The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Rettler joined the office in 1983, around the time Ah Kay joined the Fuk Ching. He found himself working in the trial bureau for a short, hard-charging attorney named Nancy Ryan, who had started prosecuting Asian gangs in New York and was known in Chinatown as “the Dragon Lady.” Luke was detailed to the Jade Squad, the interagency Asian gang unit, where he worked with Dougie Lee, the young Cantonese American detective whose family had come to America from Hong Kong when he was a child. The crime wave was starting to sweep Chinatown, and Luke was beginning to believe that the community was growing unpoliceable, completely out of control. Extortion was rampant, and when the restaurant owners and convenience store clerks didn’t pay the painstakingly polite gangsters who visited once a month, they would be dragged into the back room and beaten with a pipe. Some would show up for work the next day to find that their business had been burned to the ground. One problem with the extortion cases was that it was almost impossible to get victims to cooperate. Frightened merchants, many of them with dubious immigration status, were reluctant to go to the authorities. In China the police were corrupt, and there was no reason to believe that New York cops would be any different. The gangsters knew this, and preyed upon it. How do you explain to a terrified witness from a corrupt country the concept of posting bail? The gangster he has risked his life to inform the police about is locked up but makes bail and is released. How do you convey to a potential witness that the gangster has not simply bribed his way out?

  Ah Kay was gradually becoming known to law enforcement. Fuk Ching members were clashing with the Tung On and shaking down people on the street. With his languid movements and wiry, muscular build, Ah Kay stood out naturally in a cluster of them as a leader. But he was hard to catch. Street cops would stop him occasionally, but nothing seemed to stick. Once when they patted him down they found he was carrying $50,000. They had to let him go—they had nothing to charge him with—but they held on to the money. Ah Kay hired a lawyer to get it back.

  Still, everyone slips up eventually, and eventually Ah Kay did. In August 1985 Ah Kay tried to extort money from a restaurant owner named Charlie Kwok. Kwok didn’t want to pay, and he went to the police. Dougie Lee headed to a condo on Henry Street where he knew Ah Kay was staying, and arrested him. Ah Kay pleaded guilty and served two and a half years in prison. He did not find prison to be too much of an impediment to business; from behind bars he continued to manage his gang responsibilities, deputizing work to one of his younger brothers, Ah Wong, who was then still a teenager.

  When his sentence was served, Ah Kay was deported back to China, but he stayed only six months, then sneaked back into America, taking a typically circuitous route, from China to Hong Kong to Bangkok to Belize to Guatemala to Mexico. He was apprehended at the border in El Paso and held for twenty-four hours by the INS. They released him on bail and he returned to New York, but Dougie and the other cops who had sent him away heard he was back on the streets. They rearrested him for illegal entry, and for parole violations on top of that. Ah Kay pleaded guilty again and served eleven months. This time he was not deported immediately upon release. The massacres at Tiananmen Square had occurred while he was in jail, and he applied for political asylum in the United States, claiming that his pro-democracy politics would make him a target for persecution if he was forced to return to China. He was given a date for an administrative hearing of his claim. Until the hearing, which was months away, he was free to go.

  By the time Ah Kay walked out of prison on March 25, 1990, he had become the dai lo, the undisputed leader of the Fuk Ching gang. Foochow Paul had left the Fuk Ching in 1986 and started a gang called the Green Dragons in Queens. After ordering the execution of a rival in 1989, he had fled to China, ahead of the authorities. During Ah Kay’s time in prison and in China, his allies within the gang had laid the foundation for his ascendance, and that spring he took over an organization that had until recently been leaderless, awaiting his triumphant return. He was twenty-four years old.

  Ah Kay took his leadership role seriously, not merely responding to events as they developed but looking to the outside world for models of what it means to be a leader. “Why did Bush step down? Because the economy was in bad shape,” he remarked to one of his subordinates after Bill Clinton won the presidential election in 1992. “Why was President Reagan in power for eight years? Because he did a good job with the economy, so people supported him. The same thing here. A whole group of people follow me, and our life is the best.”

