The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  In addition to chartering a substandard ship, the snakeheads had made a curious and fateful navigational decision. Up until that point, most snakehead ships bound for the United States had taken the shorter route directly across the Pacific to Mexico or California. But several ships had recently been interdicted in the Pacific, and U.S. authorities were monitoring the waters off the West Coast, so Mr. Charlie elected to send the ship the wrong way around the world—through the chokepoint at Malacca and into the Indian Ocean, south around the coast of Africa and then north from the Cape of Good Hope.

  When Sean and the others boarded the ship in July, there was plenty of food—rice, flour, biscuits, and canned fruits and vegetables. But after a month at sea they had still not reached America; they hadn’t even reached the coast of Africa. The Indian Ocean is a desolate expanse of some 28 million square miles—more than seven times the surface area of the United States. As the ship made its slow journey toward Africa the food supply began to dwindle, and the fuel supply as well. Each day Sean scanned the water, but the horizon was a maddening ring, unbroken by ship or shore. The passengers were beginning to panic: they had been told they would reach the United States before the end of August, but it was September now, and they hadn’t seen land in weeks. Fights broke out over rations. Even the crew members, who were all Burmese, were beginning to show signs of alarm. There were no snakeheads on the ship, but they had chosen representatives, who ruled with an increasingly tyrannical bent as the situation threatened to spin out of control; they walked the decks with Glock handguns and beat passengers who got out of line.

  Finally, on September 4, 1992, they spotted land. The ship had reached the tiny, isolated island of Mauritius, some 600 miles east of Madagascar. The Najd II hobbled into the harbor at Port Louis, and the captain, a skinny Australian man named William Appleton, sought permission for the ship to remain there while it resolved its engine troubles and refueled. But the port authorities in Mauritius were suspicious of the ship, and the local press somehow got word that its cargo was undocumented Chinese. Officials in Mauritius radioed the Najd II and said that it could not stay. At that point Captain Appleton abandoned his ship. (It would subsequently emerge that Appleton’s certification to captain a ship had actually been revoked several years earlier.)

  One of the ship’s officers, an obese Filipino whom Sean disliked, took over and somehow arranged for the ship to be repaired and refueled, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the Najd II was in no shape to transport the passengers as far as the United States. After another grueling two weeks at sea, with supplies continuing to diminish and tension over food and the boat’s course intensifying, Sean spotted land again: the minarets and coconut palms of Mombasa, swimming in the equatorial heat.

  When the ship reached Mombasa, it had no more food or water or fuel, and the new captain requested permission to dock there. Kenya was already reeling from an influx of half a million refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, and the Sudan, and the port authorities asked about the nationality and legal status of the passengers on board. A few of the snakeheads’ representatives spoke English and told the Kenyans that the passengers were all from Thailand. But when the ship entered Mombasa harbor and representatives from the Thai embassy in Nairobi came aboard, none of the passengers could speak any Thai. To compound matters, the new captain had done some math, figuring that there were some 300 passengers on board, each paying an average of $30,000. He had a $9 million cargo, he realized, and he demanded more money. The snakeheads refused, and the new captain abandoned the ship and disappeared into Mombasa.

  A delegation from Mombasa’s Missions to Seamen boarded the ship, accompanied by Kenyan police, and found a terrifying scene. The Burmese crewmen were so frightened of the enforcers on board that they had actually welded themselves into their accommodation. They came out of their quarters only when they saw the Kenyans, and would not let them leave the ship without taking all the Burmese with them. The delegation took them to the Missions to Seamen’s building, where they laid out mattresses and sheets on the badminton court and allowed the Burmese to stay.

  As the Kenyan authorities searched the cabins of the Chinese passengers, they found an extraordinary number of improvised weapons. Hidden in every room was a shiv or a knife that had been made by tearing away pieces of the ship’s metal lining and sharpening them to a point. Some of the weapons were almost like swords or cutlasses, as long as three and a half feet. As the Kenyans made their way through the ship, a scrum of jumpy Fujianese followed them around, menacing them in broken English when they began collecting the weapons. None of the shivs appeared to have seen any use, but there was a prevailing dread on board the ship, a sense that whether stuck at sea with no food or fuel or stranded in a foreign port without a captain and without permission to stay, the passengers of the Najd II had spent weeks poised on the edge of anarchy, and in the event that survival actually became a matter of self-defense, they did not want to be unprepared.

