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THE PRESSURE WAS BUILDING. For weeks he'd been fending off questions from anxious clients who were worried about their investments and the whereabouts of the cheques he used to send so regularly.

And these weren't ordinary clients. They were his father, mother, aunt, friends from high school, college buddies. Many of them had been counting on him for years to manage their life savings. They included people like Altaf Hussain, who was relying on Cowan to help put his daughter, Aisha, through university. And Cowan's 62-year-old aunt, Charlotte Munro, who had entrusted her nephew with $200,000 and depended on him to keep sending $750 a month to supplement her $1,200 monthly pension. And Judie Benyei, who needed Cowan to ensure there was enough money to pay the bills at her octogenerian aunt's nursing home.

How could he tell them he'd made some bad bets on the currency markets and that most of the money was gone? How could he explain that he was down to his last $700 and that the Lamborghini, the Porsche and the pricey condo in a trendy Toronto neighbourhood were all for show?

He couldn't.

So he took the elevator down from his ninth-floor condominium to the parking garage. He ran a hose from the exhaust pipe of his Lamborghini and placed it through the window. Then he got in and turned on the engine.

It was Monday, Nov. 26, 2007. Rae Cowan was 36 years old.

TORONTO ARTIST ANDREW BENYEI will never forget how he and his wife, Judie, found out that Cowan had killed himself. They were having a party at their home in early December, 2007, when someone knocked at the door.

"There was a big, big fellow in a suit," Benyei recalls. "He said, 'I'm looking for Andrew Benyei.' I said 'That's me.' He said, 'I'm a private investigator. Rae committed suicide, and all the money is gone.'"

"So we called him in and I said, 'Would you like a glass of wine?' He sat down. We told the other [guests], 'Hey, go talk among yourselves,' and he told us the story."

It turned out the private investigator, Steve Reesor, had been hired by Cowan's parents to find out what had happened. Reesor told them what he'd discovered so far—not much besides a stack of burned documents in Cowan's condominium.

The Benyeis were stunned. This wasn't the Rae Cowan they'd known. They'd had a cottage next to the Cowan family ages ago, and Cowan used to wash the windows of their Toronto home when he was a kid. Lately, he had managed money for Judie's aunt and Andrew's mother, and he'd filled his office with Andrew's artwork.

They did know that Cowan had died—they'd gone to his funeral, weeping with hundreds of other mourners as Cowan's sisters spoke about their wonderful brother. But no one mentioned anything about suicide. Or missing money. "He'd always been very smart, extremely nice and helpful, always there if you needed him," Benyei recalls.

Like dozens of other clients, the Benyeis still can't figure out what happened. How did such a nice guy—someone who seemed to be doing so well, to love life—get into so much trouble?

He was born Michael Rae Cowan, but always went by Rae, just like his dad. William Rae Cowan built a solid career at Canadian Tire while his son was growing up. The elder Cowan started at the retailer in 1959 as an assistant buyer, and worked his way up the ranks, eventually becoming senior vice-president. A licensed pilot, he flew in his spare time for recreation.

Cowan senior and his wife, Elizabeth, had three children—Rae was born between two girls, Lindsay and Sheila. The Cowans lived in an upscale North Toronto neighbourhood. They were active in their local church, donated to the right causes and had some distinguished relatives, including a judge.

"The Cowan family were maybe more formal than some," says Munro, Rae Cowan's aunt and Elizabeth's sister. Like everyone in the family, Munro adored her nephew, but adds that there was a history of depression in the family. Cowan was a diabetic, which Munro thinks may have caused him to suffer mood swings. Other friends say Cowan was eager to please his father and mimic his success in business. "I'm sure there was a lot of pressure to succeed," says one of Cowan's childhood friends. "Rae was a lot like his dad when it came to matters of money. Rae knew where he wanted to go."

Even as a kid, Cowan was enterprising. He carried a briefcase to school, served as treasurer on the student council at York Mills Collegiate, and started a window-washing business in high school. "He always had a sense of numbers and was really efficient at providing written estimates," says the friend. "He had formulas for breaking down the cost of a job. He was definitely business- and money-oriented."

Cowan went on to Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, studying economics and accounting. He worked hard, gaining good grades, but still managed to keep up an active social life, joining underwater diving groups, dabbling in paragliding and playing racquetball with friends.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1993, Cowan headed out to make it big in the investment business. He started a company called Gibraltar Wealth Management Corp. with a friend, Gerardo Cappelli. But they had a falling-out within a few years, and Cowan took sole ownership of the business.

