The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (19 page)

Sean needed little persuading. It sounded like an adventure. On the evening of July 16, 1992, he boarded a tour bus in Bangkok with dozens of other people—Chinese men and women of various ages, Fujianese like him, some looking about them curiously after months cooped up in a safe house, most toting a single item of luggage. The buses headed south, wending their way along an elevated highway until the apartment blocks and the high-rises fell away and they reached a palm-fringed stretch of beach on the Gulf of Thailand. There were other buses there, and hundreds of passengers—240 all together—assembled on the beach before a small fleet of fishing boats that bobbed quietly on the water. They boarded the boats and headed out to sea, where Sean saw a massive vessel awaiting them, a 370-foot ferry with two long decks wrapping around it. The ship’s hull was painted red and bore a name in white letters:
Najd II
.

M
any snakeheads were represented on the
Najd II
. Even the most successful smugglers could not arrange to transport and then collect fees from hundreds of passengers at a go, so when they smuggled by ship, they preferred to join forces, distributing both the expense of the voyage and the risk that something might go awry. But the chief snakehead behind the
Najd II
was Weng Yu Hui, the pudgy Fujianese man who had been an early client of Sister Ping’s, back in 1984. Weng had worked in a restaurant to pay Sister Ping’s fees. He got a green card in 1987, under the American amnesty for anyone who had been living in the country illegally since before 1981. (Weng had arrived in 1984, but he supplied fraudulent paperwork and became a legal permanent resident.) He got a job in construction for a while, and every week or two, whenever he had a day off, he would go and hang around Sister Ping’s shop—first the little shop on Hester Street, then the bigger one on East Broadway.

Weng was curious about the snakehead business. When he saw Sister Ping he would ask her about it—who the big snakeheads were, how the business worked. Then in 1991, seeing the industry explode, with so much demand in mainland China that no amount of supply in the United States seemed able to satisfy it, Weng decided to enter the business himself. He had contacts in Thailand and arranged to start smuggling passengers by plane, supplying them with passports purchased on the black market. Weng needed to pay for these materials up front, and he assembled $30,000 and went to Sister Ping’s store on East Broadway. Sister Ping was behind the counter, and Weng asked her to send the money to Bangkok. Weng had sent small amounts of money through Sister Ping for years, but never a sum like this. “Oh,” she said jokingly as he handed over the cash, “now you’re my competitor.”

Weng’s new business grew quickly, but when the bottleneck at Bangkok began, he was unable to get any of his passengers on planes. He was maintaining an apartment in Bangkok, and his customers accumulated there until there were thirty people waiting to make the last leg of their journey. This wasn’t good for business. It was expensive to maintain customers in Bangkok—they had to be fed and guarded—and there was always the risk that a safe house would be raided, resulting in new bribes to officials in Thailand and the possible loss of lucrative clients, who might disappear into the Thai prison system and never pay the balance of their fees. It also looked bad, having customers stranded in Thailand for months at a time. Success in the snakehead trade was driven largely by word of mouth; Weng had studied Sister Ping’s success, and it was her reputation for a safe, efficient service that drove customers to select her from among the many snakeheads now offering passage. So unmatched was Sister Ping’s reputation, in fact, that some snakeheads had taken to claiming they were working on her behalf or were affiliated with her in some way, in an effort to lure customers. Weng had heard about the use of ships as an alternative to planes, and he decided to arrange for a ship to transport his passengers.

Sister Ping may have perceived Weng as her competitor, but he
knew that she faced the same problem he did when it came to the backlog in Bangkok. Her younger brother was based in Bangkok at that time, representing her interests in the region, and Weng flew there to meet with him. It was a fateful meeting: the two men were joined by a third individual, a shadowy Taiwanese bucket man who was known as Mr. Charlie. Mr. Charlie said he could arrange to charter a ship large enough to carry several hundred passengers from Thailand to America, and seaworthy enough to endure the voyage. It was agreed that Weng, Sister Ping’s brother, and a third snakehead, Lau Xing Bau, would work on recruiting passengers for the voyage and Mr. Charlie would provide the vessel. Weng would put the thirty passengers who had been in his Bangkok apartment on the ship, and Sister Ping’s brother would arrange for twenty of her customers to board. The rest of the space they would lease to other snakeheads who had passengers stranded in Thailand. Mr. Charlie found a Saudi-owned, Singaporean-registered ship that had ferried cars between the north and south islands of New Zealand and borne Muslim pilgrims across the Red Sea to Mecca. The ship was the
Najd II
.

