MANDEL: Seven years for man who held lawyer and staff at gunpoint

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Being a lawyer in Toronto can prove dangerous.

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In the latest case, Krishna Arora, 39, was sentenced last week to seven years in prison for holding Scarborough real estate and immigration lawyer Qasim Ali and his staff at gunpoint in 2020 and then forcing him to withdraw $1.75 million from his firm’s trust account.

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“In the commission of these terrible crimes, the accused showed that he is capable of threatening great violence, brandishing firearms to terrify others, and entirely selfish and greedy misconduct, regardless of its predictably traumatic effect on others,” wrote Superior Court Justice Kenneth Campbell.

It’s a disturbing trend.

A 2022 Ontario Bar Association program noted that “lawyers and their staff are increasingly subjected to threats, brutal attacks, and in some instances, fatal acts of violence.”

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Last year, Anh Chiem was sentenced to life in prison for running down Toronto litigation lawyer Scott Rosen because he was acting for her former son-in-law. In 2022, Qalid Abderezak was handed a 12-year sentence for spraying a Vaughan lawyer’s office with gunfire and warning her to drop a case against a tow truck operator or he’d come back to kill her.

Ali escaped with his life — but the lawyer told the court he was afraid he’d never hold his family again. He can still feel the “cold steel of a gun” pressed against his temple, and hear the “anguished cries” of his bound employees.

And all because Arora was angry because the lawyer was working on the mortgage foreclosure of a residential property he owned with his wife. 

The terrifying ordeal began about 4 p.m. on Sept. 15, 2020, when Arora arrived at the law office for a scheduled appointment. His unidentified accomplice showed up soon after. Arora pulled out what appeared to be a black handgun while the other man wielded what looked like an Uzi sub-machine gun.

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The accomplice tied up Ali’s three terrified employees with duct tape and wires and made them lie face down on the floor.

At gunpoint, Arora told Ali to send an email requesting a discharge of the “mortgage foreclosure” against him. While his associate guarded the staff, Arora then forced Ali to drive to the nearby TD bank to get two bank drafts, totalling $1.75 million, from his law firm’s trust account. Both were to be payable to Arora.

The man who had just held him at gunpoint then decided he wanted to put the lawyer “at ease,” according to the judgment. So Arora told Ali to go through the McDonalds drivethru and bought them a couple of lattes.

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Meanwhile, after taking the employees’ drivers’ licences and warning that he now “knows where they live” the accomplice left and made his escape. He’s never been found.

Arora wasn’t as fortunate. He was arrested the next day with the bank notes in hand.

For a man who graduated as a lawyer in India, it wasn’t a very smart plan: Video surveillance captured Arora both outside the law office and in the bank. Police found the imitation firearm he used. So last August, he pleaded guilty to four counts of forcible confinement and one count of extortion.

At his sentencing, his family wrote effusive letters about how the married father was a wonderful guy who faces deportation after his sentence. The judge wasn’t sympathetic.

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“They uniformly fail to acknowledge one undeniable reality: that, in the commission of these serious offences – where entirely innocent people were threatened with firearms, tied up and forcibly confined in a room, and where a lawyer, who had been doing nothing but his job, was extorted (at least temporarily) out of $1.75 million by the accused — the accused engaged in conduct wholly inconsistent with these tremendous virtues,” Campbell wrote.

The tough judge sentenced Arora to four years for the extortion, less 10 months credit for strict bail. But he also imposed a year for each of the four people he held at gunpoint and wonderfully insisted they run consecutively.

“If these sentences are made concurrent, then all of these individual victims,” Campbell said, “are simply lumped together for purposes of sentencing, and the severity and gravity of these four “forcible confinement” offences, is needlessly and unrealistically minimized.”

So Arora’s off to serve seven years — more than double the term his lawyer had proposed.

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