The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (11 page)

O
ne day in 1981, a slim, handsome Fujianese teenager with hard eyes, a square jaw, and a mop of black hair arrived in New York. His name was Guo Liang Qi, but he would become known by the nickname Ah Kay. Born to a humble family in 1965, in a village not far from Sister Ping’s, Ah Kay was uncommonly intelligent, but quit school in the fifth grade. He hung around the village a few more years, but he was ambitious, and an uncle living in the United States paid a snakehead $12,000 to smuggle him over. Ah Kay traveled overland to Hong Kong and then by air to Bangkok. He had a ticket for Ecuador, with a layover
in Los Angeles. But when he reached LAX he slipped out of the terminal, a quiet Chinese kid security wouldn’t give a second look. He had no papers and didn’t speak a word of English, but he managed to make his way to New Jersey, where he stayed with his uncle. He found an entry-level job at a steakhouse called Charlie Brown’s. But Ah Kay had a taste for nightlife, and for gambling in particular, to say nothing of a series of innate leadership skills which, at Charlie Brown’s, anyway, were going untapped. He left the steakhouse by the end of 1982 and moved to New York’s Chinatown. There he joined a fledgling gang, the Fuk Ching, which was short for Fukien Chingnian, or Fujianese Youth.

In those early days, before the Fujianese boom had begun in earnest, the Fuk Ching (which is pronounced “Fook Ching”) occupied a small stretch of Grand Street. The precise origins of the gang are murky, but by the time Ah Kay arrived in New York, it existed in loose form. It was founded by a man named Kin Fei Wong, who went by Foochow Paul. He was in his mid-twenties when he and a couple of associates established the gang, which made him an elder statesman next to teenage recruits like Ah Kay. Foochow Paul had a mullet and a mustache and a stylish way about him. He surrounded himself with loyal kids, paid them off, gave them apartments in which to crash, bailed them out when they got locked up. There were a few members who weren’t Fujianese, but most of them were like Ah Kay: recent arrivals from the province, connected by myriad bonds from the country they had left behind and by a fierce entrepreneurial drive to muscle in on whatever business opportunity they could. They took to dressing in black jeans and black bomber jackets. They grew their hair into dramatic pompadours streaked with dyed strands of orange or red. They congregated in the restaurants and gambling parlors of Fujianese Chinatown, lounging on the stoops, giving hard looks to passersby always seeming to venture out in clusters of three or four.

For all their violence, Chinatown gangs were first and foremost a business, and the Fuk Ching leadership tried to colonize the Fujianese territory north of Canal and east of the Bowery. They fanned out
through the neighborhood and quickly excelled at the staple enterprise of the Chinatown gang: collecting extortion. Since the dawn of Chinatown, monthly payments of lucky money had been a fact of doing business in the neighborhood, and by the time Ah Kay started collecting protection money for the Fuk Ching the practice had developed its own long-standing and elaborate choreography. If you wanted to open a restaurant in the territory of some tong or gang, you would receive a visit from a contingent of gang members. They would roll into your place of business and often be extremely, almost ostentatiously polite. Provided the business owner was cooperative, the interaction was at least superficially courteous. The particular denomination was often negotiated over tea. The one-time payment to open a restaurant could be as high as $100,000, and bought you the privilege of turning over smaller monthly payments to the gang for the foreseeable future. These were delivered in ceremonial red envelopes, and everyone paid—not just the restaurateurs, but the manicurists and the lawyers, the herbalists and the bookies, the video rental guy and the madam. During the Moon Festival each September, the gangs went door to door selling moon cakes at extortionate prices—$108 or $208, always a denomination ending in 8, for prosperity. At the Chinese New Year they sold orange plants or fireworks, again with an extravagant markup. When they were hungry, they would stroll into restaurants and order up a feast, roughhouse and boast, then simply scrawl the name of the gang on the check, tapping an inexhaustible tab that would never come due.

