The Snakehead Sister Ping: China's Most Infamous Smuggler
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The city's just getting over the World Trade Center bombing, but this morning, just before dawn on the Rockaway Peninsula, another tragedy is unfolding. Folks on the coast spot a rusting red-green ship, the Golden Venture, grounded yards out to sea. Folks are jumping off boards thrashing about in the ocean. Dozens look like they can't swim. Coast guards jump into action. It saves 276 emaciated Chinese people through the day, but 10 die.

Some drown, others stagger up to the beach and drop. "I could feel the gristle of their bodies, the cartilage," one first responder says. "They walked up out of the water, collapsed on the beach and died." Almost everyone from the disaster is from a single Chinese province. All of them have been smuggled into New York by one infamous smuggler or trafficker, a short middle-aged restauranteur in Manhattan's Chinatown district.

Cops will soon track this criminal down. What they discover about a criminal mastermind known simply as the Snakehead is going to blow the lid off one of the world's most lucrative human trafficking routes and the murky underworld of Chinatown's gangs. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Hey, welcome guys to a new episode. How's it going over there, Danny? You got vaxxed yet? Anything changing?

Yeah, man. I mean, everything's pretty much changed in New York, dude. Everyone's, most people are vaxxed up. It's, it's kind of getting back to normal a bit, you know? Oh, nice. It's like 30 degrees here in London. It's the end of my quarantine. It's my first day in the real world. I spent the whole day in my parents' house writing. So it's great. Um,

But yeah, I'm really thrilled to get this episode done. If anyone's wondered who this woman is on our merch, any of the Rogues Gallery stuff, that is Chengchui Ping, also known as the mother of all snakeheads, Sister Ping. And yeah, finally two dozen episodes into this podcast, she's getting her time in the limelight. Her life is...

pretty crazy and it kind of bends around all these major events in China's recent history. And like this show is going to tell us, she's still kind of revered as a hero across Chinatown in New York for what she did, even despite some of the pretty bad stuff the DOJ leveled at her. And I'm just going to give a massive shout out to Patrick Radden Keefe right now, who like literally wrote the book on the snakehead in 2010. Yeah, we're eventually going to have him on the Patreon, I think patreon.com slash the underworld podcast.

And ask him a bunch of questions about this and hopefully the Sacklers and opioids and all that too, because he's just a, he's a really good journalist. Amazing stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Once he's done all his press for the Sackler book, which I just bought actually. So I'm looking forward to that. I will get him on the show, but you're actually a New Yorker and you don't live like a million miles away from the Rockways, right?

Nah, bro. I'm at Rockaway all the time in the summer. I've illegally camped out there at night with a bunch of friends. I even know the queen of Rockaway herself, Katie Honan, born and raised. She's the Wall Street Journal's, I think, New York and Queens reporter right now, but a living legend and shout out to Far Rock too.

R.I.P. Stack Bundles, gone too soon. But yeah, the Rockaways is great, man. And that was, I mean, I was pretty young when that happened. I think I have faint memories, but it's definitely, I feel like I've talked to Katie about it. It's still definitely a memory there of the craziness. Yeah, I was interested because like, I didn't know how much the sources I was looking into were kind of bigging it up as this big kind of event, but it seems like it did really hit home at the time.

I mean, it was crazy. Like I said, I was really young, but I mean, this is a pretty wild thing to happen in Rockaway. It's a small community. A lot of cops live there too. I mean, it's just, it's insane, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So we're going to get to Sister Ping in a moment, right? Like smuggler, trafficker, whatever you want to call her. And that's contentious. But first I want to get into the history of Chinatown a bit because it made her and it's made millions of people in the city.

But yeah, the smuggler-trafficker debate is an interesting one, right? Because smuggler basically means someone who gets a person from point A to point B. Smugglers can be heroes. People who smuggled Jews out of Eastern Europe or Germany during the Holocaust were smugglers.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, a lot of them will portray themselves as heroes. Of course, they charge an exorbitant fee and some of them are really dangerous and have done a lot of bad things. But there is, I mean, with some people, there really is a debate around which one of those words you should use. Yeah. And I mean, it'd be cool to get some people's opinions after we do the pod, actually, because I mean, I'm not, I wouldn't come down massively on either side. There's some stuff that's kind of mixed in there from her life.