  A peculiar standoff ensued. The Kenyan government did not want to formally grant the ship permission to remain in Mombasa, but the ship was clearly in no position to leave. So the Najd II ended up at anchor in a mangrove swamp, where, according to the local authorities, the passengers were expected to stay. Enterprising Kenyan fishermen began appearing in the waters around the ship, their dhows slowly circling the Najd while the fishermen shouted sales pitches and offered their wares. The hungry Chinese would place whatever currency they had in a bucket and lower it to the fishermen with string, then the fishermen would fill the bucket with fresh fish and send it back up to the ship. Most of the passengers didn’t have any money, so instead they bartered, trading watches, clothing, the few keepsakes they had bothered to take aboard. Sean offered his sneakers and his belt for sale; other passengers discovered that their life preservers fetched a decent price and quickly sold all the safety equipment on board.

  After a few days the passengers grew bolder. Some constructed small rafts out of steel drums and plywood and went fishing for crabs in the tropical swamps around the ship. Everyone was desperate to get to shore and telephone family members. They had been unaccounted for during the months at sea, and they wanted to reassure relatives and send for money. On the voyage Sean had developed a problem with his knee; it had become swollen and painful, and he concluded that he needed to see a doctor. Accompanied by two friends from the ship, he made his way to shore and into the city. Mombasa was shockingly foreign to Sean, but he knew that no matter how far-flung or godforsaken the backwater, there are always almost certain to be Chinese there. In cities around the planet, under the most hostile of circumstances, even in times of war, the Chinese restaurant is an enduring feature. In Baghdad or Mogadishu or any one of a dozen other hellholes, the Chinese restaurant is a fixture that seems always to survive, unperturbed by ethnic strife or occasional shelling or even outright war. There were troubled corners of the world where the state itself had collapsed but the local Chinese restaurant stayed standing. In peacetime Mombasa, Sean and his companions went looking for a Chinese restaurant, and before long they found one. The restaurant’s owners were accommodating, and arranged for Sean to telephone his cousin in the United States and have him send $400, which could be wired directly to the restaurant. Sean and his friends found a cheap hotel in Mombasa’s old town and decided to lie low for a couple of days. They bought flour and salt and made their own noodles. Slowly Sean’s knee began to heal.

  By the time Sean returned to the ship, many other passengers had managed to sneak onto shore. Dozens of people were collecting money at the Chinese restaurant and venturing into town. A few of the more carefree passengers headed directly for the Golden Key casino, figuring if they had time to kill in Mombasa, they might as well enjoy themselves. The local police were angered by the Chinese wandering around the streets, given that technically they were not allowed to be there. They sent a police launch out to the ship to try to stop people from leaving, but the Chinese on board ran to the edge of
the deck and began pelting the officers below with anything they could find—plastic bottles, balled-up paper, the detritus of the months at sea. The police were furious and fired their machine guns in the air. Sean, still very much a teenager, doubled over with laughter.

  The Kenyans continued to insist that the Chinese remain on the boat, but enforcement seems to have been somewhat ad hoc. Some of the passengers were arrested and locked up in town. But others spent weeks, even months, staying openly in local hotels and gambling at the Golden Key. It depended, in a way, on how much money their families were able to send. Others still gave up, making their way to the Chinese embassy in Nairobi and asking permission to return. But China owed them nothing; they were paperless drifters in a busy East African port town; they could not prove that they were Chinese. Some of the passengers bribed Kenyan port officials to ferry them back and forth between ship and shore to purchase supplies. Eventually, many of them ended up staying at the Oceanic Hotel, a dingy establishment that merited the name “resort” only because it featured a restaurant and a casino. The restaurant specialized in Indian food, but shortly after the arrival of the Najd it went bust. Reluctant to pass up a business opportunity, however accidental or remote, several of the Fujianese from the Najd opened a Chinese restaurant in the space, which quickly became a success.