  Ah Kay had an older brother who had chosen a more legitimate path in life, entering the restaurant business. But Ah Kay enlisted his two younger brothers, Ah Wong and Ah Qun, to join the gang. As he assumed the mantle of dai lo, he was surrounded at all times by a coterie of loyal yes-men.

  “If Ah Kay said, ‘Go get me a cup of coffee,’ would you run and get him a cup of coffee?” a prosecutor would later ask one Fuk Ching member, who had joined the gang at thirteen.

  “Yes,” the underling replied.

  “If he said, ‘Get me some videotapes,’ would you go get some videotapes?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he said, ‘Go kill somebody’ would you go kill somebody? Take your time and think it over.”

  The underling thought it over. “At that time, I say yes.”

  Ah Kay was attended by two bodyguards, who were his principal deputies and confidants, a loyal but unintelligent assassin named Li Xing Hua, whose gang nickname was Stupid, and another killer named Song You Lin. Ronald Chau, an ethnic Chinese refugee from Vietnam who was known as China Man, ran street operations for the gang and oversaw extortions and assaults.

  The most unlikely member of the gang was a six-foot-tall, half Chinese, half African American named Alan Tam. Tam had grown up in the United States, the son of a Chinese mother and an African American father. He was dimwitted even by the standards of the gang, and had a serious drug problem. (“If there was no crack, I smoke marijuana just to stop thinking about crack,” he later explained.) But he served a number of important purposes. As a native English speaker, Tam could be the gang’s point of contact with the outside world, renting cars and apartments, dealing with lawyers, bailing people out of jail. There was also the fact that even the most hardened Chinese gangster tended to get nervous in the presence of a big African American. Tam was actually a fairly peaceful guy, neither especially inclined to violence nor especially good at it. He was, in the words of one FBI agent who got to know him, “a big mush.” And the gang generally had him drive the getaway car rather than carry out any serious crimes; he was too easy to pick out of a lineup. But whenever Ah Kay and his colleagues got in a tangle, their adversaries would immediately pile onto Alan Tam, figuring that their best strategy for success was to join forces against the big black guy. Tam’s body was covered with craters and nicks from knife wounds sustained in these fights. As if to underline the point, his gang nickname was Ha Gwei, literally Black Ghost or Black Guy.

  All the money the gang earned went to Ah Kay, and he in turn doled it out. He was not generous with this allowance—when he initially took over the gang, the underlings tended to make $150 to $200 a week—but he covered a variety of other expenses so that they would want for little: crash pads were paid for; meals tended to be free if eaten at a local restaurant; the gang members drove black BMWs that they forced local businessmen to rent for them, as a form of extortion.

  In some respects the Fuk Ching kids were no different from any other indolent high school or college-aged American males. They hung out, got high, gambled, and watched videos. They preferred kung fu pictures or lurid tales of Hong Kong triads. Their biggest day-to-day responsibility was collecting extortion, or, as Tam once put it, in a typical malapropism, collecting “distortion.” Their turf consisted of forty or fifty businesses, each of which had to be shaken down at least once a month. And they policed that turf vigilantly, erecting surveillance cameras along the length of Eldridge Street so they could monitor the arrival of police or trespassers.


  The gang had operated a modest casino on Eldridge, but when Ah Kay assumed leadership in the spring of 1990, he decided that it was too small. He elected to open a bigger gambling parlor in the basement of a massive red-brick building at 125 East Broadway. Gang members oversaw the conversion of the space, insulating the casino with a succession of five locked doors and a series of closed-circuit television cameras. The choice of venue was deliberately provocative: that stretch of East Broadway was Tung On territory, and Ah Kay told his underlings to expect trouble.

  The grand opening was scheduled for October 1, 1990, and that afternoon, as predicted, a posse of Tung On members sauntered up to the casino entrance. Ah Kay walked out of the building and asked what they wanted. The Tung Ons demanded lucky money. Ah Kay informed them that he would not be paying and held his ground. “If you want to fuck around here,” he added, “I’ll shoot your fucking ass.” With that he turned his back on the Tung Ons and entered the casino. A phalanx of Fuk Ching members remained guarding the door, and with no further preamble both sides drew weapons and started shooting. Ah Kay’s little brother Ah Wong took a bullet and was dragged into the vestibule as the Tung Ons ran down the crowded street, the Fuk Ching members still firing wildly after them.

