The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  This is not to suggest, by any stretch, that Sister Ping does not deserve to be incarcerated for her crimes. It might be tempting to draw some moral equivalence between the hopes and aspirations of Sister Ping and those of her clients, because they were all engaged in the same illegal enterprise. But to do so would be to overlook the fact that Sister Ping’s business thrived because of her willingness to exploit the dreams and desperation of her fellow Fujianese. To this day, if you raise the name Sister Ping in any restaurant on the Fujianese side of Chinatown, you are likely to hear encomiums to her work ethic and generosity. She has become part of the folklore of the neighborhood—a latter-day Harriet Tubman who risked imprisonment to shepherd her countrymen to freedom. But the notion of Sister Ping as some sort of heroic figure is a disingenuous canard, and these accounts tend to elide the vast quantities of money Sister Ping charged for her services, the homicidal thugs she hired, and the many nameless dead who perished as a direct result of her reckless devotion to the economies of scale. There may be some respects in which Sister Ping is a morally complicated person. She may even be a person who has managed, however incidentally, to do a lot of good. But she is not a good person.

  After her sentencing Sister Ping was transferred to a minimumsecurity federal women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Having been so explicit during the hearing about her conviction that the welfare of her family superseded the niceties of American law, she opted nonetheless to avail herself of the appeal that the legal system afforded her, and a procession of brand-name New York defense attorneys made the 70-mile pilgrimage to Danbury to meet the famous snakehead. The man she selected, Scott Tulman, was a former assistant district attorney in Queens who had become a criminal lawyer and opened an office on Market Street in Chinatown. The “notable cases” section of his firm’s Web site featured such entries as “Blood and Bullet Found in the Car—Client Confesses—Case Dismissed” and “Caught in the Act with 27 Pounds of Cocaine in the Car—Client Confesses—Case Dismissed.”

  Tulman prepared an appeal that focused on Weng Yu Hui’s testimony about asking Sister Ping to transfer money to Thailand when he got started in the snakehead business. On the stand, Weng had recalled Sister Ping joking, “Now you’re my competitor.” For Sister Ping to be found guilty of money laundering, Tulman argued, it should have been clear to the jury not only that she transferred the money but that she knew that Weng was going to use the money for alien smuggling for financial gain. Sister Ping might have suspected as much, Tulman conceded. She might even have tried to confirm her suspicions by suggesting, in jest, that Weng was her competitor. But he never replied to the joke. “Weng’s silence at the time left her without knowledge of his purpose” in sending the money, Tulman maintained. He derided the government’s evidence in the case as “reed thin” and implored the appeals court to overturn the conviction on the money-laundering and ransom proceeds charges. But the court wasted little time in upholding the conviction, observing that “the record at trial was replete with evidence that these smuggling rings were operated as commercial enterprises.”

  At the prison in Danbury, Sister Ping fell into a depression when she heard the news. She had her own explanation for why the conviction was upheld, and it had nothing to do with the technical details of the money-laundering charge. Between her sentencing and her appeal, the judge in her case, Michael Mukasey, had been nominated by President Bush to become the attorney general of the United States. For Sister Ping there was no mistaking what was going on: the appeals court judges could not overturn Mukasey’s decision now, because to do so would represent an insult to a very powerful man—an unforgivable loss of face.

  During the years after Sister Ping’s arrest in 2000, China continued its astonishing economic transformation. When I met with a police officer in Bangkok in the spring of 2007 and announced that I was working on a book about Chinese human smuggling, he replied, “People trying to get into China? For jobs? Yes, it’s a problem.” In 2008 I traveled to Fujian: to Fuzhou and Changle; to Sister Ping’s hometown, Shengmei, where the family mansion still stands; and to Ah Kay’s village nearby. Throughout the region textile factories were springing up and roads were being built at a frantic pace. Armies of manual laborers from Sichuan had to be trucked in to build new shopping malls and office towers, because most of the low-skilled Fujianese men had long since departed for the United States.

