Former New York City police sergeant Mike McMahon, 57, will pay a price for aiding the Chinese government in tracking down a U.S. resident Beijing wanted to coerce into returning to China to serve a prison sentence, a Brooklyn judge ruled on Wednesday.
McMahon was convicted by a jury in the Eastern District of New York in 2023 for acting as an illegal agent for the Peoples’ Republic of China and for interstate stalking.
“This type of crime really does threaten our country’s national security,” U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Chen said as she sentenced McMahon to 18 months in prison and an $11,000 fine for his role in “a campaign of transnational repression.”
McMahon was working as a private investigator in 2016 when he said he was “unwitting used” by Chinese operatives as part of “Operation Fox Hunt,” an expansive effort to track critics of the Chinese regime in America and force their return by various means of coercion. Relatives of the target in McMahon’s engagement, for instance, were arrested in China and held as hostages.
The former cop’s defense, however, is undermined by the fact he tried to hide the $19,000 he received for staking out the dissident by depositing it into his son’s bank account — unlike the ordinary fees he earned as a private investigator. He is one of ten defendants to be charged and convicted in connection to Operation Fox Hunt.
U.S. Attorney John Durham, who as a special counsel led the investigation into the U.S. government abuses surrounding the FBI’s “Operation Crossfire,” central to the Russia-gate campaign against President Donald Trump, was a lead on the prosecution of McMahon. While Durham only notched one collar in that probe, an FBI attorney who lied to a FISA judge but served no time, two of his targets accused of lying to the FBI were acquitted at trial. This time, though, Durham got his man.
China’s recruitment of McMahon was no isolated incident. Late last year, a U.S. citizen pleaded guilty to a federal court for his role in operating a police station for the Chinese government above a noodle shop in Manhattan’s Chinatown. That operation was just one of an estimated 100 outposts Beijing’s Ministry of State Security operates in foreign countries to threaten and monitor Chinese nationals abroad.
While the Chinese government apparently spends significant resources in “policing” its critics abroad, there is no evidence Beijing is similarly concerned about its citizens who run illegal marijuana grows or sex trafficking operations in Maine. But stay tuned.