Shortly after graduating, Cowan also joined Avalon Financial Services Corp., a mutual fund dealer that had about 80 independent representatives. In 2000, Avalon was bought by IPC Financial Network Inc., a fast-growing financial planning company that was later taken over by IGM Financial Inc., Canada's largest mutual fund company, which is controlled by Montreal's Power Corp.

Like most of IPC's 600 advisers, Cowan was not an employee of the company but an independent agent who sold IPC products and received a commission. Agents were free to run their own business, with some restrictions, and relied on IPC for administrative services and information on products. It's not clear how much Cowan made from his IPC sales, but records filed in court showed IPC paid him $41,000 in 2007.

Cowan was set. He opened an office for Gibraltar in downtown Toronto. Finding clients wasn't hard. Stock markets were booming, and Cowan's easy-going personality and charm won over almost everyone he encountered. "When I met him, such a nice person I've never seen in my life," Altaf Hussain recalls. "I liked him from day one." Jim Young says that whenever Cowan came over to his Toronto home to review the investments Young and his wife had made, "it was just like one of your own kids coming to visit. I'd always ask him about girlfriends and what he had been up to lately."

Cowan knew how to keep his clients happy. He sent out regular, detailed financial statements and made sure many elderly clients received monthly cheques from their investments. He never hesitated to answer questions or help out when needed. "If somebody needed to travel a fair distance to see somebody who was ill, he would help with airfare," says Munro.

When Munro received an inheritance in the late 1990s, she didn't hesitate to entrust $200,000 to Cowan to invest. After all, he had been handling investments for most of the family, including her father. At first Cowan sent his aunt $500 a month to supplement her pension. Then he boosted it to $750 and also made sure she had enough for emergencies, like when she needed her teeth fixed or to travel to her son's wedding. "He was a lovely, generous person," she says.

Within a few years, Cowan had roughly 300 clients and was managing millions of dollars. Money was pouring in, and he began to revel in his success. He moved into a condominium in the heart of Toronto's elite Yorkville neighbourhood. Units in the building sell for as much as $1.9 million, but Cowan rented. He leased a Lamborghini Gallardo, which sells for around $200,000, and a BMW M5, which goes for about $100,000. Clients recalled seeing him pull up their driveways in a Porsche over the years as well. Most presumed he must have been awfully clever with money to afford such luxury.

Cowan filled his office and home with 100 pieces of art, buying many from Benyei. He became a regular in many of the bars and restaurants in Yorkville, frequently holding court on the patio at a lounge called Amber. Friends say he was almost always accompanied by gorgeous women and never hesitated to pick up the tab for an expensive meal, usually paying in cash and always leaving a big tip. He was also a regular at the annual St. Andrew's Ball, a gala event sponsored by the St. Andrew's Society of Toronto, a Scottish-Canadian charity.

In one year, according to court records, Cowan spent more than $456,000 on travel, clothing, car leases, meals, entertainment and other purchases. He told clients about vacations on Margarita Island in the Caribbean, and of flying off to Paris frequently to meet his Ukrainian girlfriend. Apart from being an adviser, he had a few other ventures, including importing expensive cars from Eastern Europe, according to one client. "He seemed very successful because he had all this stuff," says a financial planner who knew Cowan. "One assumed that he had lots of money and he had lots of big clients."

Despite his outgoing nature, Cowan lived alone, his only company a Jack Russell terrier named Russell. He kept odd hours at the office, telling colleagues he was up late at night trading currencies. "This was a person who just didn't seem to sleep," says David Johnson, chief executive officer of Concord, Ontario-based Environmental Solutions Worldwide Inc., which makes products such as catalytic emission converters.

Cowan briefly served on ESW's board in 2002, and became a significant shareholder, owning just over a million shares, or a 2% stake (at the time, the stock traded over the counter in the United States at below 50 cents).

"He was a smart young guy, he had a lot of good insights into different assets, and he was very well connected with a lot of different money people downtown," Johnson says. When the two men travelled to an ESW facility in Pennsylvania, Johnson recalls, "Rae was on the phone constantly. He was just one of those guys who was a borderline workaholic."

