The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  “Do you think that Mrs. Ping has some kind of psychological—some abnormality? That wasn’t the case. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have any money. And the things that people have said, is it … is it logical?”

  She quickened her pace, speaking so rapidly that the interpreter struggled to keep up, the words tumbling out, her indignation rising, pausing only to jot a character on a piece of paper from time to time to clarify her meaning. She retold each event that had come up at trial, but from a different vantage point, in which she was the victim of the narrative. When she was arrested in Buffalo, she had merely been helping a pregnant relative in need. She said she had always known Weng Yu Hui was trouble, that he was “too wily.” She complained that the Fuk Ching gang had exploited her, robbed her, demanded extortion. “I am deathly afraid of these people,” she said. She maintained that the evidence against her had been manufactured.

  One reason an attorney might not want his client to speak freely in court is that she could make the mistake of alluding to crimes for which she has not been charged, and sure enough, despite the fact that government lawyers had made no mention of the contract on the journalist Ying Chan, Sister Ping brought the incident up, saying that the Fuk Ching had approached her and suggested that they take care of the writer for a fee.

  Relentlessly she portrayed herself as a victim, a hardworking small-business owner who had wanted nothing more than to look after her family. “Everyone can tell you I work fourteen hours in the restaurant every day,” she said. She pointed to her relatives in the back rows. “Every single one of my relatives, when they arrived, they borrowed the whole sum from me in order to pay the snakeheads.” She would not admit to having smuggled the family members herself, but there was no mistaking the responsibility and pride she felt when it came to the presence in this country of so many of her kin. “It was my choice to bring them over—all of them—to the United States,” she said.

  It was not entirely clear whether Sister Ping actually believed any of what she was saying—whether she was delusional and had persuaded herself of her own martyrdom or whether the whole thing was a misguided charade, a last-ditch effort to persuade authorities to buy the cover she had been so assiduously cultivating for so many years. At one point she seemed to accept the idea that she would have to serve time in jail and began describing the role that someone like her could play there. “In jail I can help people,” Sister Ping said. “People who are ill, people who just arrived, people who are in a bad state of mind … As a fellow passenger, I can lift their mood … because new arrivals usually do not have a happy state of mind. And I can also buy clothes, as well as daily supplies, for people who are poor, who have no money, and I can help those who are ill, who are pregnant.” It was an extraordinary image, a creative adaptation of the mythology that surrounded Sister Ping. In her rendering, prison was just another Chinatown, a hard-luck ghetto in which Big Sister Ping could minister to the disenfranchised and the displaced. “My life remains valuable,” she said defiantly. “It remains valuable.”

  But no sooner had she seemed to accept the idea of a life in prison than she changed course, blasting the FBI. “The FBI should be helping me,” she exclaimed. “I was taken advantage of a lot in Chinatown.” She seemed obliquely to suggest that she might be willing to cooperate. “I would like to speak privately with the prosecutors and with the FBI,” she said. In particular, she expressed an interest in talking with her erstwhile handler from the Bureau, Peter Lee.

  Few of the spectators in the courtroom would have known who Peter Lee was or had any inkling what Sister Ping was talking about, but this apparent offer to cooperate with the government once again raised an interesting question: why hadn’t the FBI simply flipped her, turning her into a government witness? In the early 1990s, in meetings with Peter Lee, Sister Ping had given information on Ah Kay and other rivals and adversaries to the FBI. Dan Xin Lin had informed on Ah Kay and his brothers, and when Ah Kay was in hiding in Hong Kong, the Fat Man told INS agents where they could find him. Ah Kay had informed on seemingly everyone he had ever done business with, including Sister Ping, and Sister Ping’s own husband had fed information to the FBI about his wife. One constant through the length of the whole sordid saga was that at decisive moments, each of the major players seemed willing to sacrifice loyalty for pragmatism and self-preservation and betray his or her closest associates. So why wouldn’t Sister Ping cooperate? When she was captured, she had her little black book noting immigration contacts all over the world. “The potential if she had cooperated with us for uncovering international corruption would have been tremendous,” Bill McMurry said. But when the FBI raised the possibility, she did not take it. In McMurry’s view, the decision was driven by the knowledge that if she maintained her silence, her reputation would remain intact and her family would have nothing to fear. “Her family, I’m sure, is very welcome in Fujian,” McMurry said. “If she had cooperated, all of that probably would have come to a screeching halt.”

  There may have been rewards for those who refused to cooperate, but there were rewards for those who agreed to cooperate as well. Shortly after Sister Ping’s conviction, Ah Kay appeared before Judge Mukasey. He had served twelve years in prison and played a decisive role in the government’s case against Sister Ping. Prosecutorial calculus can occasionally yield perverse results, and Ah Kay’s cooperation was now considered so valuable that despite his criminal history, despite the fact that one of the prosecutors who had put him on the stand called him “an incredibly violent man with zero regard for human life,” the government, along with Ah Kay’s defense counsel, was now recommending that he be set free.

