The Chinese fentanyl king

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0:38First thing they always tell me is, Miguel, are you sure this Sean is not an undercover DEA agent? And I say, no, he's a real journalist. He's legit. This is Miguel Ángel Vega. He knows people I'll never meet on my own. The only reason they agreed to talk to me, and in this case to you, is because they know me. I know the person very well that hooks up with these people. Dangerous people. And Miguel Ángeles taking a risk vouching for me. They tell me like, well, Miguel, if this man is not what he claims to be, I'm going to catch you in little pieces, you understand that? So it's like, it's a little scary hearing that kind of threats.

1:30But, you know, this is what I do. Today, I'm going to meet with a cartel member, and I think he knows our subject. The subject we're investigating is Brother Wang, a Chinese national whose real name is Zhang Zhidong. A Chinese man operating a massive drug trafficking and money laundering network is arrested in Cuba and could soon be extradited to the U.S. Zhang Zhidong, who's better known as his street name, Brother Wang. He's accused of working with Mexican cartels to transport fentanyl and other... News of Zhang Zhidong's arrest in November 2025 made headlines around the world.

2:11The United States government announced it caught one of the most wanted men. I'm Xiong Yuan. I'm a journalist with the BBC's Global China Unit. I'm trying to understand how a student from China's most prestigious university ended up as, according to law enforcement, one of the most significant drug traffickers in the world. This is the Chinese fentanyl king for the documentary from the BBC World Service.

2:50All right. Hi, Miguel. Very, very nice to meet you, finally. Welcome to the heat in every sense. Welcome to the heat in every sense. Miguel Ángel's way of welcoming me to his hometown, Culiacán, known as the cradle of the cartels. Culiacán is very violent these days. The two different factions, as you know, Chapos and Mayos are like clashing almost anywhere, everywhere. This is pretty crazy. But it looks... I mean, on our flight, it was very full. Every seat was taken. I was quite surprised by how many people are still coming. Well, that's the thing. You know, during the day, Culiacan, it's like a normal, any other city.

3:28But after dark, that's when everything changes. Vampires are outside, great to get you. And in this case, vampires are hidden. man, you know, they're patrolling the city. And the funny thing, you don't see them. I mean, this taxi driver can be anyone. This guy is so well, that's the kind of control the cartel has. You see, you're going to see a lot of police, soldiers, convoys, patrolling the city, and still, cartel members, they always find a way to do the hit. And they are like invisible. And they are only visible when they pull the trigger.

4:12Miguel Ángel drives us to a safe house in a run-down part of the city.

4:19We knock on the heavy metal gate and enter a compound, high walls on all sides. We're introduced to Luis, obviously not his real name. An actor is speaking his words, translated verbatim. Luis leads us into a small room covered in white tiles and offers a seat next to some large plastic containers. There's a strong smell of chemicals, and I suspect this room is used for cooking fentanyl. One hot afternoon in 2019, Luis says he was at a ranch on the edge of the city, running errands for his boss, when he was told to stop what he was doing and guard the perimeter. Then this man showed up. He came to talk to the bosses.

4:59I saw him from a distance because I was on duty, standing outside on security. It was a Chinese guy who came here to offer his products. The product he's offering? Precursor chemicals needed to produce fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans over the past decade. That was when they came and said, we are going to bring in this drug and we are going to do this. Then he pulled out some money and they start hanging it out. Courtesy of the new boss, number one. Number one is Zhang Zhidong. also known by his alias, Brother Juan. Luis says the cash tips were the sign of what was to come.

5:42They opened the window to a new drug. That's when it started generating jobs for us. People gave him affectionate nicknames. He was called Number One, the King of Fentanyl. That is when the fentanyl songs started playing. Luis is talking about Narco Corridos, ballads about the cartels sung by local folk musicians. How do you think he managed to become number one, become king of Fintanel? Well, mainly because of his brain, his intelligence more than anything, and because of the opportunities he had back where he came from. I want to ask more, but we've been talking for about 40 minutes, and I noticed Miguel Ángel is starting to get twitchy.

