Pathological Lawyer

In an industry obsessed with curb appeal, Singa Bui looked the part: designer suits, forever-fresh blow outs, a Jaguar SUV. Her collection of four-inch Manolos was a monument to upward mobility. Over the years, she had earned a place in the digital Rolodexes of many of Toronto’s real estate agents, one call away when their clients needed a lawyer to process documents and oversee the transfer of funds. Bui was professional, reliable and ­thoughtful—she remembered the names of her clients’ kids and gifted bougie baskets and $100 scented candles come holiday season.

Ryan and Danielle Fung never met Bui in person, but her flash would have been wasted on them anyway. They are devout Christians and unimpressed by material extravagance. Software engineers during the tech boom, they scrimped and saved and by late 2023 had tucked away enough to pay in full for a $2.175-million Edwardian in Riverdale. It was the quintessential Toronto dream home, although the Fungs had a different sort of dream: they planned to renovate the building to house missionaries. But, first, the deal had to close.

Related: The professor, the caregiver and the missing $30 million

Most prospective homebuyers don’t know their lawyers. Agents are the ones accompanying them to open houses, inspecting foundations, speculating about which walls are load-bearing and whether that undersized primary suite can truly accommodate a king bed. Lawyers, often connected with clients by the buying agent, parachute in at the end to oversee the finances and fine print—which is how it went with the Fungs. Through a quick Google search, they learned that Singa Bui was a co-founder of Cartel and Bui, a boutique law firm in Liberty Village, and had been called to the bar in 2010. They sent an email inquiring about her availability and got a response just 20 minutes later: she would be happy to help. Bui’s assistant followed up with an invite for a virtual meeting on November 20, a chance to introduce themselves and complete paperwork ahead of their December 1 closing date. But, five days before their scheduled meeting, an odd request came from Bui: Could the Fungs please send the funds early? “Given the current issues with fraud, banks are holding funds for longer clearing periods,” the email read. Depositing the funds early would help avoid any closing delays.

The Fungs were surprised by Bui’s request. She was asking them to wire $2.155 million—the price of the house plus lawyer’s fees and taxes, minus the deposit they’d paid when their offer was accepted—in advance without even having met. Uncomfortable, they decide to wait until their virtual appointment with Bui to complete the transfer. They got an email from Bui the following day confirming receipt and expected to hear from her next on December 1. That morning, the Fungs waited for the call letting them know they could collect the keys. Instead, around 4 p.m., Ryan heard from their agent, who asked if they’d spoken with Bui. He had three clients closing with her that day, and it was radio silence on all fronts. Even more worrisome, the seller of the Fungs’ new home still hadn’t received the balance of the payment. Pushing down his rising panic, Ryan emailed Bui. Half an hour later, his phone rang and he finally exhaled, hopeful. This would be Bui explaining she had gotten her dates mixed up or had been held up with a different deal and would transfer the money to the seller right away. But it wasn’t Bui on the line.

Nicholas Cartel is Bui’s other half, in life and on the company letterhead. His wife, he explained to Ryan, had taken an emergency medical leave to care for their fourth child, an infant son, who was ill. For now, he would be overseeing the firm’s real estate files. How awful, Ryan responded, expressing his sympathy and even offering to pray for Bui and the baby. But would it be possible to get an update on the $2.155 million that had still not been delivered to the seller’s account and was now…where, exactly?

At first, Cartel’s explanations seemed plausible. The firm’s real estate files were usually Bui’s domain. He would need a bit of time to untangle everything, he said. He was working on the file, dealing with the seller’s lawyers and trying to gain access to the account. Then he had access, but a purchase was different from a sale. He was in touch with the bank’s head office, and yes, he had signing authority, but not the right kind. He had to open an independent entity, the bank was reversing his access and blah, blah, blah, because it was all starting to sound like nonsense to the Fungs. When they pointed out inconsistencies and contradictions, Cartel would present a new deflection.

Related: Where to Buy Next—Twelve Toronto neighbourhoods destined for big things

On December 6, Cartel agreed to meet Ryan and Danielle at the TD Bank in Liberty Village, the branch that held the firm’s trust account, the following day. The couple were cautiously optimistic—surely somebody there would be able to straighten out this mess. But Cartel was a no-show. “Pointless to meet at the branch level as they cannot assist me. I will come to you with a cheque,” he texted Danielle. But he and the cheque never arrived, and the Fungs grew frantic that the deal was in jeopardy. It was time to cut Nicholas Cartel loose. They hired a lawyer, who demanded the return of the full $2.155 million in writing. Cartel responded with assurances that, no, really, he was this close to closing, but the Fungs weren’t interested. “I do want to be clear. Our clients have lost confidence in the ability of you, Singa Bui and/or Cartel and Bui LLP to close the transaction,” their lawyer wrote back.

