Douglas Todd: Sam Cooper’s exposé of corruption in Canada tops bestseller list

It’s not every day a reporter who has worked for The Vancouver Sun and The Province writes a book that hits No. 1 in sales on Amazon.ca and continues to hover near the top.

But that is what dogged journalist Sam Cooper has achieved with his thrilling and deeply disturbing exposé of what he rightly calls the “mind-blowing” connections among organized crime, casinos, the Chinese Communist Party, real estate, money laundering, offshore billionaires and Canadian politicians.

Connecting the dots like no other journalist or researcher before him, Cooper’s devastating book, Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West, took root in 2009 when he began doing investigative work for The Province.

That’s where Cooper crossed paths with Fabian Dawson, another shoe-leather journalist who had broken numerous stories about Asian criminals buying copious amounts of prime Vancouver real estate. Dawson, raised in Malaysia, had “international sources and understanding of politics and business in Asia,” Cooper writes, which contributed to his blockbuster accounts linking Asian triads to some of Canada’s top business leaders and elected officials.

Written in the first person, almost like a detective thriller, Cooper’s book reveals how courageous front-line police, investigators and intelligence officials, like Calvin Chrustie and Ross Alderson, uncovered shocking international criminal behaviour in Canada, which was often covered-up by senior officials in law enforcement and government.

One of many indications of Cooper’s high impact is the way scores of his articles for The Province, The Vancouver Sun and Global News (where he is now employed, based in Ottawa) have become official evidence for Austin Cullen, the B.C. Supreme Court judge heading B.C.’s commission into money laundering.

Since his book was published last month, Cooper has been appearing before parliamentary committees and fact-finding prosecutors.

Wilful Blindness focuses on how tycoons, gangsters, sex-traffickers and agents of the Communist party have over the decades penetrated deep into Canada’s economy, political fundraisers and housing markets. The book’s forewords by professor Teng Biao and former Beijing-based diplomat Charles Burton clarify the obvious: It’s crucial to avoid, as Burton says, “the misidentification of the Canadian Chinese community with the Communist-Party led brutal, repressive and corrupt regime in China today.”

The book’s title and cover sum up a great deal.

The title targets the “wilful blindness” of a host of Canadian officials and politicians (many of them named) who have looked the other way for decades while “a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents infiltrated the West.” The cover illustration, in turn, shows a map of the world, peppered with lethal opioid pills, with the stars of China’s flag centred on Vancouver.

In the midst of describing grisly gang shootings in restaurants and assassinations by crossbow in the otherwise beautiful metropolis of Metro Vancouver, Cooper shows in gritty detail how “Canada has become a command centre for the world’s most-prolific Chinese transnational narcos.”

After Cooper describes yet another high-level internal document obtained from brave and frustrated sources within the RCMP, which shows intimate links between gangsters and state intelligence officers from China, the author explains his motivation to keep trying to get to the bottom of things.

“I’m following the money and the power and the greatest threat to Canadian society. It’s not that other crime groups — domestic and foreign — get a pass. But I recognize the unique threat posed by state-sponsored crime,” Cooper writes.

Although Cooper is the leader in exposing such infiltration into Canada, he makes it clear other journalists have also reported on or supported front-line probes into the insidious relationship between Asian billionaires, drug manufacturers, loan sharks, gangsters, real estate insiders and politicians.

The B.C.-based writers and editors he cites include Jonathan Manthorpe, Doug Quan, Ian James Young, Cassidy Olivier, Harold Munro, Sandy Garrossino, Kathy Tomlinson, Bob Mackin, Terry Glavin, Joanna Chiu and more.

Cooper has had to endure lawsuits and China’s perpetual claims of racism to simply continue to probe what a once-secret CSIS investigation, sparked by the early stories of Dawson and others, made clear 25 years ago. The so-called Sidewinder report, which was leaked in 2001 after being buried by former prime minister Jean Chretien, described the way triads, tycoons and Chinese intelligence operatives had corrupted Canada’s institutions and markets.

It is not possible, in a short review, to do justice to the hundreds of yarns Cooper stitches together. He unveils the labyrinthine connections among hundreds of international criminals, $100,000-a-bet gamblers, Lamborghini-buying real-estate tycoons and over-cosy politicians. The final chapter alone is a remarkable tale of intrigue in the upper echelons — exploring the sordid knots behind the drive-by shooting at Richmond’s Manzo restaurant in 2020 of underground banker Jian Jun Zhu and illicit gambling kingpin Paul King Jin.

Wilful Blindness is not only a tremendous resource for journalists, law enforcement officials and (we hope) scholars who seek to “follow the money” that’s pouring into the West, it’s an eye-opening experience for ordinary readers.

Judging by book sales, they’re the ones already proving they consider it their duty to stop being naive about the community-destroying world of the transnational rich and powerful, as well as their political enablers, many of whom forever strive to do their dirty collaborations in private.

dtodd@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/@douglastodd

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