Jailed meth-smuggler’s plea: pain’ ‘No-one knows my
He was convicted in New Zealand’s biggest-ever meth trial. But after 13 years in prison, exhaustive attempts at clearing his name and a return to China, Guowei Deng says he lives to prove his innocence. Steve Kilgallon and Lucy Xia report.
For Guowei Deng, jail was a particularly solitary experience. For years, he believes he was the only Chinese inmate at Paremoremo, the high-security prison near Auckland. The only English language he had was picked up from fellow convicts he worked alongside in the laundry, factory, and kitchen, where he liked cooking them Chinese food.
His lawyers say Deng’s mental health deteriorated while incarcerated. In a translated submission to the Parole Board from 2016, the former restaurateur and shoe salesman put it more lyrically: “During this 10-year period, the most profound experience is inconstancy, unpredictability of human heart, friends who misled me. I often feel lonely and defeated in my prison cell . . . The most painful is the thought of the suffering of my loved ones.”
In particular, he meant the son he had never met. Junjian was born three weeks after Deng was arrested in May 2006 for his part in what was then New Zealand’s biggest meth-smuggling operation.
Junjian also wrote to the Parole Board in 2016, (although he may have been too young at the time to know the purpose of the letter) saying of his classmates: “Their fathers send them to school, and take them out to play, and buy them fun toys. Their fathers are their heroes, but my father is only a dial-a-father.”
It was an unsuccessful plea. Deng remained in jail, partly because he was steadfast in claiming his innocence.
“I’ve never had a day of good mood since entering prison,” he says now, in his first interview since he was freed. “I’ve always felt the injustice towards me was weighing me down.”
Released and deported in 2019 after 13 years in jail, Deng met his son for the first time – and discovered the girlfriend who had said she would wait for him had met and married someone else.
Deng is now working as a real estate agent in Guangzhou, and adapting to the rapid societal changes in China since his imprisonment.
He’s also making a final plea to clear his name to the newly-formed Criminal Cases Review Commission – assisted by Jinyue ‘‘Paul’’ Yang, a struck-off lawyer who converted Deng to Christianity while he was in prison. Deng says he’s desperate to clear his name. “No-one knows what the pain is that I have suffered for more than a decade.”
Yang has also written to Ang Lee suggesting the Oscar-winning director make a movie of Deng’s life story.
Perhaps the opening scene of Lee’s blockbuster would be the moment when police and Customs worked out how the methamphetamine was arriving into New Zealand. The newly-formed Isaac International Trade Ltd had imported a thousand tins of green paint and sacks of cement powder. The cement contained 154kg of pseudoephedrine granules – a precursor for meth. Meanwhile, encased in resin and sunk to the bottom of the paint tins, were 96 one-kilogram bags of 79 per cent pure methamphetamine.
Police, suspicious of drips of paint on the sides of the tins, figured it out when they shoved sticks inside and realised they weren’t touching the bottom.
At the time, it was New Zealand’s biggest ever bust: with a street value of $138 million, there was enough meth for one in four New Zealanders to have a standard dose.
Now-retired Detective Inspector Bruce Good, the former head of organised crime investigations in Auckland, handled a lot of drugs cases but he remembers ‘‘Operation Major’’ because it demonstrated the size of our P problem.
‘‘It opened a few people’s eyes in the senior parts of the police,’’ he says.
‘‘We had been saying there is a problem here . . . it gave my hierarchy a bit of a sense of [the size of the problem] – but none of us [his team] were particularly surprised by it.’’
Good reckoned there were three other syndicates operating at the same time using similar methods. ‘‘The way you bring it in is up to the imagination of the offenders. And that one had us stumped for a while. We knew the drugs were there, we just couldn’t find them for a while.’’
It was not the gang’s first rodeo. Police said it was a sophisticated operation. At first, the group used a company called Polymer Technology, which purported to import rubber surfacing for sports courts, and brought in five shipments between January 2005 and May 2006. A jury later accepted these were drug importations.
The Crown argued that when Polymer Technology’s December 2005 shipment was searched – albeit unsuccessfully – by Customs, the gang changed the company name and some personnel, but kept the same MO.
Deng wasn’t charged in relation to the Polymer importations, but he was for what police argued was a crucial role in the ‘‘Isaac Shipment’’.
