The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (30 page)

Ultimately, even those who were telling the truth and could prove it would have trouble making their cases—because as the Clinton administration tried to determine how to handle the Bush administration’s posture on asylum and the one-child policy, it had rediscovered
Matter of Chang
. During the fall of 1993, there was some question as to which position the administration would take on the issue: whether Clinton would bend to pressure from Republicans in Congress to continue allowing the one-child policy to serve as a ground for asylum, or whether he would definitively assert that, horrible though it might be, forced abortion or sterilization did not amount to “persecution” under U.S. law. Eventually the Board of Immigration Appeals took the latter view, maintaining that “our interpretation of the law regarding China’s one-couple, one-child policy articulated in
Matter of Chang
is legally correct and consistent.”

By September, 14 of the
Golden Venture
passengers had been granted asylum and 171 had been denied. Another 68 were still waiting to be told. (Of those who did succeed in obtaining asylum, a number were Christians from Fujian and from Wenzhou, both of which had historically been home to long-standing Christian minorities.)

But most of the passengers were rejected. The difference between a successful bid for asylum and a failed one meant more than just the life or livelihood of the individual in question; it could, in a very real sense, determine the future course of the lives of their families. Two cellmates from the
Golden Venture
could suddenly watch their trajectories diverge. The one who was granted asylum would eventually be able to send for his wife and children, if he had any. Those children could hope to attend American colleges, perhaps obtain advanced degrees, and eventually join the assimilated middle class. For the one who was rejected, the future was less certain. He could appeal the decision, but there was little reason to believe that his case would be more compelling to a dubious American establishment the second time around. When his appeals were exhausted, he could count on being sent home to China. There, after he suffered through whatever punishment lay in store for breaking the law and embarrassing Beijing, he might succeed in the lottery of the new Chinese economy. But there was a stronger likelihood that he would end up working in a factory, and that his children would grow up to work in a factory as well.

“It seems we were unlucky,” one of the passengers at York told a reporter after his asylum claim on the basis of the one-child policy was rejected. “Other people with circumstances like mine have won before, I know that. I don’t understand why I lost.”

One of Sean’s fellow inmates at York was a father of three named Y. C. Dong. In his asylum hearing, Dong told his judge that he left China because he had three children and he feared that the authorities would sterilize him. The judge denied Dong’s claim, dismissing his fear of persecution under the one-child policy as “subjective.” Sometime later, Dong was deported back to China. When he got there, he was arrested, then jailed, beaten, fined—and sterilized.

Chapter Twelve

The Fat Man

BROOKLYN’S GREEN-WOOD
Cemetery was established in 1838 and sprawls over 500 acres of rolling hills and winding paths just west of Prospect Park. Around midday on Saturday, August 28, 1993, a funeral ceremony was under way at the crematorium. Scores of mourners had gathered to pay their final respects to a forty-three-year-old Fujianese man named Ai Cheung, who had been smuggled to America by Sister Ping the year before, arriving on the shipment to New Bedford. He had joined the Fuk Ching gang, and he must have developed enemies, because the week before the funeral a beachcomber had noticed a hand sticking out of the sand on Plum Beach, a stretch of Jamaica Bay just off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, which had become a favorite dumping ground for the many bodies felled by the city’s Asian gangs. The hand was Ai Cheung’s. He had been hog-tied, stabbed to death, and buried on the beach.

As the mourners lined up to pay their final respects, none of them gave much notice to a Nissan Pathfinder that was parked some distance away, where two FBI agents sat waiting. The agent in the passenger seat was a young man named Konrad Motyka, who was burly and broad-shouldered, with close-cropped brown hair and eyes that had a natural squint. Like the driver, his colleague David Shafer, Motyka was dressed in civilian clothes but wore a bulletproof vest and had a 9-millimeter pistol strapped to his leg. As it happened, the deceased had been named
in a sprawling forty-five-count indictment that authorities in New York were preparing against the Fuk Ching gang, and when Motyka and his colleagues at the FBI learned about his funeral, they saw an opportunity: many of the other gang members named in the indictment would probably attend the ceremony, and the FBI could arrest them all at once. It would be a dazzling strike, but not without a certain danger: if the feds crashed the funeral with guns drawn, the cornered mourners might very well start shooting. Motyka remembered an incident three summers earlier, when an Asian gang funeral in Linden, New Jersey, had degenerated into a shootout. He did not discount the possibility that the same thing could happen today.

