Rise and Fall of Frank Ma, Last Asian Godfather - NYTimes.com

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By ALAN FEUER

IT was 1994 — the Year of the Dog — and Frank Ma was in a quandary.

Mr. Ma, a 40-year-old crime boss, had just arranged the murder of his longtime heroin supplier, who, on his orders, had been gunned down in a Los Angeles parking lot. He had recently found a new supplier: Golo Keung, a member of the Big Circle Boys, one of Hong Kong’s largest criminal triads.

The quandary was this, according to court records: Mr. Keung, in classic gangster fashion, had been asking for a favor. He believed his partner in Toronto had been cheating him. He wanted the partner dead.

Mr. Ma, who had arrived in the United States a decade before from China, had pondered this request for several days, and in early May, witnesses said later, he summoned his lieutenants to his doorman building in Rego Park, Queens. Before talking shop, the half-dozen men played cards: Pick Two, one of the boss’s favorite games. Mr. Ma loved gambling, federal agents say: mah-jongg, casinos, almost any sports event. Wiretaps would later catch him wagering thousands on a basketball game he did not even seem to understand: he picked teams not by standings or statistics, but according to the color of their uniforms.

As the cards were dealt that day, Mr. Ma made an announcement. He was going to take the job for Mr. Keung. There was no way of knowing that the decision would result in two botched murders, an international investigation spanning 16 years, and his own arrest and prosecution. Its effects would ripple from central Queens to Canada to Northern California and back to Manhattan, where, only two months ago, Mr. Ma was sentenced to life in prison in what the authorities describe as the downfall of the last of New York’s Chinese gangsters.

That day around the card table in Rego Park, though, all of this was safely in the future. Mr. Ma asked an underling to secure two weapons for the job. For the hit itself, he planned to use a man from California.

That man, Ah Wah, was good. In fact, as one of Mr. Ma’s associates would later testify, he was Frank Ma’s “most helpful killer.”

Mr. Wah had once killed two men in a graveyard, federal agents say, forcing them to kneel in front of a headstone before putting bullets in their brains. His partner was a man named Luyen Nguyen; people called Mr. Nguyen “Psycho.”

Mr. Wah was from Vietnam and had pledged allegiance in the early 1990s to Mr. Ma, whom he referred to as his “dai lo,” or elder brother, according to the authorities. Mr. Wah’s associates included Paul Cai, another Vietnamese man, and William Nagatsuka, a felon from Japan. Together, they made quite a crew. According to courtroom testimony, the four immigrants killed, robbed brothels, broke into computer stores, stole cars, defrauded banks, illegally cloned cellphones and took people’s welfare checks.

Not long after Mr. Ma’s card game, court papers say, Mr. Wah invited Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka to his home in Monterey, Calif. Mr. Nagatsuka later testified that Mr. Wah said that Mr. Ma was looking for some “fresh faces” for a hit. Mr. Wah had already gone to Toronto to scout the location: the Seafood Alliance Corporation, a wholesale fish seller. He asked Mr. Nagatsuka to prepare supplies: ski masks, gloves, walkie-talkies. Mr. Nagatsuka’s roommate, referred to in the court file only as Simone, bought the walkie-talkies at a Costco in Alhambra, Calif. The four of them would split $30,000 for the job.

Days later, Mr. Wah, Mr. Nguyen, Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka flew to New York. Mr. Ma’s top lieutenant, Bing Yi Chen, met them at Kennedy Airport, court papers say, and, after they had eaten at a Chinese restaurant, took them to the boss’s home. There, they met two women, referred to in court papers as Christina and Salina, who, as Mr. Nagatsuka later said, would serve as their “tourist cover in Canada.” Expense money — $2,000 in a paper clip — was handed out.

They left Queens that night in a minivan and, hours later, checked into a small motel near Niagara Falls. The following day, July 19, they surveilled Seafood Alliance, a large, nondescript storefront in an industrial park, checking for cameras and security guards. They sent Christina and Salina shopping and promptly stole a Honda as a getaway car. They met two of Mr. Ma’s Canadian associates at a Baskin-Robbins to pick up two pistols. Back at the motel, court papers say, they cleaned the guns with WD-40 and discussed the next day’s plan: fake a robbery, tie up the victims, shoot them.

•

The men who became America’s first Chinese gangsters arrived here in the mid-1800s, mostly settling in San Francisco, where many worked for prospectors during the Gold Rush, or as laborers on the rapidly expanding transcontinental railroad. Faced with harsh conditions and anti-immigrant riots, they quickly formed social groups, called tongs, that offered protection from a hostile culture alongside basic services like credit unions.

For decades, the tongs, which also dabbled in gambling and prostitution, were mainly Cantonese, but in 1965, with the passage of a new federal immigration act, the scope and nature of Chinese immigration changed. One result was the arrival of a large number of alienated youths from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some of them were put to work by the tongs as muscle at clubhouses, gambling dens and brothels in California and New York.

It is impossible to know precisely how many men were involved in Chinese organized crime over the decades, experts say. But in just two years, 1990 and 1991, at the height of the gangsters’ power, federal agents in New York alone made 130 arrests, confiscated 200 pounds of heroin and seized $25 million in assets, including $15 million in cash, as well as homes, boats, apartment buildings, jewelry stores, even the Golden Palace restaurant, one of Chinatown’s biggest, which was used to launder money.

This was the world that Frank Ma eventually inherited after slipping into the country illegally in the 1980s, court papers say. Born in China as Sui Min Ma, he started his career in the Boston rackets, moved to San Francisco and, by the early 1990s, federal agents say, settled in New York. By that point, Manhattan’s Chinatown was owned by two main tongs, each one connected with a youth gang. The On Leong tong dominated Mott Street and was allied with the violent Ghost Shadows. The Hip Sing tong controlled Pell Street and ran the Flying Dragons, whose boss, Johnny Eng, had moved into the heroin trade when the Italian Mafia’s role decreased.

(Mr. Ma, now in a federal prison in Brooklyn, declined through his lawyer, Don Buchwald, to be interviewed.)

The government does not believe that Mr. Ma was ever formally associated with a tong, but he would have known the major players — like Clifford Wong, leader of the Tung On tong, or Paul Lai, president of the Tsung Tsin Association, who once served on an advisory panel for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and even attended the wedding of the governor’s daughter. (Both men were eventually convicted on racketeering charges.)

Mr. Ma was instead a member of the 14K triad, federal agents say, a Hong Kong group founded more than 60 years ago by 14 leaders of the Kuomintang nationalist party. Based in Queens, he oversaw gambling parlors, a luxury car-theft ring, extortion rackets and an immigrant smuggling operation. By his own admission, though, his most profitable business was always heroin — and that, of course, was why he had sent his killers to Toronto.

•

In the morning, their getaway car was gone.

Perhaps someone had stolen it. The men, at any rate, had a backup plan. They had stolen license plates from another car, according to court papers, and they put these on the minivan they had driven from New York. They dropped the women at a park and drove past Seafood Alliance. In the afternoon, when the coast was clear, Mr. Wah pulled the van into a parking spot. Mr. Cai and Mr. Nguyen walked toward the door. It was locked, so Mr. Nguyen fired a few shots, shattering the glass. He stepped inside. Mr. Cai followed.

