The Taiwan Connection : A...

Jorge Guzman, a special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has a price on his head. It is his reward for snapping at the heels of one of the biggest, and most profitable, human smuggling operations in the world, a network that in turn fuels criminal enterprises from drug trafficking to credit card fraud, from prostitution to extortion.

A broad man with a broad grin, Guzman wears his moods on his sleeve. Shielding himself behind the mask and monotone so typical of his law- enforcement colleagues is clearly an unnatural act. Nor does he suffer fools easily, on either side of the law--the grin can disappear in a flash. But Guzman would hardly rate an assassin’s contract if he didn’t have an effective sting. As the L.A.-based coordinator of investigations into Asian organized crime, he engineered the only successful undercover operation to date against Chinese migrant smugglers. Operation Dry Dock arrested 132 illegal Chinese immigrants and yielded a wealth of information on the smuggling masterminds.

The man suspected of ordering the hit on Guzman is Taiwanese. Based in Guatemala, his criminal shadow looms largest over Southern California. Federal officials have asked that I not reveal his name, so let’s call him Mr. Li.

Poker-faced and a bit jowly from too much banqueting, Li looks like what he is, a successful Chinese businessman in middle age. But rather than athletic shoes or dried mushrooms, multiple sources say, Li imports China White, an exceptionally pure form of heroin. Rather than the Rotary or Kiwanis Club, they say, he is affiliated with triads in Asia and street gangs in Los Angeles. And rather than mini-malls, he invests in L.A.-area nightclubs staffed by prostitutes from Shanghai and Fuzhou.

But these interests are all peripheral to his main, multimillion-dollar line of business: smuggling economic migrants from China into the United States, some by sea and even more by air. Li has had a stake in nearly half of the 20-odd human-cargo boats apprehended in the Pacific since August, 1991, according to a confidential State Department memo outlining his career. And those are just the ships of which law enforcement is aware. “Li doesn’t have any real competitors on the West Coast,” says a senior INS official.

As big as he is, however, Li is only one link in a transnational chain of ethnic Chinese enterprises that are flooding the United States with illegal immigrants and high-potency heroin. They generate tens of billions of dollars each year, much of it used to bribe officials around the world, and have become, in the words of the Washington official, “the single most important criminal threat to the United States.”

One cannot but marvel at a network that was able to sneak 100,000 people a year through dozens of countries around the globe with hardly anyone paying attention--until a migrant-laden tramp steamer, the Golden Venture, ran aground near New York City in June, 1993. Since then, the smuggling of Chinese immigrants has fallen out of the headlines, but it continues unabated, not only in the United States but all over the world.

The story of Li’s empire, and the larger empire of which it is a part, gives a glimpse of the reaches of this network, which Guzman and other front-line agents, outmanned and out-financed, are fighting in their two-front battle against Asian organized crime. On one front are Li and his far-flung, highly mobile army, connected in myriad ways to criminal--and possibly official--organizations in Taiwan. On the other is a government that has been slow to recognize the scope and reach of highly diversified Chinese criminal groups and whose unfocused policies have made it frustratingly hard for investigators like Guzman to penetrate the human smuggling rings that turbocharge these groups with cash and manpower.

*

Li’s business empire began to burgeon in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping opened China to trade. In the boom that followed, Taiwanese were among the first and most aggressive investors, despite the political tension between Beijing and Taipei. They naturally gravitated to their ancestral province of Fujian--virtually a stone’s throw from Taiwan--where they speak the same dialects and often have relatives.

There, criminal entrepreneurs found what would become a gold mine. Farmers in Fujian, on the southeastern coast of China, were being squeezed off their land. The country’s breakneck transition to industry was replacing farms with factories, displacing millions of agricultural workers. The farm jobs that did remain were being filled by desperately poor peasants from China’s interior, willing to work for next to nothing. The pressure of unemployment and personal debt, combined with abuse from venal officials, made daily life increasingly difficult for growing numbers of Fujianese.

