By the early 1990s, the gang was beginning to undertake an adaptation that was more decisive, and ultimately consequential, than any other. There was only so much money in shakedowns, burglaries, and kidnappings. The heroin trade was lucrative, but there was a lot of competition in a limited marketplace, and the criminal penalties for drug running were enough to put you away for life. Snakeheads, in contrast, seemed to enjoy a market so inexhaustible that there was less competition. And the criminal sentences for human smuggling amounted to a slap on the wrist. Ah Kay observed the kinds of profits that Sister Ping and other snakeheads were reaping and realized that for the truly enterprising criminal, the snakehead business represented an unparalleled opportunity. “It was a better business than drug trafficking,” one Fujianese community leader recalled. “More profit. Less risk. You get caught and plead guilty right away, you only go to jail for six months. Another thing is, your merchandise can walk.”
Chapter Five
Swiftwater
THE NIAGARA River is 34 miles long. It issues from Lake Erie and flows north, cataracting over the famous falls and culminating in Lake Ontario, the rush of its currents bringing hydroelectric power to the region and the general course of its trajectory tracing the national boundary between southern Ontario and western New York State. On January 3, 1989, the Niagara County Sheriff’s Department responded to a call about “a floater.” A local man had been walking along the banks of the Niagara when he discovered two nylon suitcases and, further on, a dead body floating facedown in the icy water by the riverbank. It was snowing when officers arrived at the scene that evening. They rolled the body over and saw that it was an Asian woman, with plump cheeks, full lips, and a tangle of black hair wreathing her head. Her eyes were firmly shut. She wore a coarse gray winter coat, wool pants, and a black shirt that rode up around her belly, which was distended from river water. Her right arm extended from her body at a crooked angle, her index finger taut and outstretched, as if she had been pointing to something just before she died. The river had been cold for days, with drifts of ice floating along it. The woman’s body was frozen through; when the medical examiner cut her chest open for an autopsy, he had to wait for her internal organs to thaw.
Not far away, the officers found a cheap inflatable raft made of vinyl, the sort of thing, one investigator observed, “you might try to use in your backyard swimming pool.” From the woman’s luggage they retrieved a plastic bag of clothing: a winter coat, a green pullover, a pair of white-and-black-checked slacks. But when the officers examined the clothing, they found that they didn’t “appear to be clothing that would fit the victim.” She hadn’t been alone on the raft.
Two days earlier, on New Year’s Day, the Border Patrol at Niagara Falls had received an anonymous telephone call inquiring about whether by any chance they had apprehended a six-year-old girl in the area. They had not. Then a man named Steven Gleit telephoned and said he was a lawyer in New York City calling on behalf of a client whose six-year-old niece might have tried crossing the Niagara River by boat. He said the child should have been accompanied by three adults, including a Malaysian female. He said the little girl’s name was Haw Wang.
When the woman’s body was discovered two days later, a Niagara County investigator named Ed Garde took over the case. In the pants pocket of the woman on the riverbank Garde found a grocery receipt with a 212 telephone number scrawled across it. He dialed the number and spoke with a woman named Sue Chan. She wouldn’t answer any questions, but she asked him if he knew anything about a little girl. She said he should call her back at work and gave a different number. It was the office number of the attorney Steven Gleit.
Ed Garde called Sue Chan again and learned that she was Gleit’s secretary. The little girl, Haw Wang, was her niece. Haw Wang had been born in Fuzhou. Her mother, Sue’s sister, was living illegally in New York City. The little girl had been accompanied by an uncle as far as Toronto, where she had been turned over to a group of people who would be transported across the river, including a nice middle-aged Malaysian woman, Cheah Fong Yew, who spoke Chinese and promised to take care of her. It was Cheah Fong Yew whom the investigators had found by the riverbank.
