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Feds indict
68 in White supremacist gang bust
COURTHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
Contributing Writer
More than 60 members of the SFV Peckerwoods White supremacist street gang were indicted Oct. 2, 2024. The members used tattoos, such as initials "SFV," for "San Fernando Valley" and "Searching for Victims" to indicate their membership in the group according to a grand federal indictment. Screen shot
Dozens of a Southern California White supremacist street gangsters with ties to the state’s most prolific prison-based gangs were indicted on a slew of drug trafficking, fraud and violent crime charges on Wed-nesday, Oct. 2, the Justice Department announced.
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SAN FERNANDO — Members and associates of the SFV Peckerwoods, a San Fernando Valley-based neo-Nazi gang with ties to some of the state’s most domineering prison gangs, are accused of engaging in a years-long pattern of racketeering activity. Of the 68 who were indicted, 42 are now in custody following a coordinated effort by multiple agencies.
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“The San Fernando Valley Peckerwoods, the Aryan Brotherhood and their associates are fused by one thing: hatred, It appears, however, that the business of hate was not enough for them,” Matthew Allen, Los Angeles-based Drug Enforcement Administration special agent, said in a statement. “Driven by greed, they engaged in other crimes, including drug distribution, pushing out deadly fentanyl onto our streets.”
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Throughout the investigation, law enforcement seized large quantities of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin, as well as illegal firearms.
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At least three defendants are accused of operating drug stash houses where pounds of illegal drugs were stored before being distributed to customers, sometimes in the mail, according to the indictment.
In addition to drug trafficking, the gang generated revenue through financial fraud, including identity theft and fraudulent Covid-19 benefit schemes, according to the Justice Department. In one instance, one defendant falsely claimed to be a self-employed artist to swindle over $20,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program.
The same defendant later used stolen identities to apply for unemployment benefits, according to the Justice Department.
“The proliferation of gang-related organized crime deteriorates the core of our society,” Los Angeles Police Chief Dominic Choi said in a statement. The “Peckerwoods” originated as a derogatory term for white people in prison.
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According to the Justice Department, the gang sometimes takes orders from the Aryan Brotherhood, a neo-Nazi prison gang. Members of SFV Peckerwood distinguished themselves with tattoos of white supremacy iconography, such as swastikas or the symbol “88” which is the numerical code for “Heil Hitler,” to broadcast their white supremacist, extremist ideology.
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Some members also had tattoos of the initials “SFV” or a woodpecker symbol to indicate their status in the gang. Female gang members were referred to as “featherwoods,” according to the indictment.
The gang is also accused of having an alliance with the Mexican Mafia prison gang, also known as “La Eme,” which is the head of multiple Hispanic street gangs in southern California.
“By allegedly engaging in everything from drug trafficking to firearms offenses to identity theft to Covid fraud, and through their alliance with a neo-Nazi prison gang, the Peckerwoods are a destructive force,” US Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement. “In prosecuting the members of the Peckerwoods criminal organization, our office is carrying out its mission to protect the public from the most dangerous threats.”
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According to the indictment, members and associates of the Peckerwoods leveraged social media to keep tabs on each other and communicate, using private Facebook groups to identify people who broke the gang’s rule or share pictures of suspected undercover police officers.
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For the last eight years, the gang used violence and threats to protect its criminal operations, retaliating against rival gang members or outsiders, according to the indictment. In 2016, Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office filed nuisance abatement orders against some members of the gang after police recovered stolen cars, credit cards and heroin at one of the defendant’s homes.
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“This case strikes at the heart of our collective mission to rid our communities of the corrosive elements that fuel violence and extremism that greatly impact our way of life,” Akil Davis, assistant director in charge of the FBI Los Angeles Field Office, said in a statement.
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If convicted, the defendants face life in prison.
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Alabamians increasingly concerned about Haitian immigration
As rural communities in Alabama and elsewhere receive parolees from a Department of Homeland Security immigration program, residents are wondering whether they can support the infusion.
By GABRIEL TYNES, Contributing Writer
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ENTERPRISE, Ala. (CN) — One attendee at the mass migration meeting at the Open Door Baptist Church in rural Enterprise, Alabama, Thursday evening asked about the lack of housing available for new immigrant neighbors.
Another wondered whether their increasing presence resulted in a corresponding increase in crime.
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Standing in the back of the room, occasionally taking heat from frustrated residents, Enterprise Police Department Chief Michael Moore said there was no evidence of a correlation. Another
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person who took the microphone asked if the immigrants could legally possess guns. To a chorus of groans, Moore said he didn’t know.
Yet, another attendee said he had heard rumors the immigrants were “sex trafficking little girls” in shared housing units, while yet another proclaimed the immigrants were evidence of the “great replacement theory.”
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Their questions and concerns were directed at Jay Palmer, who became a labor trafficking expert after blowing the whistle on Indian technology company InfoSys for immigration fraud, which resulted in a $34 million criminal penalty.
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In the past several weeks, Palmer has crisscrossed the state of Alabama speaking to church congregations, civic organizations and elected officials about immigration — particularly the notable number of Haitians using the the Department of Homeland Security’s parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
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“Do I think they should be here under the program?” Palmer said during a phone call with Courthouse News Sept. 17. “No, but they are here and we have to do something because it is tearing our communities apart. And many more are coming.”
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Both on the phone and at the meeting Thursday, Palmer couched it up to a humanitarian crisis. Although jobs are available, he said there is a lack of housing and transportation for foreign workers, while language barriers and cultural differences have caused alarm and strained social services.
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The migration into each community is driven by word-of-mouth, but Palmer said problems are exacerbated by predatory staffing agencies that earn fees from both employers and employees and so-called “sponsors” of each parolee who take no responsibility for them once they have arrived.
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“These people were thrown into our communities and they brought their culture here so what are we supposed to do?” Palmer asked over the phone. “We are not a sanctuary state and these are not sanctuary communities, but we have been forced into this role.”
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Beneficiaries of the program, predominately Haitians, have been increasingly scrutinized since Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump used the platform of the Sept. 10 presidential debate to suggest they were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
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Although those claims were immediately determined to be false, people in at least a half-dozen towns in Alabama began to ask more questions about the dark-skinned, Creole speaking immigrants arriving in greater numbers in their own neighborhoods.
