The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (9 page)

T
he first outward indications that Sister Ping and her family had established a criminal enterprise in Chinatown were evident almost as soon as they had settled in New York. But to American law enforcement these early warnings amounted to a series of confusing and apparently unrelated ciphers, and it was several years before the scope of the Chengs’ operation became clear.

In the fall of 1983, a Fujianese man named Frankie Wong was arrested in New York City on a charge of alien smuggling. Wong was diminutive and gay, the owner of a travel agency on Canal Street. As part of a plea bargain, he gave authorities the names of several smugglers in Chinatown; who he said had been bringing people into the country via Toronto. One of those names was Cheng Chui Ping. At the time, no one followed up on the lead. Several years later Frankie Wong walked into the basement of a building on Catherine Street that was ostensibly a wholesale fish market but actually an after-hours gambling
joint and was shot five times. (Sister Ping was never linked in any way with the murder.)

One day in February 1985, customs officers in New York were doing a routine inspection of incoming mail when they stumbled on a mysterious package. The sender, according to the return address, was one Calgada Melchoz O’Campo, of Cuahtemoc, Mexico. The recipient was Sister Ping’s husband, Cheung Yick Tak, care of the Tak Shun Variety Store, at 145B Hester Street. The package contained six passports from the People’s Republic of China. The customs officers decided to hold on to them and see if Mr. Cheung received any more curious international mail. Sure enough, another package soon arrived, again from O’Campo, again addressed to Cheung. This one contained eight Chinese passports. Customs alerted investigators at the New York district office of the INS. The INS in turn got the telephone company to turn over toll records for all international calls made to or from the shop on Hester Street. (This is a preliminary step in most investigations and does not require a warrant.)

What they found surprised them. The small mom-and-pop variety store run by a couple of unassuming Chinese immigrants seemed to be in regular, almost constant contact with a handful of far-flung telephone numbers. The investigators started assembling minutely detailed charts, by hand, on large pieces of paper, with “Tak Shun Variety Store” written in a circle at the center and a series of lines radiating outward like spokes from a hub, each terminating in a small circle representing a number that was frequently dialed. There were calls to California and to Mexico City, but also to Fujian Province and to Hong Kong, to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

The following month a Coast Guard cutter patrolling the shoreline of Miami stopped a boat that was drifting 5 miles out to sea. On board, Coast Guard officers found a dozen undocumented Fujianese men on their way from the Bahamas to Florida. The boat was a lease, and when authorities scanned the toll records of the man who had leased it, they
found that on the day of the voyage he had made a single telephone call to New York City. The number he dialed was the Tak Shun Variety Store.

As these leads converged, the INS launched an investigation into the proprietors of the Tak Shun. They called it Operation Hester, after the street on the eastern fringe of Chinatown where Sister Ping and Cheung Yick Tak had set up shop. Aware, perhaps, of the likelihood that American law enforcement might take an interest in her activities, Sister Ping had kept a decidedly low profile in New York. The family purchased a house in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn in the mid-eighties but held on to the Monroe Street apartment. For a time it seemed that the couple’s biggest liability, and greatest risk of exposure, was the frustrating logistical chore of transporting the mammoth quantities of cash they were amassing. Given his role as second fiddle in the relationship, this task often fell to Cheung Yick Tak. In 1984 he was stopped by airport authorities in New Orleans for trying to carry $18,000 into the country from El Salvador without declaring it. (By law you must declare amounts above $10,000.) In 1986 he was caught bulk carrying money again, and again in 1989. This time he was arrested. Investigators had trouble fingerprinting him; the tips of his fingers were covered in scars. (One prosecutor speculated that he might have deliberately cut his fingertips in order to avoid easy detection by the government. But no definitive explanation for the affliction has ever emerged.) To the investigators who looked into him, Yick Tak always seemed to be a bit of a bumbler, definitely not the brains behind the operation. “He sorta married into a smuggling family,” one of them said.

