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EXCLUSIVE: Alleged Chinese Spy in New York’s Cuomo and Hochul Administrations Barred From Using Seized Millions

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Sam Cooper's avatar Sam Cooper

A U.S. judge has rejected Linda Sun’s bid to access millions in frozen assets for her defense, siding with prosecutors who say she may be hiding additional financial reserves

A federal judge has ruled that Linda Sun — the senior New York government official accused of laundering proceeds from tens of millions of dollars in corrupt pandemic-era supply deals from China, while orchestrating a covert foreign influence campaign targeting two Democratic governors — cannot access millions in seized assets to fund her legal defense.

The ruling marks a major setback for Sun and her co-accused husband, Chris Hu, in a landmark national security case that federal prosecutors say blends elite political manipulation with transnational bribery, Chinese underground banking, and state-backed espionage and interference operations tied to Beijing’s United Front Work Department.

In a decision issued July 22, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan found that Sun and Hu failed to meet even the minimal evidentiary threshold for a Monsanto hearing — a legal mechanism that allows defendants to unlock frozen assets if they can demonstrate no access to alternative funds. Cogan sided with the Department of Justice, which argued that the couple may be actively concealing substantial unrestrained assets, including income and equity tied to a lattice of nine business entities owned by Hu.

At least one of those ventures, a commercial real estate holding, was partially liquidated to fund more than $400,000 in legal fees. Others, including Leivine Wine & Spirits — a high-end Flushing boutique that FBI agents concluded could not be generating the massive bulk cash revenue it reported — allegedly handled more than $77,000 in unexplained monthly cash deposits even before the store formally opened.

The broader criminal case, as The Bureau previously reported, alleges that Linda Sun covertly acted as an undeclared foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China, advancing the CCP’s foreign policy objectives while enriching herself through corrupt contracting and laundering networks. She allegedly leveraged her role in New York’s diversity and inclusion bureaucracy to influence Governor Andrew Cuomo’s public messaging, including helping script his April 2020 tweet thanking the Chinese government for a donation of ventilators during the pandemic. Under Governor Kathy Hochul, prosecutors say, Sun’s actions became more brazen: arranging unauthorized proclamations in honor of PRC diplomats, suppressing mention of the Uyghur detention camps in official remarks, and preventing Taiwan’s representatives from gaining access to state officials.

Sun and Hu allegedly funneled at least $8 million in kickbacks — derived from over $30 million in fraudulent pandemic-era PPE contracts — into a personal laundering architecture involving real estate, luxury goods, and business accounts in Queens.

Sun — also known as Wen Sun, Linda Hu, and Ling Da Sun — and Hu deny all charges and have mounted an aggressive legal campaign characterized by multiple suppression motions, challenges to search warrants, and attempts to have the case dismissed.

These efforts have accompanied a steady stream of damaging disclosures from prosecutors, including search warrant returns detailing a trove of luxury property allegedly acquired with laundered foreign capital. Among the seized or restrained assets are a $3.6 million mansion in Manhasset, a $1.9 million condo in Honolulu’s Ala Moana district, and a $1.5 million Forest Hills rental property. Government filings also list a 2024 Ferrari Roma, a Mercedes SUV, and a Range Rover as seized vehicles — in addition to more than $200,000 in liquid cash and bank deposits, none of which, the court noted, were properly accounted for in the couple’s asset declarations. A Jeep Gladiator, not initially disclosed by the defendants, was later identified by the government as an additional unrestrained asset.

As the couple’s legal maneuvers multiplied — most of them, in the court’s view, lacking the substance to alter the case — their defense costs ballooned. In their Monsanto application, Sun and Hu portrayed themselves as effectively destitute and victims of court delays.

“The collective value of everything the government seized exceeds $7 million — and that effectively cut off Mr. Hu and Ms. Sun’s access to nearly every financial resource, making it challenging to continue to care and provide for their child, let alone pay their legal fees,” their motion argued.

“Those legal fees have inevitably climbed. Moreover, as a result of the government’s repeated delays and missteps in this action, Mr. Hu and Ms. Sun have been forced to file multiple motions and endured protracted proceedings.”

The 24-page filing also added vivid new detail to the government’s sweeping seizure operations, including countering suggestions that Sun’s parents were used not only as proxies for home purchases to disguise her money laundering payoffs from China, but also to hold personal assets and cash.

“During a search of Ms. Sun’s parents’ home, the government seized their life savings of $265,209, along with watches, jewelry, and other personal items that it has yet to return,” Sun’s Monsanto motion complains. “The government also seized $130,000 from Ms. Sun’s mother’s safety deposit box at TD Bank. To date, the government has not filed any charges against Ms. Sun’s parents or in connection with these items, nor has it included these items in any forfeiture allegations, making its continued restraint of such third-party property deeply troubling.”

The motion continued: “The only consistent source of funds that the couple previously did have—$4,800 per month in rental income from the Forest Hills Property—no longer exists. In light of Mr. Hu and Ms. Sun’s ongoing active efforts to sell the property, they are unable to rent it out. In sum, the couple is financially hamstrung.” Legal costs to date exceed $2 million, with an additional $1 million projected for November’s trial.

