Focus: Buried in a shallow grave near the Desert Road. Two men have now been charged with murder in relation to Ricky Wang’s disappearance. Video / File
Auckland crime boss Uncle Six and his longest-serving henchman, Michael Gu, both had clear reasons to rely on each other and a shared motive as they jointly carried out the murder of disloyal meth cook Ricky Wang.
That was the contention Crown prosecutors put to the jury today in the High Court at Auckland as more than three weeks of testimony in Gu’s murder trial wrapped up and was immediately followed by closing arguments.
Crown prosecutor Matthew Nathan said the “overwhelming conclusion, the inescapable inference” for jurors has to be that Gu was the person designated in advance to wield the knife on the night six years ago that Wang was lured to one of the syndicate’s clandestine meth labs, tied to a chair, interrogated at gunpoint and eventually stabbed to death.
The defence, however, argued the murder was an impromptu crime of passion that occurred inside Wang’s own apartment - likely involving only Uncle Six and another henchman while the newlywed defendant was out of town on his honeymoon.
“Nothing about this was well-planned, least of all well-executed,” said lawyer Julie-Anne Kincade, KC. “It may have been a fight, they may have lost their tempers - we can only speculate.”
Jurors are expected to begin deliberating tomorrow, after Justice Simon Moore sums up the case.
Authorities believe that Wang was lured to the Massey clan lab in August 2017 under the guise of looking at meth manufacturing glassware. Once there, prosecutors and self-confessed participants have alleged, he was restrained and confronted with rumours that he planned to team up with a rogue “Westerner” gang member to kidnap, rob, kill and replace Uncle Six - otherwise known as Brother Six, Captain or Jian Qi Zhao - as one of Auckland’s top suppliers of illegal methamphetamine precursor ephedrine.
Henchmen Zhicheng "Michael" Gu (left) and crime boss Jian Qi Zhao, otherwise known as Uncle Six, at an earlier court appearance. Photos / Sam Hurley
When Uncle Six wasn’t satisfied with the captive meth cook’s denials, the syndicate boss said he ordered Gu to stab Wang to death while fellow henchman Gordon “Fatty” Yu was to hold a towel over Wang’s head to muffle the screams. Uncle Six and another syndicate member nicknamed Kang Kang waited outside as the dirty work took place, he testified.
“We’ve got direct evidence, and that’s unusual,” Nathan told jurors today, referring to testimony from both Yu and Uncle Six. “There’s a lot about this case that is unusual.”
Uncle Six pleaded guilty last year to orchestrating the murder and agreed to testify against his former underlings. The henchman known as Fatty then pleaded guilty to murder last month, just weeks before he was set to go to trial alongside Gu, and also agreed to testify. Also occupying the witness box during the trial were two other men who pleaded guilty to accessory to murder for helping to dump Wang’s body in a shallow grave in a desolate area near Desert Rd and Tongariro National Park.
Nathan asked jurors today to put themselves in the shoes of “meticulous, methodical, careful” Uncle Six as he planned a mafia-like killing.
“When Brother Six was making a decision about what he should do ... naturally that is a decision that not only impacts him but his syndicate,” Nathan said, arguing that it makes sense the boss would have discussed options with his “inner circle” because of the “devastating impact” on all of their incomes that a bloody coup by Wang might cause. “Brother Six is the head of the snake. You cut off the head, the snake dies.”
There’s no reason the defendant, a trusted former roommate of Uncle Six’s who became the boss’ first employee, would be excluded from such planning, the prosecutor said, arguing that “to put Michael Gu at any other level other than the inner circle is nonsensical”.
Gu was given an opportunity to testify today but declined. His defence team called no witnesses.
But in her closing arguments, Kincade urged jurors to be extremely wary of the vast majority of testimony over the past several weeks. The Crown’s case relies entirely, she added, on “unreliable, selfish” witnesses - most of them immersed in the meth trade and two of them “self-confessed killers”.
“Every one of them has either lied, covered up, sought to minimise their role...” she said. “Not one of them cares for the truth. All they care about is themselves.”
Gu was a syndicate henchman, the defence acknowledged, suggesting that he was called away from his honeymoon to help dispose of the body. But he wasn’t the muscle of the group and so wouldn’t have been involved in any confrontation with Wang, she said.
“Michael’s not a gang guy, he’s not a tough guy. He’s the cook,” she said.
