The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (14 page)

As fall became winter and the river began to freeze over, the men discussed an ambitious plan for the spring. Yick Tak and Peter would give Kephart and Dullan money to purchase a boat. Then the cabbies could get fishing licenses and start ferrying large numbers of customers across. Peter told them they could each make $40,000 to $60,000 a year. When they discussed the plan for spring, it seemed implicit that it would follow a hiatus during the coldest months of winter. But the hiatus didn’t happen.

“The river is rough in the wintertime,” Kephart said when Paul told him that there was a plan to bring a group across around New Year’s. “You got ice and everything coming down through it.” But Paul didn’t worry. He never did.

On the night of December 30, Kephart and Dullan pulled a rented Ford van into their usual spot on the New York side of the river. The temperature outside was 30 degrees. The river was covered in drifting ice and flowing at 11 miles an hour. Kephart got out of the van and stood on the riverbank. The moon was in its last quarter and the sky was cloudy, but shortly after eight o’clock, several hundred yards away, Kephart saw a car pull over on the Canadian side. He could see the light from the trunk when Paul opened it to retrieve the luggage and the raft. Then the trunk light disappeared. It was cold, and Kephart got back in the van.

The radio was on, the volume low enough that above the music Kephart and Dullan could hear the squawk of gulls in the gorge below. They waited. Normally it took Paul less than twenty minutes to make
the trip, deflate the raft, and tuck it into his backpack. But after half an hour there was no sign of him. They didn’t worry. He had been late before, caught up in a current that washed him downstream, forcing him to walk the passengers back to the car. They kept waiting.

Then they heard something, a noise outside the van that wasn’t the gulls. They both heard it. It sounded like a scream.

“That might have come from the river,” Dullan said.

“Hell of a time for a cold bath,” Kephart joked uncomfortably.

The two men sat in silence for a while.

“That raft goes over, man,” Dullan said, “as cold as that water is, they got about three minutes before they freeze.”

Kephart didn’t say anything. But he started to worry. Dullan could tell by looking at his face.

They kept waiting, but they heard nothing more, and after an hour both men began to panic. They drove to a pay phone and called Paul’s house on the Canadian side. Paul had gone down to the river, his wife said. He hadn’t come home. They drove back to the riverbank and sat for another hour, but there was no sign of the raft, just the rushing of the water and the squawking of the gulls. Eventually Kephart dropped Dullan off and drove home. The next morning he woke early and used the van to drop his son off at school. Then he returned it to the dealership. Then he went home. Finally, that evening Paul telephoned.

“The raft overturned,” he said matter-of-factly “All the people drowned.”

“What do you mean?” Kephart asked.

“They all drowned,” Paul said again.

There had been four of them altogether: a young Malaysian man named Vincent Ooi; his girlfriend, Vasugee Krishan; the little Fujianese girl, Haw Wang; and the middle-aged Malaysian woman who was looking after her, Cheah Fong Yew. The four of them had been staying at a Hotel Ibis in Toronto. When Paul picked them up that night, they were dressed warmly: sweaters, overcoats, mittens. Cheah had tucked a towel around
her neck as a scarf. Sometimes Paul used two rafts, one for the passengers and another, strung to the first with a length of rope, for their luggage. But this time he opted to pack them all in together. He inflated a blue-and-white raft and laid the suitcases on its floor. Then he instructed Cheah and Vasugee to sit in the middle, on top of the suitcases. He took up position in the back, with his wooden paddle. Vincent Ooi sat in the front of the raft, and in the very front sat Haw Wang. She was bundled up, to keep warm. She carried her belongings in a little yellow backpack. They never made it more than 20 yards out. The night was dark and icy. The raft was overloaded with people and bags and the current was treacherous. The raft just flipped, throwing them all into the frigid water. Paul was a strong swimmer, and he immediately made his way to shore. He heard the others scream, saw hands flail, then disappear in the whirlpools of the Niagara. Then he went home. The following morning he went back to the riverbank, but he found no sign of anyone. Everything had been washed away. Paul relayed the news to Kephart. Then he hung up and left town, headed for Nova Scotia to lie low.

