Deng reportedly persuaded over 100 Chinese immigrants to pay him for entry to the "US Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit", an entity of which he was "Supreme Commander" and that had no official basis. He apparently promised his "recruits" that membership of the unit would eventually lead to US citizenship. The troops paid him between US$300 and US$400 to join, with an additional $120 pa renewal. Higher payments were reflected in higher ranks.
Deng established an office that reportedly resembled a legitimate military recruiting office. The recruits received kit acquired from army surplus stores. They also scored identification cards that resembled military ID's. Deng appears to have claimed that the cards could be useful in dealing with traffic tickets.
All good units have to march and otherwise strut their stuff, as Wilhelm Voigt (1849-1922) - aka the Captain From Köpenick - recognised.
Voigt, an ex-crim, leveraged Prussian deference to anyone in a uniform, acquired a second-hand army captain's suit in 1906 and blithely commandeered a detachment of grenadiers. Marching to Köpenick town hall, he arrested the burgomaster (who was sent in a car to the police station at the Neue Wache) and after examining the municipal accounts departed with 4,000 marks in two large sacks. That sum was equivalent to around $300,000.
Alas, Voigt didn't take a fast train to Hamburg, buy a one-way ticket to Mexico and enjoy an ocean cruise. He was arrested five days after his exploit, having got drunk on the proceeds. The troops went unpunished because they had "unquestioningly obeyed the command of an officer". Apart from the famous play by Carl Zuckmayer, the case is unpacked in Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2004) by Benjamin Hett and in Beyond the prison gates: punishment and welfare in Germany, 1850-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2008) by Warren Rosenblum.
Hett's incisive 'The 'Captain of Köpenick' and the Transformation of German Criminal Justice' in 36(1) Central European History (2003) 1-43 comments that -
Zuckmayer's famous play and the 1956 film directed by Helmut Käutner and starring Heinz Rühmann, attached an indelible set of meanings to Voigt's escapade. On the one hand, Voigt was the man whose wit and daring demonstrated how Imperial Germany was the paradise of militarism, a country in which anyone in a uniform would be obeyed without question, however outrageous his orders. On the other hand, Voigt had a long record of being treated harshly or with callous bureaucratic disregard by Prussia's judicial and police authorities; thus his life story seemed to embody a withering critique of these civilian institutions as well. Eventually, for many Germans (and others) the militarism critique merged with the criminal justice critique. The moral of Voigt's story was simply that Imperial Germany was the classic land of arrogant authority, and of unhappy yet submissive subjects.Deng's unit marched too but as yet his story isn't being constructed as a withering critique of US militarism and justice. The unit is described as having been "a well-known presence in the San Gabriel Valley", appearing in city parades in Monterey Park over the past two years and taking a tour of the USS Midway Museum in San Diego.
Investigation by the FBI of the scam began in 2008, following reports by Californian police that members were producing "counterfeit military ID's at traffic stops" and incidents where the 'troops' appeared at genuine Army offices to pay renewal fees rather than paying Deng directly.
A lawyer for Deng argued that the unit was established up to help Chinese immigrants assimilate into US society. Deng is in custody, apparently having been unable to raise US$500,000 bail, and faces 13 felony counts (including including obtaining money, labor or property by false pretenses, and providing false documents).
Hett, in discussing Voigt, comments that -
The real significance of the Wilhelm Voigt story is virtually the opposite of that which it has usually been given by literary writers and historians. Where most accounts have taken Voigt's treatment at the hands of police and judicial authorities to be emblematic of the failure of the Prussian/German state to meet the challenges of a modern society, I will argue that his case demonstrates the remarkable transformation that was underway in the German criminal justice system in the last years before the First World War. This transformation took place on several levels: it was both a transformation in ideas and in daily practice. Intellectually, the first years of the twentieth century witnessed a great ferment in German criminal law, as in other branches of German legal thought. The prevailing positivism of thinkers like the Leipzig professor (and judge) Karl Binding (who wrote that he "found his pride" in the complete dependence of his work on the study of statutory enactments, and dismissed as "dilettantism" the inroads that criminologists, sociologists, and practitioners of forensic psychology were making in the criminal law) was giving way to a more flexible conception of the sources of law (above all among the thinkers of the "free law movement") and a greater concern with the social ends of law (primarily among the "sociological school" spearheaded by the Berlin professor Franz von Liszt). At the level of practice, Germany's criminal courts were taking account of a wide range of new kinds of evidence - evidence of social conditions as well as of the medical and psychological histories of defendants - with the consequence that they were more likely to acquit defendants altogether, and to hand out less severe punishments to those they convicted. The prestige and power of the professionals who tended to balance the courtroom scales against the prosecution - above all defense lawyers and medical expert witnesses - increased steadily.
Prussian ministerial authorities, far from being arrogant and isolated, were deeply concerned about public opinion and were willing to take remarkable steps to cater to it. The reason for their concern had to do with another striking quality of late-Wilhelmian Germany, which historians have often missed or underplayed: the pluralism and vibrancy of its public sphere. Voigt's case shows how a right-left "culture war" of the sort familiar to Americans in the last decade had broken out over a range of linked issues - the usages of the legal system, the role of women in society and the implications of gender for the law, the permissible boundaries of public discussion of sex and violence, and of press access to trials and public officials. Behind these discussions, tectonic shifts were going on in the political, social, and cultural landscapes of the German Empire. In every sense the Weimar Republic was being born: the anger and defensiveness of the political and cultural Right, the ascendancy of the democratic parties, the growth of mass culture - all of these things that we associate with the 1920s were well in evidence by 1906.
... There is no basis here for retrospective complacency (and certainly few contemporary observers of the Wilhelmian courts were complacent about their operations). The intellectual assault on the canons of legal positivism, the incorporation of social and medical science in criminal law (with a concomitant downplaying of individual responsibility), and the rush of public opinion into the sanctuaries of ministerial offices and courtrooms, were Janus-faced developments, bringing with them possibilities of new kinds of authoritarianism as well as new kinds of emancipation. The humble figure of Wilhelm Voigt and his remarkable performance at the Köpenick town hall will help us explore the complex ramifications of these social, legal, and intellectual forces.
