“Caixin Online: Chinese coal mines turn up gangster connection”

Caixin Online: Chinese coal mines turn up gangster connection

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 05:10 PM PDT

By Luo Jieqi, Caixin Online

BEIJING (Caixin Online) -- Zhang Xihua left most of her relatives in the dark when she suddenly and secretly married Han Junhong, an apartment security guard eight years her younger, and convinced him to quit his job.

Equally mysterious was Zhang's sudden decision to divorce the father of her two children before running off with Han.

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But according to prosecutors, Zhang had at least one confidante who knew in advance why and how she would dump one husband and marry another. She had confided in a distant relative, Communist Party member and textile-factory owner named Huang Yucai.

Prosecutors say Huang, 51, not only persuaded Zhang, 46, to divorce and marry Han, but he also convinced her to kill him in the shaft of an illegal coal mine near Beijing as part of an elaborate, but apparently not so unusual, extortion plot.

Details of the plot came to light about a year after Han's death when Zhang, Huang, and a pair of miners -- Huang Xianzhong and Shi Xuesong -- were tried July 12 for murder and extortion in Beijing's First Intermediate Court.

Prosecutors said the four conspired to extort an unknown amount of money from the owner of the mine where Han died by threatening to report his illegal operation to authorities. The crime was particularly diabolical because the conspirators killed Han, prosecutors said, in a way that made the death appear accidental.

Moreover, investigators say, the three men were experienced in the dirty craft of murder-extortion plots at Beijing-area coal mines.

Defense statements in court cited Huang as the brains of the operation: He was responsible for selecting victims and then personally demanding payoffs from mine owners. Shi, 40, was in charge of finding suitable shafts at illegal mines for dumping bodies. And the actual killer was Huang Xianzhong, a 41-year-old nephew of the ringleader.

The gang's first victim was a mentally disabled man: Huang's 57-year-old brother-in-law Tong Yanfu. He died in June 2007 in an illegal coal mine in Beijing municipality's Fangshan District.

To keep Tong's death under wraps, the mine owner paid the full 330,000 yuan ($48,700) demanded by the extortionists on behalf of the dead man's family. In turn, the gang received 120,000 yuan from Tong's family -- 40,000 yuan for Huang, and the rest for his conspirators -- by claiming they needed money to get help from organized crime figures.

Two months later, Huang arranged for the death of another relative, this time in an illegal mine in Beijing's Mentougou District. The killing of 54-year-old Zhang Xiuyun, a cousin with bad hearing, was the ticket to a 190,000 yuan payoff from the mine owner to the victim's family. The gang's cut was 60,000 yuan.

Life imitates art

For fans of Chinese film director Li Yang, the crimes followed a familiar script. In his 2002 film "Blind Shaft," an extortion plot targets a coal mine boss who, in exchange for their silence, pays off a pair of mine workers who murdered a coworker and masked the death as an accident.

In the movie, the killers and victims were strangers. Huang, however, not only knew the victims but was their kin. Indeed, all the actors in Huang's plot were from the Chengde area of Hebei Province, just north of Beijing, and most knew each other.

The film's storyline is built around the uniquely Chinese phenomenon of what are commonly called "illegal" coal mines. These include underground mines of various sizes that operate secretly and without business licenses, often in remote areas, and require collusion between mine bosses and local government officials.

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