Once aware, Customs allowed that shipment to arrive at Isaac’s storage unit. When theology student and aspiring Presbyterian minister Kai Lok ‘‘Billy’’ Fung – the company’s sole shareholder – arrived to collect the drugs, they arrested him. ‘‘They put up some stupid little idiot as the ‘catcher’, and you get him,’’ says Good, ‘‘but you want to get into the main people.’’
Fung agreed to help execute a sting operation. So police loaded 20kg of a placebo powder, and 50g of real meth, into Fung’s hired Toyota Corolla, and left it in the St Luke’s shopping mall car park.
And that’s where Guowei Deng came into the story.
Guowei Deng wasn’t at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 3 and 4 1989, when troops and tanks brutally suppressed peaceful pro-democracy protests. He owned a shoe shop in Guangzhou, some 2000km away, but a year later, he says, he gave water to students participating in so-called ‘‘ripple protests’’.
Although police never investigated him, he says he worried for his safety when he saw them questioning neighbouring shopkeepers.
So when Deng came to New Zealand in May 1991, he claimed asylum on the grounds that he was liable to persecution.
A Chinese New Zealander who worked in Beijing in 1989 and supported the democracy movement says it wasn’t difficult for people who were sympathetic to the protests, but had little real involvement, to use them to secure refugee status in Western countries in the early 1990s.
Initially, Deng was denied refugee status, but won on appeal and by December 1997, had gained residency. Convictions on 11 charges for minor fraud offending prevented him from turning that into citizenship.
These were, Deng says, ‘‘hard years’’. He worked in restaurants in Rotorua and Auckland before opening his own noodle shop in Auckland’s K Rd, and had his first son, Ivan.
Then Deng began to travel back and forth, making 22 return trips to Hong Kong and China between 1998 and 2006. After the Chinese consul confirmed he was ‘‘not a person of interest’’ for the authorities, he also received two Chinese passports.
In the three years before his arrest, he made only two short ‘‘business’’ trips to New Zealand, instead spending time in Guangzhou and Chong Qing, where he had restaurant interests, was caring for his terminally-ill mother, and had formed a relationship with Na Yang, the mother of his future second child.
Yang was two weeks from her due date when Deng, then 43 years old, flew back into Auckland on May 21, 2006, he says to see Ivan, arrange milk powder deliveries back to China for his future son, and to oversee operations at his new restaurant, Flower City.
Deng told the Sunday Star-Times he dropped his bags at home in Avondale, West Auckland, then went to his friend Fan Li’s house on Kohimarama Rd, St Heliers. His purpose was to repay about $3000 he said Fan loaned him to buy a new station wagon.
The men had met four years earlier when Fan, recently out of jail, had asked for a job at Flower City. Instead, Deng paid him to be his interpreter, but said he knew nothing of his involvement in drugs. He says he knew none of the other five Operation Major defendants.
After arriving at Fan’s, Deng says jetlag overcame him and he fell asleep on the couch. Next morning, he says, Fan agreed to drive him home. But then Billy Fung phoned up telling him about the car at the mall. Deng wasn’t surprised by this – Fan was a car dealer.
CCTV footage showed Fan park up at St Luke’s and retrieve the Corolla’s keys from the wheel arch while Deng lingered in the background. Deng says he then wandered off to look at baby formula, before returning to Kohimarama Rd in the Corolla with Fan.
Police and Customs followed.
As Deng’s advocate, Paul Yang, puts it, he was ‘‘sitting on Fan’s sofa puzzling what had happened’’ when the cops kicked the door in.
They found the placebo bags opened, a money counter, scales, $60,000 in cash, several loaded guns, fake passports and multiple cellphones. Guowei Deng wouldn’t be a free man for another 13 years.
Deng always claimed he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or as Yang puts it: ‘‘The vague coincidence of timing is not evidence.’’ But he’s always struggled to convince anyone that was the case.
Deng has a laundry list of complaints he says adds up to a miscarriage of justice that shouldn’t have happened in a ‘‘developed and civilised country’’.
He’s upset that potentially-favourable defence witnesses weren’t called – a car dealer who could help explain his fateful visit to Fan’s house, or a travel agent, who would say she had predetermined his travel back to New Zealand (to counter the suspicious fact he’d returned a day before the drugs arrived).
