The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  All the snakeheads needed was a way station or staging post where authorities were willing to look the other way, what one observer described as a “geopolitical black hole” in the regulatory system. Some of these black holes were far from the United States. Others were closer to home. A handful of snakeheads saw potential in the Native American reservations that straddle the border between the United States and Canada and function as sovereign Native American territory. In a two-year period in the late 1990s, a sophisticated network of Fujianese snakeheads and Mohawk Indians smuggled thousands of undocumented Chinese into the United States through a reservation in upstate New York. Before the ring was dismantled by authorities, it made $170 million.

  As the snakehead business boomed internationally, it began to attract a more ruthless element. Snakeheads started sending their clients not in the holds of ships but in cargo containers, a mode of transportation that actually managed to be more hazardous than the Golden Venture. Throughout the late 1990s stowaways were discovered in shipping containers entering the ports of Los Angeles or Seattle nearly every week. A young Fujianese woman emerged as one of the most dominant snakeheads in Europe and adopted the moniker Little Sister Ping, in a nod both to her own diminutive stature and to her much more famous namesake. Little Sister Ping worked out of a Chinese restaurant in Rotterdam, but there the similarities end. Whereas Big Sister Ping shunned any form of ostentation, invested her money in real estate, and scrupulously maintained a low profile, Little Sister Ping had a fleet of cars, wore expensive designer clothes, and favored vacations in Italy and Greece. In 2000 she was responsible for a notorious tragedy in which fifty-eight Fujianese who had crossed Europe and were headed for London ended up suffocating to death in the airtight back of a truck. A single air vent had been closed from the outside, and as the passengers began running out of air, they screamed and clawed at the vent and slammed the walls of the truck with their shoes. But the driver did not hear, and eventually the passengers died there in the dark, their bodies discovered only when customs officers stopped the truck at Dover.

  From her village in Fujian Province, Big Sister Ping was believed to have been one of the pioneers of the snakehead route through Milosevic’s Serbia, and there is no doubt that she maintained an eclectic array of routes and way stations. But as she continued her boat smuggling operations during the late 1990s, she found that one particularly effective strategy was to send ships from Asia directly to the coast of Central America and then transport passengers overland to the United States. Honduras had the law against alien smuggling, which despite the general lack of enforcement made it a less than ideal location. But Sister Ping found a perfect logistical base in Guatemala. With stretches of coastline on both the Atlantic and the Pacific and a long and largely unpoliced border with Mexico, Guatemala was well situated as a transition point for passengers disembarking from fishing trawlers and preparing for the long journey overland. Sister Ping was hardly the only smuggler to see the virtues of the place; most of the Colombian cocaine that enters the United States passes through Guatemala first, and an astonishing 10 percent of Guatemala’s population would ultimately emigrate to the United States. The country was deeply corrupt, and with a thriving informal economy, money laundering was a routine and fairly easy activity. (During the period when Sister Ping was operating there, the off-the-books economy in Guatemala generated over 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.)

  In some ways Sister Ping’s organization was less like the Mafia than it was like a multinational corporation that seeks an optimal economic and regulatory environment in which to do business. Just as the state of Delaware offers a series of enticements in an effort to lure businesses to incorporate there, Guatemala offered Sister Ping a favorable location vis-à-vis China and the United States, a permissive government whose officials could easily be bought, an underground economy so extensive that it nearly engulfed the licit economy and made it more or less impossible to disentangle dirty money from clean, and a small but robust Chinese and Taiwanese population, which could be a source of safe houses, middlemen, and couriers. On top of everything else, Sister Ping could arrange for the Guatemalan navy to help facilitate the offloading of her ships, at the reasonable price of $50,000 a pop.

  So after the Golden Venture debacle, Sister Ping began routing her ships through Guatemala. She had connections in the country dating at least as far back as 1984, when she smuggled Weng Yu Hui to the United States via Guatemala, and her family obtained visas from the mysterious Taiwanese man at the Guatemala City Ritz. But as more ships dropped off customers there, Guatemala became a crucial hub for Sister Ping. If you drew a map of the many routes Sister Ping’s customers took, a disproportionate number of them would converge on Guatemala, much as a map of flights by Continental Airlines would reveal the carrier’s hub at the airport in Houston.

  Of course, Sister Ping herself did not have to be present in Guatemala very often. Provided she had someone she could trust, to whom she could outsource the actual work of collecting passengers from ships, holding them in safe houses, and transporting them to Mexico, she could effectively telecommute, working from her home in Shengmei village, or from a hotel suite in Fuzhou, or from an apartment that she owned in Hong Kong. Sister Ping’s man in Guatemala City, whom she found eminently reliable, was a Taiwanese-born smuggler named Kenny Feng. Feng spoke Spanish. Like so many others, he had become involved in the snakehead business when the boom was just starting, in 1990. He and Sister Ping had met in 1992, before the voyage of the Golden Venture; they collaborated on several successful shiploads of passengers that year, and they had continued to work together ever since.

