Sam Cooper, the author, credits Dawson’s work in the 1990s and early 2000s for setting the stage to expose Chinese sway in Canadian political circles, describing him as “something of a legend” with “shoe-leather reporting skills.”
Dawson, who began his career reporting for the New Straits Times and Malay Mail, migrated to Canada in 1988 and rose to become an editor with The Province in Vancouver. Cooper joined his investigative team in 2009.
“To call Dawson old-school would be an understatement,” Cooper wrote in his book.
Cooper recalled: “Fabian hated to be desk-bound and was more like an intelligence officer. He got his scoops by spending late nights talking to cops and underworld sources in gritty Vancouver bars.
“He scored terrific stories with his uncanny capacity to get businessmen with ambiguous backgrounds chatting freely with him.”
A classic example, according to Cooper, was Dawson’s 2009 interview of David Kwok Ho, the billionaire scion of a Hong Kong tobacco dynasty.
Ho moved to Vancouver in the 1980s and immediately bought a golf course, a shipping company, a Rolls-Royce dealership, and prime real estate.
He also forged connections with British Columbia governments by making big donations and even landed a spot on Vancouver’s Police Board.
That was before his crack smoking and abuse of drug-addicted prostitutes was exposed in 2008.
Ho was charged with unlawfully confining a woman at his Vancouver mansion and illegally having a semi-automatic pistol.
But he told Dawson that his crack-fuelled sex parties with impoverished prostitutes occurred because of his “humanitarian trips” to the heroin-scarred Downtown Eastside, one of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods.
“I’m addicted to helping them,” Ho was quoted as saying in Dawson’s 2009 Vancouver Province scoop. “It’s worse when it rains … that’s when I get into the car and go looking for them.”
Cooper wrote that Dawson was also first to grasp the scale of real estate money laundering in Canada.
One case involved 44 dirty Hong Kong cops who had followed the Five Dragons gang to Canada, using their children and concubines to make major real estate investments in Vancouver and Toronto.
Based on intelligence reports, Dawson also published key documents and names of triads, tycoons and Chinese spies, who, as major investors, were believed to have corrupted Canada’s institutions and markets.
They included a Chinese movie mogul and alleged leaders of the Sun Yee On, one of the world’s largest heroin-trafficking syndicates.
Dawson said the book was a riveting narrative that “should be ringing alarm bells everywhere as China continues to exert its influence in so many covert ways”.
“But we must also be aware that while the book focuses on China, the US has also used similar tactics to exert its influence,” he said.
Dawson has also featured in three documentaries and a made-for-TV movie based on his book on the 2000 honour killing of a young Indo-Canadian beautician, Jaswinder (Jassi) Sidhu, in India.
The book, “Justice for Jassi”, a moving account of forbidden love and greed was co-written by the publisher of Vancouver-based Asian Pacific Post, Harbinder Singh Sewak, originally from Tanjung Tualang in Perak.
Jassi was killed allegedly because her wealthy Canadian family was scandalised by her secret marriage to a poor rickshaw puller.
She had her throat slit and body dumped in a canal but her husband survived after they were attacked by armed men during a trip to India.
As a result of a relentless international crusade by Dawson and Harbinder, Jassi’s mother and uncle were arrested in Canada in 2012. They have been extradited and are awaiting trial in India.
After receiving many accolades for his work, Dawson was given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the Jack Webster Foundation for excellence in journalism in 2019. He was the first Asian recipient of the award.