The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Dougie Lee, the Cantonese American detective from the Jade Squad, knew Sister Ping slightly. He would see her around the neighborhood, running errands or working the counter in her store. Through his own sources he heard about the contract on Ying Chan, and he understood that Sister Ping’s stature in the community was such that if people thought she would be open to the idea, some ambitious upstart might kill Chan just to make a good impression. He sent word back through the community that the NYPD knew about the threat to Ying Chan’s life, and if anything should happen, they would know where to look. Before long, the idea of killing Ying Chan was abandoned.

  (Sister Ping denies that she offered money to have Chan killed but acknowledges that she disliked the press coverage she was receiving, and maintains that she was approached by a member of the Fuk Ching who offered to take care of Chan for $6,000. She declined the offer, she insists, telling the gang member, “It doesn’t matter to me. Whatever they want to write, they can go ahead.”)

  What is clear is that by this time Sister Ping was beginning to feel besieged. With both Ah Kay and Weng Yu Hui arrested, she must have realized that one or both might start cooperating with the government and furnish them with evidence of her criminal activities. In recent years she had relied heavily on the young men of the Fuk Ching to offload her smuggling ships, and now several lesser figures from the gang were reportedly prepared to testify against her.

  The FBI continued to monitor her activity throughout 1994. Its agents obtained a warrant to wiretap her telephones, and it appeared that her smuggling had continued uninterrupted after the Golden Venture fiasco. In March 1994 she arranged for a ship to transport over a hundred passengers to the New Jersey shore. The following month, investigators recorded a conversation in which a passenger who was being held after arriving in the United States told his family that if they didn’t pay Sister Ping, his captors would amputate his feet. After months of painstaking investigation, a federal indictment was finally ready in December 1994, charging Sister Ping with kidnapping and with holding customers for ransom.

  But by then she was already gone. Sister Ping had used her passport to fly to Hong Kong on September 20, 1994. It was the last time she would travel on her own documents. After that flight, one government lawyer would later observe, “Sister Ping, at least on paper, ceased to exist.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Freedom Birds

  TO CRAIG Trebilcock, a rangy young litigator with a boyish face and a casual manner that belied a certain intensity, the small city of York, Pennsylvania, seemed like a throwback to America in the 1950s, in both positive and negative respects. By the time Craig moved to York to practice law in 1991, the city was suffering from factory closures and a steady erosion of the manufacturing base that had made it a boomtown in an earlier era. Many of the businesses in the handsome brick buildings of the historic town center were shuttered, and a certain sense hung in the air that the city’s best days might be behind it. But York’s residents were fiercely devoted to it, and to the particular, almost exaggerated sense of Norman Rockwell–style, small-town American life that the city more or less preserved. Peppermint Patties, which took their name from York, were no longer made in town, but the Harley-Davidson plant was still active, as was York International, which manufactured heating and air-conditioning systems, and many people in town still drew a living by punching a clock in a factory. When Trebilcock left his office at lunchtime, it sometimes seemed that half the people he passed in the span of a block or two were friends or colleagues or acquaintances, everyone smiling and wishing him well. Politically, the area was fairly conservative, with “values” voters determined to raise their families in a traditional Christian manner; potlucks and dinner parties invariably began with someone saying grace. York residents tended to share an abiding and deeply felt appreciation for the United States and all that it stood for. The Articles of Confederation were drafted in York, and many local businesses still bear the proud, if historically erroneous, name First Capital.

  The flip side of all that tradition was that York could seem close-minded and claustrophobic at times, even retrograde. A local joke had it that the state was divided neatly into Western Pennsylvania on one side, Eastern Pennsylvania on the other, and Alabama in the middle. The town was home to a fairly active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. When a local bookstore featured the works of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a display window, the proprietor received anonymous death threats.

  One day in June 1993, a partner at Craig’s firm asked the young associate to do him a favor. The Golden Venture incident several weeks earlier had made national news, and Craig was surprised to hear that nearly half of the passengers from the ship had been relocated to the county prison on the outskirts of York. The INS had contacted the local bar association, because the detainees were entitled to bring asylum cases before they were deported and they would need representation. The partner had signed up to volunteer his time, but now he had a scheduling conflict. Could Craig go in his place? Craig was already busy with work and wasn’t exactly looking for some additional, time-consuming, pro bono commitment. It will take you ten hours, the partner assured him. Nothing more.

  Craig knew nothing about immigration law, or about immigration as an issue, for that matter. There weren’t many immigration lawyers in York; there weren’t many immigrants. But the bar association arranged a training session, a three-hour crash course in asylum law. From what Craig could gather by talking to people at the session, representing the Golden Venture passengers would be a straightforward process consisting primarily of paperwork. The Chinese men would apply for asylum in America, citing their political activism or their resistance to the one-child policy; then they would be granted asylum, as Chinese asylumseekers fleeing those conditions routinely were, and Craig could go back to working for billable clients. The whole thing would be pro forma.

  As the session concluded, someone handed out a list with the names of the Chinese detainees on it and instructed each attorney to pick a name. When the list came to Craig, he peered at it with a mild sense of trepidation: everything seemed forbiddingly unpronounceable, a thicket of Xs and Qs. He scanned the list for a name he could manage and finally spotted one: Pin Lin.

