The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian Province began arriving in America. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the gangs 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 noodle store on Hester Street, where she ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business was smuggling people. As a "snakehead," she built a complex global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs. 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. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story not only of Sister Ping but of the gangland gunslingers, the immigration and law enforcement officials, and the generation of penniless immigrants who braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream.

Review :
Keefe ("Chatter") examines America's complicated relationship with immigration in this brilliant account of Cheng Chui Ping, known as Sister Ping, who built a multimillion-dollar empire as a "snakehead," smuggling Chinese immigrants into America. Sister Ping herself entered the U.S. legally in 1981 from China's Fuzhou province, but was soon known among Fujianese immigrants in Manhattan's Chinatown as the go-to for advice, loans and connections to bring their families to America. Her empire grew so large that she contracted out muscle work to the local gang, the Fuk Ching. Keefe points to the "Golden Venture"-a ship full of Fujianese illegals that ran fatally aground in 1993-as the beginning of the end for Sister Ping. She was sentenced in 2000 to 35 years in prison for conspiracy, money laundering and trafficking. Despite an enormous cast of characters in a huge underground web of global crime, Keefe's account maintains the swift pace of a thriller. With the immigration debate still boiling, this exploration of how far people will go to achieve the American dream is a must-read. "(July 21) -- Publishers Weekly, starred review" Advance Praise for THE SNAKEHEAD "Patrick Radden Keefe has written a vivid non fiction thriller. The Snakehead reads like a Chinese-American version of The Sopranos, except that the mob boss is a grandmother who runs a human smuggling enterprise, and the story is true." --Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side "In The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe recreates an absorbing portrait of a 1993 shipwreck to illuminate the methods used by Chinese racketeers to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States. At the same time, in an artful twist, Keefe leaves the reader pondering the whole process of immigration." --Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China "The Snakehead is a brilliant tour de force, both a gripping true-crime saga, full of intrigue and suspense, and a chilling exposure of the dark