit offences this serious?”
To hear Folla tell it that day, the fires were an aberration—an impulsive break from character brought on by a betrayal he still seemed to find unspeakably deep. The source of that betrayal, he said, was a broker named François Léger. “He’s someone I gave a lot to,” explained Folla. “We had a beautiful relationship.” Then, in 2017, Léger left Sutton for another firm.
Folla didn’t mind Léger leaving. “People come and go,” he said. What he resented was the ensuing months that Léger spent trying to poach Folla’s agents and destroy his business. That he took personally. “I developed an unfathomable desire for vengeance.”
Schoepfer then asked him how far he might have gone in his quest for retribution had he not been stopped. “No further,” he replied. In fact, it was essentially already over, he explained. He was getting ready to come clean about everything. “But then I was arrested.”
It was a good story, and Folla was good at telling it. It just wasn’t quite what happened.
Folla was born in 1953 in Los Barrios de Luna, a mountain village in northwestern Spain, into a poor family. At six, he was sent to a religious boarding school in France, his uncle paying his way—until he refused to join the priesthood. In 1975, Folla immigrated to Canada, joining his older brother, Manuel, in Montreal.
The pair of ambitious twentysomethings were set on following their father into construction, and their ascent was swift. Within a few years, they went from selling and renovating modest properties in the city’s southwest to spearheading major housing developments and moving tens of millions of dollars a year in sales.
Then, as quickly as it had come together, the business fell apart—they lost everything. Folla would later attribute the collapse to his brother’s refusal to heed his advice; they do not speak to this day.
Folla pivoted to real estate. In 1994, he launched Sutton Québec, the provincial arm of the Sutton Group, a national real estate network founded in British Columbia a decade earlier.
The Sutton model was straightforward: brokers paid a modest monthly “desk fee” to operate under the Sutton banner, and in exchange, they kept their entire commission—a direct challenge to established firms where agents surrendered a hefty cut of every sale. Those desk fees were the engine of Sutton’s business. More brokers, more revenue. Lose the brokers, lose everything. “Royal LePage, La Capitale, Remax—it’s over,” Folla boasted to a Quebec financial paper when his new company was barely two weeks old. “From here on out, the future belongs to Sutton.”
Folla’s bombast may have sounded premature, but his timing couldn’t have been better. At the tail end of a grinding recession, Sutton’s model proved irresistible to agents looking to trim expenses and claw back some financial stability. Within a few years, nearly 800 agents had flocked to the upstart, among them François Léger.
At his parole hearing, Folla cast himself as Léger’s benefactor. “I helped him enormously,” he said. “Financially and in every way.” But Léger hardly entered the business as someone in need of a lifeline. He came from a storied Laurentians real estate family, one who helped shape the region into what it is today. His mother launched her own agency in the 1960s, which Léger took over and grew into one of the area’s largest independent brokerages. In 1997, when he folded his operation into the Sutton group, it was news—an article at the time called his arrival “a showcase” for the ascendant banner.
Léger spent the next two decades building up his franchise, with his daughter joining him in 2005. They added office after office (eight in all) and, in 2013, rebranded as Groupe Sutton Humania. The name became synonymous with the Laurentians’ cottage-country real estate market—the kind of ski chalets and lakefront retreats that draw wealthy Montrealers north Friday to Sunday.
In the early 2010s, Sutton Québec controlled 15 percent of the province’s real estate market, as reported by TVA, and counted more than 2,500 agents among its ranks, making it second only to Remax. But even during the good years, there were signs of how Folla operated when he felt crossed.
In April 2012, Sutton Royal, a Montreal-area franchise, imploded following the discovery of a scheme that had defrauded two major banks of nearly $1.7 million. For three years, Sutton Royal’s office manager wrote bogus cheques between at least three different accounts at TD Bank and other institutions. Though those accounts didn’t have the funds to cover the cheques, real money could be withdrawn before anything bounced. Then, another fake cheque would be deposited to cover the float. The money moved in circles, back and forth between accounts, keeping the illusion of liquidity going. When the sheer volume of transactions finally caught the attention of bank investigators—200 cheques issued and withdrawn in a single day—TD Bank sued Sutton Royal, freezing its accounts, including one holding $600,000 in brokers’ commissions.