  On his way out to the prison, Craig was curious to meet his new client, but also, preemptively, a little dubious. Before arriving in York he had been an Army lawyer, working as a defense attorney in courts-martial, and after a while he had developed a kind of hardwired skepticism, an abiding hunch that a lawyer can never trust his client 100 percent. At the training session, some of the other attorneys had told him that according to the INS, the Chinese had a tendency to lie in their asylum applications and the notion that the Golden Venture detainees at York County Prison were all political refugees was a sham. Craig would go in and hear what his client had to say, of course, but he considered himself warned. He was not going to let anyone dupe him that day.

  Craig presented his credentials at the prison and was led to a small room where inmates can meet their attorneys. When he laid eyes on Pin Lin, the first thing that struck Craig was how frightened he seemed. He was shaking; his shoulders were hunched protectively; his face was downcast. Craig had brought a young interpreter, and he looked at the interpreter and looked at Pin Lin. Then Craig realized: He’s frightened of me. Through the interpreter, Craig began to explain why he was there, why Pin Lin was in prison, the complex choreography of obtaining asylum. It was slow going, but over the course of several meetings, Pin told Craig a terrifying story. When his wife gave birth to their second child, he had been chased and beaten by the local family-planning cadres, he said. They had sterilized his wife and tried to sterilize him. He fought the men off physically and eventually went into hiding, before fleeing to Thailand and boarding the Golden Venture at Pattaya.

  It was an awful story, and at first Craig was incredulous. As he and Pin Lin talked, he employed a number of techniques he had picked up as a defense attorney to determine whether a c
lient was telling the truth. He began by suggesting, in effect, that Pin should sweeten the story, pointing out that hypothetically had this or that happened, it might help Pin’s chances of winning asylum.

  “No!” Pin would interrupt impatiently. “That’s not what happened!”

  In his defense work, Craig had found that liars often have trouble repeating the same complicated lie, detail for detail, more than once. In his meetings with Pin, he would suggest that they revisit some portion of the story that they had discussed the day before, but Craig would adjust some minor detail of the narrative. Again Pin would interrupt him, reiterating each particular he had recounted the previous day.

  At a certain point during these lengthy sessions in the cramped little room at the prison, Craig came to a surprising realization: he believed Pin Lin was telling the truth. It certainly bolstered the man’s credibility that he seemed to pass every test Craig imposed and avoid the usual tells of a liar. But there was something else, something from Craig’s own past, that made him believe Pin Lin.

  Between 1988 and 1990, the Army had stationed Craig with the armored cavalry regiment overlooking the Fulda Gap, a key strategic stretch of the border between West Germany and East Germany during the cold war. From Observation Post Alpha, you could peer through binoculars at East Germany across a 300-yard stretch of no-man’s-land. During those years Craig bore witness to the enormous sacrifices that regular East Germans undertook to flee a miserable life under communism. He knew of incidents where whole families rushed across the border, and incidents when, in full view of the American troops, East German guards would open fire and cut the runners down. At the foot of the American watchtower, a white birch cross commemorated an East German farmer who was fatally shot one Christmas while trying to escape with his son. To the thousands of Americans amassed there, that stretch of the border had become known as “the frontier of freedom.”

  Craig and his wife chose to live not on the base but in the nearby town of Fulda. They liked the community, liked their neighbors. Despite the cultural differences, they felt that the West Germans weren’t so different from themselves: they seemed to harbor similar hopes and nurture similar plans. Craig knew that before the Iron Curtain had been erected a generation earlier, the area had been one more or less coherent community—that families and friends had been split asunder by the Wall. He had always assumed somehow that apart from the divergent political ideology that they might or might not subscribe to, the people on the other side of no-man’s-land were probably much like his neighbors in Fulda.

  But when the Wall came down late in 1989 and the East Germans began streaming into town, they looked different to Craig, on some fundamental level: they looked ragged, downtrodden, bereft of any hope. They seemed to have a sickly pallor. Curious to see what life was like on the other side, Craig ventured into the towns and villages across the border and was appalled at the grim disrepair he encountered. The houses were forlorn and unkempt, the churches darkened by soot. Many of the buildings still bore the scars of ordnance from World War II. And the people seemed universally dispirited. The more Craig pondered the circumstances on either side of the border, the more it seemed like a sort of object lesson or psychological experiment, in which a single community had been roughly divided into two different systems in order to see how each might play out. To Craig the evidence was unambiguous. Whereas his West German neighbors were gregarious, relaxed, and generally optimistic, the East Germans seemed just to shuffle along, their eyes on their shoe tips, always a little fearful of what the future held in store.

  Craig was not a political person and had never been given to the sort of reflexive anticommunism he had occasionally encountered growing up, but on an almost anthropological level, the countenance of the East Germans he observed in 1989—that look—instilled in him an abiding conviction about the oppressive toll that a Communist system could have on the human spirit. And four years later, as he sat facing Pin Lin in the York County Prison, he recognized that look again.