  As of 2007, some Chinese estimates still maintained that between 30,000 and 50,000 Fujianese continue to leave the province illegally every year. But at this point most of the Fujianese who want to leave have left, and the center of outmigration has shifted to other areas, like the city of Wenzhou, farther up the coast. As I spoke with people around Fuzhou, a consensus emerged that the dynamics of emigration have changed as well. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was the most ambitious and adventurous Fujianese who took the risk of leaving for America. But today the fee for passage can reach as high as $70,000, and Fujian’s best and brightest see little point in going into debt and risking their lives to become an undocumented dishwasher on the margins of American society. Much better to stay in China and start a business. “The people going away now are the ones who aren’t doing that well,” a young entrepreneur in Changle told me. “If you can do anything here, you stay.”

  If China has changed, Chinatown has as well. Strolling along East Broadway, it is difficult to imagine the dark days of the 1990s, when a daylight double homicide in a beeper store on Allen Street would not occasion so much as a one-line notice in the Daily News. In 2002, for the first time in memory, the NYPD’s Fifth Precinct did not register a single homicide. A few gangs are still active in the neighborhood, and extortion, graft, and other forms of exploitation persist. But the open criminality has receded from the sidewalks, and Chinatown is once again a vibrant bustle of schoolkids and tourists, hawkers and vendors, young professionals, and the elderly out for a stroll.

  Still, even now the snakeheads are in business, and the undocumented migrants come. “The smuggling’s never going to go away,” Billy McMurry told me one afternoon at the FBI.

  “It’s too lucrative,” Konrad Motyka chimed in.

  “It’s too lucrative,” McMurry continued. “And our country’s laws are never going to get restrictive enough where you’re going to completely stop it.” He paused. “Which is probably a good thing as well,” he added. “It’s what this country’s based on.”

  New snakeheads have emerged to take Sister Ping’s place. “Sister Ping got into the smuggling business early when few others were aware of it,” a snakehead in Fuzhou observed. “But her reputation was inflated beyond her actual capability. She was successful for a while in the early 1990s, but her days are gone. I know people in Fuzhou who are far more successful than Sister Ping.”

  A short walk from FBI headquarters, not far from Sister Ping’s restaurant, a modest white structure on Allen Street houses the Church of Grace for the Fujianese. I stopped by the church and spoke with the pastor, a man named Matthew Ding. Every Sunday during services, Ding takes a moment to welcome new arrivals to the city, he told me. And every Sunday another five or ten stand up.

  What lessons can we learn from the saga of Sister Ping? There are roughly 200 million migrants in the world today, some 30 to 40 million of whom are undocumented. This transnational global underclass with a population larger than Canada’s is on the move, in search of better opportunities, and just as the Gold Mountain of America held a special appeal for the Fujianese, these migrants are anything but random in their choice of destination. Seventy-five percent of all of the world’s migrants end up in only 12 percent of the countries; they tend to venture from the preindustrial to the industrial, from the third world to the first. And in something of a paradox for immigration authorities, intensified enforcement along the border often has the perverse effect of bolstering the human smuggling trade, because when it becomes difficult for individuals to smuggle themselves into a country, they are obliged to turn to the expe
rts. Human smuggling is one of the fastest-growing international crimes in the world today, and even as the boats from Asia may have stopped arriving on American shores, they continue to come ashore in Central and South America; boats still leave Cuba and Haiti overloaded with passengers desperate to reach the beaches of Florida, and in Europe the boats arrive as well, crude wooden fishing vessels and rust-speckled trawlers ferrying Africans from Morocco to the south of Spain or from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Afghans are smuggled to Indonesia, then loaded onto boats bound for Australia, and more than a quarter of a million Ecuadorans have boarded fishing boats bound for Mexico, from which they then cross into the United States.

  In any boatload of migrants there will be those fleeing oppression and those fleeing demoralizing poverty and those who are not fleeing anything at all—those who have simply heard that in some distant city or town there are dishes that need washing or strawberries that need picking or bathrooms that need cleaning, and that in these jobs they might actually make enough money to send some of it home.

