The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  The ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope before the end of April, plying the same waters that De Gama had on his return from India to Portugal in the fifteenth century, that Magellan, circumnavigator of the globe, had a few years after that. It hugged the African coast for a while, then angled west in the direction of Brazil, charting a course for the cold waters of the North Atlantic, where Ah Kay’s fishing boats would be waiting.

  Chapter Nine

  The Teaneck Massacre

  FROM THE moment the Golden Venture departed from Thailand, it was Ah Kay’s plan to offload it somewhere on the high seas in the Atlantic, as he had done with so many other ships by now. He would not participate in the actual offloading himself; as dai lo, Ah Kay saw his job as negotiating the deals and delegating to his underlings, then exercising a kind of loose supervision while they did the dirty work. On his identity card, which was issued by the Fukienese American Association, he listed his occupation simply as “manager.” In that respect Ah Kay was a typical Mob boss: he rarely ventured to the actual scene of a crime.

  Instead he relied on an assortment of deputies, some of whom had been working for him for years and would, and often did, risk their lives to do his bidding. But as the Fuk Ching gang expanded, it began to admit new members who felt less personal allegiance to Ah Kay. One of these newcomers was a reedy young man with an angular face and straight black hair that hung in a fringe just above his eyes. His name was Dan Xin Lin. He was twenty-eight and had come from Fujian five years earlier.

  Dan Xin had been a member of the gang for a couple of years and had worked as Ah Kay’s bodyguard. But he was slightly older than many of the gang members, and he was promoted quickly and given responsibility for the gang’s burgeoning human smuggling business. He saw the large numbers of people the Fuk Ching was bringing to New York in boats and vans, and he knew the huge fees that Ah Kay received for this work and then doled out, at his own discretion, to his underlings. Ah Kay had become a multimillionaire in a short few years; but to oversee the most lucrative of his criminal enterprises, he was paying Dan Xin a paltry $500 a week.

  Ah Kay was developing a reputation for stinginess, and he was gambling more—more often, and with ever larger sums of money on the table. He lost tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars at a sitting, but he continued gambling, in some measure, perhaps, because the sheer quantities of cash he was collecting allowed him to sustain the habit. Dan Xin was ambitious. He knew that he was more intelligent than the Fuk Ching rank and file, and he was not cowed by the reverence for Ah Kay that the longer-serving members of the gang seemed to share. He saw Ah Kay’s greed and his wastefulness, and it rankled him that it was he and the other underlings who actually did most of the smuggling work, hiring the Vietnamese fishermen, traveling out to sea to meet the mother ships, transporting the passengers to safe houses, and so on.

  By the early 1990s the sudden influx of Fujianese and the flourishing of the snakehead trade had created a boomtown vibe in underworld circles in Chinatown: it was not clear how long this gold rush would last, and you would be mad not to get a piece of it for yourself while the going was good. Dan Xin had contacts in China and wanted to go out on his own, shipping in his own customers and negotiating offloading contracts with other snakeheads. In the summer of 1992 he traveled to Washington, D.C., and met with a Fuk Ching affiliate there to discuss a smuggling venture independent of Ah Kay. When Ah Kay learned about the trip, he was furious that Dan Xin would conduct such a meeting without his permission.

  Ah Kay was blessed with a kind of natural charisma that would become legendary both in Chinatown and in law enforcement circles. He was muscular and handsome, and he possessed a striking calm, an outward tranquillity that somehow also bespoke intensity and convinced others that he was always thinking one or two steps ahead. But Dan Xin’s disloyalty worried him. It was good to be envied, but not by someone who might have the intelligence and leadership skills to supplant him. And there was no question that Dan Xin coveted Ah Kay’s role. “Dan Xin wanted that spot,” one prosecutor would later say. “He was real itchy for it.”

