The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  When she was asked where she resided in Hong Kong, Sister Ping supplied the address of an apartment tower on Connaught Road West, in the same waterfront district where she had lived and worked in the late 1970s, before she left for the United States. It emerged that Sister Ping had maintained her residence in Hong Kong and had been living there on and off during the entire period that U.S. authorities had been searching for her. The detectives rushed to the building, noting, perhaps, in passing that the complex in which Sister Ping had been hiding was located one block from a major police station. Inside the twenty-second-floor apartment they encountered a Chinese couple, both carrying Belizean passports, who appeared to be customers and had just arrived in Hong Kong. They also found plane tickets—from Los Angeles to San Salvador, from San Salvador to Belize, from Hong Kong to Singapore, and so on. The plane tickets had been booked under the name Lilly Zhang, and in the apartment investigators recovered an authentic Belizean passport for a woman named Lilly Zhang, whose date of birth was listed as December 14, 1951. The photograph in the passport was of Sister Ping. There was another passport there as well, this one from Taiwan and in Sister Ping’s own name. But it appeared that in recent months, at least, Lilly Zhang had been her default false identity. The passport had been issued just three months earlier, in January 2000. But it was covered in a welter of stamps. Under “occupation,” Sister Ping had listed “housewife.” But the passport bore visas for Honduras, Mexico, Mongolia, and numerous other places. In three months, Sister Ping had made fifty trips to foreign countries.

  Bill McMurry and Konrad Motyka were elated when news of the arrest reached New York. When they found out about the passport, they were not surprised. Belize has a program that it euphemistically terms “economic citizenship,” whereby a passport can essentially be purchased for a fee. If Sister Ping was traveling on a legitimate Belizean passport under someone else’s name, there was almost no way that the FBI or Interpol or any foreign government might have succeeded in spotting her at an airport, unless they had someone on hand who actually recognized her face. When the agents contacted the authorities in Belize to try to get a copy of the passport application Sister Ping had filed, they were informed that it had been lost in a fire.

  “It was lost in a lighter accident,” Motyka joked.

  “A very small fire,” McMurry added with a smile.

  But perhaps the most interesting thing that the Hong Kong investigators recovered from Sister Ping was a little black book full of names and phone numbers. There on the pages of the book, etched in Sister Ping’s hasty, artless calligraphy, was a rendering of the extraordinary global web of contacts she had grown to rely on over a two-decade career. It was a singular document, a blueprint of her guanxi and her global operations. There were entries for an “Immigration Friend” in Thailand and immigration officials in Malaysia, Moscow, and Belize. There were associates in Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Canada, and, naturally, the United States.

  Sister Ping was transported to prison in Hong Kong, and the United States announced that it would seek her extradition. “The arrest of Cheng Chui Ping after several years of diligent detective work demonstrates once again our common determination to bring to justice those who engage in the reprehensible and deadly practice of human smuggling,” announced Michael Klosson, the U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, before noting—appropriately, if perhaps erroneously—that Sister Ping was “one of the masterminds” of the Golden Venture incident.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Mother of All Snakeheads

  ON MAY 16, 2005, Sister Ping was escorted into a courtroom in the federal courthouse on Pearl Street in downtown New York City. It had been over a decade since she fled from the neighborhood to take refuge in China, and she was visibly older: her face was still unlined, but her hair, which had grown long, was streaked with gray. She wore a smart black pantsuit, the professional garb of an inoffensive businesswoman. It was a canny choice of uniform: a businesswoman, Sister Ping would maintain throughout the trial, was all that she had ever been. The courtroom was filled with press, and with dozens of supporters and relatives from Chinatown. There was a measure of cruel irony in the location of the courthouse, in a cluster of imposing municipal buildings that abuts the southwestern corner of Chinatown. The restaurants and funeral parlors of Mott and Mulberry were a mere block away, and beyond those the safety and comfort of East Broadway, which even now people called Fuzhou Street, and the restaurant Sister Ping still owned at Number 47. If life had turned out differently, Sister Ping could have walked out of the building, strolled across Worth Street, and entered Columbus Park, where every day that summer the elderly men and women of Chinatown gathered to do slow, deliberate tai chi in the mornings and to pass the humid afternoons playing cards at concrete tables in the shade of the mulberry trees. She could have joined the spry Fujianese grandmothers who gathered there, women who were in their fifties, as she was, or older, and were finally slowing down after a lifetime of grueling work. They came from the same place she did, and had the same education. They had lived the type of life that, under different circumstances, she might have lived herself. She could have sat beside these women, their contemporary in every way, taken her shoes off, as they did, and fanned her face.