  In ways that he could not have predicted, Craig was moved by Pin’s story, and despite the fact that he would have mere days to prepare the case, he became determined to prevent the government from sending Pin back to China. He made repeated visits to the prison and began studying asylum law and endeavoring to cull some corroborating material to bolster the case. Realizing that a man’s life potentially hung in the balance, he let his other work slide. Craig had never argued an immigration case before, but when he and Pin appeared before the judge, he felt that it went pretty well.

  But they lost. Like Sean Chen and so many other Golden Venture passengers, Pin learned that his claim had been denied. As word spread among the local lawyers who had taken on the asylum cases that everyone was losing and that all the Chinese men would be sent home, Craig came to an unpleasant realization: they had been set up. He had a naturally self-deprecating manner, and as various local lawyers answered the bar association’s call and took on the asylum cases, Craig had found it funny that a group he jokingly described as “country lawyers” and “guys who write wills for a living” were suddenly boning up on current events in Communist China and the finer nuances of the Refugee Act. But now it occurred to him that perhaps that was the point: the INS had hustled the Chinese passengers out of New York City, where legions of immigration specialists were on hand to represent them, and bused them to central Pennsylvania. The government had to at least appear to be offering the passengers some opportunity to make their claims, so the INS enlisted the pro bono lawyers in York, knowing full well that this was just a formality, that the game was rigged, that few if any of the claims would succeed.

  Craig’s secretary, Margo, was sitting at her desk when Craig suddenly burst into the office, angrier than she had ever seen him. “Get me NBC,” he shouted. “Get me CBS. Get me ABC. Get me the fucking White House!”

  About a month later, a Methodist minister named Joan Maruskin read an article in the York Daily Record about the Golden Venture detainees being held at the local prison. Maruskin has a wide, open face, a brassy laugh, and a feisty grin. She had long been engaged in social activism on a range of liberal causes, and she was moved by the account of the Chinese men who were being held in prison even though they were charged with no crime. The article quoted Craig Trebilcock, and Maruskin decided to telephone him and see if there was anything she could do. Craig told her that the legal cases of the passengers were proceeding, and that he and other local lawyers would be appealing the asylum decisions. But it would be good to publicize the case, he said, and to show some support for the men. Perhaps she could go to the prison?

  On a Sunday morning in August, Maruskin drove out to the prison at seven o’clock. She had telephoned a number of friends and acquaintances from her church, as well as every reporter and news organization she could think of. About ten people showed up, including a reporter from the local paper. The York County Prison was unaccustomed to protesters or vigils of any description, and the warden must have grown somewhat alarmed, because as Maruskin and her little flock approached the prison grounds, a phalanx of two dozen guards emerged from the building holding rifles and stood in formation, monitoring the group. Maruskin was startled, but delighted. She had been wondering how she could publicize the vigil so that people in town would take notice, and a photo in the paper of a harmless prayer group staring down a team of armed guards was better publicity than she could ever have asked for. “God has a sense of humor,” she liked to say.

  From that morning forth, Maruskin and an ever-expanding band of supporters began holding vigils outside the York County Prison to show their solidarity with the passengers of the Golden Venture. For the first year they met every single morning at seven o’clock. Every morning for a year, Sean Chen and the other detainees could look out the narrow windows of their cells and see a knot of people praying and singing. When summer gave way to fall, they lit candles against the darkness. As fall turned to winter, the candles blew out in the brittle wind and t
he groups bundled up in heavy winter coats and stood close together to ward off the cold. Inside the prison, it sometimes felt as though there were no seasons: the temperature always the same, the light a headachy fluorescence. But through the windows the prisoners could watch the people who attended the vigils experience the seasons, standing knee-deep in snow in their colorful winter gear, then huddling under shared umbrellas as the spring rains fell. The York residents knew which wing of the prison the Golden Venture detainees were housed in, and they would wave to them. Sometimes they saw the Chinese men, silhouetted in the windows, waving back.

  Over the months, and ultimately years, that the vigils took place in York, an extraordinarily odd and diverse cast of characters coalesced around the plight of the Golden Venture detainees. Along with Maruskin there was Beverly Church, a nurse and paralegal who was a grandmother, a gun owner, and a lifelong Republican. Bev, as everyone knew her, had always been suspicious of immigrants but had signed on to do some pro bono work through the bar association, thinking it would amount to a little light paperwork. We don’t need these people here, she thought to herself, concluding that they would probably be sent home, and that wasn’t such a bad thing. Get them in and get them out. She drove out to the prison in her big Cadillac and was introduced to Zheng Xin Bin, a forty-year-old Fujianese man whose wife had given birth to a son who was mildly retarded. Knowing that their son would not be able to care for them in their old age, the couple tried and tried again to have another son, but produced three daughters instead, enraging the local cadres. As she listened to Xin Bin’s story, which he delivered in a flat, mournful manner, Bev found herself unaccountably moved. She kept thinking about her own grandfather, who had left Ireland and journeyed to America nearly a century earlier. He had come through Ellis Island; she didn’t know what kind of paperwork he did or did not have. “This can’t be happening in my country,” she said. She resolved to do everything she could to get Xin Bin and the other passengers out of prison and help them remain in the United States.