Huge NYC Money Laundering Scheme Broken Up with Help from Georgia Cops

By: Mario Mancini

A 2018 high-speed police chase in Georgia led to the breakdown a multi-million-dollar money laundering scheme based out of New York City, Ben Feuerherd of The New York Post reports.

The officer searched the suspects SUV and discovered a suitcase and backpack stuffed with 33 bundles of $20 bills, two stacks of $100 bills and a money-counting machine. The cop seized the cash — $350,000 in all — during the August 2018 stop, the Post chronicled.

Authorities then cut the men loose — an orchestrated move to apparently cast a wider net for more suspects, according to police and federal officials. The run-in helped federal agents eventually uncover a sprawling, multimillion-dollar money-laundering scheme operated by a crew of Asian men in New York City.

For years, the crew moved and laundered money in Big Apple neighborhoods such as Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn at the behest of drug traffickers from the South and Midwest, reports The New York Post.

Since that fated stop in 2018, the investigation has ensnared five men: Li, Sun, Queens livery cab driver Jian Feng Wu and two other suspected money-launderers, Xian de Jiang and Xiao Yu Wang.

Before Li and Sun were stopped on I-85 northeast of Atlanta, federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents had spent the day spying on the pair as the duo met with cartel-connected drug traffickers in a Walmart parking lot and at a nearby apartment building about 30 miles north of Georgia’s capital.

According to The New York Post, “the agents wiretapped known drug trafficker Jose “Chiquis” Herrera-Guzman’s cellphone — and watched from the ground and sky as he and his posse handed the more than quarter-million dollars in cash to the two New Yorkers”.

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

The judgment came three months after Li was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to the money-laundering count. Sun pleaded guilty to misprision — the deliberate concealment of one’s knowledge of a felony — and is slated to be sentenced later this month.

Wu’s accused associate, Xian de Jiang, made bail and allegedly fled — and hasn’t appeared in court since. A fifth suspect, Xiao Yu Wang, has pleaded not guilty and could go to trial in Manhattan federal court later this year, according to court documents.

A rep for the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment on the case when contacted by The New York Post.