The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  The ship’s Burmese first officer, a young man named Sam Lwin, was eating lunch in the galley off the bridge when the mutineers barged into the room. The captain and the chief engineer had been removed from power and handcuffed belowdecks, they announced. They escorted the nervous Lwin to see Kin Sin Lee. Lwin and Lee have different recollections of the ensuing conversation. According to Lee, he told the first officer that he did not have to help sail the ship if he didn’t want to. “You can eat and sleep—nobody is going to hurt you,” he reassured him. If Lwin wanted to continue working, however, and take the captain’s place, he would receive an increase in his salary, and a bonus when the passengers were offloaded. In Lwin’s account, Kin Sin Lee left him with less of a choice. “Now we are going to a new spot,” Lwin says Lee told him. “You are going to drive the ship to that place, or you are going to die.” Lwin was not a licensed captain, but he knew how to control and navigate the ship. That afternoon he assumed command of the Golden Venture.

  With Tobing locked in his cabin, Lwin directed the ship to a second rendezvous point, this one some 70 nautical miles southeast of Nantucket. The slow approach to U.S. waters took nearly a week, and by the time the Golden Venture arrived at the prearranged destination it was June, and unknown to the people on board, the Teaneck massacre had occurred. Kin Sin Lee tried to reach Weng and Charlie on shore, but they were not responding on the radio. The ship floated there for several days until finally Lee was able to reach Weng. He was hoping to hear that the fishing boats were on their way, but instead Weng told him to steer the ship to yet another set of coordinates, this one off the coast of New Bedford. Lee did not know Weng all that well, and did not trust him. Weng seemed to be dissembling, and it was not at all clear that once the Golden Venture arrived at this new meeting point there would be anyone there to meet it. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he snapped. “Let Charlie talk to me.” Then he heard Mr. Charlie’s voice on the radio. Charlie was his mentor; the two men knew each other well, and the younger enforcer trusted the worldly and experienced snakehead, who never seemed to lose his cool. But Charlie would only reiterate Weng’s instructions. He repeated the coordinates of the new destination and told Kin Sin Lee to go there. The smaller boats were already sailing in that direction, he said.

  On the morning of June 4, as the Golden Venture sat in the sea southeast of Nantucket, a small airplane soared overhead. No one on board would have given it much notice. The passengers were all confined to the hold and likely wouldn’t have heard the distant hum pass above them, and the enforcers and the crew had become accustomed to the occasional passing plane etching a line across the blue sky before vanishing over the horizon. But the pilot of the plane took note of the Golden Venture. He had taken off that day from the Coast Guard Air Station at Cape Cod, and when he returned to the station he duly reported having “sited the vessel DIW” (dead in the water) at 0805 hours.

  In the weeks and years to come, the arrival of the Golden Venture would often be described as a “tragedy,” a dreadful loss of life and a stunning challenge to the immigration and asylum policies of the United States. But missing in all the commentary on this sad chapter in American immigration history is a simple, undeniable fact: the Golden Venture incident, as we have come to think of it, could have been avoided. For months prior to the sudden appearance of the ship off the beach on the Rockaway Peninsula, the United States knew that it was coming. As early as October 1992, nine months before the Coast Guard plane spotted the Golden Venture near Nantucket, the American government had learned that the Najd II was in Mombasa with a cargo of undocumented Chinese emigrants and a plan to travel to the United States. As soon as the ship arrived, representatives from Mombasa’s Missions to Seamen contacted the small U.S. consulate in the city and explained the situation. At least on paper, U.S. authorities had a strong preference for interdicting smuggling vessels before they reached American shores. The ships the snakeheads used were seldom seaworthy enough to complete the journeys they were making, and it was safest to stop them at the earliest possible moment. There was also the fact that stopping a smuggling ship at sea, or in a third country, rather than allowing it to reach the United States meant that American officials were not bound to offer asylum hearings and a whole range of procedural protections to the passengers on board.

  As it happened, in February 1993, around the time the Golden Venture was leaving Pattaya to pick up the passengers in Mombasa, U.S. authorities had pioneered a more proactive approach to snakehead vessels when a black-hulled cargo ship called the East Wood was discovered floating 1,500 miles southwest of Hawaii with some 500 Chinese passengers on board. The U.S. Coast Guard boarded the East Wood at sea. But a tense diplomatic standoff ensued. The Coast Guard wanted to divert the ship to the Marshall Islands rather than allow it to reach the United States, but the government of the Marshall Islands initially refused, observing that there was no reason it should be forced to admit 500 undocumented Chinese. Then the United States turned to Hong Kong, asking the British colony to accept the ship. But Hong Kong refused. “I think Hong Kong has dealt with more than its fair share of boat people,” a government representative said. “They are clearly the responsibility of China or the U.S.” Because the ship was registered in Panama, the United States appealed to the Panamanian government to accept the ship and either offer sanctuary to the passengers on board or deport them to China. But the Panamanians in turn looked to the shipping company that operated the East Wood, which was based in Hong Kong. The East Wood had become a liability that no government wanted to handle, and after protracted negotiations, officials in Washington arranged to have representatives from the United Nations high commissioner for refugees board the ship and determine if the passengers had fled from China because of bona fide persecution or a well-founded fear of it or if they were simply economic migrants, and as such de-portable.

