The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (36 page)

Mark Riordan, the Bangkok-based INS officer who came so close to capturing Mr. Charlie after he was arrested by the Thai Tourist Police in Pattaya in February 1993, was still on the lookout for the smuggler. But even after Weng Yu Hui had been captured and interrogated about his shadowy accomplice, Mr. Charlie remained a mysterious figure about whom little was known. After his escape from Pattaya, the Tourist Police had given Riordan a copy of the passport Mr. Charlie was carrying, which was from Laos. Riordan ran the information through the INS database and found a match: a Thai passport and a U.S. immigration file. The file contained a photograph of the handsome snakehead, and fingerprints. It also noted that Mr. Charlie had been arrested in San Francisco for alien smuggling in 1986.

Riordan took a copy of the Thai passport to the Thai police, along with the fingerprints. But they said they had no information on the smuggler, and there the trail ran cold. Nobody knew anything about
Mr. Charlie: where he was from, who he worked with, where he was hiding out, what he was up to now. Over the next two years, Riordan made a point of mentioning the
Golden Venture
incident and the name Mr. Charlie whenever he was meeting with contacts in Thailand, to see whether anyone knew anything about the elusive smuggler. But no one ever did. Riordan began to conclude that Charlie had protection at a very high level; that was the only explanation for his ability to escape the prison in Pattaya and be released to Laos, and it was the only way he could disappear so comprehensively from the scene, leaving behind only a maddening series of nicknames and aliases, none of which ever seemed to ring a bell with the corrupt denizens of the local constabulary. It was beginning to seem that Mr. Charlie was a ghost, that he had simply evaporated and might never reappear.

Then one evening in the fall of 1995, Riordan met an attaché from the Taiwanese embassy in Bangkok for tea. Riordan liked the attaché; he had an unguarded, chatty manner. As the conversation was winding down, Riordan paused, as was his custom, and withdrew from his pocket a worn list of names. The names on the list belonged to various smugglers and fugitives and other local disreputables he was seeking information on. He ran down the list to see if any of the names might spark a reaction in the attaché. He wasn’t especially optimistic; this was a wish list, the names that no one knew anything about. But he had found that in a convivial and often corrupt place like Thailand, it never hurts to keep asking. When he read Mr. Charlie’s name, the attaché stopped him. “I’m having dinner with him Thursday night,” he said.

Riordan felt his heart skip.

The attaché told him that Mr. Charlie’s real name was Lee Peng Fei, though he went by Mr. Charlie and Charlie and Char Lee and sometimes Ma Lee. He had been a snakehead for some time and had become very wealthy. He had a wife and child at home, but he was known for enjoying Bangkok’s nightlife. He liked to spend the evenings in clubs, singing karaoke. “He’s a good singer,” the attaché said, with evident admiration. “He’s
a great
singer.”

“Is he Thai?” Riordan asked.

“No. He’s Taiwanese,” the attaché said. “I’ll give you a copy of his military record.”

Riordan was flabbergasted. Mr. Charlie had been in Bangkok all along. On a muggy day not long afterward, a team of Royal Thai Police officers assembled and headed to a high-end condominium complex near Bangkok Airport. When they arrived at the building, they found Mr. Charlie standing outside polishing a brand-new forest green Mercedes, which glistened in the tropical sun.

In Thailand it is not uncommon for criminals with wealth to pay poor surrogates to serve jail sentences in their place, and when Mark Riordan heard that Mr. Charlie had been arrested, he wanted to see the man in person to be certain it was him. The smuggler had managed to slip out of police custody in Pattaya, and Riordan didn’t want to see it happen again. When he entered the room where Mr. Charlie was being held, he immediately recognized the well-groomed, slightly sporty young man who had appeared to be so helpful in the police station in Pattaya nearly three years before. Riordan asked Mr. Charlie how he had managed to get some two hundred passengers onto the
Golden Venture
before the Tourist Police stopped the operation. The smuggler responded, very casually, that in that particular instance he had enjoyed the assistance of the Royal Thai Navy. Riordan asked about the
Golden Venture’s
arrival in Rockaway and Charlie said that he had been standing on the beach, waiting for the ship to come in. What he couldn’t understand was how anyone could blame him for the deaths of people who decided by themselves to jump overboard.

