The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (49 page)

In Fuzhou and Changle the debts really begin to multiply, and acknowledgment is complicated slightly by the fact that the individual who acted both as mentor and as fixer, and opened doors that I wouldn’t have known even to knock on, has asked that he not be thanked by name. But an everlasting thanks to Dr. Tang and to Dr. Li, to Lin Li and her husband, to Jiang Huo Jin in Tingjiang, Fang Meng Rong in Fuqing, Zheng Kai Qu in Changle, and Song Lin, of Yingyu village, who showed me around Ah Kay’s hometown with such good cheer that I was reluctant to ask if he was any relation to the Song You Lin from the beeper store on Allen Street. Driving in China is an adventure, and I’m certain I owe my life, along with a newfound taste for sugarcane, to the irrepressible Cheng Wei. A special thanks also to Ben Ross, an American who moved to Fuqing and Fuzhou after college, started an excellent blog, and gave me a terrific rundown on what to look for before I left.

But my greatest debt in both Chinatown and China is to that aforementioned individual who did not want to be named. He did ask that rather than thank him, I honor his grandmother, a woman I never had the privilege of meeting but whose advice—that you should never see the world through the hole in a coin—he relayed to me, and I often have occasion to remember. I honor her here.

As a non-Chinese, and a non-Chinese-speaker, I was reminded on a daily basis of my own limitations, and of the fact that I was ultimately a guest in a culture that was not my own. I would not have been able to write this book without the unflagging assistance of interpreters, who helped me navigate interviews in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Fujianese and provided a crash course in appropriate custom and etiquette. Many thanks to Fei Mei Chan and Lily Lau in New York, and to Sammi Yuan and Jinhua Zhang in China.

At
The New Yorker
, I owe a great debt to Daniel Zalewski, for assigning the original article about Sister Ping, along with David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, Emily Eaken, and Raffi Khatchadourian. Thanks also, and especially, to Andrea Thompson. At
Slate
, I’d like to thank Jacob Weisberg and June Thomas for running a three-part series based on my trip to Fuzhou.

I am extraordinarily lucky to have found an editor with the cool, precise mind and affable, unflappable manner of Bill Thomas. From our first conversation, working with Bill has been a pleasure and an education. At Doubleday I’m also grateful to Melissa Danaczko, Nicole Dewey Emily Mahon, and Rachel Lapal. As ever, I feel profound gratitude to the peerless Tina Bennett, agent, advocate, and friend, who more or less exhausts positive superlatives. Thanks also to Svetlana Katz, Cecile Barendsma, and everyone else at Janklow & Nesbit. A tip of the hat as well to Howie Sanders at UTA, who has been a supporter of this project from our first conversation about it in 2005, and also to Jason Burns.

A good portion of the research for
The Snakehead
was made possible by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and I am deeply indebted to Edward Hirsh and everyone else at the foundation for affording me that remarkable opportunity.

Since 2006 I have found a professional home at the Century Foundation, a progressive policy think tank with a venerable history that operates out of a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My gratitude and appreciation go to Richard Leone, Greg Anrig, Jr., Carol Starmack, and Jeff Laurenti for supporting the work I am doing and giving
me the opportunity to research and write in the company of such a stimulating group of colleagues. Several generations of Century interns and program assistants have helped me with the book in various ways, and I’d like to thank Alex Kendall, Matt Homer, Emerson Sykes, Emily O’Brien, Jasmine Clerisme, Niko Karvounis, and especially Laura Jaramillo and Hummy Song. Thanks also to Christy Hicks, Laurie Ahlrich, Cynthia Maertz, and everyone else at Century.

Michael Auerbach, Michael Hanna, Carl Robichaud, Tim Riemann, Marisa Pearl, Nat Kreamer, Melanie Rehak, Jean Strouse, Craig Winters, Milosz Gudzowski, Danielle Lurie, Daniel Squadron, and Sai Sriskandarajah all helped in ways large and small. Thanks to Linda Barth and her ESL students at Lower East Side Prep, who studied the original Sister Ping article and helped me see the story with fresh eyes. Thanks also to SCSW, albeit in absentia, for supplying an Allen Street anecdote, and for much else besides.

