The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  “It seems we were unlucky,” one of the passengers at York told a reporter after his asylum claim on the basis of the one-child policy was rejected. “Other people with circumstances like mine have won before, I know that. I don’t understand why I lost.”

  One of Sean’s fellow inmates at York was a father of three named Y. C. Dong. In his asylum hearing, Dong told his judge that he left China because he had three children and he feared that the authorities would sterilize him. The judge denied Dong’s claim, dismissing his fear of persecution under the one-child policy as “subjective.” Sometime later, Dong was deported back to China. When he got there, he was arrested, then jailed, beaten, fined—and sterilized.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Fat Man

  BROOKLYN’S GREEN-WOOD Cemetery was established in 1838 and sprawls over 500 acres of rolling hills and winding paths just west of Prospect Park. Around midday on Saturday, August 28, 1993, a funeral ceremony was under way at the crematorium. Scores of mourners had gathered to pay their final respects to a forty-three-year-old Fujianese man named Ai Cheung, who had been smuggled to America by Sister Ping the year before, arriving on the shipment to New Bedford. He had joined the Fuk Ching gang, and he must have developed enemies, because the week before the funeral a beachcomber had noticed a hand sticking out of the sand on Plum Beach, a stretch of Jamaica Bay just off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, which had become a favorite dumping ground for the many bodies felled by the city’s Asian gangs. The hand was Ai Cheung’s. He had been hog-tied, stabbed to death, and buried on the beach.

  As the mourners lined up to pay their final respects, none of them gave much notice to a Nissan Pathfinder that was parked some distance away, where two FBI agents sat waiting. The agent in the passenger seat was a young man named Konrad Motyka, who was burly and broad-shouldered, with close-cropped brown hair and eyes that had a natural squint. Like the driver, his colleague David Shafer, Motyka was dressed in civilian clothes but wore a bulletproof vest and had a 9-millimeter pistol strapped to his leg. As it happened, the deceased had been named in a sprawling forty-five-count indictment that authorities in New York were preparing against the Fuk Ching gang, and when Motyka and his colleagues at the FBI learned about his funeral, they saw an opportunity: many of the other gang members named in the indictment would probably attend the ceremony, and the FBI could arrest them all at once. It would be a dazzling strike, but not without a certain danger: if the feds crashed the funeral with guns drawn, the cornered mourners might very well start shooting. Motyka remembered an incident three summers earlier, when an Asian gang funeral in Linden, New Jersey, had degenerated into a shootout. He did not discount the possibility that the same thing could happen today.

  Motyka had grown up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His father was first-generation Polish American and his mother was from Germany; they met on a ski trip. They were eager to see their son preserve a sense of European culture and tradition, and sent him to the Lycée Français on the Upper East Side, where he became fluent in French, and from there to Columbia University. But the more Motyka’s parents endeavored to instill a European identity in their son, the more profoundly he insisted that he was a regular American kid. At Columbia he signed up for the football team. When he graduated, in 1985, and his classmates headed to law school or investment banks, Motyka joined the Marine Corps. The choice was driven by a sense of patriotism—a conviction that as an American he owed a duty to his country. But it didn’t hurt that as a Marine he would get to see the world. He spent the next couple of years as an infantry officer in Norway, the Philippines, and Okinawa. Eventually he married his college girlfriend, who was working as a nurse for the Navy, and together they applied to the FBI.

  After completing the academy at Quantico, Motyka was assigned to the Bureau’s office in New York and spent several years working on cold war counterintelligence, pursuing spies embedded in the city’s foreign consulates and UN missions. In 1989 the Bureau formed a new unit, known as C-6, to deal with what was referred to as “nontraditional” organized crime. C-6 was run by Ray Kerr, the agent who handled the Fuk Ching gang defector Dan Xin Lin during his brief period of cooperation. Its mission was somewhat diffuse, touching on any ethnic organized crime that did not involve the Mafia. Kerr and his agents went after Jamaican groups and Greek groups before moving on to the new breed of Asian gangs that had begun to terrorize Chinatown. By the time Konrad Motyka was transferred to C-6 in 1992, the unit was developing a case against Ah Kay and the Fuk Ching gang.

