Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in his early days in office covertly met with notorious Chinese crime boss Paul King Jin and a Chinese army veteran in a rendezvous surveilled by the RCMP.
RCMP officers, in at least two separate instances, have confirmed Trudeau’s closed-door meeting near Vancouver International Airport sometime between late 2015 and early 2017.
The Globe & Mail first reported on the clandestine meeting over the weekend, with a second report from The Bureau released Tuesday.
RCMP officers, independent from those who spoke with the Globe, confirmed to The Bureau that the meeting was held and that the prime minister was linked to the organized crime suspect and PLA (People’s Liberation Army) veteran.
Jin is suspected of being a key player in an elaborate transnational crime syndicate and has been linked to money laundering operations, drug trafficking, and corrupt real estate deals.
“He’s spending a lot of time in Latin America and the Caribbean,” a source told The Bureau.
He also allegedly laundered money through illegal casinos and, as The Bureau reported based on Canadian intelligence sources, has ties to China’s Ministry of Public Security and clandestine Chinese police stations in B.C. that were under investigation by the RCMP.
Jin, banned from BC casinos, took his gambling operations underground in 2015, generating $32 million in four months, as underground casinos became a cash-flow haven for North American drug trafficking. The Bureau reported that membership fees were as high as $100,000.
The outlet heard from multiple sources that there is now a “trade connection” from “Latin America and the Caribbean to Canadian Asian organized crime commodity trades, primarily via the Maritimes.”
One key destination for such clandestine operations is Panama. Intelligence reports obtained by The Bureau align Jin’s trips to Panama and other Latin American nations with collaborations between the Canadian Triads — Asian gangs operating in Canada — and Mexican cartel operatives.
“These collaborations facilitate the trafficking of narcotics, money laundering, and commodity smuggling into the United States,” wrote The Bureau.
Jin has reportedly been caught using false identities, including to buy a house in Richmond, BC, as well as to travel through multiple hubs en route to Panama.
“They said, ‘No, you're inadmissible. Something's wrong here. You're traveling under this name, but we have you here as another person,’” a source told The Bureau’s Sam Cooper.
“So Panama punted him and sent him back exactly the same route, and we caught wind of this because of the liaison office down in Bogotá.”
“And they let us know, and locally, the CBSA (Canada Border Services Agency) guys let the Toronto guys know because that's where he would clear Canada Customs coming back. So they were like, ‘Okay, this is worthy of an interview.’ And they put a flag in the system and everything else.”
Yet — nobody interviewed Jin when he returned to Vancouver.
“It just shows you the brokenness of our own system, that we can't even get a key guy like that consistently checked and stopped, and he's traveling under false papers,” said the source.
“Asian organized crime is running amok. Foreign actor interference is getting really established. How it works is the current government welcomes any contributions from the motherland. What does this have to do with Asian organized crime in Canada? There's a trade connection now from those areas in Latin America and the Caribbean to Canadian Asian organized crime commodity trades, primarily via the Maritimes.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has flagged Panama as a “hub of Chinese crime and state influence,” as the Caribbean nation has become a focal point for Jin’s criminal operations.
“Jin was spending an awful lot more time down in Panama, where we think he is putting a lot of his capital,” a source familiar with North American law enforcement investigations told The Bureau.
“They have the same kind of problem going on in Panama City as Vancouver, with all of the condo towers, and they’re empty. So people are plowing money into that place too.”
“To make a long story short, it all fell flat. Nobody interviewed him. He just came right back — came right back to his place here in Vancouver. And so it just shows you the brokenness of our own system, that we can't even get a key guy like that consistently checked and stopped, and he's traveling under false papers,” said the source.
They added that Jin’s growing influence in Panama aligns with one of President Donald Trump’s central concerns: the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the West and Canada’s apparent unwillingness or ineptitude in cracking down on it.
