Madrid/Zhi Dong Zhang, also known as Brother Wang and one of the biggest fentanyl kingpins internationally, is detained in Cuba, according to reveals this Tuesday the Spanish newspaper El País. This has been confirmed to the media by official Mexican sources, who are negotiating with the Island – which has not commented on the matter – for its immediate delivery. The drug trafficker is a priority target for the United States, where he will also be urgently extradited as soon as Havana delivers him to Mexico after interrogating him.
The bizarre story of this 38-year-old criminal became popular this summer, when he managed to escape from a Mexican prison from which he was about to be sent to the United States. Zhi is accused by the US anti-drug agency (DEA) of directing for almost a decade a network that works for the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel. According to various sources, the base of its business has been in Los Angeles and Atlanta, but it has ties throughout the continent, as well as in Europe and Asia.
A year ago, Zhi Dong was arrested in Mexico City and accused of drug trafficking and money laundering. There he entered a maximum security prison until, suddenly, a judge granted him house arrest with military custody. At that time, President Claudia Sheinbaum considered the measure nonsense. “The judge, without any argument, because the Prosecutor’s Office was fighting and giving all the arguments, gave him house arrest. He should not have had that resolution from a judge,” said the president.
There he entered a maximum security prison until, suddenly, a judge granted him house arrest with military custody.
The country was negotiating a security agreement with the United States and the controversial decision regarding a criminal so wanted by Washington put the country in trouble. This judge, remember The Countryalso changed the prison to house arrest for the former attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, controversially accused of forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice in the case of the students of Ayotzinapawhich led Sheinbaum to charge even more against him.
The consequence came in July of this year, when Zhi Dong managed to evade security and fled Mexico. The escape occurred just six days after a federal court in Georgia expanded the charges against him: between 2020 and 2021 he would have laundered – according to the investigation – 20 million dollars in the United States, through a scheme of at least 150 shell companies and 170 bank accounts.
The case was expanded thanks to the arrest of one of his associates, Ruipeng Li, from whom bank documents of his ties were seized, and which ended up revealing how the criminal network operated. As explained The Countrywhich had access to the Georgia court complaint, a Mexican cell collected the money from drug sales from traffickers while a Chinese cell received and laundered it through the companies and accounts mentioned.
According to the investigation, more than 1,000 kilos of the latter and twice as much fentanyl were moved.
The amounts deposited – in different states – never exceeded $100,000 and were made through large banking entities, which “are used to receiving large sums of money without asking too many questions,” according to the document. Among the banks are the well-known Bank of America, JP Morgan or Wells Fargo. Most of those moves went to the same shell company, Mnemosyne International Trading Inc, linked to Zhi Dong.
The DEA documentation also shows intercepted calls and messages that specialists have coded. Coffee (coffee) was fentanyl and food (food), cocaine. According to the investigation, more than 1,000 kilos of the latter and twice as much fentanyl were moved.
In addition to the alias of Brother Wang, the trafficker had others such as El Chino, Tocayo, Pancho and Nelson Mandela, as well as several false identities with which he moved around more than half the world. As it is now known, the drug trafficker fled to Russia with a false passport, but his entry was refused. He tried the same thing in Cuba, where, on the contrary, he has been arrested and, paradoxically, this time he may be the one who facilitates the capture of one of the biggest drug criminals that keeps the United States in check.
