How an ‘untouchable’ Chinatown informant played the feds, NYPD for nearly two decades

In the dead of a July night, two men burst into a private room at a karaoke bar in Flushing, Queens, where a group was celebrating an upcoming wedding with beers and sing-along tunes. 

“Shoot him,” one of the men allegedly told the other, who was carrying a .40-caliber handgun. 

The gunman, a bodyguard known as “Little Beijing,” leapt onto a table at the center of the room and took aim at a man singing into a microphone. 

He unloaded his pistol, striking his target – a businessman and investor in an interstate Chinatown bus line – six times from a distance of about two feet, close enough the gunpowder exploding off the gun seared the victim’s skin. 

A hostess who ducked for cover when the shots rang out was hit in the head as she cowered, the bullet ripping through her brain.

Both of the victims were killed nearly instantly. 

The man who allegedly ordered the gunman to open fire that night in 2014 was a 32-year-old Chinatown Dai Lo, or gang leader, named Xing Lin, aka Ding Pa, apparently motivated by greed and a desire for clout.

At his RICO trial years later, Ding Pa’s defense attorneys claimed a rival gangster and prolific government informant had helped federal prosecutors in Manhattan orchestrate the case by providing a parade of witnesses to testify about their client’s guilt.

The informant was Qian Zheng, a well-known figure in gambling parlors and other seedy neighborhood hangouts.

In Chinatown, he was known as Cash. 

For nearly two decades – from 1998 through 2015 – Cash was a snitch for NYPD Major Case Squad detectives and federal immigration investigators, according to court documents recently unsealed at the request of The Post. 

For at least eight of those years, he was also the head of a violent organized crime outfit – later dubbed the “Zheng Organization” by the feds – that trafficked ketamine and MDMA, ran a high-stakes gambling parlor, collected debts through violence and extorted business owners in New York’s Asian-American communities, according to court documents.

For the host of crimes he committed as a Dai Lo, Cash pleaded guilty to racketeering in Brooklyn federal court in 2017 and was sentenced to nine years in prison.  

The details of how he began working as a source for the NYPD are murky, in part because the first decade of his informant file is missing, according to a newly unsealed sentencing submission filed by his attorney in 2017.

In the memo, Cash’s attorney claimed “dozens of convictions, from both state and federal prosecutions involving prostitution, smuggling, human trafficking, assault, gang activity, murder, and police corruption were secured with his assistance.” 

Back in 2007, Cash became the owner and manager of a bus company that ferried passengers to the south from New York. Around the same time, he passed information to law enforcement about extortion and collusion in the industry, as well as violence and cigarette smuggling along the routes, according to the documents. 

In 2009, he told the NYPD about off-duty cops who worked as security guards at an “underground club,” illegally selling parking permits and allegedly swiping cash from a separate nightspot when police raided it. 

Then in 2014, he passed along another tip about NYPD officers from the 109 precinct in Flushing extorting one of his “business partner[s].” The business partner later made recordings of the officers, which led to the arrest of three cops, according to the documents. 

Cash also spent years as a stoolie for Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE, the documents state. 

In his first stint as a federal informant from 2003 to 2006, he sang about a human trafficking victim, wore a wire on a “handful of occasions” and provided information about murder, extortion, alien smuggling and money laundering,” then-HSI Acting Deputy Assistant Director Anthony Scandiffio said in a letter submitted in his case. 

“[Cash] also set up a dinner party for the targets of the investigation, which aided in the arrest of these individuals,” Scandiffio added in the 2017 letter. 

His second stint as an ICE informant started in 2010 — not long before feds hunting Ding Pa over the 2004 Flushing shooting tracked him down to Toronto, Canada, and arrested him.

Prosecutor’s alleged that Ding Pa had been extorting a bus line run by the singer gunned down in the Kissena Boulevard karaoke joint.

When the victim refused to pay, Ding Pa, worried he was losing “face” – or respect – as a shot-caller in the neighborhood – went to the karaoke joint that night to flex his muscle, prosecutors said.

After his bust, Ding Pa struck a plea deal with Manhattan federal prosecutors that would have required him to plead guilty to aiding and abetting the use of a firearm in an extortion conspiracy and serve 10 years in prison. 