But yeah, we'll get into her in a little bit. But like Chinatown, I mean, this was just fascinating, like researching all this stuff. This, I mean, if anyone's been there, like this little tiny kidney-shaped maze of streets at the end of Manhattan, Chinese and Chinese, I mean, it's Chinatown, right? Yeah. I mean, it's home to 100,000 people, which is kind of mad given how small it is. But it started a long, long time ago, longer than I thought it had for sure.

when Chinese migrants were fleeing racism on the coast, when the gold rush fizzled out. I know there's actually two bigger Chinatowns in New York right now. I'm pretty sure Flushing and Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn are... I'm almost positive that they're bigger than Chinatown Manhattan right now. But Chinatown Manhattan is also interesting because it's one of the few areas down there that really hasn't genderfied too much. It's still got a lot of ethnic neighborhoods in Manhattan...

probably south of 100 well south of like 125th street even uh have kind of changed over as a lot of money has come into the city you know little italy's barely you know anything of itself but chinatown's really stayed strong yeah i mean i think the flushing one is bigger uh and from what i remember is it's like really cool as well but it's like in a totally different way it's like come later on but this was like early doors um when these guys are fleeing from the from the pacific coast

Lower Manhattan at the time is just this wild mix of cultures like Irish, Italian, freed African-American slaves. And these guys all live and love and they have kids and it becomes this mad melting pot that kind of makes America sound really awesome and cool.

I mean, it was also one of the gnarliest, most criming places in the world at this point. And for decades afterwards, like if you've read Low Life or Gangs of New York, about five points and the Bowery. We'll do a historic episode on it one of these days. But wild, wild place of just like insane poverty and violence and ethnic gangs and all that fun stuff. Yeah. I mean –

The Chinese guys have one of the shittiest ends of this racial stick, right? They're denied citizenship by the states, which means they're not protected by the law at all. So they kind of stick together instead. And they found this thing called the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in the 1880s. And it winds up being a kind of ad hoc government for the area.

And at this point, I guess because it's panhandlers and migrants coming over to earn some cash, Chinatown is really male. And I mean, like, massively, massively male. And then it gets even massiver when this thing called the 1875 Page Act bans the migration of Chinese women to, quote, end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women. So it's just some racial bullshit by the senator called Horace Page. So screw you, Horace. Anyway, the 1900s, thanks partly to him,

Chinatown is home to 4,000 men and 36 women. Now that is a sausage fest. It sounds like the parties that Sean used to throw in college. It does. It does. Once I kissed a girl at a house party down the side of my mom and dad's house or the garage, but that's another story. And in Chinatown, here's another really important thing. The people basically don't speak, speak a lot of English, which is why so many of them get involved in stuff like laundry and

clean in stuff where they don't have to interrupt, interact much with the punters. Can you explain what punters are? I actually, I mean, I think I know, but I had someone asked me this and American asked me this a couple of weeks ago about something else. And I just kind of said like drunken English yokels. Is there another term? I mean, I don't know what it is in the rest of the UK, but in London, it would just mean like anyone buying something just mean any customer. But I think it has like a betting connotation elsewhere. Yeah.

I'm also wondering if my voice is going to sound way more London now. I've been here for like a week and a half because it usually does that. Anyway, Chinatown, right? By and large, this time early in its history, cops don't really go there. So these organized crime groups start flourishing. I mean, guess what? You have tons of migrants, no rights, tons of racism. They're only able to make a few bucks from crappy jobs and you get gangs. Who knew?

I think also though, you, you do have to point out that some of these people came over from China already associated with gangs, like the triads and, and things along those lines. Yeah. And a lot of them had those bad-ass haircuts with like half their hair shaved and the, the, uh, like, like braided hair down the back. But, uh,

There's a show on HBO Max now. I think it was like the last thing Bruce Lee wrote, and it's about the Chinese gangs in San Francisco right after the Civil War. It's pretty, I mean, you know, it's like gory kung fu stuff, but it's actually awesome. I think it's called Warrior, but definitely check that out. Cool.

