Charm Offensive

Even before the truth came out, there were two faces to Sandford Sussman. To his customers in Barrie, middle-class people looking for safe investments, he was a tall, handsome man with unruly dark hair and a permanent smile. He was from the area, the son of a mortgage broker who had inherited the family business on Dunlop Street, ­Barrie’s main drag. When clients came in, he’d greet them with a firm handshake, often dressed as if he’d just come in from a jog: running shoes, track pants, an Under Armour jacket. He’d lead his customers to his office, where he’d whip out an oversized calculator and punch buttons, showing how fast their money would grow with his generous 9.5 per cent interest rates. Then he’d swing his monitor around and pull up pictures of the properties they’d be investing in, mostly quaint single-family houses in cottage country.

At his home just north of Forest Hill, however, Sussman was another man altogether. Instead of athleisure, he opted for preppy chic: Lacoste, Polo, Brooks Brothers, all tailored and monogrammed. Now in his 70s, he spent weekends at the Oakdale Golf and Country Club, a 27-hole Eden in the Humber Valley with a saltwater pool. He may have started out in Barrie, but it was here that he looked to make his mark. He networked incessantly to make inroads among respected lawyers, accountants and businesspeople in Toronto, securing a roster of wealthy investors. Many of them trusted Sussman with their life savings.

And then, when the Muskoka boom hit, he made a huge bet on cottage country. If it succeeded, he could expand his business substantially and further endear himself to his hard-earned clientele. If it failed, he would lose everything.

Sussman learned the mortgage trade from his father, Murray, who founded Sussman Mortgage Funding Inc. in 1962, when Sandy was a child. After grad school at NYU in the late 1970s, Sandy joined SMFI as a mortgage broker, and father and son split their time between the Barrie office and Summerhill, where Sandy’s parents owned a townhouse.

SMFI dealt in syndicated mortgages, essentially serving as a middleman between homeowners in search of short-term mortgage loans and investors looking to collect some reliable interest. For a lender, these made excellent investments: they generated rates far higher than the average GIC, and if the loan went sour, the property could always be repossessed. Investors would hand their cash to the Sussmans, who would then lend it to a mortgagor, usually for no longer than a year. When the borrower made their monthly payments, the Sussmans would forward those payments to their investors, minus their six per cent cut. And when the mortgage came due and the borrower repaid the loan in full, the Sussmans would repay their investors accordingly.

As Sussman was settling into the firm, his brother was becoming a fixture of Toronto’s well-to-do circles. Peter Sussman was a successful TV producer who would eventually work on Schitt’s Creek. By the mid-’80s, Peter had broken into a social tier that included Joy Cherry, a third-generation fashion mogul and the wife of respected Toronto pediatrician Fred Weinberg. It was at Peter’s 40th birthday party that Sandy first spotted Cherry’s daughter, Deena, a luxury fashion retailer. Sandy began an ardent courtship. When Deena was in Italy scouting for designers, he sent two bouquets of flowers to her hotel room each day. Deena was charmed, and they married in 1995.

Now connected to Toronto’s wealthy and powerful, Sussman set to work turning them into investors. He moved into a stately family home on Alexandra Wood, where his neighbours included the heirs to the Reichmann business empire. Around 2008, he leveraged a connection to score an invitation to lunch with accountants from Green Chencinski Starkman Eles, a firm headquartered at Yonge and Sheppard. Sussman gained several investors that day. Some of them would go on to pitch SMFI mortgages to their own clients and families, widening the circle of trust—and placing more money in SMFI’s hands.

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“The Sussmans are ungovernable,” wrote the FSCO

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But, even as Sussman climbed the social ladder, a reckoning was beginning at SMFI. In the early ’90s, the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO) had begun to tighten its regulations around the type of syndicated mortgages that SMFI had built its business on. Brokers often advised their investors to divide their cash into shares of several different mortgages; that way, if one defaulted, they wouldn’t lose their whole investment. This left brokers like the Sussmans holding many complicated and difficult-to-trace investments. Back in 1980, one leading provider of syndicated mortgages, the Argosy Group, collapsed, leaving $21 million owing to 1,000 investors and landing its CFO in prison for fraud. A similar crash happened with Mater’s Management, a company run by real estate mogul Alberto DoCouto, which fell apart and left some 5,000 investors out $100 million. (DoCouto was charged with breach of trust and offering a secret commission, but those charges were eventually dropped.) In 1992, to prevent more implosions, the FSCO started requiring brokers to provide detailed disclosure statements to lenders. They also mandated cool-down periods between investments so brokers couldn’t immediately roll investors’ money into new mortgages.

