The killings were grisly confirmation, Oklahoma officials say, of a growing threat in the state: marijuana farms illegally run by out-of-state and foreign entities that manage to circumvent state and federal law.

Moreover, the state’s narcotics agency says it is seeing a rising number of Chinese nationals owning and operating these facilities.

And while the gruesome slayings have shaken Asian-Americans across the country, community leaders say many young and desperate Chinese in cities like New York are lured to Oklahoma by the promise of quick money.

Over the last 2 ½ years, according to Mark Woodward, public information officer for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics (OBN), “close to 80 per cent of the 200 or so farms we have shut down [were] either run or owned by Chinese nationals or were linked to a Chinese criminal organisation”.

More than half of the 165 arrests involved in those cases, he added, “were tied to China”.

Currently, 21 states in the US, along with Washington DC and Guam, have legalised the recreational use of marijuana; 37 states have legal medical marijuana programmes – including Oklahoma. In March, Oklahomans will vote on whether to legalise recreational use.

So why is Oklahoma a destination for marijuana growers? “Cheap licences, cheap land and liberal laws in terms of fewer restrictions on the size of the farm have made Oklahoma very attractive,” Woodward said.

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In 2018, Oklahoma allowed its residents to obtain permits to legally grow an uncapped amount of cannabis for medical purposes and sell the produce to licensed dispensaries. The law requires 75 per cent of each business to be owned by a resident who has lived in the state for at least two years.

A grower’s license costs a one-time payment of US$2,500, with an annual renewal fee of US$2,000. In neighbouring Arkansas a similar annual permit costs about US$100,000.

Cannabis can be grown for as little as US$100 a pound in Oklahoma, and sold for US$3,500 to US$4,000 a pound in California or New York in the black market or street sales. Oklahoma’s narcotics agency says it has seized more than 600,000 pounds of cannabis worth millions of dollars since 2020.

“This is going out of the state and in truckloads,” Woodward said of the crop.

“We have intercepted wire transfers for several million dollars that are going to places like Mexico or China that are tied to the groups we were investigating for illegal marijuana on the black market,” he added.

According to OBN Executive Director Don Anderson, many criminal organisations – national and international – have migrated to the state to exploit the law: “We have hundreds of cases going on as we speak.”

John O’Connor, who just stepped down as Oklahoma’s attorney general, said that more than 80 per cent of the marijuana grown in the state is exported illegally.

Oklahoma, he said, was the No 1 supplier of marijuana in the US: “That gives you an idea of the scope of the problem.”

As of July 2022, Oklahoma had 7,348 growers, 2,286 dispensaries and 1,433 processors, according to the state’s Marijuana Authority. In August, to curb illicit operations, the state imposed a two-year moratorium on new medical marijuana grower, processing and dispensary licenses.

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In the Hennessey case, court documents contend that Wu had been involved in “an illegal industrial-scale marijuana grow operation” in Oklahoma.

The farm was run by “Liu & Chen Inc”; prosecutors say it obtained its license to grow marijuana fraudulently by listing an Oklahoma resident, Richard Ignacio, as a major stakeholder in the business a year before the murders.

Kingfisher County Sheriff Dennis Banther told local reporters that the deed listed Yi Fei Lin and one of the male murder victims as the farm’s owners.

In an affidavit filed in District Court of Kingfisher County, Assistant District Attorney Austin Murrey said that Wu had demanded US$300,000 from the employees at the farm “as a return of a portion of his investment” in the business.

“The fact that it could not be handed over on a moment’s notice is what precipitated the mass murder,” Murrey said.

Medical reports of Lin Quirong and Chen He Chun released by the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner concludes multiple gun shots as the probable cause of their deaths.

The report lists their home addresses in New York City. Chen He Chun, which the report reveals was 60, was related to Chen He Qiang, and Fang Hui Lee. Medical summaries for the other two dead are still pending.

John Chan, president of the Asian-American Community Empowerment, a Brooklyn-based Chinese-American group, said that the 44-year-old Quirong, a native of a village near Fuzhou City in Fujian province, had come to the US in 2020; he lived in New York for two years before moving to Oklahoma two months before the killings because he couldn’t find a stable, well-paying job in the city.

“He had nothing to do with the money dispute. He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Chan said. The organisation is now assisting Quirong’s wife in getting a US visa for his funeral.

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While no official data is available, Chan estimated that around 20,000 people from Brooklyn alone had moved to states like Oklahoma in the past two years, drawn by the prospect of earning US$300 a day.

“So many people have left that there’s difficult to find anyone to work in restaurants,” he said. Hardly anyone gets those promised wages on the farms, he added.

Woodward said that certain law firms and brokers have “recruited all over the United States, oftentimes on websites, saying, ‘Come to Oklahoma, you can make a lot of money with growing marijuana, and we will help you get a license for a fee.’”

Woodward also confirmed the workers’ poor living conditions. “We have often come across conditions that we believe would qualify for labour trafficking,” he said, including living outdoors, often without proper sanitation and enough food.

But, Woodward noted, such workers “typically never complain” – either out of desperation to find employment or fear of retaliation by the drug lords.

“At the end of the day, they’re typically let go. And you will see them either getting in vehicles or walking up the road to try to get work at another one of the marijuana farms that are usually not that far away.”

Chan hoped the murders would dissuade community members from joining the business. “Weed is still an illegal drug in China,” he said, adding that such events risk further stereotyping of Asians in the US.

But John Duncan, a former OBN agent who now teaches at the University of Oklahoma, said that the state’s Chinese community has always had a good reputation. “Their culture is more non-violent. You don’t see on the streets a lot of Chinese criminals running around”.

He said that most people who ended up in the business entered the US illegally and didn’t have the means to enter the society other than working on the farms, which made them vulnerable: “A lot of migrants over here are taken advantage of and, basically, not much different from slave labour, in some ways.”

03:17

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Without commenting on the case, Liu Pengyu, the Chinese embassy spokesperson in Washington, said the embassy was in touch in Quirong’s family and that it would “urge the US side to facilitate relevant visas based on humanitarian principles”.

A community news portal on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media application that caters to the US Chinese community, noted that the murders had alerted people of the dangers involved and that it would “more or less” affect their willingness to work in the weed industry.

A report on the WeChat portal just two days after the murders said that such farms rely on local networks of friends and family for labour, recruiting from Chinese and Mexican communities in Los Angeles and New York. Sometimes advertisements are also posted on WeChat.

The report quoted people in the Brooklyn who knew people who had sought work at these farms, despite the risks. One, identified as Mr Wang, was quoted as saying “Life is the most important thing”.