The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream |  | Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Anchor
Category: eBooks
In Stock
Rating:  56 reviews
Sales Rank: 24,721
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1370973
ASIN: B002HMJZAA
Publication Date: July 15, 2009
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Book Description
A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss.
In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown. The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business—a business that earned an estimated $40 million—was smuggling people. As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her. Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and hone in on its unusual mastermind. The Snakehead is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.
A Q&A with Patrick Radden Keefe
 Question: Can you tell us a little bit about Sister Ping? She is one of the most unusual "godmothers" in the annals of modern crime.
Answer: Sure. I first found out about Sister Ping in 2006, when she was on trial in New York. It emerged that she was a Chinese woman who had come to the United States in 1981 with no education, didn’t speak English, and started smuggling other people—from her home village and then the region in China that she came from—to the U.S. She did this for the better part of two decades, and made $40 million or so in the process, and then went on the lam. She was the FBI’s most wanted Asian organized crime figure for another five or six years before they finally tracked her down in Hong Kong, extradited her to the U.S., and tried her. Q: If you passed her in the street, or went by her place of work, if you were wandering around Chinatown as a tourist, would you have any idea about what she did? A: You wouldn’t give her a second look. This was a part of what was so fascinating about her; she made an enormous fortune but she made a point of being very humble in her appearance. She worked incredibly long hours, and there was nothing ostentatious about the way she carried herself. And I actually think that this studied anonymity was part of what allowed her to do what she did with impunity for so long. And it also secured her a huge amount of respect within the Chinatown neighborhood, where she was regarded as kind of a humble, hometown heroine who hadn’t let the success she’d had go to her head. Q: Sister Ping was clever enough to distance herself from the more violent aspects of human trafficking. How did she outsource the seedier aspects of what she was doing, and how did that ultimately affect her? A: Well, this in some ways was what brought about her downfall, in that she was always a perfectionist, and when she started out as a smuggler in the early 1980s she would transport people herself. By that I mean, she would be there in Hong Kong when she put them on a plane; they would be flown to Guatemala, she would be there in Guatemala when they arrived. They would be escorted up through Mexico; she would meet them in California, then she would fly back with them to New York City. But as her operation grew, and the word spread—really, around the world—that this was a woman who could move anyone from point A to point B, it got so large that she could no longer oversee everything herself, and she had to start subcontracting. And this, in some ways, was her great mistake, because she subcontracted to a very violent gang of youths in Chinatown known as the Fuk Ching gang, and the gang, ultimately—because they were less scrupulous than she was about issues of safety and things like that—ended up mismanaging things. There were a number of these journeys that ended in death, and then a number of murders as well. Q: Tell us what the title The Snakehead means. A: The snakehead is the name, the Chinese name, to refer to these human smugglers, who basically emerged in China in the 1960s and 1970s, helping smuggle people out of China. But then in the late 1980s and early 1990s—basically after Tiananmen Square—it became a massive (many say four- to six-billion-dollar-a-year) industry. These were the snakeheads, and among the snakeheads Sister Ping was the most prolific and certainly the most famous. In the case of The Golden Venture, they would bring these ships to the U.S., and they wouldn’t want to bring them right to the shore in California or Massachusetts or New York—as you can imagine, it would look a little strange to have a freighter coming up, to appear in Brooklyn and drop off hundreds of Chinese people. So they would bring them to about a hundred miles off shore, out in the open ocean, and then they would send out small fishing boats which would offload the ships. This was called offloading and it was actually a kind of niche in the industry. And the gangsters were the ones who occupied this niche. They would take these fishing boats out and bring the passengers back in. Because Sister Ping had outsourced offloading to one of these gangs, the gang happened to have a lot of inner turmoil in the early part of 1993, precisely because they were making so much money in the snakehead business and they didn’t know how to divide it, and so there was a massive shoot-out just weeks before The Golden Venture arrived, and the guys who were supposed to go and offload the ship were all killed in the shootout. All of the guys who had gone to kill them were hoping they could be the ones to go and offload it and collect the money from the passengers, but they were all locked up and put in prison. So when the ship arrived, there was nobody to offload it, and that was why it came in—all the way in, to the Rockaways, in Queens, and actually ran aground right there on the beach in the media capital of the world. Q: Of course, the real payoff for the reader is this reading experience—this is an amazing crime story with incredible twists and turns. A: Yeah; it’s funny, I really didn’t anticipate this to be the case when I began the research. As I started digging in and talking to law enforcement sources and finding out about these various underworld figures, in Chinatown but also in places like Bangkok, I began to realize the relationships between them. One of the things that’s interesting in the book is that you realize that a whole series of people were actually cooperating with American authorities at different times over the years, that we’d never really known about. And in many cases, they were going to American authorities and giving them information about one another. There was an interesting, almost spy-versus-spy game going on between these ruthless, but also very enterprising and business-minded, underworld figures. (Photo © Sai Srikandarajah)
Product Description
A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss
In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown.
