University of Florida employee, students implicated in plot to ship drugs, toxins to China
2024.5.28

A University of Florida research employee and students have been implicated in an illegal, multi-million dollar scheme investigated by the Justice Department to fraudulently buy thousands of biochemical samples of dangerous drugs and toxins that were delivered to a campus laboratory then illicitly shipped to China over seven years, according to federal court records.

Among the students tied to the scheme was the president of UF’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association. The group openly protested a Florida law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year that limits universities from recruiting students and faculty from China — and bans employing such students from working in academic labs without special permission.

That student, Nongnong “Leticia” Zheng, confirmed Friday in an interview that a federal prosecutor notified her last year in writing she was the target of a grand jury investigation, and the Justice Department was preparing to seek criminal charges against her. She said she has been assigned a federal public defender, Ryan Maguire of Tampa. She said government agents have threatened to imprison or deport her.

The university on Saturday banned Zheng from its property for three years.

It wasn’t otherwise clear whether the UF research employee or other students — identified in court records as co-conspirators — have been charged or arrested yet. The UF employee worked in the stockroom of one of the university’s research labs, prosecutors said.

The materials smuggled to China included what the government described as purified, non-contagious proteins of the cholera toxin and pertussis toxin, which causes whooping cough. Cholera is a generally non-fatal intestinal infection that can cause severe dehydration. Whooping cough is a highly contagious bacterial infection that can lead to violent coughing, vomiting and even respiratory distress — but is preventable with a vaccine.

Other materials smuggled to China in the scheme included small amounts of highly purified drugs — known as analytical samples — of fentanyl, morphine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, codeine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, acetylmorphine and methadone, court records showed. Such small samples would generally be used for calibrating scientific or medical devices.

The substances can’t legally be exported to China.

Prosecutors described one student involved as a Chinese citizen majoring in marketing in the business college last year, who agreed to change her UF email signature to falsely represent that she was a biomedical engineering student to purchase items without raising suspicions, court records showed. One line across hundreds of pages of court documents in the case cited an excerpt of an email that her first name was “Leticia.”

Zheng, a senior marketing major in the business school, is president of the Chinese students and scholars group, which describes itself as officially approved by the Chinese embassy. Zheng was enrolled as recently as the spring semester that just ended, university records showed. Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, identified “Leticia” as Zheng using biographical clues in university records shared by none of the other 58,441 UF students enrolled last semester.

Zheng, who said she lived most of her life in China, said in a tearful interview Friday at her apartment complex she was deceived and victimized by the scheme’s organizers, who she said solicited help finding paid interns from the Chinese student organization. Foreign students on educational visas are limited in how or whether they can work for pay.

“This case seems to be really big,” she said. “What I was doing was, like, just a little work, and I didn’t get paid that much.”

Zheng said in hindsight, she noticed red flags such as a lack of paperwork or consistent payments for the administrative work she did. She said she wasn’t familiar with the substances she was directed to order. The man described as the scheme’s ringleader — who has pleaded guilty in the case — reassured her, and she didn’t realize she was in trouble until the Justice Department contacted her, she said.

Zheng said she hopes to be allowed to finish her degree and said she doesn’t understand how the university didn’t have policies in place to protect her.

While Zheng has now been physically banned from campus, in some cases students can still attend classes virtually. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Zheng was also being suspended because student disciplinary records are generally kept secret under a federal privacy law. She said she had been warned she faced suspension.

“I do need help, honestly,” she said, adding: “I would like to see if there’s anything that can help me not get charged and get out of this whole mess.”

Earlier this year, Zheng’s organization issued a statement calling Florida’s new law restricting Chinese students in university labs as “nationality-based discrimination” and said it violates principles of academic freedom and openness and impedes international exchanges.

The scheme’s organizers also paid UF students other than Zheng to allow use of their UF email addresses to order the substances, prosecutors said. Organizers paid the UF research employee with Home Depot gift cards worth hundreds of dollars and paid for trips and loans, court records showed. Prosecutors said organizers also used the email addresses of two UF researchers who had already left the university by 2015. They were not described as co-conspirators.

The university said in a statement that it has been cooperating with the Justice Department for weeks but declined to answer directly whether anyone has been fired or kicked out of UF.

“We will have more details to share regarding UF’s administrative actions as the DOJ’s criminal case unfolds,” spokesman Steve Orlando said. “Employees who break the law will be separated from employment, and students who break the law will face suspension.”

The scheme ran from July 2016 to May 2023, the government said.

The Chinese Students and Scholars Association’s faculty adviser, Eric Jing Du, a professor in the UF Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering, said Friday in an interview that he was unaware of the criminal investigation and that Zheng never told him she was ordering biomedical supplies.