  But Sister Ping had chosen a different life, and while she would continue to insist that she was simply a small businesswoman from Chinatown who had lived a hard and humble existence, the prospect of a leisurely retirement was looking increasingly unlikely. For Bill McMurry who with Konrad Motyka had worked to pursue her around the world, and who sat in the back of the courtroom alongside the contingent of supporters from Chinatown every day of the trial, finally laying eyes on Sister Ping had come as something of a shock. “She’s just a little old woman,” McMurry marveled. “You wouldn’t look at her twice on the street.”

  Sister Ping had always been a fighter, dismissive of the system of laws but more than ready to hire high-priced attorneys when it suited her. After her arrest in April 2000, the United States had announced that it would attempt to extradite her to face charges in New York. From a cell in an overcrowded maximum-security prison in the New Territories, she arranged to be represented by a leading barrister who was an expert on extradition law. She would argue that the Hong Kong government should not turn her over to the United States because so much time had elapsed since the crimes spelled out in the indictment against her that prosecution was barred by the statute of limitations. This gambit seemed animated by a curiously naive notion that if a criminal simply goes on the lam and stays away for long enough, her crimes will be forgiven.

  When a Hong Kong court ruled against her, Sister Ping tried another argument, suggesting that Hong Kong’s own Department of Justice had a conflict of interest, because in its handling of her case it had consulted with the American Justice Department and thus was representing the interests of the United States. She sued the government, saying she was being unlawfully detained and naming the United States and the prison where she was being held as defendants. Amid this flurry of legal activity, she was reportedly hospitalized for depression, which further delayed the proceedings. (Whether she was genuinely clinically depressed or merely stalling for time remains unclear.)

  In December 2002, Sister Ping presented herself to the Court of Appeals in Hong Kong. By that time she had fired her attorney and in a bizarre move had chosen to represent herself. There is no question that Sister Ping was an exceptionally shrewd and intelligent entrepreneur, but she was no legal scholar, and after years of deference and reinforcement from those around her, she had developed a somewhat elliptical and highly self-referential style of conversation that produced comic results in the courtroom. She began by telling the court that she wanted to quote from a Mandarin television series, Honorable Judge, which she had enjoyed during her years on the mainland. “In the execution of law, not only had the judge to understand fully what the law says,” she solemnly intoned, “but how the system
deals with the cases and the general complexities of the case.”

  Sister Ping told the court that the Public Security Bureau in China had frozen her assets. She explained that she simply wanted to return to America and continue running her restaurant on East Broadway, which she had been forced to leave in the care of family and friends. “But if I go back,” she added, “I would like to go back with the proper status.”

  The appeal was unsuccessful, and on Friday, June 6, 2003, a decade to the day after the Golden Venture ran aground in Queens, her final appeal was rejected as well. After three years of fighting, Sister Ping was out of options. A young FBI agent named Becky Chan flew to Hong Kong to escort her back to America. On the flight home the two women sat side by side in the back of the plane. Sister Ping wore plastic flexicuffs over a Rolex watch. She was adamant that she had done nothing wrong and that as soon as they touched down in New York she would be released and reunited with her family. Chan could see the determination in Sister Ping’s eyes. “I’m going to beat this,” her countenance seemed to say. “I’m going to get let out.”

  It was only when the plane touched down in San Francisco and Sister Ping caught sight of the media photographers waiting there that her confidence began to slip. She asked if she could telephone her husband. Becky Chan said that she could, but that they could not speak in their native dialect, which Chan did not understand. They had to speak in Mandarin.