By late December, the seller of the house wanted out; the Fungs were officially in breach of the sale agreement. Through no fault of their own, they’d forfeited their deposit, and the home, their home, was going back on the market. They were crushed but resolute. There were other houses, other paths forward. Let these charlatans answer to God; they just wanted their $2 million back. Except Cartel was equally resolute. He would fix everything, he promised. He would buy the house himself, if that’s what it took. And the missionaries? They could come and stay with him until everything was sorted out. It was an absurd proposition, and still the Fungs responded with remarkable poise: “Thanks for your concern, but you can best help us by returning our funds.”

They would soon find out just how far they were from achieving that goal. When Ryan went to pull up the Cartel and Bui website, he got a broken URL notification. On the Law Society of Ontario website, Bui was now listed as “not practising.” The Fungs’ lawyer suggested an asset search on both Cartel and Bui, and the results were horrifying. The two homes they owned were mortgaged to the hilt. Even more disturbing was a recent private loan against both properties with an 18 per cent interest rate and a two-month maturity period. It was a level of financial recklessness the Fungs couldn’t fathom. But it was also confirmation that the nightmare scenario they had been pushing out of their minds for weeks was a reality: the lawyer they had put their faith in was a liar, and their $2 million was probably gone.

It’s a little on the nose when you think about it: trust account. Every year, hundreds of thousands of homes change hands across Canada, representing billions of dollars. For those fortunate enough to be able to afford their own home, it is probably the single largest financial transaction they will ever be involved in. Yet most people spend more time vetting a new hairdresser than their real estate lawyer, rarely pausing to consider the vulnerabilities of the current system. It wasn’t always like this. In Ontario, buyers used to have to make out two separate cheques—one to the company or bank holding whatever mortgage was left on the property and another to the seller for the balance of the sale price. In other words, nobody except the company holding the mortgage could cash cheque number one. Now, the whole amount usually goes from the buyer’s bank to the buyer’s lawyer’s trust account to the seller’s lawyer, who disperses the funds accordingly. There is a code of conduct, oaths sworn as officers of the court. Some of the lawyers I spoke with put it in Fight Club terms. The first rule of estate law is: you do not touch the trust funds. The second rule? You do not touch the trust funds.

In the vast majority of cases, the transaction proceeds properly, everyone moves on with their lives and the lawyers’ names fade to black. But there are other outcomes, such as lawyers using trust accounts as their own personal piggy banks. The Law Society’s approach when it comes to policing places a lot of faith in its members. Trust accounts are monitored via a system of self-­reporting and spot checks, which are supposed to be conducted every few years (but rarely are) or in response to specific complaints (which investigators often take months, even years, to act on). Critics argue that the system, as it stands, is more than just ineffectual—it’s incentivizing. An over-leveraged lawyer will commit an infraction thinking they’ll have time to cover it up before they get caught. “You see this pattern where lawyers are essentially going for broke—getting their hands on as much money as possible before the doomsday clock runs out,” says Brian King, CEO of King International Advisory Group, a Toronto-based firm that investigates mortgage fraud on behalf of insurance companies.

Related: Meet the most charming fraudster in GTA real estate

During Covid, virtual real estate transactions became commonplace, a modern convenience that comes with less person-to-person interaction and more risk. And the surge in home values during the pandemic made trust accounts that much more alluring to would-be fraudsters. In August, the Real Estate Council of Ontario ordered Mississauga brokerage iPro Realty Ltd. to shut down all 17 of its offices following the discovery of a $10.5-million shortfall—the two lead brokers stand accused of siphoning from the company’s trust accounts. Arash Missaghi, a prolific mortgage fraudster from Brampton, managed to evade authorities until 2024, when he was murdered by one of his victims. And in 2021, a Mississauga real estate lawyer named Shahid Malik stole $10 million in trust funds and fled to Dubai. Despite being arrested a year later at Pearson, Malik seems to have inspired several copycats. Before the pandemic, only a couple of the cases that crossed King’s desk involved unscrupulous lawyers. Since 2023, he’s worked on more than a dozen. Malik’s MO—pinching the money meant to close out the seller’s mortgage—is known as failure to discharge. It’s a popular scam because it can take a few weeks for the company holding the mortgage to detect that the money is missing. “The goal is anything that gives a bit of wiggle room,” says King.

