A Canadian citizen was identified as the victim of an execution-style killing at a marijuana farm near Lake Thunderbird, Oklahoma, in July — a case now at the center of U.S. congressional scrutiny into Chinese-backed organized crime.
At a hearing Thursday in Washington, Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Director Donnie Anderson told lawmakers the death highlights the violence spreading through an industry hijacked by transnational Chinese gangs believed to be guided by the Chinese Communist Party. Anderson testified that Chinese networks have set up thousands of illegal grow operations in Oklahoma, exploiting the state’s loose licensing regime and funneling proceeds through global laundering systems, while pointing to a vast national security risk. Shielded Chinese government interests are believed to be behind marijuana grows strategically purchased beside sensitive infrastructure, including a munitions base in Oklahoma that produces much of the Pentagon’s heavy weapons.
“This isn’t just about marijuana,” Anderson said. “It is my belief that the CCP maintains access to the criminal marijuana site operations, particularly through its known practice of controlling expatriates via so-called ‘police stations.’”
Anderson tied the farms to human trafficking, fentanyl, money laundering, and the risk of broad access to U.S. critical infrastructure, noting that commanding directors from New York and California — seldom seen locally — were behind the exploitation of Oklahoma farmland.
Anderson’s testimony aligns precisely with The Bureau’s investigations into Chinese cannabis and money laundering networks in Vancouver, which found that Beijing’s United Front Work Department was orchestrating a parallel cannabis trafficking and laundering system. That system leveraged Canada’s legalization to export product abroad and recycle proceeds through Canadian banks. The key figures identified in Vancouver included associates of the notorious Sam Gor global fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking triad networks, as well as targets of the RCMP’s investigations into CCP “police stations” in Canada.
The Bureau’s reporting found that United Front command-and-control cells in Vancouver were routing Canadian “B.C. Bud” across the country in trucks and into New York, where U.S. law enforcement has identified significant Chinese organized crime leadership.
The human toll of brutal Chinese crime operations on U.S. soil was another focus of the hearing, pointing to a Canadian link. Without naming the victim, Anderson referred to the drug house execution of a Canadian national in July near Lake Thunderbird, Oklahoma.
Local reports say the Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the victim as 42-year-old Canadian citizen Vongphachanh Philavanh. Deputies responded around 10:30 p.m. on July 18 to a licensed marijuana grow on East Hill Drive, just east of Lake Thunderbird. Capt. J.T. Palmer said two masked men forced their way through the front door of a residence on the property. Shots were fired, Philavanh was killed, and two surviving workers were bound with duct tape as the intruders ransacked the home before escaping.
Investigators believe Philavanh was the target of a robbery.
The method bore the classic hallmarks of a “grow rip” — a home-invasion style raid long practiced by the Big Circle Boys, a cellular and ultra-violent network with roots in China’s military, in which masked assailants bind occupants, execute rivals or debtors, and strip properties of cash and product.
U.S. lawmakers heard yesterday that Philavanh’s death was not an isolated tragedy but evidence of a much larger command structure. All three witnesses in Thursday’s hearing — Anderson, Heritage Foundation fellow Paul Larkin, and former DEA executive Chris Urben — pointed to the same conclusion: the Chinese Communist Party stands behind the crime syndicates now dominating America’s marijuana industry.
Urben described a DEA investigation codenamed Operation Sleeping Giant, which found that beginning around 2016, Chinese criminal networks completely took over global money laundering for cartels and organized crime active in the United States. The key enabler, he told lawmakers, is WeChat, the encrypted platform controlled by Beijing. “No other global crime network has a (state-protected) trusted communications system like that,” Urben said. “WeChat needs to be disrupted. It cannot continue to function as a secure platform for criminal money laundering. There must be a state-level, legislated solution with the Chinese government — one that ends WeChat’s use in these trusted networks.”
This testimony aligns directly with The Bureau’s long investigation into Chinese state-linked laundering in Vancouver. Around the same period U.S. agents were running Operation Sleeping Giant, Canadian police in Richmond uncovered the Silver International case — a vast Chinese drug-cash bank that exposed the so-called Vancouver Model. According to a Canadian police expert with direct knowledge, United Front operatives and Sam Gor-affiliated figures turned short-term rental properties across Vancouver into covert cannabis brokerage houses. These homes aggregated marijuana from acreages in B.C.’s interior and readied shipments for destinations including New York and Tokyo. Investigators observed a steady stream of people arriving with garbage bags and leaving with duffels, a pattern that mirrored the cash couriering at the center of the Silver International casino case.
“It was just phenomenal,” a Canadian intelligence source told The Bureau. “And all of it links back, ultimately, to the exact family and community of people that we’ve talked about for years.”
The source pointed to senior Vancouver Chinese consulate associates and known leaders of Beijing’s United Front Work Department community groups in Canada. These networks have been linked to Chinese military and government veterans operating in Canada. In The Bureau’s reporting, police sources said marijuana legalization under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inadvertently handed Chinese organized crime the perfect cover. Product from farms in Oliver, Prince George, and the Okanagan was consolidated in the Lower Mainland, packaged and branded in transient brokerage houses, and then shipped east across Canada in gutted appliances and commercial loads. Once across the border, it flowed into New York, where cash proceeds were collected in United Front-linked brokerages and cycled back into Canadian financial institutions.
“They transport it down, and then we started seeing the rise of these brokerage houses again, with United Front control and Asian organized crime links,” a source said. “New York is a favourite destination. The weed goes out in a variety of routes, the money comes back to be laundered. The process is repeated.”
The system was sophisticated, distributed, and shielded by state direction. “Since legalization, Asian organized crime has emerged as the dominant force behind cannabis in Canada,” one source texted to The Bureau. “Product from grow ops in the interior of B.C. gets consolidated at short-term rental houses in the Lower Mainland. Brokers bid on product and provide packaging services for online sales.”
The fact that United Front suspects identified in these Canadian investigations — including community figures tied to Beijing’s Vancouver consulate — were the same actors later scrutinized by RCMP in foreign police station probes aligns exactly with Anderson’s testimony that he believes the People’s Republic of China has direct access to U.S. marijuana operations through CCP diaspora-control networks. The Bureau’s reporting found corroborating evidence of those commanding networks in Vancouver, and the same patterns of control exist in Ontario as well.
