For the fourth time in three years, federal agents based in Miami traveled the globe to infiltrate and dismantle a major Chinese alien smuggling ring that claimed responsibility for ferrying hundreds of immigrants into the United States, law enforcement officials said Monday.
Five persons were arrested Sunday in Miami, including the alleged ringleaders, Alexandre Wei and his wife, Bing Xie. Two more suspects, including the couple’s son, were in custody in the Philippines, said John P. Woods, assistant special agent in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Miami office.
While the criminal complaint unsealed Monday is based on 15 smuggled immigrants, Wei and Xie told undercover agents posing as smugglers that they had contracts with 100 would-be migrants and had recently identified another 300 wanting to pay for illegal passage into the United States.
“We have them telling us that they were responsible for smuggling more than a thousand people over the last 20 years,” Woods said.
Smuggling immigrants from China has become a lucrative business with ringleaders, known as “snakeheads,” using fake travel documents to transport Chinese across various nations before reaching the United States.
Once here, many immigrants end up in New York working in restaurants and other service-sector jobs to support families in their native land and pay off their smuggling debt.
In recent years, the last stop for many illegal Chinese immigrants bound for the United States has become Caribbean nations such as Jamaica and the Bahamas, which have lax immigration enforcement. From there, smugglers bring the immigrants to South Florida by air and sea.
THE SCHEME
Wei, 57, is a Taiwanese-born French citizen with a home in Lyon. He used his French passport to travel to the United States, Jamaica and the Bahamas to broker deals with the middlemen smugglers and to receive final payment from the illegal migrants’ families, authorities said.
Xie, 43, lives in China, and before her arrest had never been to the United States. Undercover agents arranged for her to obtain a visitor’s business visa to allow her to travel to the United States, and she was arrested at a hotel near Miami International Airport.
Wei told undercover agents that they typically charged $50,000 to $52,000 per immigrant. Xie would collect $15,000 from the immigrant or his family in China, another $15,000 when the immigrant landed in the Caribbean and the balance once he arrived in the United States
The ICE human smuggling task force launched its undercover operation in June after receiving intelligence that Wei and Xie were looking for smugglers who could help them move Chinese nationals from the Caribbean to the United States, according to court documents.
Supervisory Special Agent Frank Cabaddu first approached the couple in June in Montego Bay, Jamaica, telling them he had “business associates” in the United States bribing government officials to produce legitimate but illegally obtained travel documents.
At their first meeting, the couple agreed to pay $45,000, or $15,000 apiece, to smuggle three aliens. Two weeks later, Wei traveled to Miami and gave Cabaddu a $6,000 down payment, with the $39,000 balance due at the completion of the smuggling trip.
The undercover agents successfully smuggled six more Chinese nationals into the United States in June and July for Wei and Xie.
UPPING THE ANTE
After the July journey — from Montego Bay to Nassau to Fort Lauderdale and then New York — Wei started worrying that Jamaican officials had learned of his illegal enterprise.
Cabaddu upped the ante: For a higher price, he could arrange a door-to-door operation that would bypass the Caribbean staging areas.
In August, Wei agreed to pay $105,000, or $35,000 per person, to smuggle three aliens from Asia to New York. On Sept. 3, Cabaddu and two other undercover ICE agents arrived in Hong Kong and were paid a $30,000 down payment.
Four days later, the agents delivered the three immigrants from Bangkok to New York via Amsterdam, and were immediately paid the remaining $75,000 balance.
During another meeting in Bangkok, Wei and Xie said they had lost more than $2.2 million when a boat they loaded with 25 Chinese capsized en route from Suriname to St. Maarten, resulting in the death of 11 migrants. Agents are still trying to corroborate the incident, Woods said.
THE BUST
Wei and Xie were arrested near Miami International Airport after the undercover agents were paid $55,000 for the delivery of three more aliens. Three persons who went to the hotel to pay for the smuggled aliens and return them to New York also were arrested.
The couple’s son, Jacques, and a woman were arrested in Manila as they tried to escort a new group of five illegal immigrants onto a jet, Woods said.
The 15 illegals who entered the United States as part of the operation will be arrested this week in the New York City area and will face deportation, authorities said.
The investigation was code-named Operation Morpheus, after the Greek god of dreams, because Wei dreamed of smuggling hundreds of aliens at a time rather than in small numbers, Woods said.
By Larry Lebowitz, The Miami Herald