Motyka had grown up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His father was first-generation Polish American and his mother was from Germany; they met on a ski trip. They were eager to see their son preserve a sense of European culture and tradition, and sent him to the Lycée Français on the Upper East Side, where he became fluent in French, and from there to Columbia University. But the more Motyka’s parents endeavored to instill a European identity in their son, the more profoundly he insisted that he was a regular American kid. At Columbia he signed up for the football team. When he graduated, in 1985, and his classmates headed to law school or investment banks, Motyka joined the Marine Corps. The choice was driven by a sense of patriotism—a conviction that as an American he owed a duty to his country. But it didn’t hurt that as a Marine he would get to see the world. He spent the next couple of years as an infantry officer in Norway, the Philippines, and Okinawa. Eventually he married his college girlfriend, who was working as a nurse for the Navy, and together they applied to the FBI.

After completing the academy at Quantico, Motyka was assigned to the Bureau’s office in New York and spent several years working on cold war counterintelligence, pursuing spies embedded in the city’s foreign consulates and UN missions. In 1989 the Bureau formed a new unit, known as C-6, to deal with what was referred to as “nontraditional” organized crime. C-6 was run by Ray Kerr, the agent who handled the Fuk
Ching gang defector Dan Xin Lin during his brief period of cooperation. Its mission was somewhat diffuse, touching on any ethnic organized crime that did not involve the Mafia. Kerr and his agents went after Jamaican groups and Greek groups before moving on to the new breed of Asian gangs that had begun to terrorize Chinatown. By the time Konrad Motyka was transferred to C-6 in 1992, the unit was developing a case against Ah Kay and the Fuk Ching gang.

Motyka and his colleagues had begun assembling information on the gang and watched in shock as the death toll escalated. There was the brazenness of Ah Kay’s botched effort to have Dan Xin assassinated at the beeper store in January 1993; then there was Dan Xin’s bloody revenge at Teaneck in May. But if each of those incidents was an incremental indication that the Fuk Ching and the snakehead trade were growing out of hand, the arrival of the
Golden Venture
on June 6 was something else altogether. Suddenly the Fuk Ching investigation took on a new urgency. The message from Washington was unequivocal: spare no time or expense in tracking the people who masterminded the voyage of the
Golden Venture;
take them down.

As Motyka and Shafer watched, the funeral ceremony appeared to be coming to an end. Mourners in black suits began to leave the crematorium and make their way toward a line of waiting limousines parked along the road. Motyka braced himself, and Shafer started the engine.

N
early three months earlier, the day after the
Golden Venture
ran aground, the ship’s captain, Amir Tobing, and the chief onboard enforcer, Kin Sin Lee, sat scowling at each other in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. Tobing looked disheveled, his hair uncombed. He claimed that he was a victim—that it was only after the mutiny divested him of power that everything had gone awry. “He beat me and tortured me,” he said, gesturing at Kin Sin Lee, who sat erect and motionless. “They cheated me out of my money.”

Both men were ultimately charged with conspiracy and smuggling.
Because alien smuggling convictions still carried relatively light sentences, prosecutors took the unusual step of charging Kin Sin Lee under an antique statute that dealt with manslaughter at sea. The ten crew members were also charged, along with eight of the passengers who had assisted Kin Sin Lee during the voyage. All twenty of the perpetrators who had been on board the ship pleaded guilty. The judge, Reena Raggi, rejected a plea bargain offered by defense attorneys, observing that light sentences might run the risk of “trivializing” the severity of the crime committed. “The boat did not just run aground,” she said, her voice rising. “It was deliberately run aground.” For his role in the operation, Kin Sin Lee was sentenced to ten years. When he was asked what obligation he had felt for the safety of the passengers, he replied, “I never thought of that at the time.” Sam Lwin, the first officer, received four and a half years. And despite his protests, Captain Tobing was sentenced to four years. “I am sorry,” he told the court. “I promise not to do it again.” (If he meant smuggling, this was not a promise he would keep. Several years after he was released and deported to Indonesia, Tobing resurfaced off the coast of Washington State, when the Coast Guard stopped a sailboat he was skippering, which happened to contain five tons of Cambodian marijuana. “Why Smuggle Pot to NW?” the local press wondered. “Authorities Puzzled; There’s Plenty Here.”)

