The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (40 page)

When the bus was 70 miles from the Guatemalan border, the driver needed to relieve his bladder. He pulled over to the side of the road and jumped out of the bus. As he did, a car appeared out of nowhere on the road behind him and raced up alongside the bus. Two men climbed out. One was a Honduran immigration official. The other was Jerry
Stuchiner, the goateed INS agent from Hong Kong who had worked with the Fat Man to locate Ah Kay.

Shortly after Ah Kay’s arrest, Stuchiner had been transferred to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. He was not happy with the move. He had loved the glamour and intrigue of Hong Kong; with just over a million people, the mountainous city of Tegucigalpa was a provincial backwater by comparison. The city had none of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan glamour. The people lived in sprawling shantytowns. Stuchiner’s residence had no hot water or electricity. Worse still, he was deprived, at least initially, of that sense, so palpable in Hong Kong, of being at the heart of things professionally—an immigration agent in a den of human smugglers.

Still, Stuchiner did his best to stay close to the action. He explored the possibility of doing business deals on the side—exporting shark fins to Asia, perhaps, or fish stomachs. He kept in touch with the Fat Man, who visited him occasionally in Honduras. The two men would take steam baths and talk business. Stuchiner had a friend in Tegucigalpa, a Honduran of Jewish origin named Herbie Weizenblut, who Stuchiner thought would make a good Honduran consul in Hong Kong. Stuchiner thought of Weizenblut as “a coreligionist, and a lost soul,” and wanted to help him out. In a decidedly unconventional move that was indicative of Stuchiner’s deep friendship with the Fat Man, and of the Fat Man’s willingness to buck propriety and indulge the occasionally shady side of government activity, the two men were able to persuade the Honduran government to make Weizenblut its new consul in Hong Kong, but only after the Fat Man committed to personally cover half of Weizenblut’s expenses while he was on the job—a sum of $15,000 a month.

For Stuchiner, the saving grace of his new Central American home was that in its own way, little backward Honduras was emerging, along with nearby countries like Panama, Belize, and Guatemala, as a major regional hub in the global snakehead trade. Just as Stuchiner was arriving in the country, rumors were beginning to circulate about “Chinazo,”
a major scandal in which it emerged that in 1991 the Honduran National Assembly had passed a law that was nominally designed to attract foreign investment but actually amounted to a cash-for-citizenship scheme. A sophisticated ring of corrupt officials made nearly $20 million selling Honduran passports to the Chinese. Few of these newly minted Chinese Hondurans actually settled in Honduras. Instead, using their Honduran passports, they booked flights to Tegucigalpa that stopped over in the United States. Then they would destroy the costly passports on the airplane and request asylum at the first American airport they hit.

The case was emblematic of a deep culture of corruption in Honduras, and in Central America more generally, a culture that, along with the region’s physical proximity to the United States, made it immensely appealing for smugglers. One seldom-remarked irony of globalization is that while the increased interknittedness of the world undoubtedly facilitated a plethora of useful innovations for consumers and governments, the unfettered flow of goods, people, capital, and ideas that so characterized the 1990s also presented major opportunities for the enterprising cross-border criminal. Any international effort to regulate clandestine international trade, whether of drugs, guns, or people, will be only as good as the least vigilant nation in the system. If the community of nations relies on official documents issued by countries to denote who is entitled to travel where, it takes only one spoiler country, like Honduras, to undo the whole thing. What’s more, the better the rest of the system works—the more harmonized and efficient the international regulatory architecture is—the higher the rewards will be for the one country willing to cheat, offering an illicit back door into the licit international system.

Just as Bangkok functioned as a hub in the smuggling networks because snakeheads could put passengers on planes, Central America was emerging as a new hub. Official corruption is the oxygen that any kind of global smuggling requires to thrive, and the kind of corruption evident in the Chinazo case was pervasive in the region. In 1995 alone, the
immigration directors of Panama, Belize, and Guatemala were all fired for accepting bribes from smugglers. That year a federal working group on alien smuggling reported that the growth of human smuggling was “made possible by staggering levels of official corruption” and a sense in many transit countries that the activity was fundamentally a “victimless crime.”

