Yi Feng Wu covers his face while leaving an immigration hearing in Vancouver in August 2008.

Photograph by: Ric Ernst, The Province
After an eight-year battle, federal agents and Vancouver police have finally succeeded in getting an alleged high-ranking Chinese gangster ordered out of the country.
Until Wednesday, Yi Feng Wu was one of about 100,000 foreign nationals fighting government efforts to deport them.
“It’s like chasing a dragon,” an RCMP officer said last year of Wu. “We have solid intelligence on him but have not been lucky in the courts.”
Wu — who authorities allege was a heroin trafficker, cocaine smuggler, money launderer and marijuana producer — was ordered deported by the Immigration and Refugee Board on Wednesday under a rare finding that he was a member of a criminal organization, a law-enforcement source confirmed.
That finding triggered the deportation order.
Nineteen years ago, Wu came to Canada with his wife and a daughter as refugee claimants. He collected welfare while police investigated him for heroin dealing. He was arrested and charged with drug dealing and assault. Seized documents allegedly linked him to pot growing and cross-border narcotics trafficking.

But Wu, allegedly a leader of a Big Circle Boys — Dai Huen Jai — gang cell, was never convicted of a crime.
Meanwhile, he drove expensive cars, but claimed to work at a seafood shop. The system that tracks large or suspicious casino transactions documented 18 of them worth more than $10,000 by Wu.
He and his wife Lan Mao Feng divorced when his heroin-dealing charge put at risk her landed-immigrant application. He remarried her, applied for residency under her sponsorship, then showed up at the Vancouver airport a few months later with his girlfriend, Yee Yun Yip.

Feng collected welfare until 2001, when authorities determined she was living with Wu. Yip was also collecting welfare for herself and her children.
Wu in 2001 filed a deportation appeal, claiming he’d be at risk if sent back to China. A federal court granted him a stay of removal, deeming it best for his three children that he stay in Canada.
Federal authorities alleged that his wife and girlfriend held hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets. In April 2006, Wu and Feng were living in a Vancouver home, owned by Feng, assessed at $1.1 million.
A police search of the house turned up about $100,000 in cash, $40,000 of it bundled in what police described as “typical of drug money.”
Authorities allege that in 2001, Wu received a large shipment of cocaine from the U.S. in a Vancouver intersection, and slipped away with the drugs from a police takedown.
“Mr. Wu’s criminal activities, and the pattern of criminal activity of his Dai Huen Jai cell, transcended national boundaries through operations in the United States,” federal government lawyer Jesse Davidson told Wu’s IRB hearing last year.
A CBSA organized crime investigator has testified that Wu drove a BMW X5 SUV, registered to his wife, and that a BMW 540i sedan was also registered to her.
Wu, through a lawyer, argued against his deportation in a four-day hearing before the IRB in May 2008.