As the trial of a man accused of running an illegal Chinese “police station” in lower Manhattan gets underway, his defense is being aided by a former NYPD cop who himself was accused of acting as secret Chinese agent before those charges were eventually dropped.
Fired NYPD officer Baimadajie Angwang was sitting at the defense table Wednesday in Brooklyn Federal Court as an investigator for defendant Lu Jianwang’s legal team.
Lu, 64, of the Bronx, is charged with opening an underground, secret police station on East Broadway in Chinatown, at the behest of China’s Ministry of Public Security, to track and harass Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy advocates living in the U.S. He’s also known as Harry Lu.
Opening statements in his trial start today. Lu is represented by John Carman, the same defense lawyer who handled Angwang’s case.
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Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News A secret police station, dubbed the “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station,” operated out of a Chinatown office on the third floor of 107 E. Broadway in early 2022. The building is pictured here on April 17, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
Lu maintains his innocence, and his lawyer, Carman, told jurors that he was merely running an office and social club — complete with mahjong and ping pong tables — where Chinese citizens in New York could renew their Chinese driver’s licenses remotely.
“Harry Lu is not a spy. He’s not part of the Chinese intelligence services. He’s not a member of the Chinese Communist Party,” Carman said.
Angwang was charged with acting as a Chinese agent, accused in 2020 of allegations he spied on the city’s Tibetan population for the Chinese Government while working as a community affairs officer for the 111th Precinct in Bayside, Queens. He spent six months in MDC Brooklyn, much of that time in solitary confinement, before getting bail.
In January 2023, federal prosecutors dropped the case.
But that wasn’t enough to save Angwang’s job. Six months after the charges were dropped, the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau ordered he sit down for an interview, but when Angwang learned that interview would be a five-day affair, he refused. That led to a disciplinary hearing, and his firing in January 2024.
Angwang went on to sue the NYPD, contending that the department wanted to “subject Angwang to 1,700 questions in a sham investigatory interrogation, a near singularity in NYPD disciplinary history.”
In the lawsuit against the NYPD this January, Angwang contended that the feds concocted a spying narrative out of whole cloth, spun from mistranslated text messages and his “respectful, but wholly innocuous, relationship with certain low-level employees at the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan.”
“Based on these innocuous communications that Angwang had with consular employees, law enforcement concocted wholly fabricated charges that Angwang was a foreign agent for the Chinese government, ginned up amidst a McCarthyite fervor that presumed that Chinese-Americans were traitors,” his lawsuit alleges.
Angwang declined comment Wednesday.
Wednesday, as Lu’s trial got underway, supporters rallied outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse Wednesday, one carrying a sign reading ‘Chinese Americans are Americans.”
In her opening statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey Oken argued that Lu “took direction from China” and was a willing participant in the Ministry for Public Service’s plan in 2022 to open “overseas police service stations” across the globe.
“The defendant returned to China, where he attended the launch ceremony for that operation,” she said.
Lu and a second man, Chen Jianping, who has since entered a guilty plea, were the leaders of a nonprofit organization founded in 2013 that described its mission as a “social gathering place for Fujianese people.”
It opened the secret police station out of its Chinatown office in early 2022, prosecutors allege, and even if the office stuck to just renewing Chinese driver’s licenses, it would still have needed to register with the U.S. Attorney General. At one point, the Chinese national police directed Lu in March 2022 to find the home of a pro-democracy advocate living in California. That dissident is expected to testify at the trial.
Lu deleted WeChat messages between him and his Chinese government handler after catching wind of an FBI investigation, but he “wasn’t careful enough to delete them everywhere,” Oken said.
Carman, in his opening defense, painted the picture of an overzealous FBI, working off an article by a non-governmental agency called “Safeguard Defenders,” raiding the alleged police station in October. Lu was charged months later, he said, for “failing to file a form, a form that I can guarantee you never heard of, a form that no one has ever heard of… and for good measure, there is a charge about a missing WeChat.”
Carman said that during a visit to China in early 2022, Lu was asked to help citizens of China’s Fujian province in the U.S. renew their driver’s licenses.
“Unfortunately, he agreed,” Carman said.