  “I’ll be candid with you,” Mukasey told Lisa Scolari, Ah Kay’s new attorney. “It is extraordinary. It is colossally extraordinary … Your client had been directly responsible for ending a lot of lives and a lot of worlds.” Scolari insisted that Ah Kay was a changed man, that the murder of his brothers marked “a turning point in his life.”

  Then Ah Kay spoke. “I am close to forty years old now,” he said. “The long-term incarcerations have taught me to be mature, have taught me to be a steady person.” He said that he had found religious belief and that he regretted the pain he had caused his community and his family. “I have wasted half my life and have accomplished nothing,” he said. “I swear that the next half of my life I will change thoroughly.” He suggested that he would like to work with young people so that they might learn the lessons he had learned, to keep them out of gangs.

  Ah Kay had not lost his charisma during the years in prison, his ability to mesmerize and persuade. Somehow, within the span of an hour-long hearing, Mukasey was won over. “I’m going to grant the motion to a far greater extent than I intended to,” he said. “Mr. Guo, my hope is that the story that you wanted to tell youngsters gets out to youngsters, because in my view, that’s really the only good that can still come of this.”

  And with that, Ah Kay’s sentence was reduced, and shortly thereafter he was quietly released. Because of his many betrayals, the FBI assumed that Ah Kay would not be safe if he returned to Chinatown, so they created a new identity for him and placed him in the witness protection program. Today the dai lo of the Fuk Ching has a humdrum job in a humdrum town somewhere in America.

  “He’s serving pizzas in Idaho,” Konrad Motyka said with a laugh.

  As Sister Ping’s speech dragged on, the spectators in the courtroom were beginning to shift uncomfortably in their seats, the way guests at a dinner party might when someone’s story goes on a bit too long. In the back rows, where her family and supporters were sitting, an adolescent boy in a Nautica jacket, who might have been a nephew, was nodding off to sleep. Again and again in her remarks, Sister Ping returned to the concept of family, so important to the Fujianese, as the overriding explanation for her deeds and for her life. One of the prosecutors, Leslie Brown, was heavily pregnant. Sister Ping turned and addressed her directly. “Ms. Brown, you are about to be a mother,” she murmu
red in an icy tone. “I congratulate you for being a mother. Once you become a mother, you will understand me.”

  To Judge Mukasey she said, “Your Honor may have noticed that when the trial began, there was a white-haired old man who came every day. That was my father.” During the course of the trial, the old ship jumper who decades earlier had taught his daughter the snakehead trade had died. “I feel very sorrowful,” Sister Ping said. “When I remember that my father instructed me how to conduct my life, I feel no regrets.

  I feel I have a clear conscience. I have lived up to my father’s will.”

  Sister Ping sat, and Judge Mukasey, who had grown more visibly irritated the longer she spoke, fixed her in his gaze. “Ms. Ping, it is not my practice to deliver sermons at the time I impose sentence,” he said. “But the words that you spoke … are bound to be reported in places other than this courtroom, and it may be that people will get the idea, reading those words and having no familiarity with your case, that you somehow were the victim of an unjust prosecution.” Mukasey called her remarks a “lengthy exercise in self-justification” and pointed out that the statements of the various witnesses against her had been corroborated by phone records and other evidence. He was unmoved by her account of being robbed by the Fuk Ching and suggested that those initial encounters had “established, in a way, their credentials from your standpoint.”

  “You say that you love the United States,” Mukasey continued. “I can’t speak to that. But what the evidence in this case did show is that you were willing to take advantage of the attraction of the United States for the reasons that you described—in that you can lead a decent, honorable life by working hard. You took that attraction for many, many hundreds of other people, thousands of other people, and turned it to your own financial advantage.”

  Then Mukasey delivered the maximum sentence. For count one, she would receive five years; for count three, twenty years; for count five, ten years. The sentences would be served consecutively; she would be incarcerated for thirty-five years. Sister Ping was nearly sixty years old. She might very well die in jail. As Mukasey tallied the counts, Cheung Yick Tak listened, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly ajar. He added up the numbers on a little piece of paper on his knee.

  Bill McMurry was thrilled when he heard the sentence. “It gets the message out to the community that it doesn’t matter how big you get or if you flee the country. It doesn’t matter where you go. We’re gonna get you,” he concluded. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see a smuggler of the notoriety of Sister Ping again. There will be smugglers. But no smuggler will dominate the industry in the way that she did.”

  Everyone stood up. The Fujianese family and supporters who filled four benches in the rear of the room looked shell-shocked. Some of them began to whisper among themselves, shaking their heads. Others looked straight ahead in mournful resignation. Others still expressed confusion, unable to fathom what kind of system could bestow so merciless a punishment on the woman they had revered as both an agent and an embodiment of the American dream. Judge Mukasey left the courtroom through a door behind his bench, and the marshals began to escort Sister Ping away. As she was being ushered out a side door, she turned suddenly to face her family in the back of the room. She gave a kind of schoolgirl wave, an awkward gesture that seemed poignantly at odds with the gravity of the moment. Then she walked out of the courtroom, a strange smile on her face.

