Snakehead Mafia

Simon Israel, Rob Lemkin

April 2001 – 15’15

Rotterdam - Europe's biggest container port and the gateway to England for thousands of Chinese illegal immigrants. To the smugglers, known as snakeheads, the trade is worth 120 million pounds a year.

Or was until last June.

It was close to midnight on June 16th when a group of Chinese illegal immigrants arrived at Rotterdam central station, after a gruelling SIX THOUSAND mile trek by air, road and rail from Fukien province in South East China.

Channel Four News has obtained the police statements of the only two survivors

Statement of KE SHI GUANG, Survivor:
"Different snakeheads met us along the route, giving us food, taking charge. At Rotterdam we were met by three Chinese, one of them was from my home town. He had left four or five-years ago. We were split up into small groups. The one from my town drove us from the station in a black BMW saloon."

They were taken to a safehouse and kept in a room for two nights awaiting instructions on how they were to be transported to their final destination.

This was to be the last stage of their journey...a journey to what they hoped would bring them a future of prosperity. They came in different cars, groups of them from different safehouses and they were gathered in that warehouse through the railings over there.

It was in that warehouse that they were herded into at container - human cargo ready for shipment to Britain.

This was the layout drawn by the survivors of inside the warehouse when all 60 Chinese had been brought and loaded into the container.

Once inside, 700 boxes of tomatoes were loaded on to hide the human parcels..

Statement of KE SU DI, Survivor:
"There were four or five white men in the warehouse. All communication was done using hand signals. The man stacking the tomatoes in the lorry explained that when the vent window was open we can talk in a low voice and when it was closed we could not talk at all because we were crossing the border."

Perry Wacker was the driver. For him the trip was supposed to be have been easy money - £330 a head - 20,000 total for the return trip.

But instead he was convicted today on 58 counts of manslaughter.

When closed circuit television captured his truck coming of the ferry at Dover, 54 men and four women were dead in the back of the container.

We cannot show the awful scene inside which was filmed by a police cameraman on entering the back of the truck.

But Kent police used 60 Gurkhas of similar size and weight to the Chinese, to recreate what conditions must have been like crammed inside the sealed metal box when Wacker closed the only access to air...the vent.

KE SHI GUANG, Survivor:
"..I felt I was going to die soon...KE SU DI and myself held hands and comforted each other for a few minutes. I started grabbing tomatoes from the floor, eating them quickly. We have a saying in China that it is better to die full than hungry."

At 45, He Chang Ming was the oldest of the 58 to die inside the sealed container. His family in China had paid the snakeheads £18,000 pounds for safe delivery.His brothers in England live in fear. One, only agreed to talk, provided his face was hidden.

Brother of victim HE CHANG MING:
" We only heard later when pictures of the dead were published. The pictures were unclear so we were not certain. My younger brother went to the morgue but was still not sure. Second time we both went. Then we were sure. I was really heartbroken. I cried a lot."

Alongside Wacker in the dock was a Chinese interpreter Jenny Guo, the other footsoldier in the conspiracy to smuggle in illegal immigrants. Her mobile phone number was found on 27 of the bodies, written on scraps of paper, or pieces of clothing - one victim's socks- another victim's trousers. The survivors say it was given to them in Rotterdam by a snakehead.

Statement of KE SU DI, Survivor:
"He told us that if we were arrested in England that we should ring MsGuo on the number and she would get us bailed straight away."

Today Jenny Guo, the fixer, was jailed for six-years. But she'd been London's meeter and greeter to hundreds of illegal immigrants long before the Dover tragedy..in fact she dealt with around 7 per cent of all Chinese asylum applications to the Home Office in that time.

Properties were used by Guo at one time or another as safehouses to accommodate her new arrivals. - rented houses in suburbia all over London and the South East which were temporary addresses holding up to ten people at any one time.

Armed with a diploma in English she used a vast network of firms of solicitors all over the capital who were all unaware of the true organised background to these asylum claims.

In one East London High Street alone she employed three legal practices, all within a hundred yards of each other. She supplied them with dozens and dozens of asylum cases.

Just one solicitor would talk to us about Ms Guo, but only on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisals.

Q: Did Ms Guo ever say how she came into contact with these people?

A: I asked her once and she said she always goes to Chinatown and I find these people there and they ask for help.

Q: In the street?

A: In Chinatown, yeah

For months Channel Four News has been in Chinatown chasing those operating in this dangerous twilight world of the snakeheads, the ones behind WACKER, GUO and the Dover set up.

The authorities both here and in Holland have been tracking these people for some time and a number are awaiting trial in Rotterdam.

No one in the Chinese community will talk openly about the organisations either because of fear or self interest. But sources both inside the community and in law enforcement agencies have told us that one of the country's three most powerful snakeheads had employed Guo as his fixer.

One man who has detailed knowledge of all of them through his work as a translator, knows the identity of Guo's boss who he refers to as 'D'

A: She works for him as a translator. She goes to Dover, Waterloo using the solicitors as a disguise.

Q: Why is she involved with 'D'?

A: She's paid to do so - a few hundred pounds each.

Q: So Guo was sent by D

A: Of course

Q: And she will pay the price?

A: They probably have a private arrangement.

The National Criminal Intelligence Service has been monitoring those in control of the smuggling rackets. D is one of them. They told us that this snakehead disappeared immediately after the Dover tragedy.

But we tracked him down to a takeaway in South East London. We can't show his face and we can't identify him because he's under investigation.

