By Garry Clement

The death of Toronto Police Constable Marc Pinizzotto should not be viewed solely as another tragic line-of-duty death. It should be understood as a warning that Canada has become dangerously vulnerable to the convergence of transnational organized crime, foreign state actors, money-laundering networks, and domestic criminal enterprises.

For decades, I investigated organized crime, financial crime, terrorist financing, and corruption. Those experiences, chronicled in my book Undercover: 50 Years of Dirty Money, Organized Crime and the RCMP, taught me a lesson Canadian governments have repeatedly ignored: organized crime follows money, and hostile foreign actors increasingly follow organized crime.

The shooting death of Constable Pinizzotto during a raid connected to investigations involving attacks on the U.S. Consulate and synagogues in Toronto should force Canadians to confront a reality that law enforcement officers, intelligence agencies, and financial crime specialists have understood for years. Canada has become an attractive operating environment for criminal organizations and foreign influence networks because the risks remain low and the rewards extraordinarily high.

The Bureau’s analytical report on Pinizzotto’s death outlines a disturbing but increasingly familiar pattern. Iranian proxy organizations, Mexican cartels, outlaw motorcycle gangs, corrupt facilitators, money-laundering networks, and young contract shooters are all operating within the same criminal marketplace. While the public often views these threats separately, investigators know they are increasingly interconnected.

At the recent Canadian Institute Anti-Money Laundering and Financial Crime Conference in Toronto, a topic that surfaced repeatedly was the growing international concern regarding Canada’s effectiveness in combating money laundering and organized crime. More than one participant suggested that Canada may ultimately require placement on the Financial Action Task Force grey list before meaningful reform occurs.

That suggestion would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Today, it reflects growing frustration among experts who have watched Canada struggle to address persistent deficiencies in beneficial ownership transparency, professional money-laundering networks, sanctions enforcement, terrorist financing investigations, and organized crime prosecutions.

The FATF grey list is not reserved for failed states. It is designed to identify jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies in anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist financing regimes. While Canada remains far from the world’s most problematic jurisdictions, the fact that respected financial crime professionals are openly discussing grey-list status should alarm every Canadian.

The underlying issue is not simply drug trafficking or gang violence. It is the financial infrastructure that enables criminal and hostile-state activity to flourish. Every fentanyl shipment, every contract killing, every foreign influence operation, every sanctions-evasion scheme, and every terrorist-financing network depends on moving and laundering money.

Iran understands this.

For years, I have publicly warned about Iran’s growing use of criminal proxies. Increasingly, the Iranian regime outsources operations through criminal intermediaries, allowing it to maintain plausible deniability while leveraging existing organized crime networks. Recent American indictments involving Iranian-directed plots, cartel-linked actors, and Canadian-based criminal associates demonstrate that the distinction between national security threats and organized crime threats is rapidly disappearing.

The United States has recognized this convergence. American prosecutors routinely employ the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to target entire criminal enterprises rather than simply arresting expendable foot soldiers. Canada still lacks an equivalent legislative framework capable of systematically dismantling sophisticated criminal organizations and their financial ecosystems.

Instead, we continue to arrest shooters while leaving the architects, financiers, facilitators, and professional enablers largely intact.

That approach is failing.

The deaths of police officers, the targeting of synagogues, attacks on diplomatic facilities, corruption investigations involving public officials, cartel-linked trafficking operations, and foreign-sponsored intimidation campaigns are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of the same underlying disease.

Canada’s response must begin with acknowledging the scale of the threat.

We need stronger anti-money-laundering enforcement, expanded intelligence-sharing, enhanced terrorist-financing investigations, meaningful beneficial ownership transparency, stronger sanctions enforcement, and legislative tools comparable to RICO that allow prosecutors to target entire criminal enterprises.

Most importantly, we need political leadership willing to tell Canadians the truth.

Constable Pinizzotto died serving the public in an environment shaped by decades of underestimating organized crime and its growing relationship with hostile foreign actors. His death should serve as a national wake-up call.

If Canada continues treating these threats as separate issues rather than components of an integrated criminal and national security ecosystem, more lives will be lost.

The warning signs are already here. The question is whether our political leaders are prepared to act before Canada becomes known internationally not merely as a money-laundering concern, but as a jurisdiction where organized crime, foreign adversaries, and terrorist proxies have discovered that the risks of doing business remain far too low.

Constable Pinizzotto paid the ultimate price confronting that reality. Canada owes him more than condolences. It owes him action.

TORONTO – At 5:40 in the morning on June 11, heavily armed tactical officers breached a fourth-floor unit at 15 Martha Eaton Way, a high-rise in the city’s northwest that has been marked by gang gunfire for decades. They were executing one of several search warrants tied to a series of shootings across the city — including the March 10 attack on the United States consulate, an incident American prosecutors allege was directed from abroad by a commander of an Iranian proxy militia. Within moments, Constable Marc Pinizzotto, a 43-year-old tactical veteran and father, was shot dead. A 19-year-old resident, Nicholas Bennett, was struck multiple times by return fire and will be charged with first-degree murder. A second 19-year-old, Zara Jabbi, wanted in connection with the consulate shooting, remains at large.

The Martha Eaton tower, like the similar tenements of the nearby Jane and Finch corridor, resembles a Chicago or Los Angeles of the north, with numerous “Crip” sets of teenage shooters and street dealers moving cocaine, fentanyl, and methamphetamine for brokers whose supply lines ultimately trace to the networks exposed in Toronto Police’s Project Brisa, which focused on the North American distribution pipeline of Ryan Wedding and his Mexican cartel suppliers.

To understand what perished with Constable Pinizzotto, it helps to separate what is known from what is not — because the gap between the two is where Canada’s most dangerous national security problem now lives.

Here is what is known.

A federal criminal complaint unsealed in Manhattan alleges that the consulate shooting, and an attack on a Toronto synagogue, were claimed by Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old commander of Kata’ib Hizballah, the Iraqi militia that operates as a proxy of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Captured on a wiretap ten days after gunmen fired on the consulate, Al-Saadi boasted that “our people” carried out that attack and the strike on a Toronto synagogue that he strangely called “the Knesset.”

The complaint alleges that since the opening of the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran in late February, his network directed or promoted at least 18 attacks across Europe and two in Canada — and that it did so not through sleeper cells of ideological loyalists, but through a procurement system that any logistics manager would recognize.

Attacks were financed through currency exchange houses — an economy of Iranian underground banking and sanctions evasion tied to Middle Eastern, Mexican and Chinese criminal networks, which The Bureau has documented well for three years now — with refunds built in if the violence failed to materialize.

“If you send the Mafia, they can pick a place of their choosing,” Al-Saadi explained to a source reporting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “If they hit, then that’s good, but if they don’t, then I get my money back. This is how the deal is.” He attempted to hire what he believed was a Mexican cartel operative to burn synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and Arizona.

Here is what is not known.

Canadian authorities have not stated that the young men targeted in the Martha Eaton Way raids are connected to Al-Saadi’s network. But they, along with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and likely Canadian intelligence officials, have been working with the FBI — and U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, a former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has taken a close personal interest in the case.

What The Bureau, Canadian investigators, and at least one other news organization have established instead is a local milieu. The Globe and Mail, citing a source with knowledge of the investigation, reported that the raid connects to a wider probe of a shooters-for-hire network — one allegedly responsible not only for the consulate attack but for gunfire directed at the properties of a waste-management giant, at tow-truck businesses, and at private homes.

That milieu is easily recognizable to anyone who follows crime in Toronto, where underage shooters — often including murderers whom police are legally barred from naming — have become the sicarios of the north.

Police associations across Canada have repeatedly warned that the country’s youth justice laws are being used as shields by serious organized crime in this shooters-for-rent market.

