The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  The great Fujianese influx of the 1980s coincided with a series of developments that together would spark a severe crime epidemic in Lower Manhattan, although it went largely unnoticed outside the Chinatown community. Whereas the population in the neighborhood had remained somewhat constant during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Chinatown was flooded with new immigrants throughout the eighties. They came from Fujian, and also from Vietnam—refugees from the war, many of them ethnic Chinese who had grown up amid the brutality of the waning years of the conflict.

  Meanwhile, Turkey had cracked down on poppy farming during the 1970s, and the French connection, which had supplied the majority of America’s heroin, was dismantled. The center of gravity for global opiate production shifted to the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. The Italian Mob had traditionally controlled the drug trade in New York, but Asian gangs had easy access to China White (as the heroin from the Golden Triangle was known), and the population explosion in Chinatown combined with the profit opportunities associated with the drug trade led to a sudden profusion of gangs. Whereas traditionally a handful of Cantonese gangs, each affiliated with a major tong, had bickered over territory in the neighborhood, suddenly it seemed that a new gang started up every week. Nor was it ABCs, or American-born Chinese, starting the gangs; immigrants who had arrived mere months before hatched fledgling criminal enterprises. The 1960 census showed 20,000 Chinese living in New York City. By the mid-eighties, the population had swelled to more than 200,000, and Chinatown soon burst its boundaries. Along with the eastern expansion of the neighborhood by the Fujianese, satellite Chinatowns sprang up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and in Elmhurst and Flushing, Queens, in the low-rise, low-rent neighborhoods surrounding Shea Stadium, along the trajectory of the Number 7 train, which soon became known as the Orient Express. Competition for turf was so intense that entrepreneurial gangs laid claim to the tiniest of territories, sometimes waging all-out bloody war over a single city block. The Italian Mob, doomed by high-profile prosecutions, a low birthrate, and flight to the suburbs, found that whole blocks of the Lower East Side that had historically belonged to the Cosa Nostra were being swallowed up by ragtag bands of gun-toting Chinese teenagers. “You gotta be strong with the Chinese,” one Gambino family capo exclaimed, a little defensively, on a wiretap. “You gotta push their skinny asses into a chair and stick your fingers in their face. ‘Keep your fucking chopsticks outta my place, you little slant cocksucker. You savvy?’”

  The new gangs were much more violent than their predecessors. Without adult supervision by the tongs, they fell into bloody feuds based not just on real estate but on the most petty of pretexts. An insufficiently deferential facial expression on a Friday night at a bowling alley could result in shots fired. The police often came to the aid of teenagers who had been beaten and stabbed on a busy sidewalk, only to learn that the victim had no gang connection and the whole incident was a case of mistaken identity: the assailants had thought he was somebody else. A gang of Vietnamese teenagers who, in a chilling appropriation of the stock phrase of American GIs, called themselves Born To Kill, or BTK, became known for upping the ante on indiscriminate brutality. They worked for various tongs, or even for other gangs, in a freelance capacity, when there was truly dirty work to be done. A BTK funeral at a cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, was interrupted once when several mourners dropped the flowers they had brought, produced automatic weapons, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, prompting some of the mourners to take cover by jumping into the open grave and others, who had come to the funeral armed, to fire back.

  Because much of the gang violence was Chinese-on-Chinese, and many of the victims were undocumented immigrants who could disappear from the streets without anyone so much as filing a police report, it took some time before the authorities came to appreciate the extent of the brutal anarchy that had taken hold. On the Fourth of July, 1991, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Rhona Lantin came to New York City for a girls’ night out with old friends from high school. Lantin lived in Maryland and worked as an economist at the Department of Agriculture in Washington. As a graduate student at the University of Maryland, she had met and fallen in love with a fellow student named Patrick, and the two were engaged to be married the following spring. It was a warm, beautiful night in the city, and Lantin and her friends watched the fireworks over New York Harbor, then all six of them piled into a Ford Explorer and drove to Chinatown for a late-night snack. The narrow streets and sidewalks were crowded with merrymakers, and the Explorer slowed to the halting pace of Chinatown traffic. Inching north along Mulberry, none of the passengers would have realized it, but they had entered the heart of Ghost Shadows territory. At around 11:30, as they reached the intersection with Bayard, several shots rang out and a single bullet pierced the windshield and struck Rhona Lantin in the head. It was a stray bullet in a gang shootout; the killer, a teenaged Ghost Shadow, would eventually be convicted of “depraved indifference” murder. The morning after the shooting, Lantin died in the hospital. For police and prosecutors in New York, the randomness of the killing—and the fact that the victim was not Chinese or Vietnamese, that she was a tourist—brought home the urgent realization that the violence of the Chinatown gangs was no longer purely indigenous or contained. It had become an epidemic.

