The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Ah Kay admitted that he had ordered the killings at the beeper store in January 1993, and described the price he had paid for it with the murder of his brothers in Teaneck. When Dan Xin Lin and the other murderers were tried in a courtroom in New Jersey, the prosecutor wanted background on the case and dutifully made the pilgrimage to the MCC to visit Ah Kay.

  Nor did Ah Kay merely assist with cases in which he had personally played some role. He volunteered information on cases that hadn’t even been cases—the buried bodies of nameless Chinese Americans who had run afoul of one gang or the other and disappeared, unnoticed, from the city’s streets. He spent hours shuffling through surveillance photos, explaining who was who, correlating birth names with nicknames, and volunteering capsule histories of the criminal careers of a generation of thugs. He still had sources in China, and when he didn’t know something, he would make a few phone calls back to Fujian Province to learn the answer. So extensive was this proactive intelligence-gathering that from behind bars Ah Kay ran up $60,000 in long-distance charges making international phone calls on behalf of the FBI. “The one thing about Ah Kay was that when he decided to cooperate, he cooperated one hundred percent,” one of his handlers at the Bureau said. “He was probably the best cooperator that any of us have ever dealt with.”

  Over the years Ah Kay assisted in fifteen different federal cases, including a major investigation that resulted in an indictment against thirty-five members of another Chinatown gang, the Fukienese Flying Dragons. What’s more, because he was such a notorious figure in the demimonde of Chinatown crime, the fact of his cooperation paid dividends far beyond the valuable information that he furnished. When word spread on the street that Ah Kay was talking, everyone who had ever done business with him was forced to consider whether he or she might be indicted next. The result was the criminal equivalent of a run on the banks. In the past, federal agents had struggled to persuade Chinatown criminals to turn their backs on the community and entrust their lives to the authorities by cooperating. But when Ah Kay became an informant, suddenly everyone seemed to want to come in and cut a deal. In the crude game theory of American organized crime, nobody wants to be the last one to rat. Before long, Luke Rettler joked that he had a line of Asian gangsters stretching out his door.

  Upon his return to the United States, Ah Kay had agreed to plead guilty to murder and racketeering charges. But since his willingness to assist the FBI was driven at least in part by a desire to mitigate his own punishment, there was no sense in actually sentencing him for his crimes until he had been given an opportunity to help. So for several years Ah Kay’s sentencing was postponed. Finally one day in 1998 he appeared before a federal judge, accompanied by his attorney, Gerry Shargel. Ah Kay had worked “virtually full time for five years doing what he could to improve his situation,” Shargel told the judge. The government agreed. The federal prosecutor Chauncey Parker, who had spent the summer of 1993 working with Luke Rettler to re-up the wiretap on Ah Kay’s father, maintained that the “unprecedented” level of assistance Ah Kay had extended was worthy of a lenient sentence.

  Neither Ah Kay nor Shargel mentioned it during the proceedings, but if there was a model they were contemplating in their bid for a diminished sentence, it was surely the recent, highly publicized case of the former Gambino family underboss Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, who had turned state’s evidence in 1991 and testified against his former employer, the Gambino crime boss John Gotti. After confessing to involvement in nineteen murders, Gravano was sentenced in 1994 to a mere five years. The prosecutors in that case had argued that a minimal sentence for Gravano might drive other criminals to cooperate with law enforcement in the future, and both Ah Kay and Shargel were acutely aware of the precedent established by Gravano’s good fortune. (Shargel was perhaps especially so, as he had represented Gotti.)

  “In these five years, I have felt the pain of two younger brothers and their suffering,” Ah Kay told the judge. “I have felt regretful about all the unforgivable crimes that I have committed in the past.”

  But the judge, John Martin, was not swayed, and it was immediately apparent that Ah Kay would not be getting off quite so easily as Sammy the Bull. “There are five people dead directly because of this defendant,” Martin said. “This defendant was the symbol of terror in the community where he lived, where his gang terrorized merchants, killed innocent people.” He sentenced Ah Kay to twenty years in prison, and he said that he worried even that might not be sufficient. “That community is going to look on this sentence and be puzzled as to why a court would only give this man twenty years,” the judge concluded.