  After the incident in Washington, Dan Xin became more openly defiant and started trying to persuade other members of the gang to join his splinter faction. “He’s no good,” he would tell the young members of the Fuk Ching. “He’s cheap.” The rebellion enraged Ah Kay. Before long, Dan Xin had persuaded half a dozen gang members to defect, and he seems to have raised doubts in Ah Kay about the quality of his own leadership. “What are my shortcomings?” the dai lo asked several of his remaining allies, trying to persuade them to air any grievances rather than go to the other side. He particularly resented the suggestion that he was a miser. “I never say no,” he complained. “When you guys are in trouble, I put out the bail for you. When you guys visit home, I give each three thousand dollars. And when it’s your birthday, I wrap a thousand dollars as a gift. What else do you want from me?” He accused Dan Xin of gambling excessively. “The money he lost on the gambling tables, fuck! Unthinkable. He lost on the gambling tables and he wants me to pay for it?”

  In late December, Dan Xin and several of his allies moved their belongings out of the Fuk Ching safe house where they had been staying, in New Jersey, and relocated to Pennsylvania. Ah Kay thought the move showed weakness, that Dan Xin was a “paper tiger,” without enough support in Chinatown to weather a conflict. “Dan Xin, you want to fight me?” Ah Kay said when the two men spoke by phone. “That will be a job for the rest of your life. Either I die or you die.” He warned Dan Xin not to come back to Chinatown, and if he did, to watch his back. Ah Kay didn’t make such threats lightly; to other members of the Fuk Ching, he announced that he would pay anyone who killed Dan Xin $300,000.

  For a few days around the New Year, Dan Xin was able to stay away. But on January 8, 1993, he returned to Chinatown to renew the contract for his beeper at an electronics store on Allen Street. Around three o’clock that afternoon, Ah Kay was at a friend’s house when he got a call on his cell phone from Song You Lin, one of his closest deputies, telling him that Dan Xin had come back and asking if he should go through with the murder.

  “Do it,” Ah Kay told him. “Do a clean job.”

  “Dai lo, don’t worry,” Song replied. He packed a .380 automatic, and he and two Fuk Ching members walked along the bustling sidewalks of eastern Chinatown to Allen Street. They entered the beeper store, and one of them blocked the entrance while Song pulled his gun. They found Dan Xin standing with two bodyguards, disaffected former Fuk Ching members who had decided to join him. Song fired at Dan Xin, but Dan Xin ducked behind a pillar. One of the bullets came within an inch of his head, singeing his hair, but miraculously, none connected. One of Dan Xin’s bodyguards rushed toward Song to stop him, and Song shot and killed him. Dan Xin’s other ally pulled a gun of his own and fired at Song, and Song fired back, hitting him in the chest and then the head. With the other two out of the way Song raised his gun to finish Dan Xin, but it clicked empty—he had run out of bullets. Song dashed out of the store. Dan Xin checked on his two friends. One of them was dead on the floor. The other had managed to crash out onto the sidewalk, where he lay bleeding, beyond help. Dan Xin straightened and fled the scene.

  A broad-daylight double homicide on a busy street in Chinatown was brazen, but not atypical for the Fuk Ching gang. It was perhaps a reflection of the level of violence in New York City at that time, and of the general disregard in the press for Chinese-on-Chinese crime, but none of New York’s major English-language newspapers contained so much as a mention of the event. The police had heard enough about the tensions within the Fuk Ching to bring Ah Kay in for questioning, but he stonewalled them, saying he knew nothing about the incident. Chinatown’s residents and small-business owners were terrified of the gangs; after an incident like this, no one wanted to risk helping the police. They had no witnesses and no cooperators who could explicate the internecine clash that explained Ah Kay’s connection to the murders. They wer
e forced to let him go.

  Ah Kay was unhappy with Song for allowing Dan Xin to get away. He worried about the police investigation, and about Dan Xin, who had only just escaped what was obviously an assassination engineered by Ah Kay. Worse, the deaths of Dan Xin’s two associates had only added to Ah Kay’s reputation as a careless leader with little regard for the younger members of the gang. He fell into a depression, which was tempered only by his fury at Dan Xin. “I’m going to wash my hands and close the business,” he told one associate. “My brothers—fuck! My close brothers, they won’t take this,” he said. “I can just put out one million dollars and they will die for me.” Because he knew there were no witnesses who would testify about the shootings, he developed a bizarre plan to oblige local people from the community to volunteer as witnesses and say they had seen the shootings and that Dan Xin himself had killed his two allies. “It boils down to who has the money to get a better lawyer,” Ah Kay concluded. “One hundred thousand dollars or eighty thousand dollars will not be a problem for me … But Dan Xin, can he handle that? I bet he can’t. That’s not a problem of whether I underestimate him or not. That’s a fact.”

