You couldn’t blame Burt for fainting.

The air was stale and the questions kept coming.

Where were the ledgers?

Who paid for the factory?

The ledgers? Burned. The money? Borrowed.

They were lies, of course, and they were the hardest kind of lies because they weren’t his.

Phillips had fed him the lies just like Phillips had fed him the money; Burt just built the pianos.

But George Robert Burt couldn’t take it. He did faint amidst the shouting and the chaos. Court adjourned for the day.

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You may know a handsome old apartment building about halfway down Roncesvalles in Toronto’s west end. You may know the nice brick gates across from it that open onto the wide and expansive High Park Blvd. It’s not so likely however that you’d know that this old apartment was once two storeys shorter and was the headquarters of York Loan — a national financial scam. But it was, and here’s how it happened.

Joseph Phillips was a charmer and was about 42 years old when, in 1895, he became president of the York County Loan and Savings Co. Born in Wales, Phillips had been a salesman, a bookkeeper and maybe even a preacher. He had been married once and was working on his second. He’d lived in New York and had a growing inventory of children.

The York Loan was a Ponzi scheme: it seemed shareholders committed themselves to small weekly deposits for three years. After three years, they got a 4-per-cent return on their money, but if they missed even one weekly payment, everything they had deposited until then became the property of York Loan.

Phillips called the missed payments “lapses,” and they were the lifeblood of the company, because in addition to the four cents he promised to pay back on every dollar he took in, it cost Phillips another 20 cents in expenses — he needed a consistent 24-per-cent return just to break even. The lapses covered this crazy math and then some. A lot of people lapsed and Phillips grew rich.

Within a few years, York Loan had more than 66,000 shareholders across the country. Every week, an army of commissioned agents banged on doors from Halifax to Vancouver, put coins in sacks and sent them by train to Phillips in Toronto. At the York Loan office, a small cadre of unquestioning young women and men processed it all.

At first Phillips operated out of the prestigious Confederation Life Building. The building would have lent respectability to his dodgy operation. It still stands handsomely at Yonge and Richmond today. He then built his own headquarters on Roncesvalles Ave., in 1904 — not just to impress, but also as part of a desperate investment strategy. By the early 1900s, the government was outlawing the “lapse”-based system, and Phillips was scrambling to earn the 27-per-cent-plus returns he needed to survive.

His first bet was on land. He bought almost everything below Bloor from Lansdowne to High Park. He built his offices but also built roads, houses, stores and factories to rent and sell. He knew New York and wanted High Park to be like Central Park — a lush, green anchor for a grand residential district. And he did OK; his headquarters isn’t bad and his gated High Park Blvd., with the three remaining York Loan houses at nos. 2, 4 and 6, is still pretty impressive.

His second brainstorm was to convince shareholders to swap their York Loan deposits for products he could make. He produced Liszt brand pianos; he invented the National Monthly magazine and established the Toronto Life Insurance Co. His agents across the country aggressively flogged these things but it was a race against time and he was losing: not enough pianos, magazines or houses sold. He needed a streetcar line up Roncesvalles to make the area more attractive but couldn’t get one. He invested $200,000 to get electricity from the Humber River but that generated nothing. By late November 1905, lines of shareholders were trudging up Roncesvalles and storming the York Loan office. They wanted their money and Phillips didn’t have it.

At around 5 p.m. on a cold, dry January Monday in 1906, detectives Mackie and Twigg arrested Phillips at what he called his York Loan Club House, one of three identical handsome houses that still stand on Roncesvalles’ Wright Ave. He appears to have been living blithely at the “Club,” taking most of his meals there — while his wife and seven children resided only blocks away.

Jovial as always, Phillips boarded the Queen streetcar only to find he had forgotten his fare. The officers paid it for him. No one spoke on the way to the police station at Old City Hall. By September, Phillips was in Kingston serving five years for fraud.

National Trust liquidated York Loan. With the owner of the streetcar company on the National Trust board, streetcars soon started rolling up Roncesvalles. The real estate now sold steadily and much money was recovered. By the time Phillips left Kingston in 1911, his “high class” district had filled in. It would be known as the York Loan lands for years to come, and it’s hard not to see Phillips walking High Park Blvd. thinking about what might have been.

Robert Home Smith, the young lawyer who liquidated the properties for National Trust, had seen what happened — how parks, rivers and handsome streets could create real estate value. He soon bought up both shores of the Humber River and made his fortune creating the Kingsway neighbourhoods.

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Shakespeare said there is a tide in the lives of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Phillips rode his flood to fortune but the tide then washed him up on the north shore of Lake Superior. At 68, we find him in the lumbering town of Thessalon, with Georgina Hudson from the York Loan days playing the housekeeper for propriety’s sake. Far to the south in Mimico, his wife, Martha, had long since finished raising their kids, one of whom — in an almost too Canadian touch to the story — went on to win a Stanley Cup in 1926 with the Montreal Maroons.

So, while I know this guy was a crook, I can’t help liking him for his vision. Dishonest? Sure. But mean and small? Not at all. Take a walk down Roncesvalles and out along High Park Blvd. He cheated but he tried.