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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

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 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........

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