Former Michael McMahon, 57, a retired NYPD sergeant from Mahwah, New Jersey, was found guilty by a federal jury in Brooklyn of interstate stalking and operating as a foreign agent without notifying the U.S. attorney general.
“McMahon, a former law enforcement officer who once swore to protect the public, broke that oath by participating in a scheme directed by the People’s Republic of China,” said John Durham, the U.S.
McMahon and his co-defendants, Zhu Yong, 68, and Congying Zheng, 29, were convicted in June 2023 after a three-week trial, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn.
Family, pressuring them to return to China to face alleged corruption charges.
McMahon, they said, “gathered sensitive information” about the individual and reported his findings back to Zhu and others, including a police officer from the People’s Republic of China.
Prosecutors revealed that McMahon also conducted surveillance outside the New Jersey home of the man’s relative, providing detailed reports on the family’s activities.
According to prosecutors, McMahon knew that the Chinese government was behind the investigation, a fact he later volunteered to share with an investigator he had hired.
McMahon was convicted amid a broader push by the Biden administration to crack down on what it termed transnational repression, or the intimidation and harassment by authoritarian U.S. adversaries such as China or Iran of dissidents on U.S. soil.
For his involvement in the illegal repatriation scheme, McMahon was paid over $19,000, with some payments even deposited into his son’s bank account, prosecutors said.
“The law is the law,” she stated.