From afar, the United States shimmered with wealth and opportunity. And in Fujian, which has a long history of rebellion, secret societies and sea-based smuggling, a tradition of emigration began to reassert itself. Conflicts arising from the emergence of the Ching dynasty in the 17th Century had led to a massive migration, mainly to Taiwan, Southeast Asia and later to Latin America. Now, with help from enterprising investors like Li, another massive exodus would begin.

Li and his main competitor, another Taiwanese man now based in Brazil, are the biggest of the many entrepreneurs in the smuggling business. Both men quickly transformed their mom- and-pop smuggling ventures into full-service, global operations. Fleeing a murder rap in Brazil in the mid-1980s, Li moved to El Salvador and then Guatemala, where he worked his way through the ranks of his new trade. He didn’t come alone. “Smuggling (had been) controlled by a base of Cantonese families,” notes the State Department memo. But then the “Taiwanese moved in and established a base of about 150 families.” By 1991, they had taken over, and Li was the new boss.

In the meantime, by no coincidence, the clientele had changed too, both in number and kind. More than 90% of the estimated half-million migrants who have been smuggled from mainland China into the United States since 1984 are from Fuzhou--the capital of Fujian province--and three adjacent counties, an area not much bigger than greater Los Angeles. Seldom has so large a migration been so geographically concentrated at the source, and never has one been so overwhelmingly illegal.

The United States is not the only promised land. A Taiwanese man in league with Fuzhou “snakeheads”--booking agents for migrant smugglers--was recently convicted of alien smuggling in Japan, where Chinese crime syndicates have forged ties with their Japanese counterparts, the Yakuza. More than 20 ships unload their cargo there annually, according to an INS agent based in Asia. Australian authorities have apprehended four ships in the past eight months. Last fall, the interior minister of Austria announced that police had “uncovered a Europe-wide network of Mafia-like (Chinese) organized crime” responsible for smuggling thousands of migrants into Vienna. Similar reports have come out of Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic.

And these are only the target countries. China’s Public Security Bureau estimates that there are half-a-million Chinese nationals in smuggling way-stations around the world--50,000 in Moscow, 15,000 in Ho Chi Minh City, 25,000 in Bangkok, 25,000 in Africa, 10,000 in Brazil, 5,000 in other countries including the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Romania and Bulgaria--waiting to complete their journeys.

Until the ‘80s, says Jim Hayes, Guzman’s boss and head of anti- smuggling operations for the INS in Los Angeles, “alien smuggling had always been a localized, small-scale affair--people would find their own way to the other side of the Mexican border and hire a smuggler from there. But as demand increased, organizations began to spring up around the world. Today it has gotten to the point where a smuggler can accommodate someone who walks in off the street in Fuzhou or Kiev or Karachi.”

*

The engine of the people-smuggling network, the heart that makes the blood flow, is Taiwan. The 40 ships identified by U.S. authorities that have tried--successfully, in most cases--to deposit their cargo in the United States since 1991 are “overwhelmingly connected in some form or fashion to the island of Taiwan,” notes Assistant U.S. Atty. James Walsh, who heads the Organized Crime Strike Force for Los Angeles. Most are owned, and many were captained and crewed, by Taiwan nationals. The few vessels that were not Taiwan registered disguised their origins with flags of convenience from Belize, Panama or Honduras.

But the Taiwan connection goes much deeper than that. “The boats are set up there, the money is laundered there,” says a senior INS official in Washington who requested anonymity. “The behind-the-scenes people who control some of the gangs that pick up at airports, control safe houses and collect money are also Taiwanese”--people like Li and his rival in Sao Paulo.