  Ah Kay hid in an apartment in Flushing, Queens. He stayed there through at least the end of February, talking to his underlings by phone, trying to persuade them not to leave the gang. But he continued to worry. Then one day he left New York altogether and returned to China, to Fujian, to the dirt lanes and ramshackle homes of Yingyu, the village of his birth.

  When Ah Kay left, he handed authority to his younger brother, Guo Liang Wong, who was only twenty-five. Ah Wong, as he was known, was a tough kid with a square jaw, a small mouth, and the same fierce, intelligent eyes as his older brother. He was skinny, with a sinuous, muscular body and a tendency to flaunt his good fortune at being the kid brother of a neighborhood kingpin. He wore gold jewelry and drove around New York in an expensive Lexus.

  Ah Kay instructed Ah Wong that he was to manage the offloading of the Golden Venture, and Ah Wong began preparing for the arrival of the ship, making phone calls to the various snakeheads associated with the voyage to check on its status. The ship was already overdue to arrive, and Sister Ping and the other snakeheads would be counting on Ah Wong to oversee the offloading of their customers. But apart from preparing for the ship’s arrival, Ah Wong kept a low profile; law enforcement was still trying to solve the beeper-store murders, and Dan Xin Lin was still at large somewhere and no doubt eager for revenge. The Fuk Ching had numerous safe houses in the cities and suburbs around New York, and Ah Wong began shuttling from safe house to safe house, aware that living too conspicuously in Chinatown was risky. To rent these spaces Ah Wong relied on Alan Tam, the amiable half African American giant whose fluent English made him the gang’s designated public face for any interactions with the outside world. Tam served not just as realtor for the group but as scheduler and legal secretary. He kept track of everyone’s criminal cases, maintaining a stack of minutely detailed notebooks and calendars, telling people when they had to go to an arraignment or a bail hearing. When Luke Rettler at the Manhattan DA’s office eventually saw Tam’s records, he was amazed. They were as orderly as a clerk’s docket. Tam found criminal lawyers for the gang when they needed them, and bailed people out of jail, and chauffeured them around in his Mustang. When Ah Kay had a daughter, Alan Tam baby-sat her. He also signed leases on safe houses, sometimes using the alias John Tam, and, less plausibly, John Stein.

  The safe houses were rentals, usually in quiet residential neighborhoods without a big Chinese population. The gang often had to hold customers who had arrived in America but had not yet paid their snakehead debts. They coexisted with these customers in a strange relationship; they cooked and ate and talked with the new arrivals, who often came from the same villages in China that they did. Prosecutors sometimes referred to the practice of holding people until they had paid their fees as “hostage-taking.” But most of the arrivals seemed to think of themselves as debtors who had not yet fulfilled their end of a contractual exchange. They weren’t tied up or locked up; this was one of the advantages of having safe houses far from Chinatown. With no immigration status and no English, if these people fled, where could they go? At the same time, the customers were often beaten and threatened when they didn’t pay; and they were forced to cohabit, often in large numbers, in the basement. Alan Tam always specified to real estate agents that he would need a space in which the basement was finished.

  In the months after Ah Kay’s departure, Ah Wong and a few supporters were switching safe houses every few days. They moved so frequently that Alan Tam often couldn’t remember at the end of the day where they were supposed to be staying that night. In the safe houses themselves, life had its indolent, adolescent pleasures. For all the violence and intrigue that marked their lives, Ah Wong and his followers were college-aged kids with plenty of money and a lot of spare time. They treated the houses like crash pads. Various people cycled through—the gang members, their girlfriends, the occasional customer who hadn’t paid a debt. The bathroom at a safe house might have eighteen different toothbrushes in it, accommodating a revolving door of regulars and passers-through.

