The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  The prosecution never called upon Yick Tak, but again there is some evidence, however circumstantial, that he may have already played a role in the government’s efforts to apprehend Sister Ping. After pleading guilty to two counts of conspiracy in 1998, Yick Tak was not sentenced until July 14, 2003, which happened to be two weeks after the FBI agent Becky Chan escorted Sister Ping back to the United States. Was Yick Tak somehow instrumental in securing the extradition and prosecution of Sister Ping? Did he trade his wife’s freedom for his own? The answer may never be known: everyone involved in the case, including the judge who delivered Yick Tak’s sentence, is adamant that the nature of his cooperation must never be disclosed. But having been named in the original indictment with Sister Ping back in 1994, and having worked with her as a cash courier and junior partner throughout her criminal career, Yick Tak got off with a conspicuously light sentence of eighteen months. In Bill McMurry’s view, Yick Tak “got a very good deal.”

  The trial took four weeks. “Sister Ping sat atop a smuggling empire that she herself had built over the course of almost two decades from the ground up,” Leslie Brown, one of the government lawyers, said in her summation. “By the end of her long run, Sister Ping was at the apex of an international empire, a conglomerate built upon misery and greed.”

  In his closing arguments, Hochheiser invoked the Arthur Miller play The Crucible, about the witch trials in Salem. Most of his indignation seemed to be directed at Ah Kay. “He ordered murders,” Hochheiser catalogued. “One beating that we heard about, ten ordered beatings, ten to twenty robberies, forty to fifty extortions, two arsons, a thousand alien smugglings, one racketeering, one gun possession, one parole violation, tax evasion, and fake passports.” Hochheiser was a veteran defense attorney, but even he seemed sincerely impressed by the length of Ah Kay’s rap sheet. “That’s one of your main witnesses!” he exclaimed.

  On June 22, after five days of deliberation, the jury members sent a note to Judge Mukasey saying that they had “come to an impasse” on count two, the hostage-taking charge. Hochheiser promptly requested a mistrial on that count, suggesting that Mukasey not resubmit it to the jury. He feared that when the jurors left the courthouse each day, they were being exposed to a barrage of negative publicity surrounding the case. It was true that the local newspapers in New York were painting an unflattering portrait of Sister Ping and suggesting that she had somehow been the ringleader behind the Golden Venture incident. It could not have helped that during the trial, in an unrelated incident, a restaurant worker from New Jersey had been gunned down at Sister Ping’s restaurant on East Broadway.

  Hochheiser was especially troubled by a front-page story and accompanying editorial in the Daily News, which, he noted, “may be the most popular paper in the city.”

  “They will be relieved to hear that,” Judge Mukasey deadpanned.

  The headline in the News was “Evil Incarnate.”

  But if Sister Ping was demonized in the mainstream New York press, she was lionized in Chinatown. Copies of the city’s Chinese-language dailies sold out at newsstands throughout the trial. There was a great upswell of sympathy in the neighborhood, where Sister Ping was widely regarded as someone who had provided a service, lifting a generation of people out of dead-end lives of rural poverty. The World Journal reported that in Sister Ping’s home village of Shengmei, people were volunteering to do jail time on her behalf. They described her as a “living Buddha.” Ninety percent of the villagers now lived overseas and had managed to leave China through the good offices of Sister Ping. The remaining residents prepared a petition to send to Judge Mukasey, requesting lenience in her case.

  To be sure, there was diversity of opinion among Fujianese in both China and the United States on the subject of the famous snakehead, but the prevailing attitude in Chinatown was that while she may have broken laws, her crimes were essentially victimless, and were ultimately justified in terms of the prosperity they created for her customers. “My sister was just thinking of helping others,” the snakehead’s younger sister, Susan, said from her home in New Jersey. “How would she know it would get her in trouble?” Chinatown residents made frequent, if somewhat inapt, comparisons between Sister Ping and Robin Hood. “She is even better than Robin Hood,” one supporter said. “Sister Ping never stole anything, and still helped the poor. She is a good person.”