By then, the Sussmans were looking after $18 million in investments from some 30 investors, spread out over 130 mortgages. When the FSCO approached them with its new requirements, they balked. A tribunal would later find that, rather than report their finances to their investors, the Sussmans created a new company and declared it their investor, meaning that, technically, they had to report only to themselves. Father would pay son, son would send documentation to father, and none of their investors in Barrie or Toronto would ever see hard numbers.

That fooled the FSCO for a few years, but by 1998, regulators were showing up at SMFI’s offices demanding to see the books. According to the FSCO, the Sussmans resisted in any way they could: refusing to photocopy records, claiming computer crashes. When the regulators finally obtained their books, some of the numbers were suspicious. On one mortgage deal, the borrower’s payments had inexplicably dropped from $12,487 to $9,375 over the course of two months. The borrower, it turned out, was a friend of a friend, and Sandy described the loan as an “inside deal” where they allowed monthly payments at any amount, so long as SMFI’s investors received 7.5 per cent interest on their money. Sandy then took a third of that interest as an administrative charge—without letting his investors know about the arrangement. It was all highly unusual, and in 1999, the province went nuclear and, based on the FSCO’s allegations, froze SMFI’s bank accounts. The Sussmans didn’t even blink—they just opened a new account, funnelled their on­going interest payments into it and carried on as usual.

By 2000, the FSCO had had enough. It took the Sussmans to the Financial Services Tribunal to revoke their licence and, hopefully, put an end to their careers as brokers. “The Sussmans are ungovernable,” wrote the regulator in 2002. After a confrontational hearing, the court agreed to shut the Sussmans down, finding that neither Murray nor Sandy could be trusted to act with “integrity and honesty.” Only a technicality saved them. The tribunal, the Sussmans’ lawyers argued, hadn’t reviewed penalties in similar cases or considered alternatives, and it hadn’t given the Sussmans an opportunity to dispute their punishment. And so the case dragged on. On appeal, the Sussmans got the licence revocation overturned. Instead, their punishment was a slap on the wrist: a one-month suspension for the company plus an additional six months for Murray.

Most of the Sussmans’ clients knew nothing of the firm’s legal troubles, which continued well into the 2010s. Between 2009 and 2010, Murray and the firm were sued three times for professional negligence, and when SMFI failed to disclose those suits to regulators, it earned the Sussmans repeated fines from the FSCO (in 2009, 2010 and 2015). In 2014, Sandy was slapped with a $5,000 fine for unlicensed broker activity, and SMFI received a $7,500 administrative penalty. A year later, the FSCO demanded that Murray step down as SMFI’s principal broker, which he did. He died four years later.

All of these fines, threats and court cases were publicly available, the kinds of red flags that an investor doing due diligence might have been able to find. And yet, it seems no one bothered to look. Instead, many simply relied on Sandy’s good word. With clients, he was invariably pleasant and positive, making the most complex financial interactions sound simple. His charm was the bedrock of his success.

In the early 2010s, Sussman reconnected with a former roommate from New York, a successful entrepreneur who had moved back to Toronto. He introduced the man to his future wife, and on visits to the man’s home, Sussman casually dropped hints about investment opportunities. Such was his magnetism as a salesman that, when the man came into some cash, he went straight to Sussman. After all, Sussman was an old friend, was known to pay good returns and lived just a few blocks away. Over several years, the former roommate would invest nearly $4 million with Sussman, including his wife’s half-million-dollar inheritance and $340,000 they had saved for their daughter. Meanwhile, Sussman kept regularly coming by for visits, bringing his children to play in the summertime. “Maybe I should have done more digging,” the investor told me. “But I didn’t. I believed in Sandy.” (A few of Sussman’s investors agreed to speak about their losses for this story, but only on the condition of anonymity.)

