The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

Queens and treated for hypothermia, exposure, exhaustion, and various injuries. The rest ended up in the INS holding center at 201 Varick. The facility had only 225 beds, not enough to accommodate the Golden Venture passengers. The immigration authorities were overwhelmed, ill-equipped to deal with this number of new arrivals.
    President Bill Clinton had been in office for only six months. He had not yet appointed a director of the INS. As agency officials scrambled to house and process the passengers, they had to contend with the press as well. The arrival of the ship in New York was a sensational event. The New York Times alone assigned two dozen reporters to the story. The man who stepped into the leadership vacuum at the INS and presented himself to the cameras and microphones to address the situation was the agency’s New York district director, Bill Slattery. Slattery had grown up in Newark, New Jersey, and done stints in the Marines and on the Texas Border Patrol before being assigned to the New York office of the INS, where he quickly rose through the ranks. He was extremely ambitious, and tough—tough on illegal immigrants and tough on his own subordinates. “A meat eater, not a grass eater,” one colleague said.
    “This is the twenty-fourth ship that the U.S. government has encountered since August of 1991,” Slattery told reporters. “Almost all the aliens are Chinese nationals coming from Fukien province.” (Fujian is sometimes pronounced “Fukien,” and the Fujianese are also known as Fukienese.) In the past nine months alone, two thousand illegal Chinesehad been captured trying to enter the country, he said. Two weeks earlier a freighter had slipped beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and deposited 240 Fujianese on a San Francisco pier. The following day, 57 more had been discovered locked in a warehouse in New Jersey.
    The fee to reach America was $35,000, with a small down payment due before the trip began and the balance owed if the migrants survived the journey. Strictly speaking, this was “human smuggling” rather than “human trafficking.” Though the terms are often used interchangeably, they describe two different crimes. Human trafficking generally involves some form of deception or exploitation, where an individual is misled about where she is going or what she will be doing when she gets there and is often pushed into sex work or forced labor. Human smuggling is a risky and often extremely dangerous undertaking, but migrants generally enter into it with their eyes open; no one is telling them they will be models or waitresses when they arrive, and incidents of smugglers forcing migrants into prostitution, while not unheard of, are exceedingly rare. Still, human smuggling is a rough and exploitative business. Slattery explained that the poor Chinese undertook enormous debts to make the journey and then spent years working as indentured servants, turning over their earnings to the shady underworld entrepreneurs who financed their passage.
    “In effect, slavery here in the U.S.,” one reporter prompted.
    “That’s right,” Slattery replied.
    S everal miles away, inside a small shop at 47 East Broadway, in New York’s Chinatown, a woman watched the news unfold on television. She was short and pudgy, with a broad face, small, wide-set eyes, and a hangdog expression. She spoke almost no English; her hair was cut in a sensible shoulder-length bob; and she favored the cheap, utilitarian apparel of her countrymen from Fujian Province. She worked long hours in the store, selling clothing and simple goods, and in a restaurant downstairs, which served Fujianese specialties like oyster cakes andfishball soup to the newly arrived Chinese peasants who had settled in the neighborhood. When a truckload of supplies came, neighbors saw her hauling the goods into the shop. She could have been mistaken for one of those destitute peasants herself.
    But in fact she was a very wealthy woman, the owner of the