The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (32 page)

The Fat Man and Stuchiner made an unlikely pair, but the two became close friends. It is not unusual for a certain intimacy to develop between a confidential informant and his handler. Many people who find themselves in this situation are leery of it, reluctant to be beguiled by a temporary symmetry of interests into believing that the official and the criminal have a more enduring bond. But the ambitious immigration agent and the Shanghainese rogue had no such reservations. They flouted official INS guidelines and began socializing together in their spare time. They even discussed going into business together, importing paintings from the People’s Republic or sending Chinese guest workers to Israel.

One day in August 1993, the Fat Man telephoned Stuchiner. The hunt for Ah Kay was on; Stuchiner knew he was coming in and out of Hong Kong, but the Fat Man had more specific information. Ah Kay was staying at a hotel on the north side of Hong Kong Island, not far from where the Fat Man lived. He was traveling under an assumed name and carrying a fraudulent Hong Kong residence card.

Stuchiner was excited. He conferred with his colleagues in the U.S. consulate and told them he wanted to go and do surveillance in the area. They worried that he was too much of a cowboy—that a
gweilo
, or “white ghost,” as the Cantonese called Caucasians, would stick out like a sore thumb and might alert Ah Kay that they had tracked him down. Besides, U.S. law enforcement had no jurisdiction to act on its own in the streets of Hong Kong; the most it could do was pass a request to the Royal Hong Kong Police.

Several days later the Fat Man supplied information that was even more concrete: the name of a restaurant where Ah Kay would be dining that night. Stuchiner wanted to stake out the restaurant himself. “Jerry, I’m a
gweilo
, you’re a
gweilo,”
one of his colleagues said, trying to reason with him. “You’re gonna walk into a restaurant full of Chinese and no one’s gonna spot you?” Instead, the FBI took over the operation and fed the intelligence about the restaurant to its counterparts in the Royal Hong Kong Police, who sent a team of officers to the area.

D
uring his time in Hong Kong, Ah Kay had developed something of a routine. He spent the days indoors, sleeping, and emerged only in the early evening, surrounded by a coterie of bodyguards. He would work out, eat dinner with his entourage at a restaurant, and then gamble through the night, often returning home at six or seven the next morning.

On Friday, August 27, he left the building at dusk, with Li Xing Hua and three other bodyguards. Ah Kay was dressed casually, in jeans and a cotton pullover. The four men strolled to the restaurant where they planned to eat, which was really just a food stall in a busy market. Suddenly they were surrounded by plainclothes detectives from the Triad Bureau of the Royal Hong Kong Police. Ah Kay surrendered peacefully. When the officers searched him, they found no weapons and only a few dollars. The sole hint of his fortune and infamy was his jewelry: several gold chains dangling around his neck and a large gold ring fashioned into the head of a dragon.

Jerry Stuchiner was furious. He and the Fat Man had effected Ah Kay’s arrest, he felt, yet it had somehow become an FBI operation, and the INS wasn’t getting any of the credit. For his part, the Fat Man had anticipated some monetary reward for his assistance in securing so high-profile a target, but he had no relationship with the FBI the way he did with the DEA and the INS and was disappointed when no payment came through.

As soon as Ah Kay was in custody, one of the FBI agents in Hong Kong made a phone call to New York and spoke with Konrad Motyka and his colleagues in the C-6 squad. It was time to move on the Fuk Ching gang.

T
he following day Motyka was sitting in the Pathfinder with David Shafer in the Green-Wood Cemetery when the funeral cortege started
to leave the crematorium. A long column of black limousines began rolling at a slow, stately pace toward the exit of the cemetery. The agents were parked on a little road that fed onto the main road through the cemetery to the exit, and as the convoy approached, Shafer turned on the engine and drove onto the main road directly in front of the procession, effectively becoming the lead car. Motyka felt his adrenaline surge as they approached a predetermined spot on the road amid the steep green hills of the cemetery. Suddenly Shafer hit the brakes. The Pathfinder was clogging the road now, blocking the mourners’ limousines from reaching the exit. Motyka and Shafer got out and dashed around to the front of the vehicle. They didn’t know how the next few minutes would play out, but they suspected there might be shooting. In the movies, police officers always seemed to be taking cover behind car doors, but in reality a lot of bullets can pierce a car door. Motyka wanted as much steel as possible between him and whatever was about to ensue.

