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.
It seemed an unlikely spot for a showdown between Chinese gangsters: a marijuana farm on the prairie in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.
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.
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.
…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.
UPDATE: This is a good article in and of itself and also because it shows how easily a well-organized criminal enterprise supported by a powerful nation-state can evade American law enforcement and operate without being detected inside USA. Sad to say, USA is riddled with criminal gangs of this type, some going back centuries, engaged in many other enterprises besides drugs and human trafficking. It pains me that so few realize that our nation has already been entirely infiltrated by gangs backed by nation-states who have penetrated and now control the highest levels of power in America. We can see this phenomenon at the state level in Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California and at the national level in Washington, DC where politicians eagerly do the bidding of foreign governments and even kowtow to their leaders when they visit Congress. ABN
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