The first time El Monte police raided Pacific Place, a gated pink complex of office buildings and warehouses, they found an illicit casino.
Crammed inside a suite were electronic gambling tables with flashing lights, a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit. Police seized the machines on Dec. 9, 2021, along with cash and several pounds of methamphetamine.
Police returned to the Valley Boulevard property and an adjoining building four more times in three years, search warrant affidavits show. They found something different each time: Gambling parlor. Marijuana stash house. Psilocybin mushroom grow.
Then came the strangest discovery yet: When police searched the property owner’s mansion in the neighboring city of Arcadia, they found 15 children, most of them toddlers.
Guojun Xuan, 65, told detectives he fathered 22 kids in all. All but two were born to surrogates, women who’d been paid to receive an embryo transfer and carry the children to term.
Kollin Cieadlo, a lieutenant for the Arcadia Police Department, said his detectives didn’t know if they’d stumbled onto a human trafficking operation or if, as Xuan and his partner told police, the couple “simply wanted to have a large family.”
Arcadia police asked the FBI to investigate after learning Xuan and his partner, Sylvia Zhang, 38, transferred money to surrogates and traveled across state lines to collect the children, Cieadlo said. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment.
But Xuan’s ownership of the drug-plagued El Monte property — which has not been previously reported — has deepened the mystery surrounding the family.
It’s possible Xuan was merely an unwitting landlord to bad actors. Court records show his companies evicted several tenants in 2025, alleging they violated leases by engaging in illegal activity.
No charges have been filed against Xuan or Zhang, who did not respond to inquiries from The Times. In comments to the Wall Street Journal, Zhang denied involvement in human trafficking and said she was motivated by the damage of China’s one-child policy to have as many kids as she could afford.
The search of Xuan’s home that revealed the children has mystified neighbors in a suburb whose good schools and safe streets have made it a landing spot for wealthy Chinese emigres. Journalists staked out Xuan and Zhang’s beige stone home with a large balcony and twin turrets. Some reports heaped speculation atop what little was publicly known. “Twisted baby factory,” one tabloid declared.
But after making headlines in July, the mystery seemed to fade from public view.
Then this month, El Monte filed a civil abatement claim against Xuan and others connected to Pacific Place, laying out a series of police raids that allegedly uncovered illegal gambling and drug manufacturing.
In the complaint, El Monte authorities say they found evidence at Xuan’s property of a “well-established, sophisticated and persistent criminal enterprise”: Trash bags full of drugs. Guns. Counterfeit currency.
And links to a felon nicknamed Dragon.
El Monte police were first led to Xuan’s Pacific Place property in 2021, tipped off it was operating as a”possible illegal nightclub,” a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit.
When police pulled over a man who was leaving the premises and found five pounds of meth in his vehicle, it was enough for detectives to get a warrant to search the buildings.
Xuan bought the 116,160-square foot property two years earlier for $10.5 million through a company called Hongxing Investment, property records show. It became the headquarters for Xuan’s real estate business. Dozens of holding companies that own his properties are registered there.
Within the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese diaspora, Xuan is known as a deep-pocketed investor who snaps up foreclosed properties at courthouse auctions, according to a business associate who requested anonymity because he feared retaliation.
In his office at Pacific Place, Xuan put up a large map of Los Angeles and Orange counties covered with red dots, which he said represented his properties, the associate said.
It isn’t clear when Xuan met Zhang, the alleged mother of the children found in the Arcadia home. Both were previously married and filed to divorce their spouses within a 10-day span in 2021, court records show. The lawyer who handled their cases didn’t return a request for comment.
Xuan already was father to a young child. In a divorce petition, Xuan said he had a 2-year-old boy with his 59-year-old wife. It wasn’t clear if a surrogate gave birth to the child. A judge granted Xuan custody after the mother returned to China, court records show.
Four months after Xuan filed for divorce, he and Zhang reported having a child at a Riverside hospital, according to a birth certificate filed in court. The document didn’t say whether Zhang or a surrogate gave birth to the boy.
Around this time, a person named Guilan Huang registered a company, Mark Surrogacy, at Xuan’s Arcadia home. In business records, Zhang was listed as its manager. Its stated purpose was “surrogacy and real estate.”
In March 2023, El Monte officers returned to Pacific Place, according to a search warrant affidavit. Zhang had called the officers herself. Identifying herself as the property manager, she told the officers a man had attacked her in an office suite, she said.
Officers searched the unit and another one rented by the same tenant, finding a full-blown psilocybin mushroom farm. Fungi sprouted in trays, jars, boxes and petri dishes. Police seized 1,715 pounds of mushrooms in all, a detective wrote in the affidavit. Officers also confiscated 95 pounds of concentrated cannabis wax, ammunition and a small, flat handgun that resembled a cell phone.
According to the affidavit, the tenant was Haoren “Dragon” Ma.
Ma, 61, first caught the attention of law enforcement in 2009, when he was running a business in San Gabriel called New Arrival Immigration Service, a federal agent wrote in an affidavit.
