The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  The year that the bucket business really took off was 1992, and while many snakeheads made the switch to ships for purely economic reasons, others were obliged to adapt their smuggling routes by using ships for a more pressing logistical reason: they could no longer get customers onto airplanes. During the years immediately following Tiananmen, snakeheads had relied on a great deal of official corruption at the international airport in Bangkok. Thailand is extravagantly corrupt even by the standards of Southeast Asia, and the snakeheads had no trouble finding officials at the airport who would turn a blind eye to travel documents that were obviously phony. The situation was somewhat comical: you could walk into the departures hall at Bangkok Airport and see eight ticket windows without any line at all and a long line of Chinese travelers waiting patiently at the ninth, where the official was on the take. By 1992, U.S. authorities were encountering so many fraudulent documents on incoming flights from Thailand that they dispatched additional personnel to Bangkok to monitor their counterparts. American officials would perform “operation disrupts,” monitoring the Thai ticket-takers to make sure no fake passports were getting through and obliging the attendants to shuffle stations every twenty minutes so that snakeheads could not simply count on sending their customers to a designated window. American document experts worked alongside the Thais, examining any passport or visa that didn’t look legitimate.

  Until that point Bangkok had been a kind of gateway to America; if you could make it from China to Bangkok, you could make it to the United States. People undertook long journeys to reach the city, and would wait in fetid safe houses in Bangkok’s Chinatown until they were able to board an airplane. But when authorities cracked down at the airport, a bottleneck developed. Many snakeheads had gone to great lengths to get people to Bangkok. The business was a pipeline, and there were always customers at different stages of the route. With the bottleneck suddenly clogged, the safe houses in Bangkok started filling up with people, sometimes as many as thirty, crammed into small spaces, waiting for their flight out.

  The solution was boats. In the past, snakeheads had flown their customers to Central America and used boats to transfer them north, into the United States. But with thousands of passengers accumulating in Bangkok, the smugglers improvised and began using ships to undertake the entire journey. Between August 1991 and July 1993, thirty-four ships carrying as many as 5,300 Chinese were found in waters near Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and the United States. And those were the boats that were found; an untold number of others boarded passengers in the Gulf of Thailand and bore them around the world, releasing them, undetected, on U.S. shores.

  It was typical of Ah Kay’s entrepreneurial approach that when he moved the Fuk Ching gang into the smuggling business, he began not by offering customers anything resembling a full-service operation but by identifying and embracing a lucrative niche and offering his services as a subcontractor to more established snakeheads. Dating back to 1989, the gang had gone into business as hired muscle who could force derelict aliens to pay their fees. But Ah Kay had watched Lo Cho running a boat smuggling operation from Belize, and he had spent the early months of the snakehead boom in prison, where he was able to contemplate the best manner in which to enter the industry. Sailing a ship full of illegal aliens directly to the coast of the United States was a risky proposition: the ship would attract the attention of the Coast Guard; hundreds of ragged Chinese peasants disembarking from a decrepit freighter at a crowded marina had a tendency to raise alarms. A more cautious approach was to sail to a point several hundred miles off the coast of the United States, in international waters, and transfer the passengers to smaller, less conspicuous fishing boats, which could ferry them to shore.

  Ah Kay called the process “offloading,” and after his release from prison he made contact with Vietnamese refugees who lived along the East Coast and had access to fishing boats. Then he put the word out in Chinatown, offering his services to snakeheads who had ships coming in. “We [would] send out fishing boats to make contact with the larger boat,” Ah Kay later explained. “We would wait until the big wave rise and then, you know, the level of the fishing boat would come up, and at that moment the people from the big boat would jump over to the small boat.” In the dark of night, in the open sea, it was a haphazard, often perilous exercise. Occasionally a passenger would jump over and fail to land securely on the smaller boat, clinging to the side as the two boats heaved and swayed, nearly getting crushed as their bows bashed together.

