A few days later Riordan returned to the station, curious about the status of the investigation and of the undocumented Chinese. When he arrived, he was greeted only by the officers; the Chinese weren’t there. “Where is everybody?” Riordan asked.
“They were all deported, to Cambodia and Laos,” the officers told him. They were matter-of-fact about it, but Riordan knew that the Thais never expelled people that quickly. Thai justice was slow-moving—you could commit some minor violation and sit in jail for a week before anyone decided what to do with you. Someone powerful had wanted those passengers out of the country.
Riordan approached Pao Pong. What about the young guy who was going to help catch Charlie? he asked.
“The one with the telephone?” Pao Pong said. “That was Charlie. He had a passport from Laos. They moved him back across two nights ago.”
Mr. Charlie’s real name was Lee Peng Fei. He was born in Taiwan but styled himself as a globe-trotting businessman. He had an athletic build and a take-charge attitude; he was a sharp dresser and had a good singing voice. He fancied himself a bit of a crooner and was known to be excellent at karaoke. Mr. Charlie had started smuggling years before; he had been arrested on alien smuggling charges in California in 1986.
A week after meeting with Ah Kay in New York, Mr. Charlie and Weng flew to Thailand. The plan was that Ah Kay would front the funds for a new boat. Weng visited Sister Ping and told her that while the Najd II was still in Mombasa and couldn’t continue, he and Mr. Charlie were assembling investors, including Ah Kay, and were going to arrange for another ship. Sister Ping was firm with Weng: she told him that regardless of which investors he was able to gather, her passengers must be put on the new boat and brought to America. Sister Ping still owed Ah Kay $300,000 from the New Bedford offloading, and it was agreed that she would wire that money to Bangkok so that Mr. Charlie could purchase a new boat.
Next Mr. Charlie summoned a protégé of his, a young ruffian in his twenties named Kin Sin Lee, who was Fujianese by birth but traveled on a Malaysian passport and had helped Charlie on smuggling operations in the past. In January 1993, Kin Sin Lee traveled to Singapore to purchase a boat. Through a shipping agent there, he acquired an aging, rust-eaten 150-foot coastal freighter with a Panamanian registry, the Tong Sern. The ship had been used to transport dry goods on short trips between Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam; it was not designed for transoceanic travel, but Kin Sin Lee showed no signs of being troubled by this.
In Singapore, Lee met the forty-four-year-old Sumatran ship’s captain Amir Tobing. Tobing later insisted that when he signed on for the voyage, he was unaware of what the ship would be carrying, but as a general matter he was unencumbered by scruples and comfortable with the kinds of compromises occasioned by a life on the ungovernable seas. A prosecutor later described him as “a pirate,” an itinerant mariner with a mercenary sensibility. Lee enlisted a crew, and the Tong Sern set sail for Bangkok. There he announced to Tobing and the crew that the ship would be carrying Chinese migrants. He offered them bonuses for taking part in the operation. Tobing would be paid $2,000 a month, and an additional $40,000 if the journey was successful.
As the ship sat in Bangkok harbor, Mr. Charlie and Kin Sin Lee made preparations for the voyage. They laid plywood planks across the steel struts that bisected the dank, cavernous hold of the ship, creating two levels of makeshift accommodation. Charlie purchased eight hundred blankets, which would serve as bedding for the passengers who came aboard. He gave Kin Sin Lee money to pay the crew’s wages, and on February 14, Captain Tobing and Kin Sin Lee piloted the ship out of Bangkok harbor. Just before the Tong Sern was to leave, Sister Ping wired the smugglers an additional $20,000 and reiterated that when the ship reached Kenya, it was essential that her customers get a place on board—“no matter what.”