Waiting in the van, Mr. Nagatsuka heard more shots. Many, many more. Years later, at the murder trial of Bing Yi Chen, he testified as to what happened next:

Mr. Wah “started putting the minivan into reverse, started pulling away from the parking lot. Once we were driving away, we see Paul Cai and Luyen coming out, running fast. Along the way, Paul Cai disassembled his handgun, threw the handgun parts to an empty lot on the right side. We were following at a slow pace along with Luyen and Paul Cai. There was a Home Depot nearby. We went to the back of it. That’s where the plan was to meet, in the back of the Home Depot. Once we turned the corner to the Home Depot, we start hearing the siren.”

They found Christina and Salina and hurried the 80 miles back to Niagara Falls. The next day, they saw news coverage of the murders on TV: two bodies being carted off by the police. They returned to New York City and to Mr. Ma’s apartment. There, court papers say, they apologized to Mr. Chen.

They had escaped unscathed. But, on reading the morning papers, they realized they had killed the wrong two men.

•

Within hours, the case was assigned to Detective Sgt. Douglas Grady of the Toronto homicide squad.

It was a Wednesday, Detective Grady’s day off, and he was at home watching the Blue Jays on television. After six years on the job, he was accustomed to the untoward hours of police work and immediately left for the scene. He found Seafood Alliance’s glass door shot out and bullet casings strewn across the ground. “In my entire career,” he recalled in a recent interview, “I’d never seen so many shots fired at a scene.”

The victims were identified as Samson Yip, 32, a computer technician, whose body was found slumped against the wall, and Stephen Kwan, 36, an accountant, who was lying in a pool of his own blood. Detective Grady saw that both men had suffered “torture shots” to the leg and had been finished off with “coup-de-grâce shots” to the head. Mr. Kwan’s lunch — a hamburger and orange juice — still rested on his desk.

By the next morning, Detective Grady was working several leads. In a nearby parking lot, the police found a knapsack containing ski masks, walkie-talkies, a canister of WD-40, a Niagara Falls baseball cap and pieces from a 9-millimeter pistol. And in a neighborhood park, they recovered two guns and another ski mask and baseball cap.

Witnesses reported seeing a van leave the scene, but no one could identify the license plate. The guns turned out to be untraceable; the masks and clothes were tracked to the United States. Even the victims, Detective Grady said, were puzzling: college graduates with no criminal records. “There seemed to be no reason at all,” he said, “for these guys getting killed.”

One potential investigative path was the walkie-talkies. Detective Grady’s team quickly determined they had come from the Costco in Alhambra, Calif. But the list of people who had bought such radios ran into the dozens, if not the hundreds, he said. He could not — or would not — ask officials in Alhambra to track down every person on the list. Nor could he do it himself. “What? I’m going to ask my bosses to let me go to California? From Ontario? They’d think it was a scam,” he said.

The only other avenue was Seafood Alliance’s owner, David Seto, who, Detective Grady determined, had a reputation for sharp elbows and late payments. So his team investigated Mr. Seto’s finances and discovered that he lived a much more opulent life than importing shrimp or cod should probably allow. They interviewed his workers, competitors and suppliers, but it was not until they examined his investors that they found a startling clue: Mr. Seto had been in contact with a man named Golo Keung.

“Every time we interviewed him, he was nervous,” Detective Grady recalled of Mr. Seto. “He wasn’t forthright — he was dodging and weaving, as they say. He thought that somebody had tried to kill him, but he couldn’t say why or who. It just became clearer that he was the intended victim, that he was the reason these two men were dead.”

When Mr. Seto left the country in 1995, the case went cold. Months, then years, went by without another lead.

“We’d gone to Crime Stoppers,” Detective Grady said. “We’d gone to our informants in the Asian community. We dealt with the constabulary in Hong Kong. But we weren’t getting anywhere.

“There was nothing left as to who did this,” he said. “Or why.”

•

Eight years later, in 2002, Special Agent Bill McMurray of the New York office of the F.B.I. busted a drug ring connected to a Chinese triad called the Wo Lee Kwans. Cooperating witnesses in that case led to the arrest of a killer known as Psycho: Luyen Nguyen.

One day, as often happens in police work, Agent McMurray mentioned his triumph to a friend, Officer John Glenn of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Officer Glenn, it turned out, had once been assigned to Detective Grady’s homicide squad and had never forgotten the seafood murders. On a professional whim, Officer Glenn sent Agent McMurray the one outstanding, albeit long-shot, lead in the case: the list of people who bought those Costco walkie-talkies all those years ago.

The whim paid off. Agent McMurray recognized the name Simone, Mr. Nagatsuka’s former roommate. Psycho had mentioned him while being questioned.

Within a year, the case had broken open. Mr. Nagatsuka, already in custody on other charges, began to cooperate. Bing Yi Chen, Mr. Ma’s right hand, was arrested in Arizona in 2003 and eventually went to trial, where he was convicted of committing murder while engaged in a narcotics conspiracy. The authorities found Paul Cai in Los Angeles, and he pleaded guilty to similar charges. Ah Wah, who had fled to China, was returned by extradition in 2007 and pleaded guilty to racketeering and murder charges. He now awaits sentencing.

Frank Ma, who had also fled to China in 1996, was arrested in Boston after he slipped back into the country in mid-2003. His case took nearly as long to wind through the courts as it had to investigate. He pleaded guilty to murder and narcotics charges. Finally, in February, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan handed down the life sentence.

“He’d killed the wrong guys, and it caused a conflict with his supplier back in Hong Kong,” Agent McMurray said in an interview. “Before he left, Frank Ma was this mysterious godlike creature, but in China, on the run, he didn’t have the support to live the lifestyle he was used to. People owed him money in America. That’s why he came back.”

His downfall marked the passage of an era.

“Could there be another Ma-type guy still out there?” Agent McMurray asked. “The fact is our source base is so good that we’d probably be aware of his existence, even if we couldn’t make a case.

“Frank Ma was probably the last of the Asian godfathers.”

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His Specialty? Making Old New York Talk in Dutch

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By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY — Henry Hudson bobblehead? Check.

One-legged Peter Stuyvesant statuette? Yes.

A mirror emblazoned with the logo of New Amsterdam beer? Absolutely.

These are office knickknacks that only a true connoisseur of Dutch Americana could love. And there surely is no one who loves Dutch Americana more than Charles T. Gehring.

How else to describe a man who has spent the past 35 years painstakingly translating 17th-century records that provide groundbreaking insight and renewed appreciation for New Netherland, the colony whose embrace of tolerance and passion for commerce sowed the seeds for New York’s ascendance as one of the world’s great cities.

Toiling from a cramped office in the New York State Library here, Mr. Gehring, as much as anyone, has shed light on New York’s long-neglected Dutch roots, which have been celebrated this year, the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that bears his name.

Mr. Gehring, by the way, only has about 4,800 pages left of the 12,000 pages of Dutch-era letters, deeds, court rulings, journal entries and other items that have been housed at the State Library for decades. They paint a rich picture of daily life in the colony, which the Dutch surrendered for good in the 1670s.

