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Zhi Dong Zhang, who escaped house arrest in Mexico this summer, is accused of supplying cartels with fentanyl from China, smuggling and money laundering millions under the alias “Brother Wang.”
Oct. 23, 2025, 1:53 p.m. ET
He linked some of Mexico’s most powerful cartels with drugmaking chemicals from China, officials say, and smuggled cocaine and fentanyl across the U.S. border by land and air.
He ran stash houses packed with drugs throughout the United States, according to court documents, and laundered millions in cash using dozens of bank accounts.
And he slipped from house arrest — through a hole in the wall, one senior Mexican official said — while under the watch of Mexico’s National Guard, setting off an international manhunt that ended with the announcement this week that he had been arrested in Cuba.
The U.S. and Mexican authorities have accused the man, a Chinese national named Zhi Dong Zhang, of being a major cartel broker with aliases including “Brother Wang,” and a leader of a criminal network linking China, the Americas and Europe. His detention in Cuba was announced late Wednesday by Mexico’s Security Ministry, which said that he had been detained along with two others, a Mexican and a Chinese national.
The ministry’s statement did not name Mr. Zhang but clearly described his case — from his arrest in October 2024, when Mexican police and military forces swept into one of Mexico City’s busiest neighborhoods, to his escape from house arrest this summer.
His escape, recalling embarrassing prison breaks of notorious criminals, raised host of difficult questions for Mexican officials about security lapses and potential corruption. It also came at a particularly sensitive moment in U.S.-Mexican relations, with the Trump administration putting intense pressure on Mexico to do more against drug cartels.
Mexico has responded by delivering dozens of suspects to the United States, cracking down on a powerful cartel and tightening cooperation with U.S. officials on crime.
After his arrest last year, Mr. Zhang seemed bound for extradition to the United States, where he faces drug trafficking charges, with Mexican officials saying the extradition process was close to being finalized when he slipped out of house arrest. .
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Mr. Zhang was initially held in a maximum-security prison. But a judge then placed him under house arrest — a decision that President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico called “outrageous,” after his escape.
“How is it possible that even as the attorney general’s office appealed to the Judicial Council, stressing the importance of keeping this person in custody, the judge went ahead and granted his release?” Ms. Sheinbaum said in a news conference.
Mr. Zhang executed the escape itself by digging a hole through the wall of the house where he was being held, slipping into an adjoining residence, according to the senior Mexican official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive criminal case.
Mr. Zhang fled first to Cuba, the official said, explaining that he is then thought to have tried to enter Russia with fake documents, but was detained and sent back to Cuba.
The security ministry said that it learned he was in Cuba after international authorities were alerted about the manhunt and the Cuban and Mexican governments exchanged information.
Mexican officials say they are speaking with their Cuban counterparts about his possible deportation or extradition to Mexico.
American and Mexican officials have accused Mr. Zhang of being a major player in the drug trade, with links to Mexico’s largest cartels and operations that include drug production, smuggling and money laundering.
Mr. Zhang was “an important manager of international money laundering,” Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s security minister, said not long after his first arrest. Mr. Zhang, he said, was “also responsible for making connections between cartels for transporting fentanyl from China to Central America, South America, Europe and the United States.”
He also helped lead a drug organization that crisscrossed the United States — including in Georgia, California, Illinois and New York — according to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent’s affidavit filed in a U.S. federal court in Georgia this summer.
That filing accused him of leading a vast drug-trafficking and money-laundering network that moved cocaine and fentanyl from Mexico into several U.S. cities.
That network, court documents said, had operated in the Atlanta and Los Angeles areas since at least 2016, smuggling in large quantities of cocaine and fentanyl for distribution across the United States and channeling the profits back to Mexico.
Mr. Zhang coordinated the smuggling and oversaw the distribution, the court documents said, managing stash houses where cash proceeds were collected, counted, and deposited into U.S. bank accounts he controlled.
An investigation found about 150 companies and 170 bank accounts connected to Mr. Zhang’s organization, the court documents said, with about $20 million deposited in accounts it controlled in 2020 and 2021.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