I
t didn’t take the Niagara investigators long to realize that Cheung Yick Tak was married to Sister Ping. In fact, well before the drowning, a hard-nosed Buffalo INS agent named Patrick Devine had believed she was behind the sudden onslaught of Chinese coming over the border from Canada. Her name had started appearing in case after case, and eventually Devine drove down to New York and connected with Joe Occhipinti, who gave him all the information assembled on the Cheng family during the Hester investigation. Devine even stopped by the Tak Shun Variety Store. Yick Tak was there, minding the shop. Devine introduced himself and asked if he could look around. Yick Tak consented, in broken English, and Devine wandered through the shop. He didn’t find anything objectionable, and eventually he left. But before he did,
he approached Yick Tak. “We know what you’re doing,” he said. Yick Tak looked at him blankly. “We know you’re smuggling. We’re going to get you eventually.”

Devine told the Swiftwater investigators that what they had stumbled on was actually an extensive and intricate criminal enterprise. Ed Garde thought the best approach was to flip Kephart and Dullan, and the cabbies were happy to cooperate; they seemed to realize they had gotten in a bit over their heads. Slowly Garde assembled information on Yick Tak and Peter. “The organization appears to be structured, utilizing travel routes and safehouses through Hong Kong; Vancouver, British Columbia; Toronto, Ontario; and New York City,” one Swiftwater report concluded. “The organization has smuggled approximately 75 Chinese Nationals into the United States between August and December, 1988.”

Then suddenly that spring there was an unexpected break in the case: Patrick Devine and the INS in Buffalo managed to capture Sister Ping. A Canadian deadbeat named Terry Honesburger had been working at a Chinese restaurant in Toronto when, like the cabbies, he was lured into the smuggling business by the promise of a quick buck. He started driving Chinese immigrants across the border in the trunk of his car, but he was caught almost immediately. A bearded Canadian Mountie named Larry Hay told Honesburger that the authorities would spare him, but only if he helped set up a sting. On March 28, 1989, Hay met with Honesburger and drove to the Toronto airport. They waited by a bank of pay phones in the arrivals area, and before long a short Chinese woman in a gray knit sports jacket approached them. It was Sister Ping. She looked impatient. “What took you?” she demanded in broken English. With her were four Chinese people: a man, a boy, a pregnant woman, and a teenage girl in a brown leather jacket.

“Are all four to go?” Hay asked her.

“No,” she said, indicating the teenager. “This one is my daughter.”

Sister Ping slid $340 into a newspaper and handed it to the Mountie, with the understanding that he would drive the passengers over the border. Then she and her daughter left, and Hay eventually delivered
the three passengers to a bus station in Albany, where they were arrested. Several months later, with a warrant out for her arrest, Sister Ping arrived at the Vancouver airport and was about to board a flight to Mexico when the police caught up with her. After she was transferred to upstate New York and charged, Sister Ping posted $25,000 bail and immediately hired one of Buffalo’s most elite and expensive criminal defense lawyers to handle her case. Patrick Devine didn’t understand how this woman who had no education and spoke hardly any English managed to connect to a brand-name defense attorney, but he noted that money was apparently not much of a concern.

Sister Ping did not want to go to jail under any circumstances, and she expressed a willingness to plead guilty and cooperate with law enforcement if it might help her avoid incarceration. On several occasions she flew into Buffalo, accompanied by her daughter Monica, who had a better grasp of English, and met Devine at a Denny’s to haggle over the terms of cooperation for a few hours before catching a flight back to New York. Devine was mystified by this gruff, brusque little woman. At one point she produced her passport to show it to him, and all sorts of carefully folded money that had been tucked between the pages scattered out onto the floor. Finally, on June 27, 1990, Sister Ping pleaded guilty, acknowledging that “I knew that if the three Chinese people go to the U.S. they would be illegal” and signing her confession in a slanted, looping script.

A few weeks later INS agents assembled outside 14 Monroe Street at 6:15 one morning, banged on the door of Apartment 7B, and arrested Cheung Yick Tak. Paul and his wife had already been captured in Canada. Peter had fled to Hong Kong, but he was eventually captured as well, as he tried to reenter the United States through a pedestrian line from Mexico. When Yick Tak was taken in, Patrick Devine went to see him. He was different from his wife, Devine thought. More evasive. He would just deny and deny, play dumb to the charges, beat the investigators with silence. Sister Ping was never linked to the rafting deaths in any definitive way. But many of the investigators who tracked the
couple over the years believe that there wasn’t anything Yick Tak did that she wasn’t somehow behind. And Devine, for one, was convinced she had had a hand in it.

