Gold, diamonds and psychic guidance. How an Ontario man took millions from investors and left them with nothing

Under the calming, low light of Bonnie Mori's clinic, surrounded by shelves packed with vials of homeopathic remedies and crystals, a visitor could catch a breath and unload his troubles.

Behind a large desk, a wall adorned with certificates announced Bonnie's credentials as a healer.

Alex Christoff sat and told her his story of how a hunting mishap decades ago left a phantom knife in his spine that he could never remove. Surgery didn't work.

Nothing could repair it," recalled his nephew Rick Christoff.

It was 2001 and Alex, then 72, was looking for hope.

After several sessions and hundreds spent on herbs, supplements and treatments at the clinic, Alex's back was no better. But he felt a friendship growing.

Bonnie visited his home, sometimes bringing dinner. The Mori family invited him to a family wedding and then to a family vacation in Florida.

Later that year, as one of the clinic sessions ended, Bonnie said she had something else to offer Alex, Christoff would later recount to his nephew. An opportunity he couldn't afford to pass up, located just down the hall from her clinic, in the office of Gold Insight Resources, a mining company owned by her husband Richard.

Richard talked fast behind a thick beard and moustache. Rock samples littered his desk and maps of gold and diamond mines were tacked on the wall.

Through a miracle of God, the finances, ... our value in this year of 2001 could go as high into the billions of dollars. That's due by the power of God, not by my strength. I'm only a servant," Mori had told investors around the time Christoff was contemplating investing.

Christoff had no experience investing in mineral companies, but he trusted Bonnie. And he felt he could trust Richard. The Mori name, well known in Niagara, carried credibility.

The Mori's garden centre, nestled along Highway 55 across from one of the region's most popular wineries, was a Niagara-on-the-Lake landmark for nearly half a century. The family patriarch, Leno Mori, one of the wealthiest men in the community, rubbed shoulders with the wine region's richest vineyard owners.

Richard, Bonnie told Alex, is schooled all over the place."

It's a golden opportunity for you to get in and buy shares before the company goes public on the stock market," Richard told Alex, according to his nephew.

The jewel of Mori's eye was a gold mine called Cordova. The hamlet with a heart of gold," is its official slogan.

Founded during a late 19th-century gold rush, the community northeast of Peterborough had once teemed with miners and their families. There were schools and shops, even a racetrack.

We have proven gold reserves," Mori told investors during a 2001 meeting. We're not a Bre-X ... it never proved an ounce of gold. Why anyone bought stock in it, I don't know ... it was all promo. It was all setup."

Alex was in for $22,000 and convinced his nephew to throw in $4,000.

The Christoffs were among 188 investors lured in by Mori's gilded promises. Some poured their savings into his firm. From 2001 until around 2017, Mori pulled in more than $2 million from investors. And it took nearly as long for these investors to fully understand what had really happened to their money in the labyrinth of Mori's dummy companies and increasingly fringe ventures.

A corner of Mori's claims touched upon reality. Investors received share certificates. The company had an accountant. Experts said the properties had potential. There is a mine in Cordova.

But investors could not see the dry rot in these foundations, a Torstar investigation has found.

Cordova was a contaminated ghost mine that had not produced an ounce of gold since before the fall of Nazi Germany. Gold Insight was hemorrhaging investors' money. Richard Mori's drilling plans relied in part on the guidance of a psychic.

A handful of investors have sued but it took a small band of Gold Insight board members and other angry investors years to see through the Gold Insight mirage.

It's been six years of this, without a break," said Fred Bates, who is on the company's board of directors. We're just a small group of senior citizens trying to do what is right, but it doesn't seem to end."

Bates, with the help of Mori's former accountant and former company executives, uncovered thousands of pages of company records. Torstar has reviewed those documents and interviewed a dozen investors, board members and contractors of Gold Insight.

For Alex Christoff, a steelworker for three decades, the truth came too late.

Eighteen years after he met Bonnie, Christoff, now 91, frail and in failing health, tried to have the last word.

While his uncle lay in his sickbed, Rick started filming.

Do you feel that Bonnie's treatment helped you?"

No," said Alex, struggling to speak.

Do you think Richard scammed you?"

Yes," said Alex.

He died in February 2021 of natural causes having never seen a cent of his money returned.