  By the summer of 1992 the gang had successfully offloaded several ships for New York–based snakeheads. They had been paying the Vietnamese $200,000 for their help each time, and Ah Kay sent an underling to Florida to purchase a boat for the gang, so they could cut out the subcontractor and “control the business” up and down the East Coast. Ah Kay was ferociously ambitious, and in the snakehead business he sensed a perfect opportunity: a service that, while not uncomplicated, required only one or two high-IQ masterminds and a great deal of low-skilled labor; a potentially unlimited market of customers in China, who seemed happy to endure any hardship and promise any fee in exchange for a new life in America. His goal, he told one associate, was to make $100 million in the snakehead business. “I’m not boasting,” he said. “It’s already in progress. If I was boasting, I’d say this business will make a billion.”

  Ah Kay was living in an apartment on Hester Street, not far from the shop Sister Ping had used as her base of operations throughout the 1980s. One day in August 1992 he was visited by a man named Wang Kong Fu, who came from Yingyu village, where Ah Kay grew up. It was hot, and the two men went to the rooftop to talk. Wang said he had come on behalf of Sister Ping. She understood Ah Kay had been “successful with boats.” She had a ship coming in and wanted Ah Kay to offload it.

  Sister Ping’s fortunes had not suffered, nor had her business slowed down, after her conviction in Buffalo. A month after the raft sank on the Niagara River, Ping and Yick Tak filed a new business certificate for their shop. This time they offered a different translation for the name: “Everything will come out fine.” But one price Sister Ping paid for her encounter with law enforcement was publicity. She had long been known within New York’s Chinatown and in the villages of Fujian as an especially capable snakehead, but she had enjoyed a certain obscurity when it came to the larger community in New York. In 1990 a Chinatown journalist named Ying Chan, who had worked for several of New York’s Chinese-language dailies, coauthored an investigative series for the Daily News that exposed Sister Ping and her operation. Under the headline “Merchants of Misery,” the story described Ping and Yick Tak. “The couple portray themselves as respected shop owners and devoted parents of four,” the article suggested, but in reality they are “an efficient business team who managed to stay one step ahead of authorities.” Chan traveled to Fujian and interviewed a local Communist Party official from a farming village near Shengmei, who told her he wanted Sister Ping to send his youngest son to America. “She’s the best,” the official said. “She delivers.” The Fujianese Chan encountered had heard about Sister Ping’s legal troubles, but their desire to hire her was undiminished; she had more customers than she could handle. The piece included a photograph of the family mansion in Shengmei, and another of Sister Ping dressed in a gaudy plaid blazer and a black skirt, one hand shielding her face from the camera.

  Sister Ping was angered by the coverage. She had always worked hard to maintain a low profile, and she feared that she was being unfairly portrayed, not as a local entrepreneur who was helping out her family and fellow villagers but as a “devil woman.” But there was nothing she could do. The world outside of Chinatown was becoming aware of her activities. By 1991 a Senate subcommittee investigating Asian organized crime named Sister Ping as a prominent snakehead in Chinatown and found that she was “alleged to have amassed a personal fortune of over $30 million from alien smuggling.”

  Shortly after
Ah Kay and Wang Kong Fu met on the Chinatown rooftop, Sister Ping telephoned Ah Kay. The two had not interacted since the burglaries back in the eighties, and Ah Kay hastened to apologize. “Sorry, Sister Ping,” he said. “Everyone has their past.”

  Remarkably, Ping didn’t seem angry. “That’s what happened in the past,” she said. “We’re talking business now.”

  Her boat was due to arrive soon, off the coast of Boston, she explained. She wanted to know if Ah Kay’s method for offloading customers was safe. He told her it was. She agreed to pay the gang three quarters of a million dollars for the job.

  A few weeks later Sister Ping called with a walkie-talkie number, so that the Fuk Ching could make contact directly with the crew of the ship. Again she asked for Ah Kay’s assurances that the offloading would be safe. Money was not the issue, she explained. She could pay him more if necessary.

  “No need,” Ah Kay said.