  Motyka and his colleagues had begun assembling information on the gang and watched in shock as the death toll escalated. There was the brazenness of Ah Kay’s botched effort to have Dan Xin assassinated at the beeper store in January 1993; then there was Dan Xin’s bloody revenge at Teaneck in May. But if each of those incidents was an incremental indication that the Fuk Ching and the snakehead trade were growing out of hand, the arrival of the Golden Venture on June 6 was something else altogether. Suddenly the Fuk Ching investigation took on a new urgency. The message from Washington was unequivocal: spare no time or expense in tracking the people who masterminded the voyage of the Golden Venture; take them down.

  As Motyka and Shafer watched, the funeral ceremony appeared to be coming to an end. Mourners in black suits began to leave the crematorium and make their way toward a line of waiting limousines parked along the road. Motyka braced himself, and Shafer started the engine.

  Nearly three months earlier, the day after the Golden Venture ran aground, the ship’s captain, Amir Tobing, and the chief onboard enforcer, Kin Sin Lee, sat scowling at each other in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. Tobing looked disheveled, his hair uncombed. He claimed that he was a victim—that it was only after the mutiny divested him of power that everything had gone awry. “He beat me and tortured me,” he said, gesturing at Kin Sin Lee, who sat erect and motionless. “They cheated me out of my money.”

  Both men were ultimately charged with conspiracy and smuggling. Because alien smuggling convictions still carried relatively light sentences, prosecutors took the unusual step of charging Kin Sin Lee under an antique statute that dealt with manslaughter at sea. The ten crew members were also charged, along with eight of the passengers who had assisted Kin Sin Lee during the voyage. All twenty of the perpetrators who had been on board the ship pleaded guilty. The judge, Reena Raggi, rejected a plea bargain offered by defense attorneys, observing that light sentences might run the risk of “trivializing” the severity of the crime committed. “The boat did not just run aground,” she said, her voice rising. “It was deliberately run aground.” For his role in the operation, Kin Sin Lee was sentenced to ten years. When he was asked what obligation he had felt for the safety of the passengers, he replied, “I never thought of that at the time.” Sam Lwin, the first officer, received four and a half years. And despite his protests, Captain Tobing was sentenced to four years. “I am sorry,” he told the court. “I promise not to do it again.” (If he meant smuggling, this was not a promise he would keep. Several years after he was released and deported to Indonesia, Tobing resurfaced off the coast of Washington State, when the Coast Guard stopped a sailboat he was skippering, which happened to contain five tons of Cambodian marijuana. “Why Smuggle Pot to NW?” the local press wondered. “Authorities Puzzled; There’s Plenty Here.”)

  As investigators questioned perpetrators from the Golden Venture, names began to emerge—names of co-conspirators who were not on board. Along with Mr. Charlie, Weng Yu Hui had been the chief liaison for the ship, loading the stranded passengers from the Najd II onto the Golden Venture in early April and coordinating the crash landing in Queens over the ship-to-shore. On the morning the Golden Venture arrived, Weng had visited Sister Ping in her shop and found her watching the news coverage—the arrests, the deaths, people jumping from the ship and being rescued from the surf. “The government is definitely going to investigate the people behind the boat,” Sister Ping said. She told Weng to leave town for a while
. She had an apartment in New Jersey. Perhaps he could go there.

  Weng did as she said, but he did not stay gone for long. The following month he was back in Chinatown and dropped by Sister Ping’s store at 47 East Broadway. “How come you’re still in New York?” Sister Ping asked angrily. “This is very dangerous.”