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In August, residents in the communities of Albertville and Boaz began to voice concerns about busloads of Haitian workers delivered to chicken processing facilities. Employers in the area explained the buses were provided free to transport their workforce, who were all legally eligible to work.
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In the city of Sylacauga, elected officials suddenly adjourned a city council meeting after residents began asking questions about Haitian immigration Sept. 6. On Sept. 17, a member of the Sylacauga City Council appeared on national news to express fears of pending “civil unrest” over the issue.
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Several hundred residents of Coffee County, Alabama packed a town hall meeting about the Department of Homeland Security's CHNV parole program Sept. 19, 2024 in Enterprise, Alabama.
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Days later, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville sent a letter to US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas claiming selective enforcement of immigration laws and allowing “an unanticipated influx of tens of thousands of Haitians to rural towns where resources are already strained.”
Tuberville pointed to the parole program as one culprit and added the program offers a false promise of support for migrants while also undermining national security.
According to an August report from US Customs and Border Protection, nearly 530,000 people had entered the country under the program, including 214,000 Haitians. The program was briefly paused in August due to a fraud investigation, but since it has resumed, there are concerns many thousands more parolees are in the pipeline.
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In a phone conversation earlier Thursday, Alabama State Representative Ben Robbins, a Republican from Sylacauga, said there is a lot of misinformation surrounding the new arrivals, but he emphasized the parole program has created “pure chaos.” Robbins claimed the federal government cannot provide specifics about the program because it does not track or monitor the parolees.
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“There’s simple questions that can’t be answered and that frustrates me,” he said.
While he agrees with Palmer that local governments have largely been kept in the dark, Robbins does see a legislative opportunity.
“There are serious state legislation discussions and I plan on introducing some immigration bills,” he said.
Among the lower hanging fruit are requiring businesses to report the hiring of program parolees and to hold sponsors accountable for monitoring and reporting their compliance with the program.
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“There hasn’t been a push to regulate staffing agencies, but we can certainly do something to look under the hood,” he said.
Back at the meeting, Zulma Fleury made her way to the microphone with the help of a walker. Fleury — a Haitian American who immigrated to the United States more than four decades ago and who owns a popular Puerto Rican cafe in neighboring Daleville — was one of the few non-white attendees of the meeting.
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Fleury told the crowd that although she had fallen in love with her forever home in Alabama, she has recently become scared by the xenophobic rhetoric.
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“I know everyone here tonight is here for the love of their country and their community and their family and 99 percent of us are God-fearing people,” she said. “But I’m worried about those who aren’t.”
Categories / Immigration, Regional
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From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found.
China Up the 'Yin-yang' in America's
'Pot' Business
Gangsters, Money and Murder: How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market
A quadruple murder in Oklahoma shows how the Chinese underworld has come to dominate
the booming illicit trade, fortifying its rise as a global powerhouse with alleged ties to China’s authoritarian regime.
By SEBASTIAN ROTELLA, KIRSTEN BERG, ProPublica
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On a Sunday evening in late November 2022, a blue Toyota Corolla sped down a dirt-and-gravel road in the twilight, passing hay meadows and columns of giant wind turbines spinning on the horizon. The Corolla braked and turned, headlights sweeping across prairie grass, and entered the driveway of a 10-acre compound filled with circular huts and row after row of greenhouses. Past a ranch house, the sedan stopped outside a large detached garage.
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The driver, Chen Wu, burst out of the car with a 9 mm pistol in his hand. Balding and muscular, he had worked at the farm and invested in the illegal marijuana operation.
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Charging into the garage, Wu confronted the five men and one woman working inside. Like him, they were immigrants from China. Piles of marijuana leaves cluttered the brightly lit room, covering a table and stuffed into plastic bins and cardboard boxes. Wu aimed his gun at He Qiang Chen, a 56-year-old ex-convict known at the farm as “the Boss.” Chen had a temper; he was awaiting trial in the beating and shooting of a man two years earlier at a Chinese community center in Oklahoma City.
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Before Chen could make a move, Wu shot him in the right knee. The boss fell to the floor, writhing in pain. Wu held the others at gunpoint. He said Chen owed him $300,000 and told his hostages they had half an hour to get him the money.
If they didn’t, he said, he would kill them all.
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Both the shooter and his victim were from Fujian, a coastal province known for mafias, immigration and corruption. They had come to America and joined a wave of new players rushing into the nation’s billion-dollar marijuana boom: Chinese mobsters who roam from state to state, harvesting drugs and cash and overwhelming law enforcement with their resources and elusiveness.
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Now, their itinerant odysseys had collided in this remote outpost in the heartland. The clash left four people dead and unveiled an international underworld of dangerous dimensions.
Wild West
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The bloodshed in Kingfisher County made national headlines, highlighting Oklahoma’s role as the latest and wildest frontier in the marijuana underworld.
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From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity.
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Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
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Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. A grim offshoot of this indentured servitude: Traffickers force Chinese immigrant women into prostitution for the bosses of the agricultural workforce.
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The mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China, according to state and federal officials. Known as “triads” because of an emblem used long ago by secret societies, these criminal groups wield power at home and throughout the diaspora and allegedly maintain an alliance with the Chinese state.
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In 2018, the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes. The law did not limit the number of dispensaries or growing operations—known in the industry simply as “grows.” It requires marijuana businesses to have majority owners who have lived in the state for two years, and it bars shipping the product across state lines.
But limited enforcement enabled out-of-state investors to recruit illegal “straw owners” and to traffic weed clandestinely across the country. And land was cheap. In this wide-open atmosphere, the industry grew at breakneck speed and, regulators say, is now second only to the oil and gas industry in the state.
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Since Colorado became the first state to legalize marijuana for personal use in 2012, a patchwork of marijuana-related legislation has developed across the country. State authorities generally require licenses and put limits on cultivation, and federal law prohibits interstate sales. But steep taxes on legal products and gaps and differences in laws across states have created the conditions for a massive black market to thrive.
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Oklahoma has quickly become a top supplier of illicit weed. Although street prices fluctuate and calculating the value of a black market is complex, officials estimate the value of the illegal marijuana grown in the state at somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion a year. State investigators have found links between foreign mafias and over 3,000 illegal grows—and they say that more than 80 percent of the criminal groups are of Chinese origin.