Du — who condemned the plot described in court records — said the two have worked together in the two years he has been the group’s adviser. He separately hired her briefly in 2022 to produce some images for an academic proposal, he said.

“It’s like some UF students are trying to make a profit on this without knowing the potential consequences,” he said. Du said he’s worried investigations like this could lead to further crackdowns against international students. The new Florida law targets students from so-called countries of concern: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria.

“This is a very complicated time,” Du said.

The man who prosecutors identified as the scheme’s ringleader, Pen “Ben” Yu, 51, of Gibsonton, Florida, near Tampa, has already pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine when he is sentenced on Aug. 2.

Yu provided Zheng, the UF student, with a credit card to place dozens of fraudulent orders last year, the Justice Department said. At Yu’s direction, she wrote to the biomedical company that she was “working in collaboration with other researchers” in biotechnology and requested “a good price since we will be purchasing these items routinely,” court records showed.

After the biomedical orders arrived at UF, the research employee would bring them or otherwise provide them to Yu, who shipped them to China, prosecutors said. The UF researcher in charge of the lab – which included the stockroom where the supplies were delivered – was not described as a co-conspirator in legal filings.

“Ben, I believe I have 35 or 36 boxes for you today,” the UF research employee wrote in 2016.

Yu paid for the employee’s gasoline, $10 for every hour he drove to meet him. “I will pump the gas for you at the place where we meet,” he told the research employee, prosecutors said. Yu disguised the shipments to China as legal “diluting agents,” court records showed.

“Faking an affiliation with an academic research lab to obtain controlled biochemical materials, and then sending those materials to China, is not only wrong but illegal,” said Matthew S. Axelrod, the assistant secretary for export enforcement in the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. He said the criminal investigation should put other universities on alert.

It wasn’t clear who Yu was working for in China. In intercepted messages, the government said he referred to his superior only as his boss. Yu and his defense lawyer, Robert Earl Zlatkin of Orlando, did not immediately return a phone message.

A sales executive for Massachusetts-based Sigma-Aldrich Inc., which sold the samples, also has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Gregory Muñoz, 45, of Minneola, Florida, west of Orlando, was set to be sentenced July 23. Muñoz sold products from the company to several universities in Florida, including UF, court records said.

Yu emailed Muñoz in 2020 and said his employer needed 10 boxes of cholera toxin, which he acknowledged was a substance heavily regulated by the U.S. government.

“This is the cholera toxin,” Muñoz replied. “Remember, we had issues in the past and they require a lot of documentation signed by the university.”

Muñoz discovered in December 2022 that his employer was investigating him and warned Yu, who continued to place hundreds of new orders to ship to China in 2023, court records said. “Wow, I am really screwed now,” Muñoz wrote. “Anti-bribery, anti-kickback.”

Last year, in February, Yu emailed Muñoz and asked, “Do you still need Leticia to send you this order?” Muñoz and his lawyer, Fritz J. Scheller of Orlando, also did not immediately return a phone message.

A third person, Jonathan Rok Thyng, 47, who lived at the same address as Yu in Gibsonton, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit a federal crime and faces up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Prosecutors said Thyng ordered some of the biomedical substances and shipped some of the packages to China. He was expected to formally enter his plea June 18.

Thyng and his lawyer, Bjorn Erik Brunvand of Clearwater, also did not immediately return a phone message.

Prosecutors said U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized a shipment in April 2023 that Thyng sent from Tampa to China containing biomedical items ordered by the UF marketing student and others.

The Justice Department said orders placed through UF qualified for significant discounts — prosecutors said the scheme’s organizers paid $4.9 million for $13.7 million worth of biomedical supplies — and included free items and free overnight shipping.

Prosecutors said in court records they would recommend leniency for Yu, Muñoz and Thyng because they promised to cooperate with investigators and accepted responsibility for their crimes. Prosecutors said all are American citizens. The Justice Department asked the judge to order Yu and Muñoz each to forfeit $100,000, which it said was how much Yu and Muñoz had earned over the years.

The scheme unraveled when the company — known as MilliporeSigma, a subsidiary of Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany — discovered the ruse involving UF and reported its involvement to the U.S. government. Under new Justice Department rules, such companies that self-report export violations and cooperate can escape prosecution.

The company said in a statement Friday that it fired Muñoz and cooperated with investigators to avoid prosecution. This was the first time those rules were applied, the government said.

“Because of MilliporeSigma’s timely disclosure and exceptional cooperation, a rogue company insider and his accomplice pled guilty to fraudulently diverting millions of dollars’ worth of biochemicals to China, and the company will not be prosecuted,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in Washington.

