The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  His father promised to send the funds.

  Under Title III of the Criminal Code, warrants for phone taps needed to be renewed with a judge every ten days, and Luke Rettler spent most of the summer frantically preparing applications to re-up the tap. Rettler had been cross-designated to work in the U.S. attorney’s office, because the Fuk Ching case would be a federal prosecution. He was collaborating with an old friend, Chauncey Parker, a talented prosecutor who had worked with Rettler at the DA’s office before moving over to the federal side. Parker’s girlfriend’s family had a big, beautiful house on the water in Rhode Island, and on Friday afternoons the two prosecutors would load a car full of legal materials, pick up Parker’s girlfriend and Rettler’s wife, and drive out to the beach house. The four of them would relax over dinner on Friday night. Then the next morning Rettler and Parker would wake up first thing and spend the day preparing progress reports in order to extend the wiretap.

  When Ah Kay’s telephone calls indicated that he was making trips to Hong Kong, it seemed that there might be an opportunity to catch him. Hong Kong was still under British control in 1993, and U.S. authorities had close working ties with their counterparts in the colony. The challenge would be determining when Ah Kay left China and traveled to Hong Kong, where he was staying, and what identity he was using, as he was almost certainly not traveling under his own name. In New York, Rettler was told that U.S. authorities had a secret informant in the Hong Kong underworld, a man who might be able to help them find Ah Kay. His identity was a closely guarded secret, so much so that Rettler never learned more than his code name: Four Star.

  Standing six feet tall and possessing a considerable girth, Dickson Yao was an outsized, jovial figure with a confident swagger and a booming laugh. His manner of dress was ostentatiously expensive: he wore gold belt buckles, a sapphire ring, and a gold-and-diamond Rolex. He could stride into any restaurant or gambling den in Southeast Asia and act like he owned the place, and so complete was his cocksure insouciance that the other patrons tended to assume that he did.

  Yao had been born in Shanghai. His father was a lieutenant general under Chiang Kai-shek, who sent him to navy school in Great Britain. He was still a teenager when he returned to China and became the skipper of an anti-smuggling patrol boat. On this first exposure to the world of smuggling, he began to blur the line between enforcement and transgression that he would continue to straddle for the rest of his life. Under Dickson Yao the patrol boat became a kind of pirate ship: the crew would descend on a smuggling vessel, seize its cargo, sink it, and then sell the goods themselves. In Saigon during the Vietnam War, Yao met a U.S. Air Force colonel, and the two of them began using American pilots to smuggle materials around Southeast Asia. It started with wristwatches and bales of fabric, but soon they were moving morphine base from Bangkok to Hong Kong. In the 1980s Yao was arrested in Bangkok and thrown into jail. An American minister visited him in his cell, and Yao had a single request. He wanted to see an American narcotics agent; he was willing to cooperate.

  It was the beginning of a decades-long relationship between Dickson Yao and U.S. authorities in Southeast Asia—a relationship in which Yao furnished enormous amounts of information not just about drug smuggling in the region but about human smuggling as well. To generations of U.S. agents in Bangkok and Hong Kong, Dickson Yao was an unreformable rogue, but also a reliable and well-connected source of intelligence. To Rettler and others working in New York, he was known as Four Star. But to the men who interacted with him in the bars and hotel restaurants of Southeast Asia, he was known by another, more appropriate nickname. They all called him the Fat Man.

  The Fat Man had marvelous guanxi—a web of relationships and acquaintances that encompassed the loose-knit cross-border criminal underworld of Asia and stretched as far away as the United States. He had superb connections everywhere he went, among them a beautiful young Chinese girlfriend who happened also to be the mistress of the prime minister of Thailand. He was so likable, and so credible in his role as a reprobate, that there were occasions when he would orchestrate a sting, setting up a big-ticket drug runner to be busted by the DEA, and then, some years later, approach the same drug runner to propose another buy and set him up again. The agents knew the Fat Man was a scoundrel, of course; by all indications, he continued to dabble in drug smuggling throughout his tenure as a DEA informant. But he seemed incorrigible, a man of epic appetites and infectious mirth, and if he indulged occasionally in the seamier side of the Southeast Asian economy, it was a small price to pay for the kind of access he provided.

