The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  One breezy afternoon in the summer of 2008, I drove from Jacksonville, Florida, to Amelia Island, a pretty, palm-fringed stretch of beach not far from the border with Georgia, where Bill Slattery the former district director of the INS in New York and the man who first decided to detain the Golden Venture passengers, lives today. Following the arrival of the ship in 1993, Slattery’s career continued its rapid ascent, and he was nominated to take on the number-three position at the INS. But after a short few years on the job, he was forced to retire from the agency amid a revolt by his subordinates and allegations of corruption. (No formal charges of corruption were ever brought.)

  We sat at Slattery’s kitchen table and made sandwiches from cold cuts and talked about immigration for hours. Slattery remained angry about the degree to which snakeheads like Sister Ping had exploited the vulnerabilities of the United States, and to this day he is skeptical about the asylum claims of the passengers aboard the Golden Venture. He showed no remorse for having thrown the passengers into prison, and mocked as sentimental those who were moved by the thousands of paper sculptures the detainees made during their years behind bars. But when I asked Slattery what he thought should become of the passengers now, I was surprised by his answer. “These people now fall onto the legitimate side,” he said. “We’re not going to send them back once they’ve been here this long.” Slattery’s rationale was pragmatic, he explained. Right now, immigration officials are wasting time monitoring the paroled Golden Venture passengers when they could be devoting their energies to stopping new illegal immigrants from entering the country. “So I would support the private legislation,” he concluded. “Give them the okay and let them be productive members of society.”

  The sun was setting by the time I said good-bye to Slattery and drove back along the beach. The waves of the Atlantic were battering the shore. I thought about Sister Ping, who, having failed in her appeal, was now determined to take her case to the Supreme Court. The court would ultimately decline to hear the case, and Sister Ping will likely spend the rest of her years in jail. Ah Kay had fared much better, and I marveled at a recent, improbable turn of events: since his release, Ah Kay had been working with his lawyers and his supporters in the government to quietly obtain something that still eluded so many of the passengers from the Golden Venture: his citizenship.

  I thought about the hundred or so passengers from the ship who had been deported to China over the years and the fact that almost all of them had eventually come back. The resilience of these people was astonishing to me, and it occurred to me that in their sheer determination to get to this country and stay here, the passengers from the Golden Venture, who were born in China and still speak only broken English, are in some ways more American than I will ever be.

  I remembered something that Sean Chen had told me. He was describing the little indignities of being illegal in America, and I asked him whether, knowing what he knows now—knowing about the arduous journey, the years in prison, the perils of an undocumented existence, and, perhaps worst of all, the new prosperity in China, that country he had once risked everything to flee—he felt any regrets. Without hesitation, Sean shook his head. “If you gave me the chance,” he said, “I would do it again.”

  Farther down the Florida coast, about a mile off Palm Beach, a rusted freighter lies nestled in the seabed 70 feet beneath the waves. Glittering schools of yellowtail and barracuda thread through the barnacled hatches, and brightly colored coral quilts the deck. On weekends amateur divers descend from power boats above to circle the wreck and rummage through its gaping portals, peering into the dark recesses of the ship’s cramped hold. It is as fitting a resting place as any for the Golden Venture.

  After the ship was auctioned by the marshal’s service back in 1993, it was painted red and renamed the United Caribbean. For a time it was used to transport cargo up and down the coast, but the aging vessel was not even up to that task, and the new owner abandoned it on the Miami River. Eventually local authorities decided to sink the ship and turn it into an artificial reef for divers. One day in 2000 it was towed out into the Boca Raton Inlet, where holes were cut into the hull and water was pumped into the hold until the ship began a slow descent and sank to the ocean floor.

  Every shipwreck tells a story. And if this particular story is in some ways an unhappy one, it is also a story about the awesome power of optimism and bravery and hope, about the many twisting paths that bring strangers to this country, and about what it means to be—and to become—American.

