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Credit: Stefano Summo for ProPublica
Criminal Justice

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 and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton
Adcock, The Frontier March 14, 5 a.m. EDT
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Co-published with The Frontier

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to
receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was
produced in partnership with The Frontier. Additional funding for this story was
provided by The Pulitzer Center.

It seemed an unlikely spot for a showdown between Chinese gangsters: a marijuana
farm on the prairie in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.

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.

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.

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.

Stacks and boxes of marijuana fill the garage where four people were shot to
death on a farm, shown in a still image from a sheriff’s deputy’s bodycam video.
Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department

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.

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.

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.

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

The bloodshed in Kingfisher County made national headlines, highlighting
Oklahoma’s role as the latest and wildest frontier in the marijuana underworld.

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.

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, in an interview.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A body-camera image shows a law enforcement officer responding to the murders at
the marijuana farm. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department

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% of the criminal groups are of Chinese origin.

The federal response, however, has been muted. With the spread of legalization
and decriminalization, enforcement has become a low priority for the U.S.
Department of Justice, anti-drug veterans say.

“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.”

The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese
organized crime as a global powerhouse, 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 a former senior DEA official,
Donald Im.

“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal
networks to expand their underground global banking system for cartels and other
criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight
against Chinese organized crime.

ProPublica

Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Aimed to Make Cops a Gateway to Rehab, Not Jail.
State Leaders Failed to Make It Work.

U.S. 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 dedicated to Chinese
organized crime dwindled — while the power of the underworld grew.

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.

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.

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. (A second part of this series further
explores that issue.)

“You’d be very naive to sit and say the Chinese state doesn’t know what Chinese
organized crime is doing in the U.S.,” Anderson said, “or that there is not a
connection between the Chinese state and organized crime.”

In February, 50 U.S. 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.”

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.

The Department of Justice plans to respond to the questions raised by the
legislators, a department spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“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.”

The department declined to comment about other issues raised in this story.

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.”

“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.”

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.

Credit: Stefano Summo for ProPublica

CALIFORNIA DREAMS

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 U.S. 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.”

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.

The semirural 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.

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.

The cross-country move was part of a migration of criminal groups into the
marijuana industry. Other destinations 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“They weren’t scared or afraid,” Negrete said in an interview. “It was like
regular business for them.”

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.

“It made me think they were at a higher scale in an organization,” the detective
said.

CASH AND DISCIPLINE

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.

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.

Suspects used banks in China to wire money to the U.S. 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 U.S. 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.”

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 U.S. marijuana ventures,
current and former officials said.

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.

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.

“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.”

In the federal prosecution in Sacramento, a defendant pleaded guilty this Feb.
27. The real estate broker and two others are still awaiting trial.

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.

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.

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. U.S. investigations show that WeChat, although heavily
monitored by Chinese security forces, is often a forum for discussions of
criminal activity.

Oklahoma’s marijuana industry surged to “an astronomical level,” said Ray
Padilla, a Denver-based DEA agent. He estimated that 90% of Colorado’s illicit
producers moved to the neighboring state.

Oklahoma was the new frontier, Padilla said. And it was “absolute insanity.”

GUNPLAY AT THE ASSOCIATION

A statue of a panda bear sits like a chunky sentry atop a pillar on Classen
Boulevard in Oklahoma City’s Asian District.

Mixing a longtime Vietnamese community with a more recent Chinese one, the
boulevard is lined with stores, restaurants, massage parlors, nail salons and,
block after block, marijuana dispensaries.

Behind the panda, a ground-floor suite in a corner mini-mall houses the local
chapter of the American Fujian Association.

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.

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.

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.

“Shoot him,” Chen told Lin, according to witnesses.

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.

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.)

An Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics agent searches for witnesses and survivors at
the Kingfisher County farm where four people were shot to death. Credit:
Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department

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% 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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. ”

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
U.S. immigration documents.

Neighbors complained about uncollected trash blowing into nearby pastures and
endangering cattle, said Sgt. Michael Shults of the Kingfisher County Sheriff’s
Department.

“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.”

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.

AWASH IN WEED

By 2021, a mysterious investor had joined the crew at the Kingfisher farm.

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.

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.

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.

Yet he moved to Oklahoma and invested in Chen’s farm. After months working
there, he argued with his partners over money and left.

By then, the state was awash in weed.

Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics agents and Kingfisher County deputies search
through buildings on the 10-acre marijuana farm. Credit: Kingfisher County
Sheriff’s Department

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

PITCH-BLACK NIGHT

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.

“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.”

Kingfisher County deputies discovered the bodies of four victims among stacks of
marijuana in the garage. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department

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. 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.

“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.”

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.

“You need to back him off,” a sheriff’s lieutenant yelled to his deputies.
Afterward, they would wonder who had sent him so quickly.

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.

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 U.S., 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.”

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.

“If I go back to Oklahoma, I’ll be killed in the prison or jail,” he said
through an interpreter. “I’m afraid I will be killed because these people are
mafiosos.”

Credit: Stefano Summo for ProPublica

AFTERMATH

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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“You couldn’t pry him out of that car,” Thompson said. “Once he reached
Oklahoma, he wouldn’t get out of 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.)

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.

“We are funding Oklahoma,” she said. “Oklahoma City will be like a ghost town if
we leave.”

Law enforcement officers search dozens of metal and plastic marijuana grow
houses at the Kingfisher farm the day after the quadruple homicide. Credit:
Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department

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.

“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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