The Martha Eaton building itself sits in territory long contested by Crip-affiliated street gangs, and its recent history is a chronicle of juvenile gun violence: last August, eight-year-old JahVai Roy was killed in his bed by stray rounds fired toward the building’s playground, and three teenagers were charged with first-degree murder. The suspects charged in two of the March synagogue shootings are 18 and 17 years old.

There is, as of today, no proven chain of command running from Tehran to the fourth floor of 15 Martha Eaton Way. What there is, on the face of the American complaint and the Canadian charge sheets, is something more disturbing — a marketplace.

Teenage shooters who will fire on a rival fentanyl dealer, a synagogue, a consulate, a tow truck, or a child’s bedroom window with equal ease — for whoever is paying — brokered through layers designed so the shooter never knows the client. In an economy like that, the foreign sponsor is the last thing Canadian investigators can prosecute, if they find it at all.

And it is not an isolated discovery. Over the past six months, Canadian court filings have surfaced the same architecture again and again, with different clients at the top.

Consider Project South, the Toronto police corruption investigation that authorities describe as among the gravest in modern Canadian history.

At its center is Brian Da Costa, an alleged Toronto trafficker facing 16 charges, whose network is accused of bribing serving Toronto police officers and conspiring to murder a senior corrections official at the Toronto South Detention Centre — reportedly because that official was too effective at keeping drugs out of the facility. Police initially disclosed only obliquely that it was a fentanyl, cocaine, marijuana and meth distribution network with serious international ties.

As The Bureau later reported, court filings now place Gurpreet Singh on Da Costa’s no-contact list. Singh is the alleged Indo-Canadian trucking operative indicted in the United States as a key cross-border smuggler for Ryan Wedding, the former Olympian turned Sinaloa Cartel heavyweight whose organization, American prosecutors allege, moved hundreds of kilograms of cocaine into Canada, ordered the Medellín assassination of a federal witness, paid a Brampton lawyer roughly $1 million to penetrate Canadian police investigations, and bribed Canadian officials. Singh has been held since October 2024 at Toronto South — the same jail Da Costa’s network allegedly sought to supply, and whose drug-blocking official it allegedly sought to kill. A second supervisor at the facility, who according to the Toronto Star oversaw the unit housing Singh and visited his cell with unusual frequency, has had her seized devices searched under warrant in the same probe; she has not been charged.

Then consider the case that fuses the two threat streams — cartel and state — into a single Canadian defendant.

In 2024, federal prosecutors in Minnesota unsealed an indictment charging Damion Patrick John Ryan, a full-patch Hells Angels member from British Columbia, with conspiring in a murder-for-hire plot against an Iranian defector and his companion living in Maryland. The client was the network of Naji Sharifi Zindashti, a drug lord American and British officials say carries out assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents on behalf of Iranian intelligence. The negotiations ran over an encrypted phone service built by a defunct Vancouver company. A Canadian biker, recruited by Tehran’s outsourced killers, to silence refugees on American soil: the contract model of Al-Saadi’s money-exchange terrorism, three years early, with a Canadian gang as the vendor.

And if there were any doubt that this model has matured into a direct threat against Canadian public figures, the United States Department of Justice removed it in March. As The Bureau reported exclusively, American prosecutors announced the court-authorized seizure of four websites operated by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, dismantling a regime-run cyber and psychological operations network that issued a $250,000 bounty directing the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — an organization Canada itself designated as a terrorist entity in February 2025 — to behead former Ontario legislator Goldie Ghamari at her Ottawa home. The supporting affidavit, filed by the FBI in Maryland, states that the cartel had already been given the home addresses of its targets when the bounty was issued. An Iranian intelligence ministry, contracting a Mexican cartel, to execute a Canadian politician in Canada’s capital: every layer of the marketplace, assembled in a single American court filing.

The annual public report of CSIS, published in March, names the Iranian-linked group behind the operation — the Handala Hack Team — but only in connection with the doxxing of a Canadian journalist, omitting any mention of the cartel bounty on a Canadian politician, even as the same report warns in the abstract that hostile states “sometimes hire organized crime groups or proxies” to project their reach into Canada. The same month, pressed by CTV News on whether foreign-directed activity poses a public safety threat, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme answered: “what we have in our holdings is we have people that are intimidating people, harassing people, but connecting the dots to a foreign entity, regardless of the country, we don’t have that.”

Lay these cases side by side and the pattern is unmistakable.

Mexican cartels and Iranian proxies are not merely drawing on the same Canadian service economy — encrypted communications, trucking and logistics cells, corrupt insiders, compromised professionals, and a deep bench of young shooters in neighborhoods the state has effectively ceded — they are, in the Ghamari case, contracting one another inside it. And the violence is climbing the institutional ladder. A jail official marked for assassination. Police officers on a trafficker’s payroll. Now a tactical officer killed serving a warrant in a terrorism-linked probe, two days after an Ontario Provincial Police constable died on duty.

Against this, the response of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has been inadequate where it has been visible at all.

Ottawa’s signature effort against the antisemitic violence of recent months has amounted to statements of condemnation while three synagogues absorbed gunfire within a single week in March and a proxy commander in Iraq bragged about hitting “the Knesset” in Toronto.

There is still no Canadian equivalent of the American federal racketeering statute — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — that allows prosecutors to charge an enterprise rather than chase its disposable triggermen one teenager at a time. There is no legal architecture that treats a money-exchange business for terrorism, a cartel’s police-corruption budget, and a biker gang’s murder contract for a foreign intelligence service as what they are: the operations of continuing criminal enterprises whose leadership, financing, and facilitators can be prosecuted as such.

It is not that Canadian institutions are blind.

In Senate testimony in May, a senator asked the heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI whether Washington was concerned with fentanyl moving in from the northern border.

The drug agency’s administrator answered that “we’re keeping our eye on Canada,” and said his agency proposes to open two more offices in this country in 2027. Then FBI Director Kash Patel went further. “What we’ve also focused on, at least at the FBI, is working with our Canadian partners on the production capabilities that the drug traffickers have moved up to the north of our border,” he testified. “And we’ve had some success there working with our Canadian partners because the drug traffickers got smart with the securitization of the southern border and moved it up there. So we’re tackling that with our CSIS partners.”

Note what the director of the world’s premier federal police force said, almost in passing. The Canadian partner he named on cartel production migrating north was not the RCMP. It was Canada’s spy service — the same agency whose annual report would not connect an Iranian-tasked cartel bounty to the politician it targeted, and which, characteristically, has declined to confirm to The Bureau whether it is investigating Mexican cartels in Canada at all. The intelligence picture exists, and Canada’s closest ally is describing it under oath in open session. What does not exist is the legal machinery to act on it, the candor to tell Canadians about it, and the political will to build both.

It seems likely that CSIS — with Canadian justice officials now facing death threats, or dying — has a very good understanding of these increasingly lethal threat networks, and no capacity to act on it. The probable reality, if Canada's past is a fair guide, is that classified assessments of this dire convergence are flowing upward to the office of Prime Minister Mark Carney — and that, as a decade of warrant delays, shelved warnings, and commission findings would predict, the only result will be deadly inaction, while Canada's sovereignty and safety erode.

Constable Pinizzotto went through a door in a building where an eight-year-old boy was killed in his bed ten months earlier, in a city where a jail official survived a hit allegedly arranged with help from inside his own justice system, in a country where a Hells Angel took a contract from Tehran and a former provincial politician learned from an American court filing — not a Canadian one — that a cartel had her home address and a price on her head. The marketplace that connects those facts is open for business, and its clients — cartel and state alike — have learned that in Canada, the price of violence is low and the prosecution of enterprises is rare. Until Parliament changes that calculation, Canada remains, as The Bureau has reported citing former U.S. State Department and U.S. intelligence official David Luna, a “safe zone” for the worst threat networks in the world.

