The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (44 page)

Nevertheless, the impression hung heavy in the courtroom that whatever the charges against Sister Ping, her trial would represent the final, definitive account of the tragic voyage of the
Golden Venture
. The judge in the case was Michael Mukasey a stern, bespectacled conservative
who in later years would become the attorney general of the United States. Mukasey had heard cases brought by
Golden Venture
passengers in the past; he had more than a passing familiarity with the tragic details of the voyage. The government lawyers, a team of three young assistant U.S. attorneys, spent an inordinate amount of trial time examining and reexamining Sister Ping’s role in the
Golden Venture
. Their aim was not to convict her for any of the particulars of the voyage or the deaths, but to establish in as much detail as possible that she was not merely a shopkeeper or banker but a snakehead, and a major one at that.

“This is a case about the brutal business of smuggling human beings into the United States for profit, and about one woman, the defendant, Cheng Chui Ping, who rose to become one of the most powerful and most successful alien smugglers of our time,” one of the prosecutors, David Burns, declared.

To make its case, the government produced a devastatingly comprehensive array of former criminal associates. Weng Yu Hui appeared in the courtroom and described how Sister Ping smuggled him to America in 1984; how she gave him money to take to her passengers when they were stranded in Mombasa; how the day the
Golden Venture
arrived, she had told him to get out of town. “She said that she had bad feelings and she was afraid,” Weng recalled. “She was worried about her two customers.” Various former underlings from the Fuk Ching detailed Sister Ping’s complicated history with the gang. Larry Hay, the undercover Canadian Mountie who had executed the sting at the Buffalo airport leading to Sister Ping’s first conviction, testified. Kenny Feng, the Taiwanese snakehead from Guatemala, recounted the tragedy of the boat that had overturned in 1998. A Fujianese woman whom Sister Ping had charged $43,000 for the journey to the United States explained that she was willing to commit to such a considerable fee because she knew Sister Ping’s name and trusted her reputation.

But the most damning witness was the man who had been living in a temporary jail cell since 1994, the man whose decidedly complicated history with Sister Ping was about to undergo one final twist. After
receiving his twenty-year sentence in 1998, Ah Kay had been waiting for the opportunity to do one last service for the government. When he strode into the courtroom and was sworn in, the jury could not perhaps appreciate the sense in which for Ah Kay, this was the culmination of his years of cooperation, what Konrad Motyka called his “final part to play.”

Ah Kay was still a youth at the time of his arrest, but when he appeared in the courtroom, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, he looked older, calmer, and more sensible, his hair shorn close to the scalp, his demeanor precise and free of hostility. Ah Kay was middle-aged. He had always been a quick study, and as a government witness he did not disappoint. For three days he testified about Sister Ping’s role in the community, about his decision to rob her house in Brooklyn in the 1980s, and about how readily she had forgiven him when she needed him to offload her customers at sea. He was matter-of-fact about his own crimes, acknowledging his role as the Fuk Ching’s
dai lo
and describing the murders he had committed and the mayhem for which he was responsible. He admitted that he had personally smuggled as many as a thousand people into the United States, and that in addition he had helped snakeheads like Sister Ping offload their ships and collect their fees. When he was asked whether this entailed violence, he replied, “Of course violence was used.”

With impressive recall, Ah Kay revisited each detail of the decision to purchase the
Golden Venture
and send it to Africa to retrieve the passengers from the
Najd II
. He described asking Sister Ping to wire the funds for the ship to Thailand. “I told her that she still owed me three hundred thousand dollars,” he recalled. “I said I would invest the money in that
Golden Venture
boat. She said, ‘No problem.’” Ah Kay was direct and unflappable. He made a perfect witness, which should perhaps be no surprise; he had been preparing for this moment for ten years.