As ever, I’m humbled by the debt I owe to my parents, Jennifer Radden and Frank Keefe, who read through numerous early drafts and offered astute advice. While I’m at it, I figure I should take this opportunity to thank my uncle, Jim Keefe, on the off-chance that if I do, he’ll stop ribbing me for failing to thank him last time. My brother, Tristram, and my sister, Beatrice, are both writers themselves, and on an almost daily basis I turn to one or the other of them for guidance, advice, or inspiration. Thanks also, of course, to Mr. Chopes.

But most of all, this is for Justyna. From the beginning she has supported my decision to waste a perfectly good legal education and devote myself to writing instead—indeed, it was practically her idea. We were married about a year after I started spending time in Chinatown, and she sacrificed an overdue vacation for a research trip to Thailand. (When I brightly suggested that she look up the charming resort of Pattaya in her guidebook, she flipped to the relevant page and read aloud, “A haven for sex tourists, long blighted by overdevelopment…”) Justyna read the book as it was being written, in thousand-word installments, and has lived with the story for three long years.
The Snakehead
is dedicated to her.

A Note on Sources

THIS BOOK is primarily based on over three hundred interviews conducted between 2005 and 2008 with FBI agents, police officers, immigration investigators, attorneys, White House officials,
Golden Venture
passengers, Chinatown residents and community leaders, and individuals who have worked in the snakehead trade. I also made substantial use of thousands of pages of court transcripts from numerous trials, internal government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and the records from law enforcement wiretaps and interviews with various criminal suspects.

The vast majority of the people who spoke with me for the book agreed to do so on the record, but in a handful of cases individuals who are still working in government and were speaking without official authorization, or who feared some form of retribution if they spoke with me and then were cited by name, requested that I preserve their anonymity.

No dialogue or scenes are invented, and I have adhered faithfully to the chronology of the events as they actually occurred. If a line is rendered in quotation marks, it is drawn from either a court or a wiretap transcript, or from the recollection of an individual who was present when the words were spoken; in the occasional instances when I attribute thoughts to characters, I do so because they expressed those thoughts either to me or to some other interviewer or during a trial, or because they conveyed the thoughts to someone else with whom I have subsequently spoken.

In many instances the events in the narrative unfolded more than a decade before my conversations with those who went through them, and throughout my reporting I endeavored to correct for the little distortions that our fallible memories can occasionally introduce. Most of the major sources were interviewed multiple times, and wherever possible I tried to corroborate one source’s memory of an event with the recollections of another source who experienced it as well. I was also fortunate to uncover vast reams of transcripts and interviews and incident reports in which various people expressed their memories of events on paper mere weeks or even hours after the events unfolded.

Access inevitably drives narrative in any heavily reported piece of writing, and I should note here that if Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been as accommodating in providing me with access as the FBI, the DA’s office, and the NYPD were, the book would have balanced the close focus on the investigation of the FBI with an examination of the important work done by the INS and ICE. While ICE did offer some cooperation, that cooperation was both grudging and limited. As a consequence I was obliged to track down former INS officials and current ICE employees who would speak to me only anonymously because they were doing so without authorization. This system worked well enough, and once word got out that I was pursuing the project, people who had worked on Chinese smuggling over the years had a way of emerging from the woodwork and finding me. But I’m keenly aware that for the many law enforcement officials who actually lived and worked these cases, there will be certain glaring lacunae in this book. If the names of some individuals who did their jobs with dedication and valor are not mentioned here, it is largely because ICE, for whatever reasons of its own, did not want this story to be told.

In the summer of 2008, Sister Ping agreed to meet me for an interview, but despite my best efforts and those of her attorney, Scott Tulman, we were unable to persuade the warden at FCI Danbury to allow me to enter the prison for a face-to-face meeting. (The warden’s rationale, if you can call it that, was that such a visit might jeopardize the “security situation” at the facility.) As an alternative, Sister Ping agreed to an exchange of written questions and answers, from which I have drawn extensively in the book.

