As long as Sister Ping wanted to stay in the village of Shengmei, she had nothing to fear. Her guanxi penetrated deep into the local bureaucracy, where officials would ensure that no harm befell her, and in the popular mythology of the region she was regarded as a kind of saint. Like some homegrown Chinese Vito Corleone, Sister Ping had spent a lifetime accumulating favors owed, and the result was that in China, at any rate, she was untouchable. Everyone knew where she was during those years, recalled a local police officer who was charged with working specifically on the snakehead problem. But in order to take any action against Sister Ping, the authorities needed something to charge her with—a witness, a complaint. And no one was willing to come forward. “This is a different era from Mao Zedong’s time,” the cop observed. “If you’re going to lock someone up, you need evidence.”
At the FBI in New York, evidence was not the problem. Investigators had plenty of evidence on Sister Ping; they had an indictment that was beginning to gather dust. Their informants in Chinatown told them that Sister Ping was living out in the open, that she held meetings in hotels in Fuzhou, that she owned property throughout the region. But when the agents passed the information along, their Chinese counterparts simply refused to cooperate. When they tried to “follow the money” by tracing the international flow of Sister Ping’s funds, lack of cooperation from the authorities in China amounted to a kind of wall, behind which assets and capital flows were simply beyond their investigative reach. “There’s this giant black line, which is the border of China, and that is the end of the trail,” one FBI agent explained. “There was money that we could have followed for a while, into Hong Kong and Thailand and places like that. But eventually all roads led back to China, and that’s the end of the road.”
It cannot have helped that Sister Ping was a hometown hero in Fujian, but there was another key reason that the authorities in China would not cooperate with the FBI. At any given time, the Bureau had a list of twenty wanted fugitives who were hiding in China and whom the Chinese government would not help them catch. China and the United States do not have an extradition treaty, which would facilitate the process. But the real problem was a famous episode from the recent past that was still fresh in the minds of members of China’s People’s Security Bureau when Sister Ping went on the lam in 1994. While the incident never drew much press coverage in the United States, it was painfully familiar to the members of America’s various three-letter agencies, and in the minds of many, it was the event that irrevocably soured relations between law enforcement agencies in the United States and China. It was known as the Goldfish Case.
In the spring of 1988, customs officers in San Francisco seized seven pounds of heroin that had been stuffed into condoms and sewn into the bellies of sixty-nine dead ornamental goldfish in a crate shipped from Hong Kong to a local pet store. As the Drug Enforcement Agency began investigating, its agents went to great lengths to cooperate with their counterparts in China’s People’s Security Bureau. Several suspects were arrested for the scheme: the Americans picked up two co-conspirators, Andrew and Chico Wong, in San Francisco, and in Shanghai the People’s Security Bureau brought in a young man named Wang Zong Xiao. The Chinese held their suspect in Shanghai from March 1988 to December 1989, while federal prosecutors in the United States developed their case against the Wong brothers. An assistant U.S. attorney named Eric Swenson was hoping that in a highly unusual step, he could use the Shanghai suspect as a witness in his case, obliging the Chinese to lend him their suspect long enough for Wang to fly to San Francisco and testify against his former accomplices. In May 1988, Swenson flew to Shanghai and tried to persuade Chinese officials that there would be “no downside” to sending Wang to America to testify. Technically, China would not be extraditing Wang, because he faced no charges in the United States; he was China’s suspect, to be dealt with by the Chinese criminal justice system. But he would make a valuable star witness against the American-based drug smugglers, and after a series of meetings in which Swenson and representatives from the DEA made their case, the Chinese agreed to fly Wang to San Francisco, under close Chinese custody, and allow him to testify in the trial before flying back to China to face his own punishment.
In late December 1989, Wang flew to San Francisco along with five handlers from the Chinese police. The trial began in January, and after several weeks of testimony, Eric Swenson called his witness to the stand. The courtroom was full as Wang was led in; both Washington and Beijing were carefully monitoring the unprecedented experiment that was about to unfold. If Wang could point the finger at the San Francisco smugglers and help convict them, it might cement a new level of cooperation and trust between law enforcement in the two countries. It might even lay the foundation for a mutual legal assistance treaty some day.
Wang took the stand and was sworn in, and Swenson began to question him. But in his testimony Wang meandered, changing his story and then changing it again. He couldn’t keep his account straight, and became flustered and increasingly frightened. After a brief recess, he returned to the stand and continued to dissemble for a while before finally breaking down and announcing that the People’s Security Bureau had encouraged him to lie on the stand in order to indicate that the source of the goldfish heroin was not Shanghai but Hong Kong. He said that during his confinement in China he had been tortured with a cattle prod, and that the handlers who accompanied him said that if he erred on the stand, he would be shot.
Then Wang asked for political asylum.
Chaos ensued. A mistrial was declared, the judge barred Wang from being returned to China before his asylum claim could be resolved, and the handlers from the People’s Security Bureau hastily left the country. It emerged that the prosecutor, Eric Swenson, had ample evidence that Wang might have been tortured in China but had chosen to overlook it. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigated and found that Swenson had acted “with reckless disregard of his obligations as a prosecutor,” and the judge in the case, William Orrick, ultimately issued a blistering 131-page opinion in which he chastised U.S. officials for telling “outrageous lies.”
