Escaping Oklahoma: A Worker’s Story From Inside an Illegal Marijuana Operation

by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Frontier. Additional funding for this story was provided by The Pulitzer Center.

Lin’s most vivid memory of the marijuana farm is the moment he found himself staring into the barrel of an AK-47.

He was one of several dozen Chinese immigrants who had spent months working without pay at the farm in Oklahoma. None of them had spoken up because they were intimidated by the bosses and their armed guards. But Lin and his wife, who also worked on the farm, were desperate for money to send to their kids back in China.

Seething with anger and frustration, he gathered his courage, confronted the manager and demanded his unpaid wages. As Lin’s wife looked on, aghast, the manager reached for an assault rifle and raised it to Lin’s face, he said.

“The gun was against my forehead,” Lin recalled in an interview. “I believe he was capable of pulling the trigger.”

The terrifying incident caused the couple to flee to New York. Three years later, Lin still lives in fear. He has received menacing calls from the farm’s owner and anonymous men, he said. His former bosses blame him for inciting labor conflicts at the farm and for a drug raid that shut it down in 2022, he said.

Lin’s story is a rare firsthand account of the harsh conditions and violent atmosphere endured by Chinese workers on many marijuana farms in Oklahoma and other states. ProPublica and The Frontier have reported that Chinese criminal groups, some with suspected ties to the Chinese state, have become a dominant force in the illicit U.S. marijuana trade and subjected thousands of Chinese immigrant laborers to abuse and exploitation.

Until now, though, much of that information about illegal activity in the cannabis industry has come from law enforcement officials, court and police records, community leaders and advocates. Lin gave a frightening front-line look inside the underworld.

Lin, a youthful 44-year-old, asked to be identified by his surname for his safety. He said he decided to recount his experience to seek justice. Interviewed through an interpreter, he spoke in a soft, strained voice as he described threats, stolen wages and employees confined to the farm against their will.

Reporters corroborated many aspects of Lin’s story with law enforcement and labor officials, court files, other government documents, interviews with another former worker, Chinese-language media reports, communications records and other sources.

Lin’s skills as a plumber and electrician made him a kind of leader among the employees at the farm, he said. (Alan Chin, special to ProPublica)

The owner of the now-defunct farm, Lamkam Ho, pleaded guilty last year to a charge of marijuana trafficking. She and her companion, Zhixuan Hai, who was the manager, are awaiting trial for allegedly robbing a business associate in Oklahoma City last year. Ho, 58, and Hai, 48, have not yet entered a plea in that case.

In addition, Ho has had contact with a suspected Chinese organized crime group involved in illicit activity in several states, according to a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.

A lawyer representing the couple, Tyler Box, said he and his clients had no comment about the allegations against them. Ho and Hai did not respond to requests for comment.

Like many laborers and entrepreneurs in the U.S. marijuana industry, Lin is from the tough coastal province of Fujian. He says he left in 2016 because the government persecuted him for his Christian faith. He paid $50,000 to smugglers who bribed Chinese officials to issue him a passport and then sent him by plane to Tijuana, Mexico, where he climbed over the border fence into the United States and applied for political asylum.

He settled in New York. But when the pandemic disrupted the economy in 2020, he became one of many Chinese immigrants who found marijuana jobs in the West. He went to New Mexico and then Oklahoma.

In September 2020, Lin and his wife got hired at a former cattle farm in Maramec, about 45 miles west of Tulsa. His skills as a plumber and electrician made him a kind of leader among the employees, he said. At first, he won the trust of Ho, the owner, and Hai, the manager, who had both recently relocated from the Los Angeles area to set up a new operation, Lin said.

“I didn’t dislike the boss, because I’m technical personnel,” he said. “The boss wouldn’t mess with [me]. He knew that I just did my work.”