And people are apparently not the only commodity moving through the network. Walsh, who says that Asian crime is by far the “premier consumer” of the strike force’s resources in Southern California, has also identified “several Asian heroin smuggling and distribution organizations active in the L.A. area” that may be connected to larger smuggling networks. Here, too, links to Taiwan are emerging. Mainland Chinese police have arrested several dozen Taiwanese over the last couple of years for manufacturing, processing and trafficking both heroin and crystal methamphetamine, called ice. “Both Taiwan and China play a major role in drug trafficking to the U.S.,” says a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official in Washington. “Taiwan is a major transit area--there is no doubt. It has replaced Hong Kong.”

The changeover has been startlingly rapid. Throughout the late 1980s, Taiwan police seized about three kilos of heroin a year. Then the numbers began to explode, from 98 kilos in 1991 to 1,100 in 1993. By the end of June this year, seizures totaled 1,000 kilos, the most of any country in Asia except China and Thailand.

Taiwan denies that it has become the preferred stepping-off point from mainland Asia for heroin and ice smugglers. “Taiwan is not a major transshipment point,” says the country’s minister of justice, Ying-jeou Ma. “We have our own drug problem.”

No doubt true, but U.S. experts still see a discrepancy. “The massive amounts of heroin seized is far in excess of the amount needed to supply the Republic of China’s domestic needs,” noted a 1993 FBI report on the United Bamboo Gang, a huge Taiwan-based criminal organization with a major presence in the United States, especially Southern California.

So far there is no smoking gun linking the operations that traffic in drugs and people. Smugglers are too smart to move contraband carrying vastly different penalties--a couple of years for migrants, up to life in prison for drugs--in the same shipments. Yet the suspicions remain. “There is evidence,” says San Francisco-based U.S. Atty. Michael Yamaguchi, who helped set up an Asian organized crime strike force for the West Coast and Hawaii last year, “that heroin and aliens are being smuggled by the same people.”

The Taiwan connection to smuggling is so consistent as to raise troubling questions about official corruption. A 150-foot fishing vessel, the San Tai No. 1, for example, was purchased in 1991 by the Taiwan government as scrap metal only to turn up a year later off the coast of California with a boatload of migrants. Of the more than 10,000 Taiwanese passports--used to smuggle migrants via commercial air carriers--that find their way into smugglers’ hands every year, hundreds, and perhaps more, are issued by Taiwan consulates around the world, especially in Latin America.

Walsh, who has worked on several Taiwan-related cases, sees “no reason to believe alien smuggling is connected to the government.” To be sure, Taiwan has given the United States permission to board Taiwan-registered smuggling ships, provides information on Taiwan nationals apprehended on board and usually pays to repatriate mainland Chinese migrants. Once, on request, it even ordered every Taiwan flagship on the high seas to radio in their positions.

But other officials have doubts about Taiwan. “I’m not sure the government has as much control as it thinks it does,” says Timothy Wirth, Clinton’s undersecretary of state for global affairs. And John F. Shaw, INS assistant commissioner for investigations, questions Taiwan’s “will to cooperate” on this issue. Another frustrated federal investigator says that while Taiwan police do forward information about some suspects, they somehow never acknowledge queries about others. “We’ve requested arrests records for Li and his top people many times,” said one frustrated federal investigator, “and we always draw a blank.”

The historical ties between the ruling Kuomintang party and organized crime are a matter of record. From Shanghai’s Green Gang in the 1940s to the still-thriving United Bamboo Gang, party leaders have frequently used powerful crime syndicates to do their dirty work, even political assassination on U.S. soil. When Henry Liu, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Taiwan, published an unflattering biography of Taiwan’s then-President Chiang Ching-kuo, Taiwanese intelligence officers recruited and trained United Bamboo Gang leaders to murder him at his home in Daly City in 1984. Only enormous international pressure brought the culprits in Taiwan to justice, and even then they were paroled after a few years in jail.

