The North Toronto enclave of Ledbury Park radiates suburban tranquility. On Saturdays, well-heeled denizens take their children on bike rides past the faux chateaux that have colonized its streets; processions of devout Jewish families – fathers and sons clad in black hats and coats, wives and daughters pushing baby carriages – walk home from synagogue.
On the night of March 25, however, the calm was disrupted by a terrifying sound: gunfire. At 613 St. Germain Ave., dentist David Meisels and his family awoke to find their glass front door shattered, its wooden frame pockmarked by bullets. On a nearby lawn, police discovered a gun – a warning, neighbours later speculated, from the Israeli Mafia.
The violence likely was not aimed at the dentist. It was intended instead for his brother-in-law, Tzvi Erez, a 42-year-old former printer who lived around the corner. The bankruptcy of Mr. Erez's Toronto company, E Graphix, exposed a $27-million Ponzi scheme that would lead to his arrest and to charges of seven counts of fraud, on which he is now awaiting trial. A series of threats had forced him, his wife and three children underground – where he remains – and those responsible for the gunshots evidently believed he was using his sister's place as a safe house.
Seemingly an unlikely target for gun-toting thugs, Mr. Erez by background and appearance was largely indistinguishable from many young Jewish professionals who call this Bathurst and Lawrence area home. He graduated from two of the city's most buttoned-down parochial schools, Associated Hebrew School and the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, and holds an MBA from York's Schulich School of Business. The one-time piano prodigy also performed recitals at the city's most prestigious concert halls, and had released a couple of well-received classical CDs, including Tzvi Erez Plays Chopin. Pictured on the CD cover, the musician appears a decade younger than his then 36 years.
His smooth, round baby face, crowned by a full head of close-cropped brown hair, emerges almost incongruously from his tuxedo, as if it had been Photoshopped. The biography Mr. Erez posted on his website at the time of the album's release – before he is suspected of launching his scheme – suggests he already possessed the self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, needed to pull it off: “Singularity, originality, and a deep understanding of music inform and define the towering musical talent of Tzvi Erez,” begins the 620-word paean, which concludes with an acknowledgment of his family, “who are destined to share their lives with a charismatic genius.”
“He was a bit nerdy, a bit chubby,” says Aaron Sher (not his real name), one of several creditors who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He presented himself as having this little business, which through his ingenuity produced great returns. It wasn't rocket science. It was something people could understand.”
But there was a profligate Mr. Hyde to the hard-working, somewhat nebbishe Dr. Jekyll. It emerged that Mr. Erez was secretly a heavy gambler, taking covert trips to casinos and playing high-stakes poker online under an alias. Indeed, he previously had been charged with fraud for writing fraudulent cheques to several Ontario casinos.
For many of his 76 creditors, some of whom face financial ruin, the revelations about Mr. Erez's gambling habit left a host of unanswered questions: Was their money really gone? Could Mr. Erez have used online casinos as a vehicle to conceal it? And how did he manage to deceive them for so long? “Six weeks before all this happened, he was dancing with his baby at his mother-in-law's retirement party,” says Sheldon Esbin, a close friend of Mr. Erez's father-in-law who loaned him money because of their family connection. “To look at him, so happy, you would think that everything was fine. But nothing was fine.”