There’s no evidence that Folla had run the scheme—Sutton Royal’s office manager and president would later plead guilty to the charges. But the brewing scandal threatened the brand’s reputation and Folla’s grip on his brokers, and he moved quickly to get a handle on both.
According to court documents filed in civil proceedings, Folla met with the brokers whose commissions had been seized, at a Holiday Inn in Pointe-Claire, a suburb in Montreal’s West Island. At first, he promised to get their commissions back—but only if they agreed to follow a plan whose details he refused to explain. Then, at a series of increasingly hostile meetings held through May of that year, the brokers say they were misled, pressured, and berated into signing legal affidavits and contracts with other franchises, without being allowed to read what they were agreeing to. If they didn’t sign, Folla said, they would lose their listings and their real estate licences.
Two brokers refused to sign. At a meeting on May 17, Folla singled out one of the holdouts, a broker named Lambros Demos. “I will fix you and bury you,” Folla told Demos, pointing his finger at him. Then, he turned to the group. “If any of you go to the police, media, or hire your own stupid lawyers, I will sue you and fix you. You will never be able to practise again,” he told the brokers. “I know how to play with the law. I tell the judges in Quebec how it works.” The threats continued at another meeting later that month: “I am an animal in business,” he warned. “I have never lost in court in over thirty-five years.”
The brokers were out anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $300,000, and thirteen of them filed a lawsuit against Folla and Sutton Québec. They sued not just to recover their commissions but because Folla—who was contractually obligated to oversee his franchises and had admitted at one of the meetings in May that he never did—had then used their vulnerability to manipulate them for his own ends.
Folla, in turn, sued two of the brokers for defamation. The cases, messy and expensive, dragged on for years. The brokers lost every appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court. “He’s not a good person,” said one veteran broker who was involved. (She didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisal from Folla.) “It hurts, how he played us.”
The brokers weren’t the only ones who have ended up in court over Folla’s business tactics. His name—or that of his companies (Sutton excluded)—appears over 100 times in Quebec civil court records, with mentions stretching back to the early ’80s. Some cases were standard real estate disputes; many involved accusations of loan fraud or breached contracts with banks and insurers. Others still stemmed from his desire to bend institutions to his will—in the mid-2000s, there was an attempted (and unsuccessful) coup of the Montreal realtors’ board and a hostile takeover of a golf club (which he now owns). In 2017, he backed out of a $4.3 million penthouse once construction was nearly complete, then turned around and sued the developer.
André Chesnay knew Folla’s coercive and litigious methods first-hand. In 1999, he bought the Tennis Interclub, a sports complex near Saint-Sauveur. For the former tennis player, it was a passion project. When Chesnay’s co-owner—a young man in his twenties—died in a car crash in 2011, his grieving father wanted to sell his son’s shares. Word got around in the small community. Folla heard the shares were available and pressed Chesnay for an introduction. At a dinner together, Chesnay watched Folla lowball the father on the price, then pressure the man to also sell the hockey season tickets he’d shared with his son.
Folla wasted no time asserting his authority at the club, dictating day-to-day decisions and firing long-time staff, all while promising big returns based on rosy projections. When those forecasts failed to materialize, he blamed Chesnay and turned to legal tactics, bringing in an expensive team and filing suits over everything from leaky roofs to tenant departures—including a tenant Folla had personally requested they take on.
By 2014, Chesnay was fed up. Worn down by years of lawsuits and drained financially, he agreed to sell his stake on “balance of sale,” with the agreement that Folla would pay him back over time. “I was ready to do anything to get rid of it,” he says. Chesnay signed his share away.
Except Folla never paid. Chesnay lost the club he’d spent fifteen years building, the millions he’d invested, and his house. “He took everything from me,” says Chesnay.
Folla had always found ways to punish those that crossed him. With Léger, he’d take it to a whole other level.
In 2017, Sutton Humania was one of the top agencies in Quebec, handling more sales than any other franchise. But after two decades under the Sutton banner, Léger decided he’d had enough. Early that year, months before his contract was up for renewal, he informed Folla that he wouldn’t be signing on again—he was taking his business to Royal LePage, one of Sutton’s major rivals in the province.
