'Mother of all snakeheads' faces accusers

May 17, 2005

Cheng ... her lawayer accused witnesses of making "deals with the devil".

A petite, middle-aged woman, her dark hair streaked with grey, is the "Mother of All Snakeheads" who brought thousands of Chinese illegally into America on hellish ships and used violent gangs to hold them hostage, a US prosecutor said.
Human trafficking by Cheng Chui Ping, 56, also known as "Sister Ping", has been linked to major shipments of illegal immigrants in which more than 20 people died, Assistant US Attorney David Burns said at the woman's federal trial in Manhattan.
Cheng is also accused of laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars from the smuggling operations and using some of the money to finance the 1992 voyage of a rickety freighter, Golden Venture, which carried 300 illegal Chinese immigrants.
The ship ran aground off New York in June 1993 and 10 people drowned while trying to swim ashore. The tragedy sparked global concern over human trafficking.
If convicted, Cheng faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The title of "Mother of all Snakeheads" stems from accusations that she headed a human trafficking operation that can be traced back to the 1980s, Mr Burns said.

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Over the years, she rose "to become one of the most powerful and one of the most successful aliens smugglers of our day", he said.
"This is a case about the brutal business of smuggling human beings into the United States for profit. Sister Ping promised hope and prosperity but she only delivered misery and suffering while fattening her purse."
The term snakehead is a slur meaning "alien smuggler", typically from China into Hong Kong. It stems from an image of slithering from point to point along clandestine routes.
Mr Burns said those smuggled were mostly from China. They were crammed into ships where their life at sea was a "nightmarish hell" and confined to "dungeon-like conditions" where one bathroom served hundreds of people.
After arriving in the US, they were turned over to a violent street gang and held until family members could pay smuggling debts that could run as high as $65,800.
Mr Burns said prosecution witnesses would include some of those gang members.
Lawrence Hochheiser, Cheng's lawyer, said he would try to discredit those witnesses and accused the Government of making "deals with the devil" by promising gang members lighter sentences in return for testifying.
"Murderers were hired to give you testimony in this case ... they have killed people in the coldest blood you have ever seen," he said.
Cheng, a native of China who lived in New York City from the early 1980s until 1993, was first indicted by a federal grand jury in 1994. She fled the country but was arrested in Hong Kong in April 2000 after a five-year manhunt and extradited to stand trial in New York.