The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (31 page)

Tam proved to be a valuable source. He had always been a pushover—after all, with little more than peer pressure and drugs, Dan
Xin had persuaded him to assist in a quadruple homicide. The FBI easily convinced him to cooperate. In some respects he was a less than ideal informant; he was inarticulate to the point of incoherence sometimes, and his foot soldier’s view of the world could never capture all the intricacies of Ah Kay’s organization. But at the same time Tam had a Zelig-like quality that had managed to put him in the room or behind the wheel of the car during numerous important exchanges.

At considerable expense, the government paid to have a new identity created for Alan Tam. He was relocated and given a new name in order to avoid retribution from the gang. But like Weng Yu Hui, Tam seems to have found himself unable to thrive far from the Chinatown ecosystem where he had spent so many years. When Rettler telephoned him at his new residence and made a point of asking to speak to him by his new name, Tam would grow confused. “What? Who?” he would say, before offering, “This is Alan.”

One day a detective from the Fifth Precinct, in Chinatown, went to lunch at a Japanese and Chinese restaurant a block north of City Hall Park, near the federal buildings of downtown Manhattan and Luke Rettler’s office on Centre Street and a five-minute walk from Chinatown. As she was eating her lunch, she looked up and saw a tall, half-black, half-Chinese man emerge from the kitchen and stand behind the counter. She thought he looked familiar. “Aren’t you Alan Tam?” she asked. The man froze, then spun around and dashed into the kitchen.

The detective telephoned Luke Rettler. “Where’s Alan Tam?” she asked.

“He’s in witness protection,” Rettler replied.

“Well, they can’t be doing a very good job with the witness protection,” the detective said. “Because I just saw him working in a restaurant about three blocks from Chinatown.”

Motyka and his colleagues were interested in the information Tam could feed them about his former boss, but there was someone else they thought they could use in order to get to Ah Kay: his father. Ah Kay
was already a fast-rising member of the Fuk Ching by the time his father immigrated from Fujian to New York in the late 1980s. When Ah Kay fled to China, he continued speaking with his father, who lived in an apartment on the third floor of the Fukienese American Association, at 125 East Broadway. The FBI set up a wiretap on the telephone, hoping to catch a conversation between father and son.

Of course Ah Kay had considered the possibility that the authorities might try to monitor his father’s phone. When it comes to new technologies, criminals are often early adopters. Before the police and the FBI had beepers, the drug runners and gangsters did; by the time the authorities got their own beepers, the crooks had moved on to cellular phones. During the summer of 1993, it was possible for the FBI to monitor only fifteen different cell phones in the New York area at any given time. It was not unusual for an agent to go to the phone company, warrant in hand, only to be told that all the available taps were in use. Knowing that cell phones were more secure than landlines, Ah Kay had purchased one for his father and told him to use it whenever the two communicated.

But if anything, Ah Kay was too much of an early adopter. Or at any rate, he was an earlier adopter than his father was. The older man found the new telephone confusing and offputting. He couldn’t work out how to make a call go through. After several failed experiments with the cell phone, he took to using a more traditional method: the landline in his apartment at 125 East Broadway.

“Are you on the cell phone?” Ah Kay would ask every time his father called.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on the cell phone,” the delighted agents would hear his father reply.

Ah Kay’s father was concerned, because the young gangster’s gambling problem appeared to be growing out of control. The members of the Fuk Ching gang had always loved to gamble. They played mahjong, thirteen-card poker, pai gow, fan tan, seven cards, high-low, anything they could bet money on. Like Mock Duck, the fabled tong war warrior
before him, who was “known to wager his entire wealth on whether the number of seeds in an orange picked at random from a fruit cart was odd or even,” Ah Kay gravitated to high-stakes games of chance.

Since the
Golden Venture
had run aground, Ah Kay had been hiding in Yingyu village with his most loyal lieutenant, Li Xing Hua. Li was happy. He was a country boy content to be back in the village where he had grown up. He could have stayed there forever. But Ah Kay was restless. The village he had left as a child was a remote backwater, and even the nearby centers of Changle and Fuzhou seemed provincial in comparison to New York. There was gambling in Fujian Province, to be sure, but for paltry stakes, and with none of the heady splendor of the big city. Ah Kay had seen the world, made millions of dollars, and killed men; he was still in his mid-twenties, and the staid life of rural China bored him. So he started making trips to Hong Kong to gamble.