  At one point a delegation from the United Nations high commissioner for refugees visited the ship and offered to relocate the passengers to one of the refugee camps near Mombasa; the passengers refused, pointing out that unlike the refugees from Somalia and other African countries, they were going to the United States. For a time there was a rumor that because the Najd II was a Saudi ship, the Saudi government might intervene. But it did not, and the ship languished in the port for months. The mood on board turned to despair. According to several people who were on the ship, some of the women were taken into the hold by the snakehead enforcers and raped.

  But through it all, Sean Chen never thought about returning to China. He telephoned his parents in Changle and acknowledged that the situation looked grim. “If something happens to me,” he said, “just pretend you never had a son.” There were only two possible futures for him at that moment, he told them, “Either I’ll die, or I’ll get to the U.S.”

  In November, Weng flew to Mombasa with $30,000 to distribute among the passengers so they could sustain themselves. Sister Ping gave him $20,000 and instructed him to pass the money along to her twenty passengers—$1,000 each. (Sister Ping was upset that the ship had stalled in Mombasa, and it was probably in consideration of what this type of gaffe would do for her reputation in the marketplace that she provided such a generous allowance.) The customers were angry and anxious, but Weng told them not to worry. Mr. Charlie was going to purchase another boat, which would come and pick them up.

  This was indeed Mr. Charlie’s plan, and not long afterward he flew to New York City for a meeting. He had found a ship that could sail to Kenya and pick up the stranded passengers. But he didn’t want to charter the ship this time, he wanted to buy it. For that, he needed an investor. He was looking for someone who could put up a large sum of money to purchase the ship, in exchange for an even larger sum of the passengers’ fees once it arrived. Sister Ping and Weng were both big figures in the smuggling world, and they were both desperate to get their customers to the United States, for the $9 million bounty if nothing else. Mr. Charlie was looking for someone who was flush with cash and wanted to break into the business in a bigger way, to work with the likes of Sister Ping and Weng and own an equity stake in the voyage. One night in New York City, he and Weng arranged a dinner at a restaurant in Koreatown to meet with one such potential investor. The investor was Ah Kay.

  Chapter Eight

  The Phantom Ship

  PATTAYA IS situated in the northeastern crook of the Gulf of Thailand. The town is only a couple of hours’ drive from Bangkok, and as a low-rent resort destination, it retains some of Bangkok’s grit. Pattaya Beach Road is lined with food stalls, massage parlors, and cheap hotels. In the evenings, alleys occupied by outdoor bars are clogged with drunken Europeans who brawl and sing, careening down the sidewalks. Before the Vietnam War, Pattaya was an unspoiled encampment of village fishermen and white sand beaches. But when the GIs descended, the town devolved into an R&R bacchanal, and the go-go bars and seediness only persisted and multiplied after the war, through decades of overdevelopment. Somewhere along the way Pattaya gained a reputation as a haven for sex tourists.

  On the evening of February 14, 1993, a stocky Thai police officer named Pao Pong was patrolling a secluded line of beaches on the outskirts of town. Pao Pong was a member of the Tourist Police, an elite force responsible for interacting with the surge of visiting foreigners—keeping them safe, and keeping the local population safe from them. On the coast just north of the main town, a series of slightly spiffier modern hotels rose above a row of stunted cliffs overlooking the ocean. It was largely the clientele of these establishments, and the Thais who serviced them, who frequented the narrow ribbon of sandy beach below: holidaymakers lounging on foldout chairs beneath umbrellas, gazing at the sea; sunburned German men sprawled belly-up on the sand like beached whales, enjoying a fifty-cent massage. Thai children, dark-eyed and gangly, sold burnished conch shells to passersby.

  As darkness fell the beach began to empty, but Pao Pong continued to survey the area. The Tourist Police had received an alert that a major human smuggling operation might be taking place in Pattaya. The precise details of the scheme were unknown, but earlier in the week there had been a report that a man was asking around town, looking to rent twelve speedboats for the evening of the fourteenth. The man had said he wanted to take a group of Chinese businessmen out on a cruise of the harbor islands and wanted the boats from eight to midnight. Pao Pong hadn’t seen any signs of the boats yet, but he walked a beat among the hotels perched above the beach, keeping an eye out for anything unusual.