  On the night of September 21, 1992, Ah Kay’s deputy Cho Yee Yeung boarded a fishing boat for the 200-mile trip into the North Atlantic. He took bread, water, and a gun. The sea was calm; there was no wind, and Cho had no trouble arriving at the rendezvous point, where a ship full of immigrants was waiting. The passengers were desperate, fighting to get off the ship and onto Cho’s fishing boat. He fired his gun in the air and told them to be calm; “I did not want any accidents to happen,” he would later say. There were over a hundred passengers, and Cho forced them at gunpoint into the fish hold of the smaller boat, a cramped, dark, smelly space. The journey back to shore took over twenty hours; the fish hold was not ventilated, and some of the passengers fainted in the heat. Cho splashed water on their faces to revive them.

  The night after the pickup at sea, a security guard named John Marcelino was on duty at Homer’s Wharf, an outcropping of wood-planked landings lined with fishing boats and yachts in the gritty former whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Shortly before midnight, Marcelino saw a fishing boat enter the harbor and come to a stop alongside several vessels tied up by the pier. Normally when a fishing boat came in, it was all commotion and noise—wives and girlfriends thronging the wharf, rowdy sailors happy to be home, the hasty effort to unload the fresh catch. But there was no one waiting onshore for this boat, and it floated there silently in the dark for forty-five minutes.

  Then, as Marcelino watched, three U-Haul trucks approached the pier. Suddenly he saw activity on the fishing boat. Dark figures materialized on the deck—many of them—scrambling out of the fish hold, clambering onto the wharf, then disappearing into the U-Hauls. They each carried a piece of luggage. Marcelino called the police. But before they could arrive, the last of the people left the boat and boarded the trucks, and the three U-Hauls started their engines and left the wharf. Marcelino couldn’t wait on the cops, so he decided to follow the trucks. He drove after them at a distance and saw that they were headed for the highway. He pursued them north on Route 18, then west on 195. The trucks were traveling fast, but not conspicuously so. The roads were nearly empty at that late hour, and as he followed on 195, Marcelino saw the trucks suddenly slow down. They must have spotted him on their tail. He kept his pace, pulling alongside one of the U-Hauls. Marcelino looked into the passenger-side window. Two Asian men stared straight back at him. Then, as Marcelino looked at them, the one on the passenger side lifted something up to the window. It was a submachine gun. Marcelino veered his car away and got off at the next exit.

  The U-Hauls proceeded south, reaching New York around dawn. They drove to a warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Ah Kay was waiting for them. Various Fuk Ching members hurried the passengers out of the trucks and into the warehouse, and Ah Kay telephoned Sister Ping to inform her that the offloading had been successful. Sister Ping was pleased. She sent Yick Tak to the warehouse to meet the passengers. For Ah Kay she prepared a red envelope containing $38,000—a bonus for a job well done.

  When the FBI began investigating Fujianese organized crime in the United States, they found that it differed in several fundamental ways from the paradigms they had developed over decades of studying the Sicilian Mafia. Chinese organized criminals did not adhere to any fixed hierarchies or organizational structures. The original Chinese triads had been steeped in secret ritual and byzantine codes of conduct and allegiance, but there were no blood oaths among the Asian gangs in America. Rather, Chinatown’s heroin dealers and human smugglers, its racket men and pimps, thought of themselves as entrepreneurs and opportunists, driven above all by a mercenary sense of self-interest and by the exigencies of circumstance. Family loyalty may have been a deep and enduring bond among the Fujianese, but extrafamilial loyalties didn’t make sense from a business point of view. Alliances and coalitions were fluid, ever-evolving. An assortment of underworld types might come together in a temporary joint venture in order to move a shipment full of migrants or China White, but then they would split up and go their separate ways, looking for the next promising opportunity. The flip side of this dynamic was that while loyalty was bad for business, grudges were as well. And that may in part explain how it was that Sister Ping found herself in business with Ah Kay, a violent youth who had robbed her twice and threatened the lives of her children.

