LAPD detective charged with trying to buy illegal gun silencer from China, US DEA agent charged with spying for China
LAPD Detectives Beat Enforcer
LAPD Detectives Beat Enforcer
By Mark Hines
(Bloomberg) — “I know I will get it back,” a former LAPD officer said, showing off a stolen Beretta M9 9mm pistol that police used to kill an unarmed man they caught on video in 2015.
The detective told me he was ready to show it to me, then admitted he had lied to me to get me to think he had. “It’s a gift,” he said coyly, referring to his stolen gun, a Taurus PT 9 semiauto pistol he had bought in China for $22,500. He said that he had never fired the gun.
He knew it contained a silencer, he said, but he didn’t know it was illegal. I asked him if he ever bought the silencer, which comes with the gun, for a reason other than to turn it into a silencer. “Yes,” he said.
A Chinese-American who worked in the LAPD’s Intelligence Division in the years leading up to last year’s arrest of his ex-girlfriend, Tarlie Espinosa, as she tried to sell them her stolen gun, was charged with trying to purchase and sell silencers, and of trying to help her friend, who was under investigation in the United States for being a Chinese spy.
The detective was identified as Mark Wu, a former member of the LAPD’s Intelligence Division. He was an undercover officer, assigned to infiltrate the Chinese government’s national counterintelligence program into the United States. He had no prior experience in the United States, but he had lived and worked in the U.S. for a decade with no convictions.
Wu was arrested in China on Dec. 1, after helping the LAPD detectives catch his girlfriend on tape, as she tried to sell them her stolen Beretta M9 9