  The story of the Golden Venture is a particular one, but the questions it raises have relevance throughout the world. How can governments combat the growth of organized human smuggling? How should individual countries handle the influx of undocumented migrants seeking work? How can an asylum policy be both efficient and fair without becoming a magnet that actually induces poor people to leave their homes and risk their lives in the expectation that if they can survive the journey, they will receive asylum once they arrive?

  On the matter of law enforcement, it seems clear that purely domestic solutions will never be effective. International cooperation is essential in combating global criminal networks like Sister Ping’s. In 2003 a new agreement, the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, went into force. This sort of legal instrument offers a promising framework for international cooperation, by obliging states that ratify the treaty to make certain activities, such as money laundering and corruption, a crime, and by encouraging extraditions and mutual legal assistance. The convention has an additional Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, though in typical UN fashion, the key achievement of the protocol seems to be the parties’ success in agreeing on a definition of human smuggling. And in any event, Thailand and Guatemala have signed the protocol but not yet ratified it, and China has yet even to sign it.

  It is spoiler countries like these that are the problem, and in the frustrating game of international crime and crime prevention, the more successful the United Nations is at creating a harmonized system of sovereign law enforcement bodies that agree to cooperate in cracking down on human smuggling, the higher the pecuniary rewards will be for any one particular nation that is induced by some deep-pocketed operator like Sister Ping not to play along. We live in a world in which the flow of ideas and capital and goods and people is largely unimpeded by the quaint restrictions of national boundaries. These global currents are so strong that they sometimes seem inexorable, and the challenge for national governments that want to dam such currents is that the global system is now integrated to a point where a single spoiler jurisdiction can make law enforcement impossible. As long as it is possible to purchase a valid passport in Belize, it will be possible to remain a fugitive and travel the world without tipping off the authorities. Whatever our moral assessment of Sister Ping, what can be said with certainty is that she was a creature of her moment in history—an exponent of free-market capitalism run amok in an ever more borderless world.

  Corruption is the common denominator in spoiler countries, and there is little sense in fighting the human smuggling trade without fighting corruption first. The United States should remain alert to the extremely high likelihood of corruption within the ranks of foreign governments. But as the story of Jerry Stuchiner makes clear, it is not merely the underpaid functionaries of developing countries’ immigration services who prove susceptible to bribery; occasionally the corruption hits closer to home. “No agency of the government is more vulnerable to corruption than the INS,” a New York Times investigation found in 1994. “Year after year, dozens of employees are arrested for taking bribes or related crimes.” In my conversations with two dozen current and former immigration officials, the persistence of corruption on the front lines of America’s immigration service, even after the INS was incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security and rechristened Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was a frequent refrain. On June 26, 2008, Constantine Kallas, the assistant chief counsel of ICE, was arrested at a casino in Highland, California, and charged with accepting thousands of dollars in bribes.

  To be fair, in the years since the arrival of the Golden Venture some real progress has been made on the problems of alien smuggling and abuse of the asylum system. Perhaps the single most conspicuous element of American immigration policy to act as a magnet during the prime years of the snakehead boom was the practice of issuing undocumented asylum applicants with working papers so they could go into the city and find jobs while their claims were processed. In 1995 the government repealed that policy, and the impact of that single, surgical fix was immediately apparent: almost overnight, the number of new asylum applications filed every year dropped from roughly 140,000 to roughly 35,000. In addition, criminal penalties for human smuggling have increased considerably since Sister Ping served her four months in Buffalo, and since 1996 law enforcement has been empowered to pursue snakeheads using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Together, these changes have succeeded in slowing, if not halting, the snakehead trade and the onslaught of smuggled asylum seekers.

