The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Devine told the Swiftwater investigators that what they had stumbled on was actually an extensive and intricate criminal enterprise. Ed Garde thought the best approach was to flip Kephart and Dullan, and the cabbies were happy to cooperate; they seemed to realize they had gotten in a bit over their heads. Slowly Garde assembled information on Yick Tak and Peter. “The organization appears to be structured, utilizing travel routes and safehouses through Hong Kong; Vancouver, British Columbia; Toronto, Ontario; and New York City,” one Swiftwater report concluded. “The organization has smuggled approximately 75 Chinese Nationals into the United States between August and December, 1988.”

  Then suddenly that spring there was an unexpected break in the case: Patrick Devine and the INS in Buffalo managed to capture Sister Ping. A Canadian deadbeat named Terry Honesburger had been working at a Chinese restaurant in Toronto when, like the cabbies, he was lured into the smuggling business by the promise of a quick buck. He started driving Chinese immigrants across the border in the trunk of his car, but he was caught almost immediately. A bearded Canadian Mountie named Larry Hay told Honesburger that the authorities would spare him, but only if he helped set up a sting. On March 28, 1989, Hay met with Honesburger and drove to the Toronto airport. They waited by a bank of pay phones in the arrivals area, and before long a short Chinese woman in a gray knit sports jacket approached them. It was Sister Ping. She looked impatient. “What took you?” she demanded in broken English. With her were four Chinese people: a man, a boy, a pregnant woman, and a teenage girl in a brown leather jacket.

  “Are all four to go?” Hay asked her.

  “No,” she said, indicating the teenager. “This one is my daughter.”

  Sister Ping slid $340 into a newspaper and handed it to the Mountie, with the understanding that he would drive the passengers over the border. Then she and her daughter left, and Hay eventually delivered the three passengers to a bus station in Albany, where they were arrested. Several months later, with a warrant out for her arrest, Sister Ping arrived at the Vancouver airport and was about to board a flight to Mexico when the police caught up with her. After she was transferred to upstate New York and charged, Sister Ping posted $25,000 bail and immediately hired one of Buffalo’s most elite and expensive criminal defense lawyers to handle her case. Patrick Devine didn’t understand how this woman who had no education and spoke hardly any English managed to connect to a brand-name defense attorney, but he noted that money was apparently not much of a concern.

  Sister Ping did not want to go to jail under any circumstances, and she expressed a willingness to plead guilty and cooperate with law enforcement if it might help her avoid incarceration. On several occasions she flew into Buffalo, accompanied by her daughter Monica, who had a better grasp of English, and met Devine at a Denny’s to haggle over the terms of cooperation for a few hours before catching a flight back to New York. Devine was mystified by this gruff, brusque little woman. At one point she produced her passport to show it to him, and all sorts of carefully folded money that had been tucked between the pages scattered out onto the floor. Finally, on June 27, 1990, Sister Ping pleaded guilty, acknowledging that “I knew that if the three Chinese people go to the U.S. they would be illegal” and signing her confession in a slanted, looping script.

  A few weeks later INS agents assembled outside 14 Monroe Street at 6:15 one morning, banged on the door of Apartment 7B, and arrested Cheung Yick Tak. Paul and his wife had already been captured in Canada. Peter had fled to Hong Kong, but he was eventually captured as well, as he tried to reenter the United States through a pedestrian line from Mexico. When Yick Tak was taken in, Patrick Devine went to see him. He was different from his wife, Devine thought. More evasive. He would just deny and deny, play dumb to the charges, beat the investigators with silence. Sister Ping was never linked to the rafting deaths in any definitive way. But many of the investigators who tracked the couple over the years believe that there wasn’t anything Yick Tak did that she wasn’t somehow behind. And Devine, for one, was convinced she had had a hand in it.

  In September a Buffalo federal judge named Richard Arcara held a sentencing hearing for Sister Ping. He called her a “prime mover” in the illegal alien business. “I am convinced you have been involved in smuggling aliens on a more extensive basis than you have admitted,” he said.

