The house with the red-brick exterior, huge old-growth maple, and sprawling back patio on Castle Frank Crescent in Toronto’s pricy Rosedale neighborhood seemed like the perfect symbol of generational wealth and respectability. As Malcolm Johnston reports for Toronto Life, the occupants, Chakib Mansouri and Majdouline Alouah, might have appeared to be upwardly mobile, driving fancy cars and “dripping” with designer couture. In reality, they funded all their luxuries with a life of crime.
By the fall of 2023, Mansouri and Alouah were so engrossed in their lives of leisure that neither picked up on the vehicles tailing them, day after day. Nor did they notice the plainclothes officers posted up on street corners, in condo lobbies and at cafés, collecting evidence that would expose the couple’s part in an audacious scam that stole more than $185 million from victims in Toronto, across Canada and around the world.
More picks from Toronto Life
The Great French Fry Mystery
“When an A&W takeout bag appeared on my neighbour’s porch in the middle of the night—followed by another, then another—I became obsessed with solving a fast food whodunit that was as baffling as it was beguiling.”
The Inside Job
“Robert Konashewych was a young police officer with expensive tastes, two girlfriends and a mountain of debt. Heinz Sommerfeld was recently deceased with a large unclaimed estate. Problem, meet solution.”
Becoming El Jefe
“Before Ryan Wedding landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list as a high-level associate of El Chapo, he was a bright-eyed kid from Thunder Bay. The inside story of how an Olympic snowboarding prodigy became one of the world’s most dangerous and powerful drug lords.”
