Police drive under the taped off scene as the Toronto police investigate a shooting where 3 adult victims were pronounced deceased in the lobby of an office space at 25 Mallard in Toronto on Monday.
A triple shooting in North York saw one man take the lives of two people he believed had defrauded him and his family of their life savings, the Star has learned.
Toronto police have not released the name of the shooter, saying only that he was 46 years old and confirming he was among Monday’s dead.
A source with knowledge of the investigation, however, has identified him as Alan Kats.
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Kats’ wife, Alisa Pogorelovsky, told the Star in an emailed statement Tuesday that her husband “could not handle losing our life savings.”
A court decision details how the family sued a number of people and companies after losing $1.28 million in a mortgage fraud scheme. The lawsuit names the two other people left dead in this week’s shooting.
Arash Missaghi, 54, was one of those killed, police confirmed Tuesday. Missaghi has long been embroiled in a web of civil and criminal legal action, including the most recent lawsuit, in which lawyers for Pogorelovsky are alleged to have “uncovered a network of shell companies whose directorship once or presently included Arash Missaghi and his relatives.”
Samira Yousefi, 44, was also killed, police said. She was named in the same lawsuit as running a front in the mortgage fraud scheme and inducing investments from Pogorelovsky’s family.
“The events that gave rise to the litigation that we are involved in with Missaghi and Yousefi have devastated and now destroyed our family,” Pogorelovsky’s statement said.
“Alan could not handle losing our life’s savings and that is what led to this tragic event. He wrote a note before he died that I found today which explains what he was thinking and why he acted as he did.”
A copy of the note was provided to the Star.
Three people were found dead after police were called to a commercial building at 25 Mallard Rd. near Don Mills and York Mills roads on Monday afternoon. A senior investigator said the shooter was among them.
Det.-Sgt. Alan Bartlett told reporters police believed four people had been inside the commercial building at the time of the shooting. An office worker told the Star that he called 911 after hearing loud bangs.
Arash Missaghi, pictured in a March 2014 file image, was one of three people who died in a Don Mills office Monday.
Randy Risling Toronto Star
“We believe that the individual responsible for the shooting is among the deceased,” Bartlett said, adding he couldn’t say definitively if the shooter had died from a self-inflicted gunshot.
“With every homicide investigation, we have to be open to all possibilities.”
In a court document released this month, stemming from a motion connected to the complex lawsuit, an Ontario Superior Court ruling summarized the case as arising from Pogorelovsky’s loss of $1.28 million to “a syndicated mortgage fraud.”
That fraud, the ruling said, “took place over a stretch of time” and involved the alleged victims’ interest in creating an investment fund for the family by releasing the equity in their home. They then mortgaged their home with an institutional lender and paid into a fund “that promised a higher rate of return through the investment in syndicated private mortgages,” the ruling said, but was actually an “elaborate ruse to obtain the plaintiff’s money.”
At one point, Pogorelovsky obtained a 50 per cent transfer of the family home from her mother to free up the mortgage financing to obtain the $1.28 million for investing in the scheme, the document said. She then awaited updates on her returns on the investments, and after some “hounding” received “small payments” that appeared to be “efforts to comfort the plaintiff as to the progress of the mortgage investments,” the ruling said.
As the scheme went on, Pogorelovsky discovered there were no mortgages on the properties securing her investments, the judge wrote.
Noting many of the allegations Pogorelovsky made about the mortgage fraud scheme were “speculative,” the decision nonetheless noted she’d proven the “essential elements of fraud” for the purposes of an injunction, namely that the money had been taken and she “never received much back beyond the dribs and drabs clearly intended to buy time to dispose of the money.”
“Ms. Pogorelovsky eventually lost the family home and has $331,425.43 left in her bank account,” the decision said.
An injunction is not a judgment on the facts of a case, but allows for some interim relief — in this case, a freezing of assets.
As for Yousefi’s involvement, the document said Yousefi was operating Saarad Investments Inc. as a “front” for the scheme.
“The syndicated funds managed by Yousefi were to be secured by mortgages on properties in the Greater Toronto Area,” the judge wrote.
Missaghi had a reputation for recruiting younger, ambitious professionals to his alleged schemes. The recent court document in the lawsuit filed by Pogorelovsky noted “at least” two lawyers “have already lost their licences for having aided ‘Missaghi and his associates’ in fraudulent real estate transactions.”
One of those was rookie lawyer Golnaz Vakili, whose suspicious disappearance the Star reported on in 2014. Vakili fled the country in March 2013 — with $5,000 in cash and a bag stuffed with yoga pants and purses — shortly before she was named as a central player in a mortgage scheme rooted in the Bridle Path that defrauded investors of as much as $17 million. In November 2013, police charged Vakili with fraud, perjury and using a forged document and issued a warrant for her arrest.
Golnaz Vakili, now in hiding, swears she’s innocent of an alleged mortgage fraud investors say could be worth as much as $17 million. The Star
Police described the operation, which they dubbed “Project Bridle Path,” as a “sophisticated and complex mortgage fraud investigation.” Investors were allegedly introduced to people who pretended to be the owners of luxury properties, a police news release said, and forged documents were produced to add legitimacy to the transactions. Mortgages that were expected to be secured on the homes were never registered, something that was misrepresented to lenders.
The Crown eventually dropped the charges against Missaghi and his other associates in the midst of the pandemic. Vakili returned to Canada and surrendered to police, eventually pleading guilty to obstructing justice and uttering forged documents.
There were no outstanding criminal charges against Missaghi at the time of his death and he had never been convicted any crime.
With files from Emily Fagan and Emily Mathieu
Jennifer
Pagliaro is a Toronto-based crime reporter for the Star. Follow
her on Twitter: @jpags.
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