The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Xin Bin had left a wife and a young son and daughter behind when he boarded the Golden Venture, and in August 2000 he was finally able to send for them. The family settled in Washington, D.C., and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Xianjuan, enrolled in a local school and quickly established herself as a star: she learned English with ease and became an A student. She adapted more quickly than her older brother to American life and became a sort of manager for the family, a liaison to the outside world: she paid the bills, oversaw the banking, and handled the family’s credit cards. By 2005 she was an eighteen-year-old senior at Northwestern High School and had decided to apply to college and study law. Xin Bin was fifty years old. He was reunited with his family, and the horrors of the voyage and the years in prison were beginning to recede. He and his wife were dependent on Xianjuan to assist them in their everyday affairs, and to some extent, by allowing them to continue functioning in a primarily Mandarin idiom, she may have served as a kind of buffer between the two of them and the English-speaking world, an impediment to their own assimilation. But at the same time she was in a very real sense the literal embodiment of their commitment to a life and a future in the United States. They were enormously proud of her.

  Xin Bin was working as a cook at a nondescript Chinese restaurant in a strip mall in a rough corner of Washington. One evening his children came to pick him up at work. It was after ten o’clock, near the end of his shift, and Xianjuan filled a cup with seafood soup and went outside to wait for her father in front of the restaurant. As she sipped her soup, a car entered the parking lot, and two men got out. They walked toward Xianjuan. Then one of them pulled out a gun and shot her twice in the head.

  “All of a sudden I heard pang, pang—two gunshots—and I went outside,” Xin Bin said through tears not long afterward. “Ayah, my daughter had fallen there.”

  She lay by a blue mailbox, dead. Xin Bin collapsed on the ground beside her, his body convulsed by sobs. “I only have this one daughter,” he said later. “She was so beautiful. She was such a good student.”

  No suspects were ever apprehended; the crime remained unsolved. Police speculated that it may have been a botched robbery, or a case of mistaken identity. Xin Bin was distraught, and his wife was even more so. She had a breakdown and remained in the house for weeks, catatonic with grief. Without Xianjuan the family became isolated from the outside world, and their despair deepened. Eventually Xin Bin’s wife announced that she wanted to return to China. “She wants nothing to do with America,” Bev said. “They killed her baby.”

  Before Xianjuan died, Xin Bin had been trying to obtain a green card for her. After her murder, he tried to explain to the people from Citizenship and Immigration Services that they should discontinue the application, because his daughter was no longer alive. But without Xianjuan to act as interpreter, he struggled to make himself clear, and for over a year after her death the agency continued sending him notices and forms, insisting that the family send them information that was necessary for Xianjuan to become a permanent resident of the United States.

  Sean Chen had been luckier than the other detainees at York. He had walked out of the prison over a year before the other men did, after his lawyer, Ann Carr, managed to persuade a federal judge with a complex legal argument over whether or not the men who jumped off the Golden Venture had technically succeeded in entering the United States. If, as Carr contended, the passengers had indeed managed to enter the country, then there was a time limit on how long the government could keep them in jail (whereas if they had been caught before formally entering, they were “exclusion” cases and could be detained more or less indefinitely). The judge’s ruling was ultimately reversed by an appeals court, but not before Sean had a chance to telephone relatives in China and the United States and assemble the $10,000 he needed for bail. On the day he was set free, Bev Church went to the prison. She had always admired Sean’s fearless swagger, and she took him a pair of sunglasses as a gift. He wore them as he walked out.

  Despite his suggestion in prison that he would avoid Chinatown at all costs, Sean moved to Philadelphia and found work in the Chinese community there. He owed his bail money to the various family members he had borrowed from, and needed to start earning in a hurry, so he found a job as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant. Next he worked at a garbage processing center, which paid him $8 an hour, and at a parking lot. Sean traveled light—he always had—and he was always in search of a new experience and a better paycheck. Through a Fujianese employment agency he found a job in New York City working as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant on Forty-ninth Street. He moved to New York and took the job, but he lasted there only one month before he relocated to the Bronx and found work as a cashier at a takeout restaurant. He didn’t like that job either, and after another month or so he received a call from a cousin who owned a Chinese restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut. She needed a cashier, so Sean moved once again.

