Investigative journalist, Sam Cooper’s new book Wilful Blindness is a powerful narrative that exposes the connections among organized crime, the Chinese Communist Party, real estate, offshore billionaires and Canadian politicians. This excerpt from his book tells the story of how he began his investigations with Fabian Dawson, the editorial advisor for The Post Group and former deputy editor of The Province and Vancouver Sun.

“When I arrived in the Vancouver Province newsroom in 2009, Fabian Dawson was something of a legend. He had migrated to Canada from Malaysia in the 1980s and scrapped his way into the business with shoe-leather reporting skills that were rapidly becoming a thing of the past in modern newsrooms.

And he succeeded — as he would tell me over lagers at the Lions Pub near the Province’s downtown office — at a time when few Asian reporters were hired in Canada. To call Dawson old-school would be an understatement.

He hated to sit at his desk and look at the computer. He was more like an intelligence officer, and he got his scoops by spending late nights talking to cops and underworld sources in gritty Vancouver bars.

He was known to disappear from the Province newsroom for weeks, chasing down leads in exotic countries. He scored terrific stories with his uncanny capacity to get businessmen with ambiguous backgrounds chatting freely with him.

The classic example was Dawson’s 2009 interview of David Kwok Ho, the billionaire scion of a Hong Kong tobacco dynasty. Ho moved to Vancouver in the 1980s and immediately bought a golf course, a shipping company, a Rolls-Royce dealership, and copious amounts of real estate. He also forged connections with B.C. governments by making big donations and even landed a spot on Vancouver’s Police Board.

That was before his crack-smoking and abuse of drug-addicted prostitutes was exposed in 2008. Ho was charged for unlawfully confining a woman at his Vancouver mansion and possessing an unregistered Glock semi-automatic pistol. But he told Dawson that his crack-fueled sex parties with impoverished prostitutes occurred because of his humanitarian trips to the heroin-scarred Downtown Eastside.

“I’m addicted to helping them,” Ho was quoted as saying in Dawson’s 2009 Vancouver Province scoop. “It’s worse when it rains ... that’s when I get into the car and go looking for them.”

As a rookie reporter at the Province, if I was running into roadblocks on a story, editors would tell me to go see Fabian.

Usually, the issue would be finding good sources. That’s a big challenge for young reporters. I remember that I would explain my cases to Fabian while he leaned back with arms crossed, blank-faced, giving the impression he’d much rather be somewhere else. He would periodically mutter a question and offer a few comments. And then he would break into a grin and abruptly rattle off about ten names and phone numbers.

In Vancouver in the 1990s — because of Dawson’s international sources and understanding of politics and business in Asia — he was first to grasp the scale of real estate money-laundering in Canada.

Dawson took the Five Dragons scandal to the next level when he obtained a covert study from B.C. Co-ordinated Law Enforcement Unit’s (CLEU) Asian Organized Crime division. He reported that one of the Five Dragons, Hon Kwing-shum, had bought at least 11 residential and commercial properties in Vancouver’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. The study showed that up to 44 dirty Hong Kong cops had followed the Five Dragons to Canada, using their children and concubines to make major real estate investments in Vancouver and Toronto.

CLEU believed these heroin-trafficking cops bought blocks worth of prime property in Vancouver. “It is not exactly understood how much influence or power these former police officials possess regarding Chinese criminal activities in North America,” Dawson quoted, from the CLEU study. “But, because of past ties, former influence, possible triad connections and money illegally obtained, they definitely could influence Chinese criminal patterns as we know them today.”

As Dawson continued to probe Asian organized crime, he travelled east to Ottawa to meet with contacts from the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada. Everyone told Dawson about McAdam and his dossier. They said McAdam’s career had ended when he was recalled from Hong Kong to Ottawa in 1993. Some in the Criminal Intelligence Service told Dawson they thought McAdam had pointed to powerful figures in Canada without adequate evidence. But others believed McAdam’s dossier contained solid reports that made him a target for people with lots to lose.

Dawson decided to look McAdam up, and they agreed to meet in Dawson’s hotel near Parliament Hill. As McAdam told his story, Dawson flipped through the Hong Kong dossier. The writing was packed with details and sourcing. Right away, Dawson understood it was probably too much for the average Ottawa bureaucrat to digest, let alone believe. But for an investigative reporter who understood corruption in Southeast Asia, the material was plausible. Here were the names of the Hong Kong juggernauts that had purchased about 20 percent of Vancouver’s prime real estate during the 1980s in blockbuster transactions, including the Expo ’86 land deal.

Dawson recognized a handful of bombshell stories in the dossier. He saw the names of top Canadian consular officials and staff, Hong Kong legislative assembly leaders, Canadian politicians, and alleged Chinese spies.

He saw a shady Taiwanese immigration-consulting business funnelling incredible amounts of money into Quebec’s immigration program, and directly into the riding of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.

And McAdam’s dossier crossed over with names that Dawson recognized from his own files. So he flew back to Vancouver with the

dossier and started to track down the Canadian diplomats and RCMP officers cited as sources in McAdam’s work.

And in 1999, he began to break major stories that suggested a cover-up in Ottawa.

Dawson reported that RCMP Cpl. Robert Read had been tasked with investigating McAdam’s allegations that staff in the Canadian embassy had received bribes. Some of the allegations related to 30 Canadian officials who had accepted gambling cash from tycoons McAdam believed were Triad figures. Dawson reported the RCMP was preparing criminal charges, but in 1999 RCMP brass abruptly decided to abandon the bribery probe.

Read had been so disappointed with the decision that he leaked several records to Dawson.

Dawson reported that names of the Canadian officials who had faced criminal charges in the abandoned probe “have been ordered to be kept secret, [but these people] have since gone on to become senior government officials after only minor reprimands.”

But after Dawson broke Read’s whistleblower stories, the RCMP fired Read. And this led to an RCMP tribunal hearing in Ottawa.

Dawson covered the hearing and learned a second RCMP officer assigned to review Read’s immigration fraud probe in Hong Kong was “shocked beyond belief ” that Immigration Canada had tried to bury Read’s investigation.

An RCMP memo revealed that an RCMP liaison officer in Hong Kong had warned his superiors that Canada’s ambassador would “be screaming at the highest political levels” if the RCMP continued investigating McAdam and Read’s bribery allegations.

Dawson reported the Royal Canadian Mounted Police External Review Committee found that the RCMP had dropped Read’s politically sensitive probe because it didn’t want to anger the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs.

“What is at issue was a deliberate choice made by the RCMP not to pursue an investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing,” the review found, “even though numerous examples had been drawn to the RCMP’s attention of incidents that suggested that an immigration fraud ring was operating within the [Commission] and possibly involved employees of the government of Canada.”

Looking back almost 20 years after he dissected the McAdam and Read files, Fabian Dawson told me he could draw several key inferences.

First, the names disclosed in McAdam’s files included some of the most powerful men in China, Hong Kong, and Canada.

Dawson told me he firmly believes too much money and power was involved in McAdam’s files and Robert Read’s criminal probe.

That’s why the RCMP couldn’t follow the Hong Kong probe to its logical conclusions.

So Dawson did what the media is supposed to do in such circumstances.

He published key documents and names from the reports filed to Ottawa in the early 1990s by McAdam and Clement.

It was these intelligence reports that would ultimately trigger a secret RCMP and CSIS study — code-named Sidewinder — that alleged Triads and tycoons and Chinese intelligence operatives had corrupted Canada’s institutions and markets.

I obtained a copy of one of these reports, called “Triads Entering Canada.”

It was a powerful national security warning that should have put Ottawa on notice.

In Dawson’s media reports for the Province and Asian Pacific Post, McAdam’s files to Ottawa were broadly called “the Hong Kong probe.”

