Donny "Golden Boy" Lalonde, the now 56 year-old former boxing light-heavyweight champion is most famous for being one of boxing legend, Sugar Ray Leonard's most formidable opponents. His fame has now taken a turn ever since being found all over the Panama Papers in connection to a large number of companies and real estate developments in Costa Rica.

After the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists leaked more than 11.5 million financial and legal records from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm, Donny became the focus of an investigation done by Canada's CBC News and the Toronto Star in collaboration with The Malta Independent.

This newsroom joined the investigation after it was found that Donny moved to St Paul's Bay in Malta last year with his wife and is currently managing a Libyan boxer, Malik Zinad in a gym in St Julian's.

His fight with Sugar Ray, although resulting in a loss, got Donny a paycheque of $5.5 million. After years of living luxuriously with nothing being off limits, the former champion resettled in Canada in 1990 with the idea of making an even larger fortune in real estate.

By 2004, Donny was forced to declare bankruptcy in British Columbia due to his failed real estate venture, and he subsequently moved to Tamardino in Costa Rica. The larger-than-life personality tried his hand in real estate once again, at one point controlling 38 companies in Costa Rica related to, what he called, the largest real estate development project in Costa Rica.

A decade later, much like his first venture in Canada, investors are now asking for their money back with around 30 of them hoping to get their $3.5 million back in a class-action lawsuit. This lawsuit is one of Costa Rica's largest to date, regarding Lalonde's El Escape and Howler Ridge real-estate deals involving investors from Canada and America.

The plaintiffs' lawyer, Jeannette Salazar said that, although some of the funds entered Costa Rican and Panamanian bank accounts, "the main problem is that Lalonde never fulfilled the development of what he called 'our community'."

Donny denies any and all allegations made against him saying that he has sacrificed years of his life for that development. "All they have to do is go look at the records and tell me, what did I do? Look at the work I did from Day 1 until I resigned. Tell me what fraudulent person sits there and works nine years on a project that they're fraudulently doing something with. It makes no sense," the former champion said in an interview which took place in St. Julians with the Toronto Star, CBC and The Malta Independent .

Lalonde repeated the same explanation over and over again during the interview saying, "I've been threatened many times by the same crew. But if I did something to you so terrible, would you wait eight years to do something about it? There's nothing. These guys are threatening me, using social media, slandering my name in grocery stores."

When asked whether he has ever thought of suing the people who he claims have slandered his name, Donny said that he "thought about it many times. There's lots of people in my life that I've crossed paths with that I could've sued. Including media people! Sorry. But I've never done it. I don't waste my time with negative energy."

Real estate in Malta

This newsroom was interested in finding out whether the boxer was looking at breaking into the local real estate scene, but he shook his head saying he has no intention to try. "I've spoken to Maltese friends about this. They're like: "Donny, in Malta, there's 5% of the country is real estate is owned by foreigners. Because we don't sell our real estate. We value our real estate. "And I said: "I respect that. I don't need to buy real estate. I'm not looking to be in the real estate business anymore." I'm looking to live my life, write my book, help people, help Malik, help any boxers I can get with. That's my life now," the boxer said.

When this newsroom prodded a little further about him possibly being approached for investments here since Costa Rica, Donny said that there are a number of reasons why he never accepted. The main one being that he has lost "lots of money" in the business adding that "all these people want their money back."

 

 

He insisted that he doesn't know the market in Malta. "I'm not like a house speculator buyer. I just was forecasting by reading books like 'Where on Earth are we Going?' by the undersecretary general to Kofi Annan.You know, the assistant or whatever that's called.  I just followed a few instincts in life and did some good real estate speculating. But I'm not you know, a sophisticated real estate investor."

Regarding whether he plans on staying in Malta, it all depends on the boxer he is currently managing in Malta. "But as long as I'm, like I said, enjoying contributing to the boxing community, the Malik thing... He may move to another country. He already moved to Finland once and came back. So that, some things are unknown."

He referred to Malik at a different stage in the interview as a future world champion if he stays on course. "He has twice the talent I did. He's younger than I was. He's got a better manager at a younger age. He's much healthier. So in other words he doesn't have the challenges that I had. If he stays on track, I will be surprised if he doesn't dominate the light-heavyweight division for a period of time."

The interview with journalists from the partnered newsrooms also focused on what sparked Lalonde's interest in real estate to begin with. How does someone renowned for fighting become so adamant on using property to make a fortune?

It turned out that Lalonde was into real estate even before he was a boxing champion. On advice from a co-worker at the water plant in British Columbia, he learnt a "formula" of how to by property for close to nothing and then use any income from the properties to buy others.