CANADA – A Toronto police officer was shot and killed early Thursday during a raid targeting suspects in the March shooting attack on the United States consulate in Toronto — an attack that federal p…

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WASHINGTON — A website seized this week by U.S. authorities as part of a Chinese intelligence-linked recruitment operation used the exact name and registered address of a Toronto-based company incorporated eight years earlier.

The site, finnaclevesperconsulting.com, was one of thirteen domains the FBI seized. It posed as a leading Canada-based consulting firm, advertised analyst roles focused on the Middle East and Latin America, and listed its contact address in Toronto’s financial district.

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In this conversation, Abbas delivers a direct warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney: that Canada is on what she calls a “suicide mission,” repeating a mistake Washington took decades to correct. She argues that Beijing is the hidden hand behind a long roster of the world’s crises — Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s proxies, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela — and that its real target is the Western democratic order itself.

She explains why she recognized that strategy at once: because she was raised inside it, taught as a child that this would be China’s “century of retaliation” against the West. She recounts why a sitting Liberal member of Parliament sounded, to her ear, exactly like a Chinese official. And she predicts that the scale of foreign infiltration inside Western governments — Canada’s included — is about to be exposed.

It’s a hard-hitting and deeply personal conversation about genocide, transnational repression, the price of speaking out, and her determination to “fight harder” against an amoral regime.

OTTAWA/ISTANBUL — On June 12, Dr. Gulshan Abbas turns 64. She will mark the birthday, as she has marked the last seven, inside a Chinese prison — serving a 20-year sentence her family says was manufactured to punish her sister for speaking out.

That sister, Rushan Abbas, co-founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, joined the Bureau Podcast from Istanbul this week to discuss her memoir, Unbroken, and to deliver a blunt warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney: Canada is walking the same road the United States walked decades ago and only really corrected course over the past decade.

Ottawa, she said, is taking “the whole of Canada to a suicide mission,” its deepening engagement with Beijing a direct threat to Canadian sovereignty and national security. “This is not just the story of the Uyghurs anymore. This is the future of the justice and democracy, and the sovereignty of individual nations,” Abbas said. “So I have to continuously speak.”

Among her most arresting claims was that Beijing now operates in the background of much of the proxy clandestine operations worldwide, as well as media influence shaping opinion across the West, in order to fulfill Beijing’s plan to supplant the Western democratic order — a strategy she said she recognized at once, because she was raised inside it.

Beijing’s goal, she said, is to replace the international order the democracies built over the past 70 years with one of its own — and it advances that goal through allies and surrogates. Running through Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s arming of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, North Korea’s provocations, and the troublemaking of Cuba and Venezuela, she returned each time to the same refrain: “China’s behind that.” While those proxies sow chaos abroad, she said, “China itself, Beijing, is very effectively implementing their proxies, their people, their spies to everywhere.”

And Canada is in grave danger, she said, not only of losing its sovereignty, but of becoming a tool in Beijing’s global operations:

“I was born, raised and educated in my homeland in the Uyghur region. And when I was growing up, they used to brainwash us every Wednesday afternoon,” Abbas recalled.

Her most precise criticisms concerned the recent conduct of a sitting Canadian parliamentarian. Liberal member of Parliament Michael Ma’s combative questioning of the China expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, Abbas said, was indistinguishable from a Chinese government performance.

“I felt like I was listening to a Chinese official speaking,” she said, likening his tone to Beijing’s most aggressive diplomats and calling it “straight out of China’s playbook” to dismiss documented evidence of Uyghur forced labor.

Abbas placed Ma’s conduct alongside the guilty plea of a Southern California mayor who admitted to acting on Beijing’s behalf — an official who, she noted, had promoted a fake Chinese news outlet denying abuses in the Uyghur region. Both, she said, are “just the tip of the iceberg.” She predicted that the scale of Chinese infiltration inside Western governments — Canada’s among them — will soon be exposed. “How many more out there that we don’t know?” she asked. “I wonder how many people that Mark Carney has around him that’s actually working for China.”

That prediction carried an implicit nod to investigations advancing in Washington, where, she said, opposition to Beijing is now one of the few things uniting a fractured Congress.

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OTTAWA — In January 2026, the RCMP signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), renewing a framework for police cooperation with the same arm of the Chinese state that prosecutors in two democracies have now tied, in open court, to the surveillance and intimidation of dissidents on foreign soil — and, in one of those jurisdictions, to a notorious triad. It is a development that corroborates recent United States Treasury sanctions and Washington Post reporting pointing to deepening ties between Beijing’s security services and transnational Chinese mafia proxies.

In May, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Lu Jianwang, a 64-year-old Bronx resident known as “Harry Lu,” of acting as an illegal agent of the PRC for opening and operating an MPS “police station” in lower Manhattan, and of obstruction of justice for destroying evidence. He faces up to 30 years at sentencing. His co-defendant, Chen Jinping, had pleaded guilty in December 2024. The United States Justice Department called the outpost an instrument of transnational repression.

Asked directly whether it accepts that the MPS is behind transnational repression harmful to Canadians — as the New York verdict and a leading rights investigator have asserted — the RCMP declined to say.

In late May, The Bureau put two questions to the RCMP and to Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The first asked whether the agencies, as bodies mandated to protect Canadians, agree or disagree that the MPS is behind transnational repression harmful to Canadian citizens, as was proven in New York and as the investigator Laura Harth has asserted. The second relayed a question Harth had asked Canadians to weigh.

CSIS spokeswoman Magali Hébert said the RCMP would be better placed to answer the questions.

The RCMP’s reply ran several paragraphs and answered neither.

The force said it “takes threats to the safety and security of people in Canada very seriously, including foreign interference and transnational repression,” and that where there is evidence of criminal activity backed by a foreign state, “it is investigated.” On the central question of attribution, it wrote: “Due to ongoing investigations, we are not in a position to attribute responsibility to specific entities or comment on individual claims.”

On the agreement itself, the RCMP described the January 15 signing as “a renewal of a long-standing cooperation framework,” noting that Canada and China have entered non-binding memoranda on combating crime since 2010. The arrangement, it said, “supports limited cooperation such as information sharing and investigative assistance and is grounded in mutual respect for sovereignty and compliance with Canadian law and values,” and presents an opportunity to work on counter-narcotics and organized crime. The force said it applies rigorous risk assessments and safeguards, including obligations under the Avoiding Complicity in Mistreatment by Foreign Entities Act, to all international cooperation.

Harth, of the human-rights group Safeguard Defenders, whose documentation of Beijing’s overseas police stations helped expose the network at issue in the New York case, and who has herself been the target of a Chinese state online smear campaign, told The Bureau she found it “staggering to see democracies walk into the same trap time and again.”

She pointed to the contradiction that Ottawa had “spearheaded international efforts to put the issue of transnational repression at the top of the agenda” and now was “legitimizing one of the very same counterparts (MPS) that is known to be part of biggest perpetrating apparatus of the practice around the world.”

Then she put a question she asked Canadians to consider: “who made the request for an MoU with the RCMP? And subsequently: who stands to gain from this agreement?” If the answer to both is the PRC, she said, “why on earth should Canadians assent to it?”

The New York case is the clearest judicial finding to date that the MPS directs repression abroad. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York charged that Lu and Chen opened the Manhattan outpost on the ministry’s behalf and used it to monitor and pressure pro-democracy dissidents.

The Canadian silence is thrown into sharper relief by developments in the United Kingdom, where law enforcement has begun to say openly what the RCMP will not.