Mr. Charlie was eventually extradited to the United States, where he admitted that he had given the order to run the
Golden Venture
aground and pleaded guilty to charges of alien smuggling and manslaughter at sea. He was sentenced to the maximum, twenty years in prison. It was a major triumph for American law enforcement. Mr. Charlie was the twenty-second person charged in relation to the voyage, and the one who had played the most important role in the botched logistics
that led to the deaths at Rockaway. “This case demonstrates our resolve to strike at the very heart of international alien smuggling,” Attorney General Janet Reno announced. At the same time, however, a suggestion endured that Mr. Charlie’s capture might not signify the absolute conclusion of the
Golden Venture
investigation. “He is not a general but a top lieutenant,” Mr. Charlie’s protégé, the onboard enforcer Kin Sin Lee, had told investigators. There was a lingering suggestion that the case was not yet closed, that some elusive twenty-third suspect might still be at large.

S
ister Ping’s movements during these years remain somewhat mysterious, but it is known that when she left New York and flew to Hong Kong in 1994, she continued on to Beijing for an anniversary celebration of the Communist Party, where she was to be honored, along with other notable overseas Fujianese. But when she arrived in Beijing, she was arrested. She was not held for long; she managed to bribe her way out of custody. But it was clear at that point that with the FBI’s investigation of the
Golden Venture
intensifying in New York, it was only a matter of time before the agents ascertained that it had been she who helped finance the purchase of the ship by wiring Ah Kay’s money to Thailand, and that one of the ten dead passengers was a customer she had put on board. She could not return to the United States.

Instead, just as federal prosecutors in New York prepared to indict her, Sister Ping returned to her native village of Shengmei and took up residence once again in the palatial house she had constructed at Number 398. During the thirteen years she had been living in the United States, the village had prospered, as she had facilitated the passage of more and more of her neighbors to New York City. Other grand houses had sprung up in the area, some of them even dwarfing her own. Another side effect of Sister Ping’s successful relocation of so many of her fellow villagers was that the area had grown conspicuously quiet. The narrow alleyways were empty, save for the occasional grandparent walking
hand-in-hand with an American-born toddler. Eventually the village saw the introduction of what was by Chinese standards a novelty: an old folk’s home. So many of the young and middle-aged residents of Shengmei had left the village that there was no one left behind to take care of the older generation. A placard in the lobby heralded the various New York–based Fujianese whose contributions had underwritten the construction.

In the wake of the
Golden Venture
incident and the negative publicity it generated for Beijing, the Fujianese authorities launched a far-reaching anti-snakehead campaign, vowing to hunt down and prosecute the smugglers and discourage local people from leaving illegally. “Illegal Emigration Is a Crime,” banners in Fuzhou read. “Resolutely Clamp Down on the Crime of Snakehead Activities.” In Sister Ping’s village, officials erected a sign that said, “It seriously damages the reputation of our party and our country, undermines border security, destroys public stability, and ruins the general social atmosphere.”

But in reality the campaign and its placards amounted to so much lip service. For the Fujianese who could now afford refrigerators and televisions, who could purchase cars or throw decadent wedding banquets or build new homes, no amount of propaganda or persuasion could diminish the widely held conviction that the snakehead trade was a fundamental social good—that it had enabled hundreds of thousands of people to pull themselves out of poverty and indulge in material comforts that would have been unimaginable to the generation before them. At a major intersection in downtown Changle, an imposing monument was erected, which dispelled any ambiguity about the role of outmigration from the region. The monument was a gleaming, soaring sail, from the base of which sprouted a set of angular wings, like the wings of an airplane. It was built to symbolize the debt that Changle owed to the people who had left the city on boats and planes.