"You need sellers that are willing to co-operate, to give you the right to buy it," Lalonde said. ". . . The houses were $16,000 to $24,000. . . . That was a different world. Today, for a $2-million house, I wouldn't know how to do it."

An economic downturn in the 1990s severely affected Lalonde's money flow and in 2000, federal courts ordered the sheriff in British Columbia to seize and sell all property related to Alias Developments Ltd., one of Lalonde's companies, to collect $78,000 in unpaid taxes. This eventually led to his bankruptcy in 2004.

The bankruptcy report stated that ""Donnie Lalonde was involved with several companies as a developer. Christie (his wife) was also self-employed as a design consultant. Lack of business experience and education.Poor financial management. Business failures." As a result, Lalonde's creditors also took a massive blow.

In reaction to this, Donny said, "I should never have taken money and tried to become a land developer in Canada. I should have left my money with my qualified, educated money manager who had me making $30,000 a month, you know, hanging out with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bryan Adams, hockey players, actors, having the life of Riley," he said. "And I should never have gone back to Canada."

This was the same formula which he used again in Costa Rica after his Canadian ventures failed miserably. This time, all the money came from investors so he didn't have to pay a cent. He said during the interview that he sold himself as the "guy on the ground in the jungle fighting off everybody who wants to steal it from us. You go back home to Tennessee and I'll be your partner."

His two main Costa Rican ventures were El Escape, which was dubbed a Wild-West village; and Howler Ridge which promised two residential communities with all amenities, a restaurant and a microbrewery.

At this point, Dirk Brauer from Mossfon Asset Management, which is an arm of the Mossack Fonseca law firm, valued Donny's net worth at $3 million. This was after Donny was seemingly worried about spending all his money, so he handed over a mandate to Mossfon Asset Management obliging him to produce income in Costa Rica and save funds for the future.

The El Escape Ranch is currently entirely abandoned with no signs of construction or life whatsoever. Even the trees are now dried up and the once promising lot is now the arid base of a hypothetical ghost town.

When it comes to the Howler Ridge Development, the brochure for the development read, "With consistent funding, and a continually employed roster of contractors, including earth movers, architects and legal support, Howler Mountain is undergoing daily improvement." However, this development is currently an abandoned lot with a few houses with a partially built home owned by Lalonde himself.

Mirroring what happened in Canada, once a recession hit in 2008, the big "boom" which he had been banking on officially shut down and he was left with 46 hectares of land but no buyers, but he decided to carry on.

When it came to his El Escape cowboy village, Donny sent an email to investors explaining that permits were taking longer than expected and the $3 million which was meant to be to handle the infrastructure disappeared.

One investor in El Escape, Sue Lindstrom, was one of the lucky few who managed to get some money back in 2014 after a court case, a full seven years after buying into the project. The rest were meant to be paid back in installments, but those payments never arrived. In her words, "he destroyed my dream of paradise."

Another investor in the lot, Daphne Buhlert, wasn't so lucky as she hasn't yet received a single cent of her $55,000 investment. She was told in 2011 that she was second on the list to be refunded. She went from someone who was pretty much in love with his celebrity and charisma to calling Donny a "has-been" saying, "it makes me angry they are gallivanting around Europe."

During the interview, Donny, never once admitting to any wrongdoing, actually looked directly into the camera and apologized to Daphne and other investors. According to the boxer, 40% of investors have so far got their money back because that's all the money there was.

Regarding Howler Ridge, investors were calling it a "Ponzi Scheme", but Donny had reservations about this. "There's no Ponzi scheme about it. You have to raise money, you borrow money. And then if you finish the project with the money, great. If not, you borrow more money," he said. "It is real-estate development. You win some, you lose some."

In 2006, a group, led by Suki and Joel Hahn, invested a total of $1.7 million in the development. In 2008, Lalonde confirmed that "Things are moving along in the project, it is actually going GREAT."

However, when the couple visited the lot in 2011, they regretted ever investing in the project. "Donny guided us down these jungle roads you could barely get through," said Suki. "We get to this spot where we have to hike up a mountain for hours and look at this completely undeveloped land that we'd given $1.7 million to. Nothing had been done."

The couple also never got any money back.

Although Lalonde is currently happy living his life in Malta and has no intention to move back to Costa Rica, he has said that if the class-action suit is filed and proceedings are initiated, he will be back there to defend himself in a heartbeat. He still denies that he did anything other than work hard at the real estate development business, which is inherently risky and so, investors should have known that their money was always at risk.

Tanya Talaga from the Toronto Star and Katie Nicholson from CBC News led the investigation.