A newly declassified Home Office study, based on interviews with officials across 14 law enforcement agencies, reportedly concludes that Chinese organized crime groups — long treated as a purely criminal problem — are now backed and directed by the Chinese Communist Party, a shift that has “changed the issue of Chinese organised crime from being one of a solely criminal nature to that of a national security issue.”

The report, written by David Wilson, a regional coordinator on the organized immigration crime taskforce at West Midlands police, warns that triads, the second-largest category of organized crime in Britain according to the National Crime Agency, could be leveraged for espionage, the infiltration of institutions, the funding of political influence campaigns, the bribery of officials, and the use of brothels for intelligence gathering, blackmail and coercion against influential figures, including members of Parliament. It found that few forces grasped the threat, and that suspects were evading prosecution for lack of Chinese speakers within law enforcement.

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PHNOM PENH — A new undercover investigation that set out to map Cambodia’s illegal wildlife trade has instead opened a window onto a far larger criminal ecosystem — one in which industrial scam compounds linked to Chinese transnational criminal networks, China-to-Mexico fentanyl and precursor-linked routes, elite Cambodian corruption, global money laundering and the sale of purported vitality products like “tiger penis wine” to Chinese officials converge inside the same casino, port and special-economic-zone corridors.

The report, released by Earth League International, an investigative nonprofit that says it uses intelligence methods more commonly associated with national-security and organized-crime investigations, is titled Operation Sandokan.

The group says its investigators spent more than a year infiltrating active trafficking networks in Cambodia, Laos and the Lower Mekong, documenting how traffickers moved endangered species through ports, airports and border crossings while openly naming their political protectors. The same networks, the report says, intersected with drug trafficking, prostitution, counterfeit goods, money laundering and the scam-compound industry that until late 2025 poured vast profits into Cambodia’s illicit economy.

The convergence reaches into the Chinese state through its customers, according to the traffickers quoted in the report. The buyers for the most expensive contraband — rhino horn, ivory, tiger wine — were, by the traffickers’ repeated account, Chinese government officials and employees of state-owned enterprises. “They all work for the Chinese government,” one kingpin said of a buying group. “We help them to smuggle into China after they pay the money here.” A trafficker the report identifies only as “Cam11” said Chinese Embassy officials were major consumers of his tiger-penis wine, “which as of 2025 retailed for $1200 a bottle, often sold in sets of three.”

The goods are smuggled home to be “gifted,” the report notes, with traffickers saying such contraband is attractive because, unlike cash, it can help corrupt officials evade the Chinese Communist Party’s own anti-corruption surveillance.

The traffickers the group investigated were not specialists, but part of a criminal ecosystem tied, in the report’s framing, to Chinese elite and governmental figures. The same people moving rhino horn and tiger bone were, by the report’s account, also moving drugs, drug-precursor chemicals, timber, counterfeit goods, and proceeds from prostitution, and laundering the proceeds.

One network chart flags “Fentanyl (China to Mexico)” alongside container ships operating between Cambodia and China.

Another person of interest was described as a smuggler of drugs and precursor chemicals “between China, SE Asia, and the Western Hemisphere.” The same warehouses in Cambodia’s special economic zones, the investigators found, were used to store wildlife, timber and methamphetamine; the same casinos used to wash money sold endangered species over the counter.

What bankrolled it, until recently, were the scam compounds — the industrial fraud parks, primarily owned and operated by Chinese nationals, where trafficked workers run the online swindles that have stolen billions from victims across the world, and that have recently become the subject of whole-of-government investigations and lawmaker attention in Washington. ELI’s report argues that those scam compounds were not a separate underworld, but the financial engine for other illicit markets around them.

Even as Earth League International’s sources reach toward Cambodia’s ruling family — alleging that relatives of the country’s leadership invested in the scam compounds and directed the regional drug trade — the figure the investigation’s threads keep returning to is Chen Zhi, the Fujian-born chairman of the Cambodia-based Prince Group. The scam compounds his conglomerate is accused of running were a central engine of the illicit economy, described as “the biggest money laundering entity in Southeast Asia.”

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HOUSTON — For more than a year, the prosecution of Minsu Fang has stood as a showcase of the evolving front in America’s fentanyl war — a case that investigators say runs from a Texas warehouse through Mexican cartels and back to the chemical suppliers of China. In the government’s telling, it also documents something larger. Chinese suppliers had come to recognize that the Mexican military, under pressure from Washington, had hardened the southern border against fentanyl smuggling, and that the nexus of Mexican cartels and upstream Chinese chemical suppliers would have to adapt — rerouting their trade through clandestine trans-shipment and false packaging.

The case cuts to the heart of a charge pressed by American lawmakers: that Beijing is not a bystander to the fentanyl crisis but a deliberate author of it. At a hearing on transnational repression on June 4, Representative Christopher H. Smith, co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, placed “fentanyl poisoning our cities” within what he called “a broader, interconnected CCP strategy” — a set of seemingly separate assaults that, in his words, “share a common purpose: exploit our openness, gather leverage, weaken our institutions.”

Last week the Texas case produced what may be an extraordinary precedent. A federal judge agreed to the unusual request of the accused broker — Minsu “Fernando” Fang — allowing him to reach into China for the testimony he says will exonerate him, and to ask the Chinese state for help in obtaining it.

At a hearing on May 28, Judge Keith P. Ellison granted Fang’s request to question a witness who can be reached only inside China, brushing aside the objections of prosecutors who had argued in a detailed brief that the testimony would be unreliable, beside the point, and cause delays in a critical matter. Fang’s lawyers told the judge they would pursue the deposition through a formal request for judicial assistance — addressed to the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China.

The ruling reorders a case the government has treated as a milestone victory. Fang, 48, was arrested in June 2024 as he prepared to board a flight from New York to Mexico City, roughly a year after drug agents in Texas seized some 2,500 kilograms of chemical precursors in one of the largest fentanyl-related busts in the country’s history.

For the U.S. government, Fang is a rare capture: not a sanctioned factory or an unarrestable name on a sanctions list, but a living broker who allegedly stitched Chinese precursor suppliers to Mexican cartels, re-routing chemicals by mislabeled parcel through the United States and onward to Mexico.

It is a case that speaks to recent testimony from the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, and the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole, who have argued that the United States has significantly hardened the southern border and aggressively targeted cartel kingpins in Mexico. Where Chinese suppliers once shipped fentanyl precursors by the container into Mexico’s Pacific coast, the Chinese-Mexican narco convergence has evolved its smuggling routes through trans-shipment, with the route described in Fang’s case a plausible example, even as Patel and Cole have pointed to Vancouver and Canada’s border with the United States as the newest concern.

“We charged this defendant for importing enough fentanyl precursor chemicals from China to kill millions of Americans,” Merrick Garland, the attorney general at the time, said when the Fang indictment was unsealed. The superseding indictment charges Fang with conspiracies to manufacture and distribute fentanyl and to import and export a precursor the government identifies as 1-Boc-4P.

Fang says he is a freight man who was deceived. His defense rests on a single witness in Shenzhen: Wu Xincheng, a former freight-business partner who, in an affidavit notarized in China, swears that the two of them believed they were moving lawful goods. “I know from my first involvement in this matter that Mr. Fang believed, at all times, that his conduct was not illegal or improper, and that the goods he was attempting to move were legal substances,” Wu states. “We believed this to be true based on the representations that were made by LIU, Tao, specifically that the chemicals he was trying to cross into Mexico were to be used to make cosmetics and were not controlled substances. I had no reason to know that the goods shipped were illegal in any way and to my knowledge, neither did Mr. Fang.”

That account is the heart of what the defense calls exceptional circumstances. Wu is a Chinese national beyond the reach of an American subpoena, and, his lawyers argue, the only person who can describe from the inside what Fang knew and believed as the shipments moved.