  Guatemala was so corrupt that at times it seemed the job of actually smuggling people was secondary to simply paying officials the gratuities they had come to expect. The officials were fairly shameless in this regard. In 1991 Guatemala’s consul general had to be removed because of allegations that he had been selling visas to Chinese citizens. The industry was generating so much largesse that everyone needed to wet his beak. Occasionally Sister Ping would send her brother to Guatemala City with a suitcase containing $400,000, just to pay people off.

  It was a fruitful operation. But boat smuggling is by its very nature a somewhat perilous activity, and there were mishaps from time to time, some of which were fatal. One morning in May 1998, a body washed ashore on a beach near Escuintla, on Guatemala’s Pacific Coast. More corpses washed ashore throughout the day; fourteen were recovered in all. Sister Ping was in China, but she spoke with Kenny Feng on the phone and explained that one of her ships had sunk, and the survivors were stranded. She needed Feng to pick them up. If he could collect them and transfer them to another group of snakeheads at the Mexican border, she would pay him $10,000 for each customer who made it to the United States. Before she hung up, she instructed Feng to look after the bodies of the dead. They should be buried at a Chinese cemetery in Guatemala City, she said. She would cover the expenses.

  Under slightly different circumstances, the deaths of the fourteen passengers in Guatemala might have signaled the end of the road for Sister Ping. A woman she had smuggled to Guatemala, who went by the name Sandy, had moved in with Kenny Feng and was living with him in the apartment in Guatemala City. (When Sandy arrived, Feng told her that her fee for the full trip to the United States would be some $20,000 more than what she had been told before leaving China, and she had no way to pay) Feng tired of Sandy eventually, however, and sold her to some Mexican coyotes, who ended up holding her captive in a safe house in Brownsville, Texas. Desperate to escape, she jumped out a second-story window and broke her back when she hit the ground. From her hospital bed, she described her ordeal to the police, and eventually Kenny Feng was arrested.

  It seemed that Sister Ping might be arrested as well. Jerry Stuchiner knew that she was operating out of Latin America, and he was still in regular contact with the Fat Man, who knew all about Sister Ping and her activities. Stuchiner was the INS’s man in
the region. He had managed to lock up Gloria Canales, and in the course of things it would have been only natural for him to move on to pursuing Sister Ping.

  But by the time the ship went down off Guatemala in 1998, Jerry Stuchiner was gone. He had been unhappy in the months after the Canales arrest. He and his wife had quarreled. One day in July 1996 he boarded a plane bound for Hong Kong, accompanied by his Salvadoran mistress. He had altered his appearance somewhat, shaving his trademark goatee and dyeing his dark hair blond. The couple flew business class, and as the plane finally angled low over the bright lights of Hong Kong, Stuchiner grew excited: he was back on his own turf.

  Stuchiner and his girlfriend exited the plane at Kai Tak Airport and queued at customs. Stuchiner flashed his black diplomatic passport, even though this was not technically an official visit. But as he was leaving the airport, he suddenly found himself surrounded by a team of Hong Kong Police officers, who placed him under arrest. He had not realized it during the long flight, but an undercover agent had been sitting a few rows behind him in the business-class cabin, watching his every move. Security agents began rifling through Stuchiner’s belongings, and in his briefcase they found what they were looking for: five blank Honduran passports. According to the investigators, it had been Stuchiner’s intention to sell the passports for $30,000 apiece to Chinese immigrants bound for the United States.

  The Fat Man was standing in the airport arrivals lobby waiting to greet Stuchiner when he too was arrested. Herbie Weizenblut, the friend Stuchiner and the Fat Man had installed as Honduras’s consul general in Hong Kong, was detained by the police as well, but he claimed diplomatic immunity from arrest and was released. He immediately left the colony, traveling first to Macau and from there to Kuala Lumpur, where authorities lost track of him. As details emerged about the immigration scam that Stuchiner had operated with the Fat Man and Weizenblut, Honduras’s foreign minister was investigated for having permitted the Fat Man to pay Weizenblut’s expenses during his time in Hong Kong. “I am very sad and very disappointed,” said Angelina Ulloa, the anti-corruption crusader who as head of immigration in Honduras had worked with Stuchiner to crack the Canales case. She added that she had considered Stuchiner a friend. (She was subsequently suspended and investigated for corruption herself, though she insisted that she was innocent.)

  Stuchiner pleaded guilty to passport fraud and was imprisoned in Hong Kong’s Lai Chi Kok prison. But as the July 1, 1997, deadline for Great Britain to return Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China approached, Stuchiner, the great embellisher of stories and lover of international intrigue, outlined one last cloak-and-dagger scenario. He began to hint to the press that it might be shortsighted for U.S. authorities to allow him to serve out his sentence in a Chinese jail. He had been a senior federal agent for many years, and had been exposed to untold reams of sensitive intelligence. What if he was forced, under interrogation or even torture, to share those secrets with the Chinese?

