APRIL 24, 2006 ISSUE

The Snakehead

BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE 

  

Several hours before dawn on June 6, 1993, two Park Service police officers were patrolling the road next to Jacob Riis Park, a long stretch of beach on the Rockaway peninsula, in Queens, when they were startled by two Asian men flagging them down. As the officers got out of their car, they heard the sound of screams coming from the beach. The moon was full, and about a hundred yards offshore the officers saw a hundred-and-fifty-foot tramp steamer that had run aground. The ship’s deck was crowded with people, and, as the officers watched, men and women jumped over the side, falling twenty feet into the surging waves below. Dozens of figures bobbed in the water, some managing to clamber ashore, others flailing wildly, apparently unable to swim. The officers radioed for backup.

The ship’s name, stencilled in white block letters on the bow, was the Golden Venture. Its cargo was nearly three hundred illegal Chinese emigrants. Before reaching the Rockaways, the ship had sailed some seventeen thousand miles, from Thailand to Kenya, around the Cape of Good Hope, then across the Atlantic to New York.

The passengers—mostly adults, but a few children—were emaciated. They had been confined in the ship’s hold for months, subsisting on rice, peanuts, and purified salt water. It had been uncomfortably hot, and many passengers wore only underwear; when they hit the water, which was fifty-three degrees, some went into cardiac arrest. One Coast Guard officer who performed CPR on two men onshore recalled, “I could feel the gristle of their bodies, the cartilage. They walked up out of the water, collapsed on the beach, and died.”

Six bodies were recovered from the surf; four others were found later. By dawn, news helicopters were capturing live footage of the disaster. The Golden Venture accident was not an isolated incident: in the preceding year, more than a dozen ships had dropped human cargo from China on American shores. In April, a ship called the Mermaid 1, carrying two hundred and thirty-seven illegal Chinese, had been intercepted by the Coast Guard near the Bahamas. In May, the Pai Sheng had slipped beneath the Golden Gate Bridge at night, depositing two hundred and fifty passengers on a San Francisco pier. An internal Department of Justice report declared an “immigration emergency”; the San Francisco Chronicle heralded a “ SMUGGLER SHIP INVASION .”

Several miles from the beach, in a small shop at 47 East Broadway, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a middle-aged woman named Cheng Chui Ping watched the story unfold on television. Short and stout, with cropped black hair, wide-set dark eyes, and a hangdog expression, she was known in the neighborhood as Ping Jia—Sister Ping. Her gruff demeanor and simple clothes gave her the appearance of a Chinese peasant; she had little formal education, spoke almost no English, and spent most of her waking hours managing the shop, which sold clothes and goods from China, and a restaurant in the basement. But Sister Ping was also an extraordinarily wealthy businesswoman who owned the restaurant and the shop, as well as the building that housed them. She was what the Chinese call a shetou, or “snakehead”—an underworld entrepreneur who charges tens of thousands of dollars to shepherd undocumented migrants from one country to another. She helped purchase the Golden Venture, and two of its passengers owed her fees. One of them had died.

Last summer, twelve years after the Golden Venture ran aground, Sister Ping—now fifty-six, and a grandmother—was tried in a federal courtroom in New York City. She became the twenty-third person to be convicted in connection with the voyage. Described by the authorities as “the mother of all snakeheads,” she was charged with operating what prosecutors called “a conglomerate built upon misery and greed.” Moving people illegally from one country to another requires an extensive network of international contacts and an ability to outwit immigration and law-enforcement officers. With a well-connected family, acute entrepreneurial instincts, and a callous, life-is-cheap attitude toward the poor migrants who were her customers, Sister Ping was well suited to the job. Working with associates in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Belize, Kenya, South Africa, Guatemala, Mexico, and Canada, she helped create the China-to-Chinatown route in the early nineteen-eighties and ushered thousands of undocumented Chinese emigrants to America. According to the F.B.I., over the course of two decades she made some forty million dollars.

Not long ago, I visited a man named Michael Chen, who arrived in America on the Golden Venture and had agreed to talk with me about the journey. Chen is now thirty-two. He is short and slight, with a boyish face and thick, expressive eyebrows. We met in the spotless Chinese restaurant that he owns in a strip mall in suburban Columbus, Ohio; in the lull between lunch and dinner, he related his ordeal.

The first Chinese who came to America, in the mid - nineteenth century, originated from a few counties on the Pearl River delta, around the southern city of Guangzhou. Michael Chen was part of another great wave of emigrants, who came from a series of villages along the Min River in Fujian Province, a mountainous sliver of coast across the straits from Taiwan.

Chen grew up outside Fuzhou, the regional capital. His father was a produce farmer who fished at night to supplement his income. Several of his uncles had gained entry to New York in the nineteen-eighties by paying snakeheads. These smugglers had emerged during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when many mainland Chinese were fleeing to Hong Kong, which was then still in British hands. At Sister Ping’s trial, one Fujianese snakehead explained that when smuggled emigrants slither through the wire fences strung along borders “the shape of it looks like a snake.”

