Training ensures that crime does not pay

On Aug 19, 1997, he killed seven people and injured five with an accomplice at the entrance of a hotel in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, and took 1.4 million yuan from them.

About a week later, he killed the accomplice and went back to Beijing with his mistress.

Bai was caught at his mother's home on Sept 5, 1997. He said in his confession in court that he did not fight when police detained him because he could not kill in front of his mother.

Mafia-style boss of gang

Zhang Jun started out as teenage hoodlum, stealing just to feed himself and getting into petty scuffles. By the time of his death, he had risen to the status of a Mafia-style don.

For roughly a decade, he masterminded a gang of heavily armed thieves and murderers - mostly his own family members - who staged a number of robberies in Central China, killing 28 people in the process.

The youngest of seven children, Zhang grew up in an impoverished area of Hunan province. Both of his parents died when he was just 10 years old and in 1983, aged 17, he was sentenced to three years in juvenile detention after a street brawl.

Upon being released, he attempted to go straight. He tried farming, running a restaurant and opened a shoe shop. Each business failed.

By 1991, he had committed his first robbery. He acted alone and used a homemade pistol to threaten his victim. The following year, he began purchasing more firearms in Yunnan province, close to the boarder with Vietnam.

The gang was not formed until 1994. Deciding that he needed more people to steal more money, he recruited 20 friends and family from his hometown - all of them poor and desperate for a change in luck.

Zhang ran a professional operation: Members practiced shooting in the woods and were required to do 200 pushups every day, and before robberies they would go over the plan using a sand table.

One fact that fascinated people was that seven members were women, five of whom were Zhang's mistresses. Using his good looks and offering pledges of eternal love, he convinced them to hide firearms for him.

Between 1991 and 2000, when they were caught, Zhang's gang had killed 28 people and injured 20 others, and had taken possession of properties worth a total of more than 6 million yuan in five provinces.

The gang was so brutal that one victim was found with seven bullet wounds to the head.

At their trial in 2001, the prosecutor spent 50 minutes simply reading out the list of charges. About 2,800 pieces of evidence were submitted to the court.

Fourteen members of the gang were sentenced to death, including Zhang.

Four years after the gang was broken up, God Doesn't Harbor Evil, a 28-part drama series based on Zhang's crime spree, was aired on China Central Television and several provincial stations.

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