Two-Faced Woman

By Edward Barnes/New York City

She has no visible halo, but the stocky, uneducated Chinese woman is a saint to thousands. For 13 years Cheng Chui-ping sold clothes and cheap eats along East Broadway in New York City's Chinatown. During lunch hours she would chop vegetables, wash dishes and wait on tables at a restaurant that served dishes from her native Fujian province. Occasionally she could be seen tottering down the street struggling with bales of clothes, dragging them into her general-merchandise store. But to many she was a veritable goddess, dispensing both mercy and fortune. Her devotees called her Dajie Ping--Big Sister Ping.

To the U.S. government, however, Big Sister Ping is a big-time crook and people smuggler. She may have puttered around the Yung Sun restaurant and the Tak Shun variety store, but federal investigators say she also ran a global crime network that netted her more than $40 million, made her a major competitor of China's central bank, helped her corrupt foreign government officials and changed the face of New York City. For years, law enforcement called her the Mother of All Snakeheads, a leader of the species of international gangsters who specialize in the brutal trade in humans from China. And next month, after a six-year manhunt, they expect to have her back in New York for a trial.

So who is the real Sister Ping?

She entered the U.S. as an illegal herself. Born in 1949 in the poor farming village of Shengmei in China's coastal Fujian province, she made her way to Hong Kong and then to the U.S. in 1981. After opening a small variety shop on Hester Street, then on the outskirts of Chinatown, she somehow obtained naturalization papers. A year later she was joined by her husband and children. According to Peter Kwong, a professor at Hunter College and an expert on people smuggling, she appeared at a fortuitous time, when ties between China and the U.S. were warming, opening trade, travel and tourist links. "For years the only way out of China was to work as a seaman and then jump ship," says Kwong. "She was here when other means became possible and started by helping friends and family out. Then she recognized the business potential in the trade."

Almost single-handedly, according to the police, she put the pieces of a global smuggling network together, at first making the trip to China herself and acting as guide to small groups, using Mexico, Belize and other Central American states as staging points. Police say she did it by buying off corrupt immigration, tourist and other officials, using fake or purchased papers and then transshipping immigrants to America. She charged a small down payment, and hopefuls promised to borrow the rest of the money upon arrival from families already in the U.S. Those who couldn't pay were found jobs at restaurants and garment factories and allowed to pay off the debt, with interest, in installments. In the 1980s, according to police, the fee for the trip to America was $18,000. It is now $60,000.

She survived a couple of major brushes with the law. In 1989 she was arrested for paying an undercover U.S. policeman to smuggle a group of Fujianese through Canada to New York. Earlier that same year she was carrying $50,000 and an address book that police said had the phone numbers of safe houses around the world. She pleaded guilty to smuggling charges in Buffalo, N.Y., and served four months in prison. A few months earlier her husband had been arrested for trying to smuggle another group across the Canadian border near Niagara Falls in a $59 raft. The raft capsized, and four people drowned. He served nine months.

After getting out of prison she moved to 47 East Broadway, paying $3 million in cash, according to government sources, for a building directly across the street from a branch of the Bank of China, Beijing's central bank. She set up her restaurant in the building, and it quickly became a hub of the illegal Fujian Chinese community. It also became a major competitor of the bank. According to police and a number of Ping's clients, she used her connections in China to begin transferring money from those she smuggled back to their families in China. She proved more efficient than the bank across the street. Says a female immigrant who patronized Ping's service: "The Bank of China took three weeks, charged a bad foreign-exchange rate and delivered the cash in yuan. Sister Ping delivered the money in hours, charged less and paid in American dollars. It was a better service." Steven Wong, an outspoken critic of snakeheads, says that things became so bad that the bank began offering color televisions and prizes to those who used them to transfer money. "Still," he says, "no one came."

Ping's not-so-secret bank was also used to enlarge the smuggling operation, according to the police. Kwong says it enabled the snakeheads to lend money in China to those who couldn't afford the down payment on the trip or who didn't have relatives already in the U.S. to sponsor them. "They charged 30% annual interest, enough to keep someone working to pay it off over a very long time," Kwong says. It also enabled Ping and others to transfer the payments for the smuggling fee immediately after they were made, opening up a whole new pool of financing for would-be immigrants.

By the late '80s, Ping's stature had grown so large that she was probably the best-known and most revered figure in Chinatown. Almost everyone in the Fujianese ghetto owed her something. She and her husband Cheung Yick-tak contributed $10,000 to buy the building that would house the Fujianese association, which police say soon became the center for human smuggling. He sat on the board. Both continued to work each day in the store or restaurant. There were no big cars or flashy clothes. When she traveled she took the subway, seemingly unafraid of the reach of the law.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown created a boom in Ping's business. The amnesty granted by President George Bush to Chinese living in the U.S. established a huge legal population that could afford to pay to bring family and relatives over. As demand skyrocketed, larger criminal gangs learned that smuggling people was more profitable and legally less risky than smuggling drugs. Quickly the nature of the game changed. Gangs with bases in Hong Kong and China entered the field. Immigrants were recruited en masse, even if they couldn't afford a down payment. And when they couldn't keep up the payments or find jobs in a recession-wracked America, they were kidnapped, tortured and sometimes killed. To accommodate the demand, snakeheads pooled resources and bought old unseaworthy ships and stuffed the holds with people who would spend months at sea in horrific conditions. During one month in 1993, at least 25 ships, carrying thousands of immigrants, set off from Fujian crammed with human cargo. One of them was the Golden Venture, a dilapidated freighter that had been won in a poker game by Gu Liang-chi, who went by the street name Ah Kay, the leader of a Fujianese street gang that controlled East Broadway. According to U.S. government charges, Ah Kay, Sister Ping and several other snakeheads loaded the ill-fated hulk with immigrants. When it ran aground in the icy, turbulent waters off New York in June 1993, 10 of the 300 passengers perished trying to escape the ship. As it turned out, the U.S.-based guide who was supposed to organize the unloading had been killed in a gang dispute. It was the first of many tragedies that would awaken the world to the horrors of the trade.