The government’s answer was to turn Fang’s own messages against him — and in doing so it disclosed the most revealing new evidence in the case. Across years of WeChat exchanges with Wu, prosecutors wrote, the two men “often referred to the chemicals as ‘sensitive goods,’” and discussed how “Mexican military and police had a full presence along the Mexican border and were detaining goods.” In August 2023, according to the filing, Fang told Wu that a package had been seized and the “DEA is investigating.” Rather than retreat, the men “worked to find other couriers and warehouses that would accept the powders and liquids.” And on September 20, 2023, prosecutors say, Fang told Wu plainly what the cargo was for: the powders and chemicals were used “to manufacture prohibited substances,” “like fentanyl and such.”

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WASHINGTON — Thirty-seven years to the day after Chinese tanks rolled into Beijing, Arthur Liu sat before a congressional commission in Washington and described the existential fear he had escaped in 1989 — and the moment it chilled him to the bone again, as he boarded a flight with his teenage daughter while she prepared for the Olympics.

“As we were boarding our flight, I received a telephone call from the FBI,” Liu told the commission. “The agent informed me that the spy was on his way to our home. I will never forget that moment.”

Liu, the father of American gold medalist Alysa Liu, was the most prominent witness at a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China devoted to transnational repression — the technical term for the way Chinese agents and their proxies hunt and harass, on foreign soil, the people the Communist Party fears.

The hearing’s co-chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, opened by casting cases like Liu’s not as isolated incidents but as facets of a single strategy.

“We see that strategy in scam networks stealing from US citizens, fentanyl poisoning our cities, PRC-linked land purchases near military installations, efforts to corrupt politicians and elections, steal private personnel and biometric data, and intellectual-property theft from businesses and universities,” Smith said. “These may look like separate problems. But they share a common purpose: exploit our openness, gather leverage, weaken our institutions, spread propaganda, and make Americans pay a price for standing up to Beijing.”

The story of Liu and his daughter, each becoming a primary threat and target for Beijing in different arenas, is so far outside the bounds of chance that it demands explicit framing.

Arthur Liu was a student leader in southern China during the Tiananmen crackdown who, by his own account, became one of the most wanted democracy activists before he escaped to Hong Kong, arrived in the United States as a refugee and built a career as an immigration lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His daughter became one of the finest figure skaters of her generation — and, in the months before the 2022 Beijing Games, a person of interest to the Chinese state. It was believed at the time that Beijing had eyed Alysa as a prospect for its drive to naturalize foreign-born athletes for those Games, the same campaign that brought the San Francisco–born freestyle skier Eileen Gu to compete, and win gold, for China.

Testifying before the commission, Liu recounted for the public the counterintelligence investigation that he says protected him and his daughter, and the years of targeting that surrounded it.

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By Garry Clement

I recently had the privilege of speaking to the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association in Victoria. It was a meaningful moment for me personally because I had addressed this same group more than 25 years ago. At that time, many Indigenous police services across Canada were severely under-resourced, underfunded, and often isolated from the broader law enforcement framework.

What I witnessed this time was fundamentally different.

I met chiefs and deputy chiefs who demonstrated professionalism, humility, and a deep commitment to the communities they serve. Many First Nations police services have evolved into modern, accountable policing organizations operating in some of the most challenging environments in Canada. Yet despite this progress, they continue to confront a reality most Canadians do not fully appreciate: organized crime, transnational trafficking, financial crime, and foreign interference are increasingly targeting vulnerable and underserved communities.

This is not merely a policing issue. It is a national security issue.

For decades, organized crime in Canada was viewed through a narrow lens — gangs, drugs, violence, and contraband. But modern organized crime has evolved. Today’s criminal enterprises operate like multinational corporations: highly adaptive, globally connected, technologically sophisticated, and deeply embedded in financial systems. They exploit gaps between jurisdictions, weaknesses in governance, and communities that lack adequate protection.

That reality was underscored recently following major arrests tied to Project Puma in Winnipeg — a sweeping organized crime investigation involving alleged fentanyl trafficking, money laundering, weapons offences, and links to transnational criminal networks. The investigation exposed what many in law enforcement have warned about for years: Canada’s illicit economies are deeply interconnected. Contraband tobacco, synthetic drugs, organized crime financing, and foreign supply chains are not separate problems; they are part of the same criminal ecosystem.

Former Ontario Provincial Police Deputy Commissioner Rick Barnum, one of Canada’s most experienced organized crime investigators, captured the significance of the case when he described illegal tobacco as “the connective tissue” linking criminal networks moving fentanyl and precursor chemicals into Canadian communities. Barnum warned that the contraband tobacco trade — much of it tied to illicit manufacturing operations operating near the Ontario–U.S. border — has become a low-risk, high-profit funding stream for transnational criminal organizations with connections extending into Mexico and China.

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OTTAWA — The Canadian Security Intelligence Service issued an extraordinary joint alert Wednesday alongside its Five Eyes counterparts — the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, New Zealand’s Intelligence Community, Britain’s MI5, and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation — warning that China’s military intelligence services are systematically hunting current and former government and military personnel through professional networking sites and online job platforms, in what the agencies described as an aggressive and escalating effort to strip Western democracies of sensitive secrets.

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OTTAWA — On the evening of June 1, at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Prime Minister Mark Carney told an audience of Jewish leaders something no Canadian prime minister had said so plainly: that the …

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OTTAWA — On May 6, Guangming Daily — not just an official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, but allegedly the favored mouthpiece of the world’s largest intelligence agency — published an admiring essay under a headline that reads “From dependence to autonomy: how the Carney government is reimagining Canada–U.S. relations.” The piece, which approvingly amplified Carney’s odd choice to flourish a figurine of the British general Isaac Brock, famed for repelling an American invasion in 1812, does not report on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s rupture with Washington so much as celebrate it.

It casts his turn away from the United States not as a crisis to be managed but as an awakening to be admired, a passage from servitude to sovereignty.

The striking part is that the essay’s central idea — dependence giving way to autonomy — was, almost to the word, the case Carney himself made to a room of American financiers three weeks later.

At the Economic Club of New York on May 28, the prime minister described Canada’s drive to become “more autonomous” as a “core” objective of his government, then sanded the edge off with a line built for the room: “Let’s be absolutely clear. Canada Strong will help make America great again.”

Strip away the flattery — a borrowing of Donald Trump’s own core slogan — as Guangming Daily does, and the same program remains beneath it: a deliberate loosening of the ties that bind Canada to the United States, even as Carney trumpets forging deeper strategic ties with Beijing in trade, law enforcement, media and culture.

According to the Australian analyst Alex Joske, the China-influence expert who wrote the definitive study of Beijing’s feared Ministry of State Security, Guangming Daily is, in his words, “still the MSS newspaper of choice today.” In Spies and Lies, his account of the ministry’s influence operations, Joske documents its long use of publishing houses, think tanks and newspapers as fronts to shape Western opinion and to reach its agents; among them is the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, an organization the ministry knows internally as its Eleventh Bureau. This is the apparatus that has now chosen to lavish praise on a sitting prime minister of a Five Eyes democracy.

The essay’s other enthusiasms are specific.

It praises Carney for resisting what it calls American expansion, and casts Canada, under his hand, as a representative of a world standing against “America first” and economic coercion. It applauds the defense decoupling now underway in Ottawa — the pledge to route the bulk of federal defense contracts to domestic firms, the march toward five percent of output on the military by 2035, the billions promised for the Arctic — and reads each as a healthy loosening of the American grip. And it closes by noting that Canada supplies roughly sixty percent of American crude imports and is Washington’s most reliable source of nickel, while a tariff-burdened Trump administration heads into a midterm election under strain. The subtext is not subtle.

