Laundering the Dragon: a developer's truthful novel about Canada's seeming indifference to money laundering
Veteran developer turned crime writer John D'Eathe worries that the ethics of Canada's business elites are "slipping badly."
“I thought we might as well lunch with the money-launderers,” joked John D’Eathe, veteran property developer turned crime writer, as he welcomed me to the luxurious panelled dining room of the Vancouver Club. “At least the ones in suits.”
If there were illicit money managers in the noisy, diverse and well-tailored crowd, it was impossible to pick them out, which was precisely D’Eathe’s point.
In a 50-year career that started in Hong Kong and included a long stint in the leadership of Bentall Kennedy (now BentallGreenOak), one of Canada’s largest developers, D’Eathe has seen and heard it all.
So when BC’s $18.6 million Cullen Commission into money laundering proved unable to say with certainty how much money laundering occurred in the province, exactly who was behind it, or precisely how it could be reined in, D’Eathe was determined to find out the facts himself.
“But there are no facts,” he exclaims. “The reason there are no facts is that the fox is looking after the hen house.” The “don’t say, don’t tell” cone of silence over money laundering in Canada, especially in the big banks, is impenetrable, unless it is pierced by American authorities.
Housebound by the Covid pandemic, D'Eathe decided to write the truth, as he knew it, but as fiction, a story based on reality as he had observed it.
The result was Laundering the Dragon: Black Renminbi, a “cynical light-hearted financial crime novel” set in Hong Kong and Vancouver that remains a steady seller in Vancouver bookstores three years after D’Eathe published it.
In a complex narrative that spans the Pacific, a half-century of history, and dozens of characters, D’Eathe traces the financial adventures of Ron Leyland, the scion of a westside Vancouver logging dynasty who finds a way to use Hong Kong investors to turn leaky condos into real estate gold.
A truly naïve Canadian, Leyland is both guided and protected in his Chinese financial adventures by his lover and then wife Wong Mai Xi (Maisie), the voluptuous and savvy secretary to Wong Mai Fu. Wong is her brother and the mid-level agent of a Mainland Chinese gang with roots in human smuggling, brothels and night clubs. He’s ready to move on to bigger things.
The Mainland Chinese counterparts to Leyland and Maisie Wong are Ah-Cy Huang, the daughter of a revolutionary hero and an up-and-comer in the newly emerging capitalist China, and her husband Zhang Man Lok, a tedious and loyal party man of little distinction.
This is a melodrama, and D’Eathe gives a nod to the conventions of crime fiction. It opens with a murder and missing sacks of cash. Alcoholic libations are specified by name and quality, and where niche couture brands are worn, those facts are noted.
Bodices are ripped, sex happens. Ah-Cy’s marriage is one of convenience, not love, but she achieves sexual climax by singing revolutionary marching songs, accompanying her lovemaking with “quick tempo, patriotic vocals.” Leyland and Maisie develop more conventional bedroom rituals after a first date that culminates in a bare-breasted restaurant mishap involving lobster thermidor.
But the book’s real focus is financial, with discussions of money laundering and fraud so numerous and detailed that an RCMP veteran asked D’Eathe if he’d set out “to write a novel or a textbook?”
The man at the centre of D’Eathe’s web, the kingpin if you like, is Dean Dr. Poon Ping Kin. a gay Macau accountant, money manager and consigliere to The Six, a shadowy group of top party and business officials in China with massive cash surpluses seeking a safe harbour. Ping Kin is the gatekeeper who deftly directs their river of cash to whoever can offer the best deal.
Leyland, the dim-witted but well-meaning Canadian, expert at looking the other way, rides this rising tide of money to undreamed-of riches, moving from low-level property development to immigration investment services and on to major property projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
It is his wife, Maisie, who has the ethical and political sensibilities necessary to shield the couple from harm.
“Either she was Maisie Leyland or Mai Zi Wong,” D’Eathe writes. “Was she governed by principles or riches? Like all good Canadians, she would avoid a confrontation, hoping for both, just waiting to see what transpired.”
The geopolitical backdrop to Laundering the Dragon includes the chaos of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and China’s privatization drive of the 1980s, coming just as BC’s own elites were casting about for solutions to a deep recession and troubles in the resource sector.