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The federal response, however, has been muted. With the spread of legalization and decriminalization, enforcement has become a low priority for the US Department of Justice, anti-drug veterans say.
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“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”
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The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global power- house, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The huge revenue stream from marijuana fuels that laundering apparatus, which is “the most extensive network of underground banking in the world,” said Donald Im, a former senior DEA official.
“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal networks to expand their under- ground global banking system for cartels and other criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight against Chinese organized crime.
US law enforcement struggles to respond to this multifaceted threat. State and federal agencies suffer from a lack of personnel who know Chinese language and culture well enough to investigate complex cases, infiltrate networks or translate intercepts, current and former officials say. A federal shift of priorities to counterterrorism after 2001 meant resources for Chinese organized crime dwindled—while the power of the underworld grew.
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And the shadow of the Chinese state hovers over it all. As ProPublica has reported, the authoritarian regime and the mafias allegedly maintain an alliance that benefits both sides. In exchange for government protection, Chinese mobsters deliver services such as illegally moving money overseas for the Communist Party elite and helping to spy on and intimidate Chinese immigrant communities, according to Western national security officials, case files, Chinese dissidents and human rights groups.
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Because China has emerged as the top geopolitical rival of the United States, carrying out brazen espionage and influence activities in this country, the spread of Chinese mafias in Oklahoma and elsewhere also poses a potential national security threat, state and federal officials say.
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Leaders of Chinese cultural associations in Oklahoma and other states are allegedly connected to both the illegal marijuana trade and to Chinese government officials, ProPublica and The Frontier have found. A number of influential leaders have been charged with or convicted of crimes ranging from drug offenses to witness intimidation.
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“You’d be very naive to sit and say the Chinese state doesn’t know what Chinese organized crime is doing in the US,” Anderson said “or that there is not a connection between the Chinese state and organized crime.”
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In February, 50 US legislators wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland expressing concern that Chinese nationals, “including those with potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” are “reportedly operating thousands of illicit marijuana farms across the country.”
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The bipartisan group of lawmakers, who included all but two members of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation, asked whether federal authorities are investigating CCP connections to the marijuana underworld and how much illicit revenue returns to China.
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The Department of Justice plans to respond to the questions raised by the legislators, a department spokes- person said in an emailed statement.
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“The Department is working on developing a marijuana enforcement policy that will be consistent” with federal guidance related to state legalization initiatives, said the spokesperson, Peter Carr. “Among the federal enforcement priorities under that policy is preventing the revenue from the illegal distribution of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels.”
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The department declined to comment about other issues raised in this story.
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In response to a list of questions, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., said in an emailed statement that he was “not aware of the specifics” related to Chinese organized crime in the marijuana industry. But the spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said China wages a determined fight against drugs, the “common enemy of mankind.”
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“We always ask our fellow citizens to observe local laws and regulations and refrain from engaging in any illegal or criminal activities while they are abroad,” Liu said in the written statement. “The Chinese government is steadfast on fighting drug crimes, playing an active part in international anti-drug cooperation, and resolving the drug issue with other countries including the US in an active and responsible attitude.”
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ProPublica and The Frontier interviewed more than three dozen current and former law enforcement officials in the United States and overseas, as well as academic experts, defense lawyers, farmworkers, Chinese dissidents, Chinese-American leaders, human rights advocates and others. Some sources were granted anonymity to protect their safety or because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Reporters reviewed thousands of pages of court files, government reports, news reports and social media posts in English, Chinese and other languages.
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The intractable ravenous appetite by Americans is the fuel for the exploding marijuana trade—both legal and illicit controlled by Chinese drug lords. American hardcore addiction to drugs has created a profit center exceeding the nation's profits from oil and gas combined.
California Dreams
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He Qiang Chen came to New York about 30 years ago from the Changle district outside Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian. Chen and his older brother opened a restaurant and a laundry in the Bronx and became legal US residents. By the early 2000s, they had moved to North Carolina, where they also ran restaurants, according to public records and law enforcement officials. They shuttled back and forth to New York, buying properties in and around Flushing, which has a vibrant Chinese business district. The area has also developed a reputation as a bastion of Chinese crime bosses with nationwide reach, leading to a refrain in law enforcement: “All roads lead to Flushing.”
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Until about five years ago, public records indicate that Chen’s encounters with the justice system consisted of repeated tickets for speeding and reckless driving. In 2017, though, the brothers launched into the marijuana racket at a level that would make investigators think they’d been involved in crime for a while. They went to California, where Chen paid $825,000 for a four-bedroom house behind a wrought-iron gate in the San Joaquin Valley about 35 miles from Sacramento.
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The semi-rural lot was near a winery and an equestrian center. But Chen wasn't interested in genteel pastimes. Along with his romantic companion, a 43-year-old woman from San Francisco named Fang Hui Lee, Chen and his brother got to work converting the spacious barn into a cannabis plantation.
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Several associates also established themselves in the Sacramento area. A 39-year-old fellow transplant from North Carolina, Yifei Lin, bought a suburban house and set up a clandestine indoor grow, court records show.
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The cross-country move was part of a migration of criminal groups into the marijuana industry. Other destina- tions included Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. California law limited cannabis for personal use to six plants and required commercial growers to get a license. With criminal penalties diminishing, the goals of legalization were to establish regulation, generate tax revenue and eliminate organized crime from the picture.
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Instead, the low risk and fast money set off a feeding frenzy. The players who established clandestine grows included Mexican cartels, Cuban immigrant gangs and longtime locals. But the Chinese crews were the biggest and best organized. They smuggled their product by car, truck and plane to the East Coast, where profit margins were stratospheric.
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In this rapacious subculture, mobsters went into subdivisions and snapped up a half dozen homes at a time. In San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles, a federal court convicted a real estate agent in 2020 for a typical tactic: paying “ghost owners” to fly in from China posing as buyers, sign paperwork and go home, according to case files and interviews.
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The bosses brought in recent Chinese immigrants to tend indoor crops, often stealing industrial quantities of water and power from public utility systems for their operations. Grow houses created a nefarious mix of risks: toxic fumes from banned pesticides, deadly fires from makeshift electrical bypasses, volatile chemicals and flammable equipment. The presence of drugs, cash and weapons was a magnet for crime, and the blighted homes hurt property values.