Well before that, in 1977, Taiwan had already earned a place on the State Department’s “criteria list,” a select category reserved for “foreign governments whose intelligence activities are hostile to, or of particular concern to, the national security of the United States so that counterintelligence activity is required.” The FBI, which set up a special Taiwan Counter-Intelligence Unit known as Squad 13, is equally wary. “Since the government (on Taiwan) has lost diplomatic status,” concludes a December, 1993, FBI report, “it may depend on the United Bamboo Gang to carry out assignments that normally would be assigned to its intelligence agencies.”

Ma’s terse response when I asked whether any linkages remained between the government and organized crime: “That was a long time ago.”

*

Willard H. Myers III is a bona fide maverick. As a radical trial attorney in the early 1970s, he defended domestic terrorists pro bono; today, the 51-year-old immigration lawyer from Philadelphia is one of law enforcement’s best friends.

Working with shards of data gleaned over the course of a decade from his clients--thousands of illegal immigrants from the Fuzhou region of southern China--this methodical, soft-spoken ex-professor pieced together a detailed map of smuggling routes and the organizations that maintain them. He identified key players, including Li, and was so alarmed by the scope of criminality he uncovered that he wrote up his findings in 1991 and sent them to top INS officials in Washington.

“My own practice notwithstanding, when I realized the extent to which international organized crime was involved, I felt compelled to act,” says Myers, whose wild gray hair and beard seem at odds with his button-down lawyer’s garb. “I was amazed. From entirely different sources we were coming up with the same names and the same connections.”

Hayes, Guzman and INS investigators in other cities were amazed, too. Here was an attorney in private practice who, on his own, had penetrated not one, but two highly elaborate smuggling rings. “It was obvious,” concedes one agent, “that he knew more about this stuff to begin with than we did.”

Myers is today widely recognized as the leading authority on Chinese alien smuggling, perhaps on Chinese organized crime in general. Besides having been called to give testimony before the House and Senate, he is regularly consulted by three federal agencies and as many foreign governments. His annually updated report--last year’s edition weighed in at 500 pages--was the cornerstone of a recent headline-grabbing CIA study about immigrant smuggling. Comments he made during interviews on CNN led to the indictment and dismissal of Said Mouse, minister of immigration in Belize. Myers, who runs a single-engine think tank called the Center for the Study of Asian Organized Crime, in other words, has done more to sound the alarm about the growing power and influence of Asian organized crime than anyone in the country.

“Without doubt, nationals of Taiwan represent the most powerful group in transnational ethnic Chinese organized crime,” Myers told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April. A few month earlier, he told a House committee much the same, pointing an accusatory finger at unnamed “high-ranking members of (Taiwan’s) National Police Agency.”

Myers suspects that rogue members of Taiwan’s military or intelligence community beyond the reach of civilian law enforcement are profiting directly from the trade in human cargo from Fujian. (Justice Minister Ma, for his part, bristles at the suggestion of high-level corruption and points to the lack of hard evidence. “We would be happy to have such information,” he adds, “because we are in the process of cracking down on corruption.”)

After his congressional testimony, recalls Myers, he was contacted by Taiwan’s diplomatic office in Washington, the Coordination Council for North America, and invited to lunch. “They wanted to know where I had gotten my information and how much I knew.” Hardly surprising. But then came a call from a man who identified himself as an investigator, based in New York, with Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice. He, too, wanted information. When Myers checked with his U.S. law enforcement contacts, however, he was told that the caller was actually a member of Taiwan’s intelligence bureau. Because the incident involved a nation on the criteria list, a State Department official advised him to contact the FBI. Since it was about that time that a couple of relevant files were stolen from his locked car, Myers did just that. A federal official later told him that the Taiwan agent, who used the name David Ho, had been expelled from the country.

*

Whether or not senior Taiwan officials are involved, corruption is undoubtedly what greases the ever-shifting pathways of migrant smuggling, from police stations in seaside villages near Fuzhou, to INS offices in New York or San Francisco--and everywhere in between. When gross earnings are in the billions, then millions in bribes becomes an acceptable cost of business.