The Fujianese (sometimes called Fukienese) had various reasons for leaving home—what demographers call “push factors”—ranging from political repression to China’s policies of sterilization and forced abortion. But interviews with numerous Fujianese who entered the United States illegally indicate that many were prompted by the “pull factor” of America’s capitalist system. “In their life here, they’re working like slaves, but there is hope for them to change everything,” said Justin Yu, a veteran reporter for the World Journal, a Chinese-language daily. “But over there, for a fisherman? For a farmer with a little piece of land? They’ll never change their life.”

As a teen-ager, Michael Chen was admitted to a school for talented children, but a local Party official stole Chen’s identity in order to enroll his son. Provincial Party bosses govern more or less unchecked in Fujian, and soon afterward, in 1991, when Chen was sixteen, his parents borrowed enough money to make a five-thousand-dollar down payment to a local “little snakehead”—a recruiter who drums up business for “big snakeheads.” The total fee was thirty thousand dollars, with the balance due upon Chen’s safe arrival in America. Chinese snakeheads had Bangkok immigration officials on the payroll, and furnished their clients with “photo-sub” passports, which required only the substitution of the passenger’s picture. “They told us, ‘Easy: you just go on the bus, or motorcycle, to Thailand,’ ” Chen told me with a bitter smile. “ ‘In Thailand, maybe one week or two weeks, they will arrange you by plane to the U.S.A.’ ”

During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the demography of New York’s Chinatown was changing significantly. The 1960 census showed twenty thousand Chinese living in the city; by the mid-eighties, the population had swelled to more than two hundred thousand. The arriving Fujianese settled on Chinatown’s grubby eastern frontier—along East Broadway, under the Manhattan Bridge, and on Eldridge and Division Streets—and established restaurants and small businesses. As soon as a new arrival paid off his snakehead debt (which often took years), he began saving money to bring over another family member. In this manner, whole clans made the journey, and, eventually, entire villages. Men of working age abandoned once-bustling rural Chinese communities. Emigrants who prospered sent money back for the construction of multistory houses, which rose incongruously from the rice paddies—monuments to the filial loyalty of “overseas Chinese.” In status-conscious small towns, this inspired other villagers to emigrate, and within several years many of the houses emptied out—becoming lavish, tenantless temples to the good life in America.

New York’s established Cantonese community saw the Fujianese as strivers and peasants. The Fujianese dialect is incomprehensible to Cantonese and Mandarin speakers, so the fledgling community was doubly isolated—a ghetto within a ghetto. East Broadway became known as “Fuzhou Street,” and the Chinatown shorthand for new arrivals was “eighteen-thousand-dollar men,” after the snakehead rate in the eighties.

Some of the Cantonese disapproval stemmed from the fact that the influx of Fujianese coincided with a rise in violent crime in the neighborhood. Chinatown had long been home to street gangs, which managed illegal gambling and massage parlors and extorted money from local businesses. But during the eighties a new kind of gang emerged which was conspicuously more violent.

These gangs embraced human smuggling, initially by working as strongmen for sophisticated international syndicates. Illegal migrants typically have a grace period of two or three days after arriving in America, and borrow a large sum of money to pay their snakeheads—thereby indenturing themselves to friends, family, or loan sharks. The gangs began holding delinquent arrivals hostage, occasionally beating, torturing, or raping them when they failed to come up with the money. Soon the gangsters established their own smuggling networks. “It was a better business than drug trafficking,” Steven Wong, a Fujianese community leader in Chinatown, told me. “More profit. Less risk. You get caught and plead guilty right away, you only go to jail for six months.” He added, “Another thing is, your merchandise can walk.”

The snakehead trade was further fuelled by changes in U.S. immigration policy. A 1986 federal law declared that green-card status could be provided for undocumented aliens who demonstrated that they had lived in the country since 1982 or earlier. This policy was surprisingly useful to those who had not yet left China, as neighborhood businesses could forge backdated records to satisfy the residency requirement. After the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, President George H. W. Bush issued one executive order granting amnesty to Chinese students in the United States and another giving “enhanced consideration” to asylum applications from Chinese nationals who resisted the country’s family-planning policies. These orders effectively meant that any Chinese adult could be classified as a refugee. According to Peter Kwong, a professor at Hunter College and an authority on American Chinatowns, the largest influx of illegal Chinese in the country’s history entered the United States between 1988 and 1993. A United Nations study estimated that by the mid-nineties the snakehead trade from China to the United States was a three-and-a-half-billion-dollar industry.

Among emigrant Chinese in New York, Sister Ping is widely revered both as an immigrant success story and as an extraordinarily capable professional. “The Fujianese thank two people: one is Cheng Chui Ping, and one is George Bush the father,” Philip Lam, a Chinatown real-estate agent who emigrated in the nineteen-eighties, told me. Even as she became more powerful within the neighborhood, Sister Ping cultivated a modest image, avoiding any gaudy trappings of success and working hours that were considered long even in Chinatown. Although she had learned little English during her years in America, she encouraged young Chinatown residents to study the language, arguing that it was an important precondition for success. She developed a tendency to refer to herself in the third person.