  Acknowledgments

  MY FIRST thanks go to the hundreds of individuals who invited me into their homes and offices and took the time to talk with me over the past three years. Occasionally when I reached someone by telephone for the first time, they would exclaim, “I’ve been saying someone should write a book about this since 1993,” and in that spirit many people became not just sources but co-conspirators, raiding their files and photo albums and Rolodexes and giving me access not just to their recollections but to a rich historical paper trail. It would be impossible for me to thank here everyone I spoke with, or even just those I spoke with on more than one occasion, but I must acknowledge a handful of the most long-suffering sources: Konrad Motyka and Bill McMurry Bev Church, Joan Maruskin and Craig Trebilcock, Luke Rettler, Jim Goldman, and four other immigration officials, one of them retired, three of them still working in government, who spoke with me off the record and helped connect me with the larger network of veterans of the smuggling wars. A huge thanks also to the unfailingly patient and professional Jim Margolin of the FBI’s press office, to Megan Gaffney of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and to Mark Thorn of ICE. Thanks also to Sister Ping’s appellate lawyer, Scott Tulman, and to Ah Kay’s lawyer, Lisa Scolari.

  The book would have been impossible without the cooperation of the passengers who came to America in the hold of the Golden Venture. Over the years I had brief interactions with numerous passengers, but I’d especially like to thank those who spoke with me at greater length: Yang You Yi, Michael Chen, Dong Xu Zhi, Zheng Kai Qu, and most of all Sean Chen. I should also thank Sister Ping, whose note-perfect reply to my early requests for an interview was “What’s in it for me?” I appreciate her willingness to indulge me by answering my written questions. Her answers have improved the book beyond measure.

  In the early stages of my research I benefited enormously from the scholarship and guidance of several individuals who had been working in this area for years before I showed up. Ko-lin Chin, Peter Kwong, Zai Liang, and the filmmaker Peter Cohn generously shared their work and their time. The academic work of David Kyle, Rey Koslowski, Paul J. Smith, Wenzhen Ye, Peter Andreas, Sheldon X. Zhang, and Dušanka Miščević was also very instructive, as was the writing on immigration law and policy of Philip Schrag, Peter Schuck, David Card, and George Borjas. James Mills’s magnificent opus, The Underground Empire, was especially valuable for its portrait of the Fat Man, Dickson Yao. Dating back to the 1980s, a handful of journalists have done work on human smuggling, Fujianese immigration, Sister Ping, and the Fuk Ching gang, and I want to acknowledge my debt to the extraordinary reporting of Seth Faison, Celia Dugger, and Nina Bernstein at the New York Times; Thomas Zambito at the Bergen County Record; Anthony DeStefano and Mae Cheng at Newsday; Ying Chan and James Dao at the Daily News; Pamela Burdman at the San Francisco Chronicle; Marlowe Hood at the Los Angeles Times Magazine; Brook Larmer and Melinda Liu at Newsweek; Peter Woolrich at the South China Morning Post; and Caryl Clarke at the York Daily Record.

  Given the truly global scope of this story, I relied on the kindness of numerous sources in foreign countries. I can’t name everyone here, but a particular thanks to Matiko Bohoko, Father Michael Sparrow, Reverend Richard Diamond, and Jay New for their help on the Mombasa chapter; to the three colonels in Bangkok, Jaruvat Vasaya (“Col. Dong”), Ponsraser Ganjanarintr (“Col. Jon”), and Apichat Suriboonya (“Col. Phum”); and to the staff at the UN’s Office of Drugs
and Crime, especially Wang Qianrong, Burkhard Dammann, and Jamnan Panpatama. A hearty thanks to Senior Sergeant Major Pao Pong, now with the Bangkok Immigration Police, and to the tireless Senior Sergeant Major Thana Srinkara of the Pattaya Tourist Police, who helped me find Pao Pong and interpreted our conversation. Thanks also to the American officials who spoke with me in Bangkok but prefer not to be mentioned by name. In Hong Kong, I was especially grateful to Kingman Wong of the FBI for talking to me at such great length; to Yiu-Kong Chu at the University of Hong Kong, for demystifying the triads; and to Wayne Walsh, of the Hong Kong Department of Justice, for agreeing, on my second visit, to meet with me. Thanks also to Bill Benter, who showed me around on both trips to Hong Kong and was my guide on some memorable gustatory excursions.

