The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (24 page)

The Fleischmann boys were hardly the only ones to notice the shooting. It was a balmy May evening, and still light. A neighbor who lived nearby was mowing her lawn and saw the shooters sprint by. Another neighbor was watering his garden and heard the shots. Three local kids were riding their bicycles along the sidewalk when the shooters ran by. The police were receiving 911 calls before the shooting had even stopped. When officers arrived at Somerset Road, they found a terrifying scene: two men dead in the front foyer, two others bound, gagged, and shot in the head downstairs. In the basement they found a pool of blood that didn’t correspond to either of the victims on the floor, and they realized that one of the men in the foyer above had been stabbed so aggressively that the knife had pierced the hardwood floor and blood was seeping through to the basement.

It was beginning to get dark as police officers cordoned off the area. The lights from their cruisers cast magic-lantern shadows across the foliage and facades. Akiva Fleischmann still didn’t know what to make of the events he had just witnessed, and from the safe distance of his front lawn, he watched the officers work. Then he remembered seeing the man throw something under his neighbor’s Cadillac. He approached the car and reached underneath it, still thinking it was some sort of firecracker. He pulled out a black Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter, sleek and cool and heavy, its grip pebbly in his palm. Holding it in front of him, Akiva approached a cop who stood nearby. “Do you guys want this?” he asked.

A
h Wong was still alive, sprawled on the freshly cut grass, when a member of the volunteer ambulance corps approached him and began scissoring the bloody clothes away from his body. As the medic worked, Ah Wong slowly reached into his pocket, withdrew a wad of crumpled
money, and handed it to him. He died at the hospital three hours later. “Naked oriental male, black crew cut hair, five foot five, 120 pounds,” the medical examiner wrote when Ah Wong lay dead on a gurney, medical tubes still coiling out of his mouth. He surveyed Ah Wong’s small, hard body, a weathered butcher block of gouges and nicks, a contour map exposing the full topography of a gangland youth—the marks that his few brutal years had left upon him.

Each arm was sheathed in a multicolored 8-inch tattoo of a ferocious dragon. Another dragon, this one a foot tall and 7 or 8 inches wide, sprawled across his back. “On the victim’s upper right arm, approximately one inch below the armpit, the victim has what appear to be two old bullet wounds. On the deceased’s lower chest and abdomen are six old scars which appear to be old stab wounds.” Ah Wong had been shot nine times that night. Seven of the bullets were plucked from his body; two more had passed clear through. A tenth bullet—a .380-caliber hollow point—was extracted from his leg, but it didn’t match any of the ballistics at the scene. The medical examiner determined that it was from an old gunshot wound he had never had treated. Even Fujianese who weren’t involved in criminal activity tended to avoid the hospital; they rarely had insurance, and they didn’t want to occasion any unnecessary checks into their immigration status. But the gunfighters of the Fuk Ching were especially inclined to stoicism in the face of injury if it meant they could avoid questioning by police. Ah Wong had been walking around with a bullet in his leg.

F
our-Eyed Fish and another assailant, Shing Chung, had fled in the blue Audi. They headed north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and escaped. Four-Eye was eventually apprehended two years later, in Florida, where he was working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. Shing Chung has never been caught.

Dan Xin Lin was not so lucky. “Get out of here!” he shouted when
the Dodge Caravan picked him up. “Get onto the highway and cross the bridge.” It may simply have been the terror and exhilaration of the slaughter the boys had just participated in, and a kind of homing instinct that suddenly asserted itself, drawing them out of the unfamiliar suburban universe of subdivisions and safe houses and back to the cramped safety of Chinatown. But heading back to Chinatown was a mistake. The George Washington Bridge was the most obvious route back into Manhattan, and within minutes of the shootings an all-points bulletin had gone out to police in the area to look out for the blue Dodge van that had fled the scene. In nearby Fort Lee, a police officer was stationed by the entrance to the bridge and spotted the van approaching the tollbooths. He drew his gun, walked toward the van, and ordered the passengers to get out. Five Chinese men stepped onto the pavement. The clothes they wore were covered in blood.

R
ay Kerr was asleep that night when he got a call from a colleague at the FBI telling him that Dan Xin Lin had killed four people in New Jersey. When Dan Xin was put in jail and permitted to make one telephone call, he contacted Peter Lee. The authorities were furious, and embarrassed, that their witness in the beeper-store case had taken matters into his own hands. The
Daily News
ran an article on the incident under the headline “FBI Informer Held in Massacre.” Kerr cut it out and put it on his wall, as a reminder to himself and others of the risks they ran when dealing with people like Dan Xin Lin.