  Her lawyer, William Skretny objected, insisting that Arcara sentence her “for what she did in this indictment and not, as may be alleged, [because] she is something akin to an empress of alien-smuggling.”

  “I knew what I did was wrong,” Sister Ping said when it was her turn to speak. She said that the pregnant woman she had been smuggling was her cousin, who had fled from China with her husband and nephew to escape a forced abortion. (Government agents said that the abortion part of the story was true but that the two women were not related.) “With my Chinese cultural background, I have to put family considerations into top priority,” she said. “When my cousin was pleading for me to help, how could I not?”

  Arcara was unimpressed, and delivered the maximum sentence of six months. But Sister Ping was desperate not to serve. She volunteered again to give Devine information in exchange for leniency. She had conditions: she would not testify against associates or wear a wire or allow her telephone calls to be recorded, but she would supply information. She gave Devine the addresses of two apartments in Arizona, and when INS agents raided them, they found sixty undocumented Chinese. But as busts go, they were inconsequential. Devine wasn’t after the passengers themselves; he was after the snakeheads. Part of him suspected that the Arizona loads might even be Sister Ping’s own clients, whom she had sacrificed so that she could appear to be cooperating.

  Nevertheless, the government recommended a reduction in Sister Ping’s sentence, from six months down to four. She was not satisfied with that and had her lawyers argue that her sentence should be reduced to the two months she had already served. “I’m either the fourth or fifth attorney to represent Mrs. Cheng,” a New York lawyer named Stephen Goldenberg told the judge in June 1991. Her habit of acquiring prominent counsel seemed to have backfired: two of the attorneys hired to represent her in Buffalo had to abandon Sister Ping because after taking on her case they had been appointed judges. Goldenberg pointed to the Arizona case as an example of Sister Ping’s cooperation. “This smuggling route through Phoenix, Arizona, has been shut down,” Goldenberg said. “In effect, the case which Mrs. Cheng assisted the Government with was a far larger and more significant prosecution than her own case.”

  The prosecutor objected. “We believe that we have identified, prosecuted, and convicted a person who may well be the single largest figure in Chinese alien smuggling in the United States,” he said. “She stood in this court, addressing the Court through her attorneys, as if this incident for which she was convicted was an incident of aberrant conduct, and not something consistent with what we think to be her past history.”

  But the incident wasn’t “an alien smuggling for profit type situation,” Goldenberg insisted. He raised a nuanced distinction: Sister Ping may have known that she was breaking the law. But she did not think of herself as a criminal. “People from the area of China that she comes from assist one another in getting to the United States. They try to bring over their families. And in speaking to members of her family, they don’t see it as a criminal enterprise, but almost as a duty to try to get family members in.”

  When her lawyers ascertained that there would be no further reduction in her sentence in exchange for cooperation, Sister Ping asked whether she might provide further information that could “go to my husband’s credit.” She might have wondered, because Cheung Yick Tak had been sold out by his own partner and brother-in-law, Peter. In March 1991, Peter was sentenced to three months in prison. He had obtained a reduction in his sentence because his lawyers claimed that he was in no way responsible for the deaths on the Niagara, that his only involvement in the scheme consisted of transporting the aliens a
round New York City once they arrived. Peter was not the ringleader but the flunky, they argued. Yick Tak was the number-one man in the operation. And Peter was willing to cooperate and give them information about him.

  Even so, Yick Tak somehow managed to avoid paying any serious dues. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens and was initially sentenced to nine months, with the stipulation “that such incarceration will not commence until release of defendant’s wife from current custody.” But the sentencing kept getting pushed back. Finally, in February 1993, the prosecution and defense had a session with the judge. The records of this session are sealed, and the government has never offered any explanation, but according to the docket in the case, the upshot was that “sentence is reduced to 0 incarceration.” It seems clear that Yick Tak, like his wife, had offered the authorities some information or cooperation in exchange for leniency. But the precise nature or extent of his assistance remains a mystery.

