New criminal gangs from mainland China, particularly the Fujian province, whose members include former soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army, all of them highly trained in weaponry and hand-to-hand combat, are muscling in on the old-style gangs. Although they are essentially Triads, they focus entirely on the smuggling of immigrants and are more commonly referred to as Snakeheads – a name that refers to the way their clients need to twist and turn to find ways round border controls and immigration laws. The Snakeheads place far less emphasis on the historical and ceremonial aspects of Chinese organised crime and as a consequence have little hesitation in using firearms if they are available. And all the signs are that, in London, they are.
In June 2003, exactly a year after Li’s death, a gunman walked into the BRB bar in the heart of London’s Chinatown and shot dead thirty-seven-year-old businessman You Yi He. His death was immediately linked to the Snakehead gangs – he was said to be involved in helping to find work for the new immigrants – but what detectives found most disturbing was the escalation in gang violence: it was the first time in history that a gun, rather than a knife, had been used in a killing in Chinatown. Moreover, a month earlier a terrifying arsenal of weapons had been found hidden in a Chinatown restaurant. The haul included several AK47 assault rifles and a number of handguns as well as more traditional weapons, like serrated knives and sharpened throwing stars.
While the Triads work in relative isolation, the Snakeheads have formed strong alliances with criminal gangs from across the world and, as a result, have become far more powerful. On the streets of Chinatown no one will talk about the Snakeheads for fear of reprisals: both the murder of You Yi He and the deaths of the fifty-eight Chinese at Dover show that the gangs will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Those who risk the journey from mainland China to the UK often find themselves treated little better than cattle.
At the tender age of twenty, Ke Su De found it hard to escape the feeling that, in many ways, his life was already over. As a delivery boy in Changle, a city in the heart of China’s Fujian province, De earned just fifty pounds per month, the same as his father. With no prospects for promotion and no chance of a pay increase in his lifetime, De felt he had no option but leave. ‘In China my life was not too good,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have a good life at home or at work and so I wanted to go to Britain because you can earn good money there. Life can be good.’
The Fujian province borders the Taiwan Strait so it is no surprise to find that people from the area have a long history of restless seafaring – and of involvement with organised crime. The first ever Triad gang originated near the capital, Fuzhou, and soon applied the skills they had learnt from the smuggling of illegal goods to the smuggling of people out of China.
In many of the towns within Changle’s jurisdiction, up to three-quarters of all the residents are now living abroad. The population of many of the villages has been crippled by this emigration, but for many of those left behind the benefits far outweigh the difficulties.
To take a walk through Changle is to go on an astonishing journey. Alongside the traditional brick huts, windowless shacks and rusty bicycles are fantastically ostentatious mansions replete with huge statues of dragons and warriors, and ornate ponds teeming with goldfish and brightly coloured koi carp. Gleaming new cars sit in the driveways.
Changle and nearby Fuching are, the locals say, ‘widows’ villages’, but such is the admiration given to those who send money back from abroad that poverty is now considered shameful, a disgrace. Those who receive money from relatives working abroad are considered the beautiful people.
It was this peer pressure and the constant view of these symbols of wealth that finally convinced Ke Su De to go to a Snakehead. ‘I met him through a friend. He told me that the people he had sent away had sent back enough money to build big houses. The Snakehead told me he’d helped many people go abroad. He said he had good connections with officials everywhere, even in the central government in Beijing. The Snakehead said, “Don’t worry, I’ve been doing this for a decade, it’s no big deal. There is no risk.”‘
De’s parents paid a Snakehead £4000, the first instalment of a £20,000 fee to get him to the UK. The balance would be payable on arrival in the West – with massive interest.
Yet despite this, and that De would face years of backbreaking labour and living like a pauper to repay the debt, even a small proportion of his earnings sent back to China would make the rest of his family incredibly wealthy. On average the Chinese migrants make £1000 per month in the UK – considerably more than the fifty pounds they would earn at home. The US offers richer pickings still at about £ 1300 per month. But travelling to the USA is twice the cost of the trip to the UK.