He also regrets not giving evidence in his own defence, and that the first trial was allowed to continue once the jury dropped to nine jurors. He feels those nine pre-judged him: ‘‘They didn’t want to look at us in the dock’’. When he got to appeal, he’s upset that a Chinese translator supplied by the court allegedly fell asleep on the opening day, and didn’t front for the second.
His counsel, David Young, was also absent on day two, with another lawyer, veteran criminal specialist Marie Dyhrberg, covering (Young, who had prior commitments, says that essentially all Deng’s business was concluded on day one, with the other defendants heard on day two). He’s also deeply dissatisfied with Josiah Wong, a Cantonesespeaking Auckland criminal lawyer who was his junior counsel at both trials, fostering a deep hatred of Wong which drove him to write an abusive letter about Wong to Prime Minister John Key in 2011.
Wong declined to comment.
In the years since his conviction, Deng has cycled through some of New Zealand’s most reputable criminal lawyers. But his biggest supporter has been Jinyue Yang, who became involved when Deng’s brother saw his advertisement in a Chinese Christian newspaper.
Yang says he visited Deng a dozen times in prison, but they spoke daily on the phone. Yang is serving a second lengthy ban from the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal for ‘‘unprofessional, negligent and incompetent’’ behaviour. He protests his innocence, but says he has no desire to regain his licence and is instead acting as a workers’ advocate – and pursuing Deng’s innocence.
He says the case against Deng is entirely circumstantial. ‘‘I know all the details, but I think the most convincing is when he applied for parole, he still insists on his innocence,’’ he says. ‘‘I judge from the way he speaks, and he is adamant, always [of his innocence].’’
The biggest issue for Deng’s ‘wrong place, wrong time’ defence was the evidence of policeman Mike Beal, first through the door in the Kohimarama Rd raid. Beal gave evidence he saw Deng on the sofa, trying to call ‘Raymond’, the Chinese-based mastermind of the plot (Raymond was never caught). When the other police arrived, three phones were beside Deng on the couch.
One had been used multiple times to call Raymond on May 21 and May 22; another had Raymond as its first contact, but without the Chinese prefix, suggesting it had always been used within China.
At trial in 2008, Deng was sentenced to 17 years’ jail. Justice Patricia Courtney said he’d played an equal role in the drugs pickup, his story about visiting Fan was implausible, and there was ‘‘no prospect of you persuading the jury that you
‘‘Their fathers send them to school, and take them out to play, and buy them fun toys. Their fathers are their heroes, but my father is only a diala-father.’’ 2016 letter to the Parole Board from Guowei Deng’s son Junjian
happened to be in a house with opened bags of methamphetamine for innocent purposes’’.
Fan received 19 years and six months, Fung got 15 years, later reduced to five. The two masterminds, Chen Ming Chan and Pan Weifeng, received unprecedented life sentences. Bruce Good says that was Operation Major’s success: ‘‘It was significant how people got significant sentences – it showed where we, and the courts, thought they stood as players.’’
Some defendants, including Deng, went to appeal in 2009 – as did the solicitor-general, who sought tougher sentences. The court reaffirmed Chen and Pan’s life terms – and Fan and Deng’s sentences rose to 25 years. The appeal court shared Courtney’s view that the evidence against Deng was ‘‘overwhelming’’.
Deng tried to recall that decision by pointing to the failure to call witnesses and the interpretation issues, but was rejected. Similar arguments put before the Supreme Court in 2013 for leave to make a fresh appeal were also declined, as was an alternate argument that his sentence was manifestly excessive as he wasn’t a ‘‘crucial player’’ in the scheme. The court said there was no miscarriage of justice nor public interest in ordering a re-trial.
That left Deng serving time in Paremoremo, where reports described him as a generally compliant and ‘‘always respectful’’ prisoner. His poor language skills prevented him enrolling in the rehabilitative courses which would have aided parole, but he admits reluctance to attend anyway for fear it would be considered an admission of guilt. Despite saying he was well-treated, he suffered growing paranoia that the Government would kill him to stop the ‘‘truth’’ emerging about his miscarriage of justice. At one stage, he wrote to the Immigration Protection Tribunal asking them to guarantee his safety.
One day, he ran into Fan Li, who, he claims, apologised for everything and said he’d told police Deng wasn’t involved in the importations.
