The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (22 page)

After two days the storm subsided, and the ship dropped anchor at Cape Infanta, in South Africa. Kin Sin Lee had arranged to take on another eighty passengers, who would board from South Africa, but Captain Tobing refused. There was just no more room in the hold.

Despite the adversity and the periodic terror of the voyage, or perhaps
because of it, a kind of society emerged on board over the months at sea. Apart from the disproportionate ratio of men to women, the passengers on the
Golden Venture
formed a fairly representative cross-section of Fujianese society, and in coping with the hardship and inertia of the voyage, many of the passengers assumed the roles they had played in the villages they had left behind. A pudgy young man who had been a village doctor tended to the sick; a teenager became known for giving good massages. Natural jokers and raconteurs emerged and amused the others, recycling stories and skits—any diversion to break the monotony. People played endless games of cards and shared recollections of their homes and families and gossiped about the reputations of the various snakeheads who had put them on the ship. (By general agreement, Sister Ping was the best.) When the weather was nice and the ship was in international waters, Kin Sin Lee permitted the passengers to go on deck and stretch and see the sun. They fished with makeshift rods.

The ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope before the end of April, plying the same waters that De Gama had on his return from India to Portugal in the fifteenth century, that Magellan, circumnavigator of the globe, had a few years after that. It hugged the African coast for a while, then angled west in the direction of Brazil, charting a course for the cold waters of the North Atlantic, where Ah Kay’s fishing boats would be waiting.

Chapter Nine

The Teaneck Massacre

FROM THE
moment the
Golden Venture
departed from Thailand, it was Ah Kay’s plan to offload it somewhere on the high seas in the Atlantic, as he had done with so many other ships by now. He would not participate in the actual offloading himself; as
dai lo
, Ah Kay saw his job as negotiating the deals and delegating to his underlings, then exercising a kind of loose supervision while they did the dirty work. On his identity card, which was issued by the Fukienese American Association, he listed his occupation simply as “manager.” In that respect Ah Kay was a typical Mob boss: he rarely ventured to the actual scene of a crime.

Instead he relied on an assortment of deputies, some of whom had been working for him for years and would, and often did, risk their lives to do his bidding. But as the Fuk Ching gang expanded, it began to admit new members who felt less personal allegiance to Ah Kay. One of these newcomers was a reedy young man with an angular face and straight black hair that hung in a fringe just above his eyes. His name was Dan Xin Lin. He was twenty-eight and had come from Fujian five years earlier.

Dan Xin had been a member of the gang for a couple of years and had worked as Ah Kay’s bodyguard. But he was slightly older than many of the gang members, and he was promoted quickly and given responsibility for the gang’s burgeoning human smuggling business. He saw the large numbers of people the Fuk Ching was bringing to New York in
boats and vans, and he knew the huge fees that Ah Kay received for this work and then doled out, at his own discretion, to his underlings. Ah Kay had become a multimillionaire in a short few years; but to oversee the most lucrative of his criminal enterprises, he was paying Dan Xin a paltry $500 a week.

Ah Kay was developing a reputation for stinginess, and he was gambling more—more often, and with ever larger sums of money on the table. He lost tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars at a sitting, but he continued gambling, in some measure, perhaps, because the sheer quantities of cash he was collecting allowed him to sustain the habit. Dan Xin was ambitious. He knew that he was more intelligent than the Fuk Ching rank and file, and he was not cowed by the reverence for Ah Kay that the longer-serving members of the gang seemed to share. He saw Ah Kay’s greed and his wastefulness, and it rankled him that it was he and the other underlings who actually did most of the smuggling work, hiring the Vietnamese fishermen, traveling out to sea to meet the mother ships, transporting the passengers to safe houses, and so on.