  The first thing Ah Kay did once the sentence was delivered was to fire Gerry Shargel. Another convict might simply have given up, resigning himself to the sentence and quietly serving his time. At the very least one might expect someone in Ah Kay’s position to swear off helping the government. But after his sentencing Ah Kay continued to assist his handlers at the FBI, because there was still one narrow possibility that he could secure his freedom. The authorities had used Ah Kay to dismantle, in a fairly systematic manner, several major pillars of the criminal universe in Chinatown. But they were still holding out for one big case. Sister Ping was one of the first people Ah Kay had supplied information on when he originally came in. By 1998 she had been a fugitive for four years and was the FBI’s most wanted Asian organized crime figure. Ah Kay had volunteered detailed information about her history and her various criminal activities, and he had made it clear that if the opportunity ever presented itself, he would be willing to testify against her—to stand in court and point the finger, the way Sam Gravano had pointed at John Gotti. If that day ever came, he might have the opportunity to do one final service for the government, to hand them the human smuggler they had been pursuing on and off since Operation Hester back in 1984. As Ah Kay sat in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, he could only hope that somehow someone could capture Sister Ping. “That’s what he was waiting for,” one of Sister Ping’s lawyers would later remark. “She was his ticket out.”

  During the years that she had been in China, Sister Ping had seemed maddeningly elusive to the men at the FBI who were pursuing her. Konrad Motyka was still working on the case, and he was joined by Bill McMurry a handsome young special agent from New Jersey, who had a quiet, almost laconic manner and began to immerse himself in the Bureau’s extensive file on Sister Ping. McMurry was patient. He could appreciate the difficulty of conducting an international hunt for a woman who had so excelled over decades at the clandestine movement of people across borders. If Sister Ping had succeeded in making whole villages of people disappear from the countryside in China, only to reappear in the tenement blocks of Lower Manhattan, then surely she would have no trouble with the final vanishing act of eluding detection herself. By the late 1990s the FBI had developed many sources within the Fujianese community in Chinatown, far more than they had had when the Golden Venture ran aground. The informers came in from the streets and told McMurry and Motyka that Sister Ping was living openly in Fujian and that she was, if anything, more successful as a snakehead than she had been in the past. It sometimes seemed that she was simply invincible, impossible to catch.

  Eventually Motyka and McMurry concluded that they could not count on China. Instead their plan would be to sit back and hope that at some point Sister Ping might leave China and travel to some jurisdiction where the authorities cooperated with the United States. Because Ah Kay had an interest in seeing Sister Ping captured, he proved happy to assist in this approach. Sister Ping was something of a celebrity in her home country, and little details like her whereabouts at a given time had a way of becoming public knowledge in the close-knit communities around Fuzhou. Ah Kay kept in touch with his sources in China, and when Sister Ping left town, he would hear about it and pass the information on to the FBI. Occasionally Motyka and McMurry would know not just that Sister Ping had left town for a few days, but that she was destined for Thailand or the Philippines.
When they contacted the authorities in Bangkok or Manila, however, they would learn that there was no record of any Cheng Chui Ping entering or leaving the airports. Sister Ping might have been traveling, but she wasn’t doing so under her own name.

  One solution was for the FBI to persuade informants who knew Sister Ping to try to lure her out of China, enabling the local authorities in a friendly country to set up a sting. On one occasion the FBI arranged for an associate of Sister Ping’s to try to interest her in a business deal. She initially agreed, and it was decided that she would meet the informant in Hong Kong. The FBI requested a provisional arrest warrant from Hong Kong authorities, and on the appointed day the Royal Hong Kong Police assembled and prepared to arrest Sister Ping. But something must have aroused her suspicions and she never appeared.