Dating back to the exclusion act, Chinese had been crossing the Niagara to enter the United States. In 1904 the Buffalo Times reported that white smugglers were outfitting Chinese with “Indian garb” and baskets of sassafras and sending them rowing across the river. Through much of the twentieth century, Canada tended to have more permissive immigration policies, especially with respect to Asians, than the United States. Hong Kong residents didn’t need a visa to visit Canada, so it became an appealing penultimate stop in the logistical networks devised by the snakeheads, a chilly alternative to the Guatemala route. By the time Haw Wang flew into Toronto with her uncle that winter, Canadian law enforcement had found that four out of ten refugee claimants entering Canada from China were subsequently smuggled into the United States. The previous July, three Chinese men had been stopped in Lewiston, New York, as they walked along the side of the road, their trousers soaked from the waist down. They admitted to Border Patrol agents that they had taken a raft across the river from Canada. By the end of August, nearly a dozen others had been caught in Lewiston alone, and because illegal immigration statistics are always a game of extrapolation, authorities surmised that a far greater number must be entering without getting caught.
On January 3, shortly after the discovery of the body, Ed Garde initiated an investigation, bringing together the Niagara County Sheriff’s Office, the Niagara Regional Police, and the INS’s Anti-Smuggling Unit in Buffalo. They called it Operation Swiftwater, after the merciless currents of the Niagara. And within days they had a significant lead. An INS informant divulged the names of two people who might have been involved in smuggling the raft across the river. One was a Vietnamese man who lived on the Canadian side of the river. The other was Sister Ping’s husband, Cheung Yick Tak.
The Niagara investigators knew nothing of Operation Hester, Joe Occhipinti’s short-lived INS investigation in New York. But when they ran Yick Tak’s name through Department of Motor Vehicles records, they found a car registered to the apartment at 14 Monroe Street. And when they found the phone number listed for that apartment, they made an interesting discovery: it matched a number that had been found in the possession of two different groups of “alien rafters” apprehended the previous summer. When they checked the phone tolls for the Monroe Street apartment, they found numerous calls to a number on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, which was listed to a Vietnamese man named Minh Hoang. A search of his toll records revealed twenty-six calls to an American by the name of Richard Kephart.
Kephart was a cabdriver with a history of petty larceny. Ed Garde worked with INS investigators to assemble information on him, and before long they showed up at Kephart’s door.
“You know what this is about?” they asked.
“I got a pretty good idea,” Kephart said.
The investigators took Kephart to the INS office at the Whirlpool Bridge in Niagara Falls and proceeded to question him for ten hours. One evening the previous August, Kephart explained, he had been driving his taxi when he responded to a call to pick up a party outside a Lewiston bar called the Bucket of Blood. There he met three Asian men and three Asian women. They each carried one piece of luggage, except for a Vietnamese man in his twenties who introduced himself as Paul. The other passengers sat in wordless silence while Paul did the talking. He had a mustache and a confident, happy-go-lucky way about him, Kephart thought. Paul said their car had broken down; could Kephart drive them to the Buffalo airport? Kephart headed in that direction, but when they were halfway there, Paul abruptly changed his mind. How much would it cost to drive them all the way to New York City?
Eight hundred bucks, Kephart said.
Paul produced a stack of cash and paid up front. They drove through the night, without talking, until they reached Manhattan. Kephart dropped them off in Chinatown
, and Paul announced that he wanted to head straight back to Buffalo. Kephart said he’d drive him free of charge; he could use some company on the ride back, to keep him awake. When they reached Lewiston, Paul said he might be taking other groups of people down to the city in the future. He asked for Kephart’s phone number.
The two men started working together, and established a routine. Paul was bringing people across the river from Canada in an inflatable rubber raft. At a prearranged time of night, Kephart would park his car on the New York side of the river. Paul would load several passengers and their luggage into a raft and paddle across. He was excellent on the water, proud of how quickly he could traverse the tricky slipstreams, zigzagging in an expert pattern through the crosscurrents to the other side. There he would deflate the raft, stuff it in a backpack, and load the passengers into Kephart’s car for the long ride to New York City.
