Ports, Fentanyl, Corruption: Beijing's Triad of threats to the United States

Unheeded Warnings: The Bureau investigates Canadian intelligence on the causes of opioids pouring into North America

NG Lap Seng was named as a co-owner in an industrial entity with Hutchison Whampoa’s prominent stockholder by Canadian immigration officer Brian McAdam, prior to the Macau billionaire’s takedown in a United Nations corruption case.

Thirty years ago a Canadian immigration officer foresaw the lethal fentanyl epidemic plaguing America today, red-flagging a Hong Kong shipping tycoon with Chinese intelligence connections.

In a series of classified reports the Canadian diplomat, Brian McAdam, warned Ottawa about a sprawling empire called Hutchison Whampoa.

McAdam and an RCMP officer in Hong Kong were concerned that Hutchison was gaining a foothold in Canadian real estate and Vancouver’s port despite the shipping entity’s "suspected Sun Yee On [Triad] connections and powerful connections to PRC government.”

As The Bureau has reported, McAdam’s explosive Passports of Convenience paper featured American intelligence spotlighting ties between Sun Yee On and a Chinese Communist Party governor in Fujian. The Chinese government and Triads were co-operating in massive human smuggling operations leveraging corruption in Latin American states, according to McAdam’s classified report.

And these human trafficking syndicates were also flooding opioids into North American cities and “creating victims (because) heroin addiction is increasing,” the 1993 report warned.

In personal notes recorded after he left government McAdam lamented that Passports of Convenience was buried in Ottawa. He speculated this was because Canadian officials were too cozy with Hutchison Whampoa’s most prominent shareholder, a Hong Kong financier.

“The message was very clear: again the Canadian government was not to be informed about what was going on,” McAdam’s notes say.

But decades later, as U.S. Congress launches investigations into Chinese Communist Party involvement in fentanyl trafficking and money laundering with Mexican cartels, McAdam’s reporting on Hutchison Whampoa and his suspicions about Beijing’s corruptive influence in North American politics look increasingly relevant.

This is because Hutchison’s Mexican ports are coming under increasing scrutiny from U.S. investigators.

A report from Dr. Evan Ellis of U.S. Army War College says trade between China and Mexico is central to the fentanyl crisis that killed over 100,000 Americans in 2023. Hutchison Whampoa has operated major ports in Mexico since the 1990s, where the Sinaloa cartel partners with Sun Yee On and 14K Triads to import fentanyl precursors from Wuhan, the report says.

“Many of those drugs and precursors are brought in through Mexican ports operated by the Chinese company Hutchison,” it says.

In an interview J.J. Carrell, a recently retired U.S. Border Control official, also pointed at Hutchison Ports. He’s among a growing number of security experts that believe the Chinese Communist Party is intentionally leveraging fentanyl and human trafficking through Mexico in efforts to destabilize the United States.

“Hutchison Holdings run and own and control the largest international terminals in Manzanillo,” Carrell told The Bureau. “That is where 90 per cent of all fentanyl precursors, that is U.S. data, are arriving in Mexico from China, through that port alone.”

Meanwhile, The Bureau’s review of McAdam’s classified reports and his explanatory notes finds sensitive allegations that could illuminate the U.S. government’s probes of global fentanyl trafficking networks.

For example, McAdam found that offshore banking fronts associated to Beijing’s so-called “Red Princeling” clans are entwined with China’s military in the global shipping interests of Hutchison’s largest shareholder.

“[Hutchison Whampoa’s principle] owns ports and facilities in the UK, the Panama Canal, the Bahamas, docks in British Columbia as well as ports in North Korea,” McAdam’s notes say. [A related company founded by Hutchison’s principle] is described as bastion of the ‘princelings’ who are sons and daughters of the ruling elite of the PRC.”

McAdam’s notes also cite testimony from Thomas Moorer, former U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander.

“An entity calling itself Panama Ports Company is actually a front corporation for Hutchison Whampoa,” Moorer testified in 1998 Senate hearings. The former naval commander added the Hutchison Whampoa “business empire has long been intertwined with the enterprises that front for the Communist military intelligence arms of the People’s Republic of China.”