  The UN monitors ultimately concluded that there were no genuine refugees on board, and the United States arranged to deport the immigrants back to China. “The government of China has given assurances that no one will be prosecuted or persecuted for having left the country illegally,” a State Department spokesman said. But no sooner had the East Wood passengers arrived back in Fuzhou than reports began to indicate that the Chinese government had reneged on its promise. In a series of stories, the South China Morning Post revealed that many of the passengers were thrown into detention centers upon their return and forced to pay punitive fines. Officials in Beijing denied the reports. But the taint was there—the suggestion that even if the passengers had not been politically persecuted before they left China, the very act of returning them in so public a fashion would engender persecution.

  Washington’s experience with the East Wood would form the backdrop for its handling of the Golden Venture, both before and after it landed in New York. It remains unclear whether the diplomatic fallout from the incident and the apparent lesson that interdiction and deportation are not always the most efficient—or the most moral—solution to boat smuggling from China were on the minds of U.S. officials who chose not to interdict the Najd II while they had the opportunity to do so. What is clear is that Washington was well aware of the presence in Mombasa harbor of another ship full of Chinese migrants and did nothing about it. From the consulate in Mombasa, word of the Najd II went to the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. But when embassy officials communicated the relevant facts to the State Department, their impression was that “Washington seemed uninterested.”

  The INS had always struggled with the fact that it was essentially a domestic law enforcement agency, with very little international presence. In 1993 there was only one foreign-based American immigration officer for the whole of Africa, a man named Don Monica. Monica was based in Nairobi. He made the short flight to Mombasa and met with the Burmese crewmen who had fled the Najd and were staying at the Missions to Seamen, and gathered intelligence about the ship. He reported his findings to his supervisors at the INS.

  Some at the INS
felt that the agency should be more proactive in these matters, employing techniques similar to those used by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Some recommended sending an undercover agent on one of the smuggling ships, but the fact that the vessels tended to be so rickety made the plan unsafe; the agency could not risk losing an agent on a sinking ship. One plan that was briefly discussed was to place some kind of transponder or beacon on the Najd II, so that the United States could track it as it crossed the Atlantic. A beacon presented less of a risk than an agent, but the challenge was how to get it onto the Najd undetected. And when an appeal was made to officials at the INS and the Department of Justice in Washington, they simply rejected the plan.

  Don Monica was still trying to decide what could be done about the Najd II when he was informed one morning in April that all the passengers from the ship had disappeared, having been transported in the dead of night to another vessel that would take them to America. He went to the office of the British naval liaison and asked for a record of all the ships that had left the port around the time the passengers disappeared. They gave him a list of ships, one of which was a cargo vessel bound for Durban, which they told him was called the Gold Future. Monica informed INS headquarters in Washington, and the name Gold Future was reported through INS intelligence channels as belonging to a ship that was possibly smuggling Chinese people to America. He also telephoned the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, to let officials know that the Gold Future was heading their way.

  On April 15, 1993, the Department of Justice issued a confidential intelligence brief describing the various smuggling ships that were thought to be approaching the United States. The document reveals the ongoing confusion of U.S. authorities. One ship identified in the report is the Tung Sheng—the Tong Sern, as the Golden Venture was named before it was rechristened at sea. The document recounts the success of the Pattaya Tourist Police in stopping an additional sixty-eight passengers from boarding the ship and says that the Tong Sern is a “Panamanian-flagged vessel” and is “most likely bound for the United States.” Then, in the same laundry list of smuggling ships but as a separate entry, the document continues, “In October 1992, a Thai ferry boat, identified as the Najd II, entered the harbor at Mombasa, Kenya, with 292 PRC nationals on board. Despite attempts to remove the aliens, the Najd II and her passengers remained in Mombasa. On or about April 7, 1993, Kenyan Port tugboats ferried most of the PRC nationals to a vessel several miles off the coast of Kenya. The vessel has tentatively been identified as the Gold Future, a Panamanian flagged cargo vessel,” which was “currently at sea along the east coast of Africa.”

  No one knew that the Tong Sern had been renamed and reflagged at sea, so as far as U.S. authorities were concerned, the Tong Sern and the Golden Venture were two separate Panamanian-registered ships. Ironically enough, the officials could have gained a much better understanding of the situation if they had simply consulted the newspaper. On April 4, 1993, the South China Morning Post delivered a report that was more accurate than the U.S. intelligence briefing of eleven days later. “A ship carrying hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants is on its way to the United States,” the article announced, before detailing the midnight departure of the immigrants who had been stranded in Mombasa. The Hong Kong–based newspaper exhibited no confusion about the names of the ships or the sequence of events, and explained that the immigrants were now bound for the United States “aboard a Honduran-registered fishing trawler MV Golden Venture.”