  After spending so many years pursuing Sister Ping, Konrad Motyka and Bill McMurry were frustrated that the Fujianese in Chinatown could not appreciate the extent to which the snakehead had exploited them. When the agents went into the community to talk to potential witnesses about testifying against her, they met with a great deal of resistance. “I don’t want to be known as the one person who testified against Sister Ping,” people would tell them. “It’s going to hurt my business. It’s going to hurt my family.” It wasn’t simply that people feared revenge from Sister Ping; they feared the kind of social stigma that would attach to anyone who turned on so popular an icon of the Fujianese community.

  “There are people who are going to say, ‘Sister Ping is the greatest thing in the world, because she brought me here,’” Motyka said. “‘I’ve been able to support my family. I now own my own restaurant. This is my version of the American dream.’ But there’s an equal number of people who drowned in the surf, or women who were raped by the gangs, or people who were shot in the head. Those people aren’t going to have as positive a view of her.” To the Robin Hood comparison, Motyka and McMurry replied, almost in unison, “Robin Hood never made forty million dollars.”

  For Justin Yu, a Chinatown journalist who covered both the legal proceedings and the response in the neighborhood and went on to write a book in Chinese about Sister Ping, the two different pictures of the snakehead represented a much deeper philosophical rift that separated those who grew up in China during the twentieth century and those who were born in the United States. What you thought about Sister Ping depended at least in part on the value you attached to a single human life and on how that value factored into a larger calculation of possible benefits and possible risks. “In China, a human’s life isn’t worth ten pennies,” Yu explained. “Ten thousand people come and one hundred people die? Bad luck. If they make it, their families get rich. Their villages get rich.”

  So for American-born prosecutors and members of the press to focus on the ten dead from the Golden Venture, or on the hazards and depredations of the journey, was to miss the point, and to indulge in a conception of the preciousness of human life and the primacy of physical comforts that would be foreign to the Fujianese because it would render almost any risk untenable. Sister Ping’s business was inherently risky, and her clients understood those risks and accepted them. The key to understanding the snakehead trade was the concept of “acceptable risk,” Yu concluded. “Acceptable risk, acceptable cruelty, acceptable lousy treatment, acceptable long trip, there’s no toilet. It’s acceptable. Because of the comparison: the life there, and the life here.”

  After several days of further deliberation, the jury returned a verdict. They found Sister Ping guilty of conspiracy, trafficking in ransom proceeds, and one count of money laundering. The jurors remained hung on the hostage-taking charge. As the verdict was read, Sister Ping betrayed no emotion, her face expressionless. But she may have been masking her surprise. Throughout the trial she had been housed at a prison in Brooklyn, and according to other inmates who met her there, she would sometimes gather her belongings and announce that she was preparing to return home, because any day she would be free.

  The press took little notice of it, but the jury acquitted Sister Ping of count four, the money-laundering charge related to her wiring the funds for the purchase of the Golden Venture. She was cleared of the only charge that actually linked her to the ship. But it made little difference. The name and face of Sister Ping would always be synonymous with the voyage.

  From their homes in cities and small towns around the country, the passengers of the Golden V
enture followed the news of Sister Ping’s conviction with a kind of detached interest. Despite the government’s best efforts, the vast majority of the original migrants now lived in the United States, including nearly all of the hundred or so who had been deported. Still enamored of the elusive promise that America seemed to hold, they had returned in a variety of ways, some of them legal, some of them not, and many of them were too busy to take much notice of the Sister Ping case. Those who did take an interest felt sympathy for Sister Ping. The only snakehead toward whom any of them displayed ill will was Ah Kay, and the fear and hostility that his name still managed to awaken in them seemed driven more by his predatory relationship with the Chinatown community than by his role in the voyage of the Golden Venture.