“Most historians don’t think much of the Dutch; they minimalize the Dutch influence and try to get out of that period as quickly as possible to get into English stuff,” Mr. Gehring said, explaining why he has spent half of his 70 years mining Dutch colonial history. “What you find out is how deeply the Dutch cast roots here and how much of their culture they transmitted to this country.”

Mr. Gehring, whose official title is director of the New Netherland Project, looks as if he has not trimmed his sideburns since he started translating the records in 1974, and he seems like the kind of mirthful man who would make a good Sinterklaas — the Dutch forefather of Santa Claus.

Mr. Gehring’s translations served as raw material for Russell Shorto’s critically acclaimed 2005 book about Manhattan, “The Island at the Center of the World.” The Netherlands of the 17th century, Mr. Shorto said in an interview, was “the melting pot of Europe.”

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“It was a place that people fled to in the great age of religious warfare; it was a refuge,” he added. “At the same time, they were known for free trade; they developed a stock market — and those things, free trade and tolerance, are key ingredients of New York City.” Mr. Gehring’s translation work, Mr. Shorto writes in his book, “changes the picture of American beginnings.”

Mr. Gehring, who was born in Fort Plain, N.Y., about 55 miles northwest of Albany, did his doctoral work in German linguistics at the Indiana University, where he specialized in Netherlandic studies. He came to Albany in the late 1960s to teach German at the State University of New York at Albany, but his real interest was Dutch history.

Mr. Gehring’s work is the most ambitious translation project in nearly two centuries. In 1974, shortly after Nelson A. Rockefeller became vice president and Malcolm Wilson replaced him as governor, a series of phone calls helped make it possible. It started with an idea at the Holland Society, a group dedicated to preserving the history of New York’s Dutch history.

“This guy in the Holland Society knew Rockefeller, and so he called Rockefeller and said, ‘Could you see if Malcolm Wilson could put money in the budget to start the translations up again?’ ” Mr. Gehring recalled.

The governor, he said, “put $20,000 in his discretionary budget — his slush fund that they had — and in the early ’70s that was a decent amount of money.”

And Mr. Gehring found himself uniquely qualified for the State Library job that came open as a result. As he put it, “I was the only one around who could read 17th-century Dutch.”

Although Mr. Gehring is a state employee, the translation project has survived largely on grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and donations. This year, however, the Dutch government decided to invest 200,000 euros — nearly $290,000 at current exchange rates — to help finance the project for the next three years.

The documents have held up through what Mr. Gehring called “a harrowing history,” including a 1911 fire in the State Library that singed many of the pages. The first set, records from 1638 to 1642, was lost completely.

“The translator at that time, Van Laer, has them out on his desk,” Mr. Gehring said, referring to the archivist and librarian A.F. Van Laer. “He’d just finished a new translation, and he’s checking his translation against the original, so his translation burns up and the originals burn up, but we still have an older translation to go by.”

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Gehring was joined in his work by Janny Venema, a Dutch-born translator and writer who, in Mr. Gehring’s estimate, has helped him translate about 7,200 pages. The project has brought to life the characters of New Netherland and its capital, New Amsterdam — which became New York City.

Some of those characters are well known, like Peter Stuyvesant, the domineering director general of New Netherland.

Mr. Gehring’s translation of the journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, a barber-surgeon and a likely ancestor of Humphrey Bogart, was turned into the graphic novel “Journey Into Mohawk Country,” by the artist George O’Connor. The journal chronicles van den Bogaert’s journey through the Mohawk Valley to Oneida, a pathbreaking trip in the winter of 1634.

Years later, van den Bogaert was made commander of Fort Orange, site of present-day Albany, but fled back into Indian country after his fellow colonists discovered he was gay. Van den Bogaert was pursued by the Dutch, captured and brought back, but he escaped when a sheet of floating ice damaged the fort. He drowned in the Hudson before he got very far.

These days, Mr. Gehring is translating records from the period of the Flushing Remonstrance, a 1657 document that helped lay the groundwork for religious freedom in America.

This chapter begins when a ship filled with Quakers, headed for Rhode Island, ended up in Manhattan instead.

“They started quaking in the streets,” Mr. Gehring explained. “Stuyvesant had them packed up and sent off right away.”

When Stuyvesant continued the crackdown on the Quakers, 30 people living in what is now Flushing, Queens, wrote a formal letter of objection. The Dutch West India Company, which operated the colony, ordered Stuyvesant to end the persecution.

Some figures in history present particular challenges to a translator, like Johannes Dijckman, a commander at Fort Orange whose scrawled script is difficult to decipher because, well, “he was a drunkard.”

After so many years, Stuyvesant, Dijckman and many other figures have become “not necessarily old friends,” Mr. Gehring said, “but they’re acquaintances,” and he has no plans to say goodbye.

“People keep asking me when I’m going to retire, or they assume I have retired,” he said. “Eventually I’ll fade out like the Cheshire cat, with nothing left but my smile.”

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N.Y. elections reflect city's shifting racial landscape - washingtonpost.com

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For first time, whites will be in the minority on the City Council

By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

NEW YORK -- When the newly elected New York City Council convenes in January, for the first time in its history white council members will be in the minority, as whites are in the city.

Also for the first time, an Asian American will serve in an elected citywide office -- as comptroller -- and the council will include two new Asian American members, giving three key posts to the city's constituency of roughly 1 million Asian Americans.

There was another first in the campaign for the post of the city's public advocate: the eventual winner, a white candidate, using images of himself with his black wife and their biracial children -- pictures that attracted national attention.

In some ways, slow-moving New York City politics are catching up with the changing dynamics of the city itself, as the number of immigrants continues to rise and the idea of dividing the political pie three ways, among blacks, whites and Latinos, seems obsolete.

This is old news elsewhere in the country, as immigrants and other minority groups have gained prominence in the politics of the West Coast and the South.

Though New York is perceived as cosmopolitan, it has long been "a very prejudiced city," said the Rev. Al Sharpton, noting that tensions broke into ethnic riots as recently as the 1990s. "We were sectioned off, people kind of lived in their own turf, we kind of practiced tribal politics. Those walls are coming down."

Part of it could be an Obama effect. George Arzt, a political adviser to John C. Liu's successful campaign for comptroller, said young Asian Americans inspired by President Obama's election last year came out to volunteer for Liu.

Bill de Blasio, who was elected public advocate, said he was encouraged by Obama's election to use images of himself with his wife, Chirlane, and their children in his campaign literature and commercials, though he was not sure how they would be received.

"I did feel there would be more receptivity than there had been in the past," said de Blasio, who has written and spoken about his decision with national media outlets. "And this is who I am."

Others said some of the changes come simply from the city's demographics. The number of Asian Americans, for instance, has increased dramatically in recent decades, and more immigrants have become citizens.

"I'm just part of the community coming of age," said Liu, the comptroller-elect, who was born in Taiwan but spent his childhood in the Flushing section of Queens. "It means that the policy decisions and budgetary allocations will more closely reflect the people of this city and will, in fact, hold more credibility."

Still, those close to the campaign say Liu was able to pull together a remarkable coalition of support from Chinese, Korean and South Asian communities, essentially creating an Asian American vote. He also had strong African American support.