Sister Ping sat quietly through the testimony, listening through headphones to a simultaneous translation and occasionally taking notes.
Hochheiser hammered at the credibility of the government’s witness. “Who are these people?” he asked. “What is the quality and character of the people that are giving you information?” Despite the fact that Weng, who was one of the government’s lead witnesses, had already served his sentence and was a free man by the time he took the stand, Hochheiser suggested not only that the men testifying against Sister Ping were mendacious criminals, but that they had all been induced to testify with the promise of lesser sentences. “Murderers were hired to give you testimony in this case, and they were paid with a commodity worth a great deal more than simply money,” he told the jury. “Their cooperation, we euphemistically call it, was bought and paid for with life—with freedom from serving years in jail.”

“Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. These men
are
killers,” the government lawyer David Burns conceded. “But they’re killers she hired.”

If Sister Ping was furious that her former associates were now lining up to betray her, she might have found some comfort in the fact that one person was not called upon to take the stand. After his arrest in 1997, her husband, Cheung Yick Tak, had his sentencing postponed and postponed again. It was as if the authorities were waiting to assess the full measure of Yick Tak’s cooperation before delivering his sentence—as if, like Ah Kay, he still had one final part to play Prior to Sister Ping’s trial, two different attorneys who represented her expressed concerns that one of the government’s witnesses against the snakehead might ultimately be her own husband.

The prosecution never called upon Yick Tak, but again there is some evidence, however circumstantial, that he may have already played a role in the government’s efforts to apprehend Sister Ping. After pleading guilty to two counts of conspiracy in 1998, Yick Tak was not sentenced until July 14, 2003, which happened to be two weeks after the FBI agent Becky Chan escorted Sister Ping back to the United States. Was Yick Tak somehow instrumental in securing the extradition and prosecution of Sister Ping? Did he trade his wife’s freedom for his
own? The answer may never be known: everyone involved in the case, including the judge who delivered Yick Tak’s sentence, is adamant that the nature of his cooperation must never be disclosed. But having been named in the original indictment with Sister Ping back in 1994, and having worked with her as a cash courier and junior partner throughout her criminal career, Yick Tak got off with a conspicuously light sentence of eighteen months. In Bill McMurry’s view, Yick Tak “got a very good deal.”

The trial took four weeks. “Sister Ping sat atop a smuggling empire that she herself had built over the course of almost two decades from the ground up,” Leslie Brown, one of the government lawyers, said in her summation. “By the end of her long run, Sister Ping was at the apex of an international empire, a conglomerate built upon misery and greed.”

In his closing arguments, Hochheiser invoked the Arthur Miller play
The Crucible
, about the witch trials in Salem. Most of his indignation seemed to be directed at Ah Kay. “He ordered murders,” Hochheiser catalogued. “One beating that we heard about, ten ordered beatings, ten to twenty robberies, forty to fifty extortions, two arsons, a thousand alien smugglings, one racketeering, one gun possession, one parole violation, tax evasion, and fake passports.” Hochheiser was a veteran defense attorney, but even he seemed sincerely impressed by the length of Ah Kay’s rap sheet. “That’s one of your main witnesses!” he exclaimed.

O
n June 22, after five days of deliberation, the jury members sent a note to Judge Mukasey saying that they had “come to an impasse” on count two, the hostage-taking charge. Hochheiser promptly requested a mistrial on that count, suggesting that Mukasey not resubmit it to the jury. He feared that when the jurors left the courthouse each day, they were being exposed to a barrage of negative publicity surrounding the case. It was true that the local newspapers in New York were painting
an unflattering portrait of Sister Ping and suggesting that she had somehow been the ringleader behind the
Golden Venture
incident. It could not have helped that during the trial, in an unrelated incident, a restaurant worker from New Jersey had been gunned down at Sister Ping’s restaurant on East Broadway.

Hochheiser was especially troubled by a front-page story and accompanying editorial in the
Daily News
, which, he noted, “may be the most popular paper in the city.”

“They will be relieved to hear that,” Judge Mukasey deadpanned.

The headline in the
News
was “Evil Incarnate.”