  In Fuzhou and Changle the debts really begin to multiply, and acknowledgment is complicated slightly by the fact that the individual who acted both as mentor and as fixer, and opened doors that I wouldn’t have known even to knock on, has asked that he not be thanked by name. But an everlasting thanks to Dr. Tang and to Dr. Li, to Lin Li and her husband, to Jiang Huo Jin in Tingjiang, Fang Meng Rong in Fuqing, Zheng Kai Qu in Changle, and Song Lin, of Yingyu village, who showed me around Ah Kay’s hometown with such good cheer that I was reluctant to ask if he was any relation to the Song You Lin from the beeper store on Allen Street. Driving in China is an adventure, and I’m certain I owe my life, along with a newfound taste for sugarcane, to the irrepressible Cheng Wei. A special thanks also to Ben Ross, an American who moved to Fuqing and Fuzhou after college, started an excellent blog, and gave me a terrific rundown on what to look for before I left.

  But my greatest debt in both Chinatown and China is to that aforementioned individual who did not want to be named. He did ask that rather than thank him, I honor his grandmother, a woman I never had the privilege of meeting but whose advice—that you should never see the world through the hole in a coin—he relayed to me, and I often have occasion to remember. I honor her here.

  As a non-Chinese, and a non-Chinese-speaker, I was reminded on a daily basis of my own limitations, and of the fact that I was ultimately a guest in a culture that was not my own. I would not have been able to write this book without the unflagging assistance of interpreters, who helped me navigate interviews in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Fujianese and provided a crash course in appropriate custom and etiquette. Many thanks to Fei Mei Chan and Lily Lau in New York, and to Sammi Yuan and Jinhua Zhang in China.

  At The New Yorker, I owe a great debt to Daniel Zalewski, for assigning the original article about Sister Ping, along with David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, Emily Eaken, and Raffi Khatchadourian. Thanks also, and especially, to Andrea Thompson. At Slate, I’d like to thank Jacob Weisberg and June Thomas for running a three-part series based on my trip to Fuzhou.

  I am extraordinarily lucky to have found an editor with the cool, precise mind and affable, unflappable manner of Bill Thomas. From our first conversation, working with Bill has been a pleasure and an education. At Doubleday I’m also grateful to Melissa Danaczko, Nicole Dewey Emily Mahon, and Rachel Lapal. As ever, I feel profound gratitude to the peerless Tina Bennett, agent, advocate, and friend, who more or less exhausts positive superlatives. Thanks also to Svetlana Katz, Cecile Barendsma, and everyone else at Janklow & Nesbit. A tip of the hat as well to Howie Sanders at UTA, who has been a supporter of this project from our first conversation about it in 2005, and also to Jason Burns.

  A good portion of the research for The Snakehead was made possible by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and I am deeply indebted to Edward Hirsh and everyone else at the foundation for affording me that remarkable opportunity.

  Since 2006 I have found a professional home at the Century Foundation, a progressive policy think tank with a venerable history that operates out of a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My gratitude and appreciation go to Richard Leone, Greg Anrig, Jr., Carol Starmack, and Jeff Laurenti for supporting the work I am doing and giving me the opportunity to research and write in the company of such a stimulating group of colleagues. Several generations of Century interns and program assistants have helped me with the book in various ways, and I’d like to thank Alex Kendall, Matt Homer, Emerson Sykes, Emily O’Brien, Jasmine Clerisme, Niko Karvounis, and especially Laura Jaramillo and Hummy Song. Thanks also to Christy Hicks, Laurie Ahlrich, Cynthia Maertz, and everyone else at Century.