In September a Buffalo federal judge named Richard Arcara held a sentencing hearing for Sister Ping. He called her a “prime mover” in the illegal alien business. “I am convinced you have been involved in smuggling aliens on a more extensive basis than you have admitted,” he said.

Her lawyer, William Skretny objected, insisting that Arcara sentence her “for what she did in this indictment and not, as may be alleged, [because] she is something akin to an empress of alien-smuggling.”

“I knew what I did was wrong,” Sister Ping said when it was her turn to speak. She said that the pregnant woman she had been smuggling was her cousin, who had fled from China with her husband and nephew to escape a forced abortion. (Government agents said that the abortion part of the story was true but that the two women were not related.) “With my Chinese cultural background, I have to put family considerations into top priority,” she said. “When my cousin was pleading for me to help, how could I not?”

Arcara was unimpressed, and delivered the maximum sentence of six months. But Sister Ping was desperate not to serve. She volunteered again to give Devine information in exchange for leniency. She had conditions: she would not testify against associates or wear a wire or allow her telephone calls to be recorded, but she would supply information. She gave Devine the addresses of two apartments in Arizona, and when INS agents raided them, they found sixty undocumented Chinese. But as busts go, they were inconsequential. Devine wasn’t after the passengers themselves; he was after the snakeheads. Part of him suspected that the Arizona loads might even be Sister Ping’s own clients, whom she had sacrificed so that she could appear to be cooperating.

Nevertheless, the government recommended a reduction in Sister Ping’s sentence, from six months down to four. She was not satisfied with that and had her lawyers argue that her sentence should be reduced to the two months she had already served. “I’m either the fourth
or fifth attorney to represent Mrs. Cheng,” a New York lawyer named Stephen Goldenberg told the judge in June 1991. Her habit of acquiring prominent counsel seemed to have backfired: two of the attorneys hired to represent her in Buffalo had to abandon Sister Ping because after taking on her case they had been appointed judges. Goldenberg pointed to the Arizona case as an example of Sister Ping’s cooperation. “This smuggling route through Phoenix, Arizona, has been shut down,” Goldenberg said. “In effect, the case which Mrs. Cheng assisted the Government with was a far larger and more significant prosecution than her own case.”

The prosecutor objected. “We believe that we have identified, prosecuted, and convicted a person who may well be the single largest figure in Chinese alien smuggling in the United States,” he said. “She stood in this court, addressing the Court through her attorneys, as if this incident for which she was convicted was an incident of aberrant conduct, and not something consistent with what we think to be her past history.”

But the incident wasn’t “an alien smuggling for profit type situation,” Goldenberg insisted. He raised a nuanced distinction: Sister Ping may have known that she was breaking the law. But she did not think of herself as a criminal. “People from the area of China that she comes from assist one another in getting to the United States. They try to bring over their families. And in speaking to members of her family, they don’t see it as a criminal enterprise, but almost as a duty to try to get family members in.”

When her lawyers ascertained that there would be no further reduction in her sentence in exchange for cooperation, Sister Ping asked whether she might provide further information that could “go to my husband’s credit.” She might have wondered, because Cheung Yick Tak had been sold out by his own partner and brother-in-law, Peter. In March 1991, Peter was sentenced to three months in prison. He had obtained a reduction in his sentence because his lawyers claimed that he was in no way responsible for the deaths on the Niagara, that his
only involvement in the scheme consisted of transporting the aliens around New York City once they arrived. Peter was not the ringleader but the flunky, they argued. Yick Tak was the number-one man in the operation. And Peter was willing to cooperate and give them information about him.

Even so, Yick Tak somehow managed to avoid paying any serious dues. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens and was initially sentenced to nine months, with the stipulation “that such incarceration will not commence until release of defendant’s wife from current custody.” But the sentencing kept getting pushed back. Finally, in February 1993, the prosecution and defense had a session with the judge. The records of this session are sealed, and the government has never offered any explanation, but according to the docket in the case, the upshot was that “sentence is reduced to 0 incarceration.” It seems clear that Yick Tak, like his wife, had offered the authorities some information or cooperation in exchange for leniency. But the precise nature or extent of his assistance remains a mystery.