Folla told the parole board Léger became fixated on destroying his business. And while Sutton may have been in trouble, it was far from Léger’s fault. His departure along with his 250 brokers was the third significant wave of defections from Sutton Québec to Royal LePage in less than a year. The brand’s bubble had burst—in addition to the lawsuits and scandals, rivals were mimicking Sutton’s model with even lower fees and better perks, like revenue sharing and retirement funds. Roughly 800 brokers had deserted the network in the previous six years.
Léger’s move may have felt like an existential threat to Folla. After all, the Sutton model depends on both scale and loyalty. Given that agents fork over monthly fees, not commission splits, head count matters more than sales numbers. With brokers paying monthly affiliation fees of several hundred dollars each, Léger’s team likely represented over a million dollars in annual revenue—gone, overnight.
At first, Folla responded as he usually did—via the courts, with an emergency injunction that barred Léger from contacting Sutton brokers or using internal business information until the franchise contract expired. Léger left anyway, and the Royal LePage Humania banner unfurled that May.
Folla had spent his career turning slights into lawsuits and standard business disputes into drawn-out battles. What changed in 2017 was not only the scale of what he stood to lose—everything, again—but also the growing sense that his usual instrument, the law, wasn’t going to be enough.
That December, the first fire was lit, at Humania’s head office on the main street in Saint-Sauveur. It was small, relative to what would come, causing only about $43,000 in damage.
Arsonists came back a year later, on Christmas Day. This time, the building was a total loss. The next month, they targeted another Humania office, in Sainte-Thérèse, an off-island suburb north of Montreal. Three fires in a little over twelve months, leaving roughly $2.3 million in destruction behind them.
Then Chesnay’s building, which housed a Remax franchise, was torched that cold February night in 2021—an accident, it transpired. Folla’s people had hit the wrong address. “It’s not a big deal, it’s the competition,” Folla said, according to evidence later presented at a bail hearing. “It will muddy the waters.”
Despite the muddied waters, Chesnay, a friend and sometimes business partner of Léger’s, had suspected for years who was behind the fires. So had Léger. But when Chesnay went to the police, he was told an investigation would be too expensive. “We don’t have the budget,” Chesnay recalls them saying.
By 2021, the fires weren’t just damaging buildings. According to Chesnay, the whole village had suffered. Investors were skittish about putting money into Saint-Sauveur—there were rumours the mob was involved. Renters were nervous, and tourists were asking questions too. After four fires targeting three franchises, the Laurentians real estate community was rattled. Brokers didn’t know where it was safe to work, if anywhere. A few months later, the Saint-Sauveur Humania office was hit again, despite the fact the banner was paying an extra $20,000 a month in amped-up security for its buildings.
Léger died in May of 2022, at the age of seventy-three. But even the death of the man whose supposed betrayal had set this campaign in motion didn’t stop it. In November that year, surveillance cameras captured three individuals lighting a fire in a metal container and placing it near an air conditioning unit at the Saint-Sauveur Humania building, causing roughly $50,000 in damage. A few hours later, the office in Sainte-Thérèse was hit as well, though there, the flames failed to take hold. The arsonists came back the next night, this time with a Molotov cocktail. They smashed the glass in the back door, lit the device, and threw it in. Camera footage showed them running off as black smoke curled out of the building.
The trio didn’t get far—they were arrested in Saint-Sauveur that night, carrying an undeployed incendiary. But they weren’t charged yet. By then, police had assembled a team known internally as Projet Rallumer, or Operation Reignite. For another year, detectives worked to prove who was directing the attacks.
A major break in the investigation came in November of 2023, when one of Folla’s accomplices, a former business partner now responsible for recruiting others to the arson campaign, approached the police and offered to talk. The informant’s name is protected by a publication ban.
What emerged was a deliberately layered operation. Folla communicated only with this informant, who passed orders down through two intermediaries, who in turn recruited others to actually light the fires.
The informant met Folla several times at Balmoral, the golf club he owns. On December 19, Folla handed him $20,000 in cash for the next round of fires. He wanted complete destruction. “The roof has to go,” he said. “Let’s give them a nice Christmas present.” Over the holidays, Folla pressed for updates. The arsonists wanted more money, so the informant told Folla the price had gone up. On January 23, 2024—around the time Folla would later tell the parole board he was preparing to turn himself in—he handed over another $10,000 and issued a final threat: “There will be other fires.”