When Stuchiner cracked the Canales ring, it was heralded as a great success in Washington, not just because one major smuggler had been removed from power, but because it seemed to promise a new, more dynamic approach to pursuing smugglers. Stuchiner recognized that in order to fight an international adversary, American authorities had to adopt a more international approach themselves. When a new head of Honduran immigration, Angelina Ulloa, took office, vowing to stamp out the corruption that had plagued her predecessors, Stuchiner began working closely with her. Their main target was Canales, and they devised a bold plan, involving the use of an undercover agent to set up the deal with the Sikhs. At that time Honduras was the only country in the region where human smuggling was actually a prosecutable crime, so Stuchiner tried to lure Canales to Honduras. It was the type of audacious scheme that Stuchiner’s colleagues in Hong Kong had complained about. And it also seemed typical of Stuchiner’s gift for self-mythologizing that rumors were soon circulating in Tegucigalpa that Canales had sent a henchman to town to assassinate him. It may have been that the rumors were true, but it was also the case that tales of assassination attempts against him were a staple in Stuchiner’s conversational repertoire dating back to his days in Vienna during the 1980s.

Nevertheless, Stuchiner’s tactics, however unorthodox, were delivering results. When he couldn’t lure Canales to Honduras, he helped persuade Ecuador to arrest her and extradite her to Tegucigalpa. Against the odds, he seemed to have devised a manner of using the international system against the very international crime syndicates that exploited it. When Canales arrived in Honduras and was awaiting trial, she was accompanied by over a dozen guards, not so much to prevent
her from escaping as to prevent her from being assassinated on behalf of the many powerful political figures with an interest in keeping her quiet.

“If this isthmus was closed off, there is no way they could get to the U.S.,” Stuchiner told the press, flush with his victory over Canales. “You would force them to use air routes, which are easier to control.” If Stuchiner was going to continue his crusade to shut down the snakehead trade in Central America, and was going to do it by finding a few clean officials in the various regional governments and forming alliances with people he could trust, it was only a matter of time before he would start to target another prominent smuggler who had recently intensified her operations in the area: Sister Ping.

T
hese new international criminals are very mobile,” a Senate investigator remarked in the mid-1990s. “For the first time in criminal history, they are able to establish and control on a day-to-day basis operations in foreign countries far from their home port. Law enforcement by and large stops at the border, and we’re just in the first stumbling steps in trying to get better coordination internationally. These crooks are way ahead of the cops.”

He could have been describing Sister Ping. After the wreck of the
Golden Venture
and her hasty flight to China in 1994, she did not curtail her smuggling activities. By the late nineties, an estimated 30,000 people from Tingjiang, the area surrounding her village, had made the trip to the United States. Many of these people faced the same predicament as the
Golden Venture
passengers released by President Clinton: without green cards, they could not petition for their family members to come to the United States legally. So instead they were forced to turn to snakeheads, and above all to Sister Ping.

It was no longer feasible to send smuggling ships directly to the coastal waters of the United States. After the
Golden Venture
, the U.S. Coast Guard had become very active in monitoring American shores, and numerous
ships were turned back in the open seas. But neither did it make business sense to abandon boat smuggling altogether and revert to the expensive and piecemeal process of obtaining phony documents and sending passengers by plane. Throughout the 1990s, snakeheads everywhere were diversifying, evolving new routes to take customers to new places, and always adapting so that they stayed a step or two ahead of law enforcement. Even a partial listing of the routes that law enforcement discovered during those years reads like the bizarre itinerary for some madcap world tour: Fuzhou—Hong Kong—Bangkok—Moscow—Havana—Managua—Tucson; Fuzhou—Hong Kong—Bangkok—Kuala Lumpur—Singapore—Dubai—Frankfurt—Washington. When snakeheads discovered that it was relatively easy to obtain visas for Chinese passengers to visit Russia, a new route developed, with passengers flying into Moscow, then trekking over the loosely patrolled border into the Ukraine and then Slovakia, from Slovakia in a minivan to Prague, and from Prague to points west—the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France, and Britain. New Chinatowns popped up in cities from São Paolo to Dubai. After sanctions were imposed on Yugoslavia in 1993, Slobodan Milosevic began cultivating the Chinese leadership in Beijing and lifted visa requirements for Chinese citizens to travel to Serbia. The snakeheads wasted no time sending their customers to Belgrade by the planeload, knowing full well that from there they could make their way into Western Europe and on to Canada or the United States. (Indeed, it seems likely that Milosevic’s sudden hospitality toward the Chinese was driven by the same intuition.)