  What has not changed, and should, is the essentially arbitrary nature of the determination of whether this country will grant asylum to an individual who is seeking it or send him back to an uncertain fate. Even taking for granted that the asylum process is bedeviled by fraud, one lesson of the Golden Venture incident is that each individual asylum case should be scrutinized with the utmost care, that decisions of such consequence should not be rushed, and that to rush a determination or to paint an entire class of claimants with the same broad brush could result—and often does result—in sending individuals home to persecution.

  Through a series of “backlog elimination plans,” immigration authorities have made some progress on the long delays in processing claims of asylum. But sometimes efficiency is achieved only at the expense of fairness. Recent studies indicate that the asylum process is as arbitrary and unpredictable as ever, and without some effort to oblige asylum officers and immigration judges to harmonize the bases upon which they will grant asylum, it appears that the fate of individuals seeking refuge in this country will continue to be determined not by any coherent policy or sense of justice but ultimately by the luck of the draw.

  Moreover, in the years since Sean Chen and his fellow passengers were first bused to York County Prison, immigration detention has gone from the exception to the norm. The sweeping new immigration law that passed in 1996 authorized the “expedited removal” of people who arrive in the United States without proper documents. Genuine asylum-seekers are not supposed to be removed, but those who try to enter the country without documents are subject to mandatory detention while their claims are pending. Like the Golden Venture passengers, they are farmed out to various facilities around the country, and there is no limit, in either federal law or agency regulation, on the amount of time an asylum-seeker may be detained. As a result there has been an enormous uptick in immigration detentions. On any given day, some 33,000 people, including children, are jailed on immigration grounds. In 2007 the government held over 300,000 people in total while deciding whether or not to deport them. Immigration detention is now the fastest-growing form of incarceration in the United States.

  The immigrants are housed in a network of detention facilities, some of which are owned by private prison companies, and in hundreds of local and county jails. These sites are overcrowded and underregulated.
It is possible for immigrants who have committed no crime apart from the civil infraction of being in this country without proper documentation simply to disappear into this system. Health care is substandard, when it exists at all. In 1999 a Chinese woman who had come to America seeking asylum gave birth in a jail cell in Illinois; the guards hadn’t noticed she was pregnant. According to a study by the Washington Post, in a recent five-year period, eighty-three detainees died in immigration custody. The actions or inactions of medical staff were responsible in a significant number of those cases. But the leading cause of death among those held in immigration detention is suicide.

  It is an ironic reflection of American attitudes on immigration that this penal system costs taxpayers an estimated $1.2 billion a year to maintain. That sum is so colossal that if even a fraction of it were redirected to hiring and training asylum officers, immigration judges, and other administrative staff to help process the backlog of immigration cases, and to do so in such a way that people’s claims are actually accorded the serious consideration they deserve, it could cut down on the duration of these indefinite prison sentences and the need to jail immigrants in the first place.

  After the last of the Golden Venture passengers departed from York County Prison in 1997, the facility continued to house immigration detainees. In 1999 the prison underwent an expansion, and that year it became the single largest immigration detention facility in the United States. York might seem, in that respect, to be an expression of America at its most xenophobic and intolerant. But whatever it was that the passengers from the Golden Venture had managed to awaken in the people of York somehow persisted long after most of the Chinese men had moved away. The motley coalition that had made up the People of the Golden Vision remains active to this day, arranging legal help and small comforts for the detainees held at the prison and lobbying in Washington for more humane treatment of refugees. The group raised funds to purchase an old property in downtown York, which became International Friendship House, a shelter and halfway house for refugees and other migrants released from immigration detention. They established the Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center, which offers free legal advice to asylum-seekers, and it comes to the aid not just of the Fujianese but of Bosnians and Iranians, Iraqis, Liberians, and Sudanese. To this day, Bev Church, Craig Trebilcock, Joan Maruskin, and other members of the group continue to work on behalf of the Golden Venture passengers, helping them with their efforts to start businesses and purchase property, pay their taxes, and care for their families. And each new congressional term, Bev Church reenters the private bill for consideration by Congress, on the off-chance that more than fifteen years after their arrival on the beach in Queens, the passengers might obtain green cards and become legal residents of the country they call home.