The ballroom at Queen's Landing - a stately Georgian mansion-turned-hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake - was dressed to impress for a 2001 investor's appreciation dinner.

Large posters showed the holdings of Gold Insight. These five properties would unlock near limitless wealth, with Cordova as the main attraction.

Mori's first venture into mining was in 1983, with the purchase of shares in an abandoned mine in Algoma - a project that yielded nothing. But by 1986, he had an Ontario prospector's licence and began buying other abandoned gold and diamond mine sites, including Cordova.

The next year Mori, who had told a local newspaper he had a childhood fascination with collecting rocks, formed Gold Insight.

Leaning on the podium, microphone in hand, Mori spoke to his investors in his staccato cadence, punctuating his promises of riches with boasts of his prowess.

I don't deal with small companies. Everything I've done in the past has been with the major corporations and companies and the people with credibility," he said.

He introduced his father as the company's financial adviser.

All I can say is that I hope we make an awful lot of money because that is the only way I know how to handle anything," Leno Mori said.

The gold from Cordova was a proven asset, Richard said, and the diamonds he would mine would serve a higher purpose.

When you buy other diamonds from other parts of the world, you don't know if they've been there. Blood money, drug money or somebody has been killed," Mori said. It's wrong. It's against humanity. It's against God's word."

Two geologists hired by Mori, John Archibald and John Thompson, were there, with Archibald saying Cordova could provide gold, gravel by the ton and even bottled water.

Mining is expensive, Mori said, so the company had money coming in from other ventures.

The company recently bought Niagara Mist perfume, purported to smell like the mist created by Niagara Falls. Mori said St. Catharines-born supermodel Linda Evangelista was going to market it.

And a health-enhancing wristwatch, endorsed by Bonnie and purportedly thousands of other doctors for its microchip that cleanses the body of radiation and reboots" the immune system, would be sold worldwide through a Gold Insight subsidiary.

The company was days away from critical meetings with big financial players that would launch Gold Insight on a stock exchange, Mori said. There were only a few weeks to invest before the stock price would skyrocket.

A few investors asked questions. Others opened their chequebooks. No one at the dinner pressed Mori for finer details of Gold Insight's assets.

It is doubtful they knew he had not paid for the Cordova mine.

With the gold reserves exhausted, the Cordova mine closed in 1940.

The schools, the race track and other businesses have long since vanished.

Cordova's 120 residents live in homes along a lonely stretch of highway. Behind a grove of trees that is home to a graveyard of rusting cars and trucks, the old Cordova mine office slumps, infested with bats and swallowed by vines.

The mine tunnels are flooded. The mine entrance is buried under blackened stone. Bits of the mine shafts protrude from the ground like pieces of old bone.

The property needs extensive work - and has needed it for decades. An Ontario government lien dating back to at least 1979 requires extensive rehabilitation to clean up soil contamination and the removal of the hazardous remains of the mine.

Until 1996, the property was owned by Walter Hood, who once penned a history of the Cordova mine, including his attempts to reopen it. When Mori approached him in 1996, Hood was willing to part with Cordova for a pittance - a promise of $5,000 from Mori, who also agreed to front an estimated $200,000 for cleanup and building access roads.

A year after the deed was handed over, Hood was still waiting for payment.

You have enjoyed the benefit of having title to the property at no cost for a year now," Hood wrote Mori on June 10, 1997. If your deposit of $200,000, to my name, in trust, is not in place ... by June 30, 1997, you will be asked to give up the title to the property."

Mori never paid Hood, nor gave up the deed. Instead, shortly before the Queen's Landing dinner in 2001, he sold the mine to Gold Insight. The company then claimed that the undeveloped land was now worth $30,000.

It was an entirely paper transaction. No money was moved. Current Gold Insight board members, Mori's contracted geologists Archibald and Thompson, a provincial government inspection report and Mori's former accountant all suggest Mori's new valuation of the Cordova land was misleading.

A provincial inspection report said the Cordova site contains tailings - a sandy mining residue that contains gold and chemical contaminants - but it is not economical to try to extract gold from them.

Just because you have gold in the ground doesn't mean you have gold in the bank," Archibald, one of the geologists, said in an interview.

Hood died in 2020 at the age of 98 still waiting for his money.

Mori told Torstar in an interview that he could not remember if he paid Hood, adding that he only paid the taxes" on the land, not the lien.