This was perhaps understandable: Chinatown residents describe the name “Sister Ping” as an international brand. It is taken for granted that people-smuggling is a perilous business, and that some level of failure is inevitable even for the best brokers—so much so that the disaster which befell the Golden Venture did not particularly diminish Sister Ping’s reputation. In fact, she handled accidents in a way that drew more customers: when passengers were caught by immigration officials, she would forgive the balance of her fee; when passengers died, she paid for their burial. Sister Ping’s name became so highly esteemed that other snakeheads fraudulently claimed to be affiliated with her in order to attract business.

Cheng Chui Ping was born in 1949, in the Fujianese farming village of Shengmei; according to the authorities, her father was rumored to be a prominent snakehead. She married a fisherman from a neighboring village, Cheng Yick Tak. In the nineteen-seventies, the couple left China for Hong Kong, where Sister Ping opened a convenience store and gained a reputation as a clever businesswoman. They had four children. In 1981, she went to the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong to apply for a visa, saying that she wished to work in America as a housekeeper. A consular official asked why she wanted to go to America to be a servant. She told him that as a child in school she had learned that the United States was “a civilized country,” and that “one could make a living” there. She explained, “It’s for the sake of my children’s future that I am willing to be a servant.”

It is unclear whether the visa was granted, or how she made it to the United States, but shortly after her interview Sister Ping entered the country—leaving her husband and young children behind. Upon arriving in New York, she opened a small variety store on Hester Street, and sent for her family. Chinatown’s Fujianese community was still new, and the shop became a gathering place for displaced villagers.

During her first years in the city, Sister Ping established a remittance business that helped emigrants send money back to China. Her network of associates in Fujian was so extensive that a New York waiter could bring her a thousand dollars, pay her a ten-dollar commission, and be certain that the next day someone would travel by motorbike to his mother’s remote village and deliver the Chinese cash equivalent to her door. Immigrants who worked in the restaurants and garment factories of New York tended to live frugally and send most of their earnings home, and Sister Ping’s service was often cheaper and faster than the Bank of China.

At the same time, Sister Ping began developing her smuggling operation. Initially, it was a meticulously run family business. During her trial, it emerged that one of her sisters met passengers in Hong Kong, provided them with false documents, and took them shopping, so that they would look more like international travellers. Her brother managed a staging post in Guatemala; her husband ferried the large amounts of cash that the family had accumulated out of the country; and Sister Ping met new arrivals in California and escorted them to New York. In 1984, when a young Fujianese man, Weng Yu Hui, wanted to come to America, he had a relative get in touch with Sister Ping, who arranged for him to travel from China to Mexico. He and several others hid in the false floor of a truck and were driven to Los Angeles, where Sister Ping was waiting for them. “Congratulations,” she told the group. “You have arrived in the United States.” She took them to Los Angeles International Airport and flew with them to Newark, sitting several rows away.

As demand for her services grew, Sister Ping was unable to supervise the process as carefully as she had originally. She began to subcontract her operations to various freelancers and affiliates, some of whom were not particularly reliable. In January, 1989, a Canadian snakehead loaded four passengers—one of them a six-year-old Chinese girl—onto a flimsy vinyl raft on the Niagara River so that they could row across to the United States. The raft sank, and all four passengers drowned. U.S. authorities recovered a phone number on one of the bodies, which they eventually connected to Sister Ping’s husband. No definite link to Sister Ping was ever established, but officials have long believed that she was behind the operation. Cheng Yick Tak, her husband, is meek by temperament, and “kind of married into a smuggling family,” one official told me; over the course of two decades of smuggling activity, he never acted alone.

Even before the Niagara River incident, Canadian authorities had begun investigating the emerging cross-border smuggling trade. In the spring of 1989, a small-time Canadian criminal named Terry Honesburger, who had befriended snakeheads while working at a Chinese restaurant, agreed to help an undercover member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police set up a sting. Honesburger and the Canadian cop, Larry Hay, went to Toronto International Airport and stood by a bank of pay phones. After a few minutes, Sister Ping approached, wearing a gray knit sports jacket and looking impatient. “What took you?” she demanded, in broken English. With her were four Chinese people: two men, a pregnant woman, and a teen-age girl in a brown leather jacket.

“Are all four to go?” Hay asked her.

“No,” she said, indicating the teen-ager. “This one is my daughter.”

Sister Ping slid several hundred dollars into a newspaper and handed it to Hay, with the understanding that he and Honesburger would drive the passengers over the border. Several months later, she was arrested in connection with the incident, and pleaded guilty to alien smuggling in Buffalo Federal Court, claiming that the pregnant woman was her cousin. She told the judge, “With my Chinese family background, I had to give family loyalty high priority.”

Sister Ping was sentenced to six months in prison in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Her lack of English isolated her from the guards and inmates. When the F.B.I. sent a young Chinese-American agent, Peter Lee, to Pennsylvania to see if she would coöperate in exchange for a reduced sentence, she immediately agreed and happily provided Lee with details about various adversaries in Chinatown’s underworld. After serving four months, she was released.

Back in Chinatown, Sister Ping continued to meet Lee periodically and give him information. Lee estimates that they met in person more than ten times. They grew close enough that, when one of Sister Ping’s daughters was engaged to be married, Lee was invited to the wedding. When, in 1992, the F.B.I. discovered that Sister Ping was still involved in smuggling, the agency terminated the relationship.