Before the Expo 86 World’s Fair, Pin King explains to Zhang, no one would have given Canada a second thought, but when “a highly publicized Hong Kong real estate magnate . . .amazingly purchased the entire site,” the Canadians even promised to clean up the land. “They give good deals there! I would recommend Canada to be one of the easiest systems in the world for us to enter, with an especially resilient economy in which to conceal our investments.”
BC, with its historic ties to China and its hunger for cheap capital, became a top destination for China’s growing battalions of millionaires and billionaires.
Maisie believes that most of those arriving through Leyland’s immigration service are decent people with legitimately earned wealth, but not all. Her brother Wong recommends some dubious characters, and we learn that Zhang, already invested in strip clubs and other Vancouver ventures, is looking to take advantage of Chinese pharmaceutical producers to build new markets for synthetic opioids.
Leyland, a prototypical Canadian, is keen to do things legally, but he loves the money. The problem is not how to get more business for Pin King but how to find places to spend the vast sums coming his way.
All this is familiar territory for D’Eathe, the son of an English working-class family who became an active trade unionist in his youth. An astute official in D’Eathe’s public sector union saw his talent and helped him on his way to a law degree. From there, D’Eathe emigrated to Hong Kong, still a British colony governed exclusively by Britons, where talented people of his age could hold jobs out of reach at home for someone so young.
“Working in Asia as a brash young manager I learned my first lesson dealing with organized crime,” he recalled in a letter to colleagues last year. “I made my manager come down hard on a triad group operating in his building and that night he was thrown off the top of the high-rise. I got the message.”
The system was rotten from top to bottom, he realized. Many years later, a senior London banker just rolled his eyes when D’Eathe asked about money laundering, saying “no banker would discuss the topic I was trying to raise.” D’Eathe later waved off the offer of a seat on the board of a Swiss bank, with annual directors’ fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars, because he was told not to ask about the bank’s depositors.
D’Eathe’s career soon took off. He moved to Vancouver in the 1960s to lead Project 200, a massive waterfront project linked to the city’s freeway frenzy. When it was cancelled, D’Eathe went on to develop many familiar BC projects, including Victoria’s Mayfair Mall and Guildford Town Centre in Surrey.
D’Eathe believes BC’s real estate sector is fundamentally sound, “despite some bad hats,” but worries that an ethical boundary is being crossed as Canadians hope, like Maisie, to be both principled and rich.
With one of the most open financial systems in the world, an enforcement regime that seldom lays charges and a judiciary that almost never convicts, the ethics of Canada’s business elite, including many who lunch at the Vancouver Club, are our last line of defense.
“I'm concerned about ethics generally,” says D’Eathe, “because I think Canadian business ethics could be slipping badly. That's the whole point. Does [money laundering] matter? Do we care? Are we even aware of it? Are we that naive?”
Unlike conventional crime novels, Laundering the Dragon sticks to real life: no bad guys are sanctioned, no crusading police are vindicated, no corruption laid bare. Ron and Maisie count themselves lucky to escape the clutches of The Six with their lives and personal wealth intact. Wong’s murder goes unsolved. That’s reality.
Yet “Canada is slowly learning how to defend itself in this generally lawless, thieving world,” Maisie concludes, in a rare hopeful note. “Our family is voting for the Canadian way of life and values,” adding wistfully, “whatever they are precisely.”
D’Eathe’s Laundering the Dragon fits comfortably in a growing library of BC fentanyl overdose crime literature. Best-selling author Daniel Kalla, a former Vancouver emergency room physician now teaching at UBC, published The Last High in 2020. Much more “rock-em, sock-em” than D’Eathe, Kalla has a surprisingly bleak view of the prospects for recovery from substance use disorders, but a clear-eyed realism about the relentless violence of the criminal underworld.
Then there’s Sam Wiebe’s well-crafted Ocean Drive, released in April, which explores the dark underside of White Rock through the eyes of a hard-bitten out lesbian RCMP detachment chief with a distinctly Elenore Sturko vibe. Wiebe weaves real estate, the port, overdoses and murder into a propulsive tale that will change the way you look at White Rock forever.