  What the FBI did not know, and could not have known, was that Sister Ping was not simply making the occasional business trip during these years to attend to her smuggling operations in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Guatemala. She was moving almost constantly. In fact, in an especially bold move she actually traveled to the United States. Because she had a range of assumed identities, it is impossible to say when and how often Sister Ping came to America during the years she was in hiding, but McMurry and Motyka were eventually able to confirm that in January 2000 the snakehead had flown into Miami International Airport. She passed in and out of the country like a ghost.

  More present, if no less mysterious, was Sister Ping’s husband, Cheung Yick Tak. He was not given to the same amount of international travel as his wife, and he seems to have led a more sedentary existence, not accompanying her on her many trips around the world. Indeed, it was rumored in Chinatown and among the FBI agents working the case that Sister Ping had fallen in love with her longtime smuggling associate Wang Kong Fu, who had introduced her to Ah Kay years earlier and who continued to work with her in Fuzhou. Yick Tak did not like Wang Kong Fu, and in later years he would blame the smuggler for encouraging Sister Ping to expand her operations too quickly. If Yick Tak was a cuckold, it would fit with his general persona—the hapless second fiddle to his fiery and intelligent wife. But it may also be that during these years, Sister Ping’s husband, who had shown such slavish fealty to his domineering spouse, had secretly committed a small betrayal of his own.

  The original criminal complaint against Sister Ping and Yick Tak was dated December 16, 1994. Sister Ping had already escaped to China by then, but on that date an arrest warrant was made out for Yick Tak. It was nearly three years before he was arrested, however. According to the FBI, its agents were unable to locate Yick Tak until 1997, when an informant walked in off the street and told them that they could find him in the restaurant at 47 East Broadway. Bill McMurry and another agent, Carlos Koo, headed to Chinatown and found Yick Tak at the restaurant. He put up no resistance when they arrested him.

  But this account raises a few significant questions, primarily because according to Yick Tak, he had not just returned to Chinatown when the FBI captured him in 1997; he had never left town in the first place. “Since 1993, I have been working every day at the restaurant,” he would later say to a judge. With Sister Ping back in China, “the restaurant needs me to run and operate it.” His lawyer said the same, pointing out that Yick Tak “was not arrested on this complaint for a number of years, although the government was aware of the conduct and they were aware of where he was and he was easy to find. For whatever reason, they took their time in making this arrest.”

  If indeed Yick Tak was in Chinatown between the time the warrant for his arrest was issued in 1994 and the day three years later when Bill McMurry picked him up, it remains a mystery why the FBI either did not know he was in town or knew and did not arrest him. But if anything, Yick Tak’s legal history grew more interesting after the arrest. On January 16, 1998, he was arraigned and pleaded not guilty. Two months later he suddenly changed his mind and pleaded guilty. He was not sentenced after the guilty plea, however. Instead, just like Ah Kay, Yick Tak found that his sentence was postponed. In the spring of 1999, the judge in the case gave an order allowing him to travel to Puerto Rico for four days. Generally a long delay in sentencing fits a certain profile, and it would seem that like Ah Kay, Yick Tak had found ways in which he could be helpful to the government. The special trip to Puerto Rico might simply have been a short vacation, but if that were the case, it is unlikely that the judge would have granted him permission to leave. A more realistic explanation is that it was a working holiday—that Yick Tak traveled to Puerto Rico in his capacity as a government informant. According to one prosecutor familiar with the case, the circumstances of the Puerto Rico trip indicate that “they were probably working him.”