Mr. Charlie and Weng Yu Hui were both experienced smugglers by this time, and particularly in the business of maritime smuggling, they tended to think of what they did as not very different from any other long-haul shipping operation. One mantra of successful cargo transporters, whether they use boats, planes, or trucks, is that you never travel with an empty cargo bay. It was decided, given the large numbers of Chinese in Bangkok awaiting passage to America, that even though the mission of the Tong Sern was to pick up the stranded migrants from Kenya, it would be wasteful to make the first leg of the trip empty. So Mr. Charlie headed overland to Pattaya, with a plan to load an additional 160 passengers on the ship. But the snakeheads had not counted on Pao Pong stumbling across the clandestine boarding process. When the passengers started arriving in speedboats and climbing aboard, Lee and Tobing received a call telling them that the Pattaya police on shore had disrupted the operation. Tobing set sail. They had already taken on ninety of the passengers; they would simply have to leave the remaining seventy behind, to be captured by the police. As the ship headed out into the South China Sea, Kin Sin Lee herded the excited passengers down a single ladder that led to the hold. The passengers were exhilarated by the late-night operation and the race to evade the police. “America! America!” they chanted.
Until the early twentieth century, there was generally some correlation between the home port or ownership of an oceangoing vessel and the nationality of the flag that it flew. But during Prohibition the American owners of two cruise ships, frustrated that they could not serve alcohol on board, were permitted to reregister their ships in Panama, despite the fact that neither the companies nor their ships, nor the routes that those ships took, had any special relationship with the Central American country. When, on December 5, 1922, the ships lowered their U.S. flags and raised the red, white, and blue flag of Panama, they ushered in a phenomenon that would become known as “flags of convenience,” in which a ship can be registered in a country that has no relationship to its owners, its crew, its home port, or its destination.
For international shipping companies, flags of convenience represented an unprecedented opportunity: by allowing shipowners to shop around for the most obliging venue in which to register their vessels, the system provided a way to avoid registering in countries like the United States, which have high taxes, rigorous vessel inspection standards, and other cumbersome regulations. For the countries that opened their registries, the practice was also lucrative. In the years since those two cruise ships raised the Panamanian flag, Panama has become the single largest registry of ships in the world. By the time the Panamanianregistered Tong Sent picked up its passengers off the coast of Pattaya in 1993, the government of Panama was collecting some $50 million a year in ship registration fees and taxes, and the maritime lawyers, shipping agents, and inspectors of Panama City were making that same amount again. Everybody won: registration was easy for shipowners and a great source of revenue for Panama. Dozens of other countries had seen the income that could be gained by offering flags of convenience. The second largest flag-state for hire was Liberia, which was riven by civil war and could hardly be considered a coherent country at all, but which offered a robust and accommodating ship registry. Today ships are flagged in Cambodia, which offers online registration in twenty-four hours; in landlocked Luxembourg and Bolivia; in the Mongolian desert, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.
But if this system worked for the larger, licit world of shippers in the global economy, it also held special appeal for outlaws, pirates, smugglers, and thieves. A transparent registration system means accountability. In principle, it should be easy to spot a ship’s name, home port, and flag and trace it back to the people who own the ship and are responsible for putting it out to sea. But with flags of convenience, it became more difficult to trace a vessel’s provenance. Because it was easy to flag and reflag ships in jurisdictions that did not insist on rigorous inspections, it became possible to continue sailing a ship long after it was no longer seaworthy. Negligent registries permitted ships with bad safety records, substandard crews, or no insurance to ply the seas. Smugglers could move a variety of goods—timber, plywood, fro
zen prawns, or palm oil—by the shipload without paying taxes. Gunrunners could flout arms embargoes and send weapons into conflict zones. Pirates could hijack tankers, rerouting a vessel and reflagging it in some lax jurisdiction, repainting its name at sea, and effectively enabling it to drop off the nautical map and disappear, becoming what is known as a phantom ship.
As the Tong Sern sailed through the South China Sea, the crew lowered the flag of Panama and raised the blue-and-white-striped flag of Honduras. Two crewmen were slung over the side by ropes and began repainting the name on the stern of the ship. They replaced the words Tong Sern with a new set of white block letters: Golden Venture.