The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people.
As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her.
Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.
THE SNAKEHEAD is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.
www.doubleday.com
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 56
 Entertaining, Beautifully Written and Smart August 11, 2009
W. Simmons (NYC)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
If you are going to read one book this summer, the Snakehead should be
it. This is a beautifully told story with many twists. We learn about
the elusive Sister Ping, the Snakehead that gives the book its title;
Chinatown gangsters; hardnosed FBI agents and tough NY prosecutors; a
small but fierce community of activists in York, PA; and most
importantly, we learn the very poignant story of the Golden Venture
passengers who endured unimaginable hardship to come to America just
to be put in jail for almost four years. Parts of the book are so
touching, they will make you tear up.
Keefe does not take sides in the polemic illegal immigration debate,
but instead he presents illegal immigration as it is - complex without
easy answers. Keefe, shines a light on the actors, describes their
actions and analyzes their motivations without deciding which side is
right. The Snakehead is a rarity in that it reads like a thriller but
leaves the reader with a much more nuanced understanding of one of
this generation's greatest challenges. A recent review in the
Washington Post said it best - "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."
The best book I've read all year July 2, 2009
northhollywoodbookfan (los angeles)
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
The Snakehead is a book that demands to be read. Once I picked it up, I didn't want to put it down. The story is true, and it's far more than just a book about a fatal shipwreck that happened off the NY Coast.
The book is about the American Dream, and the immigrant drive to succeed in their adopted country, legally, illegally or otherwise. 'The Snakehead' is also a story about the way a small town and the people who live there found their lives forever transformed when a group of Chinese immigrants arrived in their community.
I also didn't realize there were such distinct cultural variants among the Chinese people until I read this book. There's an entire group of Chinese known as the Fujianese, who speak their own language and have a separate culture from the mainstream Chinese culture. For this reason alone, the book was worth reading, as it gave me a new understanding of people from China.
Factual story that reads like a novel September 3, 2009
MC Salinger
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I picked up this book hoping to learn more about the human smuggling business that I had heard about here and there, and instead was pleasantly surprised to find myself engrossed in a book that weaves complex characters and events together as fluidly as if it were a novel. The author does a great job of intertwining immigration law and policy within the story without making it boring or interrupting the suspenseful pace of the book. This book was enlightening - it has this enhanced my understanding of the Chinese underground world, the Chinese immigrants that were indirectly a part of that world, and the US and foreign law enforcement that attempted to shake that world, and it did so in a way that was more engaging than I thought possible given the subject matter.
Excellent and needed work July 19, 2009
T. Simons (Columbia, SC United States)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is worth reading.
First off, it's worth reading because it's entertaining. It tells a compelling story of international crime, rife with gangsters and murders and shootings and human smuggling and even a major shipwreck. It trails off a little in the latter half of the book, as the action winds down and the book gets more contemplative, but it's still a compelling read throughout.
And it's the second, more contemplative half that really makes this book worth reading, because the latter portions of the book give the reader a well-balanced, fair, and detailed picture of the horrible mishmash of U.S. immigration policies that have created criminals like Sister Ping. While never hiding or eliding over the deaths and horrors caused by the international human smuggling trade, the author also clearly shows how byzantine, illogical, and contradictory U.S. political decisions have created the human smuggling trade. Sister Ping never regarded herself as a criminal, and if the Chinese and American governments had had more sensible policies, she might never have had the opportunity to become one.
Instead, though, because America almost completely prohibits legal immigration, she was able to exploit that restriction for millions; because China's currency policies ignored the actual exchange rate for so long, she was able to make millions converting currency internationally as well.
The author never flinches from showing the evils that Sister Ping caused or had part in -- the deaths in transit, the gangsterism she participated in and gave rise to. But he also is careful to show how well-liked she was among her own communities, and how thousands of people were immensely grateful to her for giving them an opportunity (however risky) to come to America.
What the book ultimately shows is a portrait of injustice, primarily to the immigrants themselves (who spend years detained, or become citizens in a trice, or find themselves deported, or who die on jungle trails in Thailand or end up with three kids and a two-car garage in Middle America -- all seemingly at random, based on the whim of individual immigration judges or the luck of their particular transit), and to the "Snakeheads" themselves, who seem as likely to get a dismissed or commuted sentence (like the case of Jerry Stuchiner, now practicing law in Nevada, who used to be an INS agent charged with investigating human trafficking until he was found selling fake passports to Chinese immigrants) as they are to spend the rest of their lives in prison (like Sister Ping).
This book does a great job of telling compelling stories about human smuggling and those involved with it, while also aiding the reader to understand the breaks, gaps, and flaws in America's immigration system, and the price paid in human lives for those flawed policies. Highly recommended.
