Businessman hired nephew to gun down ex-employee who started rival company, feds say
A property development businessman is accused of hiring his nephew to gun down a former employee after he resigned and started a rival company in New York City, federal prosecutors say.
The victim was fatally shot at his new company’s Lunar New Year celebration party, which was held at a karaoke bar in Queens in February 2019, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Businessman Qing Ming Yu, 54; his nephew You You, 34; and two other men — Antony Abreu, 34, and Zhe Zhang, 34 — have been charged in connection with the murder-for-hire plot that killed Queens resident Xin Gu over his “perceived disloyalty,” the office said in a May 10 news release. Gu was 31 at the time of his death.
Yu, his nephew and Zhang were arrested on May 10, according to the release. Abreu “is already in federal custody serving a sentence in an unrelated matter” and will be transferred over to the Eastern District of New York “at a later date.”
Attorney contact information for the defendants was not immediately available.
U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement that the four men “callously used gun violence to resolve a business dispute, reducing the value of a man’s life to a dollar figure, and bringing trauma and mourning to the community.”
The case goes back to between 2015 and 2018 when Gu worked for Yu at his property development company in Manhattan, according to prosecutors.
In 2018, Gu “became concerned about the company’s financial viability” and eventually “resigned and formed his own property development company.”
A number of other employees, as well as clients, “cut ties” with Yu’s company shortly after Gu’s decision to leave, the attorney’s office said. Then, Yu’s company closed in late 2018.
Yu is accused of then becoming “enraged” at Gu and perceiving him as a business rival, according to the release. As a result, he decided to hire his nephew, You, to kill Gu and offered him an undisclosed amount of money as a reward, prosecutors said.
Yu’s nephew is accused of instructing Abreu and Zhang to help him execute Gu, the news release said. When they discovered Gu’s company was having a celebration in February 2019, they plotted to kill him that night, prosecutors said.
You acted “as a lookout,” Zhang was “the getaway driver,” and Abreu fatally gunned Gu down in Queens, prosecutors said.
“If convicted, each defendant faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison, or the death penalty,” the news release said.
This story was originally published May 11, 2022 at 10:39 AM with the headline "Businessman hired nephew to gun down ex-employee who started rival company, feds say."
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