A typical $30,000 air-smuggling package, for example, begins with the routine purchase of a genuine People’s Republic of China passport: $500 plus another $250 for the exit permit, payable in cash or kind to one’s local police. The luxury class of smuggling routes--direct from China to the United States--is available to those who can find and afford an “official government business” passport, issued by the foreign ministry rather than the public security ministry, and seldom challenged by the INS. Add $15,000.

A recent incident suggests just how deeply the smuggling business has corrupted officials in Fujian. Sometime last year, Hong Kong police were tipped off about a protection-racket shakedown. They set up a sting, but wound up arresting the wrong men. Two of them, by coincidence, were holding drugs--ice--so the police conducted a thorough search. They soon discovered that the six men, all from Fuzhou, were snakeheads. And among their possessions, police found a little black book with the names and home phone numbers of dozens of senior government and Communist Party leaders in Fujian.

“It’s frustrating,” says the U.S. federal agent who told me about the incident. “We know exactly where the bad guys are--down to the hotel room numbers in Fuzhou--but we can’t do anything about it.”

Nor, it seems, can the central government in Beijing. Mainland China--the head of the payoff trail--has just concluded a yearlong anti-corruption campaign, the most virulent in the post-Mao era, resulting in tens of thousands of arrests and hundreds of executions. Every sector has been infected: foreign trade, the military, railways, housing, education, even the family planning bureaucracy and the media. But the campaign, even by official accounts, has had scant impact, for corruption in China has already become a way of life.

When a utilities official in Fujian was arrested for accepting bribes and kickbacks, to cite a typical case, another 110 cadres in state-run banks, construction companies and other government offices were also implicated. And the police, military and judiciary have themselves been deeply affected. Prisoners routinely buy their way out of jail, naval units engage in piracy on the high seas and senior police officials operate big-city prostitution rings, run extortion rackets and relicense thousands of luxury automobiles stolen from Hong Kong and the United States.

There is, in addition, ample evidence of a growing link with organized crime groups, “nearly all of which have government officials behind them,” conceded a government-run newspaper. A confidential report by the Royal Hong Kong Police’s Anti-Triad unit documents extensive contacts between Hong Kong’s most powerful triad leaders and senior Communist officials in Beijing, some of whom have publicly characterized triad members as “patriotic” and invited them to set up businesses in China.

A Chinese-American businessman who was in Fuzhou at the same time as Li tells another revealing story, one that established a connection between Taiwan and mainland China. Shortly after I had interviewed police officials in Taiwan for this article, a senior Communist official in Fuzhou approached the businessman and handed him a piece of paper with my name written in English. “Do you know this person?” the official asked. The official, it turned out, had gotten a warning call from someone in Taiwan about my investigation.

The anti-corruption campaign has been no more effective in stemming the flow of migrants from Fujian. “It’s pretty much business as usual,” says the Chinese-American businessman. “I personally know 15 people who left while I was still there and were already in New York when I came back a month later.” And wherever safe-houses and transit points appear along the smuggling trail, corruption is not far behind. Last fall, Mousa, the minister for immigration in Belize, was sacked for accepting huge bribes from Chinese smugglers. Then, in July, the regional chief of the Mexican immigration service in Tijuana and two of his deputies were dismissed and charged with corruption.

Such revelations did not surprise INS investigators, who have long known that Li and other Chinese smugglers had secured the services of officials in Mexico, Central America and more recently the Caribbean. But the July arrest of one of their colleagues in San Francisco did. INS Deputy Assistant Director William Tait is suspected of having sold green cards--primarily to Chinese customers, according to one source--for more than a decade, according to the indictment and other court documents. “There is more corruption within the INS than the government cares to admit,” comments Myers. When Myers discovered several INS clerks in the New York City office accepting bribes from ethnic Chinese, he collected evidence--including tape-recorded conversations--in cooperation with the Office of the Inspector General, which monitors corruption in government agencies. “It’s been more than a year now, and the same clerks are still selling employment authorization cards. When I inquired recently, the OIG said the investigation had been moved to another unit.”