We were supposed to have somebody go in there and start doing drilling and do a bunch of other stuff. And that for some reason didn't happen," Mori says. Why that didn't happen is a good question ... We got so many things flowing at us that we just kind of just left it there."

After speaking to Torstar three times earlier this year, Mori stopped responding to questions. A family friend told Torstar Mori was in poor health and could not answer questions.

Richard Mori criss-crossed Ontario in the early 2000s, pitching Gold Insight to investors.

In 2001, 11 families gathered in the Windsor home of Elmer Grove.

Mori bounded around the room, his hair bouncing as he invoked God and prophesied future riches, Grove wrote in a May 2021 letter to the Gold Insight board.

Mori, Grove wrote, was convincing."

This would be worth billions," Grove said of Mori's pitch. With a B."

All but one of the 11 couples invested with Gold Insight, including a General Motors worker who remortgaged his home to acquire the $50,000 Mori asked for.

Mori had other avenues to reach investors.

Shelley Ackrill of Niagara Falls and her 83-year-old mother met Bonnie through her alternative medicine clinic and became so close she and her husband, Joe Franklin, vacationed with the Moris. Ackrill's mother had money saved and wanted to create a foundation to help students.

Bonnie said she knew how to help.

She took me across the hall to meet her husband, who she said was a mining expert, and he was doing some exploratory drilling, some drilling up in northern Ontario and they were finding gold and diamonds," said Ackrill. Her mother invested $240,000 in Gold Insight and a diamond mining company Mori created.

Mori's promises were empty. Ackrill said she lost her investment. The company was never on the cusp of going public - a fact Mori blames on unnamed companies backing out at the eleventh hour.

There was never any deal for Evangelista to market the Niagara Mist perfume. According to Mori's former accountant, Ralph Waters, Gold Insight never even owned the product. Company records show Mori had, without the board of directors' input, given the perfume maker an unsecured, interest-free loan of more than $220,000 - nearly all the money in Gold Insight's coffers in 2001, Waters said.

In an interview, Mori could not explain the loan and said he must have talked to someone" about Evangelista, but he could not say who.

Maybe we shouldn't have got involved in something else that had nothing to do with mining," Mori said.

At the time, Mori anchored the credibility of those ventures, particularly the watch, on his wife's medical credentials. Her resume, presented to investors in 2001, claimed she was a doctor. More than a decade later, she used the title on loan applications.

Bonnie told Torstar she holds no doctorates or other advanced medical training. She says she was an acupuncturist.

Bonnie treats clients with a quantum biofeedback machine." Clients are strapped around the wrists and ankles as the machine provides readings she says tell her what their stress level is.

I don't want to teach you how it works," Bonnie said. It's classified biofeedback technology."

She denied ever introducing any of her clients to her husband.

In the early 2000s, investors believed Mori's promises, although some were growing restless.

Where was the return on their investments?

Alex Christoff wanted a refund. Mori said no.

Still, the Christoffs and dozens of others had their shares in Gold Insight. If the company could strike gold, maybe they would see the riches they were promised.

If they actually had shares in Gold Insight.

But as it happened, many of them didn't.

By 2003, Gold Insight was running out cash. Mori's investors had closed their chequebooks.

Mori needed more money, he said in an interview, otherwise, I would have had to shut it all down."

But he couldn't just sell more shares in Gold Insight. Ontario's Securities Act prohibits a privately held company from having more than 50 shareholders, and he had reached that threshold.

Mori created three new companies - Gold Insight 2003, Gold Insight 2004 and Gold Insight 2005 - and began selling shares with the same pitches as before, accumulating another 138 investors.

Those who bought these shares, including investors Rick Christoff and the Crawford family of Toronto and Guelph - patients of Bonnie's-turned-family friends who invested more than $300,000 with the Moris - thought they were buying into a real gold mine company.

But the new companies were just shells that owned nothing.

I just followed Joe's direction," Mori told Torstar in April 2021, adding that he believed investors would eventually get shares in the original Gold Insight company once it was publicly traded.

Joe is Joseph Harry Seguin, Mori's lawyer who died in October 2020. If the shell company scheme was wrong, Mori said, it was because of Seguin's second-rate legal advice.

But in a March 4, 2020 affidavit, Seguin said Mori did exactly what he told him not to do.