But Deng repeatedly failed to convince the Parole Board he wouldn’t become embroiled in drugs again. Each time he went before them, he assembled testimony from his family that a lawabiding life awaited in China. In 2016, he said he wanted to return to ‘‘fulfil his duty as a father’’, promising he’d matured and would return to the restaurant trade. ‘‘I hope the Parole Board will be considerate, there are not many decades in one’s lifespan. I long to return to society, to spend my old age.’’
As well as little Junjian’s letter, Deng’s sister, his girlfriend and her parents also wrote to the Parole Board. But despite hearing he had a low chance of reoffending, the board said it wasn’t satisfied he’d cut ties to the underworld.
Parole was denied, as were two 2017 requests for re-hearings, and another parole application in May 2018, when girlfriend Na Yang’s mother, Wu Xuhui, wrote to the board that Deng had paid for his mistakes and learned a ‘‘profound lesson’’. ‘‘Being his grandmother, I struggle to rationalise a 12-year-long cover-up story in the face of the child’s pure affection and his innocent eyes . . . when Guowei makes his daily phone call, we could still see his deep longing for his son, and his selfreproach in the same breath.’’ This time, she promised Deng would live with her daughter and work in a restaurant, and she had already enrolled him in a pastry chef’s course.
But Judge Charles Blackie said Deng ‘‘clearly remains an undue risk’’.
Deng was also pursuing another path to freedom: deportation to China. To achieve that, he applied under Article 1 of the Refugee Convention to voluntarily rescind his refugee status; the Immigration Protection Tribunal agreed and terminated his refugee status in May 2017. It was, says Yang, a ‘‘very rare’’ move, ‘‘but he has no choice, it is like a lock on him and he has to release it’’.
That August, Immigration NZ served him a deportation liability notice and a deportation order on the same day, with Deng waiving any appeal.
INZ general manager Steve Vaughan says Deng’s belief that his department delayed his deportation by two years is wrong: INZ had to wait for his refugee status to be cancelled, and for his release.
And early release was in the hands of successive, unsympathetic immigration ministers. Yang, his ardent supporter, wrote several times to successive ministers, Michael Woodhouse (National) and Iain Lees-Galloway (Labour) and to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, asking for Deng to be sent home.
He told Woodhouse about the offer to director Ang Lee, and that Deng had discovered God. ‘‘He is very sure that God will open a door for him to go home. He is willing to forgive those who made him into prison . . . we pray with tears that God will touch the heart of Hon Woodhouse to deport Mr Deng in the near future.’’
Finally, Deng secured parole. His latest and last lawyer, Michael Kan, says his struggle to learn English hadn’t helped him and he’d begun to mentally deteriorate. That consistent family support and a good psychological assessment (which Deng himself paid for) tipped the balance. Deng, he says, was ‘‘thrilled’’. He was put on a plane to China on March 21, 2019.
‘‘I know all the details, but I think the most convincing is when he applied for parole, he still insists on his innocence. I judge from the way he speaks, and he is adamant, always.’’ Jinyue ‘‘Paul’’ Yang
While Deng learned on his return to China that Na Yang had met and married someone else, he says Yang and her family remain supportive and believe in his innocence. She lives in Chongqing, 1200km away from his home in Guangzhou, but Junjian, now 12, visits regularly. This, Deng says, is a family broken by a miscarriage of justice, with two sons who grew up without a father, one of whom he rarely sees.
Former policeman Bruce Good is unperturbed by Deng’s decision to pursue a review by the newly-formed Criminal Cases Review Commission. ‘‘I don’t know what the point is. It’s pushing it uphill, as far as I am concerned, but he is entitled to do that. We have nothing to worry about . . . it’s been through the courts and it’s been tested.’’
The commission says it completes a full ‘‘due diligence’’ review before a commissioner makes a decision on whether to proceed with a case. Documents are still being gathered in Deng’s case.
He has little optimism the commission will clear his name. ‘‘I strongly hope they can investigate (this case) . . . I am willing to be investigated.’’
In October, Yang even wrote to the UN Human Rights commissioner in Geneva asking the commission to intervene.
Overturning his conviction is now Guowei Deng’s priority in life. ‘‘For each day that I am alive, I just want to bring down Josiah Wong and expose the truth . . . there’s nothing else that I’d live for,’’ he says. ‘‘I have no interest in anything other than that.’’