Free The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe Page A

amounted to $379 million. By 1995 it was $4.1 billion. With her snakehead fees and 3 percent commissions, Sister Ping soon became so successful that she and Yick Tak outgrew the Tak Shun and relocated to a handsome five-story brick tenement at 47 East Broadway, in 1990. The building’s title was not in her name, and the price she paid for it was underreported in order to avoid taxes—a standard practice in Chinatown. But it was rumored in the neighborhood that she had paid $3 million for the building. It may have merely been a coincidence, but people did not fail to notice that she had established her new operation directly across East Broadway from the glass-and veined-marble building that housed the Chinatown headquarters of her chief competitor, the Bank of China.
    On the ground floor, the couple opened a larger version of the Tak Shun, calling it the New Hong Kong Variety Store, and in the basement they opened a restaurant, the Yeung Sun, which specialized in the simple staples of Fujianese cuisine. These businesses weren’t fronts, exactly. To have a front business that wasn’t turning a profit in its ownright would be, to a Fujianese way of thinking, deeply wasteful. So the family members sold their fair share of seafood and clothing. But to the Fujianese in the neighborhood, there was no mistaking the dominant revenue streams. You could see it when a line stretched out the door on Chinese holidays, as people queued to send money home to their families. Weng would go in every couple of months and send $1,000 back to Fujian. Sister Ping would be at the counter, or Yick Tak, or sometimes their oldest daughter, Monica. “There were always people there sending money,” Weng remembered.
    Nor was it just the shop and the restaurant and the money transfer business and the human smuggling that Sister Ping and Yick Tak engaged in. They diversified, opening the Long Shine Travel and Trading Agency and the 47 East Broadway Realty Corp. In the waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, they opened a poultry shop, which sold live chickens and ducks and supplied the restaurant. They continued to operate the garment factory in Shenzhen, and they opened a video arcade and import-export business in Hong Kong. Because property transactions in Chinatown were often done in cash, no one knew the extent of the family’s holdings. In the early 1980s, the immigration code was amended to allow foreigners who worked ninety days a year in agriculture to obtain green cards and remain in the United States. The measure was designed to guarantee a steady supply of cheap Latino labor in California. But it was rumored that Sister Ping had identified a loophole in the policy and developed an interest in several farms in New York and New Jersey. The farms would allow her to become a key supplier to the insular and profitable restaurant economy in Chinatown while providing jobs, and immigration cover, for each new wave of Fujianese she escorted into the country.
    One thing was clear: Sister Ping’s greatest advantage seemed to be the immigration policies of the United States government. On November 6, 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, took effect. The act contained an amnesty provision, which stipulated that any undocumented person who could prove that he or she had beenresident in the United States prior to January 1, 1982, was eligible for employment authorization, the right to leave the country and return, and, ultimately, a green card. The law created a burgeoning industry of document vendors in Chinatown, who could whip up backdated leases, bills, pay stubs, or employment records. It was no trick to persuade officials you had been working off the books in Chinatown since 1981, so in addition to spawning another lucrative sideline for immigration profiteers, the amnesty provision extended the promise of a green card to future potential customers, who left China in the care of snakeheads long after the legislation