New York still falls short in political representation of minorities. In a city of about 2 million Latinos, none has been elected to citywide office. There has not been a Latino borough president outside of the Bronx. There has been just one mayor of color, David N. Dinkins, and he was in office only four years. Before Liu, the only other person of color elected to citywide office was Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., who is black and who just lost his bid for mayor.

For years, the City Council was a bastion of white incumbents who rarely gave up their seats to newcomers. And racial tensions were high as recently as the mayoralty of Rudolph W. Giuliani. A few weeks ago, Giuliani was campaigning with current Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and warned an audience of Orthodox Jews that if Bloomberg were not reelected, New Yorkers could return to an era of fear and danger in the streets.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about," said Giuliani, whose remarks were interpreted by many as equating Thompson with Giuliani's black predecessor, Dinkins.

Police are investigating an Election Day incident in which a group of white people allegedly shouted ethnic slurs and attacked two campaign volunteers for a Korean American City Council candidate in Queens, where the campaign had ethnic overtones.

At first glance, it appears that many New Yorkers voted in this election along racial lines. Bloomberg, an independent who is white, had the strongest support among high-income whites and had the backing of two-thirds of white voters. His Democratic rival, Thompson, took most votes from Bloomberg from among middle-class blacks, and about 73 percent of black voters chose him.

Yet analysts say this is more than a simple racial divide, as economic categories often overlap: The areas where the mayor's support dropped most precipitously since the election of 2005 have some of the highest foreclosure rates, as well as working-class and middle-class families of color.

"My opinion is the city's politics are becoming more international, and that is very American," said Se-Suk-Cook, 41, a nail salon worker walking in Union Square Park.

Dutch Celebrate Henry Hudson’s Arrival in New York City - NYTimes.com

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By A. G. SULZBERGER

The celebration riveted the nation. The government spent years in planning, the news media tracked every development, and residents flocked to the events in droves.

The reason for all the hoopla was the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Harbor, which was marked with a week of events around the city that concluded in Lower Manhattan on Sunday. But the place where this anniversary is being celebrated so fiercely is the Netherlands, the small, waterlogged European nation of 17 million people 3,650 miles away.

The Dutch organized and paid for the week’s events, running up a tab of about $10 million. The Dutch media dispatched about 50 reporters to New York, with a major television station running nightly half-hour updates on the proceedings during prime time. And thousands of Dutch citizens crossed the Atlantic to take part, including Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, who declared New York the greatest city in the world.

But aside from perhaps hearing cannon fire, spotting the stately profiles of the Dutch sailing vessels shipped across the Atlantic for the occasion, or bumping into a gang of blond, blue-eyed sailors in Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers, a busy bunch and long accustomed to spectacle, basically went about life as usual.

“It’s bigger there than over here,” said Babette Bullens, 38, who lives near Holland’s border with Belgium and was making her first trip to New York. “If you talk to New Yorkers, they don’t know what’s happening. It’s very disappointing,” she said in Battery Park on Sunday.

The reason for the Dutch interest, of course, is that the arrival of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, led to the founding of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Hudson was British, but his financial backer was the Dutch East India Company. (“Who paid for the voyage,” the crown prince said, “really counts.”)

Dutch claims to the city ended nearly 350 years ago, when control was formally transferred to the British, yet they openly carry a lingering attachment, like that of a spurned romantic.

Jos Rozenburg, a commander in the Royal Netherlands Navy, said the week was a reminder of the country’s once-mighty past. “For us it was the golden age when the Dutch were all over the world,” he said. “It’s something we look back on with great fondness.”

“In a way, it’s refreshing,” said Russell Shorto, the author of “The Island at the Center of the World,” which examines Dutch influence on the development of New York. “The Dutch are a really self-effacing people.”

“The most Dutch thing about the Dutch contributions through history is how little you notice them, because they don’t promote themselves,” said Mr. Shorto, who lives in Amsterdam.

Stephen Chaffee, 54, an American who lives in Holland, came to New York with his wife, Josje, 51, who is Dutch. “She has a tremendous attachment to the idea that Holland contributed to American culture,” Mr. Chaffee said, as the Royal Marine Band played nearby. “I’m beginning to realize how important that is.”

Of course, the celebration has not gone unnoticed in the city. NYC & Company, the city’s tourism organization, has been heavily promoting it for months. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood alongside the crown prince at an opening ceremony on the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on Tuesday.

“It was really an extraordinary week,” said Angela Vona, 66, of Manhattan, who attended as many of the activities as she could. “I talk about this to all of my friends and they don’t care.”

That was the case with many of the New Yorkers who stumbled on the celebration’s activities. “It’s just another event,” said Ralph Montuoro, 67, of Queens, getting off his bicycle to negotiate the mostly Dutch crowd in Battery Park on Sunday. “We didn’t even know about it.”

And even if some Dutch were disappointed by the level of interest, most went out of their way to say they understood. “New Yorkers have a lot going on here,” said Vivi van Leeuwen, 34, of Breda. “New York is the capital of the world, and the Dutch are proud of their history here and don’t mind sharing that pride.”

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Report Cites Atmosphere of Ethnic Hatred in Suffolk County - NYTimes.com

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By KIRK SEMPLE

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — An environment of racial intolerance and ethnic hatred, fostered by anti-immigrant groups and some public officials, has helped fuel dozens of attacks on Latinos in Suffolk County during the past decade, says a report issued Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups around the country.

“Latino immigrants in Suffolk County live in fear,” said the report, which the law center released at a news conference here. “Political leaders in the county have done little to discourage the hatred, and some have actively fanned the flames.”

The law center, based in Montgomery, Ala., came to prominence in the 1970s for anti-discrimination efforts and its legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan. It started looking at Suffolk County after Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was stabbed to death last November in Patchogue. Seven youths, who prosecutors say were driven by prejudice against Latinos, are awaiting trial in that case.

The center’s report is the product of months of investigation on Long Island, including scores of interviews with Latino immigrants and local civic leaders. While it draws heavily on news accounts and public records, center officials said it was the most comprehensive compilation of statements and events showing a pattern of hate crimes in Suffolk that were at least tacitly condoned — if not actively encouraged — by some local leaders.

The center’s investigators made “frightening” discoveries, the report said: “Although Lucero’s murder represented the apex of anti-immigration violence in Suffolk County to date, it was hardly an isolated incident.”

Many Latino immigrants in Suffolk say they have been beaten with baseball bats and other objects, attacked with BB guns and pepper spray, and been the victims of arson, the report said. Latinos, it added, are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles or pelted with objects hurled from cars.

On Aug. 15, after the center’s report had been printed, an Ecuadorean man in Patchogue was attacked by three men who used racial epithets as they kicked and punched him, the police said. The three were arrested, and two were charged with assault as a bias crime, Newsday reported.

On Aug. 20, a man in Smithtown told a mother and a daughter who wore traditional Islamic garb that he was going to “chop you into little pieces and kill you,” the police said. The man was charged with second-degree aggravated harassment, the Associated Press reported.

And on Wednesday, the police said, hate-crimes detectives were investigating a burglary Tuesday night at a Latino evangelical church in Patchogue, in which notes with anti-Hispanic comments were found on the altar.

The law center report, echoing often-repeated statements by advocates for immigrants, accused the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, of helping to create an atmosphere of anti-immigrant sentiment by taking a hard line against illegal immigration.