For years, Singa Bui had access to a steady stream of potential victims, the red-hot real estate market her unwitting accomplice. By all appearances, she and Cartel were the couple who had it all: the right house in the right neighbourhood, fancy clothes, flashy cars, children in private school and summers in Europe. But it was all just an illusion. In King’s experience, cases like this often involve a costly vice, a drug or a gambling habit that has spiralled out of control. With Bui, he sees a similar pattern: “I think what we’re looking at is an addiction to the high life.” The high life hung easily off Bui’s willowy frame, at least in the beginning. “The lovely Singa Bui has struck again,” reads a caption on a Toronto fashion blog from 2012. In the accompanying photo, Bui poses in a vintage 1950s frock, beaming from under a wide-brimmed hat. The young law school graduate was the embodiment of her parents’ aspirations. Khanh Kim Bui and Tich Quang Bui had come to Canada from Vietnam and, after settling in Toronto, founded a tech company called ABO Wireless. The business gave them financial security and social standing within the city’s Vietnamese community. It was a privileged existence for Singa and her brother, though it came with the pressure to validate their parents’ sacrifice. For Singa, failure wasn’t an option. She was beautiful and accomplished and had a bright career ahead of her. Now all she needed was the right partner.

If not quite dazzling, Nicholas Cartel was certainly dapper. Confident and rakish in a country-­club kind of way, he would roll up to the campus of Queen’s law school in his Porsche. Nearly a decade older than most of his classmates, he’d pursued a PhD in biochemistry before switching to law. “We used to call him Dr. Nick, like the character from The Simpsons,” one former classmate told me, the nickname flicking at his tendency to talk a big game. After being called to the bar in 2005, Cartel jumped from firm to firm before spending three years at the Department of Justice as legal counsel for the Competition Bureau.

He first met Bui at a party and was initially struck by her beauty, then pleased by their common career. In all other ways, it was an opposites-attract pairing. Cartel was in his late 40s, Bui in her early 30s. His passions were bookish and highfalutin—opera, ballet, European history—while she was social, in the know when it came to the latest hotspots and always up for fun. They had their first date at a restaurant on King West, and Cartel came equipped with an exit strategy in case they didn’t hit it off, but he never had to use it. They got married in 2013 and lived together in Cartel’s place—an 800-square-foot condo in the Shangri-La, then Toronto’s poshest vertical address. They were an entity on the rise: in 2014, they launched their eponymous law firm in the Carpet Factory Lofts in Liberty Village, another bold-faced address that they outfitted in pricey furnishings and artwork. One lawyer told me how the flashy display of wealth struck him as ill-considered: when you’re a mom-and-pop firm and your place looks like something out of Architectural Digest, clients are going to wonder what, exactly, their money is paying for. In the case of Cartel and Bui, such a question would have been well founded.

Bui started dipping into the firm’s trust account almost as soon as the doors opened. At first, the amounts were small, almost negligible, mostly to help pay rent or meet payroll, expenses typical of getting a small business off the ground. This illicit borrowing was just a temporary measure—soon the firm would be more profitable. And if not, there was always her husband’s income. Cartel had left his namesake firm within a year of its founding. He’d always had his sights set on antitrust law and leaped at an associate position at Goodmans, one of Bay Street’s Seven Sisters. In 2016, another big jump: a partnership role at Sutts, Strosberg, the most successful class-action shop in Canada at the time. Cartel was hired to expand the firm’s Toronto offices, a buzzy venture that was fêted on the rooftop patio at the Chase with a gathering of bigwigs in business attire—Cartel was the guy in the three-piece suit, his signature horseshoe waistcoat the sort of conspicuous haberdashery you might see at a royal wedding.