  But the biggest mystery surrounding Sister Ping’s husband is that on May 25, 1996, at a time when there was an active warrant out for his arrest, and when in the eyes of the FBI he was “out of pocket”—a wanted fugitive—Cheung Yick Tak was naturalized in New York City and became a full-fledged citizen of the United States. Under normal circumstances, immigration authorities cannot naturalize someone without first sending his fingerprints to the FBI. The Bureau checks the fingerprints and returns a report on whether the individual has any criminal history. Yick Tak may not have served any time for the deaths of the four people in the rubber raft on the Niagara, but he did plead guilty to a felony, which should have raised red flags. Yet the FBI maintains that it did not know he was even present in New York during these years. Either Yick Tak managed to slip through the system somehow, because of some miscommunication between immigration and the FBI, or he paid off someone at the INS—a possibility that several current and former immigration officials insist should not be discounted. The third possibility is that he cooperated with the government to such an extent that someone was willing to bend the rules for him as a reward.

  There is no question that Yick Tak cooperated after his arrest. When he was finally sentenced, his lawyer, Stephen Goldenberg, said, “Mr. Cheung has provided a vast amount of information to law enforcement agencies.” But along with both his defense attorney and the prosecutors, the judge in the case, Deborah Batts, refused to unseal the relevant court documents describing the nature and extent of his cooperation. Bill McMurry and Konrad Motyka acknowledge that Yick Tak came in and provided the FBI with information after his arrest. They say that none of the information was especially valuable, but they also confirm that during these years—years when he may well have assumed that his wife was untouchable, that the FBI would never be able to track her down—one of the people that Cheung Yick Tak gave them information about was Sister Ping.

  Once McMurry and Motyka had concluded that Sister Ping was traveling widely but never using her own passport, they arrived at a key intuition: Sister Ping might be invisible, but her immediate family was not. Her husband was in New York, working in the restaurant and cooperating with the FBI. Her daughter Monica worked in the restaurant as well, and when her sons traveled, they seemed to do so on their own passports. If Sister Ping had an Achilles heel, it might just be her unstinting devotion to family. The agents had distributed Sister Ping’s name to airports around the planet years ago, but now they assembled and circulated a family tree, laying out the names, nationalities, and passport numbers of Sister Ping’s closest kin.

  One day in early 2000, an American consular officer in Hong Kong was going through a stack of applications from people who had lost their green cards and were requesting a replacement copy. He paused over one of the forms, unable to figure out why the name of the applicant looked familiar. The officer ran a records check on the name. It was Sister Ping’s son. He conferred with his colleagues, and it was decided that if Sister Ping’s son was in Hong Kong and Sister Ping had herself been known to pass through the city in recent years, there was some small chance that the two might meet and she could be arrested.

  It was decided that the U.S. consulate should contact the son, citing some pretense having to do with his green card application. They did
so, and the young man dutifully appeared and tended to the paperwork they put in front of him. But when he left the building and several U.S. agents made an effort to follow him, they quickly lost him in the congested streets and sidewalks of Hong Kong.

  The team at the consulate had not issued the replacement green card, and they came up with an alternative plan. Rather than supply the new card right away, they would say that there had been a routine bureaucratic delay but that if Sister Ping’s son needed to fly to the United States, they could issue him a “boarding letter,” which he could use in lieu of a green card. The catch, they would tell him, was that in order to issue the letter, they needed to know the precise details of his flight out of the country. It was a long shot, but perhaps his mother would drive him to the airport.

  On April 11, 2000, a team of several dozen armed officers from the Hong Kong Police descended on the sleek departures terminal at Hong Kong International Airport and staked out the Korean Airlines desk. Just after 11:00 in the morning a short Chinese woman with wide-set eyes approached the counter and lingered there. She appeared to be waiting for someone. Another woman and a man who looked like he might be Sister Ping’s son appeared, and the three of them went to the counter to check in. When the detectives were certain it was Sister Ping, they made their move.

  They approached Sister Ping and asked if her name was Cheng Chui Ping. She did not reply. They asked for identification. But she wouldn’t produce any. She just stood there.

  The detectives led her to a nearby office. They proceeded to fingerprint her, and it was only then that she admitted who she was. The detectives searched her purse and found a Belizean passport that belonged to someone else and an array of loose passport pictures of other people. They found some Hong Kong currency, some Chinese currency, and $31,000 wrapped in newspaper and divided into three neat stacks.