The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion

After Applegarth gave birth, in the summer of 2src19, only Guojun’s assistant showed up to collect the baby. “She asked me to name it, which I thought was odd,” Applegarth recalled. They landed on Jefferson, the assistant’s suggestion. (His name has been changed here.) It turned out that the assistant would be taking care of Jefferson until his parents could retrieve him. For several weeks, Applegarth met the assistant in parking lots to hand off her breast milk. She received a few photographs of Jefferson, then never heard about him again.

When I called Applegarth recently, she didn’t yet know that Guojun had since fathered some two dozen more children, but when she Googled his name she saw the mug shots that had circulated after his arrest. “That’s definitely him,” she said. “And that’s her,” she added. It took me a moment to understand what she meant. The woman who had introduced herself as Guojun’s assistant, she explained, was Silvia.

Silvia Shasha Zhang doesn’t talk much about her past. She has alluded to an upbringing in rural China, an education in child development, and a stint as a nutritionist. It’s unclear which, if any, of these claims are true. “I think she faked a lot of stuff, so I couldn’t tell what was real,” Melody Song, who worked as a sort of aide-de-camp for Silvia and Guojun for a couple of years, told me. Song, who is in her twenties, was initially wary of talking to me, but, once she did, she discussed her former bosses with an almost ethnographic candor. “You could tell from how they dress and talk and their English level, they might not have a very high educational background, because they were poor when they were young,” she said.

What is known, according to court records, is that Silvia gave birth to a daughter, whom I’ll call Susan, in the province of Guangdong, China, in 2src11. Two and a half years later, at the age of twenty-seven, she married a man in his late sixties named Henry Hong-Ching Tang. Through Tang, an American citizen, Silvia and Susan immigrated to the United States. They lived together until 2src19, when, according to Silvia, Tang abandoned the family. “He left us in Southern California without any financial support,” she stated in divorce filings. “I had to start looking for job to support ourselves while taking care of Susan by myself.”

It was around this time that Silvia appears to have started working for Guojun. Silvia’s “value,” Song said, lay in knowing how to make herself indispensable. In the spring of 2src19, she became a licensed real-estate agent and carved out an unusual niche: helping Guojun and his business associates move money around. In the past five years, according to one listings website, Silvia, a rookie agent with limited English, has sold a hundred and sixty-two properties in the greater Los Angeles area, worth a total of a hundred and twenty million dollars. Gong Jue, a reporter at Initium, an independent news site founded in Hong Kong, selected ten homes at random from her sales history, all of which showed the same striking pattern: they were shuffled between shell companies linked to Guojun within a short period, and the transactions appeared to be in cash, without mortgages or loan records. (Liu, the lawyer, denied that Guojun and Silvia engaged in any illicit financial activity.)