  Part of the unruliness of the gangs was simple immaturity. Many of the members had barely reached puberty—they were twelve, fourteen, sixteen. The snakehead trade and America’s accommodating asylum policies meant that thousands of new children arrived in Chinatown every year. Many of them had been uprooted from a claustrophobic, sheltered childhood of agrarian poverty only to be thrust into the riotous urban scrum of Chinatown. They lived in cramped quarters with older relatives who were largely absent, working day and night to pay off snakehead debts or raise money to send for more relatives. They spoke little or no English and attended substandard schools. It was from these schools that the gangs plucked their recruits.

  “I would have my kids go to a high school in Chinatown and look for the turkey right off the boat,” David Chong recalled. Chong was a New York cop who infiltrated the Flying Dragons in the 1980s. He was so effective that he soon became a dai lo, “big brother,” or leader, in the gang, running his own crew of twelve. “You want him in ninth or tenth grade, he can’t speak English, he’s got a stupid haircut. And when you find this kid, you go beat the shit out of him. Tease him, beat him up, knock him around. We isolate this kid; he’s our target. What will happen, one day I’ll make sure I’m around when this kid is getting beaten up, and I’ll stop it with the snap of my finger. He’ll look at me—he’ll see that I have a fancy car, fancy girls, I’m wearing a beeper—and I’ll turn around and say, Hey kid, how come these people are beating on you?’ I’m gonna be this kid’s hero, this kid’s guru—I’m gonna be his dai lo.”

  One day in 1981, a slim, handsome Fujianese teenager with hard eyes, a square jaw, and a mop of black hair arrived in New York. His name was Guo Liang Qi, but he would become known by the nickname Ah Kay. Born to a humble family in 1965, in a village not far from Sister Ping’s, Ah Kay was uncommonly intelligent, but quit school in the fifth grade. He hung around the village a few more years, but he was ambitious, and an uncle living in the United States paid a snakehead $12,000 to smuggle him over. Ah Kay traveled overland to Hong Kong and then by air to Bangkok. He had a ticket for Ecuador, with a layover in Los Angeles. But when he reached LAX he slipped out of the terminal, a quiet Chinese kid security wouldn’t give a second look. He had no papers and didn’t speak a word of English, but he managed to make his way to New Jersey, where he stayed with his uncle. He found an entry-level job at a steakhouse called Charlie Brown’s. But Ah Kay had a taste for nightlife, and for gambling in particular, to say nothing of a series of innate leadership skills which, at Charlie Brown’s, anyway, were going untapped. He left the steakhouse by the end of 1982 and moved to New York’s Chinatown. There he joined a fledgling gang, the Fuk Ching, which was short for
Fukien Chingnian, or Fujianese Youth.

  In those early days, before the Fujianese boom had begun in earnest, the Fuk Ching (which is pronounced “Fook Ching”) occupied a small stretch of Grand Street. The precise origins of the gang are murky, but by the time Ah Kay arrived in New York, it existed in loose form. It was founded by a man named Kin Fei Wong, who went by Foochow Paul. He was in his mid-twenties when he and a couple of associates established the gang, which made him an elder statesman next to teenage recruits like Ah Kay. Foochow Paul had a mullet and a mustache and a stylish way about him. He surrounded himself with loyal kids, paid them off, gave them apartments in which to crash, bailed them out when they got locked up. There were a few members who weren’t Fujianese, but most of them were like Ah Kay: recent arrivals from the province, connected by myriad bonds from the country they had left behind and by a fierce entrepreneurial drive to muscle in on whatever business opportunity they could. They took to dressing in black jeans and black bomber jackets. They grew their hair into dramatic pompadours streaked with dyed strands of orange or red. They congregated in the restaurants and gambling parlors of Fujianese Chinatown, lounging on the stoops, giving hard looks to passersby always seeming to venture out in clusters of three or four.