The limousines were being driven by hired chauffeurs, who must have been confused to see a car cut them off and two men in bulletproof vests scramble out and disappear behind the hood. But before any of the passengers could ponder what was happening, dozens of black-clad SWAT agents suddenly materialized, charging over the hills on either side of the road. Nearly forty SWAT members swarmed around the cars, shouting and pointing machine guns at the startled mourners. The drama and surprise of a SWAT operation is designed to shock and terrify the target, leaving him too stunned to contemplate resistance. The members of the Fuk Ching were overwhelmed, pulled from their vehicles, separated from their girlfriends, identified, cuffed, and arrested.

As Motyka rounded up the mourners who were on the indictment, federal agents were fanning across New York City, making arrests at other locations. They raided apartments in Coney Island and in Queens. A team stormed the Fukienese American Association at 125 East Broadway. They wrapped the whole building in police tape and arrested
several gang members, along with Ah Kay’s father, who feigned a heart attack and had to be taken away in an ambulance.

From a high-tech command center at One Police Plaza, Luke Rettler watched the coordinated takedown unfold on an array of video screens. Nineteen members of the Fuk Ching were arrested that day, and a grand jury would soon deliver the forty-five-count racketeering indictment against them and against Ah Kay. Piece by piece the authorities were taking down the major figures associated with the
Golden Venture
, and with the snakehead trade in general. Once the captain and the crew and the onboard enforcers and Kin Sin Lee had been captured, along with Ah Kay and the Fuk Ching gang and Weng Yu Hui, only two major targets would remain. One of them was a fugitive—the Taiwanese snakehead Mr. Charlie, who had escaped capture once when he pretended to be a passenger in Pattaya and again when he had slipped out of New York after the
Golden Venture
ran aground. The other target, who was not a fugitive, or at any rate not yet, was right in New York City—Sister Ping.

S
everal weeks after the roundup of the Fuk Ching, Motyka and the C-6 squad raided Sister Ping’s building at 47 East Broadway. She was not there; she had flown to Johannesburg to visit her passengers on the ostrich farm. But in the basement restaurant and street-level shop, and in the apartments upstairs, the agents found a laminating machine and passports, driver’s licenses, green cards, Social Security cards, and employment authorization cards, all in other people’s names—what a prosecutor would later describe as the “tools of the alien smuggling trade.” Peter Lee, the FBI agent who had been Sister Ping’s handler during her brief period of cooperation, was there, and he went through the records of her money transfer business—hundreds of notes containing the names of intended recipients, the amount of money to be sent, and the addresses in the counties around Fuzhou where the funds should
be delivered. On their own, these materials might have been enough for an indictment. But the authorities did not want to repeat the folly of the Buffalo case, in which Sister Ping was prosecuted on minor charges and not forced to answer for the scope of her criminal enterprise. Instead they continued to assemble evidence in order to make a broader case against the snakehead, which might actually result in substantial jail time.

Sister Ping returned to New York after the raid, but between the roundup of the Fuk Ching and the FBI search warrant, and perhaps especially the fact that so many of her former associates and colleagues were now being interrogated by law enforcement, she must have sensed that she was running a risk by staying in the city. In addition to worrying about the steady advances of the FBI, she was growing concerned about the Chinatown journalist Ying Chan, who had written a series of high-profile articles on the snakehead trade for the
Daily News
and was working, in the months after the
Golden Venture
arrived, on getting to the bottom of who had orchestrated the voyage. Chan visited Sister Ping in her shop and was solicitous. “I heard that you are a very capable woman,” she said. But Sister Ping was leery of the reporter and angry that in her articles Chan had portrayed her as a villain and not as the hardworking and selfless immigrant success story she believed herself to be.

