5 Jailed in Probe of Ring Smuggling Chinese Into U.S.

Five people have been arrested in what federal authorities described Tuesday as the “chopping off of a big tentacle” from a worldwide network making millions of dollars a year smuggling citizens of the People’s Republic of China into the United States.

Charging as much as $10,000 a person, the alleged human smuggling operation has been in business for several years, most recently routing operations through Central America and Mexico, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Gene Chien-Jen Lee, 54, a resident alien from China living in Alhambra, was described as the ringleader in an affidavit submitted to the court by Sheldon Grover, an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent who began the investigation of the alleged smuggling operation in March, 1984.

Airport Arrests

Assistant U.S. Atty. Enrique Romero said that Chien-Jen Lee; another Alhambra resident, Gang-Wei Ferng, 40, and Nelson Li-Sheng-Fu, also 40, of El Monte, were taken into custody Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport after giving an undercover agent $2,000 and plane tickets to Brownsville, Tex., as part of an alleged plan to fly immigrants from China into the United States via Mexico.

Two others accused of being key members, James Chen-Chun Lee and his wife, Katherine, who formerly operated a gift shop in Reseda, were arrested later in Las Vegas.

“The arrest of these five people did not mean we cut off the pipeline of human smuggling from China, but it accomplished the chopping off of a big tentacle,” Grover said.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “the smuggling of Chinese goes on through Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and Europe, so we don’t pretend that we stopped the flow with this case. We think we have slowed it down, though.”

According to Grover’s affidavit, he received information from numerous sources--including the President’s Commission on Organized Crime--that there was a very active Chinese smuggling ring operating in Southern California.

Discussing the difficulties in putting the case together, Grover said:

“Frankly, despite all of the information that came to me, I wondered if I was ever going to be able to make a prosecutable case against anyone. It is nearly impossible to get someone inside these Chinese operations, because they are a very closed society. It just doesn’t work to have some American-born Chinese posing as a guy from Red China.”

Government agents got a break in January when a confidential informant went to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and said he had been contacted by James Chen-Chun Lee, who, the affidavit states, claimed to be part of a large “corporation” smuggling Chinese into the United States from Central America. Lee had tried to recruit him as a pilot for the smuggling operation, the informant told the immigration service.

The informant then agreed to introduce an undercover immigration service agent as a “necessary co-pilot for the flights,” Grover said.

By April, the informant and the undercover agent had negotiated an agreement to pick up a planeload of Chinese immigrants 240 miles south of the U.S. border in Mexico and fly them to an abandoned airstrip in Texas.

During the course of the discussions with suspects Chien-Jen Lee and Gang-Wei Ferng at the Golden Shark restaurant in Monterey Park and with James Chen-Chun Lee and his Guatemalan-born wife at their Reseda gift shop, agents were able to record conversations about smuggling plans with hidden tape recorders, according to the affidavits.

U.S. Magistrate Ralph Geffen ordered a $100,000 bond for Gene Chien-Jen Lee, and $200,000 bond for Nelson Li-Sheng Fu. He ordered Gang-Wei Ferng held without bail because he is an illegal alien and consequently a substantial flight risk, Romero said.

James Chen-Chun Lee and Katherine Lee, who has dual U.S. and Guatemalan citizenship, were being held by immigration officials in Las Vegas and will be brought to Los Angeles for a court appearance as soon as possible, authorities said.