  He was approaching the Cozy Beach Hotel when he noticed some activity in the big parking lot that adjoined it. It was dark now, but he could see that there were half a dozen vans in the parking lot, and as he watched, people were leaving the vans and making their way down a set of steep stone steps to the beach. Pao Pong looked out at the bay below, and there in the moonlight, bobbing where the water was shoulder-deep, he saw a cluster of sleek speedboats. There could be a perfectly normal explanation for this, Pao Pong thought. It was Valentine’s Day. Sometimes tourists liked to take boat trips to Pattaya’s offshore islands, several miles out, to do nature walks or stargaze. But even by the wholesale tourist group standards of Pattaya, this was a lot of people.

  Pao Pong walked toward the parking lot, and as he approached the vans, he saw two official-looking men standing nearby, who seemed to be monitoring the dark figures as they climbed out of the vans and scrambled down to the seashore. As Pao Pong got closer, he could make out the men’s uniforms. They were Thai military police; they’d be able to explain what was going on. Pao Pong greeted the policemen. But as he did, the policemen turned and ran away.

  By the time Pao Pong had called for backup and started making arrests, the speedboats had already ferried large numbers of people out to sea. They couldn’t have been going very far out into the gulf; the boats had time to make multiple trips. But the police rounded up sixty-eight people before they could board the boats, along with the two military policemen, and arrested them. The people were Chinese, and in Thailand illegally. It was obviously a smuggling operation, and Pao Pong and his colleagues wanted to take boats out into the gulf and apprehend the mother ship. But someone had warned the ship that there was trouble onshore, and it had disappeared.

  That night Pao Pong made a call to Bangkok, to the office of an American immigration agent named Mark Riordan. Riordan worked for the INS. Before coming to Bangkok several months earlier, he had been stationed in Europe, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, where he spent two and a half years and witnessed the British colony’s role as a hu
b of human smuggling. He had been transferred to Bangkok with the title “enforcement coordinator” and specific instructions to tackle the problem of Chinese migrant smuggling. Several weeks earlier Riordan had received some intelligence traffic from the U.S. embassy in Bangkok that a ship would be picking up a large number of Chinese nationals somewhere off the coast of Thailand. After consulting a map of the Gulf of Thailand, Riordan had concluded that if the passengers were being bused to the coast from Bangkok, Pattaya would be the ideal spot for a pickup. He had driven to Pattaya himself and briefed Pao Pong and his colleagues about the possibility that a major smuggling operation might be taking place.

  The morning after the Tourist Police made their arrests, Riordan arrived at the police station in Pattaya. When he walked inside, the place was overrun by Chinese passengers, all standing around, uncertain what would become of them. When Riordan questioned them, they told him that they had come from Fujian Province, that they had entered Thailand from Burma at the bustling border checkpoint in Chiang Rai. One of the passengers was sitting at a desk talking to the Thai cops. He was a handsome young Chinese man with a part in his hair and a polite, businesslike demeanor. The officers told Riordan that the man was going to help them; he had a cell phone, and he was waiting for a call from the chief smuggler, a man named Mr. Charlie. The man with the cell phone had agreed to tell Mr. Charlie to come and meet them at some designated spot, at which point the Thais could apprehend him. As Riordan talked to the passengers, he kept hearing that name; the passengers didn’t know what he looked like, but Mr. Charlie was clearly the boss, the name on everyone’s lips.

  While they waited for the call, Riordan sat down with Pao Pong. Riordan had noticed that Thais tend to smile and joke even about subjects that make them profoundly unhappy or uncomfortable. Pao Pong seemed somewhat forlorn, and Riordan asked why. “They’re going to move me to the border after this,” he said with a smile. Pao Pong explained that he had gathered enough information to glean that Mr. Charlie had set up the whole operation. But if Thai military policemen had been escorting the passengers, then powerful people were on the payroll of these smugglers, and for arresting those policemen and stopping sixty-eight passengers from boarding the ship—for doing his job—he would now be relocated to the sticks as punishment.