In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Levy said, “While we can continue to disagree about policies related to the economic and social impacts of illegal immigration, we can all agree that any violence against a fellow human being cannot and will not be tolerated.” In the past, Mr. Levy has repeatedly denied accusations that he has fomented bias.

The report pointed to a statement by Michael M. D’Andre, a county legislator from Smithtown, at a 2001 hearing on a bill to penalize contractors who hire undocumented workers. Mr. D’Andre said that if his town were “attacked” by an influx of Hispanic day laborers, “we’ll be up in arms, we’ll be out with baseball bats.” He apologized the following week for his remark.

The report also highlighted a comment by Elie Mystal, a county legislator from Amityville, who said during a hearing in 2007 that if day laborers started gathering in his neighborhood, “I would load my gun and start shooting, period.” He later apologized and said he had been joking, according to news media reports.

Mr. D’Andre and Mr. Mystal are no longer legislators.

The report said Latinos’ fears were fed by nativist groups like Sachem Quality of Life, a local organization that has disbanded.

After Mr. Lucero’s death, many immigrants in the county stepped forward to describe their attacks to the police and media. In some of the cases, the allegations were reported to the police at the time the assaults occurred, but no arrests were made, in part because language barriers made communication difficult, the authorities have said.

Law center officials said that according to immigrants they interviewed, there may have been another reason for the inaction: police indifference.

Many immigrants told center investigators that the “police did not take their reports of attacks seriously, often blaming the victim,” the report said. “They said there’s little point in going to the police, who are often not interested in their plight and instead demand to know their immigration status.”

The Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer, said in a statement, “Some of the report had concrete ideas, most of which we are already implementing, but other parts were rife with inaccuracies due to the law center’s failure to interview the Police Department, the district attorney or elected officials.”

The report urged officials to adopt measures including halting “their angry demagoguery” about immigration, promoting programs that encourage respect for diversity, and training police officers to take seriously all allegations of hate-motivated crime.

“If these measures are taken to combat an increasingly volatile situation,” the report said, “it’s likely that angry passions in Suffolk can be cooled and a rational debate on immigration and its consequences begun.”

Trains and Vans May Beat Taxis to the Airport

By JANE L. LEVERE

Getting to the airport on the outskirts of town used to be a simple proposition — catch a taxi, even if it meant sitting in traffic.

But in recent years, the number of options has grown, especially at some of the biggest airports, with direct trains and shared-ride services. The additional options are cheaper and also more reliable, in many cases, if there is a lot of traffic on the highways.

Shared-ride transfers offered by companies like SuperShuttle in the United States and Go Airport Shuttle, which operates in North America and Britain, can be more time-consuming than a taxi or limousine ride, but are significantly less expensive. And fast trains — like the Heathrow and Gatwick Express trains in London and AirTrain JFK and AirTrain Newark in the New York area — are less expensive than a taxi and often faster.

The express trains and shared-ride transfers are becoming more attractive to business travelers, said Dave Kilduff, managing director of ground transportation consulting for the CWT Solutions Group, because in “this type of economic environment, corporations are turning over every rock to save money. They’re looking at alternative forms of transportation.”

And services like the Heathrow Express “are not only faster, they’re keeping people off the road, they’re environmentally friendly,” he added.

In the first six months of this year, the number of travelers whose flights ended at Heathrow Airport was down 8.9 percent from the period a year earlier. But Heathrow Express’s share of those passengers rose 1.6 percent in that period.

Similarly, passenger traffic at La Guardia, Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International airports, all operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, declined 9.4 percent in the first five months of this year compared with the same period in 2008. But passenger traffic on the Kennedy and Newark AirTrains, also operated by the Port Authority, was 1.4 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.

William R. DeCota, the Port Authority’s director of aviation, estimates that on weekday peak travel times, one-third to one-half of passengers on the Kennedy and Newark trains are business travelers.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

In budget-conscious times, trains and shared-ride vans are becoming more popular as a way to get to and from the airport.

Perhaps the biggest attraction is the cost savings. The AirTrain JFK, which picks up travelers at the Howard Beach and Jamaica train and subway stations, is $5 one way. Travelers flying out of Newark can take a New Jersey Transit train from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan to Newark Liberty International Airport station, where they pick up AirTrain Newark; the one-way fare for the entire trip is $15. By contrast, a one-way cab ride from Midtown Manhattan to Kennedy Airport is $45, plus tolls and tip, while a one-way cab ride from Midtown to Newark can go as high as $90, plus tolls and tip. Depending on traffic, an AirTrain transfer can also be quicker than a taxi.

Kenneth Lin, a senior planning manager in New York for Parsons Brinckerhoff, a consulting company that advised the Port Authority on construction of the AirTrain JFK, says he is a devotee of public transit, including AirTrain JFK.

“It’s cheaper than a taxi and more reliable during rush hour,” he said. “It reduces stress, as it is less idiosyncratic than taxis, and it usually arrives on time. In a car or taxi, it could be a very fast or very slow trip, depending upon traffic.”

The Heathrow and Gatwick Express trains — both of which have economy and first-class cars — offer significant time savings: the Gatwick Express travels to Victoria Station in 30 minutes, while the Heathrow Express takes only 15 minutes to get to Paddington Station. During rush hour, those trips can take triple the time in a taxi.

A round-trip economy-class fare on Gatwick Expressis £28.80 (about $48) and a round-trip first-class fare is £48. On Heathrow Express, the economy fare is £32 round trip, and the first-class round-trip fare is £50.

Money saved by using these trains is also significant: During rush hour, a cab ride from Heathrow to Paddington can cost as much as £80 ($134), without tip, while a cab ride from Gatwick to Victoria Station can cost as much as £90 without tip.

To lure business travelers, Heathrow Express has installed Wi-Fi and cellphone service; Gatwick Express offers cellphone service and refreshments. There is a charge for the Wi-Fi service and refreshments.

The two top providers of shared-ride service are SuperShuttle, which is owned by Veolia Transportation and serves 33 airports in 26 markets in the United States, and Go Airport Shuttle, a group of franchised operators that serve 80 airports in 36 cities in the United States and in Toronto and London.

Both companies set a 15- to 20-minute window of time for passenger pickups, at their home, office or hotel. Passengers travel to the airport in a van with others picked up along the way.

A taxi ride may be faster, but will certainly be more expensive. A one-way SuperShuttle ride to La Guardia from the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Midtown Manhattan is $14.15, and slightly higher from a Manhattan home or office. SuperShuttle typically requires a pickup three hours before a flight departure

ShuttleFare.com, a Web site that lets travelers book many types of airport transfers, including those offered by SuperShuttle and Go, recently introduced a corporate discount program that waives its normal $4 service fee per booking, and discounts fares by 7 percent.

Matthew Holdrege, director of international sales for Strix Systems, a wireless broadband manufacturer in Newbury Parks, Calif., said he found train transfers particularly attractive “as long as you travel light.” But, he added, “If I’m traveling with my wife, who can have a lot of luggage, she may prefer the princess treatment. So forget about public transportation.”

For Puerto Ricans, Sotomayor’s Success Stirs Pride

By DAVID GONZALEZ

In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York — and probably, he thinks, the entire United States.