A
s smuggling ships went, the
Najd II
was comfortable. There were over a hundred small cabins running around the two main decks. Each cabin had two beds, and the passengers moved into these. When Sean walked into one of the cabins, he found it stuffy and claustrophobic. He moved on, exploring a big recreation room at the front of the ship. Couches and chairs were scattered about, and Sean claimed two couches, pushing them together to serve as a bed.

The ship sailed south to Singapore, but before long problems arose. They ran aground briefly off the coast of Malaysia, and the passengers began to realize that the
Najd II
was on its last legs. The ship was thirty years old; the decks reeked of diesel; the engine noise was deafening. They managed to make their way through the Strait of Malacca, between the Malaysian peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra,
and out into the Indian Ocean. But there the engine troubles intensified, and their westward journey slowed to a crawl.

In addition to chartering a substandard ship, the snakeheads had made a curious and fateful navigational decision. Up until that point, most snakehead ships bound for the United States had taken the shorter route directly across the Pacific to Mexico or California. But several ships had recently been interdicted in the Pacific, and U.S. authorities were monitoring the waters off the West Coast, so Mr. Charlie elected to send the ship the wrong way around the world—through the chokepoint at Malacca and into the Indian Ocean, south around the coast of Africa and then north from the Cape of Good Hope.

When Sean and the others boarded the ship in July, there was plenty of food—rice, flour, biscuits, and canned fruits and vegetables. But after a month at sea they had still not reached America; they hadn’t even reached the coast of Africa. The Indian Ocean is a desolate expanse of some 28 million square miles—more than seven times the surface area of the United States. As the ship made its slow journey toward Africa the food supply began to dwindle, and the fuel supply as well. Each day Sean scanned the water, but the horizon was a maddening ring, unbroken by ship or shore. The passengers were beginning to panic: they had been told they would reach the United States before the end of August, but it was September now, and they hadn’t seen land in weeks. Fights broke out over rations. Even the crew members, who were all Burmese, were beginning to show signs of alarm. There were no snakeheads on the ship, but they had chosen representatives, who ruled with an increasingly tyrannical bent as the situation threatened to spin out of control; they walked the decks with Glock handguns and beat passengers who got out of line.

Finally, on September 4, 1992, they spotted land. The ship had reached the tiny, isolated island of Mauritius, some 600 miles east of Madagascar. The
Najd II
hobbled into the harbor at Port Louis, and the captain, a skinny Australian man named William Appleton, sought permission for the ship to remain there while it resolved its engine troubles
and refueled. But the port authorities in Mauritius were suspicious of the ship, and the local press somehow got word that its cargo was undocumented Chinese. Officials in Mauritius radioed the
Najd II
and said that it could not stay. At that point Captain Appleton abandoned his ship. (It would subsequently emerge that Appleton’s certification to captain a ship had actually been revoked several years earlier.)

One of the ship’s officers, an obese Filipino whom Sean disliked, took over and somehow arranged for the ship to be repaired and refueled, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the
Najd II
was in no shape to transport the passengers as far as the United States. After another grueling two weeks at sea, with supplies continuing to diminish and tension over food and the boat’s course intensifying, Sean spotted land again: the minarets and coconut palms of Mombasa, swimming in the equatorial heat.

When the ship reached Mombasa, it had no more food or water or fuel, and the new captain requested permission to dock there. Kenya was already reeling from an influx of half a million refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, and the Sudan, and the port authorities asked about the nationality and legal status of the passengers on board. A few of the snakeheads’ representatives spoke English and told the Kenyans that the passengers were all from Thailand. But when the ship entered Mombasa harbor and representatives from the Thai embassy in Nairobi came aboard, none of the passengers could speak any Thai. To compound matters, the new captain had done some math, figuring that there were some 300 passengers on board, each paying an average of $30,000. He had a $9 million cargo, he realized, and he demanded more money. The snakeheads refused, and the new captain abandoned the ship and disappeared into Mombasa.