Ma charged Chinese nationals a fee to file asylum claims on their behalf, claiming they were persecuted for being Christian, the agent wrote. When an undercover agent visited Ma’s office, he saw religious study guides and clients watching a video about Christianity, apparently in preparation for asylum interviews, the agent wrote. Authorities identified more than 800 claims filed by Ma’s company.
When authorities arrested Ma in 2011, they found an indoor marijuana grow and cache of rifles and shotguns in his San Gabriel home, according to a sentencing memo and indictment.
From a federal jail in downtown Los Angeles, Ma sent a bizarre letter to the judge overseeing his case. If released, he could lift a curse that a Taoist priest placed on the Kennedy family that doomed all its men to die before middle age.
“If interested, please contact me,” he wrote.
Instead, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney in 2014 ordered Ma to serve four and a half years for conspiracy, identity theft and presenting false immigration documents. Before he was sentenced, Ma told the judge he’d had time in jail to reflect.
“I’m not a good man,” he said, according to a transcript of the hearing. He swore that once he finished his term, he’d return to China and never break the law again.
Nine years later, he turned back up at Xuan’s property.
On Aug. 31, 2023, El Monte police detained Ma near Pacific Place. In his car, they found a pound each of marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms, according to a search warrant return.
Ma didn’t return requests for comment left at his home or through his attorney, Ping Shen.
Shen told The Times he’d also represented Xuan in a case related to Pacific Place; he couldn’t comment on either man’s behalf, he said.
In December 2024, El Monte detectives raided Xuan’s property for the fifth time. Inside a warehouse were gambling machines, tables set up for poker and mahjong, counterfeit money and trash bags full of marijuana, the city complaint said.
Police detained a man who said he lived in the warehouse and was paid to manage the gambling parlor by a group called “the six friends,” without elaborating further.
After the police raids, Xuan transferred ownership of the property to other companies he controlled “to conceal ownership, frustrate enforcement and continue Ma’s unlawful gambling and narcotics operations,” El Monte’s complaint said.
El Monte authorities were unraveling Xuan’s ties to the property when police in Arcadia were contacted by a social worker at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in East Hollywood.
On May 7, Zhang brought a 2-month-old boy to the hospital, some 19 miles from Arcadia, a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit. The baby’s head was bruised, and Zhang told doctors the boy fell off a bed, according to the affidavit. Doctors found bleeding in his brain and retina, the detective wrote.
That day, Arcadia police went to the nine-bedroom, 10,000-square-foot home on Camino Real Avenue that Xuan’s company acquired in 2021 for $3.3 million. Inside, detectives found a “home school-type atmosphere,” said Cieadlo, the Arcadia police lieutenant.
There were classrooms with rows of desks and whiteboards. Bedrooms were set up by age, some outfitted with cribs and others with transition beds, Cieadlo said.
Six live-in nannies were raising the children, who had identical buzzcut hairstyles, according to the search warrant affidavit. In Xuan and Zhang’s bedroom was a large monitor that showed footage from about 25 cameras posted throughout the home, according to Cieadlo and the affidavit.
“We weren’t exactly sure what we were looking at,” Cieadlo said. “Whether we had human trafficking, whether it was some other kind of illegal activity that we couldn’t pinpoint.”
According to the affidavit, Zhang told police she was the biological mother of 22 kids — the injured boy brought to the hospital, 15 children living in the Arcadia house and six more in other homes. She said she gave birth to two, while surrogate mothers carried the rest, the document said.
The children didn’t bear obvious signs of abuse, Cieadlo said. But after Zhang and Xuan refused to give police access to home surveillance system, detectives got a warrant for the footage and saw that a nanny had inflicted “emotional and physical abuse” on the children, Cieadlo said.
According to the affidavit, the video showed the nanny yelling at a child seated with seven others behind a row of desks. The nanny picks up the child, pulls down their pants and hits them. The child is later seen squatting while the other kids watch, according to the affidavit. Later, another nanny strikes a child in the face, the document says.
Xuan and Zhang were arrested May 9. “They have 24-hour access to the surveillance system,” a detective wrote an arrest warrant. “Their neglect to review the footage permitted their children to suffer unjustifiable physical pain.”
Detectives also got a warrant to arrest a nanny accused of abusing the infant admitted to the hospital, but she fled and remains a fugitive, Cieadlo said.
The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to charge Xuan and Zhang, who were released after spending more than a day in jail. Cieadlo said prosecutors told his detectives to review more footage to support child abuse charges. A spokesman for the district attorney declined to comment.
Arcadia police have brought in other agencies to help translate and review several weeks of video. “Our intention is 100% to get charges filed,” Cieadlo said.
The lieutenant said his detectives are investigating only whether Xuan and Zhang abused their children. “We have not dove into the surrogacy thing and any illegal activity that may or may not be involved with that,” he said.
The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services took custody of the children, said Cieadlo, who referred questions about their placement to the child protection agency.
A spokesperson for DCFS declined to comment, citing state confidentiality laws, but a representative for a surrogate who carried a child for Zhang and Xuan said the girl is now being raised in foster care.