Vivid, Engrossing, Fascinating August 25, 2009
Seth Faison (Princeton, NJ)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book opens with a gripping, cinematic description of a signal event: The crash-landing of the Golden Venture on a sandbar outside New York Harbor in June 1993. Many of the 300 Chinese passengers hidden inside came out on deck and began leaping into the churning surf, desperate to swim to dry land and win asylum. Park police patrolling a nearby beach heard screams coming from the ocean. A Coast Guard helicopter soon circled overhead, followed by TV crews, with spotlights capturing men and women on deck, some jumping and some scared to try.
To the officers on site and to viewers watching on TV, it was equally stunning and mysterious: Who were these people? Who brought them here? How vast was this Asian migration?
This opening scene in "The Snakehead," a brilliant account of illegal immigration, is just a first taste. What emerged that dark night was really the latest iteration of a classic American story: Passage from a distant homeland to this place of promise, replete with a harrowing journey across the sea, life-and-death risks, gritty determination and acts of desperation. The story endures, even if the circumstances change.
In this telling, the Chinese ordeal of immigration has many fresh dynamics. Powerful smugglers who arrange passage and violent street gangs that manage the chattel split a lucrative take of $35,000 a head. There are edgy immigration agents, like the pugnacious Jerry Stuchiner, and savvy Chinese mob informants, like "The Fat Man." There are idiotic immigration procedures, allowing felons to walk free while the vulnerable remain locked up. Patrick Radden Keefe grasps many complex themes and weaves them into a compelling narrative.
At the heart of his story lies a crafty woman known as Sister Ping (though she, and this book, might have been called "The Godmother"). An immigrant from Fujian province, she opened a small shop in New York's Chinatown in 1982. Dressed like a shabby grandmother, with a hangdog expression, she hardly looked like a criminal mastermind. Yet she became adept, and then unmatched, as a "snakehead," or smuggler of her compatriots. Using fake passports, cheap flights, blow-up rafts to cross rivers, and underground connections throughout Asia and Central America, she created an extensive assembly of operators who shepherded thousands of Chinese to America.
Sister Ping achieved mythic status in Chinatown by granting favors and lending cash, convincing the helpless that she was a compassionate mobster. In her store, she also concocted a sideline money-transfer business, enabling immigrants to remit U.S. dollars to China without the annoying forms or restrictions of the Bank of China (whose branch sat across the street). From those laboring hard to send money home, she earned millions more.
China's economic bonanza, among other things, fueled a mania in Fujian for spending newfound money on elaborate ways to sneak into America. Demand for passage grew so fast that in the early '90s Sister Ping began contracting out logistics. Middlemen packed people inside old freighters like the Golden Venture, with conditions akin to a slave ship. Keefe writes perceptively about how Sister Ping and other Asian gangsters differed from the Sicilian model that the FBI was used to following. Asian organized crime "did not adhere to any fixed hierarchies or organizational structures," Keefe notes. "Alliances and coalitions were fluid, ever-evolving." Sister Ping reeled through a series of partners, none more fateful than a ruthless thug named Ah Kay.
Ah Kay began as a common hood and had even robbed Sister Ping. When they met again in 1992 to coordinate a smuggling operation, Ah Kay apologized for his previous misdoing. "That happened in the past," she said. "We're talking business now." Business aplenty.
Eventually, the cash flowed too fast. Rivalries within Ah Kay's gang led to shootings. Ah Kay had to go hide in China. Two of his brothers were killed outside a safe house in Teaneck, N.J., ruining Ah Kay's plans to off-load a ship that was about to land, which turned out to be the Golden Venture, which is why it went awry and reached our TV screens.
As a reporter who covered the Golden Venture and its aftermath, I was mystified by its many unanswerable riddles. The early rumor that smugglers had ordered the ship's crew to deliberately run it aground, for instance, made no sense. But now, with Keefe's painstaking reconstruction of the sequence of mishaps that led to that night, the crash-landing and other aspects of human trade become clear. As it turned out, 10 people died fleeing the ship, a handful escaped, some won asylum after years in detention and many others were sent back to China.
Ah Kay was arrested in Hong Kong in August 1993, instantly dissolving his alliance with Sister Ping. Now it was her turn to hide in China. It took the feds several years to track her down and finally nab her in a sting operation at Hong Kong's airport, which Keefe describes with brio.
In custody, Sister Ping was no match for Ah Kay. Facing charges related to human smuggling and many lesser counts, she claimed innocence. Ah Kay, who confessed to multiple murders and became a master informant about unsolved crimes, was the star witness at her trial in 2005. Sister Ping was found guilty and sentenced to 35 years. Ah Kay was set free.
Keefe's mastery of this chapter of our ongoing immigration saga is impressive. He muses thoughtfully about its many conundrums and highlights how our ethos of welcoming the persecuted gets soured by bad policy and the pervasive exploitation of the helpless. There will be more chapters, no doubt, but this one was pretty riveting.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 56
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