The F.B.I.’s New York field office occupies several floors of a federal building in downtown Manhattan, not far from Fujianese East Broadway. I went there recently to see agents Konrad Motyka and Bill McMurray, who oversaw the bureau’s decade-long investigation of Sister Ping’s organization. We met in a small conference room. Motyka is forty-two and formidably built, with a clipped mustache and small, intense eyes. He started working on Asian organized crime in the early nineteen-nineties. At about this time, he said, Sister Ping joined forces with a brutal criminal group: the Fuk Ching gang. Although she had no history of violence, her decision suggested a willingness to make almost any concession for the sake of her business, which had begun to resemble an empire. (She had recently purchased the five-story brick building at 47 East Broadway for a reported three million dollars.)

The leader of the Fuk Ching was a charismatic young murderer named Guo Liang Qi, who was better known as Ah Kay. Short but muscular, with a pompadour of black hair, Ah Kay left Fujian in 1981 and was smuggled to Los Angeles via Ecuador. He then made his way to New York, where he joined the fledgling gang. Fuk Ching is an abbreviation of Fukien Chingnian —“young Fujianese”—and many of the members were teen-agers. In March, 1984, a superior ordered Ah Kay to kill an insubordinate colleague. It was the first of five murders to which he pleaded guilty a decade later.

Fuk Ching gang members wore black, streaked their hair with bright colors, and loitered on street corners in black BMWs. “They would always be in knots of three or four, like mushrooms,” Motyka told me. “They weren’t around in the daytime, but as soon as the sun started going they’d sort of sprout out of the storefronts and the restaurants.” Wary of shakedowns, they had girlfriends hold their guns in backpacks, but their preferred weapons for street violence were knives, hammers, and ice picks.

In 1985, Ah Kay, then a Dai Ma , or low-level leader, in the gang, encountered Sister Ping for the first time. He and several others robbed her house, holding her daughter at gunpoint. They didn’t find as much cash as Ah Kay had hoped, and some months later he sent several followers to rob the house again. This time they found twenty thousand dollars stashed in the fridge. (In Sister Ping’s 2005 trial, a prosecutor asked the jury to consider “whether a legitimate businesswoman keeps her profits in her refrigerator.”)

Shortly afterward, in March, 1986, Ah Kay was convicted on an unrelated count of attempted grand larceny. He served two and a half years in prison, and was deported to China, but he soon returned, pursuing a typically circuitous route, from Hong Kong to Thailand to Belize to Mexico to Guatemala, and, finally, to San Diego. Remarkably, in 1991, Ah Kay, who had committed multiple homicides, was granted political asylum in the United States. By that time, he had become a snakehead and the leader of the Fuk Ching gang.

“My underlings were in China,” Ah Kay later testified. “They recruited aliens who wanted to come. They then shipped those people to Thailand.” As demand grew, the snakeheads could not channel people through Thailand quickly enough. The influx of Chinese passengers arriving at J.F.K. from Thailand with false documents prompted a crackdown by the authorities at the Bangkok airport.

At this point, Chinese snakeheads shifted their operations to the sea. According to Ko-lin Chin, a criminologist at Rutgers University who has interviewed dozens of snakeheads, ships were first used on the short trip from Fujian Province to Taiwan, but longer routes quickly emerged. As Chin explained, the ships made economic sense, since hundreds of passengers could be moved at once, without the need for plane tickets or forged documents.

Ah Kay developed a particular specialty: as the ships approached the coast of America—still safely in international waters—he dispatched fishing boats, piloted by Vietnamese fishermen and manned by Fuk Ching strongmen, to meet them. “Off-loading” was a crude and dangerous affair. “The two boats got closer to one another,” Ah Kay later explained. “The fishing boat was very small; the big boat was rather big. So we would wait until the big wave rise and then, you know, the level of the fishing boat came up and . . . the people from the big boat would jump over to the small boat.” In rough seas, people occasionally fell short and clung to the smaller boat, running the risk of being crushed when the two boats slammed together.

In the summer of 1992, one of Sister Ping’s business partners visited Ah Kay at his apartment, on Hester Street, telling him that Sister Ping had heard of his success with boats and could use his expertise. Ah Kay said that he would be happy to collaborate, and, some time later, he received a phone call from Sister Ping. He immediately apologized for the burglaries.

“That’s what happened in the past,” Sister Ping replied. “We’re talking business now.”

A boat was due to arrive soon, and Sister Ping offered to pay him seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to off-load it. A few weeks later, Ah Kay’s men met the ship, off the coast of Massachusetts. There were more than a hundred passengers, and the gang transported them to shore, loaded them into U-Haul trucks, and drove them to a Brooklyn warehouse. Ah Kay and Sister Ping decided to work together again.

Once Michael Chen had made his down payment in Fuzhou, in 1991, he set off with several others from his village, travelling by bus and train to the city of Kunming, a day’s drive from China’s southern border with Burma. They stayed in a cheap hotel for a week; then, one night, snakeheads hid them among bags of rice in the back of a truck and drove them closer to the border.