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In November 2018, Sgt. George Negrete, a detective for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, got a tip about Chen’s illegal grow. Doing surveillance on foot from an adjacent water treatment facility, Negrete saw telltale signs, such as spray foam filling the seams of the barn walls to mask heat, light and odor. Utility records showed that the electric bill had spiked from $170 a month to more than $2,000 per month after Chen bought the property, indicating sustained use of air conditioning and high-intensity lights.
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On Dec. 13, deputies served a search warrant. They found 3,835 plants and arrested the Chen brothers, Lee and two other men, court documents say. Chen claimed he didn’t speak English. But he admitted he was in charge. He told Negrete that someone had advised him marijuana was a good business.
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“They weren’t scared or afraid,” Negrete said in an interview. “It was like regular business for them.”
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The crew had slept on mattresses on the floor. Lee apparently supervised the day-to-day work. And deputies found two .40-caliber pistols, court documents say. Firearms were unusual at Chinese-run grows that Negrete had raided.
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“It made me think they were at a higher scale in an organization,” the detective said.
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Cash and Discipline
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The arrests of the Chens and their associates happened during a state-federal crackdown in the Sacramento area known as Operation Lights Out. On the day of the raid on Chen’s house, federal prosecutors indicted a Sacramento real estate broker, accusing her and other suspects of teaming with financiers in Fujian who wired millions of dollars to acquire houses for indoor grows through fraudulent maneuvers, according to a criminal complaint. Authorities also seized more than 100 houses.
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The elaborate and brazen nature of the alleged conspiracy led investigators to believe it involved the triads, according to three former federal officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
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Suspects used banks in China to wire money to the US defendants in suspicious and obvious increments, according to the criminal complaint and former federal officials. Yet there was no interference from the most powerful police state in the world. Although hard proof was elusive, two former senior US officials told ProPublica they suspected Chinese officials protected the scheme and may have benefited from it financially.​​
“There was no question in my mind that there was at least Chinese government awareness of this,” a former senior Department of Justice official said. “There was no way they didn’t see the movement of the money going to the same people in the United States. But could we prove it? We suspected Chinese officials were complicit.”
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Although the prosecution had a big impact by combining the might of the FBI, DEA, IRS and Homeland Security Investigations, it was one of the few federal offensives against Chinese networks involved in marijuana.
Still, DEA financial investigations around the country revealed that the emerging marijuana empire intersected with the networks laundering billions of dollars for Latin American drug lords. Some of the funds from the laundering returned to China, but a lot was reinvested into new US marijuana ventures, current and former officials said.
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The marijuana proceeds were “another massive bucket of money” with which high-level Chinese crime bosses funded interconnected rackets such as the money laundering and migrant smuggling, said former senior DEA official Christopher Urben, who is now a managing partner at the global investigations firm Nardello & Co.
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Agents marveled at the scope of the enterprise and the lack of turf wars. Around 2019, the DEA learned that triad bosses had traveled from China to sit-downs in New York, where they issued directives and kept the peace nationwide, according to Urben and other current and former officials. New York had become the command hub for marijuana as well as money laundering.
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“The discipline involved is incredible,” Urben said. “How are we having thousands of workers moved into the country and among states? How are all these groups doing this without more conflict or violence? How do you ensure that all these mid-level managers get along, with all this money, all this marijuana? The only way you can do it is with an organized crime apparatus.”
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In the federal prosecution in Sacramento, a defendant pleaded guilty this Feb. 27. The real estate broker and two others are still awaiting trial.
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Meanwhile, Chen and his associates pleaded no contest to misdemeanors in state courts, which sentenced them to probation. Wasting no time, the crew headed for Oklahoma in 2020. In contrast to California, Oklahoma did not limit the size of grows. As long as the operations had a nominal local owner and a medical marijuana license, they could spread dozens of greenhouses capable of holding tens of thousands of plants over a cheap parcel of farmland.
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Some Chinese groups redeployed by air, according to officials and case files. Federal agents began detecting flights of private planes from California to rural airfields in Oklahoma. Couriers aboard the aircraft carried hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to buy farmland, sometimes for twice or three times its value. To dodge federal interdiction teams, some pilots filed flight plans for one airstrip, then diverted to another.
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And money poured in from China. Around 2020, one group crowdfunded Oklahoma marijuana ventures through an invitation to investors on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform, said Mark Woodward, spokesperson of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. US investigations show that WeChat, although heavily monitored by Chinese security forces, is often a forum for discussions of criminal activity.
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Oklahoma’s marijuana industry surged to “an astronomical level,” said Ray Padilla, a Denver-based DEA agent. He estimated that 90 percent of Colorado’s illicit producers moved to the neighboring state.
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Oklahoma was the new frontier, Padilla said. And it was “absolute insanity.”
Gunplay at the Association
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Shortly before dusk on Dec. 8, 2020, a black Mercedes SUV carrying Chen and Lin pulled up at the mini-mall accompanied by two other cars. The crew had driven an hour from their new farm in Kingfisher County. They were looking for Jintao Liu, who had also relocated from Sacramento after his marijuana site got busted, court documents show. Liu and Chen had been feuding since Chen had failed to pay him for organizing a delivery from California.
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When Liu had asked him to pay the $2,000 debt, Chen had become infuriated and began to terrorize Liu and his wife with threatening phone calls and texts showing photos of guns. Chen squared off with Liu at a gathering and punched him in the jaw. Later, Chen threatened to kill his wife and three children, court records say.
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The reasons for the rage remain somewhat murky. Asked during a court hearing why Chen was so angry if he owed the money, not the other way around, Liu answered, “He did not want to pay. He was this kind of a person.”
On the afternoon that Chen and his crew appeared outside the Fujianese association, Liu was inside watching a friend play cards, according to court testimony. Liu and several other men came out. A brawl ensued.
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“Shoot him,” Chen told Lin, according to witnesses.
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Lin pulled a gun and fired, the bullet fracturing Liu’s hipbone, according to court documents. Police soon arrested Chen and Lin. A search of Chen’s house in suburban Edmond turned up three pistols, 27.5 pounds of marijuana, $97,000 in cash and eight vials of ketamine, the party drug of choice in the Chinese underworld, court records say.
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Prosecutors charged Chen and Lin with assault and battery with a deadly weapon and drug offenses. The men made bail and went right back to the grow. (Lin has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer declined to comment.)