Other, even wealthier clients believed in Sussman too. By then, he had added criminal lawyer Julianna Greenspan (daughter of Eddie) and her mother, Suzy, to his Rolodex. Julianna is best known for successfully defending Cal Foote, one of the World Junior hockey players charged in 2024 with sexual assault. She invested $300,000 with Sussman, and her mom put in more than $1 million. Sussman’s largest client by far, however, was Stanley Goldfarb, an accountant who had co-founded Goldfarb, Shulman, Patel and Co., a large firm that later joined with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Through his companies—the Goldfarb Corporation and Logpin Investments Limited—Goldfarb invested more than $40 million with Sussman. Goldfarb’s son, real estate lawyer Gary Goldfarb, made his own $1.39-million investment.

Under Sussman’s leadership, SMFI came to manage over $100 million in investments by 2025, more than four times the amount it had held in the early 2000s. Whatever was going on behind the scenes, investments with Sussman did indeed make good money—for a time, at least. An investor putting in sums in the range of $500,000, as many did, could expect to receive roughly $3,720 back per month, a decent complement to any salary. It was enough to quiet concerns when, as sometimes happened, Sussman automatically reinvested the client’s principal after their loans came due instead of notifying them and discussing their options. Why worry if the payments kept coming? Sussman liked to brag that, of the hundreds of mortgages he’d managed, he’d had to pursue foreclosure only once. As far as his investors were concerned, they’d hit the jackpot, and the man in charge was right there, tangible, accountable. “It was a good income, so you’re on a dopamine rush,” said one investor. “You’re mesmerized by him.”

In 2016, cottage country was on the rise. The Canadian dollar was down, and the image of Muskoka as the Hamptons of Canada was taking hold. The outrageously wealthy were moving in, and fast. Former Toronto Argonauts co-owner David Cynamon had bought a 10-acre estate on Lake Joseph with nine bedrooms, a tennis court, a tiki bar and a jacuzzi. Business mogul Bobby Genovese owned no fewer than five properties, one of which had a 15-metre-tall waterfall, a climbing wall and a waterslide all built into a rock face. Float plane flights were regularly whisking Bay Street executives from downtown to their own docks in less than 45 minutes.

The appeal trickled down: even homes without direct water access were experiencing boosted sales as middle-class buyers vied for their own slice of cottage country. In 2015, Muskoka was the second-fastest-growing recreational real estate market in the world, behind only France’s Côte d’Azur.

Up to this point, the properties Sussman had been mortgaging were existing homes, and despite any rule-bending behind closed doors, the investments had worked out. But, in trying to get his piece of the growing cottage country pie, he made a crucial error: he went from being a mortgage broker to being a developer.

Sussman began entering into much more speculative deals with home builders to partially own and finance the construction of whole subdivisions, which carried far more risk than the average mortgage. Instead of a single house with a single owner who had been approved, these developments were entirely dependent on the vagaries of the ever-changing market. Unlike his existing business, which involved short, defined timelines for the return of principal, these investments would be paid off only once the homes were built and sold. For anyone else, they would have been a hard sell to clients. But Sussman wasn’t just anyone. He assured at least one investor that these development projects were no different from the mortgages they had already financed, and he managed to get enough people on board to move ahead.

Sussman’s first development was Ballymore, a subdivision of more than 100 homes in Innisfil. The new neighbourhood was just down the road from Belle Aire Beach, a small strip of sand on the shore of Lake Simcoe where locals ditched their bikes to go for a swim. The homes weren’t on the water, but there was a marina just a two-minute drive away. In 2019, Sussman entered into a similar deal to build Lakepoint Village, a land-lease community near Ramara, at the north end of Lake Simcoe. It’s up the road from public lake access, and the sandy beach at Mara Provincial Park is just 10 minutes away.

Last and farthest north was the Waterways of Muskoka development, which Sussman became involved with in 2020. Its suburban-style homes sloped down toward the Muskoka River, each decorated with fieldstones, skylights and exposed wood beams for an aesthetic somewhere between cottagecore and McMansion. From the boat launch on Santa’s Village Road, residents could access the river that would bring them to the coves, bays and islands of Lake Muskoka.

The market continued to boom over the late 2010s, and the pandemic sent it absolutely bonkers. Waterfront real estate prices grew by a third between 2017 and 2021, and bidding wars erupted all over the area. Inland properties also got a boost, with the volume of sales jumping by 16.5 per cent in the spring of 2020. That year, SMFI received nearly $13.4 million from its three projects, which helped the company make a tidy profit of $10.9 million. From that, Sussman took a salary of $1.4 million.