“At the beginning, we weren’t scared,” Chen told me. But when they reached the border they realized that their situation was perilous: the checkpoint was closely monitored by armed guards. During the night, the snakeheads led Chen and a dozen others across the border into Burma.

A forbidding mountain range separates Burma from Thailand, and the travellers bought supplies for the month- long trek. “In the daytime it was hot,” Chen said. “At night it’s freezing. . . . We could not light a fire, because if you light in the mountains people will see it.” Along the way, the group passed the remains of other Chinese who did not survive the mountains, their decomposing bodies covered with banana leaves. The smugglers’ route led directly through the Golden Triangle, where much of the world’s heroin supply is produced. Chen recalls crossing this territory at night, dodging the drug harvesters’ spotlights, which panned across the poppy fields.

After arriving in Bangkok, in early 1992, Chen was kept in a safe house. The American crackdown at the Bangkok airport had begun, so the safe houses were uncomfortably crowded. On three occasions, Chen’s snakeheads failed to bribe local Thai officials, and the house was raided. Once, he was arrested and thrown into a Thai prison for a month, until the snakeheads could reach his parents and get them to bail him out. They had to take out a loan, and his father worked “day and night, like a machine,” to pay it off, Chen told me. He was stuck in Thailand for more than a year.

While Chen languished in Bangkok, preparations were under way in New York to purchase the ship that would transport him to America. Weng Yu Hui, the man Sister Ping had smuggled to Los Angeles in 1984, was coming into his own as a snakehead. When Weng first told Sister Ping of his ambitions, she joked, “Oh, now you’re my competitor!” But in early 1992, along with several other snakeheads, they jointly chartered a cruise ship called the Najd II to transport three hundred passengers from Bangkok to the United States. The ship stopped in Mombasa, Kenya, where the captain decided that he wasn’t being paid enough to transport the seven-million-dollar human cargo, and quit. It fell to Weng to devise a way of retrieving the stranded passengers, only twenty of whom were customers of Sister Ping. He met with Ah Kay and a Taiwanese snakehead, Lee Peng Fei, at a midtown Manhattan restaurant. It was agreed that Ah Kay would provide some of the capital to buy a new ship, and that, in exchange, he would be awarded the lucrative job of off-loading the passengers when they arrived. As it happened, Ah Kay was still owed three hundred thousand dollars for his first job with Sister Ping. He asked her to wire the money to Lee Peng Fei on his behalf.

She did so, and Lee used the money to purchase a Panama-registered tramp steamer, the Tong Sern, in Singapore. Lee hired a crew and a captain, Amir Tobing, as well as a young Chinese man, Kin Sin Lee, to act as an onboard enforcer. The snakeheads had decided that it would be wasteful to send the Tong Sern to Mombasa empty, so they arranged to pick up ninety Chinese passengers, including Michael Chen, in Thailand. “ This is the boat?” Chen thought when he first saw the dilapidated steamer, in February, 1993. That night, snakeheads had transported him from the safe house to a beach not far from Bangkok. They loaded Chen and a dozen others onto a speedboat and headed for international waters. Some of the passengers, having worked as sailors in China, deemed the ship too small to cross the Atlantic. But they had little choice, and were ushered into the hold by Kin Sin Lee and his armed associates. At sea, the Panamanian flag was lowered and a Honduran flag was raised; the name Tong Sern, painted on the bow, was replaced by a new one: Golden Venture. After a stop off Pattaya, Thailand, to take on more passengers, the ship steamed through the Strait of Malacca and across the Indian Ocean to Mombasa.

When Sister Ping’s customers in Kenya saw the Golden Venture, all but two refused to board, preferring to try their luck in Mombasa to risking passage on so rickety a vessel. The remaining stranded emigrants were crammed into the twenty-by-forty-foot hold, alongside Michael Chen and the others who were already on board. The space was dark and sweltering, rank with cigarette smoke and sweat. One bathroom serviced the nearly three hundred passengers. As the journey wore on, supplies dwindled, and the passengers were given only a small portion of rice and peanuts, or dried vegetables, each day.

During the months at sea, a society of sorts emerged. A pudgy young man who had been a village doctor in China tended to the sick; a teen-ager became known for giving good massages. Chen helped crew members prepare meals, which earned him an extra allotment of water. When the weather was clear and the ship was in international waters, Kin Sin Lee occasionally allowed the passengers to go up on deck. They fished with makeshift rods.

Ah Kay planned to off-load the Golden Venture in the Atlantic. But by early 1993 his gang had fallen into disarray. An ambitious deputy, Dan Xin Lin, had been running the gang’s day-to-day smuggling operations, and he became frustrated because Ah Kay was growing rich from the proceeds and he wasn’t. He decided to split from the Fuk Ching and start his own snakehead business, taking some of the gang members with him. The defection angered Ah Kay, and on January 8, 1993, he instructed a Fuk Ching member to kill Dan Xin Lin.

The assassin found Dan Xin in a beeper store on Allen Street, with two associates. He fired several shots, killing the two men. Then he pointed his .380 automatic at Dan Xin’s head and pulled the trigger. But the clip was empty, or the gun jammed—and Dan Xin fled the store.