  They cooked and brought Chinese takeout home and drank Heineken in abundant quantities. None of them cleaned, and the trash had a tendency to pile up. They hooked up VCRs and watched Chinese movies on video. “We watch kung fu movies or drama,” Tam would later explain. They played Nintendo games as well; “Streetfighter” was a favorite. At one of the houses, they strung up a punching bag in the backyard. Some of them listened to English lessons on tape. Neighbors might wonder at the young Asian men with moussed hair and black suits who seemed always to be entering or leaving the split-level down the block, but it was hard to distinguish the kids, to tell how many they were. People assumed that they worked for some local Chinese restaurant.

  Both the FBI and the Manhattan district attorney’s office were investigating the beeper-store murders, but the Fuk Ching’s decision to go underground made it difficult. Then one day Dan Xin Lin walked in to the FBI office and said he was willing to cooperate. Ray Kerr, an FBI agent who was working on the Asian gang problem, and Peter Lee, the special agent who had debriefed Sister Ping, met with Dan Xin. He seemed nothing like his outsized reputation in the neighborhood, the giant-slayer who had dared to challenge Ah Kay. On the contrary, he appeared thin and meek, almost delicate. But it was immediately clear why Dan Xin had come in: he was furious at Ah Kay. He wanted revenge. Kerr and Lee told him they would round up Ah Kay’s gang and arrest them, but they needed his help. “You don’t need to get revenge,” Kerr told him. “In this country, that’s what law enforcement does.”

  Dan Xin sat with the agents and looked through surveillance photos. He picked out Song You Lin, the man who had nearly killed him, and Ah Wong. The FBI agents could see what was happening; it wasn’t unusual for criminals to cooperate primarily for the purpose of getting the other guy arrested. But Dan Xin said he could help them get the beeper-store assassin. From FBI headquarters he made a call to Song You Lin, saying he wanted to meet in Chinatown to discuss the conflict. Song agreed to a rendezvous. The proposed scenario, in which the men would sit down over noodles and have a cordial discussion about the recent incident in which one had tried to murder the other, was so unlikely that the meeting could take place only if both parties had ulterior motives. Dan Xin had no intention of meeting with Song; he just wanted to confirm a time and a place where the police could arrest him. And Song had no intention of discussing the conflict. He agreed to the meeting so that he could finish the job; when the police picked him up, they found a gun, hidden, after the Fuk Ching fashion, in the backpack his girlfriend was carrying.

  The FBI coordinated with Luke Rettler at the Manhattan DA’s office and arranged to take Dan Xin before a grand jury where he could finger Song You Lin and another Fuk Ching member for the beeper-store shootings. They transported him to the grand jury room downtown under guard and closed the elev
ator bank so that he could travel up without being seen. On the way up in the elevator, Rettler noticed that Dan Xin was shaking slightly; he looked like a frightened kid.

  Dan Xin may have been shaking less from fear than from indignation. He had grown obsessed with getting revenge on Ah Kay. Certainly testifying against his assailant in the beeper store would bring some satisfaction, but he was increasingly focusing his enmity on Ah Kay’s brother, Ah Wong. He had provided the FBI with information about Ah Wong, but Ah Wong was not an immediate target in their investigation; they wanted to close the beeper-store killings. Having appealed to America’s criminal justice system, Dan Xin now felt that it was not moving quickly enough. He instructed some of his allies to try to find out where Ah Wong was staying, to study his travel habits. But it was precisely this kind of pursuit that Ah Wong was seeking to thwart by moving around so frequently, and he was evasive enough that Dan Xin could not pin down his location.

  There was one vulnerability in Ah Wong’s routine, however, and it happened to be the individual more familiar with the logistics of safe-house life than any other, if only because it was his duty to oversee those logistics. Alan Tam was loyal to Ah Wong, and above all to Ah Kay, but he was also a drug addict, and something of a buffoon. That March and April, Dan Xin and his crew began socializing with Tam. They met up with him at a whorehouse on Fifty-fifth Street in Brooklyn and offered him crack cocaine. Dan Xin talked to him about Ah Kay and told him that Ah Kay was no friend of his. Tam had been so loyal to Ah Kay for so many years but had never really benefited from all the money that the dai lo was making. Dan Xin’s deputy was a young gangster named Simon Lau, who had chubby cheeks and wore round spectacles. Everyone called him Four-Eyed Fish. He pulled out a gun and placed it on the table in front of Tam.