  Of more concern to the passengers was a conspicuous shift in the mood of the country—the return of a deep-seated panic on the issue of immigration. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the kind of periodic hysteria that has occasionally gripped the nation throughout its history returned, but with a heightened element of fear. In 2003 the two sides of INS work, benefits and enforcement, were officially disaggregated, with the benefits side becoming a new agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the enforcement side joining customs to become Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If any doubt remained about which of the competing instincts behind immigration work would prevail, the instinct to admit people to the country or the instinct to shut them out, it was surely telling that both of these new agencies were absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security. As the bureaucratic reorganization took hold, one message was unmistakable: immigration would henceforth be regarded first and foremost as a matter of national security.

  Nearly a decade after the last of the Golden Venture detainees had been released from York County Prison, the former prisoners were still on parole. ICE had begun launching impromptu raids on restaurants and garment factories across the country and rounding up illegals; numerous cities and municipalities were beginning to pass their own strict anti-immigrant ordinances. Some of the Golden Venture passengers began to fear that in such a hostile climate, they themselves might be deported. They had purchased property and opened businesses. Many of them had sent for their families, or met and married people in America. They had American-born children enrolled in elementary school. Yet in 2004 one of the men who had been pardoned by President Clinton, Zeng Hua Zheng, received a deportation order at his home in Aurora, Colorado. He was instructed to gather his belongings into 44 pounds of luggage and report on a certain date for his flight back to China.

  As their fears grew, passengers all across the country started making telephone calls to York. Some of the original People of the Golden Vision had fallen out of touch with the passengers, but many had stayed in close contact, telephoning them at Christmas and the Chinese New Year and attending their weddings and the weddings of their children. Craig Trebilcock had just returned from a year spent with an Army civil affairs unit in Iraq, and he and Beverly Church began lobbying members of Congress to introduce a piece of private legislation that would finally put an end to the uncertainty and fear in which the Golden Venture passengers had lived for a decade, by granting them permanent resident status.

  “They’re picking them off one by one,” Bev said. She was still working as a paralegal, but in her spare time, in the evenings and on weekends, she began compiling binders full of information on each of the passengers and sending them to legislators in Washington, hoping to persuade them to vote on the private bill. The catch with a private bill is that it can be approved only by a unanimous vote in Congress, and particularly on the matter of immigration, there would always be a few hardliners who would refuse to find sympathy for the men. But as long as the bill was pending before Congress, the passengers could not be deported. So at the beginning of each congressional term, Bev would work with allies in the House of Representatives to introduce the bill, and when it did not pass by the end of that term, she would make sure that it was reintroduced in the next one. “They paid the penalty but never got final status,” Todd Platts, the Pennsylvania congressman who sponsored the bill, said of the Golden Venture passengers. “We want immigrants to be willing to work hard and provide for themselves. These individuals have shown that they do.” Bev continued lobbying other members of Congress, and when her earnest letters received no reply, she would drive to Capitol Hill herself and doorstep the legislators in their offices. “You should see it,” Craig joked. “They scurry into the nearest men’s room as soon as they hear her heels coming down the hall.”

  In the spring of 2006, a documentary about the Golden Venture by the filmmaker Peter Cohn premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Bev and Craig thought it might be an ideal PR opportunity, so they persuaded the passengers whose names were on the private bill to take a rare day off work and travel by bus and car to New York. It was a happy reunion for the men, who smiled and joked and exchanged family news and baby pictures. “When we saw these gentlemen on TV, on the shores of New York State, we took these gentlemen to be heroes, not liabilities to the country,” Craig said at a crowded press conference in Chinatown. “They are the bravest men I have ever met.”