A delegation from Mombasa’s Missions to Seamen boarded the ship, accompanied by Kenyan police, and found a terrifying scene. The Burmese crewmen were so frightened of the enforcers on board that they had actually welded themselves into their accommodation. They came out of their quarters only when they saw the Kenyans, and would
not let them leave the ship without taking all the Burmese with them. The delegation took them to the Missions to Seamen’s building, where they laid out mattresses and sheets on the badminton court and allowed the Burmese to stay.

As the Kenyan authorities searched the cabins of the Chinese passengers, they found an extraordinary number of improvised weapons. Hidden in every room was a shiv or a knife that had been made by tearing away pieces of the ship’s metal lining and sharpening them to a point. Some of the weapons were almost like swords or cutlasses, as long as three and a half feet. As the Kenyans made their way through the ship, a scrum of jumpy Fujianese followed them around, menacing them in broken English when they began collecting the weapons. None of the shivs appeared to have seen any use, but there was a prevailing dread on board the ship, a sense that whether stuck at sea with no food or fuel or stranded in a foreign port without a captain and without permission to stay, the passengers of the
Najd II
had spent weeks poised on the edge of anarchy, and in the event that survival actually became a matter of self-defense, they did not want to be unprepared.

A peculiar standoff ensued. The Kenyan government did not want to formally grant the ship permission to remain in Mombasa, but the ship was clearly in no position to leave. So the
Najd II
ended up at anchor in a mangrove swamp, where, according to the local authorities, the passengers were expected to stay. Enterprising Kenyan fishermen began appearing in the waters around the ship, their dhows slowly circling the
Najd
while the fishermen shouted sales pitches and offered their wares. The hungry Chinese would place whatever currency they had in a bucket and lower it to the fishermen with string, then the fishermen would fill the bucket with fresh fish and send it back up to the ship. Most of the passengers didn’t have any money, so instead they bartered, trading watches, clothing, the few keepsakes they had bothered to take aboard. Sean offered his sneakers and his belt for sale; other passengers discovered that their life preservers fetched a decent price and quickly sold all the safety equipment on board.

After a few days the passengers grew bolder. Some constructed small rafts out of steel drums and plywood and went fishing for crabs in the tropical swamps around the ship. Everyone was desperate to get to shore and telephone family members. They had been unaccounted for during the months at sea, and they wanted to reassure relatives and send for money. On the voyage Sean had developed a problem with his knee; it had become swollen and painful, and he concluded that he needed to see a doctor. Accompanied by two friends from the ship, he made his way to shore and into the city. Mombasa was shockingly foreign to Sean, but he knew that no matter how far-flung or godforsaken the backwater, there are always almost certain to be Chinese there. In cities around the planet, under the most hostile of circumstances, even in times of war, the Chinese restaurant is an enduring feature. In Baghdad or Mogadishu or any one of a dozen other hellholes, the Chinese restaurant is a fixture that seems always to survive, unperturbed by ethnic strife or occasional shelling or even outright war. There were troubled corners of the world where the state itself had collapsed but the local Chinese restaurant stayed standing. In peacetime Mombasa, Sean and his companions went looking for a Chinese restaurant, and before long they found one. The restaurant’s owners were accommodating, and arranged for Sean to telephone his cousin in the United States and have him send $400, which could be wired directly to the restaurant. Sean and his friends found a cheap hotel in Mombasa’s old town and decided to lie low for a couple of days. They bought flour and salt and made their own noodles. Slowly Sean’s knee began to heal.

By the time Sean returned to the ship, many other passengers had managed to sneak onto shore. Dozens of people were collecting money at the Chinese restaurant and venturing into town. A few of the more carefree passengers headed directly for the Golden Key casino, figuring if they had time to kill in Mombasa, they might as well enjoy themselves. The local police were angered by the Chinese wandering around the streets, given that technically they were not allowed to be there. They sent a police launch out to the ship to try to stop people from leaving,
but the Chinese on board ran to the edge of the deck and began pelting the officers below with anything they could find—plastic bottles, balled-up paper, the detritus of the months at sea. The police were furious and fired their machine guns in the air. Sean, still very much a teenager, doubled over with laughter.