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
Failed construction entrepreneur turned massage parlour operator Tony Piao considered himself only a small-time, insignificant associate of players in an international syndicate dominating Auckland’s illicit meth manufacturing industry when he was awakened in the middle of the night six years ago by a message from feared crime boss Uncle Six.
The hours and days that followed the call would change the course of his life, he explained to jurors in the High Court at Auckland this week as he testified over three days - providing a rare glimpse into the clandestine labs that act as the economic drivers for large swaths of New Zealand’s violent criminal underworld.
“I saw his corpse on the floor,” Piao told jurors of being taken that pre-dawn August 2017 morning to a Massey rental home turned clan lab where just hours earlier distrusted meth cook Ricky Wang had been lured, interrogated and murdered. “I was in shock because I’d never seen a corpse in my life.”
Plastic sheeting covered the floor where Wang lay face up, with tape and rope around his body and a damaged chair nearby, Piao testified.
“His glasses [were] soaking in blood,” he recalled. “I saw many wounds on the hands and arm - very big and the skin very open. Um ... yeah.”
Piao, who has already served a prison sentence for his help in disposing of the body, is the first of several star witnesses set to testify at the murder trial of syndicate henchman Michael Gu, an alleged fellow meth cook who is accused of having stabbed Wang to death that day at the direction of Uncle Six. Gu has denied the murder accusations.
Uncle Six, the boss otherwise known as Brother Six or Jian Qi Zhao, admitted last year to having ordered the murder and is set to enter the witness box in the coming days. Gordon Yu, a fellow henchman also known as “Fatty” who is accused of having held a towel over Wang’s head to muffle his screams as Gu stabbed him to death, had been expected to go to trial beside Gu. He instead pleaded guilty to murder just days before the trial began and is now also slated to testify.
But none of the defendants-turned-witnesses should be trusted, Gu’s defence team has warned.
Piao said his involvement in the bizarre disposal of Wang’s body - which was placed in a bathtub full of ice and then a large portable freezer before being twice buried and encased in concrete in a remote area near Tongariro National Park - eventually led to his reluctant promotion to the syndicate’s new meth cook. That in turn led to his eventual arrest on significant drugs charges, he said, and his decision two years after the death to come forward and help police crack the case.
The witness told jurors he supposed he had been recruited that morning by Uncle Six because he was formerly a roommate and close friend of Wang’s before the two had a falling out over a $300,000 debt that caused Piao to lose his more respectable construction business.
Although not yet a syndicate member himself he knew Uncle Six and some of the boss’ henchmen as customers at his West Auckland massage club, which was also an unofficial brothel, he said.
Yanlong "Tony" Piao at an earlier sentencing for accessory after the fact to murder. Photo / Sam Hurley
The relationship started to change that morning when he received a 2am WeChat message from Uncle Six summoning him to the boss’ central Auckland hotel room, he said. The crime boss didn’t hesitate to explain the murder to Piao as soon as he arrived at the hotel, Piao testified.
“He said they had got mad at ‘Dabao’ - Ricky,” Piao testified in English, occasionally consulting a Mandarin translator who sat next to him. “I was shocked: ‘What does that mean, get mad at Ricky?’”
“We killed Ricky,” the crime boss allegedly responded.
The witness said Uncle Six then explained that Wang was a “bad man” who had betrayed the syndicate, wanting to seize power and kill Uncle Six in the process so he could take over as Auckland’s largest supplier of ephedrine - a vital methamphetamine precursor.
“I just wanted to protect myself,” Piao recalled Uncle Six telling him. “If I don’t do anything, I will be the one who will be killed.”
Piao continued: “He said Ricky had contact with a couple of gang members in Auckland - already talked to them about this [taking over]. Because Brother Six had a very good relationship with the gangs, the gang members just gave the information back to him. So he decided to kill Ricky first.”
