The lives of the two Chinese brothers and their female companion seem as puzzling as the international kidnapping scheme for which they have been indicted.
Carl F. Zhang, 31, of Hoffman Estates, was an aspiring aerospace engineer who impressed his thesis adviser at Notre Dame with his brilliance and later earned a master’s degree after writing a thesis on “Sound Radiated from a Thin Air Foil at Supersonic Speed.”
His younger brother, John, 24, also of Hoffman Estates, took a single physical education course at a small Indiana college, and was an apparent bold trickster who once secured a Wisconsin driver’s license by using an address to a Racine strip mall that included the state licensing facility itself.
And Mary Wang of Schaumburg, the other 30-year-old Chinese national who was married to, but separated from, Carl Zhang, was always the go-between: She allegedly lured Chinese businessman Zhou Xing Ping to the Zhang brothers and an unidentifed Chinese man who carried out the alleged kidnapping plot.
Just as odd as this family trio of alleged kidnappers was the motive behind the abduction of the silk garment manufacturer from Chengdu.
Zhou, who owed two Chinese banks what sources said is about $1 million, was told by his kidnappers that he was a jing ji fan, or economic criminal, wanted by his country, and the Zhou brothers and Wang were among 20 other nationals on a government mission to aprehend “economic fugitives” in the U.S. and bring them back to China.
On Tuesday, Carl and John Zhang will be arraigned on charges of kidnapping and extortion in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, where the kidnapping occurred last October.
The three Chinese nationals were indicted June 24. Wang is still being sought by authorities, who believe she has returned to China.
This trans-Pacific intrigue has all the makings of an espionage tale worthy of Robert Ludlum, but how much of the kidnappers’ claims are fact is still being sorted out by federal authorities.
Wang met Zhou last year when he asked her to represent his silk garment line in the United States. Authorities allege that Wang trailed Zhou cross-country, meeting up with him at a Los Angeles motel on Oct. 13 and delivering him into the hands of kidnappers.
Zhou said he was handcuffed, beaten, robbed and interrogated for two days before his abductors, claiming to be Chinese agents, tried to put him on a plane for China. He escaped at the Los Angeles International Airport.
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles say they are more concerned with proving the crimes than the link between the Chinese government and the kidnappers.
Still, questions arise: Were the kidnappers indeed agents of the Chinese government? Or were they just a ring of extortionists?
The Chinese consul in Chicago expressed disbelief at the kidnappers’ claims and has said that his government would be “stupid” to try to stage such a kidnapping.
But some analysts of China are not so quick to discount the claims, considering that a number of governments, including the United States and Israel, have been caught executing abduction plots in foreign lands.
Brett Lippencott, a China analyst for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., said such a kidnapping scheme would not be too unlikely for lower-level government officials in the provinces to concoct, where the Communist government control is not as strong as it is in the capital.
The scheme, Lippencott added, seems far-fetched for Beijing to sponsor, saying it could touch off an international controversy if true.
“It would be someone in a local area saying, `I’m getting pressure to pull back some loans, I’ve lent out too many and I know this guy is in the United States. I may lose my job and my Mercedes. Let’s get him back so that we can say we cracked down on loans,’ ” Lippencott said.
Nicholas Eftimiades, who in March wrote a book called “Chinese Intelligence Operations” that’s regarded as the first scholarly work on Chinese espionage, said government-backed kidnappings have been common in Hong Kong.
But, he added, “It’s quite of leap to do it in someplace like the United States.”
While he doubted that Chinese intelligence would be directly involved in such a kidnapping here, it’s plausible for intelligence officers to hire an intermediary to mastermind the kidnapping, putting distance between them and the crime so that they can deny involvement, said Eftimiades, who is an analyst for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
“It’s no secret that the PRC (Peoples Republic of China) takes economic crimes very seriously,” Eftimiades said. “You can take a look at the number of executions done every year in China (for economic crimes). As the opening of China is occurring and more money is coming in and the economic wheels are spinning faster and faster, corruption is become more pervasive.”
There seems to be little in the background of Carl Zhang, his wife, Mary Wang, and his brother, John, that would indicate that they were agents of the Chinese government.
Of the three, Carl Zhang came to the United States first, in August 1988, and began studying aerospace engineering at Notre Dame. Zhang, who is now a permanent resident, obtained his master’s degree in 1990. Wang joined him in the United States in July 1989.
Notre Dame professor Hafiz Atassi, Zhang’s thesis adviser, recalled Zhang as an “intelligent, naturally gifted” student.
“But his focus was not on academic issues,” Atassi said.
Indeed, Zhang was known on campus for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government’s massacre of hundreds of students and workers seeking democratic reforms in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
“He took a very active part in the Chinese movement,” Atassi said. “I wish he was a bit more focused on what he wanted to be.”
At his removal hearing in U.S. District Court in Chicago on June 15, Zhang had three acquaintances-a physician, a lawyer and an Argonne National Laboratory research scientist-who each offered to put up their homes as collateral for Zhang to be released on bond, said Michael Login, Zhang’s court-appointed attorney. The magistrate, however, ordered Zhang and his brother to be held without bond and transported to Los Angeles.
In October 1990, John Zhang arrived in the United States on a visa to study at Bethel College in Mishawaka, Ind., about 4 miles from his brother’s alma mater.
John Zhang was not the student his brother was. The younger brother took one course, a physical education class in softball that lasted 8 weeks and never returned to the college.
“No one here remembers him,” said Dennis Englebrecht, vice president of academic and student development.
In August 1993, John Zhang secured a driver’s license in Wisconsin and he listed the Racine address of 4801 Washington Ave. as his residence, according to court documents. That address belonged to Shopko Plaza and Westgate Mall, which houses a state drivers’ licensing office, documents said.
When John Zhang secured an Illinois drivers’ license in 1992, he claimed to live in a West Dundee residence, but Marj Jefferson, a manager of the West Dundee apartment complex, said the only Asian to live in the complex that year had a different name.
While Carl Zhang, his wife and his brother had been living in the Chicago area, they changed addresses frequently, especially in the Hoffman Estates and Schaumburg area along Golf Road.
FBI agents arrested the Zhangs at the younger brother’s Hoffman Estates apartment, where he was renting a $549 a month one-bedroom unit under the surname of “Nguyen” and had told manager Joe Tomasich that he was Vietnamese.
Wang’s last address, according to court records, was a Schaumburg apartment about a mile away from the Zhangs’, where she also maintained her marketing business for imports late last year.
