Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Gary Ross, a senior editor of Saturday Night, went to Las Vegas for that magazine some years ago to report on gambling Canadians. Out of that experience came a novel, Always Tip the Dealer (CBRA, 1981), and now a tale that is, as the cliché has it, stranger than fiction. Ross tells the story of Brian Molony, who perpetrated the largest bank fraud in Canadian history and gambled it all away. When Molony’s theft was discovered, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was out $10.2 million, although Molony’s total take from the bank was nearer $17 million. (Sometimes he repaid one theft by embezzling from a different source within the bank.) One of the many startling aspects of the story is that Molony’s theft was discovered virtually by accident through unrelated police wiretaps. Until he was arrested, Molony had aroused no suspicion at the CIBC.

Stung reads like a novel. Its narrative is laced with dialogue, and interior monologue reconstructs the thoughts of the major characters. Its writing style thus becomes very casual at times (“God, Brian could be infuriating!”), but in its entirety it makes fascinating reading. Ross gives us more than an exciting tale of a man who grew up in the “sober affluence” of a surgeon’s home, graduated with honours from the University of Western Ontario, and was named assistant manager of a Bay Street branch of the CIBC at 24, only to end up in prison for theft. Stung offers intriguing glimpses into life in banking, specifically at the CIBC (“Until recently it had expected employees to ask permission to marry”), and insight into the strange, frightening world and psychology of the compulsive gambler, from Freudian theories to a succinct definition, offered by a dealer at Caesar’s, of a loser: anybody you see more than twice. Ross writes of the police work that eventually snared Molony, tells us of Molony’s subsequent trial defence by Eddie Greenspan, and gives us brief, searing glimpses of prison life through bits of Molony’s diary. An epilogue relates the subsequent fortunes of major characters, and appendices detail figures about the frauds and the gambling losses.

Stung was justly chosen by the Crime Writers of Canada for the Arthur Ellis Award for the best work of crime-related non-fiction published in Canada in 1987, and was the winner of the Sleuth of Baker Street prize of $1000 in the same category.