  Again Sister Ping volunteered a place for Weng to hide, but this time she did not think New Jersey would be far enough away. She proposed that he fly to South Africa, where she happened to own an ostrich farm. How it is that Sister Ping would own property in South Africa at all, much less an ostrich farm, is unclear. It may simply be that in order to manage a truly global smuggling network, she needed hideouts and way stations throughout the world. And indeed, after eighteen of her passengers in Mombasa refused to board the Golden Venture, she had arranged to have them transported to South Africa and put up at the farm until she could figure how to facilitate the next step in their journey. Weng could join them, she suggested.

  But Weng lived a life of circumscribed horizons. He was a creature of habit, and could not stay away from Chinatown for long. He never made it to South Africa, and instead relocated temporarily to West Virginia. But he kept coming back to Chinatown. He had a girlfriend who lived in an apartment on Henry Street, and he drove to town to visit her from time to time. One day two INS agents were staking out the apartment when they saw Weng drive up and walk in the front door. They called for backup, and a team of agents raided the apartment. They found Weng cowering in a bedroom closet. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years.

  Within hours of the Golden Venture’s arrival, authorities in New York had announced that Ah Kay was a chief suspect. Konrad Motyka was working with Luke Rettler, the prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, to prepare a case against the Fuk Ching, and evidence was being assembled to charge Ah Kay with a colorful litany of crimes: murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, maiming, assault with a deadly weapon, assault resulting in severe bodily injury, threatening to commit a crime of violence. The problem for the law enforcement officers was that they did not want to round up the gang until they had captured Ah Kay. And Ah Kay was in China. After the Teaneck killings there had been some speculation that Ah Kay would return to America to avenge his brothers’ deaths, but with the Golden Venture operation gone so devastatingly wrong, it seemed even Ah Kay would not dare to come back. Stories circulated in Chinatown about a walled mansion that Ah Kay was building in his home village in China. He was a famous rogue in his native region; everybody knew who he was. He was said to be surrounded by bodyguards at all times and to enjoy the protection of local officials.

  But the FBI had one interesting advantage. In the chaos of the split in the Fuk Ching, the beeper-store killings, the Teaneck massacre, and the arrival of the Golden Venture, agents had been able to cultivate a few cooperators from the gang, chief among them Ah Kay’s former errand boy Alan Tam. After the killings at Teaneck, Tam had telephoned Ah Kay in China. It was an awkward conversation, with Ah Kay wondering if Tam had anything to do with the killings and Tam skirting the fact that he had supplied the address where Ah Kay’s brothers were hiding and a floor plan of the house. If Ah Kay was devastated by the murders of his two younger brothers, he did not let it interfere with his ability to assess the situation in his capacity as the leader of the Fuk Ching gang. (Even in anger, Ah Kay displayed a cold, almost clinical rationality. When he was asked later how he felt about the fact that Dan Xin Lin paid others $50,000 to murder his brothers, Ah Kay replied, “I wouldn’t kill someone for free.”) Before Tam hung up, Ah Kay instructed him to go to New Jersey and try to find out more about what had happened. Tam did as he was instructed, but a half-black, half-Chinese giant loitering around the police station in Bergen County was nothing if not conspicuous, and within a few hours he was under arrest.

  Tam proved to be a valuable source. He had always been a pushover—after all, with little more than peer pressure and drugs, Dan Xin had persuaded him to assist in a quadruple homicide. The FBI easily convinced him to cooperate. In some respects he was a less than ideal informant; he was inarticulate to the point of incoherence sometimes, and his foot soldier’s view of the world could never capture all the intricacies of Ah Kay’s organization. But at the same time Tam had a Zelig-like quality that had managed to put him in the room or behind the wheel of the car during numerous important exchanges.

  At considerable expense, the government paid to have a new identity created for Alan Tam. He was relocated and given a new name in order to avoid retribution from the gang. But like Weng Yu Hui, Tam seems to have found himself unable to thrive far from the Chinatown ecosystem where he had spent so many years. When Rettler telephoned him at his new residence and made a point of asking to speak to him by his new name, Tam would grow confused. “What? Who?” he would say, before offering, “This is Alan.”

