Untangling a web of corruption

One cellphone rings and one cellphone is silent, and the difference is life and death.

Chen Xintao didn’t want any interruptions while he was playing poker with his buddies, so the entrepreneur did something rare in this connection-obsessed country: He turned off his phone.

Across town, Bian Lizhong was out celebrating the birth of his daughter. All through dinner, his phone rang. After the fourth call from a business associate insisting that he had to see him right away, Bian finally agreed to meet him.

By morning, the new father was dead, his body riddled with 47 bullets.

The entrepreneur was lucky -- the killers weren’t able to reach him, so he survived. But they weren’t done with Chen: They framed him for the slaying.

For Chen, that night in the winter of 2001 turned out to be the beginning of a six-year struggle to untangle a web of corruption, a world where businessmen use police officers as hired guns and crooked authorities have the power to send innocent men to prison.

“I just have to pierce through these lies,” Chen said. “If I don’t, it would be a disappointment for me as a person and a tragedy for China as a country.”

Used-car business

When he retired as an officer with the People’s Liberation Army in the late 1990s, Chen was looking for a new start. He opened one of Fuzhou’s first used-car dealerships as China began to make the transition from a nation of bicycle pedalers to the world’s fastest-growing automobile market.

By 2001, his business was taking off, attracting the attention of a dangerous competitor. Xu Chengping was a businessman who knew how to grease the right palms to fast-track deals and do whatever it took to eliminate foes. Among his powerful friends was the city’s deputy police chief. Over the years, Xu had lavished the deputy chief with gifts of real estate, cars and shares in his auto business, according to state news media and people involved in the case. In return, the No. 2 cop watched the businessman’s back.

According to a Chinese saying, there is no room for two tigers on one mountaintop. Xu had made it clear that he intended to monopolize the local used-car market. He made a simple offer to Chen: Accept a “partnership,” or walk away from the business.

What Xu didn’t expect was that someone other than Chen might stand in his way.

Bian Lizhong was a friend of Chen’s older brother. The dapper Bian, a 32-year-old home- improvement entrepreneur, was known as someone with his own network of connections in the shady world of Chinese business. That and his considerable personal charm would seem to make him a natural negotiator to end any stalemate. But in this case, he was apparently in way over his head.

“Everyone knows Xu is not a man to cross,” Chen said. “That’s why he was so mad that Bian had the audacity to try to help us broker a deal.”

Nighttime meeting

A childhood friend drove Bian to the meeting in a small office at Chen’s used-car dealership that night.

After a few minutes of chatter, the man who had called him stepped out of the office, smoothing the hair on his head as he left. (This, police officers later confessed, was a signal for them to go in.) Seconds later, about a dozen officers sprayed the room with more than 150 bullets. Then they placed a handgun next to Bian’s body and scattered bills totaling about $10,000 on the floor to make it look like a botched robbery, according to witness accounts in court documents.

The next morning, newspapers across the city had a photograph of Bian’s body in a pool of blood and headlines like this one: “Armed Robber Deserved to Die.”

Bian’s childhood friend signed a confession saying his old buddy and Chen were mobsters who were trying to blackmail Xu. When Xu refused to pay, the confession went, Chen sent Bian to rob Xu at gunpoint. The police, it said, showed up in the nick of time to save Xu’s life.

“But I didn’t even know Chen at the time. We’d never met before this case,” said the friend, Feng Wenhu, who asserted that the police tortured him before he signed the document.

News of Bian’s death took Chen completely off guard. Worse yet, the killing happened in an office in his own dealership, and all 31 cars vanished overnight. Many of the sedans, he later learned, had been given out as rewards to officers on the scene in exchange for their silence.

Worried that whoever had done this wanted him dead too, Chen went into hiding. But before he could figure out what had really happened, the police had started a smear campaign in the local news media so severe that even his 10-year-old son thought Daddy was an outlaw.

Chen, confident that he had done nothing wrong, turned himself in. “I surprised them, because they expected me to disappear for good,” Chen said. “Their goal was to scare me away so they could take over my business.”

But when he tried to explain his innocence, he said, the police told him, “Do you know who you are dealing with? Xu Chengping is an established businessman and No. 1 on our list of people to guard and protect.” Chen was thrown in jail.