So a lot of these gangs that spring up around that time, they're associated with things called tongs, which are organizations of merchants, store owners, kind of like Chinatown's guilds. We should 100% do an episode on the tongs further down the line because some of the stories about these guys are completely bonkers. There's a whole thing called the Tong Wars that go on until the 1930s where tongs in Chinatown all over America are shooting the hell out of each other over gambling dens, opium joints, brothels.

And they've got their own secret language for naughty stuff. So like washing someone's body is carrying out a hit on them. Gun was a dog. Ammo is dog feed. I mean, this stuff isn't really the Enigma machine, but I guess there weren't really many wires up on these guys back then.

So I just like saying the phrase Tongue Wars, just like a Guy Fieri reality show or something. We actually get into this a bit in the episode on the white guy who took over Chinatown in Boston, which is, I think, like episode eight. But I do have another, I think a two-parter coming up. I want to go through the history of the Tongue Wars in New York and then into some of the more modern fighting that happened in the 80s and 90s with some of the Vietnamese gangs that are pretty wild. Yeah, it's crazy stuff that I was looking at some of that for this episode.

The guys who come over to Chinatown first, they're mostly Cantonese. So from the Pearl River Delta, home to like 80 million people today. This is your Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong, tons of people. The newer ones, the ones that came from like the 1960s onwards, they mostly come from Fujian province, which is this massive one on the eastern seaboard, looks straight onto Taiwan. It's got this ancient city called Fujiao with shrines and pagodas. It's really amazing.

Have you been to China, actually? I've driven up to three of its borders, but I've never been. I went to go to Xinjiang years ago, had this whole fake itinerary mapped out, hostels, trains, a lot, and then they didn't give me the visa. Yeah, I haven't, but one of these days.

It depends how many of these episodes we do, I guess. It's true. We could get the ban. I mean, so we're going to get to Fujian a little bit more later on. But now, Sister Ping. So she's born in 1949 in Fuzhou. I think Fuzhou. So well after the Tong Wars are finished, Second World War is just over. Mao's Red Revolution is sweeping across China. Her real name, like I said, is Cheng Chui Ping.

And Smuggly's in the family, actually. So her father comes to the US in 1960 as a merchant sailor and then stays undocumented all the way up till 1977 when the authorities grab him and send him back. And then he just starts smuggling folks out himself. And like Sister Ping just gets this brutal rise and grind ethic from him. And the cultural revolution is all about sacrifice for the cause, violence for the cause, anything for the chairman.

She works on a family farm when she's young too, raising animals for meat and growing veg. And there's this incident in Patrick Ranke's book from her early life when she's in this rowing boat and it capsizes. And she says, quote, the two people who were lazy and sat back while others worked ended up dead. This taught me to work hard. I mean, Jesus Christ, next time a guy in a Patagonia vest tells you bootstrapped his AI firm with his old man's money, tell him about Sister Ping. She's like the Chinese Ayn Rand.

Yeah. How good would like an Instagram business influencer quote, would that be, you know, just like an image of a rowboat in the sunset. And the quote is when your rowboat capsizes, it's the lazy people who end up drowning and dying. And then just a bunch of people saying King in the comments like that, that would make me rise and grind for sure.

I'd rather see millions of those than a single Silicon Valley guy. As a young woman, so it's like Ping is the head of a local Red Guards, right? Who are these mass paramilitaries, mal-mobilized to terrorize his political opponents. But just like anywhere, anyone who's wearing Western clothes or even a teacher,

In the end, these guys ran rampage, killing and torturing across the country so badly that even the communist party disavows them ruling their quote, brave disorder damage and retrogression is sending the country back. I think up to 2 million people died in the cultural revolution. Like absolutely brutal. I think you're going to piss off a bunch of 16 year olds with anime Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to deal with them. That's on you. I knew, I knew the tankies. Yeah. Um,

As a young woman, Ping's dad heads off to the States, right? And by the time he's sent back, she's married to a guy called Chung Yik Tak, which is an awesome name. And she moves to Hong Kong into a place called Stonecutter Island, which from what I can make out is just part of Hong Kong today. And out there, the Fujinese people are considered lower stock than the Cantonese. She has to grind everything out back to the wall kind of stuff.

Eventually she succeeds wheeling and dealing clothes for expat Fujinese. By 1979, she's opened a garment factory just across from Hong Kong on the mainland in Shenzhen, which is kind of like China's Silicon Valley these days, or maybe just the whole of China is China's Silicon Valley.