This was lucrative grazing, and the right to graze in a certain corner of the neighborhood did not come uncontested. For each block they controlled, for each basement mahjong game or walk-up brothel, and above all for control of the local heroin trade, the Fuk Ching had to fight a rival, and in Ah Kay’s early years as a foot soldier they regularly clashed with the Tung Ons and the Flying Dragons. Fuk Ching members fought with knives, machetes, and ballpeen hammers—anything that could shatter bone with one quick, lethal swing, then just as quickly be concealed. They had guns as well, but the male gang members
rarely carried them because of the penalties if they were caught with one in a stop-and-frisk by the cops. Instead they gave the guns to their girlfriends, who were less likely to be searched and held them at the ready. Not unlike Mock Duck in the tong wars, who is said to have closed his eyes while he pulled the trigger, the Fuk Ching were terrible shots. It was not unusual for the FBI to descend on the scene of a noisy gang clash and discover thirty shell casings on the ground and not a single person wounded.

Nevertheless, the Fuk Ching eventually gained control of a series of streets around Eldridge, and in that grove of narrow seven-story brick tenements they established a home base. With their connections to China and Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia, the gang moved into the heroin trade, and Foochow Paul is said to have become a multimillionaire during the 1980s. He bought an apartment in mid-town and property in Fujian and Hong Kong.

From his early days in the gang, Ah Kay knew that he was smarter than most of his lughead, country-boy contemporaries, and he must have observed Foochow Paul’s largesse with a combination of admiration and envy. He was unusually ambitious from the beginning, and excelled as an earner and enforcer. In the spring of 1984, a Fuk Ching member named Steven Lim was rumored to be defecting to the gang’s sworn enemies, the Tung On. On Saint Patrick’s Day, Ah Kay and a couple of associates let themselves into Lim’s apartment. Lim walked out of the bedroom and Ah Kay and the others fired a volley of shots, killing him. As they stood in the hallway they heard a woman scream and realized that Lim was not alone: his girlfriend must be with him. Ah Kay opened the bedroom door and shot her. He didn’t stick around to find out if she’d lived or died. The episode was Ah Kay’s introduction to killing, and he performed the task with a cool-headed insouciance that would become his signature. To Ah Kay, the lives of his own countrymen were cheap and expendable; the authorities took no notice when it was expunged, and killing Fujianese made him not a pariah in the neighborhood, but a known comer, a young man on the rise. “You Fujianese?”
he once observed. “You die? You die. No more than killing a dog or a cat.” An absence of scruples and a steady hand helped him rise through the gang, and in no time he was anointed a
dai ma
, or lower leader—a deputy, with his own crew. His chief responsibility was overseeing the gang’s extortion of Chinese-owned businesses in Chinatown and as far away as midtown.

For their own survival, traditional gangs in Chinatown had tended to exploit the most vulnerable members of the community and show a certain respect for the existing power structure. But the Fuk Ching distinguished itself early on by showing no such deference. By 1985 Sister Ping had already established herself as a major figure in Fujianese society. People treated her store as a second home. They paid her to bring family members to them and used her money transfer service to remit their savings back to China. They trusted her. But to Ah Kay, Sister Ping’s stature in the neighborhood rendered her not less of a target but more of one: it meant that she was rich.

Bank accounts were uncommon in Chinatown in those days. The neighborhood functioned as a cash economy for the most part, and residents tucked away bills in shoeboxes, coffee jars, or the back of the sock drawer. The abundance of cash squirreled away in local apartments was not lost on the gangs, and armed robbery became a favorite sideline. One day in 1985, Ah Kay decided to rob Sister Ping. Cash was, in a very real sense, the product of her money transfer business. Perhaps she had it warehoused somewhere. He knew she had a house in Brooklyn but didn’t know precisely where it was, so he dispatched his girlfriend to trail Sister Ping’s daughter Monica one day when she took the subway home from school. The girlfriend reported that the family lived on Neck Road, in Sheepshead Bay. Ah Kay and several others followed Monica themselves one day, and as she was walking to her house from the subway they drove by in a van, opened the side door, and snatched her off the sidewalk. She sat facing Ah Kay. “Robbery,” he said simply, pointing a gun at her. “Be cooperative.”

Monica let the gangsters into the house, where they found her
younger brothers but no adults. Ah Kay trained his gun on the children and told them to sit on the couch and stay quiet while the other Fuk Ching members ransacked the rooms in search of money. They managed to dig up a thousand dollars, but that was it, and eventually the gangsters departed, tying up the children and telling them that if anyone spoke to the police, they would return and kill the family.