He still recalls the headline: “Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor.”

“You would’ve thought I had been named attorney general,” he said. “That’s how big it was.”

Half a century later, the long and sometimes bittersweet history of Puerto Ricans in New York added a celebratory chapter on Thursday as the Senate confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Her personal journey — from a single-parent home in the Bronx projects to the Ivy League and an impressive legal career — has provoked a fierce pride in many other Puerto Ricans who glimpse reflections of their own struggles.

“This is about the acceptance that eluded us,” said Mr. Torres, 78, who himself earned distinction as a jurist, novelist and raconteur. “It is beyond anybody’s imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court.”

Arguably the highest rung that any Puerto Rican has yet reached in this country, the confirmation of Judge Sotomayor is a watershed event for Puerto Rican New York. It builds on the achievements that others of her generation have made in business, politics, the arts and pop culture. It extends the legacy of an earlier, lesser-known generation who created social service and educational institutions that persist today, helping newcomers from Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Yet the city has also been a place of heartbreak. Though Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship in 1917 and large numbers of them arrived in New York in the 1950s, poverty and lack of opportunity still pockmark some of their neighborhoods. A 2004 report by a Hispanic advocacy group showed that compared with other Latino groups nationwide, Puerto Ricans had the highest poverty rate, the lowest average family income and the highest unemployment rate for men.

In politics, the trailblazer Herman Badillo saw his career go from a series of heady firsts in the 1960s to frustration in the 1980s when his dreams of becoming the city’s first Puerto Rican mayor were foiled by Harlem’s political bosses. Just four years ago, Fernando Ferrer was trounced in his bid against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

All those setbacks lose their sting, if only for a moment, in the glow of Judge Sotomayor’s achievement, which many of her fellow Puerto Ricans say is as monumental for them as President Obama’s election was for African-Americans. It has affirmed a sense of Puerto Rican identity at a moment when that distinction is often obscured by catch-all labels like Latino and Hispanic — and even as it is subjected to negative comparisons.

“Many elite Latin Americans have implied that Puerto Ricans blew it, because we had citizenship and did nothing,” said Lillian Jimenez, a documentary filmmaker who co-produced a series of television ads in support of Judge Sotomayor’s nomination. “But we were the biggest Spanish-speaking group in New York for decades, and bore the brunt of discrimination, especially in the 1950s. We struggled for our rights. We have people everywhere doing all kinds of things. But that history has not been known.”

That history is in danger of disappearing in East Harlem, long the cradle of Puerto Rican New York. After waves of gentrification and development, parts of the area are now being advertised as Upper Yorkville, a new annex to the predominantly white Upper East Side. While the poor have stayed behind, many of East Harlem’s successful sons and daughters have scattered to the suburbs.

“We have a whole intellectual and professional class that is invisible — people who came up though the neighborhood, with a working-class background, who really excelled,” said Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy.

“But it’s so dispersed, people don’t see it. They do not make up a real, physical community, but they have the identity.”

For those who paved the way for Judge Sotomayor, embracing that identity was the first step in charting their personal and professional paths out of hardship. Manuel del Valle, 60, an overachiever from the housing projects on Amsterdam Avenue, made the same leaps as the judge — to Princeton University and Yale Law School — but preceded her by five years.

Taking a cue from the black students at Princeton, he and the handful of other working-class Puerto Ricans from New York pressured university officials to offer a course on Puerto Rican history and to admit more minority students. They saw their goal as creating a class of lawyers, doctors, writers and activists who would use their expertise to lift up their old neighborhoods.

“Talk about arrogance,” said Mr. del Valle, who now teaches law in Puerto Rico. “We actually believed we would have a dynamic impact on all the institutions American society had to offer.”

Judge Sotomayor’s appointment, he said, is a vindication of those efforts.

“We were invisible,” he said. “She made us visible.”

In New York, many have welcomed the judge’s visibility during a summer when the most celebrated — and reviled — local politicians were two Puerto Rican state senators who brought the state government to a standstill by mounting an abortive coup against their fellow Democrats.

“She really came at a moment when there is a public reassessment of the value of identity politics through this brouhaha in the Senate,” said Arlene Davila, a professor of anthropology at New York University who has written extensively on Puerto Rican and Latino identity. “Here came this woman who reinvigorated us with the idea that a Latina can have a lot to contribute, not just to their own group, but to the entire American society.”

But it is among her own — in the South Bronx, East Harlem or the Los Sures neighborhood of Brooklyn — where Judge Sotomayor’s success resonates loudest, for the simple reason that many people understand the level of perseverance she needed to achieve it.

Orlando Plaza, 41, who took time off from his doctoral studies in history about five years ago to open Camaradas, a popular bar in East Harlem, sees her appeal as a sort of ethnic Rorschach test.

“Whether it’s growing up in the Bronx, going to Catholic school or being from a single-parent household, there are so many tropes in her own story that we feel pride that someone from a background like ours achieved something so enormous,” he said. “This is the real Jenny from the block.”

And it is on the block, among the men and women who left Puerto Rico decades ago so their children might one day become professionals, where her story is most sweetly savored. The faces of the men and women playing dominoes or shooting pool at the Betances Senior Center in the Bronx attest to decades of hard work.

Many of them came to New York as teenagers more out of despair than dreams. Lucy Medina, who arrived in the 1950s, worked as a keypunch operator and in other jobs as she single-handedly raised two children. Today, her son is a captain in the city’s Department of Correction and her daughter is a real estate executive.

Impressive as the judge’s accomplishments are, Ms. Medina is more impressed with the judge’s mother, Celina Sotomayor, who did what she had to do in order to raise two successful children in the projects.

“Her mother and I are very similar,” said Ms. Medina, 77. “I know what she went through. We sacrificed ourselves so our children would get an education and get ahead. A lot of women here have done that. We stayed on top of our children and made sure they didn’t get sidetracked.”

Cemeteries Fall Into Turmoil as Jewish Burial Societies Fade Away

By PAUL VITELLO

Someone was buried in Florence Marmor’s grave, and it was not Florence Marmor.

When Mrs. Marmor visited her deceased husband’s cemetery plot in Flushing, Queens, one afternoon, she found that someone had been freshly buried in the spot next to his, where she had planned to rest someday. No one could tell her why.

Strange and wrenching discoveries like that have sprung up repeatedly in Jewish communities over the past few decades as families have discovered that the cemetery properties where they expected to be buried among spouses, children and parents are caught in a legal knot that no one can untangle.

The reason: the Jewish burial societies that sold the gravesites no longer have administrators. Founded by the immigrant ancestors of the people caught in this bind, the societies, in effect, have died.

The problem has mainly plagued New York, Boston and other Northeastern cities where Jews arrived at the turn of the last century from Eastern Europe, bringing with them the tradition of dues-paying societies — usually organized by people from the same hometown — that bought and maintained cemetery plots.

Besides reducing burial costs, the societies held periodic meetings that became important social events for networking and keeping up with others from similar roots. Robust for decades, the associations lost members as descendants grew affluent, moved away and left a dwindling, aging few to keep the books and the cemetery lots in order.

Until recently, few religious or government officials took notice. But an accrual of painful scenes has convinced some of the need for intervention.