After customs alerted the INS to the Chinese passports being sent to Yick Tak from Mexico in 1985, the case was referred to the chief of the New York office’s Anti-Smuggling Unit, or ASU, a short, bullish immigration agent named Joe Occhipinti. Occhipinti contacted immigration authorities in Hong Kong, thinking that perhaps they might have some information on the family. They did. Several years earlier they had debriefed a high-ranking document forger, who told them about a Fujianese
family that was beginning to assume a major role in global human smuggling. Sister Ping’s father was “the main arranger in Foochow,” Occhipinti’s Hong Kong contacts told him. He was “assisted by three daughters, two sons and a son-in-law in escorting the aliens from Hong Kong, Central and South America on to Mexico.” They identified Sister Ping as “a daughter who travels extensively between Hong Kong, Mexico, and New York City. She and her husband, Cheung Yick Tak, collect the monies on arrival in New York from families of the smuggled Fukienese. The trip costs range between $12,000 and $18,000.” It emerged that in January 1983, only fourteen months after Sister Ping had first arrived in the United States, she was questioned by officials in Hong Kong and admitted that she had fraudulently obtained two reentry permits from mainland China.

From the Hong Kong investigators Occhipinti learned about Sister Ping’s brother Cheng Mei Yeung, who had met Weng Yu Hui in Guatemala and was believed to be establishing a West Coast stronghold for the family’s operations, in Monterey Park, California. Susan, the younger sister who had taken Weng shopping in Hong Kong, was chiefly responsible for obtaining visas to Central America, they continued. She was married to a Fujianese man in his twenties named Cheng Wai Wei, who went by the name Peter and who was the son of one of their father’s closest friends, a man with whom he had jumped ship back in the sixties. When Susan wasn’t in Hong Kong securing documents, she often helped out at the Tak Shun Variety Store.

The previous spring Susan had been stopped on the Hong Kong-China border trying to smuggle twenty-nine Chinese passports into the colony. When investigators questioned her, she did something that her older sister, Ping, would never do throughout her criminal career: she confessed, unburdening herself to her interrogators and explaining, in surprising detail, the dynamics of the family’s nascent smuggling operation. The passports she was carrying belonged to prospective migrants who were waiting to be smuggled to Central America, Susan explained. The way the system worked, she continued, was that her father would
recruit migrants around Fuzhou and then forward their passports to her. The family had an important connection in Guatemala, a Taiwanese native whom Susan always telephoned at the Ritz Hotel in Guatemala City. He helped her secure Guatemalan visas for the passports, which could then be used to fly passengers legally to Central America.

Susan seems to have won clemency with her detailed confession; the authorities in Hong Kong eventually let her go. But they took down all the information she gave, and when Joe Occhipinti questioned them about Sister Ping’s family, they dutifully passed the details along. The more Occhipinti looked into the complexity of the smuggling network, the more impressed he became. During one ten-month period in 1985, INS agents found Sister Ping’s name on twenty airline manifests, linking her to 250 Chinese traveling from Latin America to the United States. Her name kept cropping up in various ways; she seemed to be behind everything. Occhipinti pored over the call charts his team had assembled, tracing the tendrils of Sister Ping’s operation through her dozens of telephone contacts on three different continents. Given its resources, there was no way the INS could go after such an intricate worldwide enterprise, Occhipinti realized. He decided to propose a well-funded national task force. “The smuggling of ethnic Chinese represents the most sophisticated level of criminal activity which the [Immigration] Service encounters,” he wrote in the proposal. “Approaching the problem on the basis of individual incidents without gathering intelligence and sharing information on an international basis has little impact on the overall smuggling enterprise.”

Occhipinti put together all the information he could gather on Sister Ping and Yick Tak—the phone calls, the passports, the reports from Hong Kong immigration—and went to the FBI to make his case. He thought there was enough for an indictment. But this was 1985, and the FBI politely told him that its major concern was the Soviets and it didn’t have the time or the resources to launch its own investigation into his Chinese shopkeepers. He took his Hester file to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, and they accepted the case
for possible criminal prosecution. But without the FBI, the prosecutors had to rely on the INS to develop information for the case, and Occhipinti’s request for a national task force had gone nowhere. He had asked for $25,000, thinking he might be able to use it to smuggle an informant through the Cheng family ring. But INS headquarters in Washington wouldn’t authorize the task force or grant the funds. Eventually the prosecutors let the initiative lapse. There was no grand jury investigation, and Project Hester slid into “pending-inactive” status.