Meth syndicate henchman Gaoxiang "Gordon" Yu, who was known by the nicknames Pangzi or Fatty, sits on a motorbike belonging to a gang member he sold large quantities of drugs to. He pleaded guilty to the murder of Ricky Wang and agreed to testify against former co-defendant Michael Gu.
It makes much more sense that Fatty - a large-framed man like Wang who had the most gang connections and was considered the “syndicate enforcer” - would have accompanied Uncle Six as he went to Wang’s apartment to confront him about the rumours, she said. As the confrontation went south, an unplanned murder occurred, she speculated.
“If this was a plan, it was hopeless because nothing was done in advance of Ricky Wang being killed,” Kincade said, pointing to the testimony earlier in the trial of Clive Zhang - someone with no prior involvement in the syndicate who was recruited to help dump the body.
He was so hopeless as a criminal that he searched “New Zealand help dispose of a body” on Google, she pointed out.
It also makes no sense that Uncle Six would have devoted so many resources to renovating Wang’s apartment after the murder if he hadn’t been killed there, she said.
After Uncle Six and Fatty killed Wang at his apartment, they stuffed Wang’s body into the boot of his own Audi and took it to the Massey clan lab to buy time while they decided what to do next, Kincade suggested. She pointed to traces of blood police would later find in the boot of Wang’s car.
Although further tests to determine if it was human blood came up negative, that test can be made inaccurate by sustained heat and the boot wasn’t tested until two years later, she said. Crime lab technicians only tested one of the four areas of blood stains in the boot, offering to test the other areas but having their offer declined by police, Kincade said.
She theorised that was because at that point police we being led astray by someone who would eventually turn out to be one of the trial’s star witnesses: massage parlour owner and syndicate associate Tony Piao.
Kincade saved most of her ire for Piao, who helped police crack the case when he informed them from prison several years after the killing that Wang had been murdered and dumped near Desert Rd. Before that point, police didn’t realise Wang was missing.
Yanlong "Tony" Piao at an earlier court appearace. Photo / Sam Hurley
The defence lawyer pointed to the many lies Piao told, both in statements to police that were later recanted and, she alleged, in the witness box. They included his denial that he was involved in the drug trade prior to Wang’s death and, she said, the minimising of his eagerness to participate in the mutilation and disposal of Wang’s body.
“The audacious, arrogant man - lies, lies, lies,” she said, suggesting that some of Piao’s lies were motivated by his hatred of the defendant, who had often called Piao by the disparaging nickname “Brothel Boss”.
“He lies about everything,” Kincade said. “When Tony Piao’s lips are moving, he’s lying.”
But because he was the first person to speak to police, he got to control the narrative, she said, arguing that it would later motivate Uncle Six and Fatty to match his version of events as much as possible when they pleaded guilty regardless of whether it was true. By getting in line with Piao’s version of events - which at that point had also been adopted by police - they might seem more co-operative, she argued.
“That is something that must make you extremely wary of what they have said,” Kincade said, suggesting that the duo have not only had their sentences shortened but have managed to stay out of a maximum security prison as a result of their co-operation. “They are incentivised to be of as much assistance as they can be.”
Prosecutors acknowledged Piao is not a “paragon of virtue” but Wang’s body would still be buried near Desert Rd if he hadn’t come forward, they noted.
“Nobody does something for nothing - especially in organised criminal syndicates,” Nathan said, arguing that the witness’ information checked out in the end - enough so that two of the three murder defendants pleaded guilty.
The defence theory that the murder took place in Wang’s central Auckland apartment not only contradicts all of the witness statements but doesn’t make sense for someone as meticulous as Uncle Six, he added.
The apartment was on the fifth floor of a building filled with other tenants, required swipe card access, had CCTV cameras and the carpark where Wang’s body would have been taken in that scenario was clearly visible from the windows of other apartments. The riskiness of the location doesn’t match the profile of someone who made his minions switch phones every few months, whose carefulness “is something that’s almost in his DNA”, the prosecutor said.
It also doesn’t make sense that Brother Six would have confronted Wang, who was taller and heavier, by himself or with Fatty, who was recovering from hand surgery. It’s hard to imagine, he said, an “underweight drug dealer and effectively a one-armed man overpowering Ricky Wang” then trying to carry his 100kg corpse to the boot of his car.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