An unabashed Europhile, Cartel had a flirting style somewhere between nerdy and pretentious: “Ich möchte diese Kunst kaufen!” (German for “I want to buy this art!”) he wrote to Bui in an email with an attached photo of a $92,000 abstract nude sculpture he said reminded him of her. Curves aside, Cartel was attracted to his wife’s ambition. For example, he liked to tell the story of when Bui gave birth to their first child, in 2018. According to him, Bui went from the office to the Bay to pick up a few pre-delivery essentials, then walked to the hospital, gave birth and was in a meeting by 3 p.m. the next day. Parenthood was an exciting new chapter, yes, but it was also a fresh opportunity to project status. Their son’s birthday celebration, held at the Shangri-La, was like something out of an episode of The Kardashians. Soon Bui was pregnant with their second child, and keeping up meant a move to North Toronto—into a detached three-bedroom home on the outskirts of Lawrence Park. One of Canada’s priciest postal codes, the neighbourhood is nestled between the Cricket and Granite clubs and ringed by private schools—including the Toronto French School, where Cartel and Bui would eventually send their children. More space meant more stuff, and Bui’s reliance on the trust account grew. Her family’s uptown existence didn’t come cheap. Liquidity was a concern, so she leaned on credit cards. Life had become a flurry of spending in the moment and then scrambling to make up the difference.

When Cartel left his high-paying Bay Street job to return to the couple’s firm, the move struck many in Toronto’s class-action community as strange—the equivalent of ditching Broadway to rejoin your old college theatre troupe. Cartel says he left to pursue the greater rewards that would come with overseeing his own cases—a claim that is not, theoretically, impossible. Whereas most lawyers get paid by the plaintiffs or defendants they represent, class-action suits are often funded by third-party investors who pump in money from the sidelines in hopes of a major payout. Class-action lawyers also stand to earn big, maybe even huge. Still, it’s a gamble and a long game. While they waited, Bui was the sole breadwinner, and she was footing the bill for both the family’s expenses and her husband’s entrepreneurial endeavours.

When they started out, husband and wife had shared office space, but when Cartel returned, he set up a separate practice on the second floor, with new computers and servers. The couple’s third child was born in late 2020, Bui’s truncated maternity leave another instance of blink-and-you’d-miss-it. Now was hardly the time for her to step away, after all. The world might have been in lockdown, but the real estate market was on a bender, and home values were exploding across the GTA. Bui dipped ever deeper into her firm’s trust account, and why not, with all these new clients clamouring for her services? Cartel was also circling potential paydays. He was about to file a $200-million class action involving the legal software provider Dye and Durham Ltd. And he was involved in two international infrastructure projects: a port for cruise ships in the Bahamas and a commercial shipping dock in Guyana, both promising millions in brokerage fees if they came through.

Cartel wasn’t the type to dwell on “ifs.” How else to explain email exchanges with a Sotheby’s real estate agent based in Turks and Caicos? He was interested, Cartel wrote, in purchasing a house or a villa from which to operate an international business. He had a budget between $9 million and $11 million, but he needed advice on the location. Long Bay or Grace Bay? He was open to both but leaning toward the latter: “Our understanding is that Grace Bay may be more beautiful or more revered,” he wrote. In the same exchange, he asked the agent to recommend a colleague in Paris. He and his wife were also on the hunt for a hôtel particulier, a grand urban home for their family, preferably one along the Seine with a view of the Eiffel Tower. The budget he presented for the proposed pied à terre: $10 million to $16 million—a price tag entirely divorced from his family’s real-world financial situation.

---

The celebration Bui and Cartel threw for their son’s birthday was like something out of The Kardashians

---

The same could be said of their day-to-day spending, which had jumped from unfettered to unhinged: five-star travel and hundreds of thousands spent at high-end boutiques (Christian Dior, Chanel, Brunello Cucinelli, Harry Rosen). Many people developed online shopping habits during the pandemic, but Bui’s designer sprees read less like Confessions of a Shopaholic and more like retail Russian roulette. On a number of occasions, she made large purchases—a few thousand dollars at a Net-a-Porter or Mytheresa—then reversed the charges before the package was even shipped. It was a sign, perhaps, of momentary lucidity. But whatever crisis of conscience Bui may have been feeling was ultimately stifled by her social ambition.

A small and exclusive pocket of Lawrence Park, Teddington Park is a private dining room in an already posh restaurant. Built up around the relocation of the Rosedale Golf Club in 1909, the neighbourhood is home to properties ranging in value from $4 million to $17 million and sporting horsey-set nicknames. When it was listed in 2022, “the Flag House,” a six-bedroom, five-bathroom home on Golfdale Road, was trumpeted as “the envy of the neighbourhood.” Later that year, Cartel and Bui—who was pregnant with their fourth—bought it for $4.5 million and moved in. In step with the generally accepted practices of late-stage Covid, most of their new neighbours kept to themselves. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t watching, peering through plush curtains to get a read on the recent arrivals—an expanding family that seemed a little young for the area. “I knew they were both lawyers, and she was pregnant, so still of childbearing age,” one long-time Golfdale resident told me. “I saw the cars in the driveway. You had to wonder how they were financing this lifestyle. Something just didn’t add up.”

It’s a special kind of trick, this rich-person math—the ability to assess and appraise and issue a verdict on who is legit and who is almost certainly faking it, to sort private-school rich from private-jet rich in the casual way that most people sort laundry. There are no have-nots in this universe, just a lot of want-mores and house-poors, overextended and miserable but committed to upholding the illusion. “Fake it till you make it” is a well-worn motto of class mobility, but it’s also its own grift. Because there is no making it, not really—there are just new excesses to aspire to.

Anthony Ingarra started working with Bui in 2015, on the recommendation of his brother, a real estate agent. A fire captain in Oakville, Ingarra runs a side hustle as a mortgage agent; over the years, he sent hundreds of clients and millions of dollars Bui’s way, including many of his own private loans. They developed a friendly working relationship, texting regularly. In 2022, Ingarra, his brother and their mother pooled funds to issue a $308,000 loan. Bui was their lawyer, entrusted to oversee the financial transfers and pay out Ingarra and his family on maturity. The borrowers held up their end of the bargain, wiring the capital repayment to the Cartel and Bui trust account, after which—poof—it disappeared.

Bui’s betrayal of her long-time colleague coincided with the cooling down of the real estate market. It dipped gently at first, dropping a few percentage points in early 2022, then took a nosedive. The high times had come with earnings spikes for everyone in the field—developers, agents, lawyers—but suddenly profits were tanking, and borrowing rates tripled. The industry hangover was brutal, and for Bui, it was the beginning of the end. She started voicing a desire to get out of real estate, telling at least one client about her dream of living off a “passive income” in England. Even as the couple was filling out the paperwork for their home on Golfdale in late 2022, Cartel was emailing a colleague in the UK asking for advice about schools: “My wife wants our children to be educated internationally and wants to maintain homes in Canada and the UK,” he wrote. Soon, Bui was going back and forth with an administrator at a London private school called Alleyn’s, saying she hoped to register her children for the start of the following school year. She promised to send the registration fee soon and asked if she could pay by credit card.

Money management in the household had become a game of million-dollar Whac-a-Mole. Bui and Cartel embarked on an extended borrowing spree, securing $1.5 million in litigation funding—a loan against future class-action earnings—from a lender in Bermuda. Bui accepted nearly $1 million in loans from five family members, the memo on a $320,000 cheque from her uncle reading “bridge loan.” But, if they had any hope of paying for their new home on Golfdale, the couple would need a bigger bridge. Both the $475,000 downpayment on the property and another $1.4 million in equity came out of the Cartel and Bui trust account; a $2.4-million mortgage made up the difference. A second mortgage of $1 million on Golfdale followed a few weeks later. A few months after that, the couple took out $1.2 million against both of their Lawrence Park properties. This was the fast-maturing 18-per-cent-interest loan that had alarmed Ryan and Danielle Fung during the asset search. In the moment, though, it was just another mallet to push down another mole.

In March of 2023, a Cartel and Bui client who had sold his property the previous month was still awaiting payment and had grown impatient. His lawyer reported the firm to the Law Society, demanding an investigation of Cartel and Bui’s trust account. The escalation achieved immediate results: the next day, the client received his $1.2-million payment. The immediate crisis had been resolved, but now Cartel and Bui were on the Law Society’s radar. The doomsday clock had started its countdown.

---

For the plaintiffs, Cartel’s behaviour was both frustrating and awe-inspiring—as in, This guy cannot possibly be for real

---

Bui’s behaviour in these final months is a study in desperation. At the same time as she was going to incredible lengths to get out of debt, including taking out a fraudulent $1.28-million mortgage on a property owned by her own mother, Bui continued to fritter away clients’ funds. In October and November, she travelled back and forth to Europe, hopping between Zurich, Paris, Milan and Reykjavík. On November 22, two days after the Fungs wired Bui their $2.155 million, an investigator from the Law Society showed up at the Cartel and Bui offices, following up on a complaint about suspicious activity in the firm’s trust account. Bui wasn’t available, Cartel explained, so they would have to speak with him—except he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day dealings of his wife’s real estate practice. It really would be better to speak with Bui, he continued, but as he’d said, she wasn’t in.

A few days later, Cartel says he flew to the UK to meet with a class-action funder. When he arrived home, he says Bui announced to him that she was leaving the practice. She did not, according to Cartel, give a reason, but he assumed that it had to do with the stress of caring for their baby, who remained in hospital. On December 6—the day before Cartel failed to show for his meeting with the Fungs at TD—Bui headed to the emergency department at Sunnybrook Hospital complaining of stress and difficulty sleeping. She received a diagnosis of anxiety and was sent home. A week later, she returned, this time to the psychiatric emergency ward, overcome by crying fits, persistent nightmares and the feeling that no matter what she did, she just couldn’t keep up.

The Law & Order Toronto episode all but writes itself: an uptown family whose picture-perfect existence is built on misappropriated funds, the innocent victims hunting for their missing millions. The cops would interview former Bay Street colleagues, the Sotheby’s agent, the nosy neighbour who just knew something was amiss. The dramatic tension would stem not from whodunit but from “Where is it?” In the fictional climax, Bui would be apprehended on the tarmac, about to make a break for it. The lead detective would say something cutting, like, “Well, we knew she wasn’t going to Switzerland for the chocolate” or “I guess England isn’t looking so jolly anymore.” Mystery solved, millions accounted for, closure achieved: roll the credits.

Instead, Ryan and Danielle Fung have spent almost two years desperately trying to recover their $2 million. Weeks after their money went missing, when conversations with the police went nowhere, the couple had their lawyer file a civil complaint—the first of many legal actions that have ballooned to include more than 20 plaintiffs, multiple properties across Ontario and more than $7 million in missing funds. That the trust money was misappropriated has never been disputed. Instead, the civil proceedings are focused on where it went, what it paid for and whether there is any reasonable chance of recovering it.

For the first 10 months of the proceedings, Bui consistently failed to show up to court. Instead, Cartel relayed a version of events, over and over again, that hangs on the notion that he knew nothing about his firm’s, or his family’s, financial precarity. It’s a claim that Justice William Chalmers has been unwilling to accept. “Did she pay for nice gifts for you?” he asked Cartel in court. “Did you buy a car that she paid for? Did she pay mortgage payments? How can you not know—when you’re living with her and you’ve got a home together and you’ve got children together—where [the money] went?” Getting to the bottom of Cartel’s involvement has been central to the case. But, for the better part of a year, another question had hung in the air: Where in the world was Singa Bui?

On the professional front, Bui had last been seen in November of 2023. Then the Law Society issued suspensions against both Bui and Cartel, the court ordered their assets frozen, and the civil cases against them began to unfold. Bui failed to show up first to the virtual case conferences and then to the first in-person court date, a contempt hearing in June of 2024. By then, Cartel had spent six months in and out of court, jamming bananas into the tailpipe of justice with his non-answers and non sequiturs. For the plaintiffs, his behaviour was profoundly frustrating but also kind of awe-inspiring—as in, This guy cannot possibly be for real.

That was the reaction of two plaintiffs who met Cartel at the contempt hearing. In tasselled loafers, with pocket square just so, he allegedly sauntered over like a stranger at a garden party and introduced himself, expecting them to do the same. “Um, we are the people you defrauded,” was their dumbfounded response. Ever impervious, Cartel apparently assured them they would get their money—an empty promise given that his firm’s funds had been frozen but a classic example of Cartel’s tendency to operate according to his own set of rules.

His repeated claims that he didn’t know where the money was hinged on the supposed fragility of Bui’s mental health. Two months after first showing up at the emergency department, she was admitted to Sunnybrook as an involuntary inpatient after describing fantasies of driving into traffic. In June, around the time of the contempt hearing, she had a miscarriage (her fourth, she told doctors) and was once again admitted on an involuntary basis and administered electroconvulsive therapy. In conversations with her doctors—­including Gail Robinson, the co-founder of the University of Toronto’s women’s mental health program—Bui said that she believed her husband blamed her for their woes. Following Bui’s discharge in July, Robinson wrote in her records that Bui “had hoped that the ECT would get all these negative feelings out of her head, but the fact is that she has to deal with reality.”