  Sister Ping did go to prison, in upstate New York. She hated it—hated the mushy Western food, hated being separated from her family, hated being in an environment where she didn’t understand the language. She was bitter, because the couple she had helped at the airport in Toronto ended up obtaining asylum while she had to go to prison. She no doubt was also troubled by the opportunity costs of remaining in jail. Goldenberg had asked that she be permitted to serve her time in a halfway house in New York, arguing that she should be close to her four children, but also that if she was removed from her base of operations in Chinatown, “she would merely languish and her time would not be used profitably.”

  She did have one regular visitor, however. Five years after brushing off Joe Occhipinti’s request for assistance on Operation Hester, the FBI was beginning to take an interest in human smuggling and Fujianese organized crime, and the New York field office dispatched a young Cantonese American special agent named Peter Lee to interview Sister Ping. Lee had been with the FBI only since 1989; he was a rookie, no match, perhaps, for so formidable an adversary. He was born in Hong Kong in 1959 and had come to the United States when he was ten. Lee would take along photo arrays of various underworld figures in Chinatown, and he and Sister Ping would page through them, photo by photo, as Sister Ping told Lee who was who and who was doing what. She was remarkably cooperative, feeding Lee information about the illegal activities of her various competitors. She liked Peter Lee. He was the kind of fed she could talk to.

  Nor was implicating the opposition the only fruitful use Sister Ping found for her time behind bars. She could still communicate with Yick Tak and the rest of the family in New York City, and as her lawyer had observed, Sister Ping was eager to use her time profitably. The nature of the alien smuggling business, after all, is that there is a pipeline. It sometimes took months to move people from Fuzhou or Changle to Chinatown, so at any given moment there were numerous people at stations along the way: in Shenzhen or Hong Kong, Guatemala or Belize, Tijuana or California, Vancouver or Toronto. “Sister Ping had to keep working from prison,” Patrick Devine explained. “Because when she went in, there were already dozens of people en route to the U.S.”

  Upon her release from prison, Sister Ping continued to meet occasionally with Peter Lee. Sometimes he would go to 47 East Broadway and they would sit in an upstairs room discussing various neighborhood personalities. They became so friendly that when their daughter Monica got married, Sister Ping and Yick Tak invited Lee to the wedding. (worried about how that might look, Lee politely declined.) Then one day Lee was abruptly ordered by his superiors to terminate the relationship. In an affidavit written sometime later, Lee acknowledged that he had “learned that the defendant was continuing to engage in illegal activities even while she purported to be cooperating with the FBI.”

  The Niagara runs deep in the area where the raft crossed that New Year’s, 85 or 90 feet in places, and sometimes the bodies of the dead just disappear. Throughout the Swiftwater case, the Niagara investigator Ed Garde felt haunted by the specter of Haw Wang, the six-year-old girl who drowned. Some bodies stay submerged for months in the river, popping up only when the water warms, petrified, fish-eaten, or decomposed. And long after Yick Tak’s incarceration was reduced to zero, Garde waited for the day when someone would find the little girl’s body, when some human remains might grace the whole bleak episode with a finality that the legal system couldn’t. Garde waited. But she never washed ashore.

  Chapter Six

  Year of the Snake

  BY THE time the squat green tanks of the People’s Liberation Army rumbled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4, 1989, tension had been building in the capital for months. Pro-democracy students had been staging sit-ins and hunger strikes since April, and several massive demonstrations had converged on the square. Party officials were concerned by the sheer numbers of people turning out for these events, and embarrassed by the spectacle; by the end of May, they had declared martial law.

  But for all the complexity of the events at Tiananmen Square, the episode would be seared into the world’s imagination in the form of a simple iconic image: a lone, unidentified man who stood on Changan Avenue, clad in dark pants and a white shirt, and faced down a column of tanks. This was the image that alerted newspaper readers around the planet to the turmoil inside China. The most widely reproduced version of the picture was taken by Jeff Widener, an Associated Press photographer who took the photograph from the sixth floor of the Beijing Hotel, about half a mile away. The clean staging of the photograph told a simple, angry story: a brave individual yearns for freedom in the face of an oppressive military dictatorship. It was a stark enactment of a certain dynamic, which would come to define the international community’s reaction to China in the wake of Tiananmen.

