A Happy Valley woman is accused of leading a money laundering cell that hid nearly $100 million in drug proceeds for a drug trafficking organization.

Enhua Fang, 37, is the first of five defendants named in a six-count indictment out of federal court in North Carolina, charged with conspiracy to launder money, conceal money laundering, engage in transactions involving derived property and aiding and abetting in those crimes.

Fang was arrested in Oregon on Thursday, April 18.

She appeared Tuesday afternoon in federal court in Portland with Assistant Federal Public Defender Ryan Costello. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo ordered Fang to remain in custody and transferred to North Carolina for prosecution after prosecutors urged her continued detention.

The indictment is sealed, but the government’s motion to keep Fang in jail lays out the allegations from a 2022 multiagency investigation.

Though money laundering isn’t a charge that typically calls for detention, the “scope, scale and volume” of Fang’s alleged crimes warrants that she remain in jail, according to Melanie L. Alsworth, acting assistant deputy chief of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Narcotics and Dangerous Drug section.

“The defendant was central to the organization’s money laundering mechanism,” Alsworth wrote in the motion.

Fang was “hiding in the shadows” while “calling the shots,” Alsworth wrote in the motion.

Fang is accused of operating one of the most active cells and allegedly was the first point of contact for Mexican drug trafficking groups, according to Alsworth.

She would coordinate with U.S.-based drug traffickers and dispatch couriers to pick up hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money and make bank deposits, Alsworth wrote.

Between May 2022 and January 2024, investigators tracked 1,149 cash deposits completed by the couriers that exceeded $92 million, Alsworth wrote.

The couriers deposited money in accounts registered in the names of shell companies controlled by the illicit organization, the motion alleges. The money was then laundered further through cryptocurrency and other bank accounts, Alsworth wrote.

The deposits were made in banks in about 20 different states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to Alsworth.