Cowan left ESW's board a few weeks after he had joined because he was too busy with other activities. Johnson says he understood the decision at the time; he marvelled at Cowan's fast-paced lifestyle. "To most people, looking at him, you'd think he was living the American dream, you know? Young guy, not a bad-looking character, always seemed to have more money than he knew what to do with, driving nice cars."

WHAT JOHNSON AND OTHERS DIDN'T know was that by 2002, Cowan was heading for trouble. He'd had a good business during the booming '90s, but selling mutual funds and providing financial advice wasn't enough any more. The markets had also gone south in 2001, and Cowan was looking for new ways to make money.

According to court filings, Cowan opened an online trading account with GCI Financial Ltd., which specializes in foreign currency trading and commodities. He opened another account in Luxembourg with Internaxx Bank to trade other securities. Soon he was deep into trading futures contracts on gold, silver, oil, currencies and world indexes, court filings indicate.

Cowan's clients had no idea he had moved into this new, exotic region of the investment world. Many also weren't clear about Gibraltar, Cowan's personal company. They just presumed it was part of IPC's mutual fund operations. After all, Cowan's business card displayed the IPC logo and described him as a "branch manager" for the company.

By late 2006, Cowan started encouraging clients to put money into a new product, Indigo Secured High Income Notes. The Indigo products were administered by a Bahamian company called Genesis Fund Services Ltd. It specialized in selling asset-backed securities, some of which carried a 10.5% annual return. Many of the company's securities were tied to the U.S. health care and insurance sectors.

That's not what Cowan told clients. He intimated to some that Indigo was a bond fund run by IPC. Others believed it was a mutual fund run by Gibraltar. Murray Jacobs, a 72-year-old retired cardiologist, wasn't sure what Indigo was, but he trusted Cowan. He'd known him and his family for years, and didn't hesitate to give Cowan $200,000 to invest in Indigo. Jacobs drew added comfort from the $1,400 a month Cowan sent regularly, believing it was dividends from the Indigo investment.

But none of the money ever made it to Indigo, according to court filings. Cowan would deposit client money into one of his Toronto-Dominion bank accounts and then transfer it to his GCI trading account. The monthly cheques he sent clients were sometimes written on his own bank account.

As 2007 went on, things got rougher. Cowan's currency trading started to go badly wrong. He bet against the Canadian dollar just as it was climbing

sharply. With losses mounting, he needed even more money to shore up client accounts and keep sending out monthly payments. He started pressing clients to contribute more to their supposed holdings in Indigo. "I got a call from him saying, 'I think we should move additional amounts into bonds and into Indigo,'" says one client who asked not to be identified. Cowan was so insistent that he pushed the client to have a cheque delivered the next day.

In mid-August, Cowan persuaded another client, the elderly aunt of a friend from university days, to hand over $420,000. Cowan told her the money would be invested through IPC in guaranteed income certificates. However, he wanted the cheque to be made out to Gibraltar. The client agreed, but never saw any paperwork.

When another client kept asking to see the paperwork for his investment in Indigo, Cowan responded with a variety of excuses. "He said, 'Oh, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, I'll send you an interest cheque on it.' And I didn't get the interest cheque," says the client, who also asked not to be identified.

Meanwhile, the extra cash wasn't working. According to court filings, Cowan made more than 4,000 commodity trades during 2007 and lost nearly $700,000.

Soon he began missing monthly payments, and clients started calling. Judie Benyei was getting frantic because her aunt, who had about $500,000 invested with Cowan, was falling behind in rent at her nursing home.

Cowan always had an excuse, Benyei says. It was either IPC screwing up, or the Canada Revenue Agency gumming up the works and "this, that and the other thing." Benyei contacted Cowan in mid-November, and he promised to get her the money. When Hussain kept asking for a receipt for his Indigo deposit, Cowan put him off. Hussain didn't push the point too hard because he trusted Cowan. But then his monthly payment of $700 didn't arrive from Cowan. This was the money Hussain used to help pay for his daughter's tuition at university.

Cowan tried to keep up a brave face all round. "Just wanted to let you know your interest payment for your account should go out on Monday," he said in an e-mail to one client dated Nov. 17. "I have a note here saying I was supposed to call you at the end of October to see if you were going to add to your account. Markets are still pretty choppy so it might not be a bad idea. Talk with you soon."