In 1994, a few months after the Golden Venture ran aground, Sister Ping was invited to China along with other overseas notables of Fujianese descent for an anniversary celebration of the Communist Party. When she arrived in Beijing, however, instead of being honored, she was arrested. According to police and friends, she bribed her way out of custody but couldn't return to America because the investigation of the Golden Venture was getting close to her. She fled to her native village of Shengmei, which had benefited from the years she spent becoming an American success story. Shortly after arriving there she learned she had been indicted in the U.S. for human smuggling and illegal money transfers.

She took refuge at her house at No. 398 Shengmei village, which is three stories tall with a pagoda on the roof. She has erected other buildings in town as well. The once mud-slicked and unremarkable farming village is now dotted with flamboyant villas and pavilions, proof of the largesse of former residents who have made it big in the U.S. thanks to the auspices of Sister Ping. There is even a school set up to train future illegal emigrants in English. In Shengmei, local officials grown rich off her investments and enterprises in the village helped ensure her protection from even Beijing's reach.

Police say she turned Shengmei into her new headquarters, continuing to travel extensively. She legally holds three passports: one from Hong Kong, one from the U.S. and one from Belize. Authorities say she has managed to make several visits to the U.S., where her son and husband continue to reside. Meanwhile she has allegedly explored new routes and techniques for getting people into the U.S. Police and immigration officials say Ping and other snakeheads have made an alliance with Serbian officials and now funnel several planeloads of immigrants a day through Belgrade to Europe and the U.S. One new method the snakeheads allegedly pioneered is the use of cargo containers to smuggle people. Last month 58 Chinese suffocated in a container being driven from the Netherlands to Britain. Sister Ping has not been connected to that case.

Last April, however, her luck ran out. Unable to locate her for five years, Interpol agents began checking passenger lists of flights from Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok airport to New York. On the April 17 flight they spotted the name of her son. More than 40 agents from the Hong Kong narcotics bureau staked out the airport and waited. Around noon, they saw Sister Ping wandering around the airport. At first she denied she was Ping, but after she was fingerprinted she admitted her identity. She was carrying her three passports when she was arrested. An Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman boasted that the "arrest showed even the most mythic are not immune." An extradition hearing was originally scheduled for June, but Ping was hospitalized for depression, and the hearing is rescheduled for next month. She is expected to be extradited in August to face six federal charges of kidnapping, conspiracy and illegally transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom money paid by friends and families of smuggled aliens. If convicted she faces a life sentence without the hope of parole.

Yet, even after her arrest, it is not hard to find people who adore her. Ming Wang, a restaurant worker in New York City, says he lost his job because he injured his legs and was desperate for help. "A friend told me to go to Sister Ping. I told her my story, and she gave me $2,000. She said 'little brother, take this and pay me back when you can.' I still owe her $1,200, but she never asked for the money." Says Song Lin, a restaurant worker: "She is even better than Robin Hood because he stole from the rich. Sister Ping never stole anything and still helped the poor. She is a good person." Says Ping's younger sister Sue, who lives in New Jersey: "My sister was just thinking of helping others. How would she know it would get her into trouble?"

Even Steven Wong, the anti-snakeheads activist who has worked with the Coast Guard interviewing survivors of smuggling trips, says Ping was never like the other snakeheads. "I have no doubt she is a good person," he says. "The Fujianese don't see human smuggling as a crime. They see it as a necessary service. When the gangs took over, Sister Ping argued that those who were coming had paid money and should be treated fairly, as clients, not prisoners." He says he once interviewed her and she claimed she only helped her relatives come to the U.S. "I have heard a lot of bad things about snakeheads but never anything bad about Sister Ping," he says. "People love her because she helps reunite families. Love is bigger than the law. You can't expect fathers not to see their children. In America the law comes first. To Chinese, families are more important," he explained. And money is no object if reunion is the result. "If someone died on the journey," says Wong, "she was famous for making a payment to the family and promising free passage for the next son. In China she was like a goddess. A snakehead with a heart."

Police say she paid the gangs to do her dirty work, and her indictment lists several instances of calls from her demanding ransom and the payment of ransom money for the release of immigrants who were being held until families or relatives paid their smuggling fee. Wong, however, believes her participation in gangs was coerced. He says Ah Kay at one point sent goons who threatened to destroy her restaurant if she didn't knuckle under to his gang. Ah Kay, who pleaded guilty to alien smuggling several years ago, is expected to testify against her. Her attorney Joel Cohen says that "all the government's witnesses are gangsters, thugs and criminals. They have serious credibility problems, and I look forward to cross-examining them." Chinese-language papers in New York say that when she lived in the city, her store was robbed on several occasions by gangs. Philip Lam, a real estate agent who once rented an office from Sister Ping, said he came to her one day to complain that gangs wanted protection money from him. "I have to pay too," she told him. When she returns for trial in August, the price may be higher than she ever expected.

--With reporting by Isabella Ng and Wendy Kan/Hong Kong

With reporting by Isabella Ng and Wendy Kan/Hong Kong