  Sean liked Hartford. He helped wait on tables at the restaurant and slowly began accruing more and more experience in the business. He figured if he could work as a chef, cashier, delivery boy busboy waiter, bartender, and manager, he would become a kind of indispensable jack-of-all-trades in the Chinese restaurant world. He enrolled in bartending school and found that he loved tending bar: he was a naturally outgoing, gregarious person, and he liked practicing his English with customers. He liked having regulars. He liked having friends.

  Still, the fact that he was not technically a legal immigrant rankled Sean. He still had to check in with an immigration officer on a regular basis, an imposition that he began to resent. He had been in the United States for years. He was working hard, paying taxes, making decent money. Why was he still being treated like a criminal?

  When he wanted to start his own restaurant in Hartford, there was an additional challenge: because borrowing and lending money are so ingrained in Fujianese culture and contracts and debts tend to be honored, Fujianese people are a decent credit risk. But undocumented aliens are not, and it is difficult for a parolee, who could be deported next year or next week, to obtain a loan from a bank. Instead Sean borrowed from friends and relatives and made the mistake of running up debts on credit cards in order to open his own place. For a while it seemed he had achieved that first crucial milestone for the Fujianese: he owned his own business. But before long the restaurant folded. Sean had borrowed so heavily from everyone he knew that when he failed to find customers and cover his bills, he was forced to close the place. He was devastated, and felt like a failure. He spoke with his parents in China. “Son, it’s okay,” his father reassured him. He tried to put Sean’s trials in perspective. “You’ve been through so much,” he said. “So much more than I have.”

  But the worst aspect of Sean’s quasi-legal life was feeling like a man without a country. Eventually his parents and siblings moved to Taiwan, and he had no immediate family left in China. He had no Chinese passport, no Chinese identity papers. He felt that there was less and less connecting him to the country every day. When he spoke with his mother on the telephone, she complained that his Fujianese had become corrupted by English and by Cantonese, which he was obliged to pick up in the Chinese restaurant trade. Apart from his parents and Beverly Church, whom he still telephoned once a week, no one ever called him by his Chinese name, Chung Sing Chao, anymore. He was Sean Chen now; it was how others thought of him, and how he thought of himself. But he suffered from a gnawing anguish at the thought that he might be sent back to the country he had left in 1991, despite the fact that like generations of foreign people with foreign names from all over the world who had peopled this country and made it what it was, Sean Chen had become, unmistakably and irreversibly, American.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Snakeheads International

  ONE SUMMER day in 1995 a yellow school bus tore along the potholed surface of Highway 8 in Honduras, en route to the Guatemalan border. The bus held fourteen Sikhs who had paid to be smuggled from India into the United S
tates. They were customers of one of Sister Ping’s chief competitors, a Peruvian woman named Gloria Canales, who now worked out of Costa Rica. Canales transported migrants from India and China to Central America, then on to the United States. She was not accompanying the Sikhs herself; like Sister Ping, she had long since subcontracted her operational logistics. Instead, a hired driver was guiding the Sikhs to Guatemala so that they could rendezvous with coyotes, as Mexican human smugglers are known, and steal across the border.

  Earlier in the day the bus had been tailed by a car containing immigration agents, but the driver seemed to have lost the pursuers on the back roads, and the agents were stymied when their government-issue radios stopped working. The transmitter at the airport had been mysteriously switched off, quite possibly by someone hoping the Sikhs would make it to Guatemala unmolested.

  When the bus was 70 miles from the Guatemalan border, the driver needed to relieve his bladder. He pulled over to the side of the road and jumped out of the bus. As he did, a car appeared out of nowhere on the road behind him and raced up alongside the bus. Two men climbed out. One was a Honduran immigration official. The other was Jerry Stuchiner, the goateed INS agent from Hong Kong who had worked with the Fat Man to locate Ah Kay.

