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 The post The Real Estate Mogul Who Burned Down His Rival’s Offices first appeared on The Walrus .

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 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.

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