Piao’s job, the boss explained to him, would be to approach Wang’s ex-wife - giving her $10,000 cash and trying to convince her that Wang had run off to Australia with a prostitute as the result of a clan lab explosion at his apartment that put him in police crosshairs.
But first, they drove to the Massey home where Wang’s body lay to deal with more immediate issues.
After pointing out the body still on the floor, Brother Six led him to the master bedroom where Gu and Fatty were sleeping, Piao said.
“What kind of people can still sleep in there?” he recalled thinking, explaining that it added to his fear about what he was getting himself into - and his realisation that there was no backing out.
After the men discussed what to do next, Piao said he drove Brother Six to a Chinese restaurant where the boss retrieved a van, giving the owner $5000 cash and telling him he’d get the vehicle back but would have to sell or destroy it.
Piao said he was later ordered to return to the Massey house, where he said Gu was trying to clean the crime scene. Others arrived to help, each with cleaning supplies like plastic gloves, bleach and boiler suits that they had been ordered to purchase in small quantities so as not to raise suspicions.
He secretly took a picture of Uncle Six standing next to black rubbish bags filled with bloody rags, which prosecutors Matthew Nathan and Joanne Lee this week showed to jurors. He wanted proof of where he was, he said, in case something happened to him.
Massage parlour operator Tony Piao told jurors in the murder trial of Michael Gu that he secretly took this photo of drug boss Uncle Six in the same house where meth cook Ricky Wang was fatally stabbed, one day after Wang's death. Photo / Supplied
The idea was to take the incriminating rubbish to a construction site skip. But they didn’t yet know where to take the body, which by that time had been moved to the ice-filled bathtub.
After Brother Six’s minions took exploratory trips to Piha and Coromandel in the following days to look for potential burial sites, Piao said he remembered the Desert Rd area from his own trips to Taupō and suggested it to the group. “I tried my best to get into the team so I can be safe,” he explained.
Wang’s corpse was stripped naked after Gu cut his finger while transporting the freezer to the van, with a drop of blood falling on Wang’s clothes, Piao recalled.
Piao said he then drove Wang’s body to the Desert Rd burial site in the Chinese restaurant van, with others accompanying him in their own vehicles. Gu and Fatty sped ahead, he said, explaining that their assigned task was to serve as a diversion by being stopped for a speeding ticket if there happened to be any police on the road. When he arrived at the site, a shallow grave had already been dug by others, he testified.
“Four or five of us, we tipped the body into the grave,” Piao said, explaining that each person had bought a couple of bags of ready-mix concrete with them, which were then poured on top of the murder victim.
When they got back to the Massey house as the sun was rising, Brother Six - who had not accompanied the group - determined from the reports he received that the grave was too shallow. He sent four men back to exhume the body and put it in a deeper grave in the same spot, but Piao said he wasn’t included in that trip - instead staying behind to smoke meth and begin work on the next phase of the cover-up.
Piao reckoned he was also recruited because of his construction background. He helped remove the bloody wood flooring in the Massey house and then spent days at Wang’s central Auckland apartment to oversee renovations there, he said, explaining that it, too, had been used as a clan lab. He helped pack up the meth cooking glassware used in Wang’s apartment as the lab was decommissioned and made to look like a normal apartment again, he said.
‘I knew too much’
All of the syndicate members had originally hailed from China before immigrating to New Zealand, and most of the conversations described by Piao were originally in Chinese, he said.
Outlining the hierarchy of the group, Piao described Wang as a “sub-contractor”. Despite Wang’s somewhat outsider status he, like all others, answered to Uncle Six, whose power derived from his overseas ephedrine contacts.
“He’s the main boss. He’s the big, big boss,” Piao said of Uncle Six.
Michael Gu, the defendant, was a “very good” methamphetamine cook who had previously been a meth kitchen understudy of Wang, Piao said. He was second in charge.