The killers were held as maximum-security prisoners at the Bergen County Jail. When a judge set Dan Xin’s bail at $1 million, he had a distinctly Fujianese response. “If I come up with one million from relatives,” he wondered, “can I go?” Ultimately, Dan Xin and his accomplices were convicted and given multiple life sentences. Chang, the Fujianese hostage who was being held in the house in Teaneck, ended up surviving, albeit with a bullet permanently lodged in his head, and
testifying against his assailants. The prosecutor who put him on the stand referred to him, affectionately and out of earshot of the jury as Bullet Head.

In New York, the small band of officers of the state and federal government who knew that the bloodshed in Teaneck was in fact an installment in the larger struggle between Ah Kay and Dan Xin Lin all had the same thought: the gravest acts of terror could only be yet to come, because somewhere in the world Ah Kay had no doubt learned of the deaths of his two younger brothers, and his wrath, and his particular brand of sociopathic indifference to the mores and laws of American society, would soon be felt. Only then would the true significance of Teaneck be understood. Luke Rettler was sure of it. So were Ray Kerr and his colleagues at the FBI. The Fifth Precinct of the NYPD began augmenting security on the streets of Chinatown. Everyone braced for an all-out war.

But the officials were all tragically mistaken. To American law enforcement, Ah Kay may have seemed uncatchable and undeportable, an almost superhuman wanderer who could flit from one country to the next, completely unimpeded by the niceties of national boundaries. But as it happened, they badly overestimated him. For even as he mourned the deaths of his brothers, Ah Kay was confronted by a plan gone devastatingly awry During the trial of the murderers at Teaneck, it emerged that while Dan Xin’s desire for revenge had driven the killings, there was another motivation as well. “He said he was going to do Ah Wong because Ah Kay was in China,” Alan Tam testified. “When they do Ah Wong, they going to take over the smuggling business.” Dan Xin knew that Ah Wong was expecting a boat to arrive in the United States, with a $9 million bounty of Fujianese passengers. Because the Teaneck trial unfolded later, after the ship arrived in so spectacular a fashion, and there was a fear that any association between the defendants and that event might prejudice the jury the judge instructed Tam and the other witnesses to refer to the vessel in question simply as “the boat” or “the ship” and not by its name, the
Golden Venture
. “From what I hear from
Dan Xin,” one of the killers said, “after we kill those people … we could get Wong’s boat of people that’s coming to the United States, and we could collect those money.”

With Ah Kay stuck in China and Ah Wong and the others dead, the gang was in disarray. Even the resourceful Ah Kay would not be able to arrange a fleet of fishing boats to offload the ship in the Atlantic. And with Dan Xin and his accomplices locked up in a Bergen County jail, they would not be able to meet the ship either. It was not the arrival of Ah Kay from the East that the authorities should have been worrying about in the days following the massacre at Teaneck, but the arrival of the
Golden Venture
.

Chapter Ten

Mutiny in the Atlantic

ONE WEEK
before the killings at Teaneck, as Ah Wong and his allies were hiding out in the safe house and Dan Xin and his allies were preparing to kill them, the
Golden Venture
rumbled toward a prearranged set of nautical coordinates in the North Atlantic, five days’ journey from the East Coast, where according to the plan it would rendezvous with fishing boats sent by the Fuk Ching. The ship’s imminent arrival was well known in Chinatown. Sister Ping was expecting her two customers any day, and both Weng Yu Hui and Mr. Charlie had flown back to New York to supervise the offloading. They had supplied their onboard enforcer, Kin Sin Lee, with a radio frequency to contact the smaller boats. But when Kin Sin Lee tried to reach them, the smaller boats did not reply. When Lee was able to reach Weng and Mr. Charlie, they told him that there was a problem with the smaller boats, because with Ah Kay in China and his brothers in hiding, they had been unable to arrange a way to transport the passengers from ship to shore.