Lin laid pipes and did electrical work at the Maramec farm and at others nearby owned by the couple’s associates, he said. He did errands between the couple’s farm and their house in an upscale suburb of Oklahoma City. As one of the few employees at the remote compound who owned a vehicle, Lin took road trips to New Mexico to bring back heavy equipment, sleeping in his car rather than hotels to save money.

Hai even sent him on a mission to New York to pick up a kitchen stove — and $50,000 in cash hidden in appliance boxes, Lin said. In text messages about that October trip, Hai wrote “Thank you, brother” and told Lin “safety first,” according to a screenshot of the conversation.

But the mood at the farm darkened when planting began in dozens of greenhouses and sheds spread across 30 acres. The management hired three guards who patrolled the locked and fenced compound around the clock, Lin said. At least one of the guards has an arrest record, public records and media reports show. The armed men in civilian clothes intimidated the employees and kept them confined to the grounds unless they had permission to go out, Lin said.

The farm in Maramec, Oklahoma (Apple Maps)

“Their mere presence posed a threat,” he said. “They made the farmworkers feel threatened and afraid of the bosses. … There was no shortage of verbal violence.”

Lin and his wife, who worked in the greenhouses and as a cook, lived with other employees who were crowded into bunkhouses and trailers, he said.

“We slept with 20 or 30 people in one room,” he said. “There was only one bathroom and no air conditioner.”

As co-workers confided in him, he became alarmed at what he heard.

Two men and a woman from Guangxi province told him that smugglers, known by Chinese immigrants as “snakeheads,” had brought them across the Mexican border directly to the farm. The owner had paid their smuggling fees of about $20,000 each, Lin said the workers told him.

“The snakeheads sold them to the farm boss,” he said. “The farm boss paid the fee.”

The immigrants would have to remain at the site and work two years to pay off the debts, Lin said.

“They were not allowed to leave the farm,” he said. “We were given specific instructions not to take any of these people out on our once-a-week trips to buy daily necessities.”

A month into the job, Lin said, Hai told him the management could not pay his $4,000 monthly salary until after the harvest. The manager suggested Lin could make money instead by subcontracting a greenhouse from him to grow his own crop — a frequent tactic used against vulnerable marijuana workers to delay or avoid paying wages. Fellow employees who had moved with the bosses from a New Mexico farm to Oklahoma told Lin they were still owed many months of wages, he said.

“They only want you to work for them for free,” Lin said.

Lin said he and his wife discussed the workers’ plight with one of the few outsiders at the farm, a local contractor who drove a bulldozer and befriended them because he was a fellow Christian.

Despite Hai’s claims of financial difficulty, he drove a Mercedes and the couple owned homes in gated communities in Oklahoma and Southern California, records show. Ho incorporated a second marijuana-related business in Oklahoma with a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who is a leader of diaspora organizations affiliated with the United Front, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence arm, according to business records and media reports. (The entrepreneur did not respond to requests for comment.)

By December, Lin had had enough. One day, he and his wife went to a room in the main house that Hai used as an office and sleeping quarters, he said. Lin declared that he wanted his pay. The Lins watched in disbelief as the manager pulled an AK-47 from beneath his bed and aimed it at Lin’s forehead, backing him against the wall, he said.

“I was scared when he took out the gun,” Lin said. He said Hai was furious because “the rest of the people wouldn’t ask for payment. I’m the only one who dared to ask.”

He said the manager told him: “After the harvest, I can give you the salary. If you continue like this, I will not be this courteous to you.”

Lin still lives in fear years after what happened on the farm. (Alan Chin, special to ProPublica)

Later that day, as word of the incident spread, Hai told other workers to urge Lin to stop complaining, Lin recalled. Lin said he didn’t report the incident to the police out of fears about his immigration status.

ProPublica and The Frontier were not able to corroborate the allegation about the gun. But another former worker, who asked to be identified only by his English first name, Chris, described a similar dispute in which Hai threatened him and his friend with a gun after they demanded their first month of wages while filming him with cellphones.