  When Sister Ping had exchanged a few words with Yick Tak, the women changed flights, retracing the route east across the United States that Sister Ping had made on so many occasions with Fujianese customers who had entered the country from Tijuana. When they arrived at Newark Airport, Bill McMurry and Konrad Motyka were waiting there to meet them.

  By choosing to fight extradition, Sister Ping had actually made a significant mistake. Before her capture in 2000, Motyka and McMurry had struggled to persuade the FBI to invest resources in building a case against the snakehead. The 1994 indictment was beginning to feel somewhat stale, but given that she was a fugitive and it looked unlikely that she would ever be captured, the agents had trouble justifying the devotion of further investigative resources to tracking down witnesses and assembling evidence for a prosecution that might never come to pass. Once Sister Ping was in custody, however, Motyka and McMurry began reaching out to their counterparts in the INS and other agencies. By resisting extradition, Sister Ping had simply given them three additional years in which to refine the case against her.

  There were five counts against Sister Ping. Count one was a conspiracy charge, alleging that she had conspired to commit the crimes of alien smuggling, hostage-taking, money laundering, and trafficking in ransom proceeds. Count two charged her with hostage-taking, with specific reference to one of the Boston boats she had hired the Fuk Ching gang to offload. “Hostage-taking and alien smuggling go hand in hand,” one of the prosecutors observed. The third and fourth counts charged Sister Ping with money laundering—for the money she had sent to Bangkok so that Weng Yu Hui could start his own alien smuggling business in 1991, and for the funds she sent on behalf of Ah Kay to help purchase the Golden Venture. The fifth count involved trafficking in ransom proceeds.

  In a way, the indictment seemed to underline just how minimal Sister Ping’s role in the Golden Venture operation had been. She had sent twenty clients aboard the Najd II, but only two of them had ended up on the Golden Venture. It was true that one of those two had died in the water off Rockaway but Sister Ping was not charged with any crime related to that death. She had helped finance the ship, but technically the money she sent to Thailand so the boat could be purchased was not her own money; it was money that she owed to Ah Kay. “Cheng Chui Ping had nothing to do with the Golden Venture,” her lawyer, Larry Hochheiser, said. Hochheiser was a rumpled criminal defense attorney with fluffy white hair, a bushy mustache, and a kind smile. He was a seasoned litigator who had spent years representing the Westies, a violent Irish American gang based in Hell’s Kitchen. Hochheiser paced the courtroom with a slow gait and argued that Sister Ping had been an underground banker in an immigrant community, and that was the extent of her crimes. “It wasn’t Cheng Chui Ping who created the idea of the Golden Venture,” Hochheiser said. “No one claims that, except maybe the newspapers. The government doesn’t claim that. Even their witnesses can’t claim that. Ah Kay was the Golden Venture.” The tail was wagging the dog, Hochheiser argued. “This is a credit union. This is a money business that is being used to tie Cheng Chui Ping to the alien smuggling business.”

  Nevertheless, the impression hung heavy in the courtroom that whatever the charges against Sister Ping, her trial would represent the final, definitive account of the tragic voyage of the Golden Venture. The judge in the case was Michael Mukasey a stern, bespectacled conservative who in later years would become the attorney general of the United States. Mukasey had heard cases brought by Golden Venture passengers in the past; he had more than a passing familiarity with the tragic details of the voyage. The government lawyers, a team of three young assistant U.S. attorneys, spent an inordinate amount of trial time examining and reexamining Sister Ping’s role in the Golden Venture. Their aim was not to convict her for any of the particulars of the voyage or the deaths, but to establish in as much detail as possible that she was not merely a shopkeeper or banker but a snakehead, and a major one at that.

  “This is a case about the brutal business of smuggling human beings into the United States for profit, and about one woman, the defendant, Cheng Chui Ping, who rose to become one of the most powerful and most successful alien smugglers of our time,” one of the prosecutors, David Burns, declared.