Worried that the police would link him to the shootings, Ah Kay went into hiding in China. He left management of the gang’s activities to his two younger brothers, who would be responsible for meeting the Golden Venture when it reached the United States.

Dan Xin was eager for revenge. On the evening of May 24, 1993, two weeks before the Golden Venture arrived, Ah Kay’s brothers were at a safe house in Teaneck, New Jersey. Shortly after 7 P . M ., a van pulled up around the corner. Dan Xin, dressed in black and carrying an Uzi submachine gun, led four men into the house, where they shot and stabbed one of Ah Kay’s brothers and two other Fuk Ching members. The other brother escaped, but the men caught up with him on a nearby street and shot him repeatedly.

The killers were stopped by the police about five miles from Teaneck, as they sped toward the George Washington Bridge. All five were smeared with blood. At the ensuing trial, one of the assailants, when asked about the motive, testified that Dan Xin’s faction planned to retrieve the Golden Venture’s passengers and collect their fees.

With Ah Kay’s brothers dead, and Dan Xin’s gang in police custody, there was no one to meet the ship. When Lee Peng Fei, the Taiwanese snakehead, learned of the Teaneck massacre, he radioed the Golden Venture to say that the small boats would not be coming. The crew decided to run the ship aground in the Rockaways.

The following night, the snakeheads aboard the Golden Venture informed Michael Chen and the others that they were about to land. The ship jolted when it plowed into the sandbar, and dozens of passengers mobbed the single ladder leading to the deck. “I almost squeezed to death on the bottom,” Chen told me. By the time he emerged from the hold, there were sirens in the distance, and a helicopter hovered overhead.

In June, 1993, federal prosecutors indicted the crew of the Golden Venture on charges of conspiracy and smuggling, and the F.B.I. intensified its investigation of the Fuk Ching gang. Ah Kay was reportedly holed up in a walled compound in Fujian, accompanied by his most trusted bodyguard, whose gang nickname was Stupid. In late August, Ah Kay made his way to Hong Kong, where, acting on a tip, the Royal Hong Kong Police arrested him at a restaurant. With Ah Kay in custody, F.B.I. teams in New York were raiding buildings and rounding up the rest of the gang. All the major figures were eventually indicted on charges of racketeering, conspiracy, murder, extortion, robbery, kidnapping, assault, gun possession, gambling, and alien smuggling.

Ah Kay waived extradition and came to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to the murder charges, was imprisoned in New York, and volunteered to coöperate with the F.B.I. Those who debriefed him say that he was an exceptionally intelligent turncoat, who came to meetings equipped with legal pads outlining the information he was able to supply. “The cream rises to the top, even in gangs,” one official who dealt with him told me. “It was like having a good Fujianese F.B.I. agent on the case.” The snakehead Weng Yu Hui was arrested in New York in April, 1994. The following November, his Taiwanese associate, Lee Peng Fei, was polishing a Mercedes outside his Bangkok apartment when he was arrested by the Royal Thai Police.

Law-enforcement officials carefully amassed evidence against Sister Ping. Several months after the Golden Venture incident, Konrad Motyka and other F.B.I. agents raided the building at 47 East Broadway and recovered a laminating machine, passports, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and employment-authorization cards, all in other people’s names—a trove that prosecutors later described as the “tools of the alien-smuggling trade.” But by the fall of 1993 Sister Ping had already gone “out of pocket,” Motyka said. On September 20, 1994, she entered Hong Kong, using her own passport for the last time. After that trip, a prosecutor later observed, “Sister Ping, at least on paper, ceased to exist.”

As the organizers of the Golden Venture fled or were arrested, about half of the ship’s passengers were deported; others were held in I.N.S. detention facilities across the country. The majority of the detainees, including Michael Chen, ended up in York, Pennsylvania. The passengers were under the impression that they would not be held long; they had heard that it was not difficult for Chinese migrants to obtain asylum in America. But the Golden Venture scandal had embarrassed the Clinton Administration—critics charged that America’s policy on asylum had become a magnet for illegal Chinese—and all but a few passengers had their claims denied.

A number of lawyers in York appealed the immigration-court decisions on the passengers’ behalf. The Golden Venture’s passengers were being made an example of in the United States, the lawyers argued, but they would also be made an example of in China. Meanwhile, Michael Chen and others remained in prison, where, the York County warden told me, they were exemplary inmates. Chen swept and mopped the wing where the Chinese detainees were held, prepared meals, and became the inmates’ barber. He asked a local church group for a Chinese-English dictionary, and when the guards finished reading their newspapers he would say, “Gee, don’t throw that away.” Occasionally, there were stories about the Golden Venture in the papers, and the detainees worked through the articles, word by word.

On February 3, 1997, the Times ran a front-page story, by Celia Dugger, which noted that many of the Golden Venture’s passengers were still being detained, and observed that they might have won asylum “had they come ashore a year earlier—when George Bush was President.” Eleven days later, Bill Clinton pardoned the final fifty-three Golden Venture passengers. They had served forty-two months in prison. Soon after their release, several were approached by snakeheads demanding the balance of their fees.