As long as Sister Ping wanted to stay in the village of Shengmei, she had nothing to fear. Her
guanxi
penetrated deep into the local bureaucracy, where officials would ensure that no harm befell her, and in the
popular mythology of the region she was regarded as a kind of saint. Like some homegrown Chinese Vito Corleone, Sister Ping had spent a lifetime accumulating favors owed, and the result was that in China, at any rate, she was untouchable. Everyone knew where she was during those years, recalled a local police officer who was charged with working specifically on the snakehead problem. But in order to take any action against Sister Ping, the authorities needed something to charge her with—a witness, a complaint. And no one was willing to come forward. “This is a different era from Mao Zedong’s time,” the cop observed. “If you’re going to lock someone up, you need evidence.”

A
t the FBI in New York, evidence was not the problem. Investigators had plenty of evidence on Sister Ping; they had an indictment that was beginning to gather dust. Their informants in Chinatown told them that Sister Ping was living out in the open, that she held meetings in hotels in Fuzhou, that she owned property throughout the region. But when the agents passed the information along, their Chinese counterparts simply refused to cooperate. When they tried to “follow the money” by tracing the international flow of Sister Ping’s funds, lack of cooperation from the authorities in China amounted to a kind of wall, behind which assets and capital flows were simply beyond their investigative reach. “There’s this giant black line, which is the border of China, and that is the end of the trail,” one FBI agent explained. “There was money that we could have followed for a while, into Hong Kong and Thailand and places like that. But eventually all roads led back to China, and that’s the end of the road.”

It cannot have helped that Sister Ping was a hometown hero in Fujian, but there was another key reason that the authorities in China would not cooperate with the FBI. At any given time, the Bureau had a list of twenty wanted fugitives who were hiding in China and whom the Chinese government would not help them catch. China and the United
States do not have an extradition treaty, which would facilitate the process. But the real problem was a famous episode from the recent past that was still fresh in the minds of members of China’s People’s Security Bureau when Sister Ping went on the lam in 1994. While the incident never drew much press coverage in the United States, it was painfully familiar to the members of America’s various three-letter agencies, and in the minds of many, it was the event that irrevocably soured relations between law enforcement agencies in the United States and China. It was known as the Goldfish Case.

In the spring of 1988, customs officers in San Francisco seized seven pounds of heroin that had been stuffed into condoms and sewn into the bellies of sixty-nine dead ornamental goldfish in a crate shipped from Hong Kong to a local pet store. As the Drug Enforcement Agency began investigating, its agents went to great lengths to cooperate with their counterparts in China’s People’s Security Bureau. Several suspects were arrested for the scheme: the Americans picked up two co-conspirators, Andrew and Chico Wong, in San Francisco, and in Shanghai the People’s Security Bureau brought in a young man named Wang Zong Xiao. The Chinese held their suspect in Shanghai from March 1988 to December 1989, while federal prosecutors in the United States developed their case against the Wong brothers. An assistant U.S. attorney named Eric Swenson was hoping that in a highly unusual step, he could use the Shanghai suspect as a witness in his case, obliging the Chinese to lend him their suspect long enough for Wang to fly to San Francisco and testify against his former accomplices. In May 1988, Swenson flew to Shanghai and tried to persuade Chinese officials that there would be “no downside” to sending Wang to America to testify. Technically, China would not be extraditing Wang, because he faced no charges in the United States; he was China’s suspect, to be dealt with by the Chinese criminal justice system. But he would make a valuable star witness against the American-based drug smugglers, and after a series of meetings in which Swenson and representatives from the DEA
made their case, the Chinese agreed to fly Wang to San Francisco, under close Chinese custody, and allow him to testify in the trial before flying back to China to face his own punishment.

In late December 1989, Wang flew to San Francisco along with five handlers from the Chinese police. The trial began in January, and after several weeks of testimony, Eric Swenson called his witness to the stand. The courtroom was full as Wang was led in; both Washington and Beijing were carefully monitoring the unprecedented experiment that was about to unfold. If Wang could point the finger at the San Francisco smugglers and help convict them, it might cement a new level of cooperation and trust between law enforcement in the two countries. It might even lay the foundation for a mutual legal assistance treaty some day.