Canada has leverage, Donald Trump is vulnerable, Ottawa can afford to stall.

The Bureau makes no claim that Carney sought, welcomed, or coordinated with this Ministry of State Security endorsement. What the record shows is explicit: the propaganda arm of a hostile intelligence service has decided to celebrate, in flattering and well-informed detail, the foreign policy of an allied head of government.

That trope — Carney as the bulwark against a tariff-obsessed Donald Trump — is not new from Beijing.

It is almost exactly the message a Chinese Communist Party information operation pushed during the 2025 federal election, when Canada’s election-threat monitor, the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force, disclosed a covert campaign run through Youli-Youmian, WeChat’s most popular news account, casting Carney as the tough Canadian leader best suited to stand up to Washington — one post titled, in translation, “The United States is Facing a Tough Prime Minister from Canada.” Intelligence tied that account to the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. A year later, the Ministry of State Security’s newspaper of choice tells the same story.

There is a logic to that enthusiasm, and it is known in Ottawa.

Among the durable aims of Chinese statecraft is to divide the Five Eyes — to pry the United States apart from the allies with whom it shares its deepest secrets. A 2018 report published by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service through its academic outreach program mapped the method with unsettling foresight. Trading partners, it warned, “have quickly found that China uses its commercial status and influence networks to advance regime goals.” And it issued a caution that reads today like a note left for the present government: “Unless trade agreements are carefully vetted for national security implications, Beijing will use its commercial position to gain access to businesses, technologies and infrastructure that can be exploited for intelligence objectives, or to potentially compromise a partner’s security.”

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SAIPAN – The irony was almost too neat, and Jim Kingman felt it land as he sat in the gleaming, barely used federal courthouse on Saipan in the summer of 2024 and watched the United States government close the book on Julian Assange.

They had come a very long way to do it. The head of the Justice Department’s national security division flew in that morning; by early afternoon the WikiLeaks founder had pleaded guilty to a single Espionage Act count over the disclosure of Bradley Manning’s classified files, been sentenced to time served, and was gone — three hours, beginning to end, the federal lawyers not bothering to feign curiosity about the island they had chosen as the stage.

Kingman, a Harvard Law School graduate who had spent years prosecuting fraud, financial crimes, and child exploitation in Texas before arriving in 2023 to lead the CNMI government’s anti-corruption task force, had grown skeptical — maybe that is too soft a word — about Washington’s national security lens on Saipan, and about the inroads of an adversary that made Assange look like a saint.

To be blunt, he felt like a man disabused of an earlier faith in justice. Absent any self-deprecation, he would tell friends that his appointment as the corruption investigator probing the island’s casino hotel amounted to little more than a patsy’s role.

So as the argument unfolded about how Assange’s leaked secrets had imperiled American national security, Kingman, who had prosecuted here and read the place far more closely than its visitors, sat thinking about the airport they had flown into that morning: a port of entry that by his account had gone twenty-five years without answering an audit, functioning all the while as a channel for cheap labor to feed the United States’ appetite for clothing.

The undermining of national security, he thought, was not the thing being adjudicated in this room. It was the room itself — the whole island, and Washington’s long, deliberate refusal to look at Beijing’s saturation of its every nook and cranny.

He was not the only person in that courtroom who understood the island for what it was.

Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, was there too, and only months earlier Kingman had attended a gathering on strategic competition in the Pacific where Rudd had spoken about Chinese operations of the kind the Australians had been confronting for years.

“Rudd definitely knows the game,” Kingman recalled, in an interview. He had sat in that courtroom half-wishing the visitors from Washington and Canberra would simply stay.

“I just want these people to stay here for just a couple days, because they’ll see it as fast as I do of what’s happening here.” None of it, he said, came to fruition. The plane left. The island went back to being what it had been: a piece of America well familiar to Beltway insiders from the days of Jack Abramoff’s influence — his efforts, exposed in media reports, to attack the lawmakers who sought to turn over the rocks and examine the unsavory face of coerced Chinese labor. From the casino to the labor cases still grinding through the courts over abuse on the sprawling hotel project, it was, for Kingman, a place Washington still refuses to examine.

To understand why a Texas prosecutor came to see himself as a token investigator in Saipan — empowered on paper but constrained in practice — you have to understand the casino, and to understand the casino, you have to understand what came before it.

Saipan is a strip of coral and limestone in the western Pacific, closer to China than to Hawaii, an island of roughly fifty thousand people that flies the American flag. For thirty years after United States Marines took it from Japanese forces in 1944, it idled in the sun, known mostly for the bases it had once housed and the battle that had nearly erased it. That changed in 1975, when the islands voted to become a United States commonwealth and the Ford administration, hoping to give a near-empty economy a pulse, handed the new Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands an extraordinary bargain. Goods made there could enter the mainland with no quotas, tariffs, or duties, and could carry the “Made in the USA” label. In exchange, the commonwealth was exempted from federal labor and immigration law — free to set its own wage floor and to admit foreign workers on its own terms.

Entrepreneurs from China, Taiwan, and South Korea rushed in and built garment factories, sewing clothes for some of the most familiar labels in American malls, and recruited their workforce from the farms and slums of the Asian mainland. In the two decades after the treaty, the commonwealth’s population more than tripled; by the late 1990s, the islands were shipping roughly a billion dollars in textiles to the U.S. mainland each year.

But over time, and under the radar, according to former prosecutors, local officials, and regional analysts, operators linked to Chinese global-influence political bodies known as United Front networks — most of them nominally businesspeople or investors — subtly gained a strategic foothold for Beijing inside the American system itself.

The workers who made those clothes lived something closer to indenture than the American Dream. A congressionally mandated task force reported that 91 percent of the private workforce consisted of foreign laborers, many paying off the fees their employers had charged to bring them across the ocean.

Although the reporting from Saipan does not draw the comparison, the economics and the population flows suggest a system resembling the snakehead human shipments then flooding the West Coast of North America, which — according to American and Canadian intelligence and immigration assessments of the period — moved through Hong Kong and Fujian-based criminal networks and, according to classified Canadian intelligence from 1993, reported by The Bureau, involved Chinese Communist Party leaders in Fujian, and the Ministry of Public Security.

The living conditions and the harsh repayment demands documented on Saipan echo what those same intelligence reports described of the smuggled laborers who worked in underground factory conditions in Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. On Saipan, federal investigators documented guarded barracks, systematic underpayment, retaliation against those who complained, and contracts that forbade workers from falling in love or becoming pregnant. The task force called the islands a national embarrassment.

When reform finally threatened — a 1997 Senate vote to extend United States immigration law to the islands — the commonwealth’s government, and the textile interests it served, turned to Washington for protection. They hired the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, then at the firm Preston Gates, who massaged the assignment into an ideological crusade aimed at right-wing lawmakers, and was eventually paid millions.

Abramoff’s method was the junket.

He and his deputies flew more than a hundred members of Congress, aides, and conservative writers to Saipan; in a memo to the islands’ principal textile patron, intercepted by The Washington Post in 1998, he wrote that thanks to those trips the commonwealth had many friends on the appropriations committees, and in his own strategy documents he called the trips one of the most effective ways to build permanent friends on the Hill. By the measure that counted, it worked.

Despite years of documented abuse, Congress passed not a single bill to reform the islands’ labor regime. The scandal eventually helped send Abramoff to prison, but the machine he had built on Saipan — the lesson that proximity to power could be purchased, and that the federal government could be made to look away — outlasted him.

The garment industry collapsed in the 2000s, when the trade loopholes that had built it finally closed. But the appetite it had created for easy money did not, and a new industry arrived to feed it — one already flourishing in Macau and taking hold, on a smaller scale, in the government-run casinos of British Columbia. The VIP gamblers from China who drove it, the “whales” of Las Vegas lore, could generate turnover out of all proportion to their numbers, provided the gaming houses they visited turned a blind eye to Chinese mafia lenders, underground bankers and loan sharks.