Summers in cottage country are short, however, and so was the real estate boom. In the frenzy, buyers snapped up most of the available properties right before the Bank of Canada raised interest rates for the first time in two years. Inflation cut into buyers’ chequebooks, and by 2022, pandemic-driven supply chain issues were creating headaches for homebuilders, who were paying a premium for scarce lumber and other materials. With the end of the lockdowns in sight, city folk who had fled to cottage country began to run the other way. The market cooled, and Sussman’s balance sheets suffered. In 2022, he netted only $3.73 million from his developments and had to reinvest $1.43 million. SMFI finished the year with a profit of $679,629, around six per cent of what it had made in 2021.

There was little money coming in to pay SMFI’s investors, and power of sale doesn’t protect your investment when no one is buying. Still, there was always the possibility that the market would roar back to life. At some point, Sussman must have decided that he could keep his investors in the game long enough for cottage country to start selling again.

He set to work papering over increasingly visible cracks in his business model. His old roommate says that, by 2022, he was frequently receiving interest payments late. He and his wife had several mortgages maturing in January of 2023, and, frustrated, he called to tell Sussman that, once those came due, they wanted out. According to the roommate, Sussman assured him that it wouldn’t be a problem—as long as he could find investors to replace them. That had never been part of their contract, but the man trusted Sussman to keep his word. Indeed, Sussman had such a strong hold on him that, the same year, he advised his daughter to invest $140,000 with SMFI. Sussman, who had known the young woman her whole life, seemed happy to take her money. Stanley Goldfarb also began noticing missed payments. Sussman, ever upbeat, quickly agreed to a repayment plan, then promptly failed to meet it. By 2023, Sussman’s former roommate says the broker was alluding to cash flow problems, suggesting that he wouldn’t be able to pay him out of his investment until more of the homes in his developments had sold.

Those sales, meanwhile, were looking increasingly unlikely. The real estate market in cottage country continued to fall over 2023, and the economy was taking a turn for the worse. The boom that Sussman had bought into was well and truly over. By the end of the year, SMFI was left with a shortfall of $6.89 million. Still, he had options. One was to come clean, own up to his mistakes and admit to his investors that he’d been foiled by an unpredictable market. Another option was to lie.

Sussman desperately needed more cash to keep his investors off his back. He found it in late 2023, in the form of a middle-aged couple in Barrie who ran a small business. They had just come into $560,000 from the sale of their storefront property and each had another $95,000 in retirement savings. One of their stepfathers had been a long-time investor with Murray, and as Barrie locals, they were familiar with SMFI. They sought out Sussman in the hope of putting their nest egg to work.

At his Barrie office, Sussman brought out his calculator, leaning in with his hands clasped as they described their finances. His operation was clearly old school, which the couple found reassuring. Their money would come in cheques, and all the contracts were done with pen and paper. Boxes of old files lined the walls.

As luck would have it, Sussman told them, he had two very safe mortgages on offer. The couple invested $310,000 into a quaint old red-brick bungalow in Severn Township. The second mortgage was for a homebuilder constructing a lovely lakeside manor in Tiny Township, backing directly onto Georgian Bay. The couple invested $440,000, but they now allege that there was no such project. The homebuilder Sussman had described hadn’t owned the property since 2018. And when the money for that loan landed in SMFI’s account, Sussman promptly distributed it to his other investors, calling it dividends. In May of 2024, when their investment on the home came due and they expected to have their principal returned, Sussman kept sending interest payments as though the loan was still active. Confused, the couple visited his office, where they say he turned his computer screen to face them and told them they were looking at proof that their mortgage was still in good standing. They weren’t real estate experts, and they couldn’t really understand what was on the screen, but they trusted Sussman and were heartened by his unflappable confidence. They took his word that their principal was still invested.

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By 2023, the cottage boom was well and truly over

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Two months later, the couple says, Sussman called them multiple times insisting that he had an opportunity coming up. Even a small investment, as little as $10,000, could be fruitful, he promised. They were about to embark on a three-week trip when, at Sussman’s urging, they gave him $30,000 to put toward another mortgage. Rushing to leave, they made the deal without so much as signing paperwork. The couple says that, in August, when their mortgage on the Severn house came due, Sussman didn’t return their principal. The mortgage hadn’t defaulted; Sussman, it seemed, had simply kept the money.