  Epilogue

  The smuggler [is] a person who, though no doubt highly blamable for violating the laws of the country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.

  —ADAM SMITH

  The Wealth of Nations

  AFTER PRESIDENT George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address to Congress in January 2003, the Democratic Party was afforded, in accordance with tradition, an opportunity to respond. The speaker the party selected to deliver its rebuttal that evening was Gary Locke, who since 1997 had served as the governor of Washington and who had the distinction of being the first individual of Chinese ancestry in American history to be elected governor of a state. Locke’s grandfather had come from Canton at the turn of the twentieth century and worked as a houseboy in Olympia; Locke’s father had joined the United States Army and stormed the beach at Normandy. Locke himself was raised speaking Chinese until he attended kindergarten. He went to public schools and was a scholarship kid at Yale before moving on to law school and a career in politics. “My grandfather came to this country from China nearly a century ago and worked as a servant,” he said in his address that evening. “Now I serve as governor just one mile from where my grandfather worked. It took our family one hundred years to travel that mile. It was a voyage we could only make in America.”

  The Snakehead is the story of that mile. Migration scholars and refugee advocates tend to overlook the business of human smuggling, out of an understandable fear that the illicit means through which many immigrants reach the United States might further stigmatize the estimated 12 million illegal aliens who live in the country today. But the business of human smuggling is now a pervasive and sophisticated reality—a $20 billion criminal industry, by some estimates, second only to the global trade in drugs. To ignore it is impossible, and irresponsible as well. The greatest favor we can do for the Fujianese and other migrant groups is to comprehend the complex and often misunderstood networks that bear them from one country to another. Doing so can shed light on how best to combat the trade, but also on the extraordinary sacrifices that many of these men and women have undertaken to find a new life in the United States.

  In the minds of many of the Fujianese I spoke to over the past three years, the ultimate success or failure of a single act of emigration can be measured only in generations: if the individual who transplants herself or her family to the United States undertakes extraordinary, even irresponsible risks in order to do so, or commits some crime or other along the way, those lapses will eventually be justified by the upward mobility of her children and their children, and the notion that some later generation will be born in America and have no solid grasp of how it was precisely that their grandmother or great-grandmother first crossed the oceans but simply know that she did. For all the extraordinary freedom and comfort and opportunity that being born in America entails, it will seem to that later generation like some happy accident of geography or fate, not a circumstance for which some forebear broke the law or risked her life.

  If, as Balzac had it, behind every great fortune there is a crime, there might also be a sense in which many an immigration story begins with some transgression, large or small. Surely many American-born citizens can trace their personal genealogies back a generation or three or five and declare with conviction that at some long-ago juncture in history, no ancestor stole across a border or used a phony document. But many, many others cannot. In some ways it is the birthright of those who are born on American soil not to worry about such details, and for one ethnic group after another the story has been the same: those tenements on the Lower East Side that once housed the first-generation Italians and the Jews of Eastern Europe and today house the first-generation Fujianese will no doubt house some other scrappy flock in the years to come, as the revolving door of American immigration and assimilation continues and the Fujianese move on to bigger apartments and to houses, to the suburbs, perhaps even, one day, to the governor’s mansion.

  If one takes the generational model, there might be some sense in which Sister Ping could be absolved of her guilt by the good fortune of her grandchildren and the grandchildren of the many thousands of people she helped to make a new life in America. More than once while I was writing the book I thought of that moment in The Godfather where the dying Don Corleone utters a quiet lament that his son Michael has joined the family’s criminal business rather than pursue a more legitimate career as a senator or a governor. “I
t wasn’t enough time, Michael,” he says. “It wasn’t enough time.”

  “We’ll get there, Pop,” his son replies. “We’ll get there.”

  It also seems possible to find a measure of sympathy for Sister Ping when one considers the extraordinarily high price that federal prosecutors were willing to pay to put her behind bars—the price of setting Ah Kay free. If the various personalities whose lives converged around the voyage of the Golden Venture can be measured on an ethical continuum, with undocumented passengers like Sean Chen at the least culpable extreme and Sister Ping somewhere in the middle, Ah Kay occupies the opposite pole. Whatever remorse he may have felt in later years, the fact remains that Ah Kay was a bandit and a killer, and while he may have done the right thing eventually, by assisting the FBI, he did so only at a time when he stood to gain his freedom through cooperation. It may be that Ah Kay is completely rehabilitated today and will melt into whatever environment the authorities have selected for his witness relocation and live a peaceful and productive life. But Ah Kay is still a young man—a young man with “zero regard for human life,” in the words of the prosecutor who put him on the stand. Should the day ever come when his violent personality reasserts itself, the government will struggle to justify its decision to return a mass murderer to the streets in a trade for an aging snakehead.