Gordon “Fatty” Yu, meanwhile, spoke the best English of the group and was feared for his local gang connections, Piao said, describing him as third in charge. A “marketing manager” of sorts for the syndicate, he would go around to gang pads with a backpack filled with methamphetamine and ephedrine and forge distribution deals on behalf of the syndicate, the witness said.
The body of Bao Chang "Ricky" Wang was found in 2020, three years after he vanished. Photo / Supplied
Although he trained others how to cook methamphetamine, Wang didn’t seem to be a very good cook himself, Piao said, describing him as having ruined batches “many, many, many times”. As a result, Piao said, Brother Six felt that Wang owed the syndicate roughly $600,000.
As Piao helped Gu with the crime scene cleaning in the aftermath of Wang’s murder, he said the defendant started to open up about how loyal was to Uncle Six and how he had been the person who stabbed Wang after the interrogation. He showed Piao a military-like dagger that he identified as the murder weapon, Piao said.
Gu also explained more about how Wang had been lured to the Massey house under the guise of taking a look at glass beakers and other methamphetamine-cooking equipment, Piao said, explaining that Gu then described pulling a gun on the suspected traitor alongside Fatty and Uncle Six.
“Ricky didn’t believe this was real, because Ricky and Brother Six are very close friends,” Piao said he was told of the gunpoint confrontation. “He’s still giggling or laughing, saying this is a joke.”
But when they started to tie him to the chair he started to get scared, Piao said.
“Brother Six started to do some questioning. Brother Six asked, ‘Where is the money?’ because Ricky stole quite a lot of materials, like ephedrine, from Brother Six.” Then the boss asked Wang about the rumours he wanted to seize control of the syndicate via a bloody coup.
Zhicheng "Michael" Gu (left) and Jian Qi "Uncle Six" Zhao (right) appear in court via audio-video feed for an earlier hearing after being charged with murder. Photos / Sam Hurley
“Michael told me Ricky denied everything,” Piao said, explaining that Brother Six was unsatisfied with the responses so ordered Gu and Fatty to finish him off.
Despite their efforts to silence Wang with a towel over his head, there was screaming and shouting as he was stabbed and a struggle as he tried to free himself from the chair he had been tied to, jurors were told.
Gu seemed haunted, Piao said, as the defendant described how the shouting eventually stopped and Wang just stared at him as the life drained from his eyes.
“Michael [Gu] said, ‘I will take care of your family. Just die peacefully, please,’” Piao explained.
Later on, Gu would confess that he often saw Wang standing next to his bed in his sleep, the witness said.
As for Piao’s own role with the group, the witness said he didn’t have much of a choice when Uncle Six suggested after Wang’s body had been buried that Piao take on a job with the syndicate as an assistant meth cook.
“He said to me, ‘If you’re around me I feel much safer.’ I needed to work for him ... because I knew too much.
“I remember one day he told me, ‘If you betray me I will kill you.’ He would kill all my family members in front of me. I was very scared.”
Piao and the others would be arrested the following year after police found their next clan lab.
After pleading guilty and receiving a prison sentence for the drug charges in 2019, Piao said he thought he could finally reveal the murder to police without fellow syndicate members suspecting it was him. He instructed his wife to make contact with police, who at that point hadn’t even realised that Wang had gone missing.
Suspicious confession
From early on, police had some suspicions Piao was possibly not being totally honest with them.
Giving Piao immunity for his vital tip-off that there had been a murder no one knew about was initially a consideration, but that was taken off the table when police began to find inconsistencies in his story, Detective Inspector Kevin McNaughton said this week.
The detectives had posted a large timeline on the wall of their office, but when they gained access to location data from Piao’s phone it wasn’t an exact match to what he had described to them. Additionally, during a lengthy police interview in October 2019, Piao had described “Fatty” Yu as having been involved in the disposal of Wang’s body but not present at the actual murder. McNaughton said another source had led him to believe Yu had a larger role.