  To make its case, the government produced a devastatingly comprehensive array of former criminal associates. Weng Yu Hui appeared in the courtroom and described how Sister Ping smuggled him to America in 1984; how she gave him money to take to her passengers when they were stranded in Mombasa; how the day the Golden Venture arrived, she had told him to get out of town. “She said that she had bad feelings and she was afraid,” Weng recalled. “She was worried about her two customers.” Various former underlings from the Fuk Ching detailed Sister Ping’s complicated history with the gang. Larry Hay, the undercover Canadian Mountie who had executed the sting at the Buffalo airport leading to Sister Ping’s first conviction, testified. Kenny Feng, the Taiwanese snakehead from Guatemala, recounted the tragedy of the boat that had overturned in 1998. A Fujianese woman whom Sister Ping had charged $43,000 for the journey to the United States explained that she was willing to commit to such a considerable fee because she knew Sister Ping’s name and trusted her reputation.

  But the most damning witness was the man who had been living in a temporary jail cell since 1994, the man whose decidedly complicated history with Sister Ping was about to undergo one final twist. After receiving his twenty-year sentence in 1998, Ah Kay had been waiting for the opportunity to do one last service for the government. When he strode into the courtroom and was sworn in, the jury could not perhaps appreciate the sense in which for Ah Kay, this was the culmination of his years of cooperation, what Konrad Motyka called his “final part to play.”

  Ah Kay was still a youth at the time of his arrest, but when he appeared in the courtroom, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, he looked older, calmer, and more sensible, his hair shorn close to the scalp, his demeanor precise and free of hostility. Ah Kay was middle-aged. He had always been a quick study, and as a government witness he did not disappoint. For three days he testified about Sister Ping’s role in the community, about his decision to rob her house in Brooklyn in the 1980s, and about how readily she had forgiven him when she needed him to offload her customers at sea. He was matter-of-fact about his own crimes, acknowledging his role as the Fuk Ching’s dai lo and describing the murders he had committed and the mayhem for which he was responsible. He admitted that he had personally smuggled as many as a thousand people into the United States, and that in addition he had helped snakeheads like Sister
Ping offload their ships and collect their fees. When he was asked whether this entailed violence, he replied, “Of course violence was used.”

  With impressive recall, Ah Kay revisited each detail of the decision to purchase the Golden Venture and send it to Africa to retrieve the passengers from the Najd II. He described asking Sister Ping to wire the funds for the ship to Thailand. “I told her that she still owed me three hundred thousand dollars,” he recalled. “I said I would invest the money in that Golden Venture boat. She said, ‘No problem.’” Ah Kay was direct and unflappable. He made a perfect witness, which should perhaps be no surprise; he had been preparing for this moment for ten years.

  Sister Ping sat quietly through the testimony, listening through headphones to a simultaneous translation and occasionally taking notes. Hochheiser hammered at the credibility of the government’s witness. “Who are these people?” he asked. “What is the quality and character of the people that are giving you information?” Despite the fact that Weng, who was one of the government’s lead witnesses, had already served his sentence and was a free man by the time he took the stand, Hochheiser suggested not only that the men testifying against Sister Ping were mendacious criminals, but that they had all been induced to testify with the promise of lesser sentences. “Murderers were hired to give you testimony in this case, and they were paid with a commodity worth a great deal more than simply money,” he told the jury. “Their cooperation, we euphemistically call it, was bought and paid for with life—with freedom from serving years in jail.”

  “Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. These men are killers,” the government lawyer David Burns conceded. “But they’re killers she hired.”

  If Sister Ping was furious that her former associates were now lining up to betray her, she might have found some comfort in the fact that one person was not called upon to take the stand. After his arrest in 1997, her husband, Cheung Yick Tak, had his sentencing postponed and postponed again. It was as if the authorities were waiting to assess the full measure of Yick Tak’s cooperation before delivering his sentence—as if, like Ah Kay, he still had one final part to play Prior to Sister Ping’s trial, two different attorneys who represented her expressed concerns that one of the government’s witnesses against the snakehead might ultimately be her own husband.