The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (43 page)

It was decided that the U.S. consulate should contact the son, citing some pretense having to do with his green card application. They did so, and the young man dutifully appeared and tended to the paperwork they put in front of him. But when he left the building and several U.S. agents made an effort to follow him, they quickly lost him in the congested streets and sidewalks of Hong Kong.

The team at the consulate had not issued the replacement green card, and they came up with an alternative plan. Rather than supply the new card right away, they would say that there had been a routine
bureaucratic delay but that if Sister Ping’s son needed to fly to the United States, they could issue him a “boarding letter,” which he could use in lieu of a green card. The catch, they would tell him, was that in order to issue the letter, they needed to know the precise details of his flight out of the country. It was a long shot, but perhaps his mother would drive him to the airport.

On April 11, 2000, a team of several dozen armed officers from the Hong Kong Police descended on the sleek departures terminal at Hong Kong International Airport and staked out the Korean Airlines desk. Just after 11:00 in the morning a short Chinese woman with wide-set eyes approached the counter and lingered there. She appeared to be waiting for someone. Another woman and a man who looked like he might be Sister Ping’s son appeared, and the three of them went to the counter to check in. When the detectives were certain it was Sister Ping, they made their move.

They approached Sister Ping and asked if her name was Cheng Chui Ping. She did not reply. They asked for identification. But she wouldn’t produce any. She just stood there.

The detectives led her to a nearby office. They proceeded to fingerprint her, and it was only then that she admitted who she was. The detectives searched her purse and found a Belizean passport that belonged to someone else and an array of loose passport pictures of other people. They found some Hong Kong currency, some Chinese currency, and $31,000 wrapped in newspaper and divided into three neat stacks.

When she was asked where she resided in Hong Kong, Sister Ping supplied the address of an apartment tower on Connaught Road West, in the same waterfront district where she had lived and worked in the late 1970s, before she left for the United States. It emerged that Sister Ping had maintained her residence in Hong Kong and had been living there on and off during the entire period that U.S. authorities had been searching for her. The detectives rushed to the building, noting, perhaps, in passing that the complex in which Sister Ping had been hiding was located one block from a major police station. Inside the twenty-
second-floor apartment they encountered a Chinese couple, both carrying Belizean passports, who appeared to be customers and had just arrived in Hong Kong. They also found plane tickets—from Los Angeles to San Salvador, from San Salvador to Belize, from Hong Kong to Singapore, and so on. The plane tickets had been booked under the name Lilly Zhang, and in the apartment investigators recovered an authentic Belizean passport for a woman named Lilly Zhang, whose date of birth was listed as December 14, 1951. The photograph in the passport was of Sister Ping. There was another passport there as well, this one from Taiwan and in Sister Ping’s own name. But it appeared that in recent months, at least, Lilly Zhang had been her default false identity. The passport had been issued just three months earlier, in January 2000. But it was covered in a welter of stamps. Under “occupation,” Sister Ping had listed “housewife.” But the passport bore visas for Honduras, Mexico, Mongolia, and numerous other places. In three months, Sister Ping had made fifty trips to foreign countries.

Bill McMurry and Konrad Motyka were elated when news of the arrest reached New York. When they found out about the passport, they were not surprised. Belize has a program that it euphemistically terms “economic citizenship,” whereby a passport can essentially be purchased for a fee. If Sister Ping was traveling on a legitimate Belizean passport under someone else’s name, there was almost no way that the FBI or Interpol or any foreign government might have succeeded in spotting her at an airport, unless they had someone on hand who actually recognized her face. When the agents contacted the authorities in Belize to try to get a copy of the passport application Sister Ping had filed, they were informed that it had been lost in a fire.

“It was lost in a lighter accident,” Motyka joked.

“A very small fire,” McMurry added with a smile.

But perhaps the most interesting thing that the Hong Kong investigators recovered from Sister Ping was a little black book full of names and phone numbers. There on the pages of the book, etched in Sister Ping’s hasty, artless calligraphy, was a rendering of the extraordinary
global web of contacts she had grown to rely on over a two-decade career. It was a singular document, a blueprint of her
guanxi
and her global operations. There were entries for an “Immigration Friend” in Thailand and immigration officials in Malaysia, Moscow, and Belize. There were associates in Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Canada, and, naturally, the United States.