  On June 5, the day the photograph was taken, a top-secret State Department summary describing the events circulated in Washington. It was titled “After the Bloodbath.” The crackdown by the Chinese government created extraordinary pressure for President George H. W. Bush, who had been in office for less than six months. Bush had assumed the presidency with a goal of forging closer relations with China, a country with which he had some history. In 1974, Gerald Ford had offered Bush his choice of ambassadorships, raising prestige assignments like London and Paris. But Bush had something else in mind. “I asked him if he would send me to China—the big new challenge,” he recalled. Richard Nixon had reestablished ties with China only two years earlier, creating liaison offices in the respective capitals. Formal diplomatic relations were not reinstated until 1979, but Bush spent over a year in China, learning about the people, the culture, and the history and attempting to establish allegiances with the leadership in Beijing. He and his wife, Barbara, purchased bicycles and pedaled around the city in the manner of the local Chinese.

  As president, Bush worried that Tiananmen would undo whatever goodwill China had been able to develop in the West since 1972. “To many, it appeared that reform was merely a sham,” he concluded, “that China was still the dictatorship it had always been.” Bush was reluctant to alienate the Chinese leadership, or punish the Chinese population, by initiating broad economic sanctions, but on June 5 he authorized military sanctions, halting any sales of military equipment to the People’s Liberation Army. He also announced that the administration would encourage a sympathetic review of any requests for visa extensions by Chinese students in the United States. He met with some of these students, in a gesture of solidarity.

  What kinds of allowances the United States should make for those fleeing the carnage and repression on display in Beijing was a sensitive question from the beginning, and central to America’s response to Tiananmen. Even as the crackdown unfolded, one well-known dissident, the Beijing astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, appeared at the gates of the U.S. embassy and asked for refuge. He had been a vocal critic of the government, and China put immediate pressure on the embassy to turn him over to authorities. But he stayed. “We have no choice but to take him in,” Bu
sh wrote in his diary on June 10, “but it’s going to be a stick in the eye of the Chinese.” The president was torn. “I want to preserve the relationship, but I must also make clear that the U.S. cannot condone this kind of human rights brutality.”

  What Bush did not realize in the summer of 1989 was that his tortured posture on whether and when the United States should offer refuge to those fleeing China would unwittingly facilitate the snakehead trade and set the stage for an epic influx of undocumented Chinese. Bush’s commitment to harboring those fleeing political persecution by the Chinese government eventually found its way into a directive, Executive Order 12711, which would serve as a kind of founding document for the Fujianese community in America. Signed on April 11, 1990, and titled “Policy Implementation with Respect to Nationals of the People’s Republic of China,” the directive held that any Chinese citizen who was in the United States before the crackdown should not be forcefully removed by immigration. (There were roughly 80,000 Chinese students studying in the United States at the time, and the provision effectively offered them safe haven.)

  But Bush’s executive order contained another clause as well, one that had nothing to do with the events at Tiananmen Square. In the aftermath of the crackdown, Washington was seized by a broad antipathy toward the repressive Communist regime in Beijing, and one matter of particular concern to legislators was the sometimes brutal manner in which China was enforcing its one-child policy. Reports from inside the country indicated that in some rural areas a low birthrate was being achieved by forcibly sterilizing couples who had more than one child—and in some cases by compelling women to have late-term abortions. In the mid-eighties President Ronald Reagan had withdrawn American support for the United Nations Population Fund because of concerns that the fund was supporting Chinese programs that involved coercive sterilization and abortion. Republican legislators, pro-life groups, and the Catholic Church had been especially vocal in opposing China’s use of draconian measures in its efforts to limit population growth. Following Tiananmen, members of Congress pushed to withdraw China’s most-favored-nation trading status, but Bush refused. As a consolation, he included a significant provision in the executive order that dealt with China’s population-control tactics. In Section 4 of the order, Bush directed the secretary of state and the attorney general to provide for “enhanced consideration” under the immigration laws for individuals “who express a fear of persecution upon return to their country related to that country’s policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization.”