In New York, Paul introduced him to Cheung Yick Tak, whom Paul called Billy. When Kephart dropped people off in Chinatown, Yick Tak would meet him. “He’d come out and he’d open the door and let the illegal aliens out and pay me my money,” he recalled. Yick Tak was businesslike. He might ask how the trip had been, just to be polite, but that was it. He called the passengers “clients.” When they arrived, he would help unload their belongings for them, hustling suitcases out of the van and onto the sidewalk like a valet. He always passed Kephart his money in a brown paper bag.
Kephart started making trips every week or two. He met Yick Tak some fourteen times through that fall and early winter. There were so many people coming over that he gave up using his cab and rented a van instead. He recruited an old fishing buddy named James Dullan to help him. There seemed to be a lot of money in the business. Paul certainly spent a great deal of it. He gambled a lot; he once said he’d run up a $30,000 debt in a single day. He was a risk-taker, as evidenced by his masterful but hazardous piloting of the cheap rafts across the river (a stunt that Dullan maintained was “one step from suicide, in my opinion”). Paul’s favorite expression was “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” after the Bobby McFerrin song that was popular on the radio at that time. But he also had a callous side to him, a hardness. He told Dullan that when he met the aliens on the Canadian side, he would keep them at his house or in a cheap motel and feed them only a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. “Just throw them a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk and they’re happy,” he joked.
After a few trips Kephart and Dullan realized that Yick Tak wasn’t working alone. He had a partner in New York, his brother-in-law Cheng Wai Wei, whom they called Peter. Just as Sister Ping’s father had enlisted his children to assist him in the smuggling business, Sister Ping and her sister Susan both enlisted their husbands. Like Yick Tak, Peter seems to have married into a smuggling clan, and he took to the family business. In fact, as soon as Kephart and Dullan met Peter, it became clear that he, not Yick Tak, was running the operation. Peter was taller than Yick Tak, younger, more charismatic. It was Yick Tak who met Kephart and Dullan and took the aliens and paid them, but Kephart gradually concluded that Yick Tak was just a flunky.
It also seemed as though Peter might be making more money. He had made “millions doing this here,” Paul told Kephart.
“Are they bringing drugs across?” Kephart asked. They must be, he figured, to be making that kind of money.
No, Paul said. Just people.
Through the course of the fall Kephart and Dullan gradually came to realize that they were one small cog in a sophisticated operation. Kephart heard Yick Tak and Peter allude to a separate trick in which they sneaked people in coffins from a funeral parlor on the Canadian side over to Albany. Paul said that when the migrants arrived in Chinatown, Yick Tak and Peter could set them up with English lessons and jobs. He said Peter could get driver’s licenses and even phony birth certificates for his customers. “They have somebody down there in New York that’s a clerk or something that can take care of the paperwork,” he explained. They got the impression that Peter paid off people in Chinatown as well. Once when they were double-parked in Chinatown, unloading passengers, they saw two police officers approaching. “Don’t worry about the cops,” Peter said. “I run Chinatown.” Kephart and Dullan continued to unload people from the double-parked van. The cops approached and clearly saw what they were doing. But they kept on walking. The cabbies were impressed. Peter produced a thick roll of bills. “You guys do good,” he said. “You can make this kind of money.”
As fall became winter and the river began to freeze over, the men discussed an ambitious plan for the spring. Yick Tak and Peter would give Kephart and Dullan money to purchase a boat. Then the cabbies could get fishing licenses and start ferrying large numbers of customers across. Peter told them they could each make $40,000 to $60,000 a year. When they discussed the plan for spring, it seemed implicit that it would follow a hiatus during the coldest months of winter. But the hiatus didn’t happen.
“The river is rough in the wintertime,” Kephart said when Paul told him that there was a plan to bring a group across around New Year’s. “You got ice and everything coming down through it.” But Paul didn’t worry. He never did.
On the night of December 30, Kephart and Dullan pulled a rented Ford van into their usual spot on the New York side of the river. The temperature outside was 30 degrees. The river was covered in drifting ice and flowing at 11 miles an hour. Kephart got out of the van and stood on the riverbank. The moon was in its last quarter and the sky was cloudy, but shortly after eight o’clock, several hundred yards away, Kephart saw a car pull over on the Canadian side. He could see the light from the trunk when Paul opened it to retrieve the luggage and the raft. Then the trunk light disappeared. It was cold, and Kephart got back in the van.