Around the same time, Cowan had dinner with his Aunt Charlotte. Nothing seemed amiss. "I thought I should have been able to spot [his problems] more," she recalls. "But he covered that very well."

During the week of Nov. 19, Andrew McConnachie, a long-time client, arranged to meet Cowan on Friday, Nov. 23. They were going to talk about McConnachie's plan to take an unpaid leave from his job to open a bar in downtown Toronto. McConnachie wanted to liquidate his $50,000 investment in Indigo to pay for the new venture. A few days before the scheduled meeting, McConnachie contacted Cowan to say he couldn't make it, but he wanted to be sure Cowan would still make the withdrawal. No problem, Cowan replied.

What none of his clients and friends knew was that Cowan was down to $400 in his trading account and less than $700 in cash. He'd also just changed the beneficiaries on two life insurance policies. On one, he replaced his company as beneficiary with the name of an unidentified friend. To a second policy that named family members as beneficiaries, he added a friend and another relative (neither has been identified), according to court filings.

One form was not filled out correctly, so the insurer, Canada Life, sent it back to Cowan. He dutifully made the correction and sent it back on Monday, Nov. 26.

WHEN COWAN FAILED TO SHOW UP at the office on Monday morning, his assistant, Eliza Altuna, called his apartment. After a few tries, she headed over to his condo. She found him dead in his car.

The next morning, Liza Fruck, the compliance manager at IPC, started getting phone calls from frantic clients. They had heard about Cowan's death and wanted to know the status of their investments. Fruck began hearing about Gibraltar and Indigo, names that were new to her and had nothing to do with IPC.

Two days later, according to court filings, Fruck and other IPC officials headed to Cowan's office, downtown at 47 Colborne St. They were let in by Altuna, who was in tears, telling everyone how Cowan had treated her like a sister.

While Fruck was looking for clues, Cowan's parents hired Reesor, the private detective. Reesor got into Cowan's condo the day after his death and immediately noticed a stack of burned papers in the sparse apartment. He began packing up everything else, including Cowan's eight computers, and took it all to a storage facility for safekeeping.

Cowan's parents were trying to cope with the loss of their son. But they also had to worry about roughly $500,000 of their own money he had managed.

While Reesor and Fruck continued searching, the family arranged Cowan's funeral. Hundreds gathered at Glenview Presbyterian Church for the service on Dec. 1. But most had no idea Cowan had committed suicide. They listened as Cowan's sisters spoke lovingly about their brother and asked for donations to the Canadian Diabetes Association. Several clients, including the Benyeis and McConnachie, listened attentively, still believing the investments were safe.

Soon after the funeral, Fruck sent out letters to clients advising them of Cowan's death and asking for details about their holdings. That prompted another wave of worried inquiries.

Other clients called Indigo in the Bahamas and were told the company had never heard of Cowan. Some appealed for help to the Ontario Securities Commission, the Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada, the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, the police—anyone they could think of. But nothing changed the fact that Cowan was dead and their money was gone.

"It was like, excuse me? I don't think so," says Margaret Young, recalling her reaction when IPC told her the firm had no record of some of the investments she and her husband, Jim, had made. The Youngs had been so broken up by Cowan's death they had sent a message of condolence to the family. Now they felt betrayed.

McConnachie posted a profanity-peppered complaint on his blog when he found out his money was missing. "Sorry for the profanity," he wrote, "but the guy stole my life savings, all $50,000 of it." Just a few days earlier, McConnachie had written on the blog about how much he would miss Cowan and how odd it was that the transfer he'd requested out of Indigo hadn't been carried out.

Munro took the news of Cowan's death hard. Then she found out from IPC that much of her money was gone. But she couldn't convince herself that it was Cowan's fault. "Jeez Louise. That made me think that they made a serious mistake," she says.

In mid-December, lawyers representing IPC headed to court to put Cowan's business into receivership. The company had been asked by the Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada, the industry's self-regulatory body, to investigate the complaints against Cowan, according to court filings. IPC also felt it had an obligation to find out what had happened, court filings show, and it hoped a receiver could track down assets that could be sold to help pay back clients.

Fruck told the court in an affidavit that IPC and the clients had been the victims of a fraud and that, by her estimate, at least $5.3 million was missing. She said Cowan did not have permission to engage in "business or employment" outside his role with IPC. She added that many of the statements Cowan had sent clients were forgeries, and other documents had been altered to make it appear they had come from IPC. She also confirmed that Indigo had no record of Cowan.