In the four years during which the passengers were detained in York, Sister Ping continued her smuggling business from the village of Shengmei, in Fujian. She settled into her family’s four-story, yellow-and-white house, which had hand-painted balconies and a pagoda on the roof. After the Golden Venture incident, it was no longer feasible to send ships directly to U.S. shores, but she continued shipping people to Central and South America. In 1998, she sent a shipload of passengers to the coast off Guatemala. The off-loading went awry, and fourteen people drowned.

Though U.S. authorities knew where Sister Ping was, they could not arrest her, because America does not have an extradition agreement with China. F.B.I. agents, assuming that she might be travelling with false papers, worked with Fujianese informants to assemble a family tree. In April, 2000, U.S. authorities in Hong Kong received a tip that Sister Ping’s son had entered the city and would soon be departing on a Korean Air jet.

Dozens of Hong Kong police officers went to the airport, and detectives staked out the Korean Air desk. A woman who resembled Sister Ping appeared near the desk, and the officers arrested her. When they searched her purse, they found three Belizean passports that did not belong to her, several loose passport photos, and thirty-one thousand dollars in three neat stacks.

It turned out that Sister Ping had a luxury apartment in Hong Kong, and had been passing in and out of the city. Detectives searched the apartment and found two customers, presumably waiting to be flown to their next destination, and several plane tickets bearing the name “Lilly Zhang.” They recovered a Belizean passport, also in the name of Lilly Zhang; the photograph in the passport was of Sister Ping. The authorities later determined that, as Lilly Zhang, Sister Ping had made more than fifty trips to foreign countries—including the United States—in the three months prior to her arrest.

Sister Ping fought extradition for three years. Finally, in 2003, Becky Chan, a legal attaché to the F.B.I., accompanied her on a United Airlines flight back to the United States. Exchanging her Rolex watch for plastic flexicuffs, Sister Ping was reserved and polite, and, as Chan recalled, “she was adamant that she didn’t do anything wrong, and that as soon as she hit New York the judge would release her.”

Initially, F.B.I. officials hoped that Sister Ping would offer to coöperate with them, as she had in the past. When she was taken into custody, she was carrying a black address book that listed immigration contacts in Thailand, Malaysia, Belize, and Russia. “The potential for uncovering international corruption would have been tremendous,” Bill McMurray told me. “But she chose to fight it instead.”

The trial began in May, and lasted for a month. David Burns, an assistant U.S. attorney, described Sister Ping as “one of the most powerful and most successful alien smugglers of our time.” The prosecution’s case relied heavily on former snakeheads, among them Ah Kay and Weng Yu Hui. Sister Ping’s lawyer, Lawrence Hochheiser, repeatedly returned to the credibility of these men, and suggested that they were testifying in exchange for reduced sentences. “These men are killers,” Burns was quick to concede. “But they’re killers she’s hired.”

Hochheiser insisted that his client was primarily a businesswoman—that running an underground bank was the extent of her criminal activity. “We’ve got the tail wagging the dog here,” he said. “This is a money business that is being used to tie Cheng Chui Ping to the alien-smuggling business.” In his closing remarks, he invoked Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible.”

On June 22, 2005, the jury found Sister Ping guilty of conspiracy to smuggle aliens and take hostages, money laundering, and trafficking in ransom proceeds. The verdict may have come as a surprise to her: the F.B.I. had informants in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, who said that leading up to the trial she had packed her bags, telling people that she would be going home any day.

The press took evident satisfaction in the conviction (“ EVIL INCARNATE ” ran a typical trial headline, from the Daily News ), but the Fujianese community in Chinatown was less enthusiastic. “A lot of people in Chinatown are saying that we’re putting Robin Hood on trial,” Steven Wong, the Fujianese community leader, told me. The World Journal reported that villagers in Shengmei had volunteered to do prison time on Sister Ping’s behalf; they described her as a living Buddha.

Sister Ping was sentenced on March 16, 2006. That morning, two dozen family members and supporters entered the courtroom. Sister Ping appeared, dressed in a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and blue pants, and looking thin, her hair grown long and streaked with gray, and solemnly acknowledged her family. After a few preliminary arguments by the lawyers, the judge, Michael Mukasey, asked Sister Ping if there was anything she wanted to say. Hochheiser replied that because his client would be appealing the verdict, and might accidentally say something to prejudice the appeal, he had advised her not to speak.

But when he sat down Sister Ping slowly rose. She gestured for her interpreter, a tall Chinese woman who sat against one wall, and proceeded to deliver a strange, extended monologue. “I only cried once in court,” she began, and explained that it was when witnesses recounted how Ah Kay had robbed her house. “I was a small businesswoman in Chinatown,” she went on. “If Ah Kay had come and robbed me those times, you can imagine how many other people took advantage of me.” Huddled next to the interpreter, she spoke in a deep, assertive voice, slowly at first, and then more quickly, so that the interpreter could hardly keep up. She explained that in every major episode discussed at trial she was the victim: at the Toronto airport, she had not been smuggling the Chinese passengers but simply bringing them money; she had been extorted and intimidated by Ah Kay and Weng Yu Hui; snakeheads had lied when they testified that they were affiliated with her; the evidence in the trial had been faked. “Everybody can tell you that Sister Ping is working in the store every day,” she said. How could she have been a snakehead as well?