But Judge Cogan wasn’t moved by their claims of poverty. The Brooklyn judge found the couple’s filings omitted obvious holdings, provided vague and conclusory statements, and failed to identify how the pair had continued paying legal bills and living expenses. The court determined that Sun and Hu’s failure to declare a comprehensive list of assets was not accidental.

“This Court still does not have sufficient information to evaluate the extent of defendants’ unrestrained funds,” Cogan wrote.

The judge’s conclusion aligns with the Department of Justice’s assertion that Sun and Hu may still control millions in unreported funds.

Prosecutors revealed that beyond Hu’s nine business entities, the couple had liquidated at least $44,000 in bonds, still held over $90,000 in stock holdings, and were receiving loan proceeds and other unexplained capital transfers. The government also challenged the couple’s claim that they had been denied access to property sale proceeds.

In their Monsanto filing, the couple’s attorneys wrote: “With nearly every avenue to resources effectively extinguished by the government, Mr. Hu and Ms. Sun are now left with insufficient funds to finance their family’s monthly expenses, let alone their rising legal bills.” Their monthly costs reportedly exceed $20,000, covering property taxes, insurance, food, and childcare.

But the couple’s own legal framing may have inadvertently amplified the very financial allegations they are attempting to defeat. Central to their argument, Sun and Hu claimed their ability to retain legal counsel was crippled by disruptions to the same high-end Flushing liquor business that Hu had previously described as a bulk-cash-generating enterprise — a characterization investigators alleged was a cover for laundering illicit cash into business accounts.

Now, however, Hu claims his business depends on credit transactions.

“American Express has imposed a block on any payments made by customers using an American Express credit card at his liquor store,” the defense motion stated. “Shopify — the point-of-sale system previously utilized by his business for credit card processing — no longer allows Mr. Hu’s store to process credit cards through its system, which for a time hobbled the store’s operations.” The defense further asserted that a visible law enforcement presence near the storefront “chilled customers from entering the store and interacting with Mr. Hu, which has adversely affected sales.”

The case filings detail how Hu’s money laundering network allegedly relied on unlicensed Chinese remitters in Flushing.

Such Chinese cash brokers are part of a transnational system used to ferry capital from the PRC through underground banking corridors into American storefronts and property and banks, broader ongoing U.S. government investigations into Chinese crime networks have found.

Sun’s unsuccessful Monsanto motion also highlighted that one of their expensive failed legal efforts aimed to suppress a public comment by former Trump official Kash Patel, who described her as a Chinese agent embedded in the U.S. government and profiting from corrupt PPE contracts while frontline Americans went without protection.

“While Americans were locked down and desperate for PPE, Linda Sun and Chris Hu cashed in — allegedly lining their pockets while serving CCP interests,” Patel posted to X. “This is corruption that endangered lives.”

Although prosecutors did not cite Patel’s remarks, the defense argued the statement had unfairly prejudiced the case.

As previously reported by The Bureau, in a separate ruling denying Sun’s motions to dismiss the case and suppress evidence, Judge Cogan found ample support for the government’s allegation that Sun knowingly acted as an undeclared agent of the People’s Republic of China — in violation of U.S. laws requiring foreign agents to register.

In one WeChat exchange cited by the FBI, Sun reportedly told her parents that a Chinese contact known as “Chairman Xia” had upgraded her airline tickets. Prosecutors say she was hosted in a Beijing hotel suite previously occupied by former First Lady Michelle Obama. In the same thread, Sun acknowledged she expected to be asked for increasing “favors” by her handlers in return for their generosity — a detail prosecutors highlight as evidence of her witting entanglement in a covert foreign influence campaign.

The court cited Sun’s alleged role in arranging fraudulent invitation letters to support illegal visa entries for officials from China’s Henan province. The visit, pitched as part of a proposed $1 billion university partnership in New York, appeared to be a United Front cover operation aimed at expanding Beijing’s political and economic influence on U.S. soil.

According to government filings, Sun used her access not only to open doors for Chinese officials, but to close them to Beijing’s geopolitical rivals — especially Taiwan.

The indictment further alleges that even after receiving a warning from the FBI, Sun continued to act on behalf of PRC officials, including repeated efforts to shape New York State policy toward Taiwan and providing Chinese consular officials with advance access to internal government communications.

In early 2021, prosecutors say, Sun gave the Chinese consulate a draft of Governor Hochul’s public remarks, enabling Beijing to sanitize the language — including stripping any reference to politically sensitive topics such as the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. “Based on feedback from a PRC government official, [Hochul] did not publicly address the detention of Uyghurs in PRC state-run camps in Xinjiang,” Judge Cogan noted, citing FBI evidence.

“These actions, as alleged, demonstrate Sun using her authority and power to induce action or change the decisions or acts of another,” Cogan wrote, concluding that they were “sufficient to constitute the ‘influence’ element of a FARA offense, even as Sun defines it.”