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Their farm was about 13 miles from Hennessey, population 2,000. Lin had bought the 10-acre spread for $280,000, court documents say. To evade a state residency law, he paid cash to a local man named Richard Ignacio to pose as the 75 percent owner of the medical marijuana business and obtain a license, court documents allege. Ignacio had allegedly been drafted as a straw owner by an Oklahoma City accountant, a 20-time felon named Kevin Pham, who has been charged in connection with the Kingfisher farm and other grows, court documents say. Ignacio told investigators that he “earned significant income” acting as a hired front man.
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Ignacio pleaded guilty last year to being a straw owner for the Kingfisher farm. He and Pham have pleaded not guilty to other charges and are awaiting trial. They could not be reached for comment.
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Lin lived at and managed the place for Chen, according to court records and interviews. For equipment, three companies in China shipped about 440,000 pounds of greenhouse parts. Even among the vast marijuana farms in Oklahoma, the spread was unusually large: it contained over 100 greenhouses and several indoor grow houses, interviews and satellite images show.
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The closest neighbor, Gary Hawk, lived about a mile away. He had grown up at the place next door when it was a dairy farm owned by his parents. There was tension with the newcomers from the start. After a neighboring farmer used a plane for crop dusting, men at Chen’s farm threatened to shoot it out of the sky, Hawk said in an interview.
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“The mail carrier would go by and she would stop to deliver mail there,” he said. “They would come out of the house and one guy would come out with a machete and one guy would come out with an AR-15. That was just to pick up the mail.”
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The farm employed an armed security officer stationed in a guard hut and as many as two dozen laborers, according to law enforcement officials and others who spent time there. Workers slept in trailers, the garage or the cluttered main house, where meals were prepared throughout the day and there was only one bathroom. During an inspection by fire marshals that found multiple safety violations in 2021, most of the employees presented Chinese identification and US immigration documents.
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Neighbors complained about uncollected trash blowing into nearby pastures and endangering cattle, said Sgt. Michael Shults of the Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department.
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“We’ve been out there several times explaining to them you need to put trash up,” Shults said in an interview. “Cattle get into plastics that are blowing around, you know, cattle will eat almost anything.”
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Deputies soon became convinced that Chen’s crew, like many others, was trafficking its product on the black market in other states. In April 2021, Shults and other deputies intercepted a vehicle carrying 46.8 pounds of marijuana and arrested the driver, who was from Texas and did not have an Oklahoma cannabis transport license. Surveillance showed that she was one of two suspected couriers who had picked up bales at the farm that day, according to Shults and court documents.
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Awash in Weed
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By 2021, a mysterious investor had joined the crew at the Kingfisher farm.
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Chen Wu (also known as Wu Chen, but not related to the brothers) was in his mid-40s and from Fujian, according to officials and Chinese media reports. There are gaps in his past that investigators are still trying to fill. What they do know suggests he was a heavyweight: He had ties to Chinese criminal networks involved in money laundering, drug trafficking and migrant smuggling across the country and overseas, according to officials and court records.
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As a young man, Wu lived illegally in Spain, whose Chinese population has grown rapidly in the past two decades. In 2000, police on the resort island of Mallorca arrested him for entering the country illegally, Spanish law enforcement officials said. As often happens, though, he managed to stay. He sought work authorization in 2003 and gave an address in a gritty neighborhood of Madrid. Five years later, he got in trouble for using someone else’s identity, officials said, and Spanish police issued an arrest warrant for him in 2010.
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But he had already moved on. Wu spent time in the Caribbean, including Cuba. Arriving in the United States around 2016, he bounced around the country pursuing illicit schemes, officials said. In Minnesota, he married the owner of a restaurant and got legal status. During his divorce in 2020, Wu claimed in legal filings to have only about $18,000 to his name, records show.
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Yet he moved to Oklahoma and invested in Chen’s farm. After months working there, he argued with his partners over money and left.
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By then, the state was awash in weed.
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The number of licensed marijuana grows in Oklahoma peaked at nearly 10,000 at the end of 2021. Authorities suspected most of them of trafficking on the black market. One Chinese criminal group oversaw at least 400 grows. Another outfit smuggled truckloads to the East Coast every week, selling each for over $20 million, before investigators dismantled it. Whether bosses or grunts, most of the newcomers were from New York, where a mob hierarchy oversees the illicit marijuana trade in Oklahoma and swoops in to collect the profits, according to law enforcement officials and court files.
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“You have many different levels,” said Anderson, the state anti-drug director. “Some overseeing grows. Then another upper echelon that controls money. … They’re never around except to collect money.”
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The boom caused prices to crater, hurting the legal industry. And it brought a generalized surge of crime. At airports, wary-looking Chinese immigrant laborers with backpacks became a familiar sight to law enforcement officers. So did human traffickers accompanying flashily dressed prostitutes to brothels set up for overseers of the marijuana farms. Illegal casinos appeared, seizures of ketamine soared, and robberies and violence plagued grows, dispensaries and stash houses, according to court cases and law enforcement officials.
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There was complex criminality as well. In a case investigated by the FBI, a Chinese ring based in New York and Oklahoma allegedly used a cryptocurrency scheme to steal over $10 million from banks and other financial institutions. One defendant, who is now awaiting trial, was involved in a marijuana grow with an associate of Chen’s Kingfisher County crew, according to law enforcement officials and public records.
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The victims of another scam were law-abiding Asian Americans. Cybercriminals manipulated the computer system of the Texas Department of Public Safety to obtain thousands of driver’s licenses destined for Asian Americans, tricking authorities into mailing the licenses to marijuana farms in neighboring Oklahoma. The suspects used the licenses for fraudulent purchases or sold them on the underground market. Police arrested the accused mastermind in New York and extradited him to Texas last April to stand trial.
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Before marijuana legalization, Oklahoma was “a pretty quiet state,” said Tony Lie, president of the Oklahoma Chinese Association. “We didn’t have any Chinese criminal gangs coming here.”
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Lie has lived in Oklahoma for more than 30 years. Members of his longtime organization come from several regions in mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. In contrast, most of the newcomers are Fujianese. Lie said the ills of the marijuana industry have hurt the image of Chinese Americans in the state.
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“We don’t want people to come to Oklahoma to do something bad for the Chinese community,” Lie said.