Meanwhile, he was hounding other clients to invest in short-term loans. In July of 2024, he managed to solicit $75,000 from two investors, saying the money was going toward 30-day investments with 10.5 per cent interest rates. These, too, were highly informal: neither investor received any kind of contract, and Sussman simply dropped the cash into SMFI’s general account.

Despite his best efforts, Sussman’s façade was crumbling. More and more investors were receiving late payments or not being paid at all. Even long-time investors were growing suspicious. Sussman was inconsistent with his emails and texts, but he was quick to take a call, and his phone rang more and more often. On the line with frustrated investors, he was initially cheery, then would act surprised and concerned when they brought up their missed payments. How could that be? Why, I took the money to RBC just today! It must be an administrative problem, he’d insist. One of his housing development investors says Sussman assured him that several lots were due to close. In reality, sales were hopelessly stalled.

The size of Sussman’s network, the very thing that had once propelled him to success, soon became a liability. He had dozens of investors to tend to and dwindling funds. In December of 2024, his old roommate texted him, “It’s all BS! Non performing. No development. No houses being built. Money gone…I have given you more than six months to pay our money back.” His old friend was prepared to sue, but Sussman managed to talk him down, promising that the development could secure funding to get back on track.

Stanley Goldfarb, the investor with $40 million in SMFI, was the first to take drastic measures. Interest payments to his companies were months behind, and none of his loans had been paid off in full since 2022. On October 29, 2024, he lodged a formal complaint with the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario, which had taken the reins from the FSCO in 2019. Sussman, Goldfarb wrote, “has consistently lied and made promises he has not kept.” Goldfarb asked the FSRA if it could help him get back his principal, if not the interest. But the FSRA declined. As Ontario’s financial regulator, it’s in charge of licensing mortgage brokers and conducting occasional spot or complaint-driven audits, but it does not monitor whether individual investments work out. In its response to Goldfarb, the FSRA said that it had no responsibility over “contractual matters,” including loans such as the ones he had with Sussman. “If you are seeking compensation, you will need to take your own action,” a representative wrote.

Goldfarb did just that. By the end of 2024, he had discovered the specifics of at least one of the developments Sussman had invested in—and a chance to recoup his losses. That December, Stanley and his son, Gary, had Sussman sign a promissory note handing over his cash flow from the Ballymore project as security for the nearly $15 million the Goldfarbs were owed. In an attached note, which Sussman signed, the Goldfarbs outlined his scheme, a practice known as oversubscription. The Goldfarbs had invested their millions into four syndicated loans, but the loans themselves weren’t worth nearly that much. Sussman had taken their money but invested only a portion of it.

Where the rest went remains a mystery, but SMFI’s records show that, by this time, Sussman was paying out far more to his existing investors than he was bringing in. In 2024, his mortgages and housing projects delivered barely $278,000, so he started pulling payments from elsewhere. In February of 2025, Sussman asked one investor for $40,000 in blank cheques, promising to provide details later. The investor agreed, but when he reviewed his bank statements, he discovered that Sussman had made the cheques out to some of his other investors. Meanwhile, SMFI was scrambling to sell investments—some of them on mortgages that had already been repaid—just to service a backlog of interest payments. And yet each new dollar it brought in came with another monthly payment that would need to be sent out.

Bankruptcy was looming, and when it came, everyone with a stake in SMFI would rush to withdraw their money. The Goldfarbs wasted no time: in February, they had Sussman sign another promissory note, this time handing over his cash flow from the Ramara land-lease community, and then secured yet more debt against the Waterways of Muskoka development. Once that was done, the Goldfarbs owned the income from all three of Sussman’s developments. Even if any of the houses did sell, Sussman and his other investors would get nothing. The Goldfarbs also got Sussman to admit his guilt: in the words of one contract Sussman signed in February of 2025, he had “improperly, fraudulently and illegally” taken their money “in violation of the laws of the Province of Ontario,” all while appropriating funds to make his interest payments.