By the early 1990s the sudden influx of Fujianese and the flourishing of the snakehead trade had created a boomtown vibe in underworld circles in Chinatown: it was not clear how long this gold rush would last, and you would be mad not to get a piece of it for yourself while the going was good. Dan Xin had contacts in China and wanted to go out on his own, shipping in his own customers and negotiating offloading contracts with other snakeheads. In the summer of 1992 he traveled to Washington, D.C., and met with a Fuk Ching affiliate there to discuss a smuggling venture independent of Ah Kay. When Ah Kay learned about the trip, he was furious that Dan Xin would conduct such a meeting without his permission.

Ah Kay was blessed with a kind of natural charisma that would become legendary both in Chinatown and in law enforcement circles. He was muscular and handsome, and he possessed a striking calm, an outward tranquillity that somehow also bespoke intensity and convinced
others that he was always thinking one or two steps ahead. But Dan Xin’s disloyalty worried him. It was good to be envied, but not by someone who might have the intelligence and leadership skills to supplant him. And there was no question that Dan Xin coveted Ah Kay’s role. “Dan Xin wanted that spot,” one prosecutor would later say. “He was real itchy for it.”

After the incident in Washington, Dan Xin became more openly defiant and started trying to persuade other members of the gang to join his splinter faction. “He’s no good,” he would tell the young members of the Fuk Ching. “He’s cheap.” The rebellion enraged Ah Kay. Before long, Dan Xin had persuaded half a dozen gang members to defect, and he seems to have raised doubts in Ah Kay about the quality of his own leadership. “What are my shortcomings?” the
dai lo
asked several of his remaining allies, trying to persuade them to air any grievances rather than go to the other side. He particularly resented the suggestion that he was a miser. “I never say no,” he complained. “When you guys are in trouble, I put out the bail for you. When you guys visit home, I give each three thousand dollars. And when it’s your birthday, I wrap a thousand dollars as a gift. What else do you want from me?” He accused Dan Xin of gambling excessively. “The money he lost on the gambling tables, fuck! Unthinkable. He lost on the gambling tables and he wants
me
to pay for it?”

In late December, Dan Xin and several of his allies moved their belongings out of the Fuk Ching safe house where they had been staying, in New Jersey, and relocated to Pennsylvania. Ah Kay thought the move showed weakness, that Dan Xin was a “paper tiger,” without enough support in Chinatown to weather a conflict. “Dan Xin, you want to fight me?” Ah Kay said when the two men spoke by phone. “That will be a job for the rest of your life. Either I die or you die.” He warned Dan Xin not to come back to Chinatown, and if he did, to watch his back. Ah Kay didn’t make such threats lightly; to other members of the Fuk Ching, he announced that he would pay anyone who killed Dan Xin $300,000.

For a few days around the New Year, Dan Xin was able to stay away. But on January 8, 1993, he returned to Chinatown to renew the contract for his beeper at an electronics store on Allen Street. Around three o’clock that afternoon, Ah Kay was at a friend’s house when he got a call on his cell phone from Song You Lin, one of his closest deputies, telling him that Dan Xin had come back and asking if he should go through with the murder.

“Do it,” Ah Kay told him. “Do a clean job.”

“Dai lo
, don’t worry,” Song replied. He packed a .380 automatic, and he and two Fuk Ching members walked along the bustling sidewalks of eastern Chinatown to Allen Street. They entered the beeper store, and one of them blocked the entrance while Song pulled his gun. They found Dan Xin standing with two bodyguards, disaffected former Fuk Ching members who had decided to join him. Song fired at Dan Xin, but Dan Xin ducked behind a pillar. One of the bullets came within an inch of his head, singeing his hair, but miraculously, none connected. One of Dan Xin’s bodyguards rushed toward Song to stop him, and Song shot and killed him. Dan Xin’s other ally pulled a gun of his own and fired at Song, and Song fired back, hitting him in the chest and then the head. With the other two out of the way Song raised his gun to finish Dan Xin, but it clicked empty—he had run out of bullets. Song dashed out of the store. Dan Xin checked on his two friends. One of them was dead on the floor. The other had managed to crash out onto the sidewalk, where he lay bleeding, beyond help. Dan Xin straightened and fled the scene.