The shooting at the Fujianese association in 2020 had opened a window into a fast-evolving underworld.
But it turned out to be just a prelude.
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Pitch-Black Night
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Shortly before 8 p.m. on Nov. 20, 2022, Kingfisher County Sheriff Dennis Banther alerted his deputies to a hostage incident at a farm near Hennessey.
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“Everybody go 10-8,” the text message said: Go in service and rush to the scene.
Shults was the third to arrive. Four gunshot victims lay dead in the garage, and the shooter was on the loose. Deputies feared he was hiding in the sprawl of agricultural buildings known as hoop-houses.
“It was pitch black,” Shults said. “When you’re out there in the pitch dark, in the black night, and you’ve got four people down, been executed, and you don’t know if the shooter’s still on scene or not … it’s find the shooter. Survival.”
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The sergeant came upon a wounded man lying in a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. It was Lin, the farm manager who had been the accused gunman at the Fujianese association, according to court documents. A second survivor emerged from the darkness. A deputy struggled to ask the farmworker urgent questions using Google Translate on his phone.
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Deputies found another worker who had recorded part of the incident on a cellphone, leaving it near the garage with the camera on before fleeing, according to court documents and interviews. The survivors said the killer was Wu, who had worked at the farm until about a year earlier. He had arrived in his Toyota Corolla and shot Chen and a dog that was in the garage. Wu then told his hostages he would kill them if they didn’t hand over $300,000 in half an hour.
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“The Boss told his girlfriend, who was inside the garage at the time, to call her brother to get the money,” a witness told police. As minutes passed, Wu became increasingly agitated. The hostages tried to stop Chen’s bleeding by wrapping a long-sleeved shirt around his knee as a makeshift tourniquet. But Chen “was not doing very well,” the witness said. In a grim exchange, the wounded boss told the gunman “to finish him off.”
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Wu pumped two bullets into Chen’s chest. Then, two hostages rushed at the gunman, who let loose a barrage that killed Chen’s brother, Chen’s girlfriend Lee and a newly hired employee. The wounded Lin ran outside and took refuge in the truck.
Although the phone video didn’t capture the actual shooting, it recorded the sound of gunshots and showed the gunman leaving the garage. Emergency personnel swarmed the scene. A helicopter evacuated the wounded man. Deputies spent all night doing a sweep of the grounds, finding another terrified worker hiding in a barn.
At one point, a sedan with New York plates pulled up to the farm. An Asian man rolled down the window, startling deputies, and said he “was sent” to pick up the workers remaining onsite, a deputy said.
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“You need to back him off,” a sheriff’s lieutenant yelled to his deputies. Afterward, they would wonder who had sent him so quickly.
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In one area of the dark compound, deputies thought they were trudging through mud. After sunrise, they realized it was human excrement — a sign of the conditions in which the farmworkers lived.
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Meanwhile, the gunman sped east toward Florida. From the road, he called people in Florida, including a Chinese organized crime figure suspected of involvement in drugs and human trafficking, according to court records and law enforcement officials familiar with the case.
Investigators believe Wu wanted help from smugglers to flee the country, possibly to Cuba, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US, court records say. One affidavit for search warrants for Wu’s phones and online accounts seeks evidence “relating to the planning, preparation and actions taken to facilitate human smuggling.”
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Soon after Wu got to Miami Beach, however, a license plate reader detected his car. Police arrested him two days after the murders. During an extradition hearing, Wu told the judge his life was in danger.
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Aftermath
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It seemed ironic: a mass murderer begging the court for protection. But a strange story told by a deputy who brought him back suggests that his fears may have been well founded. Kingfisher County sheriff’s Lt. Ken Thompson had 25 years of experience transporting prisoners. He and another deputy drove nonstop to Florida in a marked Chevrolet Tahoe. In Miami, they checked into a motel near the airport in the evening, planning to sleep a few hours before picking up Wu from the Miami-Dade County jail, Thompson said in an interview.
They changed their minds, Thompson said, because “a weird deal happened.”
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Looking out of the window of his motel room, Thompson said, he saw a car pull up next to his marked police vehicle in the parking lot. Another car appeared, then a third. The three cars drove around the motel as if doing surveillance, he said.
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The deputies concluded that they “didn’t really feel comfortable sitting in this place,” Thompson said. They decided to take custody of Wu and hit the road. After the deputies left the jail with Wu in the back seat, the three cars from the motel reappeared, Thompson said, and shadowed the Tahoe on the highway. Thompson said he did evasive maneuvers to lose them, exiting abruptly and returning to the highway miles later.
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“It's just a feeling, a gut feeling that you get, and the fact that they all just kind of just paced right around us,” he said. “I mean, they flew right up on us, but then they just locked down to our speed. So, it was a weird deal.”
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Thompson suspects that people in organized crime somehow located the deputies in Miami. He said he did not know if their goal was to harm Wu, to free him or simply to monitor a case that was causing a commotion. The prisoner was polite and obedient during the cross-country ride, getting out for bathroom breaks and accepting a McDonald’s breakfast burrito that the deputies offered him. After they crossed the Oklahoma state line, though, his demeanor changed, the lieutenant said.
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“You couldn’t pry him out of that car,” Thompson said. “Once he reached Oklahoma, he wouldn’t [exit] the car.”
On Feb. 9, Wu pleaded guilty to the four murders and assault and battery. The judge sentenced him to life without possibility of parole. (He declined an interview request.)
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The quadruple murder made international headlines and set off a flurry of investigative activity and political attention. A state crackdown has reduced the number of growing operations by almost half, officials say.
Chinese immigrants involved in the marijuana industry say law enforcement has been excessively harsh on them since late 2022.
Qiu (Tina) He, who operated a marijuana-related consulting firm that is under investigation, said in an interview that many Asian investors have become disillusioned by what she called discriminatory treatment and the risks of the business. She denied wrongdoing in her case and predicted the state will suffer from the loss of tax revenue if Asian investors leave.
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“We are funding Oklahoma,” she said. “Oklahoma City will be like a ghost town if we leave.”
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The crime in Kingfisher County was a relatively unusual eruption of violence in the Chinese underworld. Law enforcement experts say the frontier atmosphere in Oklahoma is likely a result of the sheer amount of money generated by the cannabis trade and the number of criminals it has attracted. The growing wealth and power of Chinese organized crime is causing clashes elsewhere in the country as well, experts said.
