Federal prosecutors in Texas claim that a Chinese national helped provide Mexican cartels with multi-ton quantities of fentanyl precursors. The man allegedly would have the chemicals shipped from China to the U.S. and then have the chemicals smuggled into Mexico, where drug cartels would manufacture fentanyl.
This week, Minsu “Fernando” Fang, 48, went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Diana Song Quiroga in Laredo, Texas. The judge formally notified Fang of a criminal indictment filed against him. The four-count indictment accuses Fang of conspiring to import and ship controlled chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl. Court documents revealed that Fang had been in federal custody since June 19, when authorities arrested him in New York as part of the same case.
A criminal complaint filed against Fang a day before his arrest revealed that federal agents had been investigating Fang since August 2023, when they intercepted ten boxes of chemicals in New York that were sent via UPS destined for Texas. The boxes had been mislabeled to claim that they came from California when, in fact, they came from China.
During the investigation, agents learned that Fang would get the chemicals to Laredo. From there, he would coordinate smuggling the chemicals into Mexico for the drug cartels that he allegedly worked with. Authorities tracked hundreds of shipments from China allegedly coordinated by Fang. Federal prosecutors claimed that he could bypass most of the inspection measures by labeling them as other substances and listing their claim value as less than $800.
During the investigation, authorities obtained messages between Fang and his men coordinating the shipments. In some of those messages, Fang claimed his clients in Mexico were mad and wanted to kill him over some shipments that had been seized.