While acknowledging that “the potential problem of Asian organized crime is much, much larger” on the West Coast than Russian and Jamaican crime syndicates, or even the Mafia, Yamaguchi, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, insists that law enforcement is not too far behind the curve. “It has not yet affected our political and financial institutions.”

But that may be wishful thinking. Employees at banks, telephone, utility and insurance companies in New York produced thousands of fraudulently pre- dated receipts and statements to support false residency claims for Chinese nationals trying to prove they had entered the United States before April, 1990--the cutoff for eligibility for permanent residence under an executive order signed by George Bush. The IRS has also uncovered banking fraud and money-laundering schemes related to immigrant smuggling, according to one investigator, though indictments have yet to be handed down.

Triad figures in Hong Kong and Taiwan have also cultivated friends in high places, including the U.S. Congress. When a known officer of the notorious Sun Yee On triad attempted to circumvent laws forbidding his entry into the United States, he enlisted the help of a congressman, since voted out of office, to secure a visa with a “waiver of criminal activity.” The congressman lobbied with INS officials on his behalf, though to no avail.

“U.S. law enforcement has set its sights too low,” comments Myers, who recently spoke before the 16th Annual International Asian Organized Crime Conference, a gathering of prosecutors, cops and investigators from around the world. “Chinese criminal syndicates do not begin and end with street gangs and tongs. That’s just the hired muscle.”

But even catching up with the lower echelons has not been easy.

*

Jorge Guzman, the INS investigator, had just returned to Los Angeles after a stint in Washington when his unit received a tip that a Chinese couple wanted to charter a vessel to ferry passengers from another boat to shore. Posing as the captain of a large pleasure boat called the Corinthian, he arranged to be introduced, meeting the couple on the boat in the San Pedro harbor. “I drove a hard bargain,” he says, breaking into a grin. “When they offered $30,000, I said, ‘It’s got to be $50,000, and you’re going to pay me half up front.’ The man said, ‘I don’t have the authority to make that type of decision.’ So he pulled out a cellular phone and made calls to the East Coast, Hong Kong and Taiwan.” Finally the deal was struck: $42,500, half up front.

After the money was delivered, the next phase of the undercover operation unfolded like clockwork. Working with a crew of federal agents, Guzman steered the Corinthian 300 miles offshore and picked up 132 Chinese nationals. Once ashore, says Guzman, “we transported them in government undercover vehicles to a parking lot where they were, in turn, picked up by other Chinese and taken to a drop house in Garden Grove. They stayed there for three days. We allowed one group to go back to New York, where they were supposed to be followed, but there was a miscommunication--the press was there waiting--so we had to arrest them.”

Despite the glitch, Operation Dry Dock, carried out in summer, 1991, was a stunning success. Besides the arrests, the sting yielded a mother lode of valuable intelligence about the smuggling networks. Though the case was dismissed by the lower courts on a technicality, the government won on appeal and went back to trial earlier this month. “Dry Dock was one of the finest undercover operations it has been my pleasure to work with,” says Assistant U.S. Atty. Walsh, who is handling the prosecution.

But it was the first and last time Guzman and his team have been allowed to run a sting. Seven times since then the L.A. anti-smuggling unit has submitted requests to do similar operations, and seven times they have been turned down.

The rejections became especially frustrating after President Clinton outlined his strategy for combatting migrant smuggling while announcing the appointment of a new INS commissioner in June, 1993. Less than two weeks earlier, the Golden Venture had run aground in New York, causing both concern and embarrassment. “We can’t afford to lose control of our own borders,” Clinton proclaimed, pounding the lectern. ‘Deterring this transport in human cargo and traffic in human misery is a priority for our Administration.”

The Clinton plan was threefold. First, introduce legislation that would increase the penalties for alien smuggling from a couple of years to at least 10, allow prosecutors to use the same racketeering statutes that worked so well against the Mafia and make it easier to repatriate smuggled migrants. The second policy prong: interdict boats on the high seas. Returning would-be immigrants before they landed would, it was hoped, deter others.