Sister Ping was transported to prison in Hong Kong, and the United States announced that it would seek her extradition. “The arrest of Cheng Chui Ping after several years of diligent detective work demonstrates once again our common determination to bring to justice those who engage in the reprehensible and deadly practice of human smuggling,” announced Michael Klosson, the U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, before noting—appropriately, if perhaps erroneously—that Sister Ping was “one of the masterminds” of the
Golden Venture
incident.

Chapter Eighteen

The Mother of All Snakeheads

ON MAY
16, 2005, Sister Ping was escorted into a courtroom in the federal courthouse on Pearl Street in downtown New York City. It had been over a decade since she fled from the neighborhood to take refuge in China, and she was visibly older: her face was still unlined, but her hair, which had grown long, was streaked with gray. She wore a smart black pantsuit, the professional garb of an inoffensive businesswoman. It was a canny choice of uniform: a businesswoman, Sister Ping would maintain throughout the trial, was all that she had ever been. The courtroom was filled with press, and with dozens of supporters and relatives from Chinatown. There was a measure of cruel irony in the location of the courthouse, in a cluster of imposing municipal buildings that abuts the southwestern corner of Chinatown. The restaurants and funeral parlors of Mott and Mulberry were a mere block away, and beyond those the safety and comfort of East Broadway, which even now people called Fuzhou Street, and the restaurant Sister Ping still owned at Number 47. If life had turned out differently, Sister Ping could have walked out of the building, strolled across Worth Street, and entered Columbus Park, where every day that summer the elderly men and women of Chinatown gathered to do slow, deliberate tai chi in the mornings and to pass the humid afternoons playing cards at concrete tables in the shade of the mulberry trees. She could have joined the spry Fujianese grandmothers who gathered there, women who were in their
fifties, as she was, or older, and were finally slowing down after a lifetime of grueling work. They came from the same place she did, and had the same education. They had lived the type of life that, under different circumstances, she might have lived herself. She could have sat beside these women, their contemporary in every way, taken her shoes off, as they did, and fanned her face.

But Sister Ping had chosen a different life, and while she would continue to insist that she was simply a small businesswoman from Chinatown who had lived a hard and humble existence, the prospect of a leisurely retirement was looking increasingly unlikely. For Bill McMurry who with Konrad Motyka had worked to pursue her around the world, and who sat in the back of the courtroom alongside the contingent of supporters from Chinatown every day of the trial, finally laying eyes on Sister Ping had come as something of a shock. “She’s just a little old woman,” McMurry marveled. “You wouldn’t look at her twice on the street.”

Sister Ping had always been a fighter, dismissive of the system of laws but more than ready to hire high-priced attorneys when it suited her. After her arrest in April 2000, the United States had announced that it would attempt to extradite her to face charges in New York. From a cell in an overcrowded maximum-security prison in the New Territories, she arranged to be represented by a leading barrister who was an expert on extradition law. She would argue that the Hong Kong government should not turn her over to the United States because so much time had elapsed since the crimes spelled out in the indictment against her that prosecution was barred by the statute of limitations. This gambit seemed animated by a curiously naive notion that if a criminal simply goes on the lam and stays away for long enough, her crimes will be forgiven.

When a Hong Kong court ruled against her, Sister Ping tried another argument, suggesting that Hong Kong’s own Department of Justice had a conflict of interest, because in its handling of her case it had consulted with the American Justice Department and thus was representing
the interests of the United States. She sued the government, saying she was being unlawfully detained and naming the United States and the prison where she was being held as defendants. Amid this flurry of legal activity, she was reportedly hospitalized for depression, which further delayed the proceedings. (Whether she was genuinely clinically depressed or merely stalling for time remains unclear.)

In December 2002, Sister Ping presented herself to the Court of Appeals in Hong Kong. By that time she had fired her attorney and in a bizarre move had chosen to represent herself. There is no question that Sister Ping was an exceptionally shrewd and intelligent entrepreneur, but she was no legal scholar, and after years of deference and reinforcement from those around her, she had developed a somewhat elliptical and highly self-referential style of conversation that produced comic results in the courtroom. She began by telling the court that she wanted to quote from a Mandarin television series,
Honorable Judge
, which she had enjoyed during her years on the mainland. “In the execution of law, not only had the judge to understand fully what the law says,” she solemnly intoned, “but how the system deals with the cases and the general complexities of the case.”