Finally, despite the considerable original reporting that forms the heart of this account, I would not have been able to undertake the project without the groundbreaking work of a number of journalists and academics who have written extensively on the subjects of human smuggling, asylum and immigration law, transnational organized crime, and the history of the Chinese in America. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the work of these individuals, whose particular articles, books, and documentary films are cited fully in the notes that follow.

Notes

CHAPTER 1: PILGRIMS

Apart from interviews with individuals who were on the beach at Rockaway on June 6, 1993, and press accounts of the events in question, this chapter is based primarily on an extensive trove of criminal incident reports filled out by a dozen members of the United States Park Police who took part in the rescue. I obtained these handwritten reports through a Freedom of Information Act request, and in painstaking detail the officers set forth the story of what happened, from the first radio call at 1:46 A.M. until the last of the passengers had left the beach. Because these reports were written within days, and sometimes hours, of the events in question, they have a vivid immediacy and accuracy that are not always possible to achieve through interviews conducted with individuals today, who are recalling events that took place fifteen years ago. Another valuable source in creating the narrative account of events was a large archive of raw footage taken both at the beach and in the triage stations at Floyd Bennett Field by camera crews for
CBS Evening News
.

1
Dating back to the War of 1812:
The earliest recorded military fortification to be built on the peninsula was known as a “blockhouse” and was constructed during the War of 1812. Fort Tilden was formally established in 1917. On the various installations at Fort Tilden, see Corey Kilgannon, “To the Battlements, and Take Sunscreen: The Joys of Fort Tilden,”
New York Times
, July 21, 2006.

1
“Rockaway” derives from:
Henry Isham Hazelton,
The Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, Counties of Nassau and Suffolk, Long Island, New York, 1609–1924
, Vol. 1 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1925), p. 1011.

1.
At a quarter to two:
Where not other wise indicated, the account of Divivier’s and Somma’s involvement in the rescue is drawn from supplemental criminal incident reports filed with the United States Park Police by Steven Divivier and David Somma on June 7, 1993, and June 19, 1993.

2.
At thirty, Divivier:
Kevin McLaughlin and Bill Hoffman, “Chilling Screams Alerted 1st Rescuers,”
New York Post
, June 7, 1993; Patrice O’Shaughnessy, “News Honors Cops’ Venture,”
New York Daily News
, September 27, 1993.

2
At 98.5 percent white:
David M. Herszenhorn, “Breezy Point, Queens—
Bounded by Gates, Over a Toll Bridge,”
New York Times
, June 18, 2001.

2
The Breezy Point police force:
Elaine Sciolino, “A Cooperative on the Beach Loves Privacy,”
New York Times
, September 10, 1984.

2.
To Somma they sounded desperate:
Jim Dwyer, “Desperate Hours,”
Newsday
, June 7, 1993; Charles Hirshberg, “Folded Dreams,”
Life
, July 1996.

3.
Realizing that they couldn’t do the rescue:
McLaughlin and Hoffman, “Chilling Screams Alerted 1st Rescuers.”

3.
Charlie Wells, a tall:
Unless otherwise noted, the account of Charles Wells’s experience of the rescue is drawn from an interview with Wells on February 22, 2007.

4.
Three off-duty Park Service officers:
Supplemental criminal incident reports filed with the U.S. Park Police by Steven Divivier and David Somma on June 7, 1993, and June 19, 1993.

5.
They flung their arms:
Supplemental criminal incident report, P.O. B. Smith, June 30, 1993.

5
The men relied on their flashlights:
Supplemental criminal incident report, P. Broderick, June 20, 1993.

5
But the flashlights began:
Supplemental criminal incident report, Sgt. J. A. Lauro, November 5, 1993.

5
“We entered the water”:
Supplemental criminal incident report, P. Broderick, June 20, 1993.

5.
Those who were too tired:
Details in this paragraph are drawn from supple mental criminal incident report, P.O. M. Lanfranchi, June 19, 1993.