Download The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream AudioBook Free
A mesmerizing narrative about the go up and fall of an unlikely international criminal offense boss
In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese language from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groupings before them, they arrived with little money but with an powerful work ethic and an unshakeable perception in the offer of the United States. Most of them lived in a global outside the law, working in a shadow overall economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the small pavements of New York’s Chinatown.
The body who arrived to dominate this Chinese language underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her way to the American goal began with a unique business go out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Avenue. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground loan provider for illegal Chinese language immigrants. But her real business-a business that gained around $40 million-was smuggling people.
As a “snakehead,” she built a sophisticated—and frequently vicious—global conglomerate, relying seriously on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her vitality and profits. As an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an complicated 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 regulations enforcement representatives who could never quite catch her.
Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only arrived to light in 1993 when the Golden Endeavor, a ship packed with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It got New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the unlawful network and home in on its uncommon mastermind.
THE SNAKEHEAD is a breathtaking tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground overall economy in which America’s twelve million illegitimate immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative explains to the storyline not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked well for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked loss of life and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the North american goal. The Snakehead offers an intimate head to of life on the mean pavements of Chinatown, a brilliant blueprint of arranged crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects people.
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