Finally, Judge Cogan emphasized that the indictment clearly supports the conclusion that Sun understood her alleged United Front handlers — CC-1 and CC-2 — were themselves agents of the Chinese government and Communist Party. As the indictment states: “Sun understood that CC-1 and CC-2 were themselves acting as agents of the PRC government and the CCP when they made requests of Sun.”

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Bombshell report indicates Clinton, Soros group plotted to ‘demonize’ Trump

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“Julie [Smith] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil on the fire”

Newly declassified intelligence documents indicate that Hillary Clinton, her 2016 presidential campaign managers, and a top member of a George Soros group plotted to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion campaign to distract the public from Clinton’s email scandal.

Declassified by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, the 29-page “Durham annex” from 2023 chronicles the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC) investigation into purported efforts by the Clinton campaign and its allies to falsely tie Russia’s cyber interference attempts during election season to Trump.

In its investigation, OSC uncovered emails that appeared to be sent by Leonard Benardo, senior vice president of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, to people involved in Clinton’s campaign. Soros is a billionaire funder of Democratic campaigns.

The emails appear to show that Benardo engaged in discussions with Julianne Smith, one of Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, about how to use reports of Russian interference in the election to Clinton’s advantage and Trump’s detriment. Benardo later told OSC he had no recollection of writing the emails.

In an email dated July 25, 2016, Benardo told an undisclosed person that “politicization is on the table” and that he and Smith had been discussing ways to create a story casting Trump as “an agent of influence” in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to undermine the election “in the interest of Donald Trump.”

“Julie [Smith] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil on the fire,” Benardo wrote, indicating that Clinton’s campaign planned to use the FBI to push the story.

While the FBI established early on that Putin ordered “cyber influence operations” to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, it found no evidence that Putin interfered on behalf of Trump.

But former President Barack Obama and his senior advisors reportedly pressured the Intelligence Community to assert otherwise, according to documents declassified last week. Obama has denied the allegations.

The Clinton campaign’s goal, it appeared, was to divert Americans’ attention away from her email scandal, since “Hillary is hardly good-looking as far as credibility is concerned,” Benardo added.

Clinton served as Secretary of State under the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, where she used a private email server for official agency communications, putting thousands of emails with sensitive or classified information at risk.

According to a follow-up email by Benardo dated two days later, Clinton personally approved of the plan to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion.

“HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level,” Benardo wrote.

“The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. Say something like a critical infrastructure threat for the election to feel menace since both POTUS and VPOTUS have acknowledged the fact IC would speed up searching for evidence that is regrettably still unavailable,” he clarified.

Upon finding the emails, the Office of Special Council questioned Benardo, who told them he did not know who “Julie” referred to and he did not draft the emails “to the best of his recollection.”

Clinton, when questioned by OSC, said the plan she apparently approved “looked like Russian disinformation.” Campaign Chair John Podesta and other advisors each denied the validity of the emails and each called the emails “ridiculous.”

Smith was also interviewed and said she recalled neither drafting or receiving the emails nor proposing a plan to Clinton or other campaign leadership to try tying Putin to Trump. She also denied enlisting the FBI to further such efforts.

But OSC found that the verified communications between Smith and campaign advisors implied otherwise. The same day Benardo purportedly sent the email about how the FBI “will put oil on the fire,” Smith texted a Clinton campaign advisor and asked them to “see if [Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council member] will tell you if there is a formal fbi or other investigation into the hack?”

The Clinton campaign advisor, whose name is redacted, replied that the person in question “won’t say anything more to me. Sorry. Told me she went as far as she could.”

Ultimately, OSC determined that “it is a logical deduction that [redacted] Smith was, at a minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia,” and that available evidence “supports the notion that the campaign might have wanted or expected the FBI or other agencies to aid the effort” via a formal investigation.

“In short, neither the Office nor [redacted] have been able to determine definitively whether the purported Clinton campaign plan [redacted] was entirely genuine, partially true, a composite pulled from multiple sources, exaggerated in certain respects, or fabricated in its entirety,” OSC concluded, adding that regardless, the entire affair was “concerning.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Clinton and her former campaign advisors have not responded to the Durham annex’s publication, despite outcry from Republicans. The Trump administration is presenting the report as the “smoking gun” confirming recent allegations that Obama, Clinton, and the Intelligence Community created a deliberate smear campaign to delegitimize Trump’s first presidency.

“Based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means,” U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Thursday.

“History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump,” he added. “This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history.”

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$500K Forfeited, 20 Vancouver Properties Still in Legal Limbo in Case Connecting Sam Gor–Linked Suspect to Child Kidnapping Attempt and Trudeau Meeting

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Sam Cooper's avatar 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.

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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.

“On February 25, 2013, a male working for Mr. Jin attempted to kidnap the child of one of the debtors by attending at the child’s school and presenting photocopies of the child’s identification documents,” the B.C. forfeiture filing states. “The child and the school refused the male’s request to release the child. Later that day, the male was arrested by Vancouver Police after following a vehicle the child was being transported in. During the search of #1204 – 5177 Brighouse Way, RCMP located a photocopy of the child’s identification documents.”

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.

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