  Shortly after Ah Kay’s arrest, Stuchiner had been transferred to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. He was not happy with the move. He had loved the glamour and intrigue of Hong Kong; with just over a million people, the mountainous city of Tegucigalpa was a provincial backwater by comparison. The city had none of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan glamour. The people lived in sprawling shantytowns. Stuchiner’s residence had no hot water or electricity. Worse still, he was deprived, at least initially, of that sense, so palpable in Hong Kong, of being at the heart of things professionally—an immigration agent in a den of human smugglers.

  Still, Stuchiner did his best to stay close to the action. He explored the possibility of doing business deals on the side—exporting shark fins to Asia, perhaps, or fish stomachs. He kept in touch with the Fat Man, who visited him occasionally in Honduras. The two men would take steam baths and talk business. Stuchiner had a friend in Tegucigalpa, a Honduran of Jewish origin named Herbie Weizenblut, who Stuchiner thought would make a good Honduran consul in Hong Kong. Stuchiner thought of Weizenblut as “a coreligionist, and a lost soul,” and wanted to help him out. In a decidedly unconventional move that was indicative of Stuchiner’s deep friendship with the Fat Man, and of the Fat Man’s willingness to buck propriety and indulge the occasionally shady side of government activity, the two men were able to persuade the Honduran government to make Weizenblut its new consul in Hong Kong, but only after the Fat Man committed to personally cover half of Weizenblut’s expenses while he was on the job—a sum of $15,000 a month.

  For Stuchiner, the saving grace of his new Central American home was that in its own way, little backward Honduras was emerging, along with nearby countries like Panama, Belize, and Guatemala, as a major regional hub in the global snakehead trade. Just as Stuchiner was arriving in the country, rumors were beginning to circulate about “Chinazo,” a major scandal in which it emerged that in 1991 the Honduran National Assembly had passed a law that was nominally designed to attract foreign investment but actually amounted to a cash-for-citizenship scheme. A sophisticated ring of corrupt officials made nearly $20 million selling Honduran passports to the Chinese. Few of these newly minted Chinese Hondurans actually settled in Honduras. Instead, using their Honduran passports, they booked flights to Tegucigalpa that stopped over in the United States. Then they would destroy the costly passports on the airplane and request asylum at the first American airport they hit.

  The case was emblematic of a deep culture of corruption in Honduras, and in Central America more generally, a culture that, along with the region’s physical proximity to the United States, made it immensely appealing for smugglers. One seldom-remarked irony of globalization is that while the increased interknittedness of the world undoubtedly facilitated a plethora of useful innovations for consumers and governments, the unfettered flow of goods, people, capital, and ideas that so characterized the 1990s also presented major opportunities for the enterprising cross-border criminal. Any international effort to regulate clandestine international trade, whether of drugs, guns, or people, will be only as good as the least vigilant nation in the system. If the community of nations relies on official documents issued by countries to denote who is entitled to travel where, it takes only one spoiler country, like Honduras, to undo the whole thing. What’s more, the better the rest of the system works—the more harmonized and efficient the international regulatory architecture is—the higher the rewards will be for the one country willing to cheat, offering an illicit back door into the licit international system.

  Just as Bangkok functioned as a hub in the smuggling networks because snakeheads could put passengers on planes, Central America was emerging as a new hub. Official corruption is the oxygen that any kind of global smuggling requires to thrive, and the kind of corruption evident in the Chinazo case was pervasive in the region. In 1995 alone, the immigration directors of Panama, Belize, and Guatemala were all fired for accepting bribes from smugglers. That year a federal working group on alien smuggling reported that the growth of human smuggling was “made possible by staggering levels of official corruption” and a sense in many transit countries that the activity was fundamentally a “victimless crime.”