For many of the plaintiffs desperately seeking answers, Bui’s failure to face reality felt like just another ploy—and a conveniently timed one. In July of 2024, shortly after Bui was discharged, the Fungs hired a private investigator to test Cartel’s claims regarding his wife’s condition. The PI took pictures of the family walking together on Yonge Street: Cartel in the lead, followed by three little boys in matching polo shirts, and Bui bringing up the rear, pushing a baby in a stroller. The plaintiffs were livid. Bui was out and about while they struggled to follow the trail of money.

Their fury only escalated as the couple continued to hamper the court, refusing to hand over financial records or answer questions about the missing funds. In late October, Bui and Cartel were found in contempt and sentenced to 30 days in jail. For months, Bui had ignored Justice Chalmers’s order that she hand over her passport. Now that she had, her travel history became public record, and the plaintiffs learned that her trips to Europe coincided with the bulk of their money going AWOL. But they weren’t any closer to a resolution.

“Muck” is how one lawyer involved in the case described Cartel’s legal strategy to me. His end game has nothing to do with the substance of whatever appeal or motion he may be arguing on any given day—the goal is to unleash an uninterrupted stream of BS. “You kick up enough muck so that everything gets covered in it and it becomes expensive and time-consuming to determine what is actually relevant and what is just more muck,” the lawyer said. None of the plaintiffs I spoke with believe Bui will come clean about what happened to their money, but several of them see the couple’s relentless obfuscation as evidence that there is still money to be found. Why devote so much time to obstruction if there is nothing to hide?

I met with Nicholas Cartel this past July at a coffee shop in Lawrence Park, just days after the Toronto police laid criminal charges: 42 counts of fraud, 17 instances of criminal breach of trust and one count of possession of proceeds of crime over $5,000 for Bui, plus one count of fraud over $5,000 for Cartel. (The allegations against them have not been proven in court.) “It’s a ruse,” Cartel claimed, the words tumbling out, telling me that this is just what the cops do. They can’t compel a husband to testify against his wife, so they file charges as a way to legally force his testimony. I suppressed a smirk at the idea that anyone would have to force this man to talk.

He’d agreed to meet, Cartel said, because he believes Bui’s mental health has been unfairly overlooked in these proceedings. His wife, he told me, is unwell, suffers from depression and has significant memory loss as a result of the electro­convulsive treatments. He said she had recently called him from their local Loblaws because she couldn’t remember how to get home. Of course, I have no idea whether this is true. Bui, who declined to be interviewed for this story, remains largely a mystery. Was she the ill, helpless wife thrown under the bus? Her husband’s patsy? The mastermind behind a devious plot? A desperate woman who didn’t know when to stop? These are questions only she can answer. But, like so many people who went to Bui for answers, I am left talking to her husband.

Cartel didn’t quite see what all the fuss was about. He dismissed the severity of what the plaintiffs have been through, assuring me that their losses are covered by their insurance companies. It’s true that many are. But not all the plaintiffs are covered, not Ryan and Danielle Fung. Don’t they deserve to get their money back? I asked. They will, Cartel assured me, launching into a tutorial on class-action funding. The Law Society suspension—which he has appealed—means he can’t currently practise law, but he can receive a payout for the work he has already done. He referenced the $200-million Dye and Durham suit and another class action—something to do with antitrust—with a huge payout that is essentially a done deal, he said. Leaning back in his navy cashmere sweater, Cartel threw out staggering dollar amounts, and suddenly I was busy calculating percentages of percentages and thinking, Wow, that is a lot of money and Maybe the Fungs will get their $2 million back. A few moments passed before I realized that I, too, was covered in muck.

Ryan Fung has heard all of Cartel’s stories. He has attended nearly every court date and could probably ace the LSATs with all the research he has done since the fall of 2023. Of all Bui’s victims, the Fungs have lost the most—by a margin of more than $1.5 million. The Law Society of Ontario recently announced plans to strengthen its audit and complaints process relating to trust accounts, but that doesn’t get the Fungs their money back. If the multiple complaints brought against Cartel and Bui’s firm since March of 2023 had been addressed earlier, the Fungs would have hired a different lawyer and avoided this whole ordeal.

Despite everything that has happened, the Fungs are not motivated by retribution. It is Cartel, not his primary victims, who is set on vengeance. He will waste no time, he told me, in taking legal action against plaintiffs who choose to speak out against him. He has his story, and, as he’s proven time and time again, he’s sticking to it. I might have guessed as much when, two minutes into our meeting, he quoted Henry ­Kissinger—the American diplomat who famously opened a press conference by asking the assembled media: “Do you have any questions for my answers?”

This story appears in the October 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.