  The gambit succeeded, and on the eve of the handover, Hong Kong authorities commuted Stuchiner’s sentence. For reasons that were never explained, the INS never conducted any sort of thorough investigation after learning that during the chief years of the human smuggling boom, one of its top anti-smuggling operatives had been dabbling in the business himself. But it did fire Stuchiner. He returned to the United States, and was never prosecuted in this country for corruption. He moved to Nevada, where, extraordinary though it may seem, he is currently an attorney and a member of the bar. He practices law in Las Vegas. Immigration law is a particular specialty.

  No one but Stuchiner will ever know the full extent of his corruption during the snakehead boom. No investigation ever conclusively determined whether the passports were an isolated incident or whether Stuchiner had colluded with the smugglers in other ways as well. Some speculated that he had gone after Canales with such fire simply in order to eliminate a competitor. Others wondered if the Golden Venture tragedy might have been prevented if the INS’s chief anti-smuggling officer in Hong Kong had not had some vested interest in seeing the snakehead trade continue.

  But whatever the extent of Stuchiner’s corruption, it seems undeniable that his downfall represented yet another squandered opportunity to capture Sister Ping. He would have been the right person in the right place at the right time to bring her down, but instead he was selling blank Honduran passports, then sitting in a Hong Kong jail. To the immigration and law enforcement officials who were determined to capture Sister Ping, the arrest of Jerry Stuchiner brought home an unpalatable truth: the greatest adversary they faced, and their greatest disadvantage, was the pervasive, corrosive, endemic power of greed and official corruption. They had lamented the phenomenon in the two-bit backwater governments of Southeast Asia and Central America, but now they were forced to concede that the lucrative side of the snakehead trade had corrupted their own government as well. And while the boat that sank in the waters off Guatemala was a tragedy, some speculated that there must have been other boats that went down and remained unreported, minor catastrophes in which rickety vessels simply gave in to the sea, too far from dry land for the screams to be heard or the bodies to wash ashore. “The only person who really knows how many of those boats actually went down is Sister Ping,” one of Stuchiner’s colleagues said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Catching Lilly Zhang

  WHEN AH Kay returned to New York City late one night in the spring of 1994, the press was waiting for him, assembled at JFK Airport to photograph the gang leader and murderer who had authored the Golden Venture debacle. Ah Kay gazed directly into the television cameras. He looked small; he barely reached the shoulders of the officials escorting him. But he wore a cool, unapologetic expression on his face. If it is possible to strut while you have your hands cuffed behind your back and two burly federal agents fishhooking your elbows and dragging you between them, Ah Kay strutted.

  By agreeing to cooperate with the FBI, Ah Kay had succeeded in reducing his father’s sentence to eighteen months. Because the gang leader had worked over the years with so many criminal figures in Chinatown and China, Konrad Motyka and the C-6 squad had an endless list of questions for him. They installed him at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, a hulking facility in downtown Manhattan adjacent to a clutch of courthouses and federal buildings that forms a kind of criminal justice complex on the southern edge of Chinatown. The MCC generally houses inmates on a short-term basis while a trial or some other proceeding is pending, but Ah Kay would prove to be so useful to authorities that he stayed in the prison for years, while a steady stream of interlocutors from the FBI and immigration went to pick his brain. He made himself at home, and became widely liked by both his fellow inmates and the prison staff. Ah Kay had always possessed a natural gift for leadership, and before long his handlers at the FBI noticed that even behind bars he had been able to cultivate a loyal coterie of followers.

  “I’m benching three hundred,” Ah Kay told an agent who went to visit him one day.

  “No, you’re not,” the agent scoffed. Ah Kay did look conspicuously muscular and fit, but officials at the MCC had removed all the weights from the building years ago; there was nothing left to bench-press.

  “I get a table,” Ah Kay explained, “and two hundred-and-fifty-pound guys.”

  Once he made the decision to cooperate, Ah Kay committed to it with the same sort of thoroughness he had devoted to his criminal life, and it occasionally seemed that just debriefing him was a full-time job. Like the Fat Man before him, he had an excellent memory for detail, and he would patiently explicate the confusing dynamics of the tongs, the gangs, the triads, and the snakeheads. He made no effort to diminish his own culpability in the eyes of his interrogators, admitting fully to the murders he had committed, the beatings he had initiated, the parasitic patterns of Chinatown extortion. He detailed the history of the Najd II and the Golden Venture: the cooperation of Weng Yu Hui and Mr. Charlie, the interlude in Mombasa, the decisi
on to purchase a second ship, the appeal to Sister Ping to wire the funds to Thailand. When Mr. Charlie was captured in Thailand, it was in part the fact that Ah Kay was on U.S. soil and willing to testify against him that persuaded him to plead guilty rather than risk a trial.