Meanwhile, Sussman’s old roommate was doing his own research. He had a lawyer run title searches on Sussman’s properties, which pulled up records of the deals with the Goldfarbs. Those, he says, revealed that Sussman, his friend of decades, had been lying to him for months: the former roommate was not going to see any proceeds from the development projects because it had all been promised to the Goldfarbs. He and his wife sued Sussman for the $1.2 million they claim he owed them, plus negligence; unjust enrichment; personal liability; and breach of contract, trust and fiduciary duty.

The Barrie couple, too, were trying to get their money back. They visited SMFI’s office in February of 2025, where they say they overheard a man asking Sussman, in tears, “What am I going to tell my wife?” When they asked what was happening, Sussman told them the crying man’s investments were with the Ramara development, which they weren’t on. Spooked, the couple hired a lawyer to look into their investments. They claim this lawyer discovered that their lakefront home mortgage was a sham and that the two other loans they’d invested in—which were real—had already been discharged. But, instead of returning their money, the couple says, Sussman had invested it into Ramara, the very development he had assured them they had nothing to do with.

They called Sussman right away. “How could you do this to us? This was our life savings,” one of them said, threatening to call the police. But they say Sussman shrugged them off, warning them that calling the police would only delay the sale of the properties. Any legal action, he argued, would be bad for home sales, which he said were the only way the couple could hope to get their money back. Of course, this was a lie: any cash from the development would go straight to the Goldfarbs.

Shortly afterward, Sussman’s mortgage licence expired. That was the end of the road: without being able to sell more mortgages, he had no way to keep feeding the beast. He was done. On April 1, 2025, investors received a letter that read like a bad April Fools’ joke: “As you may be aware,” it began, SMFI “has been experiencing financial difficulties relating to its portfolio of syndicated mortgage loans.”

The Goldfarbs sued Sussman just days after the news went out, with Julianna and Suzy Greenspan joining as plaintiffs. (Neither the Goldfarbs nor the Greenspans responded to interview requests.) The Goldfarb-Greenspan suit, for $44 million, claims that Sussman never told them he was a part-owner of the developments they were investing in and that he was therefore self-dealing with their cash. That constituted a breach of fiduciary duty—as did the fact that Sussman had held on to their money long after their mortgages had come due, paying interest as though they were still going. The Barrie couple was next, suing Sussman for $785,000 plus punitive damages of $500,000 for conduct that was “high handed, outrageous, reckless, wanton, entirely without care, deliberate, cowardly, disgraceful and wilful.”

Sussman and SMFI have yet to file statements of defence in the Goldfarbs’ or the Barrie couple’s lawsuits. In his statement of defence against his old roommate, Sussman denied all wrongdoing. He pointed out that his roommate could hardly claim ignorance: his work had included venture capital financing, and he held a law degree. When investing with Sussman, the roommate had explicitly described himself as having a high risk tolerance and had acknowledged the possibility of losses; laid out in explicit detail in the forms they’d all signed was the fact that these were developments that would make money only if their homes sold. Sussman also claimed that he had fully paid down his roommate’s investment in the Ramara development. The daughter, he said, had invested via her father and inherited his risk tolerance.

The roommate’s family, Sussman claimed, were seeking to make him liable for their own fully informed decisions. SMFI had acted “reasonably, honestly, and in good faith” and in full compliance with the law. Indeed, since the business was conducted through SMFI, the defence sought to exclude Sussman from personal liability. SMFI denied all allegations of breach of contract, fiduciary duty and trust; unjust enrichment; personal liability and damages. Sussman, his lawyer and SMFI did not respond to my requests for comment, and the investors’ allegations against Sussman have not been proven in court.

In April, the FSRA finally decided to get involved. Missed payments were one thing, but now several of Sussman’s investors were alleging fraud. On the regulator’s recommendation, SMFI was put into receivership. It was now up to the court-appointed receiver to figure out how much money the company had, what mortgages it owned and what debts it owed. The task after that would be, theoretically, to dole out whatever was left to the investors.

On May 2, 2025, the provincial court froze Sussman’s assets and confiscated his passport. A week later, he took the stand to be questioned by a lawyer for the Goldfarb Group. There, he presented himself as penniless, destitute and a mere tenant of his wife’s house. Sussman claimed to have maxed out all his lines of credit and insisted that he had no source of income. He even went so far as to complain about the effort of managing his own imploding scheme. “I continue to do work that I am not being paid for,” he said. “I am doing what I can do to assist in attempting to recover all of the investors’ money.”