  For all their violence, Chinatown gangs were first and foremost a business, and the Fuk Ching leadership tried to colonize the Fujianese territory north of Canal and east of the Bowery. They fanned out through the neighborhood and quickly excelled at the staple enterprise of the Chinatown gang: collecting extortion. Since the dawn of Chinatown, monthly payments of lucky money had been a fact of doing business in the neighborhood, and by the time Ah Kay started collecting protection money for the Fuk Ching the practice had developed its own long-standing and elaborate choreography. If you wanted to open a restaurant in the territory of some tong or gang, you would receive a visit from a contingent of gang members. They would roll into your place of business and often be extremely, almost ostentatiously polite. Provided the business owner was cooperative, the interaction was at least superficially courteous. The particular denomination was often negotiated over tea. The one-time payment to open a restaurant could be as high as $100,000, and bought you the privilege of turning over smaller monthly payments to the gang for the foreseeable future. These were delivered in ceremonial red envelopes, and everyone paid—not just the restaurateurs, but the manicurists and the lawyers, the herbalists and the bookies, the video rental guy and the madam. During the Moon Festival each September, the gangs went door to door selling moon cakes at extortionate prices—$108 or $208, always a denomination ending in 8, for prosperity. At the Chinese New Year they sold orange plants or fireworks, again with an extravagant markup. When they were hungry, they would stroll into restaurants and order up a feast, roughhouse and boast, then simply scrawl the name of the gang on the check, tapping an inexhaustible tab that would never come due.

  This was lucrative grazing, and the right to graze in a certain corner of the neighborhood did not come uncontested. For each block they controlled, for each basement mahjong game or walk-up brothel, and above all for control of the local heroin trade, the Fuk Ching had to fight a rival, and in Ah Kay’s early years as a foot soldier they regularly clashed with the Tung Ons and the Flying Dragons. Fuk Ching members fought with knives, machetes, and ballpeen hammers—anything that could shatter bone with one quick, lethal swing, then just as quickly be concealed. They had guns as well, but the male gang members rarely carried them because of the penalties if they were caught with one in a stop-and-frisk by the cops. Instead they gave the guns to their girlfriends, who were less likely to be searched and held them at the ready. Not unlike Mock Duck in the tong wars, who is said to have closed his eyes while he pulled the trigger, the Fuk Ching were terrible shots. It was not unusual for the FBI to descend on the scene of a noisy gang clash and discover thirty shell casings on the ground and not a single person wounded.

  Nevertheless, the Fuk Ching eventually gained control of a series of streets around Eldridge, and in that grove of narrow seven-story brick tenements they established a home base. With their connections to China and Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia, the gang moved into the heroin trade, and Foochow Paul is said to have become a multimillionaire during the 1980s. He bought an apartment in mid-town and property in Fujian and Hong Kong.