“There isn’t a week that goes by that we don’t have problems with this,” said Richard Fishman, director of the New York State Division of Cemeteries, charged with regulating burial plots. “A person dies, and they can’t get buried because there is no one left to sign the papers, or the guy in charge is 99 years old and in a nursing home.”

There are no exact figures, but officials like Mr. Fishman and leaders of Jewish organizations estimate that while 20,000 or more burial societies once flourished in the Northeast, managing plots in hundreds of Jewish cemeteries, all but a few thousand are defunct.

By tradition, Jews must be buried within 24 hours of death. If the deceased is a member of a burial society or a descendant of members, relatives are supposed to contact an officer of the society, who verifies the person’s membership and signs a permit allowing the cemetery to open the assigned plot.

But Mrs. Marmor, 76, said that when she asked the cemetery director what happened to her plot, he told her it had been sold by the president of the burial society, who had since died.

“They couldn’t do anything more for me,” she said. After much stress, and with help from a lawyer, she ended up restarting the defunct association, the Trembowla Sisters Burial Society, and discovered to her relief that the plot on the other side of her husband was available.

Some burial society officers are reluctant — and not always reliable — inheritors of the job.

Sam Falk took over the Friends of Zion of Harlem Burial Society after his mother, for many years the society’s acting president, entered an assisted-living residence on Long Island a few years ago. He shipped the society’s file cabinets and cemetery maps to his home in Southern California.

“I tried to send out the notices and keep up,” said Mr. Falk, 59, whose grandfather founded the society in 1911, “but to be honest, in the last few years, I didn’t have the time.”

He was rescued by a tiny agency of the New York State Insurance Department known as the Office of Miscellaneous Estates. Tucked into a cluttered corner of the state’s Liquidation Bureau in Lower Manhattan, Miscellaneous Estates is where burial societies go to die. The agency took the burial society off Mr. Falk’s hands after an elderly woman — worried that he would not be able to provide her a plot next to her mother in a Staten Island cemetery — found a sympathetic cemetery administrator who referred her to Miscellaneous Estates.

Robin Kraus, the agency’s manager, and her assistant, Alice Jenkins, have taken hundreds of burial societies into a sort of receivership over the past decade, collecting dues from members until the last one is buried. They move with practiced deftness through the thousands of ancient index cards, yellowing ledger books and rolled-up oilcloth cemetery maps entrusted to their care.

“What we do is step up and perform all the functions of a burial society until all the people entitled are buried,” said Ms. Kraus, a lifelong civil servant who, as the child of Holocaust survivors, found an emotional home when she joined the bureau 15 years ago. Almost every Jewish cemetery in New York has her phone number on auto-dial.

Many family members who call are desperate and distraught, she said.

“You have to be able to deal with people who are hard of hearing, and oftentimes speak in thick accents,” she said.

Mark G. Peters, who heads the quasi-public Liquidation Bureau, which protects consumers who hold policies with failed insurance companies, said the government viewed burial societies as a type of insurer. “They may be a historically anachronistic insurance product,” he said, “but we are essentially the only safety net for people still depending on these societies.”

Mark Wittlin, 53, remembered attending meetings with his father at a burial society in Brooklyn known as the Senate Association. Members would address one another with honorifics like “noble grand brother” and solemnly discuss financial and maintenance matters while he and other children prowled the rented hall.

When he graduated from college, his father and other members asked him to become an officer, but he declined. When his father died, they asked again and he declined again.

A lawyer took over the society. When the lawyer died a few years ago, Mr. Wittlin answered the door one day to find a young man there, several large shopping bags arrayed around him, with rolled-up maps jutting out: the records of the Senate Association.

“ ‘My uncle wanted you to have these,’ he says,” Mr. Wittlin recounted. “He was the lawyer’s nephew.”

Mr. Wittlin said he tried to be a good president. But there were 60 remaining members, including some in nursing homes and some unaccounted for — though liable to pop up needing service at any time.

When someone told him about Robin Kraus, he went to see her. He took along the shopping bags. “I just don’t have the energy for this,” he told her.

She and Ms. Jenkins told him not to worry. They unpacked the records and maps, and told him they would take it from there.

Run Aground on the Shores of Freedom

By Alex Kotlowitz
Sunday, August 2, 2009

THE SNAKEHEAD

An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

By Patrick

Radden Keefe

Doubleday.

414 pp. $27.50

In the early morning hours of June 6, 1993, a small, weathered freighter, the Golden Venture, ran aground along the shoreline of New York's Rockaway Beach. It was carrying 300 people from China's Fujian province. Most were men, though there was also a handful of women and children aboard. It was in many ways an age-old journey: immigrants risking their lives for a better life. But this was different. Each had paid $35,000 to smugglers (the going rate is now upward of $70,000), and when the ship beached (purposefully, it turns out) those on board, who were already weakened by the 120-day voyage, were ordered by the smugglers to jump into the rough surf and swim ashore. The sea was so turbulent that it flipped a 22-foot Boston Whaler sent out to rescue the swimmers. Ten of the Chinese men died. The rest lay exhausted in the sand, tended to by medics, given food and water, and then arrested.

"For much of its history," Patrick Radden Keefe writes, "the United States has suffered from a kind of bipolarity when it comes to matters of immigration." And so it was that the men and women on the Golden Venture were not embraced but instead imprisoned, most of them in a jail in York, Pa., where they remained for three years while the government tried to figure out how it viewed them: as illegal immigrants or refugees -- or something in between. Indeed, the Golden Venture, which Keefe points out brought "the single largest arrival of illegal aliens in modern American history," came to symbolize the tightly wound tension that has long characterized this nation's stance on immigration: the instinct to take in the tired and the poor versus the oft-expressed inclination to return new arrivals to their home countries. "The Snakehead" evocatively captures our yin and yang over immigration policy. Even if you know where you stand, you'll get tossed about enough in this compelling narrative that you won't necessarily end up where you began.

"The Snakehead," thankfully, is not a polemic. It's a rich, beautifully told story, so suspenseful and with so many unexpected twists that in places it reads like a John le Carré novel. Keefe, a masterful storyteller with the keen eye of a seasoned reporter, paints a discomforting picture of a worldwide smuggling network so lucrative that an INS agent renowned for his pluck and persistence is himself eventually drawn to the allure and the enormous profits of the trade. The numbers astound. During a two-year period when many Chinese were smuggled from Canada through a Mohawk reservation in the United States (a story captured in the extraordinary movie "The Frozen River"), the Native American smugglers made an estimated $170 million.

The spine of "The Snakehead" is the account of Cheng Chui Ping, known to most as Sister Ping, an aloof if not eccentric woman who helped finance the Golden Venture. An immigrant herself from Fujian province, Sister Ping built and headed a global smuggling empire, an underground network that extended from Asia to Africa and Latin America, all stops along the way to the ultimate destination: the United States. Sister Ping made a small fortune trading in humans, which it becomes abundantly clear is a cutthroat, often brazenly violent business, measured not only by street shootouts between rival smugglers but also by the brutal nature of the travel itself, including the claustrophobic and odorous voyage in the small hold of the Golden Venture, which Keefe recounts in haunting detail. Food and water were so scarce that fights would break out. One of the smuggled Fujianese became so unhinged that he mindlessly pressed buttons on a handheld video game long after the batteries had died. Another passenger told Keefe, "I think it changed many people, being on that ship."