6:24I think we've got to go. Yes. It's a session. We shouldn't be here. Yeah. Well enough. Okay, of course. We say hasty goodbyes and Miguel Ángel explains that a place like that could be attacked any time As we're leaving, he points out a house a few doors down which is pierced with hundreds of bullet holes from a previous hit He's came for us to hear some naco-corredos for ourselves and finds a group of musicians They're drinking beers on the corner of a crossroads waiting for someone to drive up and pay them to perform a song.

7:03Four guys set up their instruments as the sun goes down.

7:25It's a classic. It's a corrido that most people in Culiacán know. The title is La Mafia Muere, which means that the mafia dies. And it tells the story of a Culiacán that's struggling. You see, like, tragedies and people are afraid. And I think it's a portrait of what's happening right now.

7:54I want to speak to someone higher up in the cartel to see if we can shed any light on how Zhang Zedong managed to become Brother One and gain the trust of the drug traffickers. Early the next morning, we meet a guy I'll call, Enrique. He's in his early 30s and works as a coordinator for the cartel. We talk in our car as he's worried about being overheard. We've translated what he said word for word. First of all, just broadly speaking, can you tell me what you do and what your role is? I cook fentanyl on ice. I am also responsible for transporting the liquids from China to Mexico and from Mexico City to Sinaloa.

8:35From what I understand, through the contact we have in China, they send the products through an airline. Just on the Chinese front. I'm wondering if you've heard of the name Zhang Zhidong or Brother Wang. Brother Wang, yes, I heard it. He was very important. He was number one on the connection. I just want to know more about his arrest and whether his arrest has disrupted the supply chain at all. In fact, that's why we're struggling a lot. That's why we are fighting so hard over the liquids right now because they have to start from scratch and build a new route. He is a Chinese man who just moved to Mexico.

9:17He's not Mexican. How do you think he built the trust between him and you guys? They love teasing him because there was one thing he was really into. He used to say he was fascinated by the woman of Sinaloa, by Mexican woman. Do you know if he's ever been involved romantically with any Mexican women when he was here? 100%. There was a woman. I'm telling you, I'm giving you the key here. That's how he got involved. I don't know much about the relationship, but I do know that he was with a... I think she was a niece. I'm telling you the truth about something very confidential. He looks quite uncomfortable at this point, as though he said too much.

10:04I decide to move on, but there's something I still want to ask him. You play a quite important role in fentanyl production. Does it trouble you to know tens of thousands of people are dying from it every year? Yes, of course. In fact, a relative of mine recently moved to the US and died from an overdose. And that's when my conscience was shaken. I said, that could have been a son or a brother. It's complicated. It shakes your conscience, but work is work, and we don't know another way to make a living. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. Support comes from Wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe.

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11:26So how did Zhang Zhidong end up in Mexico?

11:41This is Alex, but that's not his real name. He's asked me to change it because he's worried about being associated with Zhang Zhidong. And he makes it very clear that he didn't know anything about Zhang's alleged involvement in drugs until he read it in the news. We've changed Alex's voice using AI. They met once at Peking University and again when Alex got a job in Mexico. at the same mining company Zhang was working for. Do you remember what your first impression of him was? He likes to give orders, but not in a bad way, like ordering around. He's a persuasive kind of leader, and he's capable of negotiating with people.

12:23He's very resourceful, I have to admit that. And he speaks very well Spanish, because he's from Beijing. He speaks with a Pekingese accent, you know, Beijing, Colleen, or Huayin. Can you just describe to me what was the first year or so after you started working together? So what's normal? He's like my boss. We were doing business in the usual way that you do business in any country. Maybe a little different because it's Mexico. And in Mexico, when you do business, you deal with the government. You deal with the property owner. But also sometimes you have to negotiate with people in the underworld.

13:03You know what I mean? Then Alex tells me something pretty wild. His Facebook profile picture was him standing in front of a car, the front part of which is totally destroyed. And it was a Porsche SUV. And, you know, he had this badass expression on his face like he's not afraid or he's even, I don't know, he thought that was something cool, I guess. Did they tell you more about exactly what happened behind the photo? Oh, you told me that he collided with another car when he was driving with the walls, doing one and not the mountainous roads. You know, it's a very mountainous country. He had a very, you can say, not good driving habit.