Richard proceeded ... to create three similarly and deceptively named companies, all prefixed with the name Gold Insight Resources," wrote Seguin in the affidavit. Richard thereafter asked me about using these three companies to avoid the 50 shareholder limit under the Securities Act. I clearly and emphatically told him that this was not something he could do legally."

Joe said that?" Mori said when asked about Seguin's affidavit. If Joe is saying that he didn't advise to go ahead with it, then, what else can I say?"

Between the Gold Insight shares and those of the three shell companies, records show Mori raised more than $2 million. It is not clear where all that money went.

Mori said some of the money raised through the shell companies ended up in the Gold Insight treasury, which his former accountant Ralph Waters confirms. Mori said he also took a small amount ... to pay bills and things." He also says he diverted some cash to other enterprises, but never told his investors that because I was trying to make money for people, not make them lose money."

Some money vanished. Family friend Shelley Ackrill paid $50,000 for shares in a Gold Insight diamond mine subsidiary, but Waters said the payment never appeared in the company's books.

Looking back, I should have done more to stop it. I do regret that," said Waters, the accountant. It is hard to sleep sometimes."

Mori also turned to his father, Leno, who became the company's CEO, for money.

In 2010 and 2011, while the president of Gold Insight, Mori borrowed from his father without the consent of the board, the current directors say.

Financial records show that after one loan of $350,000, a combined $205,000 went to Richard, Bonnie and Leno.

The loan agreements bound the company - not Richard Mori - to repay the loans with an annual interest rate of more than 9 per cent. Leno and the current Gold Insight board say the company now owes him more than $1 million.

Richard Mori could not explain why he bound the company and shareholders to repay his father. When asked if the loans were a scheme to enrich his family at shareholders' expense, Mori only said, I can see what you are saying."

Bonnie did not answer questions about the loans, and Leno said he did not recall the specifics of the agreement.

Money was coming in, but Gold Insight's bills were not being paid. Mori pushed forward with new mining claims.

In 2009, Mori committed Gold Insight to a drilling program to try to find diamonds on the eastern shores of Lake Superior.

He ignored the warnings of his board of directors and his lawyer, who all told him there was no reason to consider a mine on the property because geological reports indicated there was nothing there.

Instead, Mori turned to a friend for help from the supernatural.

I do have psychokinesis abilities," Shelley Ackrill told Torstar. OK, so I put my hands over the map and there was an area where my hand was getting a lot of tingling."

That was the spot he was to drill for diamonds.

No diamonds were found. Ackrill blames Mori for not drilling where she told him to. This drilling cost Gold Insight around $315,000, cash the company did not have, according to an internal board report.

Meanwhile, by at least 2010, Mori convinced contractors hired to work for him, not Gold Insight, to take payments in shares in the shell companies.

Two years later, while Mori searched for another loan to buy a mine property near Kirkland Lake, Ont., he was carrying around $26,000 in credit card debt, having all but maxed out three cards, according to a 2012 mortgage application.

The document - in which Mori claimed his shares in his companies were worth $10 million - shows Mori was making small monthly payments on each card.

In 2015, Mori tried to sell his crown jewel, Cordova. He claimed in a mortgage application the property was being offered for $18.8 million but was worth as much as $68 million.

There was no buyer.

With the walls closing in, it appeared in 2016 that Mori had finally hit pay dirt. Giant diamond producer Rio Tinto wanted the rights to mine a Gold Insight-owned property in Wawa, Ontario.

The deal would pay Gold Insight $1 million in the first year, with another $1 million coming several years after that.

The deal fell apart within a few months.

Geologist John Thompson, who had been contracted by Mori to review the Wawa site, said Rio Tinto could not get the necessary government permits for the property, in part because of stern objections by a local Indigenous community.

Rio Tinto abandoned the project after paying $1 million. A company spokesperson did not respond to interview requests.

The first payment arrived on Dec. 20, 2016. Before the end of January, most of that money was gone.

Some taxes and bills were paid, including a $22,000 consultant's fee to Bates for helping set up the deal and $14,000 to Waters as the accountant, according to bank records.

Those same bank records show more than $231,000 in unexplained payouts. Waters said that money went to the Mori family.

Leno Mori said he does not remember what happened with those payments. Richard and Bonnie did not respond to questions about them.

To protect shareholders, the board set up a trust fund so any future payments to the company were out of the Moris' reach, Bates said.