Early in 1994, Chan’s investigative reporting on the snakehead trade was singled out for the prestigious George Polk Award, and some friends planned a banquet in Chinatown in her honor. But before the banquet one of Chan’s sources in the Fujianese community told her that she should stay away from the neighborhood for a while. The source explained that Chan had angered Sister Ping, and that the snakehead had put a $50,000 contract on her head. It was somewhat strange that Sister Ping would bother. For all her international travel, she still moved in a more or less exclusively Chinese-language milieu; the world of the mainstream English-language press could not have been more remote. But Chan was a Chinese journalist working in Chinatown,
which both heightened the apparent transgression of having disrespected the venerable Sister Ping and made Chan vulnerable, as a fellow Chinese in a neighborhood where dispatching another Chinese was, as Ah Kay had put it, “like killing a dog or a cat.” Chan reported the threat to the police, and the
Daily News
arranged for a twenty-four-hour bodyguard.

Dougie Lee, the Cantonese American detective from the Jade Squad, knew Sister Ping slightly. He would see her around the neighborhood, running errands or working the counter in her store. Through his own sources he heard about the contract on Ying Chan, and he understood that Sister Ping’s stature in the community was such that if people thought she would be open to the idea, some ambitious upstart might kill Chan just to make a good impression. He sent word back through the community that the NYPD knew about the threat to Ying Chan’s life, and if anything should happen, they would know where to look. Before long, the idea of killing Ying Chan was abandoned.

(Sister Ping denies that she offered money to have Chan killed but acknowledges that she disliked the press coverage she was receiving, and maintains that she was approached by a member of the Fuk Ching who
offered
to take care of Chan for $6,000. She declined the offer, she insists, telling the gang member, “It doesn’t matter to me. Whatever they want to write, they can go ahead.”)

What is clear is that by this time Sister Ping was beginning to feel besieged. With both Ah Kay and Weng Yu Hui arrested, she must have realized that one or both might start cooperating with the government and furnish them with evidence of her criminal activities. In recent years she had relied heavily on the young men of the Fuk Ching to offload her smuggling ships, and now several lesser figures from the gang were reportedly prepared to testify against her.

The FBI continued to monitor her activity throughout 1994. Its agents obtained a warrant to wiretap her telephones, and it appeared that her smuggling had continued uninterrupted after the
Golden Venture
fiasco. In March 1994 she arranged for a ship to transport over a
hundred passengers to the New Jersey shore. The following month, investigators recorded a conversation in which a passenger who was being held after arriving in the United States told his family that if they didn’t pay Sister Ping, his captors would amputate his feet. After months of painstaking investigation, a federal indictment was finally ready in December 1994, charging Sister Ping with kidnapping and with holding customers for ransom.

But by then she was already gone. Sister Ping had used her passport to fly to Hong Kong on September 20, 1994. It was the last time she would travel on her own documents. After that flight, one government lawyer would later observe, “Sister Ping, at least on paper, ceased to exist.”

Chapter Thirteen

Freedom Birds

TO CRAIG
Trebilcock, a rangy young litigator with a boyish face and a casual manner that belied a certain intensity, the small city of York, Pennsylvania, seemed like a throwback to America in the 1950s, in both positive and negative respects. By the time Craig moved to York to practice law in 1991, the city was suffering from factory closures and a steady erosion of the manufacturing base that had made it a boomtown in an earlier era. Many of the businesses in the handsome brick buildings of the historic town center were shuttered, and a certain sense hung in the air that the city’s best days might be behind it. But York’s residents were fiercely devoted to it, and to the particular, almost exaggerated sense of Norman Rockwell–style, small-town American life that the city more or less preserved. Peppermint Patties, which took their name from York, were no longer made in town, but the Harley-Davidson plant was still active, as was York International, which manufactured heating and air-conditioning systems, and many people in town still drew a living by punching a clock in a factory. When Trebilcock left his office at lunchtime, it sometimes seemed that half the people he passed in the span of a block or two were friends or colleagues or acquaintances, everyone smiling and wishing him well. Politically, the area was fairly conservative, with “values” voters determined to raise their families in a traditional Christian manner; potlucks and dinner parties invariably began with someone saying grace. York residents tended to
share an abiding and deeply felt appreciation for the United States and all that it stood for. The Articles of Confederation were drafted in York, and many local businesses still bear the proud, if historically erroneous, name First Capital.