Sister Ping told the court that the Public Security Bureau in China had frozen her assets. She explained that she simply wanted to return to America and continue running her restaurant on East Broadway, which she had been forced to leave in the care of family and friends. “But if I go back,” she added, “I would like to go back with the proper status.”

The appeal was unsuccessful, and on Friday, June 6, 2003, a decade to the day after the
Golden Venture
ran aground in Queens, her final appeal was rejected as well. After three years of fighting, Sister Ping was out of options. A young FBI agent named Becky Chan flew to Hong Kong to escort her back to America. On the flight home the two women sat side by side in the back of the plane. Sister Ping wore plastic flexicuffs over a Rolex watch. She was adamant that she had done nothing wrong and that as soon as they touched down in New York she would be released and reunited with her family. Chan could see the
determination in Sister Ping’s eyes. “I’m going to beat this,” her countenance seemed to say. “I’m going to get let out.”

It was only when the plane touched down in San Francisco and Sister Ping caught sight of the media photographers waiting there that her confidence began to slip. She asked if she could telephone her husband. Becky Chan said that she could, but that they could not speak in their native dialect, which Chan did not understand. They had to speak in Mandarin.

When Sister Ping had exchanged a few words with Yick Tak, the women changed flights, retracing the route east across the United States that Sister Ping had made on so many occasions with Fujianese customers who had entered the country from Tijuana. When they arrived at Newark Airport, Bill McMurry and Konrad Motyka were waiting there to meet them.

B
y choosing to fight extradition, Sister Ping had actually made a significant mistake. Before her capture in 2000, Motyka and McMurry had struggled to persuade the FBI to invest resources in building a case against the snakehead. The 1994 indictment was beginning to feel somewhat stale, but given that she was a fugitive and it looked unlikely that she would ever be captured, the agents had trouble justifying the devotion of further investigative resources to tracking down witnesses and assembling evidence for a prosecution that might never come to pass. Once Sister Ping was in custody, however, Motyka and McMurry began reaching out to their counterparts in the INS and other agencies. By resisting extradition, Sister Ping had simply given them three additional years in which to refine the case against her.

There were five counts against Sister Ping. Count one was a conspiracy charge, alleging that she had conspired to commit the crimes of alien smuggling, hostage-taking, money laundering, and trafficking in ransom proceeds. Count two charged her with hostage-taking, with specific reference to one of the Boston boats she had hired the Fuk Ching
gang to offload. “Hostage-taking and alien smuggling go hand in hand,” one of the prosecutors observed. The third and fourth counts charged Sister Ping with money laundering—for the money she had sent to Bangkok so that Weng Yu Hui could start his own alien smuggling business in 1991, and for the funds she sent on behalf of Ah Kay to help purchase the
Golden Venture
. The fifth count involved trafficking in ransom proceeds.

In a way, the indictment seemed to underline just how minimal Sister Ping’s role in the
Golden Venture
operation had been. She had sent twenty clients aboard the
Najd II
, but only two of them had ended up on the
Golden Venture
. It was true that one of those two had died in the water off Rockaway but Sister Ping was not charged with any crime related to that death. She had helped finance the ship, but technically the money she sent to Thailand so the boat could be purchased was not her own money; it was money that she owed to Ah Kay. “Cheng Chui Ping had nothing to do with the
Golden Venture,”
her lawyer, Larry Hochheiser, said. Hochheiser was a rumpled criminal defense attorney with fluffy white hair, a bushy mustache, and a kind smile. He was a seasoned litigator who had spent years representing the Westies, a violent Irish American gang based in Hell’s Kitchen. Hochheiser paced the courtroom with a slow gait and argued that Sister Ping had been an underground banker in an immigrant community, and that was the extent of her crimes. “It wasn’t Cheng Chui Ping who created the idea of the
Golden Venture,”
Hochheiser said. “No one claims that, except maybe the newspapers. The government doesn’t claim that. Even their witnesses can’t claim that. Ah Kay
was
the
Golden Venture.”
The tail was wagging the dog, Hochheiser argued. “This is a credit union. This is a money business that is being used to tie Cheng Chui Ping to the alien smuggling business.”