  The Fat Man had been working for the DEA for over a decade when the snakehead boom got under way in the early 1990s. Generally different agencies tend to hoard their most secret and valuable informants, but it was clear to the Fat Man’s handlers that their counterparts in the INS were overwhelmed by the sudden surge in smuggling activity in Hong Kong and Bangkok, and as a denizen of the underworld economy, the Fat Man knew a great deal about smuggling. He had spent some time in New York during the 1980s and gotten to know Sister Ping and Yick Tak, and Ah Kay as well. So the Fat Man’s handler at DEA took an unusual step and loaned him to the INS.

  Before long the Fat Man was meeting with the chief American immigration officer in Hong Kong, a man in his early forties named Jerry Stuchiner. Short and pugnacious, with a dark goatee and Coke-bottle glasses that exaggerated the size of his eyes, Stuchiner had a reputation among those who knew him as a bit of a Walter Mitty: he loved the drama and intrigue of the job and was always gunning to be the hero of the operation, the man kicking down the door. His parents had survived the Holocaust in Poland by pretending they were Roman Catholics, and had subsequently moved to Israel, where Stuchiner was born. Stuchiner told people he had been awarded a Bronze Star in Vietnam for his valor as a Marine Corps medic, though in reality he had never made it through boot camp. Like many of his INS colleagues, he spent some early years in the Border Patrol. He married the daughter of a Mexican landowner before transferring to San Francisco to work for the INS. Stuchiner was ambitious, and studied law at night. He applied for a job with the CIA but was rejected on account of his poor eyesight.

  Still, in 1984 Stuchiner’s hunger for intrigue was rewarded. He was transferred to Vienna, which had become a key hub in the effort to relocate Jews from the Soviet Union and Iran to Israel. Stuchiner told people it was dangerous work—that he had received death threats from Islamic groups like Hezbollah. Eventually he was obliged to leave Vienna—because his work had made him too much of a target, he said—and the INS sent him to Hong Kong. He arrived in 1989, two months after Tiananmen. All sorts of dissidents were trying to escape from mainland China, and once again Stuchiner found himself in the role of shepherd to the persecuted, ushering student leaders and intellectuals into the colony and then on to the United States.

  When it came to the snakeheads, Stuchiner felt that the INS should be far more aggressive than it was. He developed a habit of telephoning his colleagues without regard to the time difference, often reaching them at home in the middle of the night, and insisting that the agency take more rigorous action against the smugglers. He lambasted the bureaucrats at headquarters for being too soft, for holding him back. From the Fat Man he began acquiring fresh intelligence. The Fat Man’s sources told him about the Golden Venture before the ship had even picked up passengers in Pattaya. (It was Stuchiner who helped tip off the INS in Bangkok, who in turn tipped off the Pattaya Tourist Police.) In the days after the Golden Venture ran aground, Stuchiner telephoned Washington repeatedly, painting a menacing picture of a veritable armada of smuggling ships sitting in Hong Kong harbor, destined for the United States.

  The Fat Man told Stuchiner about the different smugglers—who the big players were, how they operated. He explained that Sister Ping was so successful because she guaranteed that her customers would arrive; if they were stopped en route to America and sent home, she would send them back again free of charge. Before long Stuchiner was payin
g 90 percent of his budget for informants to the Fat Man. With Hong Kong’s changeover from British to Chinese authorities approaching in 1997, the Fat Man was eager to obtain American green cards for his family. (He had married a much younger woman and had three small children.) He thought that perhaps Stuchiner could work something out.

  The Fat Man and Stuchiner made an unlikely pair, but the two became close friends. It is not unusual for a certain intimacy to develop between a confidential informant and his handler. Many people who find themselves in this situation are leery of it, reluctant to be beguiled by a temporary symmetry of interests into believing that the official and the criminal have a more enduring bond. But the ambitious immigration agent and the Shanghainese rogue had no such reservations. They flouted official INS guidelines and began socializing together in their spare time. They even discussed going into business together, importing paintings from the People’s Republic or sending Chinese guest workers to Israel.

