A kidney transplant surgeon from Wuhan, China, was sentenced to more than a year and a half in United States prison for laundering money internationally for family members dealing steroids online.

U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs sentenced Dr. Zhendi Wang, 44, to 20 months in prison to be followed by one year of supervised release. He pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston last month to a single count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Three co-defendants, who are listed only as numbered “Co-Conspirators” in law enforcement filings, remain at large, according to the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.

Wang has already served 17 months in prison as his case was pending, according to the sentencing memo filed earlier this month by his attorney Florian Miedel.

Federal prosecutors say that between 2020 and 2023 Wang received $1.2 million in proceeds from the sale of raw steroid materials, which are Class III controlled substances, from an online website that was not named in court materials. The steroid materials come from China and are not approved by United States regulators.

Wang is the chief of transplant surgery at Wuhan Union hospital and a professor at the affiliated medical school, according to his attorney’s memo. He traveled from China to Boston for a four-day trip in June of 2019 where he opened three bank accounts — a savings, a checking, and an investment account — at an unidentified bank, according to a law enforcement affidavit filed in the case by Suffolk County Sheriff’s Deputy Aime Le.

Le says the investigation was opened as early as January 2023 by agents of multiple federal agencies and grew out of an underlying money laundering operation that began nearly a year earlier.

Wang’s three accounts as well as others that prosecutors say were started by co-conspirators, were used to funnel revenue from the illegal steroid online business.

“Suffice it to say that Dr. Wang made a series of (decisions) that, in retrospect, he deeply regrets. They have caused immeasurable and perhaps permanent damage to him, his family, and his career — and they inadvertently helped further an unlawful enterprise that caused harm to American communities,” his attorney wrote in the sentencing memo urging the 20-month sentence.

“Zhendi Wang is a respected transplant surgeon from Wuhan, China. He has now served seventeen months in an American prison, thousands of miles from his wife, his young son, and the transplant patients who relied upon him for their survival,” the memo stated elsewhere.