The vehicle on Saipan was Imperial Pacific International, a company controlled by a Chinese business family with deep roots in Macau’s junket trade.

It won the sole casino license on the island in 2014 despite having never built or operated a casino, and before its permanent building was finished it was already running a temporary floor — what Kingman describes as a training operation to break in new dealers, eleven VIP tables tucked behind a duty-free shop.

Those eleven tables, he says, turned over more money in a single quarter than the great houses of Macau. It was those figures, reported to international gaming regulators, that first drew the notice of journalists, and then of the FBI. “At no point was it ever intended to make money,” Kingman told The Bureau. “It was intended to launder money.”

The model that replaced the garment trade was, in a sense, its mirror image. The old economy had extracted value by shipping goods outward — clothing built on coerced labor, stamped “Made in the USA” and sold to American consumers.

The new economy ran the value the other way, pulling corruption money out of China and washing it across the tables, the gaudy building almost incidental to the flow. In Kingman’s reading, the purpose of those funds carried a deeper aim than mere profit. The labor abuses did not disappear in the transition; they were rebuilt on the construction site.

The casino’s contractors brought thousands of Chinese workers to Saipan, confiscated their passports, and worked them in twelve-hour shifts for less than the minimum wage. Doctors at the local hospital recorded more than eighty serious injuries on the site in ten months. The scheme came undone only when a worker fell from the scaffolding and died in March 2017, prompting an FBI raid that uncovered a cabinet of confiscated passports and lists of undocumented laborers.

Federal authorities ultimately recovered nearly fourteen million dollars in back wages for roughly twenty-four hundred workers, and seven Chinese construction workers later won a landmark forced-labor and human-trafficking judgment of more than five million dollars. A federal grand jury indicted three IPI and contractor executives on a seventy-one-count case alleging they had moved more than twenty-four million dollars into the United States to promote illegal activity.

And yet, on the gravest questions — the corruption, and the money laundering that Kingman believes was the casino’s actual purpose — the cases never came. IPI was never charged with casino money laundering, even after the November 2019 raids that swept up not only the company’s offices but the governor’s office and the offices of a consultancy and a realty firm.

Investigators and former officials involved would later tell reporters that the probes lacked federal resources and the attention of Washington. The FBI agents on the ground in Saipan, Kingman says, ended up pushed out; the investigation, in his account, was undermined from within, “not because there’s anything wrong with the facts, but just because the Feds didn’t want it to work.”

That last is his characterization, and it is an allegation rather than an established fact. But the documented pattern around it is not in dispute: the evidence was abundant, and the serious indictments never materialized.

If Kingman sees the machine from inside a courtroom, others have described it from the altitude of national strategy. Tony C. T. Hu — a former Defense Department China director with deep expertise in Beijing’s global warfighting and clandestine capabilities — laid out the same architecture at a briefing this winter in Ottawa, attended by Taiwan’s ambassador to Canada, Harry Tseng, and his staff. Before he walked his audience through carrier strike groups and missile silos, Hu took up a question that has preoccupied Western security services for years but rarely surfaces in public: whether China is weaponizing migration into strategic islands such as Saipan. His answer was flat — yes, and it reaches to the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. “If you look at Tonga — it’s a country that’s only got about 20,000 people — you’ve got 4,000 Chinese there or something. They’re changing the demographic so that they can change the elections.” Asked whether the same approach extends into the Western Hemisphere, from Saipan to Samoa to Vancouver, Belize, and Bermuda, Hu was unequivocal: “Same thing. Same intention.”

The mechanism he described is one The Bureau has documented at length: organized-crime networks — including the junket operations that move billions through casinos from Macau to Vancouver, Saipan, and Sydney — harnessed to what Hu calls a “grand strategy” directed from Beijing. “Most of these criminal activities involve high-level people,” Hu said. “CCP people. And they benefit from it monetarily, but they also have a grand strategy. So it’s a win-win for them. They’re untouchable inside of China, and they just keep on doing it.”

When The Bureau put that fuller interpretation to Kingman directly — that the laundering was a means to an end, the patient purchase of proxy influence over a strategically vital American island in the second island chain — he affirmed it. “What you’re describing is accurate,” he said.

He also recognized another element that some U.S. intelligence sources and experts on China’s so-called “hybrid warfare” recognize: the deliberate flooding of narcotics into a target population.

As a prosecutor, Kingman had watched it unfold in rural Texas.

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Her father is Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of Zion Church, once one of the largest underground churches in China. Last October, Chinese authorities arrested him along with dozens of his fellow leaders, in what Grace told the United States Congress was the largest takedown of an independent house church since the Cultural Revolution. His crime, in essence, was refusing to install facial recognition cameras inside his sanctuary — refusing, that is, to let the state mark and monitor those who pray.

The most striking part of our conversation was not only the courage of a man now sitting in a prison cell in Guangxi province, his diabetes untreated, but the reach of the machinery arrayed against his family thousands of miles away.

Pastor Jin comes from a lineage of great Chinese ministers and authors hardly recognized in much of the West — outside of biblical scholars — including Watchman Nee, the early twentieth-century teacher whose devotional writings shaped evangelical Christianity far beyond China, and who was imprisoned by the Communist authorities in 1952 and died in a labor camp two decades later, never released.

Since Grace and her husband began speaking out, her mother near Chicago has had her tires slashed in her own garage and been threatened by callers impersonating American federal agents. Grace says she has been followed here in Washington. Her husband now sleeps with a metal bat beside their bed. There is a clinical term for this — transnational repression — but what it means, in human terms, is that Beijing’s fear of one pastor has crossed an ocean to land on his daughter’s doorstep.

And yet Grace speaks without bitterness. She gave me this interview from a hospital, 38 weeks pregnant, balancing her own coming motherhood against the fight to free her father. She tells me her family has decided not to measure their work by results but by faithfulness — that they are, as she puts it, mere individuals, and the rest is the work of God. It is a posture I found genuinely disarming, and it runs through everything she says.

We talk about her father’s improbable story: a poor farmer’s son who won a place at one of Beijing’s finest universities, watched the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square in 1989, lost classmates who were never spoken of again, and found Christianity in the rubble of that shattered worldview. We talk about the quiet, explosive growth of Christianity across China, the regime’s deepening crackdown, and why an officially atheist Party that seeks to control everything cannot abide a church that worships a higher authority than the state.

This is, in the end, a Father’s Day story. It is about a daughter who has not seen her father in person since 2020, who is about to become a parent herself.

I ask her finally, what message does she think her father would share with Americans, Canadians, and listeners across the free world now, if he could reach them on this podcast?

Her answer applies not only to Pastor Jin, locked in a jail cell, but the cause of that, and every person now living in China, restricted from speaking freely.

“How can you look away from that pain, if that is your own family member?”

WASHINGTON – Grace Jin Drexel’s husband sleeps with a metal bat beside their bed, in Washington, in a neighborhood where the couple is surrounded by friends from the United States government. Her mot…

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WASHINGTON — In 2017, as Donald Trump launched a campaign to decouple the United States from a system of economic entanglement with China that a generation of American officials had come to see as quietly corroding the nation’s security and wealth, the son of a Texas Republican was living in Beijing under a borrowed name — and, that year, was introduced to a man who, he came to understand, communicated frequently with Xi Jinping himself.

His name was Thomas Pauken II. To his audiences on Chinese state television, and on the masthead of the Chinese Communist Party’s official news agency, he was Tom McGregor — a pseudonym he later told the FBI he adopted at his father’s request, because the elder Thomas Pauken, a former Reagan administration official and onetime chairman of the Texas Republican Party, did not want his name attached to his son’s work for Beijing.