The meager haul “was not ideal for us,” Ah Kay concluded. So several months later he decided to rob Sister Ping again. This time he didn’t go himself but sent his underlings, as he called them, to do it. In order to make sure that Sister Ping was home herself, one of Ah Kay’s associates made an appointment with her, saying he had some business to discuss. Given that Sister Ping knew about the Fuk Ching robbery several months before, it is a mystery why she agreed to meet with one of the young gangsters at her own home. The particular business the two were meant to be discussing has never become clear. But in any event Sister Ping came to the door, and the gang pulled guns and forced their way into the house. The children were there, and again, one gang member kept a gun on them while the others searched the house. “Please do not scare my children,” Sister Ping said. “Just point the gun at me.” Eventually someone searched the refrigerator and found $20,000. (Years later a prosecutor would wonder aloud before a jury whether “a legitimate businesswoman keeps her profits in her refrigerator.”)

W
hen Luke Rettler first started hearing about Ah Kay, the tales of the ruthless Fuk Ching enforcer had a larger-than-life, almost mythical quality. Ah Kay seemed “untouchable,” Rettler thought.

Rettler was a young prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He had an athletic build and a quiet intensity about him, with short brown hair, blue eyes, and dimples. He had grown up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin in a big Catholic family. (Luke’s four brothers were Peter, Paul, Mark, and John.) After graduating from University of
Wisconsin Law School, he wanted to become a prosecutor, and a professor told him the only place to do it was at the Manhattan DA’s office.

Rettler joined the office in 1983, around the time Ah Kay joined the Fuk Ching. He found himself working in the trial bureau for a short, hard-charging attorney named Nancy Ryan, who had started prosecuting Asian gangs in New York and was known in Chinatown as “the Dragon Lady.” Luke was detailed to the Jade Squad, the interagency Asian gang unit, where he worked with Dougie Lee, the young Cantonese American detective whose family had come to America from Hong Kong when he was a child. The crime wave was starting to sweep Chinatown, and Luke was beginning to believe that the community was growing unpoliceable, completely out of control. Extortion was rampant, and when the restaurant owners and convenience store clerks didn’t pay the painstakingly polite gangsters who visited once a month, they would be dragged into the back room and beaten with a pipe. Some would show up for work the next day to find that their business had been burned to the ground. One problem with the extortion cases was that it was almost impossible to get victims to cooperate. Frightened merchants, many of them with dubious immigration status, were reluctant to go to the authorities. In China the police were corrupt, and there was no reason to believe that New York cops would be any different. The gangsters knew this, and preyed upon it. How do you explain to a terrified witness from a corrupt country the concept of posting bail? The gangster he has risked his life to inform the police about is locked up but makes bail and is released. How do you convey to a potential witness that the gangster has not simply bribed his way out?

Ah Kay was gradually becoming known to law enforcement. Fuk Ching members were clashing with the Tung On and shaking down people on the street. With his languid movements and wiry, muscular build, Ah Kay stood out naturally in a cluster of them as a leader. But he was hard to catch. Street cops would stop him occasionally, but nothing seemed to stick. Once when they patted him down they found he was carrying $50,000. They had to let him go—they had nothing to charge
him with—but they held on to the money. Ah Kay hired a lawyer to get it back.

Still, everyone slips up eventually, and eventually Ah Kay did. In August 1985 Ah Kay tried to extort money from a restaurant owner named Charlie Kwok. Kwok didn’t want to pay, and he went to the police. Dougie Lee headed to a condo on Henry Street where he knew Ah Kay was staying, and arrested him. Ah Kay pleaded guilty and served two and a half years in prison. He did not find prison to be too much of an impediment to business; from behind bars he continued to manage his gang responsibilities, deputizing work to one of his younger brothers, Ah Wong, who was then still a teenager.

When his sentence was served, Ah Kay was deported back to China, but he stayed only six months, then sneaked back into America, taking a typically circuitous route, from China to Hong Kong to Bangkok to Belize to Guatemala to Mexico. He was apprehended at the border in El Paso and held for twenty-four hours by the INS. They released him on bail and he returned to New York, but Dougie and the other cops who had sent him away heard he was back on the streets. They rearrested him for illegal entry, and for parole violations on top of that. Ah Kay pleaded guilty again and served eleven months. This time he was not deported immediately upon release. The massacres at Tiananmen Square had occurred while he was in jail, and he applied for political asylum in the United States, claiming that his pro-democracy politics would make him a target for persecution if he was forced to return to China. He was given a date for an administrative hearing of his claim. Until the hearing, which was months away, he was free to go.