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“Maybe it’s more like the Wild West as these groups keep spreading,” said Urben, the former DEA official. “You are going to have violence even if someone is controlling from above. I think there would be even more conflict if the triads were not so involved.”
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Sebastian Rotella is a reporter at ProPublica. An award-winning foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, Rotella's coverage includes terrorism, intelligence and organized crime. Kirsten Berg is a research reporter with ProPublica.
Newsom: State 'transforming notorious
San Quentin'
Gov. Gavin Newsom personally greets inmates at San Quentin State Prison. Courtesy Office of the Governor
By PAT PEMBERTON, Contributing Writer
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (CN)—As this writer entered the visitation room at San Quentin’s death row, I gazed at the condemned inmates there and thought about all the awful things these men had done.
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California’s death row prisoners include serial killers, child abductors, White supremacists and gang members. Some of them had tortured their victims, others had dismembered corpses. Several had burned people alive.
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As if to prove how truly bad it was there, when the inmate I had arranged to visit appeared, he looked like he had been hit by a car: His right arm was in a brace, as were both thighs. He had a noticeable lump on his head, and he moved his jaw awkwardly, the legacy of having it previously wired shut.
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"What happened to you?" was my first obvious interview question. Michael Whisenhunt nodded toward the wounded arm.
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"This is how it is here," he said, matter-of-factly. 'These are the consequences of my actions."
In 2001, more than two decades before Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to shut down death row and transform San Quentin State Prison into a rehabilitation facility, this writer covered the capital murder trial of Rex Krebs, a convicted rapist who was charged with abducting, raping and murdering two female college students in San Luis Obispo County.
Sensing that Krebs would be condemned to death, I wanted to offer a look into his future, so I arranged to visit Whisenhunt—the most recent man sentenced to death from the same county—on two occasions when the Krebs trial was not in session.
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Whisenhunt, who was polite and well spoken, said death row reeked of stale sweat, echoed with constant yelling and swarmed with anger.
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"This is a madhouse," Whisenhunt told me, gesturing to the visitation room, where several other condemned inmates met with visitors in separate metal cages. "This is insane. There is no warmth, and there's no emotion—except hatred."
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The state’s oldest prison, San Quentin opened in 1852. While inmates were executed at Folsom State Prison in the early days, San Quentin has been the only place male inmates have been executed since 1937, when the gas chamber replaced hanging. In total, over 400 executions have been carried out at San Quentin.
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However, the state has not executed an inmate in 17 years. And in 2019, Newsom signed an executive order declaring a moratorium on the death sentence, which he said was morally wrong and unfairly administered.
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In January, 2020, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began relocating the state’s nearly 700 condemned inmates, public information officer Tessa Outhyse wrote in an email. That two-year pilot program eventually became permanent.
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"As of April 28, 101 death-sentenced men housed at San Quentin have been transferred to other institutions," Outhyse wrote.
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In March, Newsom announced new plans for San Quentin.
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"California is transforming San Quentin—the state’s most notorious prison with a dark past—into the nation’s most innovative rehabilitation facility focused on building a brighter and safer future," he said in a statement. "Today, we take the next step in our pursuit of true rehabilitation, justice, and safer communities through this evidenced-backed investment, creating a new model for safety and justice—the California Model—that will lead the nation."
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The move has been predictably controversial.
"I think the whole thing is a sick joke," said Mike Rushford, president and CEO of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for tough-on-crime laws. Death row inmates, he said, represent special security risks and should not be housed with other inmates.
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"These are the worst murderers in the country," Rushford said [—] the worst of the worst.”
‘We Are Hitting a Crescendo’
According to the California Department of Justice, hate crimes in the state have doubled over the last decade. Photo Courtesy Ethnic Media Services
Forum focuses on rising hate crimes
By PETER SCHURMANN, Contributing Writer
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SAN FRANCISCO (EMS)—Hate crimes and hate-related incidents are on the rise nationwide and they are growing more violent, though prosecutions remain stubbornly low. That was one of the messages delivered during a public forum May 24 hosted by the California Commission on the State of Hate.
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California is no outlier, with data from the Department of Justice showing a near doubling of hate crimes across the state over the last decade.
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"Behind each data point is a person who has been targeted for hate and chosen to share their story," said Candice Cho, managing director of Policy and Counsel with the AAPI Equity Alliance, and co-founder of the group Stop AAPI Hate.
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Cho noted that many of the more than 11,000 reports collected by Stop AAPI Hate since its launch in 2020 happened in public to people "just going about their daily lives" walking the streets, on public transit or at work.
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"He spat on my face as he got off the bus, but I was scared and couldn’t do anything," read one report submitted to Stop AAPI Hate and shared by Cho. "On the packed bus, no one helped me."
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According to Cho, many of the cases her organization has tracked involve non-criminal acts, like verbal abuse, bullying at school or micro-aggressions in the workplace. But Cho stressed that violent or otherwise, "discrimina- tion is hate," and that such acts can have severe negative side effects for both the victims and the wider community.
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Victims often report feeling depression, fear, and losing a sense of belonging in society, at times shifting work, school, or neighborhoods in response.
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"Even if they did nothing wrong, they had to make adjustments in their life," noted Stop AAPI Hate Co-Founder Annie Lee, adding that more than a quarter of respondents said these encounters had negatively impacted their personal relationships, suggesting wider societal impacts of hate and discrimination.
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Lee, managing director of Policy with Chinese for Affirmative Action, shared results from a 2022 survey that found half of all Asian American and Pacific Islanders nationwide have experienced discrimination in one form or another but that just 15 percent reported their encounters. A majority (52 percent) said they felt it would make no difference, while 4 in 10 said they did not know where to go to file a report. More than a third reported fearing unwanted attention, while a quarter said they feared reprisals from their attackers.
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Of note, 60 percent of respondents said they wanted to learn more about what their civil rights are and about available resources, many pointing to social media and the ethnic press as their preferred channels. Two thirds also favored new civil rights legislation.
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In 2021 California passed the API Equity Budget, funneling $166.5 million into community and frontline groups working to stem the rise in ant-Asian hate. Last year the state passed two bills—AB 1664 and AB 2282—which aim to better protect religious minorities while toughening penalties for cross burnings or the use of swastikas or nooses as overt hate symbols.