Ke Su De left his home on 7 June, meeting up with another villager, twenty-two-year-old Ke Shi Guang, as they made their way to the pick-up point for the first leg of their long journey to Beijing. There was to be little luxury. The Snakeheads allowed no luggage, meaning that any clothes the travellers wished to take must be worn day and night. The only food came in the form of small bowls of nuts and rice, handed out by agents who met the travellers at pre-appointed rest stops. De and Guang were told that, as they neared their final destination, they would be given cheap Western clothes to ensure they fitted in in their new homeland.
Travelling with a group of around fifteen others as well as a Snakehead minder, it took only a few hours for De and Guang to realise they had been cheated. The Snakeheads had given them the impression that they would be flying all the way to England. Instead they boarded a plane and flew only as far as Belgrade.
From Yugoslavia, the group of migrants, now numbering sixty, were moved in separate parties of fifteen or fewer through Hungary, Austria and France to the Netherlands. Others traversed Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany, often travelling at night, by train, truck, even horse and cart, and sometimes on foot over remote border crossings.
(Such horrific journeys are not at all uncommon. Beng Chew, a London-based solicitor whose firm represents scores of Chinese asylum-seekers, has heard, first hand, many of their stories. ‘They walk for days through the mountains, sleep rough and swim across rivers before they finally reach a safe place to cross a border illegally,’ she explains. ‘It is arduous and taxing. Many don’t make it. Often they travel in winter. Last year I heard of one woman in her early thirties who died from exhaustion in the mountains. Some of the others didn’t want to leave her but the agent insisted that they carry on.’)
As De and Guang passed through Hungary the travellers had their first hitch. Hungarian border police kicked open the doors of the van in which they were travelling, discovered the migrants and turned them back towards Yugoslavia.
It was a minor setback. Within days they tried again and this time succeeded. At this point both men had their Chinese passports confiscated by their Snakehead minder, and were given fake Korean documents. With these they passed quickly through Hungary before crossing into Austria in a van with darkened windows.
They proceeded to Vienna where, on their forged Korean passports, they caught a plane to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. From there they took a train to Belgium and then on to the Netherlands, arriving on 15 June.
A week before the group arrived in Rotterdam, preparations were being made for the final leg of their journey. A local Turkish mafia gang, under the leadership of thirty-six-year-old Gurbel Ozcan, had been subcontracted to take responsibility for the group once they arrived in the Dutch city. All the arrangements for getting them to Britain would be made by him. Ozcan was an old hand at the business: in 1998 he had served six months for people-trafficking offences and the shipment that included De and Guang would be the third he had made that year.
Ozcan and his gang had met to discuss the operation in the bar of the New York Hotel, Rotterdam, on Monday 12 June, six days before the transport. Unknown to Ozcan, his car had been bugged by Dutch police and his every move was monitored. But although they had
witnessed Ozcan leaving for the meeting, the police decided that the gang leader had no imminent operations planned and lifted the surveillance.
At the meeting Ozcan expressed concerns about a backlog of migrants building up in Rotterdam. As he was responsible for the cost of feeding and housing them it made sound economic sense for him to get rid of them as soon as possible. For this reason he decided to send all sixty in a single shipment. He was only too aware of the risks. On 5 April one of his drivers, Leo Nijveen, had driven a lorry with fifty Chinese on board, hidden by a pallet of yoghurt, on to the three thirty a.m. Zeebrugge–Dover ferry. Half-way through the journey the human cargo ran out of air and started screaming and banging on the sides of the lorry.
Nijveen threw open the doors and let them out. He was fined £2000 per head for having illegal immigrants on board but allowed to return to Holland. The fine was later dropped when police said there was insufficient evidence to show that he knew the Chinese were on his lorry.