The third part of the plan was music to Guzman’s ears. “We will strengthen law enforcement efforts in the United States by expanding our investigative efforts,” Clinton said. “We will go after smugglers and their operations at the source.” That was precisely what Dry Dock was about.

More than a year later, however, the Clinton plan is in a shambles. His omnibus crime bill finally made it through Congress, but all the anti- smuggling legislation he had called for was dropped, including the provision that Administration officials wanted most: summary exclusion, the power to return illegal immigrants quickly. “We’re right back where we started,” says Jack Shaw, the assistant INS commissioner for investigations. “The smugglers are carrying out their activities with impunity.”

Why, in the words of assistant district director Hayes, is the INS “less able today to appropriately respond to pressing criminal alien-smuggling incidents than ever before”? One reason, he says, is the orphaned state of anti- smuggling programs, which seem to have disappeared from INS organizational charts. A lengthy memo outlining a major INS overhaul, in effect as of July 1, fails to even mention that category. “The INS is the bastard child of the Justice Department,” quipped one field agent, “and alien-smuggling is the bastard child of INS.”

“Whatever is accomplished here,” says Hayes, “is done through force of will. The bottom line is that Chinese aliens are still coming and there’s no apparatus in place nationwide to handle that level of activity. The Chinese are much, much more organized and sophisticated than any other organization we have seen.”

Interdiction has proven to be a cumbersome, nightmarish procedure. Each time a boat is seized at sea, it paralyzes the resources of local INS and Coast Guard units--sometimes for weeks at a time--and requires complicated international negotiations with China and the vessel’s flag country (usually Taiwan). And because the United States does not want to give smuggled migrants access to the asylum procedure by allowing them onto U.S. soil, it strong-arms neighboring countries into serving as a transit depot for processing and repatriation. Mexico took on those functions last year, but has since refused to do it again.

What’s more, interdiction has not worked as a deterrent. Fewer ships have been sighted this year, but that only means that smugglers have adapted and gone back to using air routes, or combinations of commercial flights and small ships leaving from the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.

Worst of all, from Guzman’s perspective, the interdiction policy prevents him from doing his job and prosecuting smugglers to put them out of business. When asked whether that makes his job more difficult, he lets out a bone-rattling sigh. Long pause. “We do the best we can.” Walsh is less circumspect. “With this policy in place, there is little room--none, in my judgment--for the calculated, proactive, intelligence-based work that might lead to uncovering and prosecuting snakeheads.”

Nothing illustrates this quandary better than the Jin Yinn 1, a 168-foot Taiwanese converted fishing trawler first spotted by the Coast Guard 350 miles from Los Angeles on April 9. The L.A. INS anti-smuggling unit once again proposed an undercover operation, and once again it was rejected. Instead, it was told to intercept the ship and conduct interviews on board. It took a month of pursuit on the high seas, international negotiations and costly travel, but that is exactly what happened.

As the process unfolded, Guzman felt sure that there was enough evidence to bring the captain, possibly the crew, back to the United States for prosecution. Walsh agreed. They had statements from about 20 passengers who had been subjected to or witnessed beatings with electric stun guns and lead pipes. Moreover, they said, the captain had threatened to kill anyone who cooperated with U.S. authorities. He even boasted to a U.S. interpreter that he had powerful connections to the United Bamboo Gang that would shield him from prosecution.

In the end, the migrants were repatriated to China from Guatemala, and Taiwan exercised its right under international law to prosecute its own citizens. “There was no pressure,” Shaw complains. “When it’s a case of diplomatic versus law enforcement priorities, the State Department develops an endemic condition called weak knees.”

For now then, Li is out of reach while Guzman tries to stave off an ulcer, not because he has a price on his head, but because politics, foreign policy and bureaucratic ineptitude have tied his hands.