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This year Stop AAPI Hate is co-sponsoring the "Public Transit for All" bill (SB 434), which would require public transit agencies across the state to collect survey data as a first step toward ensuring ridership safety.
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Together, says Lee, these laws "shift the burden of being safe away from individuals and onto public agencies."
The Commission on the State of Hate, part of California’s Civil Rights Department, was created to strengthen the state’s efforts to combat the surge in hate crimes and hate incidents and to foster improved relations across its diverse communities.
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The May 24 public forum was the commission’s first, the intent being to solicit input on recommendations for how to achieve its aims. "The goal of the forum today is to listen,” said Commissioner Cece Feiler, who noted that she is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and immigrants to the US.
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Brian Levin directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State-San Bernadino and is a veteran when it comes to tracking hate, with close to four decades including playing a key role in the first Supreme Court case to affirm the constitutionality of hate crimes laws in 1993.
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"We are hitting this crescendo," said Levin, as data show the number of hate crimes reaching new records even as they grow more violent.
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Pointing to FBI data, which Levin stressed is inherently flawed given the lack of reporting across law enforce- ment agencies, he noted in 2020 there were 8,263 reported hate crimes—defined as crimes motivated by prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds—with cases of aggravated assault trending upward.
There was a 12 percent increase in reported hate crimes in 2021, according to FBI numbers. Data for 2022 is currently unavailable. States, meanwhile, continue to prosecute barely a fraction of reported hate crimes cases, with Texas prosecuting just five of the "hundreds and hundreds" brought before courts there. California, Levin added, is "pretty decent… and even we’re low."
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Anti-Black, anti-gay and anti-Jewish attacks were among the highest recorded, though Levin says targeted groups vary by city, with Los Angeles seeing more anti-Black attacks and San Francisco, with a larger Asian population, seeing more attacks targeting the API community.
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And while Levin notes there have been more attacks between and among minority groups the overwhelming majority are fueled by right-wing extremists and White supremacists. With PRIDE month here, Levin called the "demonization and genocidal language" now being aimed at the LGBTQ+ community a "warning sign" and he urged greater vigilance and reporting in the runup to PRIDE related events.
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"When we see residents of our state being maligned," he said, "I don’t care what their faith or identity is. The laws of California mandate that we have to protect our civil rights."
FOUR COPS THAT KILLED
BREONNA TAYLOR INDICTED
Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her apartment on March 13, 2020, after police executed a no-knock warrant and opened fire on Taylor and her boyfriend, who had a weapon and shot at police, whom he mistook for intruders when they entered the residence. Screenshot
Louisville cops snagged for criminal conspiracy executing no-knock warrant
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (CN)—U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday the indictment of four Louisville police officers on federal criminal charges related to the shooting of Breonna Taylor, including cons- piracy charges stemming from an allegedly false affidavit used to secure a search warrant.
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Garland told reporters two federal grand jury indictments had been unsealed, while another charging document was also filed.
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Former Louisville Metro Police Department detective Joshua Jaynes and current LMPD sergeant Kyle Meany were named in the first indictment, which lists civil rights and obstruction charges related to "preparing and approving a false search warrant affidavit" that led to the raid of Taylor's apartment and, ultimately, her death.
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The second indictment names a single defendant, former LMPD detective Brett Hankison, and charges him with civil rights violations and the use of excessive force during the execution of the search warrant. Current LMPD detective Kelly Goodlett is charged with conspiring to falsify the search warrant affidavit in the third charging document.
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"Among other things," Garland said at a press conference, "the federal charges announced today allege that members of LMPD's place-based investigations unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant of Ms. Taylor's home, that this act violated federal civil rights laws, and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor's death.
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"Breonna Taylor should be alive today," he added. "The Justice Department is committed to defending and protecting the civil rights of every person in this country. That was this department’s founding purpose, and it remains our urgent mission.”
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Taylor was shot and killed in her apartment on March 13, 2020, after police executed a no-knock warrant and opened fire on Taylor and her boyfriend, who had a weapon and said he returned fire because he thought raiding police were burglars entering the residence.
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A 26-year-old emergency room technician at the time of her death, Taylor became a nationwide symbol of the struggle against systemic racism and police brutality.
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Her estate sued the city of Louisville and won a record-breaking settlement of $12 million—and a bevy of police reforms—less than five months after the lawsuit was filed.
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Detective Myles Cosgrove, who fired the fatal shot, and Jaynes were fired by the city in January 2021, while Hankison was the only officer criminally charged by Kentucky in the wake of the shooting. Hankison was charged with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment but was acquitted by a jury in March 2022.
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The press release from the Department of Justice says Jaynes and Meany knew information used to obtain the search warrant for Taylor's apartment was false, and that the execution of the warrant would likely create a dangerous situation for Taylor and the officers involved.
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Jaynes is also charged with attempting to cover up the false affidavit by lying to criminal investigators and drafting a "false investigative letter" in the aftermath of the shooting. The excessive force claims against Hankison stem from shots fired through a covered glass door, a covered window, and a bedroom window that was covered with blinds and a blackout curtain.
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None of the shots fired by Hankison struck Taylor or any of her neighbors, but his charges include language that his conduct involved an "attempt to kill," which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
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Goodlett faces several conspiracy charges for her role in the false warrant and the subsequent coverup. The
obstruction charges in the indictments carry maximum sentences of 20 years in prison, while the conspiracy and false-statement charges have maximum sentences of five years in prison.
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"On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor should have awakened in her home as usual, but tragically she did not," said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke. "Since the founding of our nation, the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution has guaranteed that all people have a right to be secure in their homes, free from false warrants, unreasonable searches and the use of unjustifiable and excessive force by the police.
"These indictments reflect the Justice Department’s commitment to preserving the integrity of the criminal justice system and to protecting the constitutional rights of every American," Clarke said.
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The attorneys representing Taylor's family—Ben Crump, Lonita Baker and Sam Aguiar—said in a joint state- ment that the charges are "a huge step toward justice."
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"We are grateful for the diligence and dedication of the FBI and the DOJ as they investigated what led to Breonna's murder and what transpired afterwards," they said. "The justice that Breonna received would not have been possible without the efforts of Attorney General Merrick Garland or Assistant AG Kristen Clarke.