The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (20 page)

The Kenyans continued to insist that the Chinese remain on the boat, but enforcement seems to have been somewhat ad hoc. Some of the passengers were arrested and locked up in town. But others spent weeks, even months, staying openly in local hotels and gambling at the Golden Key. It depended, in a way, on how much money their families were able to send. Others still gave up, making their way to the Chinese embassy in Nairobi and asking permission to return. But China owed them nothing; they were paperless drifters in a busy East African port town; they could not prove that they were Chinese. Some of the passengers bribed Kenyan port officials to ferry them back and forth between ship and shore to purchase supplies. Eventually, many of them ended up staying at the Oceanic Hotel, a dingy establishment that merited the name “resort” only because it featured a restaurant and a casino. The restaurant specialized in Indian food, but shortly after the arrival of the
Najd
it went bust. Reluctant to pass up a business opportunity, however accidental or remote, several of the Fujianese from the
Najd
opened a Chinese restaurant in the space, which quickly became a success.

At one point a delegation from the United Nations high commissioner for refugees visited the ship and offered to relocate the passengers to one of the refugee camps near Mombasa; the passengers refused, pointing out that unlike the refugees from Somalia and other African countries, they were going to the United States. For a time there was a rumor that because the
Najd II
was a Saudi ship, the Saudi government might intervene. But it did not, and the ship languished in the port for months. The mood on board turned to despair. According to several people who were on the ship, some of the women were taken into the hold by the snakehead enforcers and raped.

But through it all, Sean Chen never thought about returning to China. He telephoned his parents in Changle and acknowledged that the situation looked grim. “If something happens to me,” he said, “just pretend you never had a son.” There were only two possible futures for him at that moment, he told them, “Either I’ll die, or I’ll get to the U.S.”

I
n November, Weng flew to Mombasa with $30,000 to distribute among the passengers so they could sustain themselves. Sister Ping gave him $20,000 and instructed him to pass the money along to her twenty passengers—$1,000 each. (Sister Ping was upset that the ship had stalled in Mombasa, and it was probably in consideration of what this type of gaffe would do for her reputation in the marketplace that she provided such a generous allowance.) The customers were angry and anxious, but Weng told them not to worry. Mr. Charlie was going to purchase another boat, which would come and pick them up.

This was indeed Mr. Charlie’s plan, and not long afterward he flew to New York City for a meeting. He had found a ship that could sail to Kenya and pick up the stranded passengers. But he didn’t want to charter the ship this time, he wanted to buy it. For that, he needed an investor. He was looking for someone who could put up a large sum of money to purchase the ship, in exchange for an even larger sum of the passengers’ fees once it arrived. Sister Ping and Weng were both big figures in the smuggling world, and they were both desperate to get their customers to the United States, for the $9 million bounty if nothing else. Mr. Charlie was looking for someone who was flush with cash and wanted to break into the business in a bigger way, to work with the likes of Sister Ping and Weng and own an equity stake in the voyage. One night in New York City, he and Weng arranged a dinner at a restaurant in Koreatown to meet with one such potential investor. The investor was Ah Kay.

Chapter Eight

The Phantom Ship

PATTAYA IS
situated in the northeastern crook of the Gulf of Thailand. The town is only a couple of hours’ drive from Bangkok, and as a low-rent resort destination, it retains some of Bangkok’s grit. Pattaya Beach Road is lined with food stalls, massage parlors, and cheap hotels. In the evenings, alleys occupied by outdoor bars are clogged with drunken Europeans who brawl and sing, careening down the sidewalks. Before the Vietnam War, Pattaya was an unspoiled encampment of village fishermen and white sand beaches. But when the GIs descended, the town devolved into an R&R bacchanal, and the go-go bars and seediness only persisted and multiplied after the war, through decades of overdevelopment. Somewhere along the way Pattaya gained a reputation as a haven for sex tourists.

On the evening of February 14, 1993, a stocky Thai police officer named Pao Pong was patrolling a secluded line of beaches on the outskirts of town. Pao Pong was a member of the Tourist Police, an elite force responsible for interacting with the surge of visiting foreigners—keeping them safe, and keeping the local population safe from them. On the coast just north of the main town, a series of slightly spiffier modern hotels rose above a row of stunted cliffs overlooking the ocean. It was largely the clientele of these establishments, and the Thais who serviced them, who frequented the narrow ribbon of sandy beach below: holidaymakers lounging on foldout chairs beneath umbrellas, gazing
at the sea; sunburned German men sprawled belly-up on the sand like beached whales, enjoying a fifty-cent massage. Thai children, dark-eyed and gangly, sold burnished conch shells to passersby.

As darkness fell the beach began to empty, but Pao Pong continued to survey the area. The Tourist Police had received an alert that a major human smuggling operation might be taking place in Pattaya. The precise details of the scheme were unknown, but earlier in the week there had been a report that a man was asking around town, looking to rent twelve speedboats for the evening of the fourteenth. The man had said he wanted to take a group of Chinese businessmen out on a cruise of the harbor islands and wanted the boats from eight to midnight. Pao Pong hadn’t seen any signs of the boats yet, but he walked a beat among the hotels perched above the beach, keeping an eye out for anything unusual.

He was approaching the Cozy Beach Hotel when he noticed some activity in the big parking lot that adjoined it. It was dark now, but he could see that there were half a dozen vans in the parking lot, and as he watched, people were leaving the vans and making their way down a set of steep stone steps to the beach. Pao Pong looked out at the bay below, and there in the moonlight, bobbing where the water was shoulder-deep, he saw a cluster of sleek speedboats. There could be a perfectly normal explanation for this, Pao Pong thought. It was Valentine’s Day. Sometimes tourists liked to take boat trips to Pattaya’s offshore islands, several miles out, to do nature walks or stargaze. But even by the wholesale tourist group standards of Pattaya, this was a lot of people.