A
broad-daylight double homicide on a busy street in Chinatown was brazen, but not atypical for the Fuk Ching gang. It was perhaps a reflection of the level of violence in New York City at that time, and of the general disregard in the press for Chinese-on-Chinese crime, but none of New York’s major English-language newspapers contained so much
as a mention of the event. The police had heard enough about the tensions within the Fuk Ching to bring Ah Kay in for questioning, but he stonewalled them, saying he knew nothing about the incident. Chinatown’s residents and small-business owners were terrified of the gangs; after an incident like this, no one wanted to risk helping the police. They had no witnesses and no cooperators who could explicate the internecine clash that explained Ah Kay’s connection to the murders. They were forced to let him go.

Ah Kay was unhappy with Song for allowing Dan Xin to get away. He worried about the police investigation, and about Dan Xin, who had only just escaped what was obviously an assassination engineered by Ah Kay. Worse, the deaths of Dan Xin’s two associates had only added to Ah Kay’s reputation as a careless leader with little regard for the younger members of the gang. He fell into a depression, which was tempered only by his fury at Dan Xin. “I’m going to wash my hands and close the business,” he told one associate. “My brothers—fuck! My close brothers, they won’t take this,” he said. “I can just put out one million dollars and they will die for me.” Because he knew there were no witnesses who would testify about the shootings, he developed a bizarre plan to oblige local people from the community to volunteer as witnesses and say they had seen the shootings and that Dan Xin himself had killed his two allies. “It boils down to who has the money to get a better lawyer,” Ah Kay concluded. “One hundred thousand dollars or eighty thousand dollars will not be a problem for me … But Dan Xin, can he handle that? I bet he can’t. That’s not a problem of whether I underestimate him or not. That’s a fact.”

Ah Kay hid in an apartment in Flushing, Queens. He stayed there through at least the end of February, talking to his underlings by phone, trying to persuade them not to leave the gang. But he continued to worry. Then one day he left New York altogether and returned to China, to Fujian, to the dirt lanes and ramshackle homes of Yingyu, the village of his birth.

W
hen Ah Kay left, he handed authority to his younger brother, Guo Liang Wong, who was only twenty-five. Ah Wong, as he was known, was a tough kid with a square jaw, a small mouth, and the same fierce, intelligent eyes as his older brother. He was skinny, with a sinuous, muscular body and a tendency to flaunt his good fortune at being the kid brother of a neighborhood kingpin. He wore gold jewelry and drove around New York in an expensive Lexus.

Ah Kay instructed Ah Wong that he was to manage the offloading of the
Golden Venture
, and Ah Wong began preparing for the arrival of the ship, making phone calls to the various snakeheads associated with the voyage to check on its status. The ship was already overdue to arrive, and Sister Ping and the other snakeheads would be counting on Ah Wong to oversee the offloading of their customers. But apart from preparing for the ship’s arrival, Ah Wong kept a low profile; law enforcement was still trying to solve the beeper-store murders, and Dan Xin Lin was still at large somewhere and no doubt eager for revenge. The Fuk Ching had numerous safe houses in the cities and suburbs around New York, and Ah Wong began shuttling from safe house to safe house, aware that living too conspicuously in Chinatown was risky. To rent these spaces Ah Wong relied on Alan Tam, the amiable half African American giant whose fluent English made him the gang’s designated public face for any interactions with the outside world. Tam served not just as realtor for the group but as scheduler and legal secretary. He kept track of everyone’s criminal cases, maintaining a stack of minutely detailed notebooks and calendars, telling people when they had to go to an arraignment or a bail hearing. When Luke Rettler at the Manhattan DA’s office eventually saw Tam’s records, he was amazed. They were as orderly as a clerk’s docket. Tam found criminal lawyers for the gang when they needed them, and bailed people out of jail, and chauffeured them around in his Mustang. When Ah Kay had a daughter, Alan Tam
baby-sat her. He also signed leases on safe houses, sometimes using the alias John Tam, and, less plausibly, John Stein.