  “We almost died trying to get to America, and then we were in jail for four years,” one of the passengers, the slight, bespectacled Ohio restaurant owner Michael Chen, told the newspaper reporters assembled in the room. With fluent English and a businesslike demeanor, Chen looked every bit the modern American professional, and had become something of a spokesman for the group. “We have been out of jail for almost a decade,” he continued. “We have started businesses and families, paid taxes and been good citizens. But still we are not fully legal. It’s hard for us to buy homes, get jobs, or even get driver’s licenses. We live in fear that we will be sent back to China. We ask President Bush to recognize that we have already paid a very high price to find freedom in America, and to finally grant us legal status.”

  Standing among his fellow passengers, dressed in a black suit with the collar of his button-down shirt splayed over the lapels Saturday Night Fever–style, was Sean Chen. He had come from Philadelphia, where he had been living since 2002. He spent his days working as a manager and bartender at a Japanese restaurant and his nights tending bar at an Irish pub. He had bought his own place, a small brick townhouse on the outskirts of the city, and he was engaged to a beautiful Fujianese woman named Dana, who was tall and had flawless skin and a giddy, infectious laugh. Dana had her green card, and she and Sean had met when she went to work at the Japanese restaurant as a cashier. On their first date, Sean took her to lunch at TGI Friday’s, then to watch the New England Patriots play the Philadelphia Eagles at a Super Bowl party at a friend’s house.

  About a year after the press conference in New York City, Dana gave birth to their first child, a son, whom they named Brian. The baby was several weeks old before Sean’s mother, who was living in Taiwan, insisted on giving him a Chinese name. In the excitement of the birth and those first few days of fatherhood, Sean had not gotten around to it.

  On a lovely, crisp morning in March 2006, Judge Michael Mukasey’s courtroom filled once again with members of the press and law enforcement officers, and with the many friends and relatives of Sister Ping. Sister Ping entered, wearing a prison-issue gray T-shirt and blue pants, her long hair falling down her back. The casual clothing made the snakehead seem especially small; the T-shirt was too big for her, dropping almost to her knees. She turned to acknowledge her family, then put on her headphones so that she could hear the translation.

  After perfunctory statements by the prosecution and defense, Judge Mukasey went through the standard practice of offering the convicted an opportunity to address the court. When defendants choose to make these statements, they tend to involve brief apologies to victims or their families, some sort of show of contrition, and a request for leniency in the sentencing.

  Hochheiser stood and said that he had advised Sister Ping not to
speak. “She is not a lawyer, aware of the legal issues,” he said. “Having said that, I have told her that if she wishes to make a statement to the court, she may.”

  Mukasey turned to Sister Ping. “Is there anything you want to tell me before I impose sentence?” he asked.

  For a moment Sister Ping was silent, sitting straight-backed behind the defense table. Then, slowly, she rose. She gestured to her interpreter, a slim Chinese woman with short hair who sat several feet away. Then she spoke.

  “I cried once in court,” she began. “That was when Ah Kay robbed my home twice and I was too afraid to report it to the police … The witnesses against me have all gone home, and they have received a light sentence as a result of testifying against me,” she continued. “I’m happy for them. The way that I lead my life and also my personality is that I wish the best for people. I was a small businesswoman in Chinatown. If Ah Kay had come and robbed my home twice, you can imagine how many other people took advantage of me.”

  What followed was an extraordinary hour-long monologue as Sister Ping expounded and free-associated on her personal history and the events and personalities that had arisen in the trial. Everyone in the courtroom except her family members, who had perhaps been exposed to such Castro-style feats of digressive oratory in the past, sat rapt, amazed that the woman who had waited so silently over the course of the proceedings had suddenly hijacked an opportunity to sound a few words of regret and was instead delivering a stump speech. “Everybody can tell you that Mrs. Ping was working in the store every day, especially people from my hometown,” she continued. “I am not the kind of person that they depicted me and charged me with being.” She pointed to the fact that for years other snakeheads had claimed to be associated with her and done business “using my name;” she seemed to be implying that some of her alleged associates were not associates at all, that she was merely the victim of guilt by association.