Occhipinti kept pushing. In 1988 he proposed that the INS reopen the Hester case “as a proactive, inter-regional task force investigation,” what he called “Hester (Phase II).” As it happened, the INS had just had great success in bringing the first-ever immigration case using the RICO racketeering statute. In a 1986 investigation called Operation Hydra, the agency had shut down a major Taiwanese prostitution ring operated by a middle-aged Queens woman known as Madame Shih. Madame Shih imported Taiwanese women on routes that took them from Hong Kong and Bangkok through Bolivia, El Salvador, and Guatemala, overland through Mexico, and eventually to New York. INS investigators believed that some of those women were smuggled through pipelines operated by Sister Ping. Madame Shih’s son-in-law, a major figure in her ring, was a pimp named Hon Tok Lou, and when INS agents sent a wired informant into the Tak Shun Variety Store, Yick Tak said that he didn’t know where Hon Tok Lou was but that he owed him money. (In fact, when Yick Tak was stopped in New Orleans with $18,000 in 1984, he told authorities the money wasn’t his—he was carrying it for Hon Tok Lou.)

Thus, with the inadvertent cooperation of Yick Tak, the INS had brought down a criminal enterprise they believed was closely associated with the Chengs. But to go after the Chengs themselves would be more difficult. Whenever people asked Occhipinti about Sister Ping, he told a story that he thought demonstrated just how untouchable she had become. Early on, he had gone to see her at the apartment in Knickerbocker Village, on Monroe Street. He’d taken along another investigator
and an interpreter. Occhipinti didn’t have much to bust her on, but he made it clear to Sister Ping, through the interpreter, that he was on to her and he would get her eventually. To Occhipinti’s surprise, Sister Ping wasn’t fazed in the slightest. “You don’t have the time to get me,” he remembers her saying. “Or the resources.” He made a note of the meeting, and it ended up in Sister Ping’s file. It became part of her lore within the agency. But what always struck Occhipinti about the exchange wasn’t just the arrogance of it, or the insult, so much as the fact that she was right.

Chapter Four

Dai Lo of the Fuk Ching

ONE AUTUMN
day in 1991, an elderly Chinese man shuffled into a meeting with a Senate investigator in a federal building in New York City. The old man had an owlish look to him; he was portly and bespectacled. He walked with a cane and wore a hearing aid. He was eighty-four years old.

“My name Benny Ong,” he said.

“Are you also sometimes called Uncle Seven?” the investigator asked, as a stenographer transcribed.

“They call me Uncle Seven,” the old man said. Born the seventh of nine sons to a poor bricklayer in China in 1907, he had immigrated to New York’s Chinatown in the early 1920s. Over the next seven decades he rose from an illiterate teenager working in a laundry on Pell Street to become one of Chinatown’s most revered grandees. The name Uncle Seven, like Sister Ping, was both familiar and respectful, an honorific. Everyone knew Benny Ong, and people saw him strolling each morning from his walkup apartment to the Hong Shoon restaurant on Pell Street. The only sign of his influence was the young men who attended to him, carrying cell phones and walkie-talkies. He passed his days playing mahjong or pai gow and reading the Chinese newspapers. He was an august figure, a village elder, a pillar of the community.

“Is it true that you were convicted of a homicide sometime in the 1930s?”

The old man scrutinized the investigator. “Fifth Amendment,” he said.

Upon arriving in Chinatown, Ong had joined the Hip Sing, one of two tongs that dominated what was in those days a tiny neighborhood, consisting of a mere handful of streets. The word
long
means “assembly hall,” and these organizations sprang up almost as soon as the Chinese began arriving in America in the nineteenth century. For an alienated and often reviled Chinese population in the United States, the tongs played several roles: they functioned as credit unions and job agencies, an indigenous dispute resolution system, and a mutual aid society. Tongs are occasionally likened to triads, the highly ritualized secret societies with a long history in China, but the Chinatown tongs were very specifically the creation of an expatriate community: they afforded a shield against the hazards of being an immigrant in America, and preserved cultural and familial bonds among displaced Chinese. They offered loans and legal help and a social refuge for the ragged diaspora—a slice not just of China, but of the very village you left behind, the soothing music of your mother tongue.