  One day in August 1993, the Fat Man telephoned Stuchiner. The hunt for Ah Kay was on; Stuchiner knew he was coming in and out of Hong Kong, but the Fat Man had more specific information. Ah Kay was staying at a hotel on the north side of Hong Kong Island, not far from where the Fat Man lived. He was traveling under an assumed name and carrying a fraudulent Hong Kong residence card.

  Stuchiner was excited. He conferred with his colleagues in the U.S. consulate and told them he wanted to go and do surveillance in the area. They worried that he was too much of a cowboy—that a gweilo, or “white ghost,” as the Cantonese called Caucasians, would stick out like a sore thumb and might alert Ah Kay that they had tracked him down. Besides, U.S. law enforcement had no jurisdiction to act on its own in the streets of Hong Kong; the most it could do was pass a request to the Royal Hong Kong Police.

  Several days later the Fat Man supplied information that was even more concrete: the name of a restaurant where Ah Kay would be dining that night. Stuchiner wanted to stake out the restaurant himself. “Jerry, I’m a gweilo, you’re a gweilo,” one of his colleagues said, trying to reason with him. “You’re gonna walk into a restaurant full of Chinese and no one’s gonna spot you?” Instead, the FBI took over the operation and fed the intelligence about the restaurant to its counterparts in the Royal Hong Kong Police, who sent a team of officers to the area.

  During his time in Hong Kong, Ah Kay had developed something of a routine. He spent the days indoors, sleeping, and emerged only in the early evening, surrounded by a coterie of bodyguards. He would work out, eat dinner with his entourage at a restaurant, and then gamble through the night, often returning home at six or seven the next morning.

  On Friday, August 27, he left the building at dusk, with Li Xing Hua and three other bodyguards. Ah Kay was dressed casually, in jeans and a cotton pullover. The four men strolled to the restaurant where they planned to eat, which was really just a food stall in a busy market. Suddenly they were surrounded by plainclothes detectives from the Triad Bureau of the Royal Hong Kong Police. Ah Kay surrendered peacefully. When the officers searched him, they found no weapons and only a few dollars. The sole hint of his fortune and infamy was his jewelry: several gold chains dangling around his neck and a large gold ring fashioned into the head of a dragon.

  Jerry Stuchiner was furious. He and the Fat Man had effected Ah Kay’s arrest, he felt, yet it had somehow become an FBI operation, and the INS wasn’t getting any of the credit. For his part, the Fat Man had anticipated some monetary reward for his assistance in securing so high-profile a target, but he had no relationship with the FBI the way he did with the DEA and the INS and was disappointed when no payment came through.

  As soon as Ah Kay was in custody, one of the FBI agents in Hong Kong made a phone call to New York and spoke with Konrad Motyka and his colleagues in the C-6 squad. It was time to move on the Fuk Ching gang.

  The following day Motyka was sitting in the Pathfinder with David Shafer in the Green-Wood Cemetery when the funeral cortege started to leave the crematorium. A long column of black limousines began rolling at a slow, stately pace toward the exit of the cemetery. The agents were parked on a little road that fed onto the main road through the cemetery to the exit, and as the convoy approached, Shafer turned on the engine and drove onto the main road directly in front of the procession, effectively becoming the lead car. Motyka felt his adrenaline surge as they approached a predetermined spot on the road amid the steep green hills of the cemetery. Suddenly Shafer hit the brakes. The Pathfinder was clogging the road now, blocking the mourners’ limousines from reaching the exit. Motyka and Shafer got out and dashed around to the front of the vehicle. They didn’t know how the next few minutes would play out, but they suspected there might be shooting. In the movies, police officers always seemed to be taking cover behind car doors, but in reality a lot of bullets can pierce a car door. Motyka wanted as much steel as possible between him and whatever was about to ensue.

  The limousines were being driven by hired chauffeurs, who must have been confused to see a car cut them off and two men in bulletproof vests scramble out and disappear behind the hood. But before any of the passengers could ponder what was happening, dozens of black-clad SWAT agents suddenly materialized, charging over the hills on either side of the road. Nearly forty SWAT members swarmed around the cars, shouting and pointing machine guns at the startled mourners. The drama and surprise of a SWAT operation is designed to shock and terrify the target, leaving him too stunned to contemplate resistance. The members of the Fuk Ching were overwhelmed, pulled from their vehicles, separated from their girlfriends, identified, cuffed, and arrested.