In his application for asylum, Wang reported that he had been imprisoned during the Tiananmen crackdown and had seen pro-democracy students and newspaper reporters beaten and tortured. His request was denied, but Judge Orrick permanently enjoined U.S. authorities from returning him to China.
Officials in Beijing were irate. They blasted the United States for “utter defiance of basic international laws and norms governing international relations.” The judge’s actions represented a “wanton violation of China’s judicial sovereignty in an attempt to grant political asylum.” (Wang remained in the United States until one night in 2003 when he and his girlfriend were leaving a nightclub in Flushing, Queens, and two men approached them in the parking lot and hacked Wang to death with a machete. The killing was initially unsolved but later linked by authorities to an international drug syndicate involved in the Ecstasy trade.)
The Goldfish Case raised significant issues about prosecutorial misconduct, confessions elicited under torture, and witnesses being pressured to perjure themselves. But the most damaging legacy of the case was an abrupt and enduring chill in the relations between law enforcement authorities in the two countries, just as the snakehead boom was beginning and on the eve of Sister Ping’s escape from the United States. When Judge Orrick declared a mistrial in the case, he maintained that it was “proof positive you can’t meld the legal system in the People’s Republic of China with the legal system in the United States.”
The memory of the Goldfish Case was still fresh when Sister Ping fled the country, so American officials could count on no assistance from China in their efforts to catch her. But they did find a willing source of help in a place they were not expecting it. During a blizzard in February 1994, Luke Rettler boarded a plane with the federal prosecutor Chauncey Parker and two FBI agents, Tom Trautman and Peter Lee. When they touched down in balmy Hon
g Kong, they made their way to a maximum-security prison in Kowloon. The prison was a grim, frightening place. As Rettler walked in, he wondered for a moment whether or not he would be walking out in one piece. The Americans were ushered into a tiny room inside the prison, where they sat and waited. Then the door opened, and Ah Kay entered the room.
It was the first time Rettler had actually laid eyes on the legendary gangster. In the eighteen months he had been incarcerated, Ah Kay had been lifting weights and had bulked up his wiry frame. But his demeanor was not hostile; on the contrary, he was quiet and polite, not the least bit defiant. To Rettler, Ah Kay seemed subdued, almost relieved. His two brothers had been murdered. His father had been arrested. He had been on the run from law enforcement on two continents. And while his hated rival, Dan Xin Lin, would be spending the rest of his life behind bars in the United States, he still had contacts in Hong Kong and in China, and he might yet try to have Ah Kay killed. There was an expression Ah Kay had used occasionally while he was running the Fuk Ching gang: A big tree catches the wind. So many violent winds seemed to have gathered around Ah Kay in recent years that it occurred to Rettler, as it no doubt had to Ah Kay, that the young gangster was probably safer in prison than he would be anyplace else on earth.
For all his ruthless violence, Ah Kay was by and large a rational actor, and there were signs that even before his arrest he had entertained plans, unrealistic though they may have been, to give up the criminal life. “I feel like a failure,” he confided in an associate in the spring of 1993. “I’m thinking of running the business for another year.”
“You’re quite okay,” the associate reassured him. “Living a dream.”
“Not a dream life at all,” Ah Kay replied. “To earn a living in gangster society is … you know, is like leading toward a dead end.”
For his meeting with Luke Rettler in Hong Kong, Ah Kay had summoned Gerry Shargel, a bearded and intense attorney who had won John Gotti a surprise acquittal in 1990 and who represented numerous other members of the Gambino crime family. Shargel was an elegant dresser and a shrewd tactician who listened to recordings of Martin Luther King’s speeches and borrowed their rousing cadences for his summations. He was thought to be perhaps the finest criminal defense attorney in New York City.
Rettler was impressed—impressed that Ah Kay had flown Shargel to Hong Kong to do his negotiating, and impressed by Shargel. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss whether Ah Kay might waive extradition and return voluntarily to the United States. Shargel had insisted that his client would do so only if the government offered him an attractive deal in exchange for his willingness to cooperate with authorities. Rettler and his associates were eager to hear what kind of information Ah Kay might be willing to provide them with, and this was one of the key subjects of the meeting in the Kowloon jail. Over the course of several days, Rettler, Parker, Trautman, and Lee would join Ah Kay, Shargel, a local Hong Kong lawyer Ah Kay had hired, and a guard in the little room. Rettler marveled at Shargel’s skill in these negotiations; he always seemed to be five steps ahead of Rettler and his colleagues. Rettler found it telling that whereas he would return to his hotel room after a long day of negotiations to prepare his bargaining tactics for the following day, Shargel would head to his Hong Kong tailor to get fitted for a suit.