But if Sister Ping was demonized in the mainstream New York press, she was lionized in Chinatown. Copies of the city’s Chinese-language dailies sold out at newsstands throughout the trial. There was a great upswell of sympathy in the neighborhood, where Sister Ping was widely regarded as someone who had provided a service, lifting a generation of people out of dead-end lives of rural poverty. The
World Journal
reported that in Sister Ping’s home village of Shengmei, people were volunteering to do jail time on her behalf. They described her as a “living Buddha.” Ninety percent of the villagers now lived overseas and had managed to leave China through the good offices of Sister Ping. The remaining residents prepared a petition to send to Judge Mukasey, requesting lenience in her case.

To be sure, there was diversity of opinion among Fujianese in both China and the United States on the subject of the famous snakehead, but the prevailing attitude in Chinatown was that while she may have broken laws, her crimes were essentially victimless, and were ultimately justified in terms of the prosperity they created for her customers. “My sister was just thinking of helping others,” the snakehead’s younger sister, Susan, said from her home in New Jersey. “How would she know it would get her in trouble?” Chinatown residents made frequent, if somewhat inapt, comparisons between Sister Ping and Robin Hood. “She is even better than Robin Hood,” one supporter said. “Sister Ping never stole anything, and still helped the poor. She is a good person.”

After spending so many years pursuing Sister Ping, Konrad Motyka and Bill McMurry were frustrated that the Fujianese in Chinatown could not appreciate the extent to which the snakehead had exploited them. When the agents went into the community to talk to potential witnesses about testifying against her, they met with a great deal of resistance. “I don’t want to be known as the one person who testified against Sister Ping,” people would tell them. “It’s going to hurt my business. It’s going to hurt my family.” It wasn’t simply that people feared revenge from Sister Ping; they feared the kind of social stigma that would attach to anyone who turned on so popular an icon of the Fujianese community.

“There are people who are going to say, ‘Sister Ping is the greatest thing in the world, because she brought me here,’” Motyka said. “‘I’ve been able to support my family. I now own my own restaurant. This is my version of the American dream.’ But there’s an equal number of people who drowned in the surf, or women who were raped by the gangs, or people who were shot in the head. Those people aren’t going to have as positive a view of her.” To the Robin Hood comparison, Motyka and McMurry replied, almost in unison, “Robin Hood never made forty million dollars.”

For Justin Yu, a Chinatown journalist who covered both the legal proceedings and the response in the neighborhood and went on to write a book in Chinese about Sister Ping, the two different pictures of the snakehead represented a much deeper philosophical rift that separated those who grew up in China during the twentieth century and those who were born in the United States. What you thought about Sister Ping depended at least in part on the value you attached to a single human life and on how that value factored into a larger calculation of possible benefits and possible risks. “In China, a human’s life isn’t worth ten pennies,” Yu explained. “Ten thousand people come and one hundred people die? Bad luck. If they make it, their families get rich. Their
villages
get rich.”

So for American-born prosecutors and members of the press to focus
on the ten dead from the
Golden Venture
, or on the hazards and depredations of the journey, was to miss the point, and to indulge in a conception of the preciousness of human life and the primacy of physical comforts that would be foreign to the Fujianese because it would render almost any risk untenable. Sister Ping’s business was inherently risky, and her clients understood those risks and accepted them. The key to understanding the snakehead trade was the concept of “acceptable risk,” Yu concluded. “Acceptable risk, acceptable cruelty, acceptable lousy treatment, acceptable long trip, there’s no toilet. It’s
acceptable
. Because of the comparison: the life there, and the life here.”

After several days of further deliberation, the jury returned a verdict. They found Sister Ping guilty of conspiracy, trafficking in ransom proceeds, and one count of money laundering. The jurors remained hung on the hostage-taking charge. As the verdict was read, Sister Ping betrayed no emotion, her face expressionless. But she may have been masking her surprise. Throughout the trial she had been housed at a prison in Brooklyn, and according to other inmates who met her there, she would sometimes gather her belongings and announce that she was preparing to return home, because any day she would be free.

The press took little notice of it, but the jury acquitted Sister Ping of count four, the money-laundering charge related to her wiring the funds for the purchase of the
Golden Venture
. She was cleared of the only charge that actually linked her to the ship. But it made little difference. The name and face of Sister Ping would always be synonymous with the voyage.