The ship also changed others, as well. When many of the Chinese were detained in a prison in the working-class town of York, some of the locals befriended the new captives and then took up their cause, arguing -- convincingly -- that they should be permitted to stay in this country. But beginning with the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and then reinforced by post-9/11 hysteria, our nation has become less welcoming to those seeking refuge. We now detain roughly 300,000 people, most of them accused of entering this country illegally, most of them awaiting deportation.

Yet, as Keefe suggests, it's ingrained in the history of this country that "many an immigration story begins with some transgression, large or small." Indeed, Sister Ping, who is now serving time in prison, has become a folk hero in her Chinatown neighborhood, or as Keefe observes, "a latter-day Harriet Tubman who risked imprisonment to shepherd her countrymen to freedom." This is one of the freshest accounts of modern-day migration I've read, one filled with moral ambiguity, one that doesn't pretend to have the answers, one that in these times feels like essential reading.

Alex Kotlowitz is the author of three books, including, most recently, "Never a City So Real." He teaches writing at Northwestern University.

Entry Level - Where Nepalese Is Spoken, and Yak Is Served

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Located in the shadow of the elevated No. 7 train tracks in Jackson Heights, Queens, Himalayan Yak is a popular restaurant for Nepalese and Tibetan immigrants in the region. Jamyang Gurung, 26 (or 27, using the Nepalese method of calculating age), manages the restaurant for his uncle, who bought it about five years ago.

Behind the restaurant’s name: The old owner was pure Tibetan. The old name was Yak. We keep the same Yak, but we added the “Himalayan” word. We wanted to serve all Himalayans.

Do you serve yak? Yes. But not right now. We have to place an order before a week. We order it from over there — Minnesota, Colorado. Yak meat is not that expensive. More expensive than lamb. Yak meat is $7.99. Yak meat is very good and organic, and juicy.

On the menu: Typical Nepalese food. Our restaurant is famous for Tibetan food also. We have Indian food also. We are going to change a little bit. We want to add seafood items.

Is there seafood in Himalayan cuisine? We don’t have sea in Nepal. Nepal is a landlocked country. We don’t have sushi also over there.

Hometown: I was born in Nepal, in Mustang, like Mustang car, you know. Mustang is the border of Tibet and Nepal. It’s one of the famous tourist areas in Nepal. All our ancestors are from Tibet. Most Mustang people are similar to Tibetan. Our culture is the same. We believe in Buddhism. We also believe in Dalai Lama.

How many languages do you speak? Just three: Nepali, Tibetan and English. All the Mustang people speak Tibetan. Our mother tongue is Tibetan. The national language is Nepali. Because it’s a tourist area, it’s very important to speak English. You have to deal with customers.

On moving to New York in 2002: I thought New York must be very beautiful, very different from Katmandu. When I came to Queens, it looked so similar. But then I went to Times Square and that was, I thought, “Oh, my God.” There were all these high buildings. I thought, “How can they build like this? How many people can fit in one building?”

Does the subway bother you? Sometimes, but it has now become a habit. Mustang — we have wind, crazy wind. It’s a cold desert. It’s very loud. Around 12 midday, it stops everything. People stop to walk in the day.

On-location TV shoot: “Ugly Betty” was here. They booked the whole day. The location director came as a customer. He liked the environment. He talked to the main director. They ordered yak sausage.

The breakdown of your customers: Nepalese, Tibetan, Himalayan are 75 percent, 25 percent are foreigners.

Are they foreigners, if your restaurant is in the United States? We call them tourists in Nepal. Whenever you see white people, you call them tourists. So many people come from Europe and America, so you don’t know if they are Americans. That’s why we call them tourists. When you are over here, we have the same concept.

In Deal, N.J., Sephardic Jews Developed a Shore Haven

By KAREEM FAHIM

A century ago, Deal, a seaside resort carved from New Jersey farmland, was known as a playground for tycoons and magnates like Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim and celebrities who visited, including Mark Twain. At lavish “summer cottages,” garden parties raised money for the favorite charities of residents, predominantly Irish Catholics and Ashkenazic Jews who summered there.

By the 1940s, some of the shine had worn off, and the fabulously rich were replaced by the merely wealthy. In the late 1960s, Sephardic Jews who lived in Brooklyn and spent summers in nearby Bradley Beach began buying land in Deal; by 1973, more than 100 families had bought property in the town. By the mid-1990s, thousands of Sephardic Jews were flocking to the town during the summers, and today, local historians estimate, they make up 80 percent of the population.

That influx has led to occasional tensions with people outside their insular community. The Sephardim in Deal, many of whom call themselves Syrian Jews, include Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate mogul who is believed to have been the government informant who helped bring charges against New Jersey politicians and rabbis in a corruption and money laundering scandal this week. Before this case, Mr. Dwek was a central figure in a community built quickly and from scratch by the Syrian Jews in Deal and nearby towns.

Today, in a town of 1,000 people that swells to many times that size in the summer, there are synagogues and yeshivas, Jewish social service agencies and a main street lined with kosher delis and Syrian Jewish grocers.

Thirty-five years ago, those institutions and businesses hardly existed, said Poopa Dweck, a longtime resident and the author of a cookbook on Syrian Jewish cuisine. Ms. Dweck, who is not related to Mr. Dwek, was part of what she called a “pioneering group” that moved from Brooklyn to Deal not to summer, but to live.

“We loved the life here,” she said. “We were able to maintain our Orthodox Jewish religion and bring up our children. It was beautiful.”

Quickly, she and the other new arrivals started building the structures of their community. “We didn’t even wait,” she said, describing how she helped found the Sephardic Women’s Organization of the Jersey Shore. “We had the first meeting in my living room.”

Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, a physician and local historian, said the first Sephardic Jew in the area might well have been Benjamin N. Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice, who had a house in neighboring Allenhurst in the 1930s. The first Syrian Jewish family in Deal arrived in 1939, moving into a home that the singer Enrico Caruso had once regularly visited, said Jim Foley, the town’s historian.

Fifty years later, when Sephardic Jews started moving to Deal in large numbers, there were occasional fights for control. In the mid-1990s, a dispute over a plan to build a synagogue on the site of a house on Main Street underscored growing divisions between the Sephardim and other residents, including other Jews. Today, some of those strains persist: in interviews, some non-Jewish residents professed resentment of the Sephardim, largely because of the crowds that descend on Deal every summer.

Generally, however, residents interact peacefully, many mingling at the Deal Casino, a historic beach club that only recently started allowing out-of-towners to become members. Much of the Sephardic summer social scene takes place in huge houses set on gigantic lawns where Victorians and Queen Annes once stood.

A generation still speaks Arabic, though some of the earliest Sephardic settlers have moved away, tired of the commute back to Brooklyn.

Some of their children have been shaped by the town’s seaside charms. Henry Garfield, 19, a Syrian Jew who called himself “somewhat religious,” ate a slice of pizza Friday afternoon along Norwood Avenue and seemed not to notice the tension that has developed in Deal. This might as well have been Malibu.

“It’s a very laid-back atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is chilled out. We surf all day.”

Ann Farmer contributed reporting.