Kin Sin Lee was growing anxious. The passengers were restless: it had been over a month since they left Mombasa, and three months since the ship took on the original passengers at Pattaya. Supplies were dwindling, he told the snakeheads; the ship was running low on fuel. But this lament did not have the intended effect; rather than saying that they would send out the smaller boats immediately, Charlie and Weng suggested that if supplies were so low, Kin Sin Lee should turn the ship
around and head back east across the Atlantic to the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira, some 400 miles off the coast of Morocco, where he could resupply before endeavoring another mid-Atlantic meeting.

Captain Tobing liked this new plan. The journey had taken much longer than he anticipated. He was also fearful of being arrested in the coastal waters of the United States. It may simply be that he felt more secure heading away from America’s shoreline and into the unpoliced wilderness of the Atlantic; it may also be that he planned on abandoning the ship once it docked in Madeira, as the
Najd II’s
original captain had done in Mauritius. If the snakeheads sent an employee to Madeira to resupply the ship, the captain figured, perhaps he and his crew could take the employee hostage and demand that Weng and Mr. Charlie send smaller boats. But Kin Sin Lee didn’t like this plan. The passengers were getting manic and edgy. If the captain turned the ship around, Lee was certain they would revolt.

Tobing was two decades older than Lee, physically sturdier, and far more experienced at sea, and he stubbornly insisted that the best course of action was to head to Madeira. But Lee was in no mood to defer to some ship’s captain. He ordered Tobing to sail the
Golden Venture
to America. Tobing steadfastly refused, saying he would only take the ship east, toward Madeira. With the matter unresolved, Lee assembled his various allies from among the passengers and arrived at a whispered plan. He quietly distributed six knives, three wooden clubs, and a gun and explained that if the captain was going to be so unreasonable, they would simply have to depose him. He didn’t call it a mutiny. He called it “kidnapping the boat.”

The ship’s Burmese first officer, a young man named Sam Lwin, was eating lunch in the galley off the bridge when the mutineers barged into the room. The captain and the chief engineer had been removed from power and handcuffed belowdecks, they announced. They escorted the nervous Lwin to see Kin Sin Lee. Lwin and Lee have different recollections of the ensuing conversation. According to Lee, he told the first officer that he did not have to help sail the ship if he didn’t
want to. “You can eat and sleep—nobody is going to hurt you,” he reassured him. If Lwin wanted to continue working, however, and take the captain’s place, he would receive an increase in his salary, and a bonus when the passengers were offloaded. In Lwin’s account, Kin Sin Lee left him with less of a choice. “Now we are going to a new spot,” Lwin says Lee told him. “You are going to drive the ship to that place, or you are going to die.” Lwin was not a licensed captain, but he knew how to control and navigate the ship. That afternoon he assumed command of the
Golden Venture
.

With Tobing locked in his cabin, Lwin directed the ship to a second rendezvous point, this one some 70 nautical miles southeast of Nantucket. The slow approach to U.S. waters took nearly a week, and by the time the
Golden Venture
arrived at the prearranged destination it was June, and unknown to the people on board, the Teaneck massacre had occurred. Kin Sin Lee tried to reach Weng and Charlie on shore, but they were not responding on the radio. The ship floated there for several days until finally Lee was able to reach Weng. He was hoping to hear that the fishing boats were on their way, but instead Weng told him to steer the ship to yet another set of coordinates, this one off the coast of New Bedford. Lee did not know Weng all that well, and did not trust him. Weng seemed to be dissembling, and it was not at all clear that once the
Golden Venture
arrived at this new meeting point there would be anyone there to meet it. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he snapped. “Let Charlie talk to me.” Then he heard Mr. Charlie’s voice on the radio. Charlie was his mentor; the two men knew each other well, and the younger enforcer trusted the worldly and experienced snakehead, who never seemed to lose his cool. But Charlie would only reiterate Weng’s instructions. He repeated the coordinates of the new destination and told Kin Sin Lee to go there. The smaller boats were already sailing in that direction, he said.

O
n the morning of June 4, as the
Golden Venture
sat in the sea southeast of Nantucket, a small airplane soared overhead. No one on board
would have given it much notice. The passengers were all confined to the hold and likely wouldn’t have heard the distant hum pass above them, and the enforcers and the crew had become accustomed to the occasional passing plane etching a line across the blue sky before vanishing over the horizon. But the pilot of the plane took note of the
Golden Venture
. He had taken off that day from the Coast Guard Air Station at Cape Cod, and when he returned to the station he duly reported having “sited the vessel DIW” (dead in the water) at 0805 hours.