  The location of the casino in the basement of the fortresslike structure at 125 East Broadway was significant, because the building had recently become the headquarters of the Fukienese American Association, the FAA, a Fujianese answer to Chinatown’s Cantonese tongs. The association had actually been around for decades, but with huge numbers of Fujianese arriving in the neighborhood every week, it had suddenly gained a new prominence. The FAA was run by a wealthy middle-aged businessman named Alan Man Sin Lau, and in many ways Lau seemed to be a Fujianese Benny Ong—a slippery operator, at ease both with the licit world of politics and commerce and with the shadier universe of gang warfare and extortion. Lau was an entrepreneur who invested heavily in China, constructing a twenty-story office tower in Fuzhou. Governor Mario Cuomo presented him with an award for being an “outstanding” Asian American. At the same time, Lau was under suspicion by law enforcement in the United States and Canada as a major human smuggler. In 1990, Toronto law enforcement officers uncovered apparent links between Lau and the snakeheads. According to investigators, wiretapped conversations revealed that he had promised to provide five hundred customers to the snakeheads and to help fund their trips.

  “It is unfair to blacken the name of the Fukien American Association as a whole based on the behavior of some nonmember bad elements which are not under the control of the association,” Lau said at a press conference, insisting that he and his organization were beyond reproach. He raised money from prominent members of the Fujianese community to cover the $1.6 million cost of the new headquarters. Cheung Yick Tak was honored as one of twenty donors who gave $10,000 or more. But from its opening the building served not just as a meeting place for new Fujianese arrivals, but as a kind of annex for the Fuk Ching gang. In 1991 and 1992 alone, police counted fourteen shootings in the vicinity of the building. In some instances Fuk Ching gunmen would flee a shooting and enter 125 East Broadway, and police would follow, only to become lost in a maze of passages and hidden doors within.

  At the DA’s office, Rettler began to suspect that the FAA’s involvement in criminal activity surpassed even that of more established tongs like the On Leong and the Hip Sing. He wondered if perhaps the traditional relationship had been inverted somewhat, if maybe the tail was wagging the dog and the tong was taking orders from the gang rather than the other way around. A Senate subcommittee found in 1991 that “the tong is instrumental in assisting other ethnic Fukienese to immigrate to the United States,” and seemed to be involved in the heroin trade as well. It outlined the close relationship between Alan Man Sin Lau and the Fuk Ching gang and determined that “the leader of the Fuk Ching gang is … ‘Ah Kay.’”

  On New Year’s Eve 1990, several gang members walked into a Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue and kidnapped a Fujianese man named Fang Kin Wah. Fang had arrived in New York just a few months earlier, joining his wife and her brother, who owned the restaurant and had given him a job. The gangsters grabbed Fang and handed a beeper to his frightened wife. Fang still owed money on his snakehead debt, they said. The Fuk Ching was often employed by snakeheads as muscle, to hold migrants hostage until they paid up. But starting that fall gang members had begun demanding ransom money that far exceeded the cost of passage to the United States. They would telephone family members in China and threaten to kill the hostage unless they arranged to have money paid to the gang in New York. Law enforcement was confused by this development: a call would come in, directly to the NYPD or even to the Manhattan DA’s office, saying that a kidnapping was taking place in New York. The terrified families wouldn’t have much more information than that. But they could tell authorities where the gang members had told them to send the money, and as often as not it was 125 East Broadway. In many cases the cops would just accompany the family when they went to pay the ransom and arrest whoever showed up to receive it.

  The Fuk Ching members took Fang to a second-floor apartment on Arthur Avenue, in a vestigial Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. There they beat him with a gun and a hammer. They paused to beep his wife and demand $30,000, then continued beating him. Fang’s wife called the police, who easily traced the number the kidnappers had left on the beeper. When the cops arrived, they found Fang and over a dozen other frightened Fujianese hostages. The gang members had scrambled, leaving behind a small arsenal of weapons and a large pile of cash.