“He really liked to pull out the gun and threaten people — I experienced that firsthand,” Chris, a 35-year-old from Jiangsu province, told ProPublica and The Frontier. “We quickly snuck away and called the police.”

The Pawnee County sheriff, Darrin Varnell, confirmed in an interview that one of his deputies went to the farm in the summer of 2021 in response to that dispute and kept the peace as the terrified workers gathered their belongings and left. Sheriff’s deputies also received periodic calls from passing drivers about men patrolling the farm carrying AK-47s, but they were not able to confirm the reports, Varnell said.

After the confrontation at gunpoint, Lin said, the manager ordered him to stay in the compound.

“The boss wouldn’t let me leave the farm,” he said. “The attitude toward me changed.”

Along with two co-workers from the same village in Fujian, the Lins decided to escape. But they worried about retaliation if they got caught, he said. They spent tense and furtive days making plans and tracking the activities of the guards, he said.

“We kind of learned the patterns of when they would be there,” he said. “I stayed up at night watching to see if they would leave.”

One night shortly before New Year’s Eve, there were no guards in sight. Using a bolt cutter from the tool supplies, Lin broke through the lock on the front gate and the four of them sped off in his car, he said. They drove all the way back to New York.

On Jan. 3, 2021, Lin sent a complaint about unpaid wages by email to the Oklahoma Department of Labor. Emails show that a state official referred him to a Chinese-speaking employee of the U.S. Department of Labor, but Lin said he did not hear from that agency. An official at the federal agency declined to comment.

The Lins also called their friend the bulldozer contractor and told him what had happened, Lin said.

About a week after the escape, the owner of the farm called Lin’s wife, complaining angrily because the contractor had urged her to pay her workers, Lin said.

“She was telling us to keep our mouths shut,” he said. “My wife got really scared.”

Former co-workers told Lin by phone that the employers were looking for him and had even called a farm at which he’d worked in New Mexico asking about his whereabouts, he said. The workers also told him that others had followed his lead and complained about their unpaid wages to the owners and a reporter for Chinese-language media, he said.

The reporter relayed their accounts to federal labor officials, who advised the Oklahoma Department of Labor, according to Daniel Mares, the state agency’s assistant general counsel. State labor officials interviewed employees about the wage problems and alleged threats by the owners and alerted the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics because “concerns of potential human trafficking arose,” according to department emails provided by Mares.

The state narcotics bureau opened an investigation and, in September 2022, agents raided the Maramec farm backed by National Guard troops and sheriff’s deputies. Their search turned up 700 pounds of processed marijuana, 2,074 plants, two pistols and a small-caliber rifle, court documents say. Agents arrested four Mexican laborers and turned them over to immigration authorities.

National Guard troops raided the farm two years ago. (Oklahoma National Guard)

Ho had hired an Oklahoma resident, a known “straw owner” used by criminals to elude laws requiring local ownership, to pose as her majority partner, court documents say. Prosecutors charged Ho with illegal cultivation and trafficking and she was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport before she could board a flight to Hong Kong. In June of last year, Ho pleaded guilty to trafficking and received a deferred sentence to be imposed after a three-year probation period, court documents say.

A few weeks before that court appearance, she and Hai were arrested in Oklahoma City and charged with attacking and beating a Chinese American real estate agent in a parking lot and stealing $3,000 and two iPhones from him. The couple accused the victim, who has also been a target of drug investigations, of owing them $700,000, according to court documents. They were released on bond and neither has entered a plea in the case.

Lin, who has become a legal U.S. resident and embarked on a new life, says he has received several anonymous phone calls from Mandarin-speaking men warning him not to cause trouble and threatening to hurt his family. He believes his former bosses are behind the threats, though he cannot prove it. Friends have warned him to stay away from New York’s Chinatowns and other places with large Chinese populations.

“These people are still searching for me,” he said. “We are afraid.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier.