Sam Cooper

In a stunning detail first reported by The Globe and Mail and independently confirmed by The Bureau, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was entangled in a Canadian surveillance operation when he met privately with Paul King Jin at a Richmond hotel in the months following the E-Pirate raids.

On October 15, 2015, as one team of RCMP officers stormed a bulletproof-glass-protected office inside a Richmond business tower, another team, just two kilometres away, entered a luxury condominium on Brighouse Way. Inside the master bedroom, they pried open a gun safe and uncovered what would become one of the most notorious cash seizures in Canadian anti-money laundering history: more than $4.3 million in Canadian currency, tightly bundled in elastic bands and stacked in rows. The bundles were surrounded by high-denomination casino chips and dozens of promissory notes written in Mandarin and English — all bearing the imprint of Paul King Jin’s clandestine gambling empire.

Among the documents recovered from the unit was one investigators never expected to find: a photocopy of a child’s identification. Two years earlier, that same child had been the target of a brazen abduction attempt. A man working for Jin had arrived at the child’s school with forged documents, police say, intending to seize the student as collateral for an unpaid gambling debt. Now, the reappearance of the child’s personal ID inside Jin’s Brighouse condo offered chilling confirmation of what experts on Triad-linked infiltration had long warned: the torrent of cash pouring into Canadian cities like Vancouver and Toronto wasn’t merely about casinos and narcotics and Asian capital flight — it was rooted in the systematic intimidation of vulnerable members of Canada’s Chinese diaspora.

The Brighouse unit — with its cash-laden gun safe and disturbing evidence of child-targeted debt enforcement — was just one of many interconnected properties raided by RCMP that day. Also searched was a sprawling Richmond mansion used to host Jin’s VIP gambling clientele; the Water Cube, a massage parlour tied to high-end prostitution and elite drug trafficking networks; and Silver International, a Chinese-run underground bank operating brazenly out of a Richmond office tower. It was at Silver, investigators believed, that hundreds of millions — possibly billions — in suspected drug proceeds were funneled through an informal remittance system linked to Hong Kong and mainland China.

Nearly a decade after RCMP’s sweeping E-Pirate raids, the civil forfeiture cases launched by the B.C. government against Paul King Jin and his relatives — targeting roughly 20 Vancouver-area properties worth an estimated $30 million — remain largely unresolved. Since the core case was filed in March 2019, new claims and properties have been added year after year. But The Bureau’s review of court records shows that to date, just one asset has been successfully reclaimed: in May 2025, the province quietly secured a consent forfeiture order for $538,638.22 in cash seized from Jin’s Jones Road property — minus a portion claimed by Jin’s parents.

The remainder — including the $4.3 million from the Brighouse gun safe, a portfolio of homes and vehicles, including Porsche 911, a 2013 Bentley Continental GT, a Cadillac Escalade — remains tied up in litigation. There has been little public explanation for the delay, other than court records showing Jin citing extended overseas travel as the reason for missed filings and non-compliance. Confusion has also persisted over which of his rotating cast of high-priced Vancouver lawyers is representing him in which case.

Jin’s claims of frequent international travel align with intelligence shared by two Canadian sources, who say he regularly flies to Latin America and the Caribbean — particularly Panama and Mexico. One source told The Bureau that during a search at a Mexican airport, authorities discovered a business card in Jin’s possession linking him to Wan Kuok Koi — the U.S.-sanctioned gangster known as “Broken Tooth,” identified as a senior Sam Gor drug cartel figure and “Hongmen” leader operating under Beijing’s United Front influence apparatus.

Experts say Sam Gor has senior operatives embedded in both Vancouver and Toronto, with direct ties to Chinese Communist Party officials involved in global drug trafficking and foreign interference campaigns.

Meanwhile, Jin remains seemingly unfazed, spotted recently strolling casually through Richmond. Despite multiple criminal convictions for aggravated assault, sexual assault, and sexual exploitation, he has never been convicted for money laundering or drug trafficking in several of Canada’s highest-profile investigations. Shielded by top-tier legal counsel and a legal framework ill-equipped to confront transnational organized crime, Jin has become a symbol of impunity — and a source of political controversy given his documented proximity to Canada’s ruling elite.

In a stunning detail first reported by The Globe and Mail and independently confirmed by The Bureau, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was entangled in a Canadian surveillance operation when he met privately with Paul King Jin at a Richmond hotel in the months following the E-Pirate raids. According to The Globe, Jin attended the meeting alongside a group of Chinese businessmen. The precise date of the gathering remains unclear, but it took place during a sensitive period when the fallout from E-Pirate was still unfolding — and potentially after Jin’s arrest on February 24, 2016, when he was formally charged under the Criminal Code in connection with the RCMP investigation.

That criminal case collapsed in November 2018, just one month before trial, after federal prosecutors in Ottawa disclosed that a confidential informant’s identity had been inadvertently revealed to Jin’s defence team — a catastrophic failure reportedly of concern to senior U.S. officials, and one that ended Canada’s largest-ever money laundering case without a verdict.

If the E-Pirate trial was halted to protect the lives of police informants, it may have been in vain.

As The Bureau has confirmed, one of the Chinese-Canadian narcotics traffickers surveilled during E-Pirate — Richard Yen Fat Chiu — was found stabbed and burned to death near the Venezuelan border on June 20, 2019. Colombian news outlets reported the murder bore the hallmarks of a targeted execution.

Similarly, if the multiple B.C. civil forfeiture actions targeting Jin’s Vancouver real estate and casino-linked assets were meant to cripple his operations, the effort appears to have had limited impact.

According to a police source, Jin is now believed to be operating a new illegal mansion casino in Richmond — not the 13511 No. 4 Road property raided by RCMP during E-Pirate, which was found vacant in 2015 and, according to recent photographs, has since fallen into disrepair.

Like many of Jin’s holdings, the new suspected mansion casino is reportedly registered to a nominee, and also linked to a decades-old RCMP file on methamphetamine trafficking.

Nevertheless, in the absence of any criminal trials, B.C. civil forfeiture filings remain the clearest court account of what investigators uncovered during E-Pirate. The B.C. forfeiture office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Bureau regarding the status of its ongoing cases.

Among the parade of financial records in the filings, the most jarring detail is the evidence of a kidnapping attempt — tied to more than $4 million in cash, promissory notes written by lawyers on Jin’s behalf, and casino paraphernalia seized from one of his condos. It’s a revelation that cuts through the numbing mass of transactions and property titles with a chilling portrait of impact and depravity.

The kidnapping case is detailed within the broader context of how the Sam Gor network allegedly converted casino lending into real estate holdings across Vancouver, according to civil forfeiture filings.

Jin engaged in fraudulent schemes involving the preparation of promissory notes that falsely stated large sums of money loaned to gambling debtors were for home renovations. These documents were crafted to support constructive trust claims on real estate owned by the debtors — effectively allowing Jin to lay legal claim to the homes of individuals indebted through his gambling operation.

Multiple debtors reported to police that Jin or his associates had threatened them with physical violence and, in some cases, carried out assaults in attempts to collect on the fraudulent legal notes.

This raises the possibility that Sam Gor effectively controls unaccountable real estate in Vancouver through a parallel Chinese legal system — not only via nominee owners, but also through indebted gamblers who retain legal title in Canadian property records while ceding true ownership through secret agreements drafted by law offices.

The RCMP’s investigation into Jin’s underground gambling and money laundering network was sparked by reports from the British Columbia Lottery Corporation. By 2015, BCLC had flagged Jin as a high-risk casino patron known for delivering plastic bags and suitcases of cash into Lower Mainland gambling venues. Jin and his associates were linked to 140 suspicious transactions totaling more than $23 million, triggering a lifetime casino ban. That decision helped the RCMP to launch E-Pirate — a sweeping probe into money laundering, loan sharking, and transnational criminal finance networks tied to Chinese organized crime and the Sam Gor cartel.

At the center of the case was Silver International Investment Ltd., a Richmond currency exchange storefront that investigators say laundered, at minimum, hundreds of millions of dollars in drug cash through Canada’s casinos and real estate markets. Surveillance captured Paul King Jin and his wife, Xiaoqi Wei, arriving repeatedly with suitcases full of cash.

Surveillance showed that Jin was also a frequent visitor to Richmond law offices.

According to police, the laundering cycle operated much like the Beijing-linked illegal marijuana brokerage house system recently uncovered in Vancouver by The Bureau: illicit drug proceeds were delivered to Silver International by Asian gangsters operating across Western Canada. Jin and his network acted as brokers, passing the money to Chinese businessmen and organized crime associates flying into Vancouver, who then walked bags of cash into B.C. government casino cash cages.