  From his early days in the gang, Ah Kay knew that he was smarter than most of his lughead, country-boy contemporaries, and he must have observed Foochow Paul’s largesse with a combination of admiration and envy. He was unusually ambitious from the beginning, and excelled as an earner and enforcer. In the spring of 1984, a Fuk Ching member named Steven Lim was rumored to be defecting to the gang’s sworn enemies, the Tung On. On Saint Patrick’s Day, Ah Kay and a couple of associates let themselves into Lim’s apartment. Lim walked out of the bedroom and Ah Kay and the others fired a volley of shots, killing him. As they stood in the hallway they heard a woman scream and realized that Lim was not alone: his girlfriend must be with him. Ah Kay opened the bedroom door and shot her. He didn’t stick around to find out if she’d lived or died. The episode was Ah Kay’s introduction to killing, and he performed the task with a cool-headed insouciance that would become his signature. To Ah Kay, the lives of his own countrymen were cheap and expendable; the authorities took no notice when it was expunged, and killing Fujianese made him not a pariah in the neighborhood, but a known comer, a young man on the rise. “You Fujianese?” he once observed. “You die? You die. No more than killing a dog or a cat.” An absence of scruples and a steady hand helped him rise through the gang, and in no time he was anointed a dai ma, or lower leader—a deputy, with his own crew. His chief responsibility was overseeing the gang’s extortion of Chinese-owned businesses in Chinatown and as far away as midtown.

  For their own survival, traditional gangs in Chinatown had tended to exploit the most vulnerable members of the community and show a certain respect for the existing power structure. But the Fuk Ching distinguished itself early on by showing no such deference. By 1985 Sister Ping had already established herself as a major figure in Fujianese society. People treated her store as a second home. They paid her to bring family members to them and used her money transfer service to remit their savings back to China. They trusted her. But to Ah Kay, Sister Ping’s stature in the neighborhood rendered her not less of a target but more of one: it meant that she was rich.

  Bank accounts were uncommon in Chinatown in those days. The neighborhood functioned as a cash economy for the most part, and residents tucked away bills in shoeboxes, coffee jars, or the back of the sock drawer. The abundance of cash squirreled away in local apartments was not lost on the gangs, and armed robbery became a favorite sideline. One day in 1985, Ah Kay decided to rob Sister Ping. Cash was, in a very real sense, the product of her money transfer business. Perhaps she had it warehoused somewhere. He knew she had a house in Brooklyn but didn’t know precisely where it was, so he dispatched his girlfriend to trail Sister Ping’s daughter Monica one day when she took the subway home from school. The girlfriend reported that the family lived on Neck Road, in Sheepshead Bay. Ah Kay and several others followed Monica themselves one day, and as she was walking to her house from the subway they drove by in a van, opened the side door, and snatched her off the sidewalk. She sat facing Ah Kay. “Robbery,” he said simply, pointing a gun at her. “Be cooperative.”

  Monica let the gangsters into the house, where they found her younger brothers but no adults. Ah Kay trained his gun on the children and told them to sit on the couch and stay quiet while the other Fuk Ching members ransacked the rooms in search of money. They managed to dig up a thousand dollars, but that was it, and eventually the gangsters departed, tying up the children and telling them that if anyone spoke to the police, they would return and kill the family.

  The meager haul “was not ideal for us,” Ah Kay concluded. So several months later he decided to rob Sister Ping again. This time he didn’t go himself but
sent his underlings, as he called them, to do it. In order to make sure that Sister Ping was home herself, one of Ah Kay’s associates made an appointment with her, saying he had some business to discuss. Given that Sister Ping knew about the Fuk Ching robbery several months before, it is a mystery why she agreed to meet with one of the young gangsters at her own home. The particular business the two were meant to be discussing has never become clear. But in any event Sister Ping came to the door, and the gang pulled guns and forced their way into the house. The children were there, and again, one gang member kept a gun on them while the others searched the house. “Please do not scare my children,” Sister Ping said. “Just point the gun at me.” Eventually someone searched the refrigerator and found $20,000. (Years later a prosecutor would wonder aloud before a jury whether “a legitimate businesswoman keeps her profits in her refrigerator.”)

  When Luke Rettler first started hearing about Ah Kay, the tales of the ruthless Fuk Ching enforcer had a larger-than-life, almost mythical quality. Ah Kay seemed “untouchable,” Rettler thought.

  Rettler was a young prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He had an athletic build and a quiet intensity about him, with short brown hair, blue eyes, and dimples. He had grown up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin in a big Catholic family. (Luke’s four brothers were Peter, Paul, Mark, and John.) After graduating from University of Wisconsin Law School, he wanted to become a prosecutor, and a professor told him the only place to do it was at the Manhattan DA’s office.