We think today of China as like this crazy modern superpower, right? But the rapidness of that change from rural peasants emerging from the opium wars, Japanese occupation in Manchuria, Mao's Great Leap Forward, Red Terror, economic reforms, tech revolution, geez,

hyper-capitalist, communist, whatever the hell it is. I mean, I think it's actually understated. Like China's change in the last hundred years has been insane to put it mildly. Here's a good comparison. It's GDP per capita was 20 grand adjusted for Forex in 2019, 1981. So like just 40 years ago, it was 300 bucks. That's crazy. Damn. It's like if the whole country invested in the right meme coin. Yeah. Malcoin. Just like sold it at the right time. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

I'm selling it right now. And Fujian, it's actually one of China's wealthiest places. It's got access to ports, industry. There's always been stuff going on there. So early on when folks are getting smuggled out, they're mostly fleeing all the horrific shit the Communist Party is doing there. But later on, around the time Ping starts bringing people over, they're actually pretty well off by local standards. I guess today we call them economic migrants. I'm not sure what the term would be, but they just want a better life, right?

And by 1960, there were 236,000 Chinese in the US. By 1990, that's 1.6 million. And today, the Chinese community is the biggest Asian one in the US. And there are about 5 million folks in it. I mean, that's a lot. I mean, America doesn't have the most Chinese expats as Indonesia and Thailand, which I guess you'd expect. But it's like two thirds of those countries, which is pretty mad. And when you hear about the journey, the golden venture made, it's going to sound a lot wilder.

Smuggling, by the way. So smuggling, not trafficking. That's worth $6 billion a year, according to the UN. So there's a lot of gold in them hills. And snakehead? That wasn't a term just for Mr. Ping. Snakehead is just a Chinese term for the person at the head of the smuggling snake. Tailoring out from China. Yeah, cool name. Pretty basic explanation. So anyway, Ping's old man returns, right? And he loves Uncle Sam. What time frame are we talking about here? So this is like late 70s now.

So she's married. Her dad's coming back. She's kind of built something of a business.

And with his contacts there and with the merchant fleet, he's like the perfect guy to set up as a snakehead. Or if he's based in China, maybe he's a snake's ass or something. I don't know, but Ping gets on the expat wagon. And in Shenzhen, she gets involved in illegal banking to help Fujianese get their money from abroad back home, which is like a massive business. Like remittances are huge, man. Like they're worth about $700 billion today, which is the same size as the global sports market. And I don't know why I made that comparison.

um but yeah that should give you some idea how massive it is i'm telling you crypto man i mean that's uh that's seriously like that's a big part of of what people are aiming to do with it and if you guys just dm me i will give you the perfect coin to buy and the perfect wallet to send your money to to get in on this you need to give me that coin first man i need to get out of my debts

No, but seriously, reminiscences, I mean, people don't understand how much money coming back from the U.S. floats places like in Central America, especially a country like El Salvador or Guatemala. It really is...

Like a lifeblood to a lot of places, a lot of communities, a lot of countries even. And there's a lot of money to be made on that. And the little fees that are charged, Western Union, whatever it is, it's a massive, massive market. It's ripe for a turnkey end-to-end solution, right? Someone's got to walk in there.

And I happen to have the answer. Just, you know, give me your credit card number. Actually, like, I do a lot of reporting in the Philippines and they have a minister for like overseas workers and their remittances are insane. But anyway, I guess maybe just all of this shows how mercenary Ping was. Like she's happy to do anything if she benefits from being the head of the bloodthirsty Red Guard to making a penny off all these remittances. I don't know. I mean, she's clearly got a head for business.

And she's plugged into this Fujinese community who wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. I mean, it's written in the style she's going to become a snakehead, right? So in 1981, Ping uses her contacts to bag a job as a nanny in New York. And she lives at 14 Monroe Street, this complex called Nicaragua Village, which is one of those big brown blocks you kind of see heading across the bridges, pretty tumbledown area by the East Broadway F, which if I remember rightly, like there's like a statue of Confucius or something. I don't really remember much else.