All the snakeheads needed was a way station or staging post where authorities were willing to look the other way, what one observer described as a “geopolitical black hole” in the regulatory system. Some of these black holes were far from the United States. Others were closer to home. A handful of snakeheads saw potential in the Native American reservations that straddle the border between the United States and Canada and function as sovereign Native American territory. In a two-year period in the late 1990s, a sophisticated network of Fujianese snakeheads and Mohawk Indians smuggled thousands of
undocumented Chinese into the United States through a reservation in upstate New York. Before the ring was dismantled by authorities, it made $170 million.

As the snakehead business boomed internationally, it began to attract a more ruthless element. Snakeheads started sending their clients not in the holds of ships but in cargo containers, a mode of transportation that actually managed to be more hazardous than the
Golden Venture
. Throughout the late 1990s stowaways were discovered in shipping containers entering the ports of Los Angeles or Seattle nearly every week. A young Fujianese woman emerged as one of the most dominant snakeheads in Europe and adopted the moniker Little Sister Ping, in a nod both to her own diminutive stature and to her much more famous namesake. Little Sister Ping worked out of a Chinese restaurant in Rotterdam, but there the similarities end. Whereas Big Sister Ping shunned any form of ostentation, invested her money in real estate, and scrupulously maintained a low profile, Little Sister Ping had a fleet of cars, wore expensive designer clothes, and favored vacations in Italy and Greece. In 2000 she was responsible for a notorious tragedy in which fifty-eight Fujianese who had crossed Europe and were headed for London ended up suffocating to death in the airtight back of a truck. A single air vent had been closed from the outside, and as the passengers began running out of air, they screamed and clawed at the vent and slammed the walls of the truck with their shoes. But the driver did not hear, and eventually the passengers died there in the dark, their bodies discovered only when customs officers stopped the truck at Dover.

From her village in Fujian Province, Big Sister Ping was believed to have been one of the pioneers of the snakehead route through Milosevic’s Serbia, and there is no doubt that she maintained an eclectic array of routes and way stations. But as she continued her boat smuggling operations during the late 1990s, she found that one particularly effective strategy was to send ships from Asia directly to the coast of Central America and then transport passengers overland to the United States. Honduras had the law against alien smuggling, which despite the general
lack of enforcement made it a less than ideal location. But Sister Ping found a perfect logistical base in Guatemala. With stretches of coastline on both the Atlantic and the Pacific and a long and largely unpoliced border with Mexico, Guatemala was well situated as a transition point for passengers disembarking from fishing trawlers and preparing for the long journey overland. Sister Ping was hardly the only smuggler to see the virtues of the place; most of the Colombian cocaine that enters the United States passes through Guatemala first, and an astonishing 10 percent of Guatemala’s population would ultimately emigrate to the United States. The country was deeply corrupt, and with a thriving informal economy, money laundering was a routine and fairly easy activity. (During the period when Sister Ping was operating there, the off-the-books economy in Guatemala generated over 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.)

In some ways Sister Ping’s organization was less like the Mafia than it was like a multinational corporation that seeks an optimal economic and regulatory environment in which to do business. Just as the state of Delaware offers a series of enticements in an effort to lure businesses to incorporate there, Guatemala offered Sister Ping a favorable location vis-à-vis China and the United States, a permissive government whose officials could easily be bought, an underground economy so extensive that it nearly engulfed the licit economy and made it more or less impossible to disentangle dirty money from clean, and a small but robust Chinese and Taiwanese population, which could be a source of safe houses, middlemen, and couriers. On top of everything else, Sister Ping could arrange for the Guatemalan navy to help facilitate the offloading of her ships, at the reasonable price of $50,000 a pop.