“As national security and corporate crime increasingly intersect, companies that step up and own up under the department’s voluntary self-disclosure programs can help themselves and our nation,” she said.

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UF bans student named in Chinese smuggling probe from campus for 3 years
Prosecutors say Nongnong “Leticia” Zheng, a senior, was involved in a scheme led by a Gibsonton man. She has not been criminally charged.
May 26

GAINESVILLE – The University of Florida on Saturday banned a student from its property for three years whom the Justice Department accused of being involved in a multimillion dollar scheme to divert biomedical samples of dangerous drugs and toxins from a campus laboratory to China.

Nongnong “Leticia” Zheng, 21, a senior marketing major in the business school and president of UF’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association, has not been formally charged with any crime. She confirmed in an interview Friday that the Justice Department notified her a year ago she was a target of a grand jury investigation and could face prison or deportation.

Zheng declined Saturday to discuss UF’s decision to ban her from campus until May 2027. She referred questions to her federal public defender, Ryan Maguire of Tampa, who did not immediately respond to messages asking about the case.

The university, through a spokesperson, also declined Saturday to discuss its decision.

Zheng said she expected to graduate in May 2025. Students who are physically banned from campus can, in some cases, attend classes virtually. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Zheng was also being suspended, because student disciplinary records are generally kept secret under a federal privacy law. She said she had been warned she faced suspension.

“The charge was severe and can suspend me to study UF in the future,” she said in an interview Friday. “It can also make me deportable in this state. So, that was the only thing I was super worried about. I definitely wanted to finish my degree right now.”

UF’s spokesperson, Steve Orlando, had said Friday, “Employees who break the law will be separated from employment, and students who break the law will face suspension.” Orlando said the university had been working for weeks with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa, where the case was being investigated.

Prosecutors filed criminal charges against three men who ran the scheme two months ago —including details that implicated a UF research employee and an unspecified number of students. They said the scheme to divert the shipments started in 2016, but Zheng had been involved only since last year.

In court records, federal prosecutors cited the role of a UF student they identified only as “Leticia” who was among students paid by organizers off campus to order small amounts of highly purified drugs — known as analytical standards — including fentanyl, morphine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, codeine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, acetylmorphine and methadone. The substances were delivered to a campus laboratory, then the organizers illicitly shipped the items to China.

The materials smuggled to China also included what the government described as purified, noncontagious proteins of the cholera toxin and the pertussis toxin, which causes whooping cough.

Zheng was a marketing major at UF who agreed to change her UF email signature to falsely represent that she was a biomedical engineering student to purchase items without raising suspicions, prosecutors said. In one email, she falsely said she was “working in collaboration with other researchers” in biotechnology and requesting “a good price since we will be purchasing these items routinely,” according to court records.

Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, identified “Leticia” as Zheng on Friday using biographical clues in university records shared by none of the other 58,441 UF students enrolled last semester.

Zheng is president of the Chinese student and scholars group, which describes itself as officially approved by the Chinese embassy. The group has protested a Florida law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year that limits universities from recruiting students and faculty from China — and bans employing such students from working in academic labs without special permission.

She said in a tearful Friday interview she was worried about being sent back to China, where she has lived most of her life.

“All I was thinking about every day is that I can suddenly get deported,” she said.

Zheng said she didn’t know what she was doing was wrong until she received a letter from the Justice Department saying she was being investigated. She said she thought her boss — whom prosecutors described as the scheme’s ringleader — was odd. Each time she approached him about his unusual behavior, such as a lack of paperwork or consistent payments for her administrative work, he reassured her.

Pen “Ben” Yu, 51, of Gibsonton has pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine when he is sentenced on Aug. 2. Prosecutors described Yu and the other organizers of the scheme as American citizens.

It wasn’t clear who Yu was working for in China. In intercepted messages, the government said he referred to his superior only as his boss.

Zheng said Yu appealed to her difficulties finding work as an international student. Foreign students on educational visas, such as Zheng, are limited in how or whether they can work for pay. She said she wanted to be a well-rounded student with an impressive resume.

“It was like my first work that I found myself,” she said Friday. “I don’t know the process of getting hiring and stuff. I didn’t realize that it was so suspicious.”

Prosecutors said Yu provided Zheng with a credit card in February 2023 to pay for fraudulent orders and to compensate her. She said in an interview she was promised $25 per hour, but the only payment she ever received was a Best Buy gift card to purchase a new laptop so she could better work for Yu.

