On June 30, 2020, a Chinese national pleaded guilty for conspiring to launder money with regards to drug trafficking related operations.
According to STL News, the Chinese national, Xueyong Wu, was laundering over $4 million in drug money that was generated through massive scale cocaine trafficking in the U.S.
STL News reported on all of the legal and law enforcement actors involved:
Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger for the Eastern District of Virginia; Special Agent in Charge Wendy C. Woolcock of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Special Operations Division and Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey T. Scott of the DEA Louisville Field Division; Jason Crosby, Chief of the Criminal Investigations Division of the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS); and Special Agent in Charge James Gibbons of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Chicago, Illinois, made the announcement after U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema accepted the plea.
The court documents highlighted that Xueyong Wu built relations with Latin American drug trafficking outfits to transfer and launder American-based drug revenues. Wu is scheduled to receive his sentence on September 29, 2020.
A good portion of Wu’s money was repatriated to Mexico through a complicated set of international financial transactions. A percentage of the money that Wu received in these transactions came from laundering activities.
The bulk of this money made through the flow of cocaine or payments for cocaine all took place within the Eastern District of Virginia.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Michael P. Ben’Ary and David A. Peters in addition to Trial Attorneys Steve Sola and Kerry Blackburn of the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section are the prosecution involved in this case.
Such cases like these demonstrate how foreign actors exploit the U.S.’s weak immigration enforcement protocols.
Forget direct invasions, the U.S.’s inability to maintain its sovereignty is gradually turning into a failed state that is incapable of maintaining the most basic of public functions — security.