Despite the 5 April incident, Ozcan was determined to clear the backlog. A number of petty crooks were hired to do the dirty work, thus shielding him from any investigation. Hubertus van Keulen was paid £1200 to rent a warehouse at Waalhaven, part of Rotterdam’s harbour, while Willem Jansen was paid £2000 to buy the tomatoes, the dummy cargo, which Nijveen later collected. Nijveen also bought the tractor unit of the truck from a garage near his home, and later purchased the trailer.
Knowing that he could no longer risk the journey himself, Nijveen also recruited Perry Wacker, a lorry driver from the city’s eastern suburbs. Nijveen and Wacker had previously worked together and Nijveen was well aware that his friend was desperate for cash. The previous year while travelling through Spain, Wacker had fallen in love with a Moroccan girl called Nora. He had quickly proposed and they were due to be married on 17 July. But because Nora was not an EU national the marriage would not go ahead unless Wacker could satisfy the Dutch authorities that he had enough money to support them both. For driving the gang’s lorry across the Channel Wacker had been promised a fee of £300 per person – a grand total of £18,000 for just a few hours’ work. His money problems, it seemed, were all behind him.
With a driver engaged, the final stage in the preparations was to set up a cover company to protect Ozcan and the Snakeheads in the event that the consignment was discovered by Customs. For this they needed a katvanger, a front man paid to provide a cover identity for criminal operations. They chose Arien van der Speck, a petty criminal from the eastern suburb of Terbregge. Days before the transport, van der Speck visited the Rotterdam chamber of commerce and founded a haulage firm, Van Der Speck Transport. Ozcan’s carefully constructed plan was ready to execute.
At around two-thirty in the afternoon of 18 June the fifty-six men and four women who made up Ozcan’s shipment were brought to the warehouse at Waalhaven. They had arrived in two separate vans, one disguised to look as though it contained building materials, the other dressed up to look like an ambulance. Inside the warehouse was a 1995 Mercedes truck hooked up to an eighteen-metre container. Aided by half a dozen members of the smuggling gang, along with a chain-smoking Perry Wacker, the group was slowly loaded on to the lorry.
The third weekend of June was the hottest of 2000, and in three layers of clothing Ke Shi Guang was already sweaty and uncomfortable when his turn came to climb aboard. ‘I walked towards the back and squatted on the floor alongside the others. It was dark but there was a small window up on the left almost near the ceiling and I remember that I could see light coming through it.’
Four buckets of water were passed up, along with a handful of plastic bags for excrement. ‘They pushed one box of tomatoes towards the back and said we could eat those but that if we ate any more we would be fined,’ remembers Guang. ‘Then a man in a black T-shirt pointed to the small window and said that if it was open we can speak in low voice. He said if it closed, we not speak at all’
Then Wacker and the rest of the gang stacked the remaining boxes of tomatoes around the group, hiding them from view and taking up so much space that they were forced to huddle together. The heavy swing doors were slammed shut.
It was shortly before three p.m. when Wacker climbed into the cab and set out for Zeebrugge with his human freight. Just outside the ferry terminal he stopped off for diesel. This was the riskiest part of the journey and the need for total secrecy was at its highest. Having ensured that no one was watching too closely, Wacker climbed up the front wheel arch and reached for the vent. Inside the container, Ke Su De saw a hand reach up, then blackness.
Wacker drove through the gates of the terminal at six p.m. and had to wait around an hour before he was waved forward to board the European Pathway, a P&O freight-only ferry that would be leaving for Dover half an hour later. Once he had parked, Wacker went up into the ship’s canteen and dined on shrimp salad, roast lamb and rice, then made his way to the cinema room to while away the five-hour crossing by watching the adventure film The Mummy.
By the time the end credits rolled, the sixty Chinese had been inside the container for more than four hours. The single tray of tomatoes had lasted barely an hour but the group had far more pressing concerns than food. The temperature had soared and many felt as though they were being roasted alive. They ripped off their outer layer of clothes and gulped down the water until that, too, was gone.
The air around them became so saturated with moisture that they were no longer able to sweat. Their body temperature rose and some of the weaker members of the group collapsed with exhaustion.
And then the air started to run out.