The stakes could get exceedingly high in Hong Kong, and before long Ah Kay was losing, and losing a lot. He ran up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes in a single evening. Ah Kay had always been cavalier about his losses, but his revenue stream had been severely curtailed when he went underground and stopped offloading ships. He turned to his father for help. One day in mid-August, he spoke with his father on the phone and asked the older man to have Sister Ping remit him $20,000 to satisfy a gambling debt.

“Don’t do it anymore!” his father pleaded.

“It’s not like I’m not paying people back,” Ah Kay said defensively. “If there is no money, then say it’s because there’s no money.”

His father promised to send the funds.

Under Title III of the Criminal Code, warrants for phone taps needed to be renewed with a judge every ten days, and Luke Rettler spent most of the summer frantically preparing applications to re-up the tap. Rettler had been cross-designated to work in the U.S. attorney’s office, because the Fuk Ching case would be a federal prosecution. He was collaborating with an old friend, Chauncey Parker, a talented prosecutor who had worked with Rettler at the DA’s office before moving
over to the federal side. Parker’s girlfriend’s family had a big, beautiful house on the water in Rhode Island, and on Friday afternoons the two prosecutors would load a car full of legal materials, pick up Parker’s girlfriend and Rettler’s wife, and drive out to the beach house. The four of them would relax over dinner on Friday night. Then the next morning Rettler and Parker would wake up first thing and spend the day preparing progress reports in order to extend the wiretap.

When Ah Kay’s telephone calls indicated that he was making trips to Hong Kong, it seemed that there might be an opportunity to catch him. Hong Kong was still under British control in 1993, and U.S. authorities had close working ties with their counterparts in the colony. The challenge would be determining when Ah Kay left China and traveled to Hong Kong, where he was staying, and what identity he was using, as he was almost certainly not traveling under his own name. In New York, Rettler was told that U.S. authorities had a secret informant in the Hong Kong underworld, a man who might be able to help them find Ah Kay. His identity was a closely guarded secret, so much so that Rettler never learned more than his code name: Four Star.

S
tanding six feet tall and possessing a considerable girth, Dickson Yao was an outsized, jovial figure with a confident swagger and a booming laugh. His manner of dress was ostentatiously expensive: he wore gold belt buckles, a sapphire ring, and a gold-and-diamond Rolex. He could stride into any restaurant or gambling den in Southeast Asia and act like he owned the place, and so complete was his cocksure insouciance that the other patrons tended to assume that he did.

Yao had been born in Shanghai. His father was a lieutenant general under Chiang Kai-shek, who sent him to navy school in Great Britain. He was still a teenager when he returned to China and became the skipper of an anti-smuggling patrol boat. On this first exposure to the world of smuggling, he began to blur the line between enforcement and transgression that he would continue to straddle for the rest of his life.
Under Dickson Yao the patrol boat became a kind of pirate ship: the crew would descend on a smuggling vessel, seize its cargo, sink it, and then sell the goods themselves. In Saigon during the Vietnam War, Yao met a U.S. Air Force colonel, and the two of them began using American pilots to smuggle materials around Southeast Asia. It started with wristwatches and bales of fabric, but soon they were moving morphine base from Bangkok to Hong Kong. In the 1980s Yao was arrested in Bangkok and thrown into jail. An American minister visited him in his cell, and Yao had a single request. He wanted to see an American narcotics agent; he was willing to cooperate.

It was the beginning of a decades-long relationship between Dickson Yao and U.S. authorities in Southeast Asia—a relationship in which Yao furnished enormous amounts of information not just about drug smuggling in the region but about human smuggling as well. To generations of U.S. agents in Bangkok and Hong Kong, Dickson Yao was an unreformable rogue, but also a reliable and well-connected source of intelligence. To Rettler and others working in New York, he was known as Four Star. But to the men who interacted with him in the bars and hotel restaurants of Southeast Asia, he was known by another, more appropriate nickname. They all called him the Fat Man.