The radio was on, the volume low enough that above the music Kephart and Dullan could hear the squawk of gulls in the gorge below. They waited. Normally it took Paul less than twenty minutes to make the trip, deflate the raft, and tuck it into his backpack. But after half an hour there was no sign of him. They didn’t worry. He had been late before, caught up in a current that washed him downstream, forcing him to walk the passengers back to the car. They kept waiting.
Then they heard something, a noise outside the van that wasn’t the gulls. They both heard it. It sounded like a scream.
“That might have come from the river,” Dullan said.
“Hell of a time for a cold bath,” Kephart joked uncomfortably.
The two men sat in silence for a while.
“That raft goes over, man,” Dullan said, “as cold as that water is, they got about three minutes before they freeze.”
Kephart didn’t say anything. But he started to worry. Dullan could tell by looking at his face.
They kept waiting, but they heard nothing more, and after an hour both men began to panic. They drove to a pay phone and called Paul’s house on the Canadian side. Paul had gone down to the river, his wife said. He hadn’t come home. They drove back to the riverbank and sat for another hour, but there was no sign of the raft, just the rushing of the water and the squawking of the gulls. Eventually Kephart dropped Dullan off and drove home. The next morning he woke early and used the van to drop his son off at school. Then he returned it to the dealership. Then he went home. Finally, that evening Paul telephoned.
“The raft overturned,” he said matter-of-factly “All the people drowned.”
“What do you mean?” Kephart asked.
“They all drowned,” Paul said again.
There had been four of them altogether: a young Malaysian man named Vincent Ooi; his girlfriend, Vasugee Krishan; the little Fujianese girl, Haw Wang; and the middle-aged Malaysian woman who was looking after her, Cheah Fong Yew. The four of them had been staying at a Hotel Ibis in Toronto. When Paul picked them up that night, they were dressed warmly: sweaters, overcoats, mittens. Cheah had tucked a towel around her neck as a scarf. Sometimes Paul used two rafts, one for the passengers and another, strung to the first with a length of rope
, for their luggage. But this time he opted to pack them all in together. He inflated a blue-and-white raft and laid the suitcases on its floor. Then he instructed Cheah and Vasugee to sit in the middle, on top of the suitcases. He took up position in the back, with his wooden paddle. Vincent Ooi sat in the front of the raft, and in the very front sat Haw Wang. She was bundled up, to keep warm. She carried her belongings in a little yellow backpack. They never made it more than 20 yards out. The night was dark and icy. The raft was overloaded with people and bags and the current was treacherous. The raft just flipped, throwing them all into the frigid water. Paul was a strong swimmer, and he immediately made his way to shore. He heard the others scream, saw hands flail, then disappear in the whirlpools of the Niagara. Then he went home. The following morning he went back to the riverbank, but he found no sign of anyone. Everything had been washed away. Paul relayed the news to Kephart. Then he hung up and left town, headed for Nova Scotia to lie low.
It didn’t take the Niagara investigators long to realize that Cheung Yick Tak was married to Sister Ping. In fact, well before the drowning, a hard-nosed Buffalo INS agent named Patrick Devine had believed she was behind the sudden onslaught of Chinese coming over the border from Canada. Her name had started appearing in case after case, and eventually Devine drove down to New York and connected with Joe Occhipinti, who gave him all the information assembled on the Cheng family during the Hester investigation. Devine even stopped by the Tak Shun Variety Store. Yick Tak was there, minding the shop. Devine introduced himself and asked if he could look around. Yick Tak consented, in broken English, and Devine wandered through the shop. He didn’t find anything objectionable, and eventually he left. But before he did, he approached Yick Tak. “We know what you’re doing,” he said. Yick Tak looked at him blankly. “We know you’re smuggling. We’re going to get you eventually.”
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