As investigators questioned perpetrators from the
Golden Venture
, names began to emerge—names of co-conspirators who were not on board. Along with Mr. Charlie, Weng Yu Hui had been the chief liaison for the ship, loading the stranded passengers from the
Najd II
onto the
Golden Venture
in early April and coordinating the crash landing in Queens over the ship-to-shore. On the morning the
Golden Venture
arrived, Weng had visited Sister Ping in her shop and found her watching the news coverage—the arrests, the deaths, people jumping from the ship and being rescued from the surf. “The government is definitely going to investigate the people behind the boat,” Sister Ping said. She told Weng to leave town for a while. She had an apartment in New Jersey. Perhaps he could go there.

Weng did as she said, but he did not stay gone for long. The following month he was back in Chinatown and dropped by Sister Ping’s store at 47 East Broadway. “How come you’re still in New York?” Sister Ping asked angrily. “This is very dangerous.”

Again Sister Ping volunteered a place for Weng to hide, but this time she did not think New Jersey would be far enough away. She proposed that he fly to South Africa, where she happened to own an ostrich farm. How it is that Sister Ping would own property in South Africa at all, much less an ostrich farm, is unclear. It may simply be that in order to manage a truly global smuggling network, she needed hideouts and way stations throughout the world. And indeed, after eighteen of her passengers in Mombasa refused to board the
Golden Venture
, she had arranged to have them transported to South Africa and put up at the farm until she could figure how to facilitate the next step in their journey. Weng could join them, she suggested.

But Weng lived a life of circumscribed horizons. He was a creature of habit, and could not stay away from Chinatown for long. He never made it to South Africa, and instead relocated temporarily to West Virginia. But he kept coming back to Chinatown. He had a girlfriend who lived in an apartment on Henry Street, and he drove to town to visit her from time to time. One day two INS agents were staking out the apartment when they saw Weng drive up and walk in the front door. They called for backup, and a team of agents raided the apartment. They found Weng cowering in a bedroom closet. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years.

W
ithin hours of the
Golden Venture’s
arrival, authorities in New York had announced that Ah Kay was a chief suspect. Konrad Motyka was working with Luke Rettler, the prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, to prepare a case against the Fuk Ching, and evidence was being assembled to charge Ah Kay with a colorful litany of crimes: murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, maiming, assault with a
deadly weapon, assault resulting in severe bodily injury, threatening to commit a crime of violence. The problem for the law enforcement officers was that they did not want to round up the gang until they had captured Ah Kay. And Ah Kay was in China. After the Teaneck killings there had been some speculation that Ah Kay would return to America to avenge his brothers’ deaths, but with the
Golden Venture
operation gone so devastatingly wrong, it seemed even Ah Kay would not dare to come back. Stories circulated in Chinatown about a walled mansion that Ah Kay was building in his home village in China. He was a famous rogue in his native region; everybody knew who he was. He was said to be surrounded by bodyguards at all times and to enjoy the protection of local officials.

But the FBI had one interesting advantage. In the chaos of the split in the Fuk Ching, the beeper-store killings, the Teaneck massacre, and the arrival of the
Golden Venture
, agents had been able to cultivate a few cooperators from the gang, chief among them Ah Kay’s former errand boy Alan Tam. After the killings at Teaneck, Tam had telephoned Ah Kay in China. It was an awkward conversation, with Ah Kay wondering if Tam had anything to do with the killings and Tam skirting the fact that he had supplied the address where Ah Kay’s brothers were hiding and a floor plan of the house. If Ah Kay was devastated by the murders of his two younger brothers, he did not let it interfere with his ability to assess the situation in his capacity as the leader of the Fuk Ching gang. (Even in anger, Ah Kay displayed a cold, almost clinical rationality. When he was asked later how he felt about the fact that Dan Xin Lin paid others $50,000 to murder his brothers, Ah Kay replied, “I wouldn’t kill someone for free.”) Before Tam hung up, Ah Kay instructed him to go to New Jersey and try to find out more about what had happened. Tam did as he was instructed, but a half-black, half-Chinese giant loitering around the police station in Bergen County was nothing if not conspicuous, and within a few hours he was under arrest.