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Chenyi Wang, 29, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for his role in a methamphetamine syndicate.
Wang, lured by Fei Wei through a dating app, delivered drugs and collected cash.
Operation Worthington, launched in 2020, uncovered the syndicate’s activities and led to multiple arrests.
An immigrant construction worker with limited English said he turned to an online dating app after finding himself isolated from family, lonely and without work during the first Covid-19 lockdown.
As a result, Auckland resident Chenyi Wang, 29, did find a romantic connection, a court was recently told. Buthe also got, according to his lawyer, much more than he bargained for – an inroad into a Chinese criminal syndicate that lured the previously law-abiding citizen into helping fuel New Zealand’s meth trade with wholesale amounts of the raw ingredients needed to cook the drug domestically.
Wang also now has, as a result of the relationship and the bad decisions that followed, a five-and-a-half-year prison term to serve. The woman he met via the dating app, Fei Wei, is set for sentencing next year.
Investigators discovered a trove of messages between the two while executing a search warrant in June 2021, at the end of a lengthy undercover investigation dubbed Operation Worthington. In the messages, Wang was sometimes called “hubby” by Wei. But it was also made clear that he served as her lackey, collecting and delivering drugs and huge sums of cash at her direction.
“He was being used by the Chinese syndicate, and her [Wei’s] role was high up in it,” defence lawyer Sharyn Green said at Wang’s sentencing late last month as she asked Auckland District Court Judge Brooke Gibson for mercy.
The judge appeared somewhat sceptical of the argument that the power imbalance between Wei and Wang meant his potential sentence should be reduced.
“He’s living with the mastermind,” the judge said, explaining that he would have been aware of the scale of the commercial enterprise because he helped to count the cash payments. “He would have known its criminality ... He’s not just the grunt.”
‘Potato chips’ and ‘yellow wine’
The police National Organised Crime Group launched Operation Worthington in October 2020 on the heels of another major investigation dubbed Operation Branson/Manta.
The original investigation looked into methamphetamine imports that had been smuggled into New Zealand via shipments labelled as floor coverings, a pizza oven, drilling machines and transformers. The final shipment, intercepted by Customs, had 469kg of methamphetamine secreted inside motors – an amount that would have commanded tens of millions of dollars if sold on the street.
The information gathered during that investigation helped launch Operation Worthington, which initially looked into $10.5 million that was laundered in New Zealand via 37 clandestine money drops. And that information, in turn, turned investigators’ attention to a new group of drug offenders, including Wei and Wang.
Much of Wang’s offending was not observed first-hand by investigators but reconstructed using intercepted messages, call surveillance and cellphone polling data showing the defendant’s general location at the time of each job.
Court documents show his involvement was first traced to January 2021, when a package of printer cartridges – secretly filled with an estimated 2kg of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine instead of ink – was sent to “Rock Wang” at his Remuera rental.
“Mr Wang received this package at the behest of Ms Wei, who has a controlling influence over Mr Wang’s drug importations,” the agreed summary of facts for his case state.
Over two days in 2021, Police carried out 18 search warrants throughout the wider Auckland area as part of an 11-month investigation dubbed Operation Worthington, run by the National Organised Crime Group. Photo / New Zealand Police
During that same month, messaging between “Batman” and “Cap” outlined a series of other chores for the syndicate. Batman was identified as Wei, while Cap was Wang, police determined through context clues.
During the first eight days of 2021, investigators believe Wang delivered an estimated 8kg of methamphetamine ingredient ephedrine, collecting over $500,000 cash during four transactions set up by Wei.
Although Wei was identified repeatedly by Judge Gibson as the New Zealand-side “mastermind” of the operation, the agreed summary of facts indicates she was taking directions from another unidentified person and passing along the vast majority of the collected money to what was referred to as “the company”. She did, court documents state, have “a managerial role within the syndicate”.
Court documents also show Wang was directed by Wei to pick up parcels that had been sent to other addresses and to attend illicit sales to gang members. Ephedrine was referred to in code as “yellow rice wine”. On one occasion in May 2021, Wang received an afternoon phone call from Wei telling him to wake up and to deliver a “full bag of potato chips” – a reference to a kilo of meth – and “accept the papers”, aka $81,000 cash, in exchange.
Operation Worthington ended with a series of search warrants in June 2021. Wang and Wei were found in the same home, where police also found a parcel labelled “15 pairs of pants” was found to have trace amounts of methamphetamine - the bulk of the illicit shipment having already been removed.
Wang pleaded guilty in August to 13 different charges, all but one involving the trafficking of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. One other charge involved attempting to possess methamphetamine for supply. As a result of the pleas, he faced up to 14 years’ imprisonment.
Crown prosecutor Daniel Becker sought a starting point of five years’ imprisonment for the ephedrine charges, with further uplifts for the other drugs.
In all, it was agreed for sentencing purposes that Wang had 12kg of class B drug ephedrine, 8kg of less-serious class C pseudoephedrine and 400g of methamphetamine – a breakdown that, Becker said, gives the defendant the “benefit of the doubt”.
Wang’s lawyer asked for a lesser sentence, noting he came to New Zealand at age 21 with his mother and stepfather knowing little English. He was “essentially isolated and left out in the cold” when his mother returned to China without him but managed to make his way in the construction industry, Green said. Then he lost his job due to the Covid lockdown, which Green said made him “vulnerable to being picked up by the syndicate”.
Wang is hoping that after release he can go back to being a productive member of society with his construction skills, she said, adding that it is unlikely he will reoffend.
“He was performing a certain role within a bigger syndicate,” she said of her client. “He was running around being told what to do.”
Cash seized in 2021 as part of Operation Worthington.
Judge Gibson agreed Wang had the skills to rehabilitate himself.
The judge ordered a starting point of five-and-a-half years, six months beyond what the Crown had suggested.
“I’m not so sure it was as simple as that,” he said of suggestions from both the Crown and the defence that Wang was a low-level “catcher” or deliveryman for the syndicate.
His relationship with Wei meant he had an insight into the syndicate that showed some aspects of a “significant” role, although he agreed Wang “predominantly falls within the lesser role”.
The judge at one point reached a preliminary sentence of 10 years, including various uplifts, before reducing the sentence for totality and applying a discount for his guilty pleas.
He noted that Wang initially faced more serious charges.
“You are fortunate they were withdrawn, because the starting point would have been higher,” he said before announcing the final five-and-a-half year term.
Wei is set for sentencing in April.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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