After converting the cash into casino chips and cashing out, the laundered funds were repaid through Silver International or other underground banking channels — often materializing not through wire transfers, but through accounting sleight-of-hand recorded in the ledgers of Sam Gor–affiliated underground banks in Vancouver and China, then funneled into hundreds of Chinese bank accounts controlled by the traffickers who supplied the drug cash and the high-stakes gamblers who borrowed it to play.

Jin, investigators alleged, also operated a network of illegal gambling houses — including one fitted with baccarat tables and surveillance cameras at 13511 No. 4 Road, and another at #102 – 5131 Brighouse Way. A contractor hired to install video equipment at the Brighouse location told police he had been hired by “Paul from the Water Cube.”

On October 15 and 16, 2015, RCMP executed coordinated search warrants across six properties. At the No. 4 Road mansion — the main suspected casino site — officers found signs of a hasty cleanup operation, three empty gaming rooms, and dismantled surveillance equipment. According to details later published in Wilful Blindness, officers also discovered evidence suggesting a leak of confidential RCMP intelligence.

In addition to the $4.3 million found in the Brighouse Way gun safe, RCMP seized over $45,000 in casino chips, ledgers detailing $26 million in gambling debts, and a trove of fraudulent promissory notes — some allegedly drafted by lawyers working with Paul King Jin — designed to fabricate claims over real estate assets. A police dog later tested the seized cash and confirmed it was contaminated with narcotics residue.

Following the seizures and arrests, law enforcement undertook a detailed financial investigation. Analysis of ledgers recovered during the October 15 and 16, 2015, search warrants, combined with findings from the Canada Revenue Agency, revealed the extraordinary scale of Jin’s illegal gambling and money laundering enterprise.

The investigation found that:

From June 11 to October 8, 2015, Jin’s illegal gaming houses generated net profits exceeding $32 million, a staggering sum accrued in just under four months.

During the period from June 1 to October 15, 2015, Jin received nearly $27 million ($26,996,935) from Silver International, the underground bank and laundering hub, while depositing only $101,000 in return.

Despite the tens of millions in profit and cash flow, between 2011 and 2014, Jin and his wife reported average declared income to the CRA of just $29,969.

This massive disparity between reported income and financial activity suggested clear evidence of systemic tax evasion and laundering. The financial misconduct surrounding Jin and his network continues to unravel. As first reported by the Vancouver Sun, a new luxury penthouse in Richmond valued at almost $6-million has been added to the B.C. Civil Forfeiture Office’s expanding list of properties linked to Jin and his wife, who are now reportedly undergoing divorce proceedings, according to the B.C. court registry.

• If this trend persists, Canadian families could be out $549 in counter-tariffs by the end of the budget year.
• 77 per cent of Canadians say Canadian tariffs on American goods have increased the cost of essentials at home.

Ottawa’s counter tariffs on U.S. goods have added $1.51 billion in new taxes in April and May alone, says the MEI.

“Tariffs, whether they are applied unilaterally or in retaliation, are taxes by another name and they squeeze families just the same,” says Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI. “They artificially drive up the cost of goods imported into Canada, and it’s Canadian families and businesses who end up footing the bill.”

The Finance Department’s latest numbers show a 179.8 per cent increase in tariff collections when compared with the previous year, the result of Ottawa’s tit-for-tat response to U.S. tariffs.

This works out to $91.50 in new taxes paid for every Canadian household for the months of April and May alone.

If this trend persists, Canadians can expect to pay an extra $9.1 billion in new taxes over the course of this year. This would represent $548.97 in extra tariff costs per household by the end of the federal government’s budget year on March 31st, 2026.

Canadians already report being stretched thin. In a recent MEI-Ipsos poll, 77 per cent of Canadians said that retaliatory tariffs on American good contribute to raising the price of essentials at home.

Prime Minister Mark Carney conceded that a potential deal with the U.S. will likely include tariffs on certain Canadian exports.

In March, the MEI provided a better idea: ditch Canada’s trade barriers altogether, not just with the U.S., but with the entire world. A 2016 study for the Business Council of Canada found that unilateral free trade would boost Canadian GDP by 1.67 per cent and lower consumer prices in the country by 1.51 per cent.

“Protectionism should not be doubled down on,” says Ms. Faubert. “If we want to strengthen our economy, boost investment, and see standards of livings rise, we need to be tearing down barriers, not erecting new ones.”

* * *

The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.