Pao Pong walked toward the parking lot, and as he approached the vans, he saw two official-looking men standing nearby, who seemed to be monitoring the dark figures as they climbed out of the vans and scrambled down to the seashore. As Pao Pong got closer, he could make out the men’s uniforms. They were Thai military police; they’d be able to explain what was going on. Pao Pong greeted the policemen. But as he did, the policemen turned and ran away.

B
y the time Pao Pong had called for backup and started making arrests, the speedboats had already ferried large numbers of people out to sea. They couldn’t have been going very far out into the gulf; the boats had time to make multiple trips. But the police rounded up sixty-eight people before they could board the boats, along with the two military policemen, and arrested them. The people were Chinese, and in Thailand illegally. It was obviously a smuggling operation, and Pao Pong and his colleagues wanted to take boats out into the gulf and apprehend the mother ship. But someone had warned the ship that there was trouble onshore, and it had disappeared.

That night Pao Pong made a call to Bangkok, to the office of an American immigration agent named Mark Riordan. Riordan worked for the INS. Before coming to Bangkok several months earlier, he had been stationed in Europe, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, where he spent two and a half years and witnessed the British colony’s role as a hub of human smuggling. He had been transferred to Bangkok with the title “enforcement coordinator” and specific instructions to tackle the problem of Chinese migrant smuggling. Several weeks earlier Riordan had received some intelligence traffic from the U.S. embassy in Bangkok that a ship would be picking up a large number of Chinese nationals somewhere off the coast of Thailand. After consulting a map of the Gulf of Thailand, Riordan had concluded that if the passengers were being bused to the coast from Bangkok, Pattaya would be the ideal spot for a pickup. He had driven to Pattaya himself and briefed Pao Pong and his colleagues about the possibility that a major smuggling operation might be taking place.

The morning after the Tourist Police made their arrests, Riordan arrived at the police station in Pattaya. When he walked inside, the place was overrun by Chinese passengers, all standing around, uncertain what would become of them. When Riordan questioned them, they told
him that they had come from Fujian Province, that they had entered Thailand from Burma at the bustling border checkpoint in Chiang Rai. One of the passengers was sitting at a desk talking to the Thai cops. He was a handsome young Chinese man with a part in his hair and a polite, businesslike demeanor. The officers told Riordan that the man was going to help them; he had a cell phone, and he was waiting for a call from the chief smuggler, a man named Mr. Charlie. The man with the cell phone had agreed to tell Mr. Charlie to come and meet them at some designated spot, at which point the Thais could apprehend him. As Riordan talked to the passengers, he kept hearing that name; the passengers didn’t know what he looked like, but Mr. Charlie was clearly the boss, the name on everyone’s lips.

While they waited for the call, Riordan sat down with Pao Pong. Riordan had noticed that Thais tend to smile and joke even about subjects that make them profoundly unhappy or uncomfortable. Pao Pong seemed somewhat forlorn, and Riordan asked why. “They’re going to move me to the border after this,” he said with a smile. Pao Pong explained that he had gathered enough information to glean that Mr. Charlie had set up the whole operation. But if Thai military policemen had been escorting the passengers, then powerful people were on the payroll of these smugglers, and for arresting those policemen and stopping sixty-eight passengers from boarding the ship—for doing his job—he would now be relocated to the sticks as punishment.

A few days later Riordan returned to the station, curious about the status of the investigation and of the undocumented Chinese. When he arrived, he was greeted only by the officers; the Chinese weren’t there. “Where is everybody?” Riordan asked.

“They were all deported, to Cambodia and Laos,” the officers told him. They were matter-of-fact about it, but Riordan knew that the Thais never expelled people that quickly. Thai justice was slow-moving—you could commit some minor violation and sit in jail for a week before anyone decided what to do with you. Someone powerful had wanted those passengers out of the country.

Riordan approached Pao Pong. What about the young guy who was going to help catch Charlie? he asked.

“The one with the telephone?” Pao Pong said. “That
was
Charlie. He had a passport from Laos. They moved him back across two nights ago.”

M
r. Charlie’s real name was Lee Peng Fei. He was born in Taiwan but styled himself as a globe-trotting businessman. He had an athletic build and a take-charge attitude; he was a sharp dresser and had a good singing voice. He fancied himself a bit of a crooner and was known to be excellent at karaoke. Mr. Charlie had started smuggling years before; he had been arrested on alien smuggling charges in California in 1986.

A week after meeting with Ah Kay in New York, Mr. Charlie and Weng flew to Thailand. The plan was that Ah Kay would front the funds for a new boat. Weng visited Sister Ping and told her that while the
Najd II
was still in Mombasa and couldn’t continue, he and Mr. Charlie were assembling investors, including Ah Kay, and were going to arrange for another ship. Sister Ping was firm with Weng: she told him that regardless of which investors he was able to gather, her passengers must be put on the new boat and brought to America. Sister Ping still owed Ah Kay $300,000 from the New Bedford offloading, and it was agreed that she would wire that money to Bangkok so that Mr. Charlie could purchase a new boat.

Next Mr. Charlie summoned a protégé of his, a young ruffian in his twenties named Kin Sin Lee, who was Fujianese by birth but traveled on a Malaysian passport and had helped Charlie on smuggling operations in the past. In January 1993, Kin Sin Lee traveled to Singapore to purchase a boat. Through a shipping agent there, he acquired an aging, rust-eaten 150-foot coastal freighter with a Panamanian registry, the
Tong Sern
. The ship had been used to transport dry goods on short trips between Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam; it was not designed for transoceanic travel, but Kin Sin Lee showed no signs of being troubled by this.