  If anyone in the American diplomatic corps in Hong Kong took notice of this article on April 4, they did not ensure that the valuable information it contained reached Washington in time to correct the intelligence report on April 15. Of course, even intelligence officers familiar with the different ships might not have been able to deduce that the Tong Sern and the Golden Venture were actually one ship. But they might have paused over the fact that the intelligence community was looking for a ship called the Gold Future, while the paper proclaimed that the vessel in question was the Golden Venture. That might have seemed like a minor difference—it could just be that when Don Monica visited the naval liaison at Mombasa someone said the name wrong or he heard it wrong, an inconsequential loss in translation. But there was also the fact that the intelligence brief said the ship in question was registered in Panama, while the article suggested it was registered in Honduras. These probably seemed like trivial distinctions, and it is a commonplace in intelligence and law enforcement circles that the word of the press is not to be trusted and is no substitute for solid investigative work.

  On April 16, the South African Coast Guard received word that a ship that U.S. intelligence believed might be transporting illegal Chinese aliens to America had just entered Durban harbor. The ship was registered in Panama. It had come from Mombasa and was allegedly carrying a load of jute. It was not clear how long it would stay at anchor in Durban, and South African officials hastily boarded it and inspected the cabins and the hold. But there was no sign of any Chinese migrants on board. There weren’t even any Chinese crew members. This must have struck the South Africans as odd, because the ship’s name, painted on its bow, was definitely Gold Future. The ship’s captain was less than thrilled about the raid. “He expressed indignation at the implication that his ship was possibly carrying illegal aliens,” a subsequent cable from the embassy in Pretoria to the State Department explained. He “demanded to know who had started such a rumor.”

  The snakeheads could not have created a better decoy if they had arranged it themselves. By some extraordinary coincidence, this ship, the Gold Future, had left Mombasa at about the same time the Golden Venture had, producing the erroneous tip to Don Monica. It then proceeded down the coast to South Africa, where it was stopped by the authorities. As officials in Washington read over the intelligence report and scratched their heads, wondering how it was that the captain of the Gold Future had made a cargo of three hundred illegal Chinese disappear, the Golden Venture had sailed clear of Durban, no longer at any risk of being identified by the South African authorities, and was making its way to America.

  In Chinatown, Weng and Charlie were desperately trying to find someone capable of securing a number of fishing boats, taking them out to sea by night, connecting with the Golden Venture, and offloading the three hundred passengers. But for all the haphazardness of the particular technique developed by the Fuk Ching gang, it was skilled work, and the incident at Teaneck meant that everyone from the gang was either dead or in prison, in hiding, or in China. It appears that Ah Kay had succeeded so completely in his efforts to monopolize the offloading business up and down the East Coast that with the gang in disarray, there was literally nobody else who could do the job. The next time Kin Sin Lee radioed from the boat, Weng decided to level with him. “You guys don’t have to wait,” he said. “There’s a problem.”

  There wouldn’t be any fishing boats, Weng explained. The Golden Venture was going to have to deposit the passengers directly on shore. Mr. Charlie got on the radio and spoke slowly, trying to reassure Kin Sin Lee that the situation was under control. He told Lee to pull out a nautical chart of the New York coastal area. Then Charlie told him to look for the East River. Lee found it on the map. Charlie asked if he could see two bridges that spanned the river very close together—the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge. Lee saw them. Go there, Charlie said. “Somebody will pick you up on the left bank.” What Charlie had in mind was the low-slung piers just north of the Manhattan Bridge, a few blocks from the eastern edge of Chinatown and Sister Ping’s apartment at Knickerbocker Village. It was an audacious plan. He wanted to bring the Golden Venture into New York Bay, under the Verrazzano Bridge, along Red Hook, Brooklyn, right past the Coast Guard station at Governor’s Island and directly up to Manhattan, to drop the passengers in Chinatown—the snakehead equivalent of door-to-door service. But the first officer turned captain, Lwin, rejected the plan outright, reasoning that if they were going to try to bring the ship ashore, there were probab
ly less conspicuous places to suddenly disgorge three hundred stunned and blinking illegal immigrants than the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

  Weng suggested that they look up a part of New York called Rockaway The area was on the outskirts of the city, and remote. It faced out into the Atlantic, and on the charts, at any rate, the beach looked sandy. If Lwin could run the Golden Venture aground at Rockaway Weng said, he would send vans to the beach to pick up the passengers as they came ashore.

  The following day, June 5, Mr. Charlie and Weng drove out to Rockaway to inspect the site. People come from all over the city to visit the beach, especially during the summer months. None of the locals would have given much thought to the Chinese men looking out to sea and taking note of the sand on the beach, the depth of the water, the force of the currents offshore. Satisfied with the location, the snakeheads reached Lee on the ship-to-shore. Charlie instructed him to slow the ship so it would arrive at Rockaway late that night, when the locals were sleeping and the beach was completely dark. When he approached the shore, Charlie continued, he should gun the ship at full speed and run it aground on the sandy beach. At Charlie’s urging, Kin Sin Lee and the crew began destroying all the documents they could find on the boat: passenger lists, registration documents, Captain Tobing’s log. They tore them up and threw them overboard.