Not Your Typical Drug Bust

one...two...tree · July 25, 2007

Police raided Zhenli Ye Gon's home in March, carting off what they said was $207 million.

By Paul Duggan and Ernesto Londoño

Washington Post Staff Writers

The way U.S. and Mexican authorities describe 44-year-old Zhenli Ye Gon, he might have sprung from some pulp novelist's overheated imagination.

Born in Shanghai, he lived in Mexico and ran a pharmaceuticals company -- a front, authorities allege, that supplied Mexican drug cartels with massive quantities of a chemical used to make the street drug methamphetamine. Police raided his luxurious Mexico City home in March, carting off what they said was $207 million, most of it in $100 bills that had been stashed behind false walls and in closets. The U.S. government called it "the largest single drug cash seizure the world has ever seen."

When the law caught up with Ye Gon on Monday night, his weeks on the lam ended in an Asian restaurant on Veirs Mill Road in Wheaton -- in P.J. Rice Bistro, in Westfield Wheaton mall, near a Ruby Tuesday and a JCPenney.

This is a man who owned a fleet of luxury cars and had mistresses in several countries, according to Mexican officials. In recent years, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said, he gambled away nearly $126 million in Las Vegas casinos.

At P.J. Rice Bistro, where he and a female acquaintance ordered codfish and baby carrots, DEA agents showed up before dinner was served. "The police came to the table and asked him to go pretty fast," a bistro employee recalled yesterday. "They didn't stay in the restaurant too long."

Not your garden-variety Montgomery County drug bust.

In an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington in support of a drug charge against Ye Gon, federal authorities allege that, between December 2005 and August, his company, Unimed Pharm Chem de Mexico, illegally imported from overseas about 86 metric tons of restricted chemicals into Mexico "for the express purpose of manufacturing pseudoephedrine/ephedrine."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7072400150.html