The Goldfarbs’ lawyers were relentless. When Sussman took the stand again eight days later, they asked him to itemize his every possession, down to the shoes on his feet, as though he could be stripped naked to pay his debts. He said that the car he drove—a leased Tesla Model Y—would be returned to the dealer in weeks, less a set of winter tires, which were his. The Goldfarbs’ lawyers asked Sussman if he owned any jewellery or watches. All he had, Sussman insisted, were clothes and shoes. When the lawyers asked if any of those items were worth $1,000, Sussman complained that a sweater should depreciate in value over time. No monogrammed polo shirts could save him now. Sussman was being appraised by the very people he had spent a lifetime working to impress.

Pressured on the stand, he was by turns forthcoming and cryptic, playing sincere while slyly feigning ignorance and spinning excuses. When asked how he had planned to pay the Goldfarbs the nearly $15 million he had promised them in December of 2024, he said, “I had no plan. In such pressure, I was signing anything to keep everyone afloat.” On the matter of his own personal finances—including mysterious payments entering his maxed-out accounts—he claimed ignorance again and again. Surprisingly, however, when asked if funds collected from new investors had been used to pay the interest owed to old ones—the essence of a Ponzi scheme—he said, “They might have, yes.”

Meanwhile, the receiver was, with great difficulty, going through Sussman’s tortuous records. On June 2, they announced their findings. Sussman had 117 investors, to whom he owed $101 million­—and yet the most they could hope to recover was just under 40 per cent. Even that was a rough estimate: Sussman’s computer system was ancient, and under the pretence of conserving disk space, he had frequently deleted old records, making recovering any information before 2017 next to impossible. When he did use industry-standard tools, Sussman instructed his bookkeeper to enter figures without any supporting documentation. Many of the cells that should have recorded which loans an investor’s money was being put toward simply read: “into ???” As for what had gone wrong, the receiver could only state the obvious: Sussman’s business had collapsed because it had more money going out than coming in.

There has yet to be a ruling in any of the investors’ lawsuits, which have taken a back seat to the receivership process. Much of the money invested in SMFI will likely never be recovered. In the battle over what’s left, it has become the Goldfarb and Green­span group versus all of Sussman’s other wronged investors, who are being jointly represented by Aird and Berlis. Both parties remain locked in negotiations with the receiver, with the smaller-time investors angry at the Goldfarbs for getting at Sussman early. “Just because they’re worth 100 times more than I am doesn’t mean their losses are any different than mine,” says one. “We all got screwed.” While the Goldfarbs have continued to rely on their promissory notes, the other investors hope those will be nullified by the courts. “Sandy’s signature isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” says the same investor.

Several of Sussman’s investors are also questioning the FSRA’s role in the case. How, given SMFI’s record of suspicious behaviour, did the regulator never check on Sussman’s practices? “Pick up any file and they’d find the problem,” says one investor. “They did such a terrible, terrible job.” In a statement, the FSRA noted that its mandate doesn’t include monitoring mortgage transactions in real time and that it has no authority to order repayment. While it can investigate claims of fraud, people first need to complain, and—with the exception of Stanley Goldfarb—none of Sussman’s clients did. All his honeyed words worked to prevent exactly that.

The OPP’s anti-rackets branch has launched an investigation into Sussman, but the burden of proof is far higher in criminal cases than in civil ones. So far, he has not been charged. In other ways, though, his life has imploded. He was ejected from the Oakdale Golf and Country Club, and his name has been forever tarnished among his investors. For those who lost everything with Sussman, their association with him is a painful and embarrassing memory. Instead of retiring early, the Barrie couple will now spend another decade working full time. Both of them have since suffered from depression that they say has affected their marriage and their relationships with family and friends. For one of them, Sussman’s kind, smiling face has shown up in a recurring nightmare, in which she hands him a cheque bearing her savings over and over again.

Meanwhile, Sussman can still be spotted roaming Forest Hill. In late 2025, one of his investors was at Bruno’s Fine Foods, finishing a phone call in the parking lot, when a Tesla parked next to him. It was the very car Sussman had sworn he was returning months earlier. The two met at the prepared food counter. “Sandy,” said the investor, fed up. “Really?” Even then, Sussman was all smiles. “You guys are going to be made whole,” he insisted. “You’re all going to be fine.”

This story appears in the July 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.