  Shortly thereafter, the beating victim, Fang Kin Wah, was escorted into Luke Rettler’s office at the district attorney’s building on Centre Street, not far from Chinatown. Fang was frail and very frightened, and Rettler called in Dougie Lee to question him. Along with getting Chinese victims to cooperate, the major problem Rettler faced was language. The NYPD had only one Fujianese speaker during those years, and had started pulling cadets out of the academy if they spoke a little Chinese, to handle the multitude of gang cases. Rettler himself had started taking Chinese classes at New York University at night, but it was a difficult language, and in any event, NYU offered Mandarin, not Fujianese. On top of that, Rettler was reluctant to use Fujianese translators, or even Fujianese cops, to interpret. The area around Fuzhou was so small and tight-knit that any Fujianese speaker he could find in New York City would have family back in China, and that family would be vulnerable. There was also widespread fear within the police force that a Fujianese gang member might infiltrate the department.

  So Rettler often ended up using Dougie for translation, and Dougie made do with his Cantonese and Mandarin. As Dougie sat with Fang, flipping through photographs of the twenty-four people arrested in the Arthur Avenue apartment, trying to determine which ones had been the kidnappers, Rettler could see that they were dealing with a terrified witness. He told Dougie to explain to Fang that the Fuk Ching kidnappers had been caught red-handed, that they would never go to trial. All Rettler had to do was take Fang before the grand jury in order to get an indictment. The grand jury proceedings were secret. The Fuk Ching would never know that Fang had talked. “Don’t worry,” Rettler said. “They’ll plead guilty. You won’t have to testify.”

  Fang reluctantly agreed to go before the grand jury and he recounted the beating, the abuse, how the kidnappers had pointed a gun at his head and played Russian roulette. As Rettler predicted, the indictment came down and the culprits were charged. But they didn’t plead guilty. They wanted to go to trial. Rettler and Dougie didn’t know what to do. Their witness was panicked about retribution. They called Fang into the office, and Rettler told Dougie to translate. “Tell him they pleaded not guilty,” Rettler said. “You’re gonna have to testify.”

  Dougie relayed the news, and even before he had finished, Fang’s eyes widened and the color drained from his face. He started shaking his head, and his body began to tremble and then convulse. Rettler
thought Fang might be having a heart attack.

  Then Fang began talking in Chinese, a mile a minute, a torrent of worried words. His whole body was shaking, and he was crying, and he talked and talked, his countenance hysterical, his expression seeming to plead with Dougie.

  “What’s he saying?” Rettler asked Dougie impatiently. “What’s he saying?”

  Dougie looked at their frantic witness, then looked up gamely at Rettler.

  “Luke,” Dougie said, “he says no problem. He’ll do it.”

  They did end up persuading Fang to testify, and the case eventually went to trial. On the day of Fang’s testimony, a column of black-clad, scowling members of the Fuk Ching filed into the courtroom. When Fang saw them, he panicked and darted into the jury room to hide. He told the judge he would not leave the room, much less testify. “They want to kill me,” he said. “Dangerous men. Chinese men. Dangerous.” The judge insisted that Fang leave the room and testify against his kidnappers, but Fang refused, and began crying and hyperventilating, having what Rettler described as “a complete meltdown.” “I’m worried about my family,” Fang said, sobbing. The court couldn’t protect them from retribution, he said. “Who is going to believe in this U.S. law?” Eventually court officers had to physically drag Fang to the stand. “After I testify, I’ll be dead,” he shouted at the judge. “They will make sure I die.” The judge ended up barring the Fuk Ching members from his courtroom. Fang testified against his captors, and the jury delivered a conviction.

  After the police showed up at 125 East Broadway a number of times, the Fuk Ching stopped having ransoms delivered there. They diversified their locations. They had been using pay phones to make their ransom demands, but when the cops caught on to the phones they were using, they started using cell phones instead. When it proved too difficult to pick up a ransom in New York, they began instructing families in China to make payments to contacts in Fujian Province, so that no money changed hands in New York. Their associates in Fuzhou could then use a service like Sister Ping’s to remit the money back to them in Chinatown, saving them the scrutiny of the police. The Fuk Ching were above all adaptable. Each time the landscape in Chinatown presented some new business opportunity, they pursued it. Each time law enforcement caught on to their modus operandi, they would innovate.