The Bureau asked David Luna, a former U.S. State Department official, if McAdam’s focus on Hutchison and Chinese-controlled ports could shed light on the fentanyl trade examined now by U.S. agencies.

Luna is executive director of an NGO that briefs national security leaders on emerging threats from hostile states including China and Iran that leverage illicit financial networks in Canada and Latin America.

Luna couldn’t comment on specific intelligence from McAdam’s 1990s-era reporting, but in a written response confirmed Beijing’s influence in Western ports is concerning.

"It is true that most of the fentanyl and the fentanyl precursors in Mexico are not only sourced to China, but arrive in the hemisphere through ports where, in some cases, the PRC either has control or partial control of the port operations, or exert their corruptive influence, and with help from some of China's diasporic proxies, criminal Triads, and complicit enablers (e.g., Mexican cartels) that facilitate such cross-border illicit trade and related money laundering."

Tycoons, Corruption, Foreign Interference

McAdam’s reporting from Hong Kong was also decades ahead of U.S. government prosecutions of Chinese influence operations concerning the tycoons that McAdam and a small group of RCMP and CSIS officers probed in the 1990s.

For example, McAdam wrote that Hutchison’s main investor was also co-owner of an industrial company with a Macau billionaire named Ng Lap Seng.

McAdam’s notes allege that Ng Lap Seng was “a suspected Triad member (US law enforcement link him to drugs prostitution control in Western US.)”

He added that Ng Lap Seng — a property developer that partnered in a Macau casino with a Red Princeling and Sun Yee On associate according to McAdam’s reporting — was probed for funnelling hundreds of thousands into the Democratic National Committee in a campaign finance scandal that enabled Ng to meet President Bill Clinton, visiting the White House ten times from 1994 to 1996, according to a U.S. Senate report.

As it turned out, in 2017 Ng Lap Seng was convicted for running a United Nations corruption operation involving over $1-million in bribes paid to diplomats including former U.N. General Assembly president John Ashe.

The overarching scheme aimed at winning U.N. support for various projects including a conference centre in Macau as well as promoting business for Chinese tycoons and security companies.

The Sydney Morning Herald called it “a clandestine foreign interference operation,” using “a network of middlemen, millionaires and suspected spies.”

John Ashe was indicted in the bribery scheme.

But in 2016, while the FBI’s probe was underway, Ashe died of “traumatic asphyxia” in a weightlifting accident at his New York home. According to medical exams Ashe was trying to benchpress a barbell that fell onto his throat.

The United Nations corruption case also involved a $200,000 payment to Ashe from Australian real estate tycoon Chau Chak Wing, U.S. legal filings from the Sydney Morning Herald say.

The businessman denied any wrongdoing and successfully sued Australian media for naming him. But his case later came up in Australia’s Parliament.

“Chinese-Australian billionaire and prolific political donor Chau Chak Wing told the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2016 that $200,000 his company wired to an allegedly corrupt United Nations chief was a donation to “alleviate poverty”, Parliament has heard,” the Morning Herald reported in 2021.

The pro-democracy aftermath of Australian reporting on Chau Chak Wing’s case is described in a classified report on foreign interference from Ottawa’s National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).

“In 2017, an investigation by [Australian] media reported that two PRC-associated individuals donated $6.7 million (AUS) to the Liberal, Labour and National Parties,” NSICOP’s 2019, Canadian Eyes Only report says.

“The investigative series, including its reporting on the suspected influence ties between these donors and former Senator Sam Dastyari, led to increased public pressure on the Australian government to address what PCO (Canada’s Privy Council Office) described in a note to the Prime Minister as ‘A problem that many critics have long argued has been exacerbated by willfull blindness on the part of current and former politicians, senior government officials, journalists and universities, to the threat posed by Chinese authorities and their affiliates to the integrity of Australia’s sovereignty, political system, democratic institutions and economy.’”