Chinese underworld takeover of US illicit pot trade

This article was first published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom, together with The Frontier

On the morning of April 12, the farmworker woke up struggling to breathe and delirious with fever.

Jiaai Zeng had spent the past month working nonstop at a marijuana farm in Oklahoma run by fellow Chinese immigrants. The job was brutal, the 57-year-old had told relatives in New York. He said his bosses made him labor up to 15 hours a day in the blast-furnace heat of a greenhouse. He was feeling awful even after a visit to the doctor, so he planned to return to New York that evening for medical treatment.

At 9:38 am, Zeng sent an audio message to a cousin in Manhattan’s Chinatown. In an agonized whisper, he asked her to buy a bag of oranges for when he arrived.

“I don’t want to eat anything,” he said, speaking a dialect of Fujian province. “I just want to take a look at oranges and see if I’ll have an appetite.”

About an hour later, Zeng was unconscious and had no pulse when three people from the farm drove him to a nearby hospital. They dropped him off and left in a hurry while doctors were trying to revive him, according to a hospital report.

By 11:05 am, Zeng was dead.

“This death is not normal,” his nephew, Westin Zeng, said in an interview with ProPublica and The Frontier. “He lives there for a little bit over 30 days: from a healthy person to a dead person. It doesn’t make sense to me…. In my mind, there’s a logical link from his work to his illness, and from his illness to how they handle that, and a link to his death.”

The farmworker’s story gives a glimpse into the harsh and often abusive conditions endured by the tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants who have quietly become the backbone