What followed, according to allegations laid out in an FBI counterintelligence affidavit unsealed this month in the Eastern District of Virginia, sketches a portrait of espionage and information warfare in which the line between Chinese journalist and Chinese intelligence asset disappears — a system in which not only Chinese media are forced to spy for Beijing, but foreigners hired to perform the work of state journalism are tasked, polygraphed, paid, and ultimately turned into recruiters reaching back into Washington.

While working openly as a Chinese state-media commentator and, later, a Xinhua editor, Pauken was handled by a succession of state security operatives, subjected to a lie detector test to prove he was not a CIA spy, tasked with cultivating a U.S. government employee for recruitment, paid roughly $100,000 for reports he was told were read by Xi Jinping himself, and — by his own account to the FBI — asked to apply for a job at the U.S. State Department and report back on his progress. What emerges from the affidavit is less the story of a single agent than the anatomy of a method.

The man Thomas Pauken met in 2017, it turned out, was a speechwriter for Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party — a writer of the words the Chinese leader spoke to the world, who in the FBI’s account communicates regularly with Xi himself. It is a striking image: an American, the son of a Reagan official, drawn into the orbit of the man who helped shape the utterances of the most powerful figure in China, at the precise moment two superpowers were tearing at the seams of global trade.

And it was the speechwriter, the affidavit states, who introduced Pauken to a Chinese woman he knew only as “Cathy,” whom he was told consulted for a think tank tied to the Chinese government. Cathy, the affidavit alleges, was an officer of the Ministry of State Security, China’s premier civilian intelligence service.

For the next several years, according to the FBI, Pauken operated as what counterintelligence officers call a cut-out: a non-professional collector who recruits, services, and reports on human sources on behalf of trained intelligence officers. He carried taskings into the United States. He met with prospective sources, handed them encrypted devices, relayed Beijing’s questions, and carried their answers back. He was paid, the affidavit alleges, roughly $100,000 for his reports, plus thousands of dollars more per trip — money Cathy often wired to his wife’s bank accounts in China. Cathy told him, repeatedly, that his reports were read by Xi Jinping.

In 2022 or 2023, the affidavit alleges, Cathy administered what Pauken understood to be a polygraph. The roughly ten yes-or-no questions included whether he was spying against China, and whether he worked for the CIA.

Pauken’s own account did not stop with Cathy.

He described to the FBI reporting for two contacts in China he called Richard and William, met during the 2017 trade conflict, who told him his reports went to Japan but whom he believed worked for the Chinese government, and who asked him to apply to the U.S. State Department and report on his progress.

He described earlier clients from Wuhan, interested in technology and the U.S. Department of Justice, who he said wanted him to find an expert to help them conduct cyber espionage, and whose point of contact, he stated, worked for state security. The Wuhan clients, by Pauken’s telling, were not after commentary or analysis at all; they wanted him to locate an American technical expert who could help them carry out cyber intrusions.

Pauken’s cover was not invented; it was his actual career.

Born in 1975, a heavyset man of five feet ten inches and some 250 pounds, he listed a single employer on his federal charging sheet: Xinhua News.

Beginning around 2010, he worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, then for China Radio International, China Central Television, and China Global Television Network, before becoming an editor in March 2024 for Xinhua, the official news agency of the Chinese state and a flagship organ of the Communist Party’s vast propaganda and information apparatus — a ministry-level institution of China’s State Council, the country’s highest administrative body. The press credential was not a disguise draped over an operation. It was the operation.

There is an irony in Pauken’s biography, that resonates with current events in Canada. In 2019, under his own name, he published a book on the very confrontation that had drawn him into Cathy’s orbit. Its title was US Vs China: From Trade War to Reciprocal Deal.

In January 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney traveled to Beijing — the first visit to China by a Canadian prime minister since 2017 — and emerged with what his office called a new strategic partnership spanning trade, energy, law enforcement, and media. Among its components was an agreement, welcomed in the Prime Minister’s own readout, between Destination Canada and China Media Group, the Chinese Communist Party’s central state broadcasting and propaganda apparatus, to provide what the broader arrangement framed as mutual support and convenience for media to operate in each other’s countries.

The premise of such an arrangement is reciprocity and building bridges. Canadian media gain access to China, Chinese media gain access to Canada.

But the Pauken affidavit is a documented account of what the Chinese half of that exchange can look like in practice — of how a state media credential functions as an intelligence platform, and of how the personnel of China Media Group’s sister institutions have been deployed not merely to report but to collect, to cultivate, and to recruit. The U.S. government, moving to keep Pauken behind bars, put the duality in a single sentence. He splits his time, prosecutors wrote, working for China’s state news agency and China’s intelligence services.

A different sort of ambiguity was, for years, presented in the image Pauken cultivated. In podcast appearances and interviews promoting his work, he presented himself under the McGregor name as a widely read China journalist from Dallas living in Beijing — a man who was, in the words of one host’s introduction, “both very pro-Trump AND pro-China.” A trusted media voice that narrows the distance, an affable bridge-builder.

Political Consultant Seeking Trump Admin Job

The figure at the center of the alleged recruitment effort is identified in the affidavit only as Person 1 — a political consultant Pauken met at a Washington event in June 2023, who was at the time seeking a position in the incoming Trump administration and now, according to a footnote, works for a U.S. government agency.

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OTTAWA — When Winnipeg police laid out the largest drug seizure in Manitoba history last week — more than 525 kilograms of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl, 14 firearms, and $825,000 in cash — the bricks of narcotics and the row of guns drew the cameras. A quieter item in the evidence locker did not: 1.35 million contraband cigarettes.

To a former senior Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) organized crime investigator who has spent decades tracing the illicit tobacco trade, that detail was perhaps the most revealing thing in the multi-agency probe. Illegal cigarettes, he told The Bureau, are the connective tissue of the networks that flood hard drugs from China and Mexico into Canadian communities. If tobacco produced on Indigenous lands fueling fentanyl production does not register with citizens, he says, the one billion in tax dollars lost every year in Ontario alone should at least raise eyebrows.

And the trade is significantly influenced, in his assessment, not only by Hells Angels traffickers identified in the two-year Project Puma probe, but by an entity operating from a Six Nations base whose wealth and reach may supersede any comparable figures living in Canada or the United States.

“Probably the most successful organized crime figurehead, maybe in North America,” Rick Barnum said. “Billions and billions of dollars, never being at risk really of arrest,” with luxury properties “all over the world,” sports cars, planes and yachts.

Barnum, former Deputy Commissioner of the OPP Organized Crime command, now works for an industry group that tracks the increasing proliferation of contraband tobacco manufactured on Indigenous lands in Canada, mostly the Mohawk lands in Ontario between Hamilton and Buffalo.

According to Barnum and industry groups, whose findings are backed by police investigations, multiple Ernst & Young reports and a report last year from former U.S. national security official David Luna, illegal tobacco has become a massive, low-risk profit center for transnational mafias tied to Canada’s growing fentanyl production trade — a protected-jurisdiction revenue stream funding organized crime networks with connections to Mexico and China across Canada.

Asked directly how the Indigenous tobacco entities tied to Project Puma compared with Ryan Wedding — the former Canadian Olympic snowboarder turned cartel proxy whose legacy network The Bureau assesses to be at the center of Project Puma — Rick Barnum did not hesitate.

The Indigenous players could “buy” numerous Hells Angels clubs across North America and “could buy a Ryan Wedding too,” Barnum said. The wealth being generated from Mohawk lands, to the benefit of a relative few, he said, “makes Wedding look like a lower-level figure.”

There is a blueprint showing how Canada is exploited.

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