Federal and state authorities in rural Oklahoma on Wednesday raided a sprawling marijuana farm there, seizing more than 1,200 pounds of processed cannabis and arresting the owner, a member of a New York City heritage club with ties to the Chinese government.
The owner, Sin Tung Chan, 76, whose links to the club and the cannabis operation were detailed in a New York Times investigation in December, was charged with trafficking marijuana, according to the local sheriff’s office.
In New York, Mr. Chan, a naturalized United States citizen who was born in China, was a prominent member of the American Fuzhou Langqi Alumni Association, one of hundreds of clubs that were ostensibly formed to connect people from the same parts of China but that often maintain close ties to Beijing.
The groups have become useful tools of China’s government to undermine American politicians who oppose its authoritarian policies, The Times previously reported. And nearly a dozen high-ranking members of New York hometown associations have run or owned marijuana farms in Oklahoma in the past several years.
Mark Woodward, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control, which oversaw the raid, said investigators had determined that the marijuana from Mr. Chan’s farm was being illegally trafficked out of state. It was not clear where the cannabis was being routed, he said, but New York has been a top destination for illicit marijuana.
“That common thread that has just been repeated so many times over the last five years is Oklahoma-grown marijuana, coming off a farm, and being trafficked to Flushing, New York,” Mr. Woodward said, referring to the neighborhood in Queens. “We don’t really have a lot of details of what happens once it gets to Flushing.”
Mr. Woodward said the authorities would keep investigating to “figure out who else is involved in moving the plants, moving the money, moving the workers at these farms.” He said that Mr. Chan “obviously is a big player, but this is certainly not a one-man operation.”
Mr. Chan declined to comment when reached by phone. But he spoke at length last year about the increasing scrutiny from law enforcement authorities.
“You can’t sell this stuff now,” he told The Times then. “With all this investment, it would be a shame to just abandon it.”
In 2023, Oklahoma’s attorney general estimated that 40 percent of the cannabis consumed in New York came from his state.
Mr. Chan owns two large marijuana farms in the rural area between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The one raided this week by officers from the Oklahoma narcotics bureau and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is called Purple Ray L.L.C. It sits off a dirt road and is surrounded by a high fence.
Two weeks before the raid, the state’s regulatory inspectors shut down the farm’s operations after they said they had found that the marijuana was improperly stored or missing the state-required tracking tags.
Before buying into the two Oklahoma marijuana farms in 2021, Mr. Chan was a senior member of his hometown association, which is made up of people from an island on the mouth of the Min River in southeastern China’s Fujian Province.
He appeared at an event for the association in Brooklyn in 2019 that included a Chinese consular official and featured a rendition of the patriotic ballad “Ode to the Motherland” sung by three men dressed in Chinese Army uniforms, who saluted the Chinese flag.
Another member of that hometown association is John Chan, known among New York’s Chinese diaspora as the “King of Brooklyn,” a former Chinatown gangster who, after being released from federal prison, parlayed his close ties to the Chinese Consulate to become a political power broker, The Times reported.
Sin Tung Chan said in an interview last year that the two were both from Langqi, but that they were not related. Sin Tung Chan spent years in a prison in upstate New York after being convicted of crimes stemming from threats to business rivals, one of whom was assaulted during an attempted kidnapping in 1995.
“Everyone running weed farms tries to find loopholes,” said Mr. Chan. “If they catch you, you’re in trouble.”
Although it is legal to grow and consume marijuana with the proper licenses in Oklahoma, the state’s hands-off approach to cultivation has made it a haven for black market growers who smuggle the cannabis out of state, officials there said.
According to the state narcotics bureau, 8,400 farms were registered and operating as of late 2022. Today that number stands at fewer than 1,400 farms. Mr. Woodward said the agency was investigating at least half of them for suspected illegal activities.
“We’re hitting a farm almost every day, and so I guess they just assume they’re going to keep being criminals until somebody comes through their gate,” he said, adding: “We’ll get to them eventually.”
Liu Yi contributed reporting.
Jay Root is an investigative reporter for The Times based in Albany, N.Y., covering the people and events influencing — and influenced by — state and local government.
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