Then, in the spring of 2002, just when the case appeared to be at a dead end, a new anti-corruption campaign zeroed in on Wang Zhenzhong, the deputy Fuzhou police chief who was friends with Xu. But he got wind of his imminent arrest and fled to the United States, becoming the highest-ranking Chinese cop on the run, according to state news media. He seemed well prepared for the escape, taking with him his mistress and reportedly $10 million in cash.

As soon as Wang was disgraced, his cronies too began to fall, including Xu.

Chen thought for sure he was in the clear when he spotted Xu, the man with friends in high places, behind bars in the same prison.

“He was washing his hair,” Chen said. “At first, I couldn’t believe it. Then I looked closer. It really was him! I asked a fellow inmate to find out why he was in there. Xu said he had admitted planting the gun. I thought, ‘If he is in here, then I must be getting out soon.’ ”

Despite these new developments, Chen was convicted of extortion and blackmail and sentenced to three years in prison. But within weeks of completing his sentence, a new investigation led to a new verdict: not guilty.

Instead of being relieved, Chen thought that the real fight for justice had just begun.

The night he returned home to his wife and son, he began a letter-writing campaign, exposing what he knew to the highest authorities in the land.

Chen believed the chances of anyone getting a quick official response were akin to winning the lottery. But to his shock, two investigators from Beijing showed up within months, pledging to get to the bottom of the case. Chen suspects his case received special attention in part because of an apparent power struggle in the local police department.

Again with unexpected speed, authorities arrested the dozen or so police officers suspected of being responsible for Bian’s death, and charged two of them and Xu with murder. Last summer, Xu and the officer who fired first and also delivered the coup de grace were sentenced to death.

Won’t give up

Still, Chen considers justice much delayed and incomplete. He points to the other officers suspected of taking part in the shooting. “They are still out on the streets wearing uniforms as if nothing had happened. How can you say justice has been served?”

And Wang, the deputy police chief who sanctioned the killing, was all but untouchable because he had fled to the United States. A Chinese-language newspaper in the U.S. reported in June that Wang had died in New York of liver cancer. The Fuzhou police department followed up with a news conference confirming the news.

“We don’t think his death is real,” Chen said. “If he were to return, that could cause a huge political earthquake. Too many people would be implicated.”

But the soldier in him won’t give up. His goal now is to sue the entire police department for lost property and business, in a case that could set a precedent for official compensation.

Whether the courts will accept the suit is unknown. The communist government rarely allows open challenge to its authority. Despite a 2-decade-old law that allows citizens to sue officialdom for wrongdoing, no court has ever used it to rule against a government agency.

Until the case can be resolved, Chen is living on the $200 monthly salary his wife earns as a hospital accountant, and borrowing money for the legal fight.

“I am a veteran Communist Party member and respected businessman,” Chen said. “If I can’t even protect my private property or personal safety, you can imagine the helplessness of the average Chinese citizen.”

Bian’s widow is subsisting on loans to raise her daughter, now 7, and is on the verge of losing their home. Authorities offered her about $30,000, which she declined, saying it was an insult to justice and her husband’s memory.

“My daughter grew up without ever knowing her father’s love. How do you compensate for that?” said Xu Lirong, 32, blinking away tears that wouldn’t stop flowing in the dark and cage-like apartment where she keeps an altar for her husband and a secret from her daughter.

“When my daughter asks me, ‘Where is Daddy?’ I tell her he is away on business, in a faraway place called America,” she said. “She asks me, ‘Why can’t he call us? Don’t they have phones in America?’ I just tell her, ‘No, they don’t.’ ”

As futile as it seems, she wants to shield her daughter from the truth that has destroyed her.

“I dream of him all the time,” she said. “He is crying, telling me how much he is hurting.”

She says she had to bribe hospital guards to see her husband’s body -- $300 for 10 minutes.

“I couldn’t bear to look at him. He had 47 holes in his body,” she recalled.

“After something like this, how can anyone trust the police again? They are men in uniform. They are supposed to serve the people. How could they do this to an innocent man?”

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chingching.ni@latimes.com