For one NBA star, a dream home turned nightmare

The six-bedroom, 10,000-square-foot house on Lake Ontario that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, 25, a star player with the Oklahoma City Thunder, bought for just over 8.4 million Canadian dollars, or $6.1 million, had a dream home must be.

But in May, two days after Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander, 25, moved into the Toronto-area home with his partner, things became a nightmare, according to a lawsuit seeking to overturn the sale. A menacing visitor appeared looking for a previous resident. The couple left the next day and did not return.

The home of the young NBA player, described in the property listing as an “elegant, resort-like estate” had been home to Aiden Pleterski, a self-described “crypto king” who declared bankruptcy in 2022, owing just under C$13 million to more than 150 investment clients.

Court records show the home received a steady stream of angry visitors I tried to talk to Mr. Pleterski while he lived there and after he moved.

Court documents show that Mr. Pleterski was kidnapped last December by one of his aggrieved investors and four other men, then beaten and tortured for three days.

Testimony in the bankruptcy case shows that Mr. Pleterski had a security guard to ward off angry investors and that he was eventually taken out of the house for his own safety. Another resident also fled fearing for his safety after angry visitors showed up every day.

A holding company owned by Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander is now asking a court to reverse the purchase of the Burlington, Ont., home, saying the seller failed to identify the link to Mr. Pleterski and the home’s potential security threat announced.

Citing the kidnapping, the holding company said in its filing that the people who came to the luxury home “did not make idle threats.”

The property’s former owner, the head of a Toronto real estate company that includes apartments, retirement homes and hotels, hid information about alarming visitors from potential buyers because “any buyer who could afford to spend more than $8 million giving to a luxury The house would value privacy and would in any case not want to be part of a property that had a history of threatening visits to the previous two residents.”

Through his lawyer, Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander declined to comment.

Halton Regional Police, which has authority over Burlington, declined to provide further information and a spokesman declined to say whether Mr. Pleterski was the target of a criminal investigation.

A bank analysis by a trustee shows that Mr. Pleterski was not the investment whiz many of his investors thought he was.

It showed that of the 41.6 million Canadian dollars he raised, only 1.6 percent of the money was actually invested. He used about 38 percent of the money to pay back principals — supposed investment gains — to some clients and spent about the same percentage on private jet trips, a fleet of luxury cars, watches, including one that cost more than $300,000, and a lease for the car. Burlington House.

The trustee concluded that “Pleterski’s extravagant lifestyle, which was financed by his investors,” “ultimately led to his bankruptcy.”

During a sworn interview in 2022 with attorneys for the trustee, Mr. Pleterski said he first became interested in cryptocurrency after using it to make purchases for video games and started trading with it while he was still in high school.

He started with money from his family and his earnings as a part-time baseball umpire. His knowledge of trading and financial markets, he said, came from “YouTube videos, Google, quick Google searches.”

The company, Mr. Pleterski said, operated through his personal bank accounts until December 2021, when he formed his company at the suggestion of a former landlord.

His only records, he said, consisted of his text messages and WhatsApp messages with customers. Although Mr. Pleterski created spreadsheets for a handful of clients who requested them, he acknowledged that the investment returns they showed were just a “blanket figure” he came up with after looking at his bank accounts.

The home Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander purchased was located between Toronto, where he was born, and Hamilton, Ontario, where he grew up. It came fully furnished and included a gym, three-car garage and home theater. The bedrooms, serviced by a lift, offer beautiful views of the lake, including the property’s private jetty.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander said that two days after he moved in, a man appeared to demand to see someone he had never heard of: Mr. Pleterski. Instead of leaving when told no one by that name was present, the uninvited visitor looked around the property and then sat in his car in the driveway.

Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander’s partner, Hailey Summers, called the police department’s non-emergency number and was told the agency had “received several reports of threats to the property, including that there was a threat to burn the house down,” according to the lawsuit.

In the spring of 2021, Mr. Pleterski agreed to lease the Burlington home from a company controlled by Ray Gupta, who also controls Toronto real estate holding company Sunray Group.

But when Mr. Pleterski’s business began to collapse, he stopped making his monthly rental payments of 45,000 Canadian dollars and moved to a hotel owned by Sunray, where he was not charged rent.

In response to Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander’s complaint, Mr. Gupta’s company downplayed the frequency and potential danger posed by the uninvited visitors and argued that it had no obligation to disclose the persistence of the unwanted guests .

“Despite the fact that Aiden was kidnapped, any visit to the property by someone inquiring about the former resident would be considered a completely normal occurrence,” the report said.

But during a sworn interview for Mr. Pleterski’s bankruptcy case, Sandeep Gupta, Ray’s son, who handled all of Mr. Pleterski’s business, painted a different picture.

“People came to the house every day looking for Aiden,” Mr. Gupta said.

He said the unwanted visits continued when a Sunray employee moved in to occupy the furnished home and the employee asked for a security guard. “His wife refused to stay there,” Mr. Gupta said. “It was a very bad situation.”