Dawson reported the probe focused on Hong Kong’s wealthiest tycoons, Li Ka Shing, Stanley Ho, and Cheng Yu Tung. In one probe document cited by Dawson, Hong Kong police investigators had requested assistance from Canada to investigate Li Ka Shing’s growing acquisitions of Canadian real estate and corporate assets. But the Commission had refused to cooperate.

Dawson also reported on a memo filed by Garry Clement that warned Stanley Ho and Cheng Yu Tung were frequent guests at the Canadian Commission.

“In Hong Kong, it is a way of life for the legitimate Hong Kong society and the Triads to ingratiate themselves with charitable organizations, foreign missions and government officials,” the memo said. “[Stanley Ho and Cheng Yu Tung] are known to be associated to many documented triads … and they have been major Canadian investors.”

And Dawson’s reports identified Hong Kong probe targets Albert Yeung and movie mogul Charles Heung. Both have been named in U.S. and Canadian government records as alleged leaders of the Sun Yee On, one of the world’s largest heroin-trafficking syndicates.

The Hong Kong probe documents also detailed several instances of Triad figures approaching Canadian leaders. In the 1990s, B.C. NDP premier Mike Harcourt “was hosted by a known Triad associate, Henry Fok, whose son was arrested in the United States for arms smuggling,” Dawson reported.”

About the book Wilful Blindness

In 1982 three of the most powerful men in Asia met in Hong Kong. They would decide how Hong Kong would be handed over to the People's Republic of China and how Chinese business tycoons Henry Fok and Li Ka-Shing would help Deng Xiaoping realize the Chinese Communist Party's domestic and global ambitions.

That meeting would not only change Vancouver but the world. Billions of dollars in Chinese investment would soon reach the shores of North America's Pacific coast. B.C. government casinos became a tool for global criminals to import deadly narcotics into Canada and launder billions of drug cash into Vancouver real estate.

And it didn't happen by accident. A cast of accomplices - governments hungry for revenue, casino and real estate companies with ties to shady offshore wealth, professional facilitators including lawyers and bankers, an aimless RCMP that gave organized crime room to grow - all combined to cause this tragedy.

There was greed, folly, corruption, conspiracy, and wilful blindness. Decades of bad policy allowed drug cartels, first and foremost the Big Circle Boys - powerful transnational narco-kingpins with ties to corrupt Chinese officials, real estate tycoons, and industrialists - to gain influence over significant portions of Canada's economy. Many looked the other way while B.C.'s primary industry, real estate, ballooned with dirty cash.

But the unintended social consequences are now clear: a fentanyl overdose crisis raging in major cities throughout North America and life spans falling for the first time in modern Canada, and a runaway housing market that has devastated middle-class income earners. This story isn't just about real estate and fentanyl overdoses, though. Sam Cooper has uncovered evidence that shows the primary actors in so-called "Vancouver Model" money laundering have effectively made Canada's west coast a headquarters for corporate and industrial espionage by the CCP. And these ruthless entrepreneurs have used Vancouver and Canada to export their criminal model to other countries around the world including Australia and New Zealand.

Meanwhile, Cooper finds that the RCMP's 2019 arrest of its top intelligence official, Cameron Ortis, raises many frightening questions. Could Chinese transnational criminals and state actors targeting Canada's industrial and technological crown jewels have gained protection from the Mounties? Could China and Iran have insight into Canada's deepest national security secrets and influence on investigations? According to the evidence Cooper has found, Ortis had oversight of many investigations into transnational money laundering networks and insight into sensitive probes of suspects seeking to undermine Canada's democracy and infiltrate the United States. Wilful Blindness is a powerful narrative that follows the investigators who refused to go along with institutionalized negligence and corruption that enabled the Vancouver Model, with Cooper drawing on extensive interviews with the whistle-blowers; thousands of pages of government and court documents obtained through legal applications; and large caches of confidential material available exclusively to Cooper. The book culminates with a shocking revelation showing how deeply Canada has been compromised and what needs to happen to get the nation back on track with its "Five Eyes" allies.