A network of Chinese agents tried to use an expatriate government official’s elderly father in their plot to coerce him to return home to China — and they enlisted a former NYPD cop to help coordinate their scheme — according to Justice Department officials.
Starting this week, that retired sergeant and two other alleged foreign agents will face a trial in Brooklyn Federal Court — the first trial targeting “Operation Fox Hunt,” a sweeping Chinese government scheme to send operatives the U.S. to locate so-called corruption suspects and dissidents and forcibly repatriate them.
The plot involved plucking their intimidation target’s elderly father from his home in China, flying him to the U.S., and dropping him on their mark’s doorstep to deliver a warning — if you don’t come back and face the corruption charges against you, the government will cause trouble for your family. The victim is named only as “John Doe” in court documents.
The suspects facing trial include Michael McMahon, an New Jersey private investigator and retired NYPD sergeant; Zhu “Jason Zhu” Yong, a Flushing resident accused of hiring McMahon; and Zheng Chongring, a Brooklyn resident who the feds say harassed and threatened the target and his adult daughter at their home.
In a 2020 interview with federal officials, McMahon said one of the people he was working for “mentioned to me that they were trying to get him to come back to China … so they could prosecute him,” according to a filing from federal prosecutors.
McMahon’s attorney Lawrence Lustberg contends in court documents that the other defendants concealed the true nature of what they were up to, writing that the ex-cop “understood that his investigative actions were for the purpose of assisting a Chinese construction company which had been the victim of an offense in China.”
Zhu Yong’s lawyer Kevin Tung wrote on Friday that his client was “asked to find the person for the purpose of collecting a private…
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