There was a reason for Shargel’s calm. Cooperation from Chinese, and especially Fujianese, gangsters was somewhat unusual in those days. But through an interpreter, Ah Kay explained that he was willing to assist the government. He wanted a more lenient sentence for his father, and he wanted some lenience for himself. But in exchange he was prepared to return to America and help the FBI. He would tell them everything he knew about the Fuk Ching, about other gangs, about the snakehead trade. As Ah Kay described his proffer, outlining the kind of information he could furnish, Rettler was surprised and impressed by his intelligence. Ah Kay would arrive at their meetings with yellow legal pads on which he had outlined and bullet-pointed the information he could supply. He quickly caught on to the potential evidentiary value of different types of information—what could and could not be used in court. The cream rises to the top, Rettler thought, even in gangs. Having Ah Kay as a cooperator would be like having a good Fujianese FBI agent on the case. So central was Ah Kay’s role for so many years that if he switched sides and began helping law enforcement, he would offer a kind of Rosetta Stone for apprehending all the outstanding mysteries of Fujianese organized crime. He had information about the Fuk Ching gang, about the Teaneck killings, and about the Golden Venture. He said he would testify in court. Perhaps most significantly, Ah Kay was willing to help the FBI try to capture Sister Ping.
Chapter Fifteen
Parole
ON SEPTEMBER 30, 1996, President Clinton signed a major new piece of immigration legislation, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The law was a response to the immigration woes of the early years of the Clinton administration—the onslaught of boats from Haiti, Cuba, and China—as well as the Republican sweep of Congress in 1994 and the growing mood of hostility toward immigrants that had taken hold across the country. It introduced a host of tough new measures to curb illegal immigration: expedited removal of immigrants who did not have a persuasive asylum claim, stiffer punishments for snakeheads and other alien smugglers, and a reduction in the rights of immigrants to have their asylum cases reviewed in federal courts. Bill Clinton had been forced by circumstance to make immigration reform a major policy initiative of his first administration, and he had taken important steps to revitalize the INS, doubling the agency’s budget at a time when other federal agencies were seeing their budgets slashed, and augmenting the number of Border Patrol guards by 45 percent. The service deported 25,000 more illegal immigrants in fiscal year 1996 than it had in 1993, and the new legislation seemed to signify that the administration and the Republican Congress were in agreement on the need for a tough immigration policy.
Still, while Republican lawmakers like the Texas congressman Lamar Smith and the Wyoming senator Alan Simpson led the charge for more restrictions not just on illegal immigration but on legal immigration as well, other powerful Republicans, like Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, were pushing for a special exception to the stiff new immigration posture for those escaping forced abortion or sterilization. Before the bill was passed, an amendment was added that changed the statutory definition of persecution so that someone who was fleeing forced abortion or sterilization, or a well-founded fear of it, would be eligible for asylum. The bill’s sponsors arrived at a curious accommodation between the principled notion that anyone subjected to such treatment in China should be afforded a safe haven in the United States and the pragmatic fear that the country would be flooded by Chinese asylum-seekers. They imposed a numerical ceiling of one thousand people who could be eligible for this kind of asylum each year. While clearly designed as a compromise, the provision suggested the perverse possibility that an individual’s likelihood of receiving asylum might be determined not by the objective conditions she was fleeing but by the moment in the calendar year when she arrived. Would the one thousand and first person simply be deported? No one was especially happy with the measure. An attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights called it “an unprincipled way of standing on principle,” while a lawyer with the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies deemed it “a broad and promiscuous granting of asylum.”
One group of people who might have celebrated the new law was the Golden Venture passengers who were still being held in jail. By the end of 1996, most of the passengers had been deported to China or transferred to third countries, but fifty-five remained in York and other prisons, where it sometimes seemed that the nation had forgotten about them. “Dear President Clinton,” they said in a handwritten letter to the White House:
On behalf of all of the Chinese people of the Golden Venture ship we wish to thank you in advance for your consider
ation in granting freedom to us. We shall be good citizens and we shall contribute much to America. We have been in prison for more than three years. We have committed no crime. We come from a land where exit documents are almost impossible to receive. We fled to America the only way we could. Please help us President Clinton. We will never forget you.
Very sincerely,
The Remaining Passengers
The detainees were exhausted. They had grown resigned to life in prison. When their lawyers and other supporters in York visited to deliver the exciting news about the new law and to suggest that it might be possible to have their asylum claims reconsidered in light of the new amendment, few of the detainees could muster the energy to share in the enthusiasm. They had grown cynical about the American system and the likelihood that it would produce any results for them. One by one, they had given up hope. At a certain point they stopped making the paper sculptures.
Then, quite suddenly, things began to happen. On February 3, 1997, the New York Times ran a front-page story under the headline “Dozens of Chinese from 1993 Voyage Still in Jail.” The story, by Celia Dugger, explained that a third of the passengers had been released or resettled in Latin America, but that ninety-nine had been deported to China and a further fifty-five still remained in American prisons, thirty-eight of them in York. It noted, pointedly, that many of the passengers would have won asylum “had they come ashore a year earlier—when George Bush was President,” and cited a Clinton administration official saying that no one in the government had ever contemplated the possibility that the passengers would be detained for three and a half years. The article quoted Bev Church saying, “Shame on this country.”
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