  As Motyka rounded up the mourners who were on the indictment, federal agents were fanning across New York City, making arrests at other locations. They raided apartments in Coney Island and in Queens. A team stormed the Fukienese American Association at 125 East Broadway. They wrapped the whole building in police tape and arrested several gang members, along with Ah Kay’s father, who feigned a heart attack and had to be taken away in an ambulance.

  From a high-tech command center at One Police Plaza, Luke Rettler watched the coordinated takedown unfold on an array of video screens. Nineteen members of the Fuk Ching were arrested that day, and a grand jury would soon deliver the forty-five-count racketeering indictment against them and against Ah Kay. Piece by piece the authorities were taking down the major figures associated with the Golden Venture, and with the snakehead trade in general. Once the captain and the crew and the onboard enforcers and Kin Sin Lee had been captured, along with Ah Kay and the Fuk Ching gang and Weng Yu Hui, only two major targets would remain. One of them was a fugitive—the Taiwanese snakehead Mr. Charlie, who had escaped capture once when he pretended to be a passenger in Pattaya and again when he had slipped out of New York after the Golden Venture ran aground. The other target, who was not a fugitive, or at any rate not yet, was right in New York City—Sister Ping.

  Several weeks after the roundup of the Fuk Ching, Motyka and the C-6 squad raided Sister Ping’s building at 47 East Broadway. She was not there; she had flown to Johannesburg to visit her passengers on the ostrich farm. But in the basement restaurant and street-level shop, and in the apartments upstairs, the agents found a laminating machine and passports, driver’s licenses, green cards, Social Security cards, and employment authorization cards, all in other people’s names—what a prosecutor would later describe as the “tools of the alien smuggling trade.” Peter Lee, the FBI agent who had been Sister Ping’s handler during her brief period of cooperation, was there, and he went through the records of her money transfer business—hundreds of notes containing the names of intended recipients, the amount of money to be sent, and the addresses in the counties around Fuzhou where the funds should be delivered. On their own, these materials might have been enough for an indictment. But the authorities did not want to repeat the folly of the Buffalo case, in which Sister Ping was prosecuted on minor charges and not forced to answer for the scope of her criminal enterprise. Instead they c
ontinued to assemble evidence in order to make a broader case against the snakehead, which might actually result in substantial jail time.

  Sister Ping returned to New York after the raid, but between the roundup of the Fuk Ching and the FBI search warrant, and perhaps especially the fact that so many of her former associates and colleagues were now being interrogated by law enforcement, she must have sensed that she was running a risk by staying in the city. In addition to worrying about the steady advances of the FBI, she was growing concerned about the Chinatown journalist Ying Chan, who had written a series of high-profile articles on the snakehead trade for the Daily News and was working, in the months after the Golden Venture arrived, on getting to the bottom of who had orchestrated the voyage. Chan visited Sister Ping in her shop and was solicitous. “I heard that you are a very capable woman,” she said. But Sister Ping was leery of the reporter and angry that in her articles Chan had portrayed her as a villain and not as the hardworking and selfless immigrant success story she believed herself to be.

  Early in 1994, Chan’s investigative reporting on the snakehead trade was singled out for the prestigious George Polk Award, and some friends planned a banquet in Chinatown in her honor. But before the banquet one of Chan’s sources in the Fujianese community told her that she should stay away from the neighborhood for a while. The source explained that Chan had angered Sister Ping, and that the snakehead had put a $50,000 contract on her head. It was somewhat strange that Sister Ping would bother. For all her international travel, she still moved in a more or less exclusively Chinese-language milieu; the world of the mainstream English-language press could not have been more remote. But Chan was a Chinese journalist working in Chinatown, which both heightened the apparent transgression of having disrespected the venerable Sister Ping and made Chan vulnerable, as a fellow Chinese in a neighborhood where dispatching another Chinese was, as Ah Kay had put it, “like killing a dog or a cat.” Chan reported the threat to the police, and the Daily News arranged for a twenty-four-hour bodyguard.