The vent that Wacker had closed had been the only source of fresh oxygen for the whole container. With sixty, hot sweaty bodies gasping away, the air soon turned dank and fetid as the oxygen levels plummed.
‘People began to panic,’ recalls Ke Su De. ‘Some people passed out in the darkness. I wanted to breathe air so I got close to the tomatoes but I do not think they were any use. Then people started screaming and shouting for help. We tried to move the tomatoes and kick open the doors but it was no use. I did what I could to try to make one fellow passenger comfortable. People were having greater and greater difficulty in breathing. We all banged on the side, hit the walls with our shoes. We shouted and called for help. No help came.’
High above them in the video room, Perry Wacker glanced at his watch. There were still two hours to go before the ship reached Dover. He settled back in his seat and began watching Austin Powers.
Back in the container the group were dying one by one. Eventually they resigned themselves to their fate. They held hands and ate tomatoes partly for moisture but also because the Chinese believe no one should die on an empty stomach and ‘become a hungry ghost’.
Ke Su De held on for as long as he could, thinking of his family back home and how much he longed to see them again. With the last of his strength he tried to pry open the air vent, ripping off a wooden panel on the inside of the truck. But it was no use. As his fellow passengers lay dying around him, he felt powerless to help. Then he, too, succumbed and fell unconscious.
Across the water a British member of the Snakehead gang was preparing for the group’s arrival. Before getting on to the truck at Rotterdam each migrant had been told to either memorise or write down a mobile-telephone number and call it as soon as they arrived in the UK.
It belonged to a Chinese interpreter called Ying Guo, known to her friends as Jenny. A key member of the gang, her task was to organise asylum application and to arrange for any final fees to be paid. Originally from north-eastern China, Guo had worked in a car factory but arrived in England in the summer of 1996 to pursue her own dream of a better life. Having been granted a student visa, she enrolled on a course at Edgware College in north London studying English, accounting and computing.
But before her studies were complete, a chance encounter with a friend led to her finding work as an interpreter at the Home Office immigration centre in Croydon, south London. What began on
an ad-hoc basis soon turned into a full-time job with Guo spending up to forty hours each week interpreting for asylum applicants at Home Office screenings and interviews with solicitors.
Exactly how she came to work for the Snakehead gangs is not known, but it is clear that once she did she was soon on her way to becoming a wealthy woman. She bought herself a plush flat in South Woodford, Essex, and had so much cash to spare that she even managed to send back £37,000 to her family in China in three months. By agreeing to be the first point of contact for immigrants smuggled in by the gang, Guo would be in a position to refer these new ‘clients’ to solicitors. Because of her language abilities, the solicitors gave Guo the work of translating the applications.
In the eighteen months before the Dover tragedy, Guo dealt with more than 366 asylum applicants, nearly one in ten of all the Chinese applicants dealt with by the Home Office during that period. Although the work involved a great deal of duplication and took up little of her time, she would earn on average £125 per case plus an additional £100 per person from the Snakeheads. With the arrival of this latest group of immigrants Guo was anticipating a bumper £13,500 payday.
The red flag had been raised over Wacker’s lorry long before it arrived in Dover. For one thing Wacker had paid the £412 fare in cash. As the vast bulk of commercial freight traffic is paid on account, Customs agents automatically forward the details of any vehicle paying in cash to the destination port. He had also brought attention to himself because no one at Dover had heard of Van Der Speck Transporten – hardly surprising as it had been registered just three days before.
As the lorry rolled into view David Bell, the Customs officer, picked up the manifest and noted that the lorry was carrying a cargo of tomatoes bound for Bristol. ‘I didn’t believe it. I just knew it had to be smuggling. My immediate thought was that it was booze or fags, probably both.’
At first Wacker seemed relaxed, smoking a cigarette, chatting and joking with the Customs officers. But when they asked him more about the company he was supposedly working for, he became nervous and evasive, promising to send more details later. But by then it was too late. David Bell was already making his way to the rear of the container and opening the heavy swing doors.
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