“Doubt that Mr Piao had included all the information in his account that he should have” ended up being “fatal in his application for immunity”, the 22-year police veteran said. When Piao was interviewed again in 2020, after Wang’s grave was finally found, he was told he was being interviewed as a suspect and that he was going to be charged, McNaughton recalled.
Piao agreed to talk anyway, eventually admitting that he had intentionally downplayed Fatty’s role at first because that was the person he most feared retribution from.
Defence lawyer Scott Brickell spent all of Friday methodically picking through Piao’s testimony and prior police statements, focusing intently on each inconsistency.
A major focus was put on Piao’s repeated insistence in the witness box that he hadn’t been involved in the meth trade or with gangs until after Wang’s death, becoming a henchman only reluctantly after Uncle Six offered him the job that he felt would be unsafe to refuse. In response, the defence produced WeChat conversations from before Wang’s death in which Piao appeared to make references to drugs and guns and location data placing him near the homes of known gang members.
“My suggestion is, before Ricky Wang’s death, your massage parlour was being used in some way to supply and distribute drugs,” Brickell told the witness.
At that point, the trial was paused so that Piao could get legal advice before answering. When the trial resumed, Piao declined to answer. “I would like to exercise my privilege against self-incrimination,” he said.
Piao also didn’t initially mention to police that he and Uncle Six had parked outside Wang’s apartment for seven minutes before going to the Massey house, as was indicated by location data. Piao doesn’t remember why they stopped there, he testified as Brickell repeated the question, expressing disbelief.
When he realised in February 2020 that police - still trying to locate the grave - were interested in his Google location data, Piao called his wife from prison and instructed her to delete the data if she could. “Delete them all,” he told her in Chinese, according to a translated transcript of the call.
“You were doing that because you didn’t want them to find Ricky Wang’s body, did you?” Brickell asked.
“Just lies, weren’t they,” Brickell shot back as he took off his glasses and held them to his mouth. “Just lies.”
After hours of cross-examination, Brickell suggested an alternative theory: that Piao was actually a trusted henchman all along who helped to kill Wang at Wang’s own apartment. He then spent days refurbishing Wang’s apartment not because it was a clan lab but because that’s where all the murder evidence was, he suggested.
“You were washing Ricky Wang’s blood off the walls, weren’t you?” Brickell asked.
Piao fervently denied it.
The defence lawyer asked Piao if he had used pliers to pull Wang’s teeth out during the interrogation and if he had burned off Wang’s fingerprints, which the witness also denied.
Brickell also floated another defence theory: that Piao decided to make Gu the fall guy, describing him as the stabber to police even though Gu wasn’t present when the murder occurred. The obvious stabber would have been the larger and more feared henchman Fatty, Brickell added.
Zhicheng "Michael" Gu appears in the Auckland District Court for an earlier hearing. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Piao acknowledged telling police detailed lies at first in an effort to leave Fatty out of it, because he was “really, really, really, really shit scared” of him. But he didn’t go as far as blaming the wrong person, he insisted, emphasising that he eventually fessed up to lies that were in his initial police interview.
“I could not 100 per cent tell the truth, because I have too many considerations,” Piao explained. “I have no idea what witness protection looks like. So I chose to hold something back.
“I really had no idea how much power New Zealand Police had, but later on [after detectives revealed what they had learned from location data] I saw they are big and they are very powerful. They can do much more than I expect. That’s why later on when they talked to me I chose to tell all the truth.”
At that point, he said, he finally felt confident police could protect him and his family after months of “struggling in my heart”, unable to eat, drink or sleep.
“You know what these people can do after I tell police about everything...” he said of his initial fears. “You know Brother Six, the syndicate is international. Even my family in China, I don’t think they’re safe. Only a phone call away, they can be killed.
“But later on I thought I should do the right thing. I’ve already done too many bad things already.”
Piao’s testimony will continue for a fourth day on Monday when the trial resumes before Justice Simon Moore and the jury.
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.