And I also looked this up because I realized I never knew what a knickerbocker was. Do you know? I mean, I thought it was literally underpants. No, they're a fantastic basketball team that's had a really bad run the past 30 or 40 years, but they're in the playoffs now, so we're pretty happy about that. Okay. It's actually, it's just like an old term for people from Manhattan. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah, no idea. Must be like Dutch or something.

So Sister Ping's made it to the Big Apple, right? She's finally got this nice little apartment down by the East River. She's heading up in the world. And she kicks off the American dream and sets up a store selling stuff from Fujian, catering to all the homesick Fujianese who are moving into the area in their hundreds. New York is the biggest Chinatown in the US, by the way. So like, yeah, with Flushing, Sunset Park and Manhattan.

They're pretty far from each other, though. It's probably like a half an hour, 45 minute subway ride. So I don't know if you include them all in one. I wonder if Chinatown in San Francisco, which I know is huge and has been there forever, is bigger than each of these individually. I mean, I'm sure you could look it up, but I'm not going to do that right now. Yeah. Is that some New York exceptionalism there? I can hear some people in the Midwest groaning.

New York. No, I'm just saying like, I think, I think China, I'm saying the opposite. I think, I think Chinatown and, and I know Vancouver has a large Chinatown as well. I mean, I don't, yeah, yeah. Really big. Oh, cool. Yeah. London's one's pretty big as well. It's pretty cool. Um, I couldn't find the biggest one worldwide actually, but like, what are my favorite places to go back to the Philippines is Binondo, which is the Chinatown in Manila, which is like crazy place, art deco buildings, cool bars, food shacks. It's like, what are my favorite place in the world? I recommend people go when it's normal.

Have you ever heard that story that Napoleon used the Egyptian Sphinx for target practice and shot its nose off? Or maybe you've heard that a French astrologer named Nostradamus correctly predicted nearly 500 years of human history. Or maybe someone told you that the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi.

These stories are what I like to call historical myths. Great little tales that may or may not have any basis in historical fact. On Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story. It simply must be told.

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Still not sure? Then stick around to the end of the episode today to hear a teaser episode of our fake history. If you dig it, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And this is a quote from Patrick Radden Keefe's book. She was short and pudgy with a broad face, small wide set eyes and a hanged dog expression.

She worked long hours in the store, selling clothing and simple goods, and in a restaurant downstairs, which served Fujianese specialities like oyster cakes and fishball soup to the newly arrived peasants who'd settled in the neighborhood. When a truckload of supplies came, neighbors saw her hauling the goods into the shop. She could have been mistaken for one of those destitute peasants herself.

But Ping, as we kind of got into already, she's got absolutely no truck with being a peasant. She wants success. In the early 80s, she starts shipping villages from Fujian into the States on commercial airlines. This is the moment in the movie about her where, you know, Push It To The Limit starts playing and it's all the 80s fashion and she's just starting to rack up money. Oh, yeah. It's just like spoonfuls of fishbowl soup and people like putting back stuff on the baggage line.

So remember we were chatting about that in the Aquapolco episode, actually about these glory days of travel. So that went for smuggling too, right? You just rock up, take a seat and you have a few well-placed people along the way. And boom, you've got yourself a people smuggling snake. She's making 35 grand a pop off these guys. And she winds up owning the store and the restaurant and the five, four building they're both in. And she has three kids with Yiktak. So she's flying literally and figuratively.

And in New York, she's found the ultimate city for her hustle. In the 80s, the cities are washed with gangs and pretty much every district's got one. I mean, if you listen to our episode about Frank Matthews, the massive heroin dealer, we basically just watched Taxi Driver or any other film from that era. You'll know how run down and beaten up the place is. And the cops are easily bought, underpaid, or they're just not around full stop. Chinatown itself is stuffed to the brim with tons of gangs, which, yeah, you're going to get into, right, in another episode. Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a good one because there's...

There's a lot of really good writing on it, a lot of old New Yorker articles and stuff like that. These guys used to talk to the press, and it's kind of fascinating, but we'll get to that eventually. Yeah, I saw some pretty cool nicknames we might have to put on the top chart at the end of the year. Anyway, one of these gangs is the little-known Fuck Ching. The guy's ping uses to control the snakehead. Fuck Ching literally means young Fujinese, which is a big clue as to where they're from, of course.