  Michael Auerbach, Michael Hanna, Carl Robichaud, Tim Riemann, Marisa Pearl, Nat Kreamer, Melanie Rehak, Jean Strouse, Craig Winters, Milosz Gudzowski, Danielle Lurie, Daniel Squadron, and Sai Sriskandarajah all helped in ways large and small. Thanks to Linda Barth and her ESL students at Lower East Side Prep, who studied the original Sister Ping article and helped me see the story with fresh eyes. Thanks also to SCSW, albeit in absentia, for supplying an Allen Street anecdote, and for much else besides.

  As ever, I’m humbled by the debt I owe to my parents, Jennifer Radden and Frank Keefe, who read through numerous early drafts and offered astute advice. While I’m at it, I figure I should take this opportunity to thank my uncle, Jim Keefe, on the off-chance that if I do, he’ll stop ribbing me for failing to thank him last time. My brother, Tristram, and my sister, Beatrice, are both writers themselves, and on an almost daily basis I turn to one or the other of them for guidance, advice, or inspiration. Thanks also, of course, to Mr. Chopes.

  But most of all, this is for Justyna. From the beginning she has supported my decision to waste a perfectly good legal education and devote myself to writing instead—indeed, it was practically her idea. We were married about a year after I started spending time in Chinatown, and she sacrificed an overdue vacation for a research trip to Thailand. (When I brightly suggested that she look up the charming resort of Pattaya in her guidebook, she flipped to the relevant page and read aloud, “A haven for sex tourists, long blighted by overdevelopment…”) Justyna read the book as it was being written, in thousand-word installments, and has lived with the story for three long years. The Snakehead is dedicated to her.

  A Note on Sources

  THIS BOOK is primarily based on over three hundred interviews conducted between 2005 and 2008 with FBI agents, police officers, immigration investigators, attorneys, White House officials, Golden Venture passengers, Chinatown residents and community leaders, and individuals who have worked in the snakehead trade. I also made substantial use of thousands of pages of court transcripts from numerous trials, internal government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and the records from law enforcement wiretaps and interviews with various criminal suspects.

  The vast majority of the people who spoke with me for the book agreed to do so on the record, but in a handful of cases individuals who are still working in government and were speaking without official authorization, or who feared some form of retribution if they spoke with me and then were cited by name, requested that I preserve their anonymity.

  No dialogue or scenes are invented, and I have adhered faithfully to the chronology of the events as they actually occurred. If a line is rendered in quotation marks, it is drawn from either a court or a wiretap transcript, or from the recollection of an individual who was present when the words were spoken; in the occasional instances when I attribute thoughts to characters, I do so because they expressed those thoughts either to me or to some other interviewer or during a trial, or because they conveyed the thoughts to someone else with whom I have subsequently spoken.

  In many instances the events in the narrative unfolded more than a decade before my conversations with those who went through them, and throughout my reporting I endeavored to correct for the little distortions that our fallible memories can occasionally introduce. Most of the major sources were interviewed multiple times, and wherever possible I tried to corroborate one source’s memory of an event with the recollections of another source who experienced it as well. I was also fortunate to uncover vast reams of transcripts and interviews
and incident reports in which various people expressed their memories of events on paper mere weeks or even hours after the events unfolded.

  Access inevitably drives narrative in any heavily reported piece of writing, and I should note here that if Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been as accommodating in providing me with access as the FBI, the DA’s office, and the NYPD were, the book would have balanced the close focus on the investigation of the FBI with an examination of the important work done by the INS and ICE. While ICE did offer some cooperation, that cooperation was both grudging and limited. As a consequence I was obliged to track down former INS officials and current ICE employees who would speak to me only anonymously because they were doing so without authorization. This system worked well enough, and once word got out that I was pursuing the project, people who had worked on Chinese smuggling over the years had a way of emerging from the woodwork and finding me. But I’m keenly aware that for the many law enforcement officials who actually lived and worked these cases, there will be certain glaring lacunae in this book. If the names of some individuals who did their jobs with dedication and valor are not mentioned here, it is largely because ICE, for whatever reasons of its own, did not want this story to be told.