  One day a detective from the Fifth Precinct, in Chinatown, went to lunch at a Japanese and Chinese restaurant a block north of City Hall Park, near the federal buildings of downtown Manhattan and Luke Rettler’s office on Centre Street and a five-minute walk from Chinatown. As she was eating her lunch, she looked up and saw a tall, half-black, half-Chinese man emerge from the kitchen and stand behind the counter. She thought he looked familiar. “Aren’t you Alan Tam?” she asked. The man froze, then spun around and dashed into the kitchen.

  The detective telephoned Luke Rettler. “Where’s Alan Tam?” she asked.

  “He’s in witness protection,” Rettler replied.

  “Well, they can’t be doing a very good job with the witness protection,” the detective said. “Because I just saw him working in a restaurant about three blocks from Chinatown.”

  Motyka and his colleagues were interested in the information Tam could feed them about his former boss, but there was someone else they thought they could use in order to get to Ah Kay: his father. Ah Kay was already a fast-rising member of the Fuk Ching by the time his father immigrated from Fujian to New York in the late 1980s. When Ah Kay fled to China, he continued speaking with his father, who lived in an apartment on the third floor of the Fukienese American Association, at 125 East Broadway. The FBI set up a wiretap on the telephone, hoping to catch a conversation between father and son.

  Of course Ah Kay had considered the possibility that the authorities might try to monitor his father’s phone. When it comes to new technologies, criminals are often early adopters. Before the police and the FBI had beepers, the drug runners and gangsters did; by the time the authorities got their own beepers, the crooks had moved on to cellular phones. During the summer of 1993, it was possible for the FBI to monitor only fifteen different cell phones in the New York area at any given time. It was not unusual for an agent to go to the phone company, warrant in hand, only to be told that all the available taps were in use. Knowing that cell phones were more secure than landlines, Ah Kay had purchased one for his father and told him to use it whenever the two communicated.

  But if anything, Ah Kay was too much of an early adopter. Or at any rate, he was an earlier adopter than his father was. The older man found the new telephone confusing and offputting. He couldn’t work out how to make a call go through. After several failed experiments with the cell phone, he took to using a more traditional method: the landline in his apartment at 125 East Broadway.

  “Are you on the cell phone?” Ah Kay would ask every time his father called.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m on the cell phone,” the delighted agents would hear his father reply.

  Ah Kay’s father was concerned, because the young gangster’s gambling problem appeared to be growing out of control. The members of the Fuk Ching gang had always loved to gamble. They played mahjong, thirteen-card poker, pai gow, fan tan, seven cards, high-low, anything they could bet money on. Like Mock Duck, the fabled tong war warrior before him, who was “known to wager his entire wealth on whether the number of seeds in an orange picked at random from a fruit cart was odd or even,” Ah Kay gra
vitated to high-stakes games of chance.

  Since the Golden Venture had run aground, Ah Kay had been hiding in Yingyu village with his most loyal lieutenant, Li Xing Hua. Li was happy. He was a country boy content to be back in the village where he had grown up. He could have stayed there forever. But Ah Kay was restless. The village he had left as a child was a remote backwater, and even the nearby centers of Changle and Fuzhou seemed provincial in comparison to New York. There was gambling in Fujian Province, to be sure, but for paltry stakes, and with none of the heady splendor of the big city. Ah Kay had seen the world, made millions of dollars, and killed men; he was still in his mid-twenties, and the staid life of rural China bored him. So he started making trips to Hong Kong to gamble.

  The stakes could get exceedingly high in Hong Kong, and before long Ah Kay was losing, and losing a lot. He ran up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes in a single evening. Ah Kay had always been cavalier about his losses, but his revenue stream had been severely curtailed when he went underground and stopped offloading ships. He turned to his father for help. One day in mid-August, he spoke with his father on the phone and asked the older man to have Sister Ping remit him $20,000 to satisfy a gambling debt.

  “Don’t do it anymore!” his father pleaded.

  “It’s not like I’m not paying people back,” Ah Kay said defensively. “If there is no money, then say it’s because there’s no money.”