And the fuck ching is founded by someone called Kin Fei Wong, aka Paul Wong and Kin Tai Chan. These guys are the dialogue or bosses of the movement. And then in 89 Wong has Chan killed the direction of group changes from petty crime to human trafficking. And these guys are affiliated with the Fookian, which is just another word for Fujian, by the way, the Fookian American association, which is a tongue. If you remember them, they look after the areas, Fujianese business.

These guys are still down in a building on East Broadway, by the way. I often wonder how much real organized crime passes through that area still these days. I mean, I know there's a lot of gambling, like they still have the gambling halls and all that. There's counterfeiting. There's definitely tenement buildings where recently immigrated people are sort of kept in not great situations. But I just kind of imagine now a lot of it is white collar internet credit card fraud type of stuff.

Yeah, it's like, I can't imagine it's kind of Johnny Leather Jacket and his little gang down the street. But, I mean, it's just like what you were saying about Chinatown. It's like it even looks kind of old as well, right? It hasn't changed at all. It kind of looks the same as I guess it was back then. It's changed a bit. I mean, there's definitely some fancy restaurants in there now, hipsters living in some of these buildings and all that sort of stuff. But it's really maintained the character.

for the neighborhood like a lot of other places haven't you know literally like i said a lot of folks have moved out there's still some great places there

But a lot of the areas now is kind of touristy. You know, it caters to tourists and things like that. And there aren't that many Italians living there anymore. Whereas Chinatown still has like a really authentic presence there in a way. Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, so the fuckching, this gang gets into heroin for a while, but it soon realizes like no match for the triads down the street. So it gets into snakehead business. It actually robs Sister Ping's house and grabs 20 grand in the fridge and

In 89, Ping is arrested herself by Canadian Mounties on one of her trips that she's taken out across the state, I guess. And she spends four months at a Pennsylvania prison for human trafficking.

When she gets out, that's when she realized she needs to change from the air routes to the sea. And the fees for the ocean routes are hiked up and policing is tougher. So she turns back to the fuck Ching who can help her keep an eye on who's paying and who isn't. And even reading this back, I realized that four months of human trafficking is a pretty light sentence. Canadians, man. There's just, you know, yeah, there's no laws there. Um,

But anyway, Ping knows how to use these guys, right? And the fuckching put up CCTV along the streets of Chinatown. And they patrol the neighborhood like some kind of low-key paramilitary group or gang, I guess. Once she gets folks into the US, she then places them in restaurants or into crime gangs, basically enslaved into work or other stuff to pay the fees back.

See, that's where it shifts from smuggling the trafficking, right? The whole enslavement thing or getting people to pay to be smuggled under false pretenses. I know that's another part of it, but I think if you're just charging an exorbitant fee, I think technically you're still –

a smuggler. But if you're charging an exorbitant fee, which comes on the back end of like, now you've got to work for this place to pay back and you're paying them slave wages and all that sort of stuff. And they're locked in somewhere like that is that's trafficking right there. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So like from what I can understand, like it's not even everyone that has to do this, right? It's just those who don't pay up. So it's like smuggling on the back end and trafficking on the front end. I don't know. Like it's, it's where she kind of muddies the water anyway.

And so if you don't pay up at all, you can definitely expect a visit from Ping's boys. Some people are beaten up, tortured. There's even some reports of deaths. And she uses tons of different routes, right? There's a bit in Ran and Keith's book where he describes Ping and Yiktak in a truck from Tijuana to L.A. with a bunch of migrants smuggled into the truck's hollowed out floor space right below them. So, I mean, it's pretty crazy.

I don't know what her kids are doing while she's away as well. But then in 1990, Ping gets a boost from none other than George Bush Sr. He offers legal status to Chinese who'd lived in the US at the time of the massacres in Tiananmen Square. This is a game changer. And it makes smuggling routes way more profitable if there's a green card at the end of the snake and not just economic prosperity.