While the Golden Venture made its way across the Indian Ocean to Africa, Weng Yu Hui flew to Mombasa. He purchased oil and food and began to make arrangements for Sean Chen and the other passengers to be transported out to sea. Late on the night of April 2, 1993, a series of tugboats and dhows began silently taking on passengers from the Najd II. Of the three hundred or so passengers who had arrived in Mombasa in October, only about two hundred remained; many had grown tired of waiting and had devised other means of moving back to China or on to the United States. (Nor were they the only ones who didn’t board; a group of passengers from the Najd had found so much success running the Chinese restaurant they had opened in the Oceanic Hotel that they decided not to take their chances on America but to stay put in Mombasa. They had a business to run.)
Weng loaded the passengers onto the smaller boats and then left Mombasa. He telephoned Sister Ping to tell her that he had personally put her twenty customers on the smaller boat. But several days later she called him back. “Out of those twenty people, only two people got on the Golden Venture,” she said. Eighteen of them had seen the boat and decided that it was too small—that it couldn’t possibly make the voyage to America. Sister Ping was furious. “They refused to get on board!” she said. In a pattern that had repeated itself several times already in her career, her reputation as a perfectionist with a high standard of care had succeeded in expanding her business to a point where she could no longer handle every aspect of the passage to America herself, and she was obliged to delegate and outsource to lesser professionals. Weng had let her down.
Sean Chen was aboard one of the small boats leaving Mombasa harbor. He saw the Golden Venture looming before him, and he too thought it looked very small. It was much smaller than the Najd II, where he had been living for months, and when he got on board he realized that there were already nearly a hundred passengers there. Kin Sin Lee had selected several of the passengers to assist him as “managers,” or onboard enforcers, and together they hustled the passengers into the hold.
Sean entered the hatch leading to the nether recesses of the ship and descended the rungs of the ladder into another world—a fetid 20-by-40-foot space divided into two floors made of loosely secured plywood planks. The space was windowless and smelly; the other passengers had already been aboard the ship for six weeks. Each passenger was allotted a patch of plywood, a 2-by-6 foot spot on the floor. They fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw, wedged into a grotesquely intimate interlocking network of knees and elbows, heads and toes. Sean had to pick his way among the bodies and belongings of the others in order to claim his spot, and tread gingerly so as not to step on anyone. The space was lit by a few naked electric bulbs, and in the dim interior the passengers who had already made a home there stared at him through a fog of cigarette smoke as he passed. It was not so much a ship he had entered as a floating cattle car.
Sean and the others filed into the cramped space, corralled by Kin Sin Lee and the onboard enforcers. Some of the passengers had been sailors back in China; they looked around and judged the boat altogether too small—too small for so many people, too small for so long a voyage. The passengers were divided roughly into the Kenyan group and the Thai group, and further segregated by the snakeheads who represented them. Sean put his things down in his space and did his best to make himself comfortable. But it was difficult. The hold was hot, and the roar of the engine was deafening, a persistent, unhealthy drone. There was no privacy anywhere, no patch of floor not crawling with irritable and frightened Fujianese. There was only one bathroom for use by the passengers, Sean learned, and that was reserved for the two dozen women on board. The men were obliged to urinate where they could—from the deck if the enforcers would allow them, belowdecks if they wouldn’t. They shit into plastic bags and threw them overboard. The air grew thick with the earthy reek of excrement and sweat.
Captain Tobing, Kin Sin Lee, and the crew enjoyed cabins above deck and a kitchen and bathroom of their own. The passengers’ food was prepared on hot plates on the floor in the hold. They ate rice, mainly, along with small amounts of peanuts or dried vegetables. The supply of fresh water was extremely limited, and the passengers relied instead on a water purification system. But the system grew rusty, and some days the rice they ate was stained red by the water it yielded. Each passenger was allotted a cup of water a day. Salt was everywhere. They brushed their teeth with saltwater. There was a saltwater shower above deck, which passengers who behaved themselves were allowed to use in rotation, once a week. Their skin broke out in rashes from washing with water from the sea.