The next day, Folla and his two intermediaries were arrested. All three were charged with conspiracy to commit arson and arson causing property damage.
Folla pleaded guilty on December 4. He was sentenced to five years, minus the 262 days he served awaiting trial, which were credited at time-and-a-half. Less than a year later, he was transferred to transitional housing. In March 2026, he was granted full parole.
As part of his sentence, Folla was ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution to his victims; he told the parole board he sold the Tennis Interclub to cover the amount. Two insurance companies sued him for $4.5 million in damages from the fires, but the case settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
The day Folla was arrested, Sutton Québec cut ties with its founder. His real estate licence was permanently revoked. Julie Gaucher, Folla’s right-hand woman from the beginning, has since taken over the banner’s leadership. While Folla sat in jail, she unveiled a rebranded Sutton Québec, with a freshened-up logo to mark, the press release said, “the beginning of a new era in the company’s development.” Today, the network counts about 1,300 affiliated brokers across the province, half its 2011 peak.
At Folla’s hearing, the parole board commission asked him whether that first fire hadn’t been enough to wake him up, whether he’d understood that people could have been killed. Of course, he said, but he wasn’t capable of reason at the time. “At no point in the five years that followed,” Schoepfer asked, “did your conscience give you pause?” Folla answered that it did, certainly, but not in the way it should have. (Folla has repeatedly stressed that the fires were deliberately set at night in an effort to avoid harming anyone.)
Folla had much to say about remorse. “These people experienced unthinkable suffering and insecurity because of me,” he said. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. Why did I do this? Why did I cause such harm?” He spoke about his egotism and arrogance, about his isolation, about the burning obsession with vengeance that had overtaken him, about how he’d nearly confessed it all. The commissioner asked him if he still felt driven by this need for revenge. “I assure you,” said Folla, “that feeling has left me completely. Today, I want to help people.” (Folla declined to be interviewed for this story. In an email, he wrote “that chapter is closed and behind me.”)
When news of Folla’s arrest and eventual sentencing was shared online, some in the industry didn’t bother to hide how they felt: “Loser,” wrote one realtor. “Good,” said another. “Karma,” added a third. One agent had a few more words to share: “Scumbag! May he get what he deserves,” she wrote. “A very sick and selfish individual.” But even after his conviction, his time spent in jail, his removal from Sutton Québec, and a lifetime ban from holding a real estate licence, very few people wanted to speak on the record about him. “He has antennae everywhere,” said one broker.
Chesnay is not surprised people won’t talk. “He’s a mean, dangerous person,” he says. “And there were signs from the beginning.”
Before they were business partners, Folla and Chesnay were neighbours, living on the same quiet country road just outside Saint-Sauveur from the mid-1990s. Sometime after Folla moved in, Chesnay’s family was invited over to celebrate Folla’s son’s birthday. On arrival, Folla pulled him aside with a bizarre warning. “Your son can’t beat mine at ping-pong,” Chesnay remembers Folla telling him. Both kids were around eight years old.
Later, during a game of water polo in the pool, Chesnay recalls, Folla grabbed the ball from Chesnay’s son and pushed him under the surface. He held him there just a beat too long, his expression flat—maybe proprietorial—as Chesnay watched, dumbstruck.
The moment has stuck with him for decades—through the lawsuits, the fires, the losses. In hindsight, it was an early glimpse of Folla’s compulsion for control and retribution. He regrets the day he crossed the street, bottle of wine in hand, to welcome his new neighbour. “That day,” he says, “I shook hands with the devil.”
Adam Maida is an independent graphic designer, illustrator, and former art director for The Atlantic. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Economist, and the New York Times, among many others.
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I enjoy the act of writing, with revisions and cringeworthy phrases dotting the long arc to eloquence. It’s all “productive friction”: the struggle makes the writing itself better.
I’m Sheldon, the newest member of The Walrus’s board of directors, and a strategist who’s been focused on the ethics of AI for a decade now. When outlets rely on AI slop, they’re building their houses on sand and deteriorating trust with each “article.”
By supporting The Walrus, you’re supporting humans writing human stories. The Walrus is:
1. Hiring more contributing writers. They’re trusted voices that bring you quality writing.
2. Investing in fellowships to teach promising writers hard, journalistic skills.
3. Fact checking every single story they publish. It’s time-consuming but worth it.
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