  When Stuchiner cracked the Canales ring, it was heralded as a great success in Washington, not just because one major smuggler had been removed from power, but because it seemed to promise a new, more dynamic approach to pursuing smugglers. Stuchiner recognized that in order to fight an international adversary, American authorities had to adopt a more international approach themselves. When a new head of Honduran immigration, Angelina Ulloa, took office, vowing to stamp out the corruption that had plagued her predecessors, Stuchiner began working closely with her. Their main target was Canales, and they devised a bold plan, involving the use of an undercover agent to set up the deal with the Sikhs. At that time Honduras was the only country in the region where human smuggling was actually a prosecutable crime, so Stuchiner tried to lure Canales to Honduras. It was the type of audacious scheme that Stuchiner’s colleagues in Hong Kong had complained about. And it also seemed typical of Stuchiner’s gift for self-mythologizing that rumors were soon circulating in Tegucigalpa that Canales had sent a henchman to town to assassinate him. It may have been that the rumors were true, but it was also the case that tales of assassination attempts against him were a staple in Stuchiner’s conversational repertoire dating back to his days in Vienna during the 1980s.

  Nevertheless, Stuchiner’s tactics, however unorthodox, were delivering results. When he couldn’t lure Canales to Honduras, he helped persuade Ecuador to arrest her and extradite her to Tegucigalpa. Against the odds, he seemed to have devised a manner of using the international system against the very international crime syndicates that exploited it. When Canales arrived in Honduras and was awaiting trial, she was accompanied by over a dozen guards, not so much to prevent her from escaping as to prevent her from being assassinated on behalf of the many powerful political figures with an interest in keeping her quiet.

  “If this isthmus was closed off, there is no way they could get to the U.S.,” Stuchiner told the press, flush with his victory over Canales. “You would force them to use air routes, which are easier to control.” If Stuchiner was going to continue his crusade to shut down the snakehead trade in Central America, and was going to do it by finding a few clean officials in the various regional governments and forming alliances with people he could trust, it was only a matter of time before he would start to target another prominent smuggler who had recently intensified her operations in the area: Sister Ping.

  These new international criminals are very mobile,” a Senate investigator remarked in the mid-1990s. “For the first time in criminal history, they are able to establish and control
on a day-to-day basis operations in foreign countries far from their home port. Law enforcement by and large stops at the border, and we’re just in the first stumbling steps in trying to get better coordination internationally. These crooks are way ahead of the cops.”

  He could have been describing Sister Ping. After the wreck of the Golden Venture and her hasty flight to China in 1994, she did not curtail her smuggling activities. By the late nineties, an estimated 30,000 people from Tingjiang, the area surrounding her village, had made the trip to the United States. Many of these people faced the same predicament as the Golden Venture passengers released by President Clinton: without green cards, they could not petition for their family members to come to the United States legally. So instead they were forced to turn to snakeheads, and above all to Sister Ping.

  It was no longer feasible to send smuggling ships directly to the coastal waters of the United States. After the Golden Venture, the U.S. Coast Guard had become very active in monitoring American shores, and numerous ships were turned back in the open seas. But neither did it make business sense to abandon boat smuggling altogether and revert to the expensive and piecemeal process of obtaining phony documents and sending passengers by plane. Throughout the 1990s, snakeheads everywhere were diversifying, evolving new routes to take customers to new places, and always adapting so that they stayed a step or two ahead of law enforcement. Even a partial listing of the routes that law enforcement discovered during those years reads like the bizarre itinerary for some madcap world tour: Fuzhou—Hong Kong—Bangkok—Moscow—Havana—Managua—Tucson; Fuzhou—Hong Kong—Bangkok—Kuala Lumpur—Singapore—Dubai—Frankfurt—Washington. When snakeheads discovered that it was relatively easy to obtain visas for Chinese passengers to visit Russia, a new route developed, with passengers flying into Moscow, then trekking over the loosely patrolled border into the Ukraine and then Slovakia, from Slovakia in a minivan to Prague, and from Prague to points west—the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France, and Britain. New Chinatowns popped up in cities from São Paolo to Dubai. After sanctions were imposed on Yugoslavia in 1993, Slobodan Milosevic began cultivating the Chinese leadership in Beijing and lifted visa requirements for Chinese citizens to travel to Serbia. The snakeheads wasted no time sending their customers to Belgrade by the planeload, knowing full well that from there they could make their way into Western Europe and on to Canada or the United States. (Indeed, it seems likely that Milosevic’s sudden hospitality toward the Chinese was driven by the same intuition.)