Although he had recently left the police Asian Organised Crime Unit, Auckland-based Detective Sergeant Roy Yu drove several hours to Waikeria Prison in October 2019 at the invitation of a jailed methamphetamine syndicate henchman he had established a rapport with during a previous investigation.
The recently promoted detective expected he might receive a tip about other illegal drug operations that he could pass on to his former task force colleagues. What he received instead was of far more value: information that a man police didn’t even know was missing had been violently stabbed to death two years prior as the result of a failed drug syndicate power play.
“I’ve got some information about people’s drug-dealing activity and also want to give you some information about a murder,” Yu recalled prisoner Tony Piao telling him that day.
Feeling uneasy about Piao’s safety - the meeting room Corrections had provided was in sight of the prison yard where other inmates milled about - the detective decided to speed the conversation along.
“Forget about the people doing drugs and tell me about the murder,” Yu recalled saying.
The detective’s recollection came during the second day of testimony in the murder trial of Zhicheng “Michael” Gu, who is accused of having stabbed Bao Chang “Ricky” Wang to death with a hunting knife in August 2017 at the direction of the men’s drug syndicate boss.
Wang, also a henchman in the drug syndicate, had been tied to a chair in a Massey home that was doubling as a clandestine meth lab and interrogated at gunpoint before a drug boss “Uncle Six” - unsatisfied with his answers - ordered his death.
The detective told jurors in the High Court at Auckland today he had been familiar with Wang in the past.
His name had come up in another methamphetamine investigation years ago, Yu said. Then in January 2018, after arresting Piao while executing a search warrant at a Sandringham clan lab, the name came up again in an off-the-record chat with the then-suspect. Completely out of the blue, Piao said Wang had been put in touch with another meth cook and was on the run from someone.
“I didn’t know why he brought up Ricky Wang, because I didn’t ask about him,” Yu said of the vague and at-the-time useless revelation.
But it later became clear during the October 2019 prison trip.
“Were you there when it happened?” the detective recalled asking Piao during the short prison meeting.
“I helped to transport the body,” he recalled the prisoner saying. “I felt I had no other options.
“... We took the body to Taupō and we disposed of it somewhere near the Desert Rd.”
Piao said he had been brought to the Massey property after the stabbing had already occurred and saw the body with what he estimated to be more than 30 stab wounds, including defensive wounds. He would later be instructed to approach Wang’s ex-wife and explain his disappearance, he told the detective.
“I had to lie to her that [Wang] had gone back to China,” he is alleged to have said.
Piao told the detective the motive for the killing appeared to be twofold: a drug debt Wang allegedly owed to “Uncle Six”, whose real name was Jian Qi Zhao, and intel that Wang “wanted to replace Zhao as man on the ground in New Zealand”.
Rather than continue the conversation in the unsafe prison environment, Detective Yu said he left somewhat quickly and arranged to secretly meet Piao for a longer interview months later. The detective arranged for Piao to be released from prison for one day and dropped off at a nearby police station.
But Yu didn’t think a police station would be safe, either, so he took Piao to an Airbnb rental, where they spoke for hours, trying to pinpoint where the body could be found.
It would take much more detective work - including forensic examination of phones and scouring of satellite imagery - before Wang’s body was discovered encased in concrete in a shallow, remote grave in the area Piao had earlier indicated. It was found in March 2020, six months after the brief prison interview that launched the search.
Last year, five years after the death, the man known as Uncle Six admitted to having ordered the murder. Zhao is expected to testify against Gu later in the trial, along with Piao and two other men who eventually admitted to participating in the murder or body disposal.
During a brief opening address yesterday, Gu’s lawyer said the co-defendants turned witnesses had spun lies about her client in an attempt to curry favour with police, downplay their own involvement and obtain shorter sentences.
Gu was a syndicate member and did help the others dispose of the body but he was not present when the fatal stabbing took place, she said.
Testimony is set to continue when the trial resumes tomorrow before Justice Simon Moore.