The Fat Man had marvelous
guanxi—
a web of relationships and acquaintances that encompassed the loose-knit cross-border criminal underworld of Asia and stretched as far away as the United States. He had superb connections everywhere he went, among them a beautiful young Chinese girlfriend who happened also to be the mistress of the prime minister of Thailand. He was so likable, and so credible in his role as a reprobate, that there were occasions when he would orchestrate a sting, setting up a big-ticket drug runner to be busted by the DEA, and then, some years later, approach the same drug runner to propose another buy and set him up again. The agents knew the Fat Man was a scoundrel, of course; by all indications, he continued to dabble in drug smuggling throughout his tenure as a DEA informant. But he seemed incorrigible, a man of epic appetites and infectious mirth, and if he indulged
occasionally in the seamier side of the Southeast Asian economy, it was a small price to pay for the kind of access he provided.

The Fat Man had been working for the DEA for over a decade when the snakehead boom got under way in the early 1990s. Generally different agencies tend to hoard their most secret and valuable informants, but it was clear to the Fat Man’s handlers that their counterparts in the INS were overwhelmed by the sudden surge in smuggling activity in Hong Kong and Bangkok, and as a denizen of the underworld economy, the Fat Man knew a great deal about smuggling. He had spent some time in New York during the 1980s and gotten to know Sister Ping and Yick Tak, and Ah Kay as well. So the Fat Man’s handler at DEA took an unusual step and loaned him to the INS.

Before long the Fat Man was meeting with the chief American immigration officer in Hong Kong, a man in his early forties named Jerry Stuchiner. Short and pugnacious, with a dark goatee and Coke-bottle glasses that exaggerated the size of his eyes, Stuchiner had a reputation among those who knew him as a bit of a Walter Mitty: he loved the drama and intrigue of the job and was always gunning to be the hero of the operation, the man kicking down the door. His parents had survived the Holocaust in Poland by pretending they were Roman Catholics, and had subsequently moved to Israel, where Stuchiner was born. Stuchiner told people he had been awarded a Bronze Star in Vietnam for his valor as a Marine Corps medic, though in reality he had never made it through boot camp. Like many of his INS colleagues, he spent some early years in the Border Patrol. He married the daughter of a Mexican landowner before transferring to San Francisco to work for the INS. Stuchiner was ambitious, and studied law at night. He applied for a job with the CIA but was rejected on account of his poor eyesight.

Still, in 1984 Stuchiner’s hunger for intrigue was rewarded. He was transferred to Vienna, which had become a key hub in the effort to relocate Jews from the Soviet Union and Iran to Israel. Stuchiner told people it was dangerous work—that he had received death threats from
Islamic groups like Hezbollah. Eventually he was obliged to leave Vienna—because his work had made him too much of a target, he said—and the INS sent him to Hong Kong. He arrived in 1989, two months after Tiananmen. All sorts of dissidents were trying to escape from mainland China, and once again Stuchiner found himself in the role of shepherd to the persecuted, ushering student leaders and intellectuals into the colony and then on to the United States.

When it came to the snakeheads, Stuchiner felt that the INS should be far more aggressive than it was. He developed a habit of telephoning his colleagues without regard to the time difference, often reaching them at home in the middle of the night, and insisting that the agency take more rigorous action against the smugglers. He lambasted the bureaucrats at headquarters for being too soft, for holding him back. From the Fat Man he began acquiring fresh intelligence. The Fat Man’s sources told him about the
Golden Venture
before the ship had even picked up passengers in Pattaya. (It was Stuchiner who helped tip off the INS in Bangkok, who in turn tipped off the Pattaya Tourist Police.) In the days after the
Golden Venture
ran aground, Stuchiner telephoned Washington repeatedly, painting a menacing picture of a veritable armada of smuggling ships sitting in Hong Kong harbor, destined for the United States.

The Fat Man told Stuchiner about the different smugglers—who the big players were, how they operated. He explained that Sister Ping was so successful because she guaranteed that her customers would arrive; if they were stopped en route to America and sent home, she would send them back again free of charge. Before long Stuchiner was paying 90 percent of his budget for informants to the Fat Man. With Hong Kong’s changeover from British to Chinese authorities approaching in 1997, the Fat Man was eager to obtain American green cards for his family. (He had married a much younger woman and had three small children.) He thought that perhaps Stuchiner could work something out.