Article content continued

The indictment alleges that between April 2011 and December 2012, the men gathered patented corn seed from fields in Iowa, Indiana and Illinois. According to court documents, Mr. Wang is the only one among the six without a connection to Kings Nower Seed, a Beijing seed company.

These are actually very serious offences

While the charges are serious — U.S. Attorney Nicholas Klinefeldt said the loss of a patented seed line would cost a U.S. manufacturer at least $30-million — the alleged plot has its slapstick moments.

An affidavit by FBI special agent Mark Betten describes how police were first alerted in the spring of 2011 when a seed company manager came across Mo Hailong on his knees in a freshly planted corn field in remote Iowa. Mr. Mo said he was on his way to an agricultural conference, but when the manager took a phone call, he and another Asian male sped off in their rental car, “driving down through the ditch in order to leave quickly.”

The next month, a sheriff’s deputy in Iowa’s Polk County responded to a report of “Asian males acting suspiciously near a farm field.” The deputy found three men, including Mr. Mo and Li Shaoming, whom police would later identify as the chief operating officer of Kings Nower Seed. The unmarked field was being used to grow test seed for Monsanto.

The following spring, the FBI had begun following Mr. Mo, and he was observed driving through rural Indiana and Illinois. Officers reported that he was using “deliberate counter-surveillance activity” as he drove, alternating speeds and performing abrupt U-turns. Police obtained a warrant to search five boxes Mr. Mo dropped at a FedEx office in Illinois for shipping to Hong Kong and found 42 bags of labelled corn seed.