But at a 2012 plea hearing, Judge Miriam Cedarbaum rejected his spoken acceptance of guilt – known as an allocution – because Ding Pa couldn’t say he ordered the alleged gunman, Little Beijing, to kill his rival that night. 

He was convicted at trial in 2013 of racketeering and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison.

During his time as an ICE source between 2010 and 2014, Cash “provided the names and contact information of witnesses to a murder, which contributed to the suspect’s arrest,” Scandiffio wrote, referring to Ding Pa.

Cash’s dual roles as Dai Lo and informant smack of someone who played the criminal justice system to earn money on the street, federal prosecutors argued in a newly unsealed 2017 sentencing submission. 

“It is clear from the defendant’s behavior that he acted as an informant to further his own agenda,” Assistant US Attorneys Nadia E. Moore and Maria Cruz Melendez wrote. 

“The defendant operated commercial bus companies and extorted rival bus companies. The defendant distributed narcotics and provided information about other narcotics distributors,” the memo states. “The defendant operated illegal gambling businesses and provided information about others who ran illegal gambling parlors.”

It goes on: “The defendant extorted business owners, and provided information about others who also engaged in extortion. The defendant committed and solicited numerous acts of extreme violence, and provided information about violent crimes. The defendant was involved in alien smuggling and provided information about alien smuggling.” 

In many cases, Cash provided information to the cops he had learned from other people –but refused to introduce the actual source of the information to the cops, the memo states.

He did so, “in order to maintain their relationship and potentially obtain a benefit from the NYPD,” the prosecutors wrote.

In surreptitious recordings, Cash told his underlings he would have his rivals deported or arrested if they crossed him, the documents state. ICE also “assisted” in Cash obtaining a work permit in the US, according to the documents.

In May 2013, Cash told an underling to beat a bus passenger, according to the documents. When the NYPD responded to a 911 call about the assault, he allegedly showed the cops his handler’s card to avoid arrest. 

After his arrest in the RICO case, Cash told his wife from jail that he was waiting for “the big one” — an apparent reference to Scandiffio — to help him get visitation privileges and use of a phone behind bars, the documents state.

“He cherry picked whatever he reported to his handler,” a criminal defense attorney who works with Asian New Yorkers told The Post. “You can pretend like you’re helping the police while you’re making ill-gotten gains on the other side.” 

When he was arrested in 2015, Cash hadn’t held an above-board job in three years, but was driving a $95,000 Mercedes-Benz and wearing a Rolex and a jade necklace. 

He was also carrying a New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association card, according to the prosecutors’ sentencing memo. 

“The defendant likely intended to use this car[d] in the case of an encounter with law enforcement to attempt to avoid arrest and prosecution,” the document states.

Cash was released from prison under the First Step Act in September after serving nearly seven years, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons said. 

The NYPD, HSI and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York did not comment.

Cash’s current attorney also declined to comment.  

Ding Pa, now 50, was resentenced earlier this year to 27 years in prison after the Supreme Court ruled a robbery count he was convicted of did not constitute a “crime of violence.”  

He’s due to be released in 2034 and expects to immediately be deported to China upon release.

Since his arrest in 2011, Ding Pa has not admitted in court that he ordered Little Beijing — who has not been caught — to kill the man in the karaoke bar that night in 2004. 

At his first sentencing, he lamented that he was unable to agree to the 10-year plea deal – and blamed false testimony of witnesses at his trial for his conviction. 

“I tried to plead guilty but I could not tell you that I order Little Beijing to shoot or kill [the vicitm], because it wasn’t my intention. Still, I shouldn’t have been there with a bodyguard carrying a gun,” Ding Pa said. 

In a recent interview, Ding Pa’s trial attorney, Joel Cohen, told The Post he still does not believe his former client told Little Beijing to open fire that night.

“It just didn’t sound like him. If he was going to f–k somebody up, he would’ve done it himself. He wouldn’t have asked an underling to do it,” Cohen said.

Cohen added he thought Cash orchestrated the prosecution against him in an attempt to further ingratiate himself with law enforcement.

“He was providing so much good information to ICE that they were willing to overlook anything he did short of murdering somebody,” Cohen said.

“It also gave him a lot of face in the community. Everyone knew Cash was an informant. He didn’t hide it; he exploited it,” Cohen added. “Everyone knew Cash was untouchable.”