  Changing circumstances could mean changing loyalties, and after the success of the New Bedford ship, Sister Ping developed a complicated partnership with Ah Kay and the Fuk Ching gang. She would later claim that she had been a victim—that the gang terrorized Chinatown and that everyone was forced to make allowances for them and be tainted by their activities in ways large and small. But Sister Ping prized efficiency, and when Ah Kay performed capably and efficiently, she appears to have forgiven his past offenses—and the kinds of risks entailed in his high-profile, high-liability criminal behavior—in order to work with him. Prosecutors would later describe Ah Kay as her “hired gun,” to suggest not that he killed on her behalf but that she could subcontract her muscle and logistics to him, that he was paid handsomely to do the snakehead’s bidding. Before long she was offering Fuk Ching members a discounted rate for sending money back to China. As Ah Kay saw it, he and Sister Ping became “good friends.”

  Still, it must have seemed strange to Ah Kay that Sister Ping had so readily forgiven his transgressions. It must have seemed to him that Sister Ping’s paramount devotion to her own business was what let him off the hook. She had ships coming in, and he could offload ships. Expediency can pardon a multitude of sins.

  But expediency works in a number of ways. What Ah Kay did not know when he and Sister Ping went into business is that she had already enacted a quiet revenge. What none of Sister Ping’s clients and associates in Chinatown realized, in fact, was that after her release from prison, she continued to meet with Peter Lee, the young Cantonese American FBI agent, in out-of-the-way coffee shops and restaurants in New York, and give him information. Lee eventually terminated the relationship, after realizing that she was anything but reformed. And the FBI has since downplayed the information Sister Ping provided, suggesting that she did not furnish its agents with anything of value. But it has also been suggested that she used the young and naive Lee, feeding him information on her rivals in the snakehead trade. During the period when Ah Kay was getting into the smuggling business, Sister Ping was meeting with Peter Lee. He would quiz her about Chinatown gangs and snakeheads and show her surveillance photographs, asking her to identify various figures captured in the glossy black-and-whites. And there was one explanation for Sister Ping’s willingness to forgive Ah Kay—a little betrayal of her own, about which he would never know. Sister Ping was giving information about Ah Kay to the FBI.

  Chapter Seven

  Mombasa

  SEAN CHEN stood in the scorching African sun and surveyed the port of Mombasa, Kenya. Everything about the place was exotic, every sight and smell different from the village outside Fuzhou where he had grown up. That stretch of East African coast had been a hub of Indian Ocean trade for the better part of a thousand years, frigates crisscrossing
its waters, laden with ivory, gold, and slaves. The coastline was dominated by the sixteenth-century stone fortifications of Fort Jesus, a relic of the Portuguese, who had come, and ruled, and left. The skyline was punctuated by the minarets of mosques. Sean had come ashore with some friends briefly and wandered through the labyrinthine alleys of the old town, past the little stalls where black women sold basketware and jewelry, past buckets full of vegetables and dates, past solicitous hawkers rattling on in the strange cadences of Swahili and mysterious women swathed in black aboyas. The air was ripe with the unfamiliar smells of spices from the spice shops, of Arab coffee, of samosas and kebabs. Sean wondered about his family. He hadn’t seen them in over a year. It was January 1993. He was eighteen years old.

  Sean was short and slight but carried himself like a larger man, strutting a little when he walked and projecting a certain toughness; he was a bruiser, with a temper, and he certainly wouldn’t allow his diminutive stature to let anyone think otherwise. His head was ovular, like a snub-nosed bullet, and he had a strong, square jaw and dark eyes that were round and small. He grew up outside Fuzhou, in Changle, where his father taught at a local high school. Sean lived with his parents and two younger brothers in an apartment at the school. He was a rebellious child, stubborn and independent. In May 1989, when he was fourteen, he joined a cousin who was organizing pro-democracy students at Fuzhou University. The police investigated the group and branded Sean as a counterrevolutionary, which led to his expulsion from school. Sean’s father was mild-mannered, and somewhat meek in the face of authority. His passivity angered his more voluble son. Because Sean’s parents had violated the one-child policy twice over, local officials fined his father, dropping by the school periodically to demand payment from the family. Village cadres ruled with impunity in small-town China, and Sean’s father paid and paid again, but there was nothing he could do to satisfy the debt; he was forced to keep paying each time the officials demanded it.