As she rambled on, she stared at Judge Mukasey; her hands remained clasped in front of her, and occasionally she gestured for emphasis, sometimes leaning forward to scribble Chinese ideographs on scrap paper so that her interpreter could better understand her. “When I had my trial, I didn’t want to say anything,” she continued. “All these tainted witnesses have families, and I also want them to get benefits and go home. So whatever they said, I did not attack them.” She emphasized that she had done the things she did out of concern for her family. One of the prosecutors, Leslie Brown, was pregnant, and Sister Ping turned to her. “Ms. Brown is about to be a mother,” she said in an icy tone. “I congratulate you. Once you become a mother you will understand me.”

After more than an hour, Sister Ping sat down. Judge Mukasey, visibly irritated, said that it was not his custom to deliver lectures when he handed out sentences, but in light of Sister Ping’s “lengthy exercise in self-justification” he would make an exception. Her version of events “defies belief,” he said, and pointed out that while the witnesses who testified against her may have committed brutal crimes, they had also pleaded guilty to those crimes and coöperated with the government. He delivered the maximum sentence: thirty-five years in prison. As Sister Ping was led out of the courtroom, she smiled at her family and waved.

When I asked Michael Chen about Sister Ping, he echoed the positive views that many Fujianese express about her. “She’s a very nice lady,” Chen told me. “Even if some of her customers died by accident, it was not her fault.” He compared her favorably to Ah Kay, whom he called “a monster.” (After testifying, Ah Kay, who was described by one of the prosecutors who put him on the stand as “an incredibly violent man with zero regard for human life,” was deemed to have satisfied his sentence with time served. He is now a free man.)

When Bill Clinton pardoned the last of the Golden Venture passengers, he placed them on “humanitarian parole.” Parolees can apply for renewable work permits, but they have none of the privileges associated with asylum or green-card status. Moreover, in the absence of a Presidential or congressional grant, this parole creates an indefinite legal limbo: there is no process for graduating to permanent-resident status.

Upon being released from the York detention center, the passengers of the Golden Venture fanned out across the country. Michael Chen moved to Columbus, Ohio, and eventually opened his restaurant. But he worries that he could be deported at any time. In May, 2001, Zeng Hua Zheng, another passenger, who was living in Aurora, Colorado, was suddenly deported; soon afterward, the York lawyers who represent the Golden Venture’s passengers introduced a “private bill” to Congress which would obtain permanent status for the parolees. Private bills pass only by unanimous congressional approval, and so far the bill has failed twice. But the lawyers continue to resubmit it: as long as the parolees’ status is under consideration by Congress, they cannot be deported.

Perhaps the most telling illustration of the allure this country has for the Fujianese is the number of Golden Venture passengers who endured the voyage, imprisonment, and deportation, only to return to the United States. In 1998, Wang Wu Dong, who had been imprisoned and deported, was re-apprehended when a snakehead powerboat—the Oops II—ran aground off the Jersey shore. According to Peter Cohn, a filmmaker who has interviewed several of the passengers for a new documentary, scores of those who were deported have returned illegally.

Justin Yu, the journalist for the World Journal, says that disasters like the Golden Venture do not discourage emigrants, because, considering the stakes, such calamities represent an acceptable risk. “Acceptable risk, acceptable cruelty, acceptable lousy treatment, acceptable long trip, there’s no toilet. It’s acceptable,” he said. “Because of the comparison: the life there, and the life here.”

While ships no longer deposit smuggled Fujianese directly on U.S. shores, officials say that there is no evidence to indicate that the total number of Fujianese entering the country illegally has diminished in the years since the Golden Venture incident. China is certainly more prosperous today than it was a decade ago, but a study by Zai Liang, an expert in migration at SUNY Albany, found that the snakehead trade is driven less by absolute poverty than by “relative deprivation”—and China’s new prosperity has only widened the gap between the rich and the poor. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office noted that between 1997 and 1999 the number of aliens apprehended while being smuggled into the United States increased by nearly eighty per cent. The price for passage has risen to seventy thousand dollars, and new organizations have devised routes through Canada and Mexico. According to a federal indictment in the late nineties, a consortium of Fujianese and Mohawk Indians smuggled thousands of people through a sovereign reservation, which straddles the border with Canada. The group made an estimated hundred and seventy million dollars in two years.

Sister Ping is appealing her conviction. Meanwhile, the restaurant at 47 East Broadway still does a brisk business, and Sister Ping’s husband and one of her daughters, Monica, are there every day. F.B.I. officials suspect that they could potentially take over the family’s smuggling operation; however, while Cheng Yick Tak was previously convicted of alien smuggling, no one in the family is under investigation. Along Allen Street, some way from 47 East Broadway, a modest white structure houses the Church of Grace for the Fujianese. Recently, I spoke with the pastor and with a member of the congregation. They told me that, every week, they take a moment during the Sunday service to welcome new arrivals to the city. Every Sunday, five or ten congregants stand up. ♦