13:51He drives with his feet. He is driving a Porsche, a German car, and the car coming from the other side was a Japanese car. so instead of braking he accelerated in his logic i don't quite understand he thought that the chance of survival would be greater for him given that his car is more steady it's absolutely insane logic well yeah he was driving with a safety belt on so nothing happened to him but his boss, our boss, got hurt. Can you tell a bit more about his opinion towards Mexico, how he liked living in that country? He told me that he liked the wilderness of Mexico, and by that I mean Mexico is kind of like the Wild West for him, and he enjoys a place where the jungle lot arose.

14:51So basically, when he goes to a new place, he would investigate who's the top dog. Sometimes a government official is in charge. Sometimes a cartel's leader is in charge. So he would go to that person or go to both sides. I think that's kind of his modal sovereignty. Was there any point where you sort of began to worry that he might have gone a bit too far? No, no. during the first 10 months, I didn't detect any sign of him going, breaking bad. But he called me. He said he had a surprise for me. So he drove me like 30, 40 kilometers on National Highway and was three in the morning. So there was nobody, no car passing by and was pitched back so he produced a couple of pistols he said we'd do some shooting practice for far i said okay and first we shot at the bottles that he set up and then he started to shoot at the road signs highway road signs i was like why why would you do that he was like why wouldn't you You could say that from the moment I had this kind of hunch, you can say an omen or harbinger of what he might do in the future.

16:14Alex tells me that they made trips to the United States to buy cranes or excavators. And John started to build his business networks there and even put on roots. Do you remember what his personal life was like? Did he have a girlfriend? He had girlfriends, but I only knew one of them. Was she Mexican? Yeah, she's a Mexican girl. They had homes in Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, and Hermosillo, Sonora. And yeah, they were not married, but they did have a daughter. I don't know if the girlfriend Alex described is the same person Enrique told me about, the niece of a cartel member. In 2013, the mining company collapsed and Alex and John parted ways.

17:02I went back to China for personal issues. Did you guys keep in touch after you went back to China? At first, yes, occasionally. Sometimes he was asking me if I had any kind of plan returning to Mexico to do business or just to reunite with him. he would say that he had some kind of opportunity opening great opportunity opening for me and did you ever pop into what those great opportunities might be well he didn't reveal to me but i sort of guessed because he was sending messages you know to the wechat groups saying that he could offer a better exchange rate between your mb and the u.s dollars via alipay or WeChat, I heard from a mutual friend that he was recruiting like random people on the street to do small deposits in bank accounts.

17:57Like, can you deposit like$200 into an account, open an account, and I will give you like$20 or$40, something like that. So I guess small scale money laundering purpose.

18:13Alex says he heard about possible money laundering years before the authorities brought criminal charges So I am pulling out the indictment right now If you scroll down a few pages, right in the middle there are a few paragraphs that really jump off the page It describes the meeting in Hermosillo, Senora It's in the northern part of Mexico and there's Zhang Jidong and a buyer negotiating a shipment the thing is that according to the indictment what neither john judong nor his associates knew was that the buyer was working with the american investigators sort of an undercover agent and in his conversations with the undercover investigator in this indictment john talked about cocaine and fentanyl the way someone talks about a commodity order for example what i'm seeing here is cocaine is being referred as coffee fentanyl is being referred as food and the quantities are in the thousands of kilograms and then just look at this pages what really strikes me is the amount of time that john was able to operate invisibly eight years that's how long a minimum john's operation was running before anyone from the da sat across him in the room eight years of coffee and food, of shell companies and port officials and chemicals shipped from China through the Pacific ports in Mexico.

19:37So by the time this undercover agent sat down with him, he already had built a vast network of contracts, infrastructure, and frankly, a super efficient supply chain. Yeah, he was everywhere by then.

19:55The first time I heard of him was when news broke not before. These figures like Brother Wang are especially good at being invisible, right? And that's part of why they're so important, because if they were visible, then they wouldn't be as useful to criminal organizations. This is Victoria Ditmar, a researcher with Insight Crime, a think tank based in Mexico City, who spends her days investigating organized crime. So in your research into the precursor supply chain, where does someone like Brother Wang, based on all the information we've known so far, actually sit? People like him are key to the supply chain.

