The DA said the two men were in the country illegally from China and have been turned over to immigration authorities.
WILLS POINT, Texas — Two Chinese nationals arrested after being stopped on I-20 with $250 thousand in gold bars will not face money laundering charges and have been turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Van Zandt County District Attorney said Monday.
The county used some of the gold to pay the suspect’s attorneys as part of a civil settlement and will use proceeds from selling the rest for law enforcement purposes, DA Tonda Curry told WFAA.
A Wills Point police officer arrested Weijian Chen, 25, and Wenqiang Lin, 46, in early August after he pulled over the Chevy sedan the men were driving for following another vehicle too closely, arrest documents showed.
Sergeant Charlie Hughes’ drug-detection dog alerted to the vehicle, but Hughes said he found a backpack with 19 gold bars inside instead of narcotics.
Curry initially said she was planning to prosecute the men for money laundering, but said Monday she could not make the case against them.
“We have to be able to prove what that criminal activity was, in other words how they got the money that they laundered. A lot of times that’s hard when your case starts with a traffic stop,” she said.
Curry said she initially thought the gold bars were proceeds from illegal drug activity, but now suspects it may be from a group “that defrauds the elderly with investment-type scams.”
She believes Chen and Lin were mules — not masterminds — and said ICE officers have taken them into federal custody. She suspects they’ll be deported, as they crossed into the country illegally. ICE did not immediately respond to an inquiry seeking Chen and Lin’s current detainee status.
While the criminal case against the two men did not move forward, the civil case involving the gold bars had a lower standard of proof, Curry explained.
The two men told the officer the gold did not belong to them, Curry said. “So he can’t give it back to them and let them go on down the road, it’s not theirs,” she explained.
The county reached a civil settlement in the case last month, she said. The lawyers for the two men received 12 ounces of gold each as payment for their work and the county will sell the rest, she said.
“Even if I can’t say exactly what [crime] it was, why should they be able to profit off of it? Why should it not go back into fighting crime in our communities?” Curry said.
She said state law dictates how the approximately $195 thousand remaining can be spent — and an agreement with Wills Point police means they’ll get control of 70 percent of the proceeds.
Curry said she expects her office will use most of its share to purchase new vehicles for lawyers and investigators on the team.
“For a small county like ours, it’s a big, big relief for the taxpayers,” she said. “Even if I can’t say exactly what [crime] it was, why should they be able to profit off of it? Why should it not go back into to fighting crime in our communities?”
