They dismantled a money laundering ring that laundered millions of dollars for a Mexican cartel operating in the US

The anti-narcotics authorities in New York dismantled a group that for years laundered millions of dollars for a Mexican drug cartel operating in the US state.

According to an investigation by The New York Post, the washing team moved into neighborhoods in the Big Apple such as Flushing, Queens, Sunset Park and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn at the urging of drug traffickers.

The bleachers responded to well-known Atlanta drug trafficker José “Chiquis” Herrera-Guzmán, whom the authorities had been tracking for some time before identifying his front men.

It was precisely because of an interception on Herrera-Guzman's cell phone that agents were able to observe a delivery of millions of dollars in cash to two New Yorkers later identified as Shaui Sun and Darren Hing Li in a parking lot at Walmart and in an apartment building north of Georgia's state capital.

The officers followed the couple, who took Highway I-85 northeast of Atlanta aboard a rented GMC Terrain, and stopped them when they were still more than 1,200 kilometers away from returning to New York.

The police stopped the vehicle and ordered them to leave, noting that they were anxious.

“Mr. Sun seemed very nervous talking to me. He couldn't sit still and I could see his carotid artery beating rapidly in his neck,” the policeman later wrote in a police report.

The officer searched the men's van and discovered a suitcase and a backpack with 33 bundles of $20 bills, two bundles of $100 bills and a money counting machine.

The police seized the cash, $350,000 in total, in an arrest that took place in August 2018 and served to expose the gang.

According to the authorities, the two detainees were released, and since then followed closely, something that allowed to discover a wider network of money launderers operating throughout New York.

The washing scheme was multimillion-dollar and expanding. It was operated by a group of men including Li and Sun, but also by a taxi driver from Queens named ian Feng Wu and two other alleged money launderers, Xian de Jiang and Xiao Yu Wang.

Li and Sun's trip to Georgia was one of several out-of-state that the couple undertook during 2017 and 2018 as part of their money laundering operation, according to court documents.

During that period, the men, both 30 years old, flew to Georgia and also traveled to Detroit, Michigan, several times to collect cash that they would then deliver to warehouses in New York or wash it themselves. Crew members also collected cash in Chicago, the feds said.

To wash the dough, Sun opened two accounts at a TD Bank in the name of an alleged company based in Flushing, New York, authorities said.

From 2017 to 2018, he deposited several checks totaling exactly $100,000 into the accounts. The feds discovered that the checks were written by another person who was later convicted of tax evasion and for writing fake checks in exchange for cash.

Sun also laundered the cash by spending it on a number of luxury items at a jewelry exchange in Baltimore, including a $10,520 Vacheron Constantin wristwatch and a $4,234 Bulgari ring.

Meanwhile, the encounter with the Georgia State Police did not stop Li, a Baruch College graduate who speaks four languages and attended Brooklyn Technical High School.

Over the course of 2018, federal agents who had him under surveillance seized more than $500,000 from him during several returns, after which they finally let him go while he continued to be tracked.

Cash seizures included more than $20,000 confiscated in the parking lot of a shopping center on Willis Avenue in Roslyn, Long Island, and more than $39,000 confiscated at the New York Presbyterian Hospital on Main Street in Flushing.

“By engaging in this conduct, the defendant and others played a critical role in laundering millions of dollars in drug trafficking money,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo for Li in November 2021.

Around the same time that Li was transporting and laundering the drug money, Jian Feng Wu, a livery taxi driver in Flushing, received a commercial proposal from one of his customers to join the crew.

A man who Wu later identified to authorities as “TVB” or “Boom” paid the taxi driver several hundred dollars in exchange for picking up bags of cash and dropping them off in the city.

Wu, who escaped from the Chinese province of Fujian to emigrate to Queens at the age of 18, agreed to participate in the criminal network.

In one of the deliveries in April 2018, Wu and a suspected associate, Xian de Jiang, met a suspected drug dealer in the parking lot of a Chinese buffet on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Bayside, Queens.

Wu picked up a red bag loaded with more than $150,000 from the Hispanic man and allegedly left with Jiang. The agents who were monitoring the exchange stopped them and confiscated the cash.

The five crew members were arrested in 2019 and charged in federal court in Manhattan with conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Herrera-Guzman, the Georgia drug dealer, was convicted separately on drug charges last week and sentenced to 20 years in prison, according to local reports.

Atlanta DEA agent Robert J. Murphy said a Mexican cartel supplied Herrera-Guzman with heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time of his arrest.

Wu, for his part, was sentenced Thursday to full time by Manhattan federal judge Laura Taylor Swain, who agreed with her lawyer, Chris Madiou, that he was a low-level player in the scheme.

The trial came three months after Li was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to the charge of money laundering. Sun pleaded guilty to the deliberate concealment of knowledge of a felony, and is scheduled to be sentenced later this month.

Wu's accused associate, Xian de Jiang, posted bail and allegedly fled, and has not appeared in court since then. A fifth suspect, Xiao Yu Wang, pleaded not guilty and could go to trial in federal court in Manhattan later this year.

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