20:34Like the supply chain doesn't work if you don't have people like Brother Wang and other brokers. When we look at the supply chain, we like to imagine it kind of like an hourglass, right? Where at the top, you have chemical producers, cargo companies that move chemicals. In the middle, so the part that is the tightest, that's where the brokers are, right? They're the bottleneck of the supply chain because they are the ones who connect buyers and suppliers in very different parts of the world. And they understand how to move around the world of chemical companies in China, which as an outsider is difficult to navigate.

21:07So that access and that knowledge is key for someone who wants to sustain a drug producing operation and guarantee a consistent flow of precursor chemicals. Department of Justice called Brother Wang one of the most important and significant drug traffickers in the world. Just based on your research on supply chain itself, do you agree with that assessment? I think he was unique in the sense that, yes, he was a broker that connected Mexican trafficking organizations with Chinese suppliers of precursor chemicals. But he also had a huge presence in the U.S., right? He was able to connect Mexican producers and traffickers with buyers in the U.S.

21:43and then even get involved in money laundering operations, right? So I think for me, that was what was striking about his case because it's quite unique. How much is known about him, also his personal life in Mexico? There's not really a lot of information about him in any capacity. I think the little that we know comes from what authorities have published, right? Those records reveal one of the most remarkable chapters in John's journey, how he nearly pulled off an audacious escape. I'm in Mexico City now, and Miguel has offered to drive me from the centre to this neighbourhood called Lomas de Badierna.

22:23It's about a 30-minute drive. It's very green, and it's very, very hilly. And you can see the skyline of Mexico City. I can see on both sides of me very beautiful two-story houses. On both sides you have trees, daughters, and flowers everywhere, and some houses have barbed wires on top of the gates. This is the exact neighborhood where Zhang Zhudong was put under house arrest. But before this, he was actually put under a maximum security prison. And for some mysterious reason, a judge had granted him to be transferred from that prison to this neighborhood for house arrest. I'm just wondering, Miguel, if there's something that's come.

23:05Have you heard of things like this before? Well, absolutely. There is a history of people that are in these maximum security prisons and then they are placing housed, arrested. And the next thing is they escape. I don't know what happened in this particular case, but to me it doesn't really make any sense is the fact that being in a high security prison with such a high profile and still being sent to house arrest doesn't really make any sense whatsoever. And that's exactly what Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said, right? She said the judge, without any justification whatsoever, granted him house arrest and this decision should not have been made.

23:52And that decision of transferring him from the prison to house arrest had dire consequences. So at some point last year in July, Zhang reportedly destroyed his electronic tag and he went into a tunnel that had been dug beneath the property and threw to the house next door. And you have national guards standing outside completely unaware and he was gone by the time they realized that. And after that, he managed to fly to Cuba. And from there, he attempted to fly to Russia. But upon landing in Moscow airport, the Russian border guards spotted his forged papers. They sent him back to Cuba. And that's when Cuban border guards uncovered his true identity.

24:30And then Mexico managed to get him back from Cuba back to Mexico. That was a big success for the authorities here because it really came at a time when U.S. was really intensifying its pressure on Mexico to step up its anti-drug trafficking efforts. And then he was later extradited back to the U.S., where he now faces drug trafficking charges in New York. We approached Zhang Zhidong's lawyer, but as the case is pending, he declined to comment. I asked Alex, John's former friend and mining colleague, what he felt when he first heard about the arrest. Well, obviously, my initial reaction, I was very shocked.

25:09But in another sense, it wasn't surprising because he's a very resourceful person and he's not, strictly speaking, a person who is very concerned with morality. I guess he wouldn't care the line of business as long as it's lucrative. But I was very shocked at the scale of the thing. Did you tell to other PKU alum about this story? Everybody was talking about it because he's probably one of the most famous persons our PKU produced in the two decades, you know? It's kind of embarrassing. Just like, wow, we have this person who is even better than Walter in Britain bad. And what will happen next?

25:56Will his arrest affect the drug trade? Miguel Angel thinks not. The business, the drug trade will continue. Because, you know, they are taking a big piece. But this is not the end. Someone else will step in and will continue. Enrique, the cartel member that I met in Sinaloa, agrees. Yes, the business is affected, because he's the one with the connection over there. They took the man, and that caused a mess. But they have more people. There are others, because you always have to have a nace up your sleeve. If one falls, then you have to turn to another. Have you found any person yet? They are talking about a person, but for my own safety, I can't say.