But this is Mr D, who controls a 110 strong organisation from the humble trappings of his takeaway restaurant.

NCIS told us he is the trickiest of players.

Q: How big is the network?

A: Around a hundred people coming in per week in two or three trucks.

Q: How much does he earn?

A: At least a million pounds a year?

Q: Who ever gets to meet Mr D?

A: No one...only his followers.

Mr D's Rotterdam connection is a mysterious Chinese lady known as Sister Ping.

She's said to have more than a hundred people doing her bidding all over Europe.

She's rarely seen and her reputation is legendary. On just one day in 1997, she smuggled a total of 108 people into Britain. ****This man, whose brother died on the Dover crossing came face to face with her when he was smuggled through Rotterdam on his way to England four years ago

Victim's relative:
'I met her in her house. She's in her early thirties, speaks Mandarin, wears expensive clothes and jewellery - hair shoulder length. She is very beautiful and very commanding."

Q: She guarantees they'll make it to Britain?

A: She has a very good reputation sending people to the UK with very high success rate so people never thought 58 would die.

Q: How successful is she?

A: Told she gets 200 people in a week to the UK for the last few years.

Q: So she's made a lot of money?

A: Yes, but she's gambled a lot. So one hand is making money, the other is losing money.

Every smuggling operation has the risk of a brutal and ruthless endgame if the immigrant's family fails to meet the costs - the result - kidnap and extortion.

Detective Sergeant Jim Reeves is attached to the Metropolitan Police's kidnap unit. He knows only too well of the consequences of a failure to pay

Detective Sergeant Jim Reeves, Metropolitan Police:
When the police arrive, in our result speaking from the UK, the family members are expected to pay the money to the snakeheads.

Q:On arrival?

A: On arrival. Sometimes they can pay in advance but generally it's on arrival.

Q: And if they don't?

A: And if they don't then you have the situation where phone calls will be made to the family and they will be told if the money is not paid, the person in the United Kingdom will be beaten up, harmed.

We've had instances where the victims have listened to their family members screaming down the phone because they've been assaulted at the same time.

And there's also a fine system which generally runs at 150 dollars a day for every day you are late with your payments.

It was the country's biggest ever kidnap operation, never seen before. When police stormed a safehouse in West London, they found it difficult to distinguish between hostage and kidnapper.

Eventually the victims were marked H for hostage and given a number. They'd been held by the snakeheads for 8 days, £20,000 ransoms were demanded from the hostage's families in China. All the men arrested in these pictures were convicted and jailed in 1999.

One of them, Chen Wen Ping, told us from his cell that those abductions were ordered from Rotterdam by none other than Sister Ping. She is sought by various police forces all over the world. After June 18th she disappeared from Rotterdam and surfaced in Thailand. She's now believed to have returned to Europe and is back in business.

But our inquiries into the people behind the trade in Rotterdam have led to another disturbing question? Many of those behind the scenes were under surveillance or known about by the authorities both in Holland and Britain. So could the 58 deaths have been prevented?

What happened on the June 18th crossing very nearly happened two and a half months earlier on the same route controlled by the same gang. On April 5th, 50 Chinese migrants, clients of Mr. D and Sister Ping, were on their way to Dover in a container aboard a ferry. Halfway across, they started to run out of air.

Survivor:
"The air became less and less. The container became very hot. I was kicking the door to get attention. By the end my feet were bleeding. I thought I would die very soon. All the women started screaming and crying. There was a child in the lorry".

Survivor:
" I remember I felt hot. I vomited a lot, vomited, and vomited. I thought about my husband and I thought I wouldn't see him before dying."

Their Dutch Driver Leo Nyveen heard the screams and let them out. When interviewed by immigration and police at Dover he claimed to know nothing. Forty-five minutes later he was released.

Back in Rotterdam, eight weeks later Mr.Nyveen popped up in a long running Dutch surveillance operation prompted by information from British police and immigration intelligence.

Using secret cameras, and tracking equipment police filmed a number of meetings at the avant garde Hotel New York. The central figure was a known human smuggler Gursel Oscan.

He was seen visiting Nyveen's apartment in the suburbs three weeks before the Dover tragedy...and guess who else turned up that day?

From the Dutch police surveillance records, obtained by Channel Four News, Perry Wacker, the man convicted today for killing 58 immigrants, was seen at that address at the same time.

Oscan and Nyveen seen here from the back last month in a Rotterdam court are among 7 awaiting trial charged with the manslaughter of the Dover 58. Their lawyers claim the authorities knew so much about Oscan they had to have known about plans for the June 18th crossing.

JAN BOONE, Dutch lawyer:
"The English were investigating him and the Dutch were investigating him so they knew all the time exactly what he was doing. And they show nothing about it and they do not want to tell us what exactly happened. This means, I think, if they had done their jobs well they could have easily have prevented this crime and the disaster."

So was this a failure of intelligence by both British and Dutch authorities..or was this smuggling operation allowed to continue in the hope of ensnaring the snakeheads?

The Home Office would not be drawn on what they knew in advance and what they know now of those controlling the route. They say there are a number of ongoing sensitive inquiries.

No one knows how many are coming in the backs of lorries every night through Dover. According to Home Office figures recorded numbers of Chinese asylum applications has dropped by two thirds since the tragedy. In this trade no one is supposed to die. It's bad for business. Bad in China, bad in Holland, bad in England. But today only footsoldiers have been found guilty. June 18th was in effect corporate manslaughter. Yet those controlling the trade, the sankeheads, in London and Holland are still free and still in business.