A federal judge sentenced an ex-New York police officer to 18 months in prison over his 2023 conviction for acting as an illegal agent for the People's Republic of China, the Justice Department announced. Federal prosecutors said Michael McMahon, 57, pressured a New Jersey resident to return to China to face bribery and embezzlement charges, an example of a global repatriation campaign by Chinese law enforcement known as "Operation Fox Hunt." A federal jury in Brooklyn found McMahon, of Mahwah, a retired New York City Police Department sergeant, guilty of interstate stalking and of acting as an agent of China without notifying the U.S. attorney general. As part of his sentence, McMahon was also ordered to pay a $11,000 fine.
A former New York police sergeant was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months in prison in a U.S. case about China’s pursuit of critics abroad, a sentence that came after two members of Congress urged the judge to spare him from time behind bars. Michael McMahon was convicted in 2023 of contributing to a transcontinental pressure campaign aimed at getting a former Chinese city official to leave the U.S. and return to his homeland. The tactics ranged from Facebook messages to a threatening real-world note on the man’s New Jersey door. During an hourslong sentencing, McMahon said he was “unwittingly used” by Chinese operatives when he took what he thought was a routine private investigation job in 2016. “I never thought for one minute I was working for China, stalking anyone. Yet now I’ve lost everything,” McMahon said. “This is such a nightmare.”
A former New York City police officer was sentenced to 18 months in prison Wednesday after being convicted in 2023 for acting illegally as an agent of China. In 2016, an unknown client hired Michael McMahon as a private investigator to surveil a New Jersey resident named Xu Jin, whom the Chinese government had accused of corruption. The surveillance was part of a global campaign by Chinese law enforcement, known as “Operation Fox Hunt,” to repatriate alleged criminals living abroad.