On Friday, Dec. 28, a small group of clients gathered in a Toronto courtroom for a hearing on the receivership. Rumours were flying about Cowan being involved with cocaine, gambling and mobsters.

Murray Jacobs sat in the middle of the courtroom, just in front of the Benyeis and Kai Piechatzek, who worked at a car dealership. Most of them had hired lawyers. During breaks in the hearing, they chatted with each other, learning more about their circumstances. One client had taken out a small advertisement in a community newspaper asking for help from anyone who had "financial dealings with Rae Cowan or Gibraltar Wealth Management Corp."

"What do I do?" Jacobs asked quietly during one break. "I mean, what do I do? I've got my house, but that's about all." Piechatzek said he had been a client for 10 years and didn't know where to turn.

They left the courtroom a couple of hours later with few answers. During the hearing, Mr. Justice Geoffrey B. Morawetz had frozen Cowan's bank accounts and appointed Ernst & Young as a receiver for his estate and Gibraltar.

The receiver spent the next few weeks sorting through Cowan's five bank accounts at TD, as well as his trading accounts at GCI, TD Waterhouse and National Bank. There was less than $900 cash in total. The only investment holding the receiver could find was 1,600 shares in ESW, worth $600.

In a report filed in court last January, the receiver said that, based on the records it could find, Cowan had received $1.8 million during 2007, including $780,000 from clients and $41,000 in remuneration from IPC. Much of the money had been transferred between various accounts, including the GCI trading account, and some went to pay expenses. For example, $153,000 went to cover some clients' monthly cheques, $61,000 was spent on a car lease, and $149,000 covered credit card bills. Roughly $300,000 in payments could not be accounted for.

The receiver could not get any information about the Luxembourg account without a court order in that country, the report said. Challenging any payments made under the changed life insurance policies, worth $1.1 million, would also require further legal action, the receiver said.

The receiver also went through Cowan's computers and tried to track down the contents of dozens of e-mails sent from various addresses. Among them were a number of e-mails Cowan had sent to himself through a Hotmail address the day before he died. Many of the e-mails included attached documents. But in order to get the information in the documents, the receiver had to go to court in Seattle and get an order requiring Microsoft Corp. to turn over the contents.

In March, 2008, the receiver filed another report in court, saying the investigation had cost more than $300,000 so far, and that IPC would no longer keep paying the tab. When no client came forward to take on the expense, the receivership ended. As a result, Ernst & Young never found out what was in the e-mails or if there was any money in Luxembourg.

In the end, the only assets Cowan left were the ESW shares, some cash and the life insurance policies. Even his artwork and furniture amounted to little. Everything was sold for $1,500.

With the receivership going nowhere, lawyers for some of the clients began turning their sights on IPC, and some considered legal action. Fruck made it clear in her affidavit in December, 2007, that IPC did not "acknowledge liability for any of the above-mentioned activities of Cowan." But over the next few months, the firm settled with several clients. The terms of those settlements are confidential, but the clients involved say they are satisfied.

The company had no comment on the Cowan saga for this article. A lawyer representing about two dozen clients who have yet to settle also declined comment.

Many clients are still wrestling with their financial situation and their feelings for Cowan. Some are still furious, and several long-time family friends have turned on his parents.

But others are more forgiving, believing that Cowan never intended to steal their money. "He didn't run with the money— he was different," Benyei says. "I grieved for him," McConnachie wrote in his blog last February. "I went to the funeral and I wept for the loss of Rae Cowan. This was before I knew he defrauded me. Yet, even after I discovered his treacheries, I still lament the loss of Rae Cowan. Rae was more than the criminal he has turned out to be. Rae was intelligent, affable, kind, fun and a good friend to me...I don't believe that he ever intended to lose all our money. I actually believe he was just trying to make money with our money and in turn provide us with the best return on our investment possible."

Munro says she will never get over the pain of losing her nephew. Even though she is struggling to pay her bills and may have to leave her house, Munro can't bring herself to be angry. To keep a piece of Cowan close by, she took in his dog, Russell.

"I cannot in my mind associate this financial situation with the person, because my experience with him is so,..." she says, her voice trailing off. Then, as Cowan's dog barks in the background, Munro quietly adds, "I miss him very much."