By 2017, the company was in chaos. Investors, frustrated and suspicious, had abandoned Mori. Some were filing lawsuits, claiming they had been deceived by him, and the Gold Insight's board of directors was in full revolt.

Mori and his family dug in, fighting to maintain control.

Some investors, like Nick Mezes, wanted their money back. He was a patient of Bonnie's, and in 2012 invested $5,000 in Gold Diamet, another Mori shell company. Six years and no returns on his investment later, Mori rebuffed his demands for a refund.

Richard is a swindler ... I feel that he has used the money for his own personal and financial purposes without any regard for the people who have been wronged," Mezes alleged in a 2018 letter to Gold Insight's board of directors.

There needs to be an immediate audit investigating the Mori businesses by the Ontario Securities and Exchange Commission."

Mori sent a letter to Mezes offering to exchange his shares in Gold Diamet with shares in Gold Insight 2003, which Mori claimed had valuable assets but was actually nothing but a shell company.

Mezes said no. Emails show Mori made another offer drafted by a lawyer: If Mezes would recant his claims, Mori would pay him $10,000.

Mezes's son, Peter, said his father held firm. Mezes died in 2019 still seeking justice.

Not long after Mezes died, the Gold Insight board - once composed of Mori acolytes but now a body seeking to hold him to account - filed a whistleblower complaint with the Ontario Securities Commission.

The regulator did not investigate Mori.

I think it is outrageous," said current board president Fred Bates. The OSC's mandate is to protect shareholders ... I just want to see some accountability, some responsibility and some restitution."

An OSC spokesman said the organization does not discuss potential investigations but said the Securities Act requires a probe be launched within six years of an offence. The Gold Insight odyssey was then 18 years old.

Waters, Gold Insight's regretful accountant, also appealed to the OSC in 2019, writing in a letter, There is very egregious conduct in the management of GIR and the shareholders deserve better than a review limited to six years."

Gold Insight's board began to move against Mori in 2016, when former family friends, the Crawfords, filed a $5-million lawsuit against him and the company. The family says it settled out of court, but the board saw the lawsuit as evidence the company's founder had become a liability.

Around the same time, after learning Mori was on the hunt for more cash for yet another venture, Bates - a recent investor - began to dig into Gold Insight's records.

As he pulled on threads, the entire Gold Insight tapestry started to unweave. The shell companies. The worthless share certificates. The loans. All of it.

The board pushed Mori out in 2017 but his father, using his controlling shareholder position, restored his son to his post. Key board members who opposed Mori, including his lawyer, were ousted.

In December 2018, the board, which now included Bates, forced Mori out for good. But they still wrestle with the echoes of Mori's actions.

In March 2021, the provincial government wrote to the board saying the rehabilitation and clean up of the Cordova site had to begin immediately. The lien is now $427,000, more than three times what it was when Mori acquired Cordova in 2001.

Meanwhile, Leno Mori is still trying to get the board to repay the loans his son arranged, although he told Torstar he doesn't expect to ever be paid.

His son might be responsible for the mess that is Gold Insight, he said, but no one should expect restitution from Richard.

How's he going to pay it? He hasn't got a penny," Leno said. He's never made money in his life."

Richard - who, his father said, is now seriously ill and not long for this world" - is a good talker" but could not run a business. Leno said he bailed out his son several times over the last 20 years, but takes no responsibility for Gold Insight as its financial adviser.

I never really paid any attention. Rick said, I need this (money)' and I give it to him and that was it," Leno said. If I hadn't put all that money in there, they would have been bankrupt years before. Whose fault was that? That's probably Rick's."

Bonnie, Richard's wife, says neither she nor her husband are at fault. The criticism of investors is just sour grapes.

Are we blameless? Yes. Richard was trying to save the company, he was, you know, working on helping people make money, not having people lose money."

Richard Mori, in an April 2021 interview, said he still wants to take Gold Insight public, and believed he has enough shareholder support to take back the company.

But, he says, he should never have promised his investors billions of dollars in returns before we were ready." Maybe he should never have gotten messed up in this mining stuff" in the first place.

It hasn't made me anything. And all it's done is cause problems," Mori said. As it shows now, it's causing other people problems."

Grant LaFleche is a St. Catharines-based investigative reporter with the Standard. Reach him via email: grant.lafleche@niagaradailies.com