A former Langley developer has been accused of defrauding a U.S. development company of $800,000, while he was still in prison for another, unrelated fraud.
Mark John Chandler is best known in B.C. for his involvement in the development of Murrayville House, a condo complex near Langley Memorial Hospital.
In 2019, after the Murrayville House project had collapsed into receivership amid creditor lawsuits, construction delays, and accusations that he had promised some condo units to two, three, or even four different would-be buyers, Chandler was extradited to California on unrelated fraud charges linked to a purported housing development he had promoted in Los Angeles.
Chandler pleaded guilty to a single charge of wire fraud in that case. He was sentenced to six years behind bars and ordered to turn over $1.7 million in restitution to his victims. He was released in January 2025.
According to lawsuits filed in New Jersey, Chandler is now accused of orchestrating another fraud from inside his prison cell.
KMS Development Partners Ltd. is a real estate development firm. According to a 2025 court ruling in a lawsuit between KMS and its fraud insurer, KMS spent more than a decade working to redevelop the site of the Frank Sinatra Post Office in Hoboken, New Jersey, into a major hotel.
KMS bought the site from the U.S. government in the summer of 2022, and then went looking for construction financing.
On Jan. 4, 2023, a former lawyer for KMS introduced company representatives to a man calling himself Marcus Hamilton Chandler.
“Mr. Chandler was purportedly a wealthy descendant of the London-based ‘Chandler family,’ and the chairman of the Chandler Family Trust,” U.S. District Judge Gerald Austin McHugh wrote.
The company and Chandler agreed to work together, and Chandler offered to put up $157 million in construction loans.
But money did not flow from the ‘Chandler Family Trust’ to KMS. Instead, on Jan. 17 2023, KMS put $300,000 in an escrow account purportedly controlled by the trust.
This was supposedly to cover the lender’s “due diligence, advisory, consultants, construction analysis, entitlement analysis, accounting, and underwriting expenses.”
In February, KMS negotiated for another $50 million from the Chandler Family Trust, this led to a March 3 “commitment fee” of $500,000 being paid by KMS.
The purported investment unravelled on July 19 of that year, when Robert Reed, KMS’s vice president of construction management, revealed that Marcus Hamilton Chandler was actually Mark John Chandler, “an individual serving a sentence in federal prison for defrauding real estate investors.”
KMS launched a civil fraud lawsuit against Chandler. In the fall of 2025, District Judge Evelyn Padin noted in a ruling that Chandler initially defended himself.
“But over the past several months, he has failed to appear at multiple conferences before the court, attend his deposition, or even serve his initial disclosures.”
After his January 2025 release from prison in the U.S., Chandler was scheduled to be deported, most likely to Canada, although he also had British citizenship.
None of the allegations have been proven in court, and there is no indication Chandler has been criminally charged in relation to the case.
The Langley Advance Times has reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice office in Newark, New Jersey, to determine whether there is any criminal investigation underway.
Chandler has never been criminally charged in Canada, though before his recent stint in jail, he had already been convicted of theft in Arizona in the early 2000s, and of spousal battery in California in 2009.
He was recently fined $75,000 by the B.C. Financial Service Agency over his promotion of the Murrayville House condo project.