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美國佛羅里達大學中國學生學者聯誼會主席因涉嫌非法運違禁品回中國，被校方禁止進入校園三年。

21歲的鄭濃濃（Nongnong 「Leticia」 Zheng）是佛羅里達大學商學院市場營銷專業的大四學生，也是佛羅里達大學中國學生學者聯誼會主席。

佛州當地媒體《坦帕灣時報》（Tampa Bay Times）週日（5月26日）報導，佛羅里達大學禁止參與非法運送違禁品到中國的留學生進入校園三年。

根據司法部22日公布的一項聲明，佛羅里達州吉布森頓（Gibsonton）的51歲華人男子余鵬（Pen 「Ben」 Yu，音譯）與45歲佛州男子穆紐斯（Gregory Muñoz）合謀從德國默克藥廠（Merck KGaA）旗下子公司密理博（MilliporeSigma）採購大幅折扣的產品，經過佛羅里達大學校園實驗室之後，再使用偽造的出口文件將產品出口到中國，其中包括危險藥物和毒素。

兩人遭匯款詐騙起訴後雙雙認罪，將等待8月法院量刑。兩人面臨最高20年有期徒刑與100萬美元罰款。

根據司法部公布的認罪協議，還有三名佛羅里達大學的員工或學生（均為代號）捲入此案，其中一名同謀者的名字中含「Leticia」字樣。

24日，佛羅里達大學新聞與傳播學院的新聞服務機構Fresh Take Florida根據大學記錄中的傳記線索，確定「Leticia」就是鄭濃濃。上學期註冊的其他58,441名佛羅里達大學學生中沒有人用過這個名字。

鄭濃濃在接受當地媒體「佛羅里達政治」（Florida Politics）採訪時證實，司法部一年前有通知她，她是大陪審團調查的目標，可能面臨監禁或驅逐出境。

鄭濃濃拒絕討論佛羅里達大學禁止她進入校園直至2027年5月的決定。

她將問題轉給了她的聯邦公設辯護人瑞安‧馬奎爾（Ryan Maguire），後者沒有立即回覆對此案的詢問。

佛羅里達大學也通過發言人拒絕討論這一決定。

鄭濃濃告訴「佛羅里達政治」說，她原本預計於2025年5月畢業。在某些情況下，被禁止進入校園的學生可以上網課。目前還不清楚她是否也被停課，因為根據聯邦隱私法，學生的紀律記錄通常是保密的。

「這項指控很嚴重，將來我可能會被停學。」她說，「這（指控）也可能讓我在佛州被驅逐出境。所以，這是我非常擔心的一件事。我現在非常想完成我的學業並拿到學位。」

佛羅里達大學發言人史蒂夫‧奧蘭多（Steve Orlando）上週五表示，「員工違法將被解僱，學生違法將被停學。」

奧蘭多表示，該大學已與坦帕美國檢察官辦公室合作數週，該辦公室正在調查此案。

司法部公布的起訴書詳細列出了涉及佛羅里達大學研究人員以及學生參與這起事件的細節。向中國倒運違禁貨物的計劃始於2016年，鄭濃濃是2023年才開始參與進來。

他們運往中國的貨物包括芬太尼、嗎啡、搖頭丸、可卡因、氯胺酮、可待因、甲基苯丙胺、安非他明、乙醯嗎啡和美沙酮，以及純化的、非傳染性的霍亂毒素和百日咳毒素蛋白質（這種毒素會引起百日咳）。這些物質先被運送到佛羅里達大學校園實驗室，重新包裝後非法運往中國。

鄭濃濃是佛羅里達大學中國學生學者聯誼會的主席。該組織抗議佛羅里達州州長羅恩‧德桑蒂斯（Ron DeSantis）2023年簽署的一項法律，該法律限制大學從中國招收學生和教師，並禁止在未經特別許可的情況下僱用此類學生在學術實驗室工作。

她在採訪中流著淚說，擔心自己會被送回中國。「我每天都在想我可能會突然被驅逐出境。」她說。

鄭濃濃說，直到她收到司法部的一封信後，她才知道自己做的是錯的。

目前尚不清楚余鵬為中國的哪家機構或個人工作。司法部沒有公布這類信息。

鄭濃濃表示，她並沒有從余鵬那獲得太多酬勞。

據悉，余鵬於2023年2月給了鄭濃濃一張信用卡，用於支付欺詐訂單和犒勞她。

鄭濃濃在接受採訪時表示，余鵬承諾給她每小時25美元的酬勞，但她收到的唯一報酬就是一張百思買禮品卡，用於購買一台新筆記本電腦，這也是為了讓她可以更好地為余鵬工作。