[DM] … China in elaborate smuggling scam'
- DOJ says the scheme say thousands of dangerous drugs and toxins illegally shipped to China
- Scheme ran from 2016 to 2023 fraudulently obtained biochemical samples
- President of UF's Chinese Students and Scholars Association, Nongnong 'Leticia' Zheng,
| …who is clearly efficient as well as beautiful, but claims to be terribly, terribly naive… |
is implicated
The group openly protested a Florida law signed by Gov. Ron De Santis last year that limits universities from recruiting students and faculty from China — and bans employing such students from working in academic labs without special permission.
Zheng has confirmed that a federal prosecutor notified her last year in writing she was the target of a grand jury investigation, and the Justice Department was preparing to seek criminal charges against her. She said she has been assigned a federal public defender, Ryan Maguire of Tampa and noted how government agents have threatened to imprison or deport her.
It's not clear if the UF research employee or other students — identified in court records as co-conspirators — been charged or arrested yet. The UF employee worked in the stockroom of one of the university's research labs, prosecutors said.
Other materials smuggled to China in the scheme included small amounts of highly purified drugs – known as analytical samples — of fentanyl, morphine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, codeine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, acetylmorphine and methadone, court records showed. Such small samples would generally be used for calibrating scientific or medical devices. The substances cannot be legally be exported to China.
Prosecutors described one student involved as a Chinese citizen majoring in marketing in the business college last year, who agreed to change her UF email signature to falsely represent that she was a biomedical engineering student to purchase items without raising suspicions, court records showed. One line across hundreds of pages of court documents in the case cited an excerpt from an email that her first name was 'Leticia.'
Zheng, a senior marketing major in the business school, is president of the Chinese students and scholars group, which describes itself as officially approved by the Chinese embassy. Zheng was enrolled as recently as the spring semester that just ended, university records showed.
Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, identified 'Leticia' as Zheng using biographical clues in university records shared by none of the other 58,441 UF students enrolled last semester.
Zheng, who said she lived most of her life in China, said she was deceived and victimized by the scheme's organizers, who she said solicited help finding paid interns from the Chinese student organization. Foreign students on educational visas are limited in how or whether they can work for pay.
'This case seems to be really big,' she said. 'What I was doing was, like, just a little work, and I didn't get paid that much.'
Zheng said in hindsight, she noticed red flags such as a lack of paperwork or consistent payments for the administrative work she did. She said she wasn't familiar with the substances she was directed to order. The man described as the scheme's ringleader — who has pleaded guilty in the case — reassured her, and she didn't realize she was in trouble until the Justice Department contacted her, she said.
Zheng said she hopes to be allowed to finish her degree and said she doesn't understand how the university didn't have policies in place to protect her.
Former Republican Sen. Ben Sasse — a leading China hawk on Capitol Hill who once described the threat from Beijing as the 'defining national-security challenge of our age' — took over as the university's president in February 2022.
The plot was sure to supercharge the raging policy debate over countering China's ascension as a global power and curtailing its influence. Florida has already banned TikTok from universities and colleges, and prohibited citizens of China and some other countries from owning homes or purchasing property in large swaths of the state.
'It's like some UF students are trying to make a profit on this without knowing the potential consequences,' said Eric Jing Du, a professor in the UF Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering.
Du said he worried investigations like this could lead to further crackdowns against international students.
| …a crackdown which is clearly necessary. |
The new Florida law targets students from so-called countries of concern: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria.
The man who prosecutors identified as the scheme's ringleader, Pen 'Ben' Yu, 51, of Gibsonton, Florida, near Tampa, has already pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine when he is sentenced on August 2.
Yu provided Zheng, the UF student, with a credit card to place dozens of fraudulent orders last year, the Justice Department said. At Yu's direction, she wrote to the biomedical company that she was 'working in collaboration with other researchers' in biotechnology and requested 'a good price since we will be purchasing these items routinely,' court records showed. After the biomedical orders arrived at UF, the research employee would bring them or otherwise provide them to Yu, who shipped them to China, prosecutors said.
The UF researcher in charge of the lab – which included the stockroom where the supplies were delivered – was not described as a co-conspirator in legal filings.
It wasn't clear who Yu was working for in China. In intercepted messages, the government said he referred to his superior only as his boss.
A sales executive for Massachusetts-based Sigma-Aldrich Inc., which sold the samples, also has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Gregory Muñoz, 45, of Minneola, Florida, west of Orlando, is set to be sentenced July 23. Muñoz sold products from the company to several universities in Florida, including UF, court records said.
Muñoz discovered in December 2022 that his employer was investigating him and warned Yu, who continued to place hundreds of new orders to ship to China in 2023, court records said. 'Wow, I am really screwed now,' Muñoz wrote. 'Anti-bribery, anti-kickback.'
A third person, Jonathan Rok Thyng, 47, who lived at the same address as Yu in Gibsonton, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit a federal crime and faces up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Prosecutors said Thyng ordered some of the biomedical substances and shipped some of the packages to China. He was expected to formally enter his plea June 18.
The Justice Department said orders placed through UF qualified for significant discounts — prosecutors said the scheme's organizers paid $4.9 million for $13.7 million worth of biomedical supplies — and included free items and free overnight shipping.
Prosecutors said in court records they would recommend leniency for Yu, Muñoz and Thyng because they promised to cooperate with investigators and accepted responsibility for their crimes. Prosecutors said all are American citizens. The Justice Department asked the judge to order Yu and Muñoz each to forfeit $100,000, which it said was how much Yu and Muñoz had earned over the years.
| Are any of them naturalized citizens, and will they lose their citizenship? |
The scheme unraveled when the company — known as MilliporeSigma, a subsidiary of Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany — discovered the ruse involving UF and reported its involvement to the U.S. government. Under new Justice Department rules, such companies that self-report export violations and cooperate can escape prosecution.
The company said in a statement Friday that it fired Muñoz and cooperated with investigators to avoid prosecution. This was the first time those rules were applied, the government said.
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