The scarcity led to fights over food and water. A certain Darwinian logic took hold of the ship: the strong and the crafty managed a greater daily allotment than the weak. The weak would argue and beg or try to steal food. When they did, the passengers who had been assigned to enforce order would beat the offenders mercilessly. They had sticks and clubs as well as handcuffs, and especially rebellious passengers would be handcuffed for hours at a time. Kin Sin Lee was clearly fearful that anarchy could break out on board, and he kept it at bay by making frequent examples of those who stepped out of line. He vowed to throw unruly passengers into the sea.
At times the journey seemed so harrowingly unforgiving, so calculated to test and break the spirit and endurance of the passengers on board, that the Golden Venture took on the aspect not of a late-twentieth-century vessel bearing intrepid migrants to the promised land but of an aimlessly floating madhouse, its cargo an assemblage of lunatics and sadists, a Renaissance-era ship of fools. The surreal indignities of life in the hold and the fierce indifference of the sea seemed to haunt the passengers, to break them down. One man cried every time he had a bowel movement, which, owing to the meager rations, was only once a week. Another man brought on board a handheld video game he had purchased in Thailand and continued idly pressing the buttons long after the batteries had died. “I think it changed many people, being on that ship,” one of Sean’s fellow passengers would later say. And indeed, to this day many of the men and women who were aboard the Golden Venture refuse to discuss the particulars of what happened during the months at sea, some of them because of an enduring sense of shame about the dishonor they endured, others simply skeptical that anyone who did not experience the journey could ever understand.
As the Golden Venture neared South Africa, it was suddenly engulfed in a violent storm. Waves as high as 50 feet rocked the ship, and rain lashed the deck. The sky went the color of charcoal, and the horizon line contracted so that Captain Tobing and his crew could not see beyond the next towering swell. They thought the ship would capsize. In the hold Sean was tossed from side to side. He tried to sleep, but the ship would lurch, sending him tumbling onto the people around him. Many of the passengers were overwhelmed by seasickness; the sound of retching and the stench of vomit filled the hold. People were crying. Others were praying. Some put on their best suits, preparing for death. There were no lifeboats on board the ship, nor any life jackets. And what would happen if the ship rolled over, with Sean and nearly three hundred others trapped in its hold, and sank slowly to the bottom of the ocean? The Golden Venture was a ghost ship. It was a ship full of stowaways on an illicit voyage; the captain was not sharing its latest coordinates with authorities at the nearest port. The vessel would simply vanish forever, leaving no headsto
ne to mark the precise spot where they had died, no record or memory upon the surface of the sea.
After two days the storm subsided, and the ship dropped anchor at Cape Infanta, in South Africa. Kin Sin Lee had arranged to take on another eighty passengers, who would board from South Africa, but Captain Tobing refused. There was just no more room in the hold.
Despite the adversity and the periodic terror of the voyage, or perhaps because of it, a kind of society emerged on board over the months at sea. Apart from the disproportionate ratio of men to women, the passengers on the Golden Venture formed a fairly representative cross-section of Fujianese society, and in coping with the hardship and inertia of the voyage, many of the passengers assumed the roles they had played in the villages they had left behind. A pudgy young man who had been a village doctor tended to the sick; a teenager became known for giving good massages. Natural jokers and raconteurs emerged and amused the others, recycling stories and skits—any diversion to break the monotony. People played endless games of cards and shared recollections of their homes and families and gossiped about the reputations of the various snakeheads who had put them on the ship. (By general agreement, Sister Ping was the best.) When the weather was nice and the ship was in international waters, Kin Sin Lee permitted the passengers to go on deck and stretch and see the sun. They fished with makeshift rods.
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