This is like an unintended consequence, right? Because it's not like Bush Sr. is doing something awful. It kind of seems like the right thing to do. But yeah, I mean, sometimes these things just lead to these under-the-radar outcomes that end up –

maybe helping out people that are living this sort of, you know, underworld lifestyle in a way. Oh yeah, for sure. I don't mean, you know, as we're going to get into later on, like some people would say even that's good ultimately. But anyway, there's like, so this obviously just ramps up snakehead industry, like figures at the time. And there's this fascinating story that I read about how a load of kids from one school in a small Fujian village, this story is at foreign policy, by the way,

Uh, they come to the U S on mass, basically empty in this place of its entire youth. So many young men leave at the end of the nineties that the place is known as the widow's village. It was actually a similar story in, uh, in dreamland, which is a fantastic book about the opioid epidemic and heroin that count comes out of Mexico. And, um,

I'm blanking on the author's name, but if you look it up, it's one of the best books I think written about this subject. And the whole point is there is like a couple of small villages in Mexico where the young men all start leaving to the U.S. and they all start selling heroin. And it's kind of seen as like this rite of passage. I mean, there they go to Mexico, they go to the U.S., they sell heroin, they make their money, and they come back and they buy houses and cars and all that sort of stuff. But it's really interesting how...

how certain locales, even small towns or villages get known for this certain thing. And everyone, like all the young men, all the people capable will leave and, you know, get smuggled or trafficked into a certain area to do a certain business. Yeah. I need to put that on my reading list for this little trip I want to do. Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah.

I actually like it's the other way around in like Eastern Europe where the women left for the West to get jobs across the Iron Curtain. There's just like whole towns that were just young men with nothing else to do. And that's where you get all the neo-Nazism crazy like drugs, gangs and stuff. But anyway, yeah, this is this is a quote from an Irish Times piece by Conor O'Clary. And he says, quote, in Changlei, district of the provincial capital, Fuzhou.

Residents told me that people smuggling was regarded as more lucrative than cocaine dealing. Snakeheads demanding up to 50,000 euros for passage to England. I think that's like 75 to 80 grand in the US.

Relatives were typically asked to put down a 10% deposit and pay the rest when the criminals got confirmation that everything had gone well. The journey typically started at Fuzhou railway station with groups of 50 to 60 traveling by train to Beijing, then through Russia to Moscow and from there to English ferry ports with snakehead agents providing tickets and food. I mean, this is like a big, big industry and also like sounds like a fun route to actually go to do the other way around from London. So,

Ping is like rich, right? She's mega, mega rich. And in the word of Raden Keefe, she's, quote, the Cadillac of global human smuggling. So I don't know what I mean. That's kind of a mixed metaphor, isn't it? Sorry, Patrick. She's really a big deal. And people really do know her. Right. But the cops themselves are actually pretty clueless. Even after all this stuff's gone down in Canada and she's actually spent time inside in Pennsylvania.

By the time she sets up the trip on the Golden Venture, her fellas in the fuckching, they're already in disarray. Infighting is descending into violence and murder, just like regular gang stuff, but it seems she's losing her security. Then the ship sets sail. The Golden Venture has this wild trip from Asia to New York.

According to one survivor from Indonesia, it's stocked in, okay, here we go, Singapore, Bangkok, where the migrants and the snakehead enforcer balled, then Mombasa, Kenya, then down to the Cape of Good Hope, that's Cape Town, basically, then across the Atlantic to Brazil, Central America, and the US. It takes them 120 days, which is twice the time it took the pilgrims on the Mayflower to get to the States.

Damn. Yeah, what a journey. And when the Golden Venture runs aground and all these people who've like just been living off rice cakes and nuts for all this time stumble up the Rockaways and die, it totally opens New Yorkers' eyes to this like gigantic smuggling venture going on under the city's nose. And Sister Ping, being a female organized criminal, gets tons of attention. She escapes from the US somehow, God knows how.

She heads back to her small village in Fujian, but she continues to work in the trade. Then in 1998, another ship carrying folks she's trafficking capsizes off the coast of Guatemala, killing 14 Chinese passengers. She's arrested two years later in Hong Kong and brought back to the US to face trial. The FBI, by the way, it reckons Sister Ping made over 40 million bucks from her work. And this is from their webpage on her. Quote,

During the early 1990s, she ruled her enterprise from a variety store in Manhattan's Chinatown. Using her illegal proceeds, she also ran a legitimate travel agency and real estate company. Many customers were illegal aliens she smuggled into the country. At the height of her operations, she owned restaurants, a clothing store, and real estate in Chinatown, as well as apartments in Hong Kong and a farm in South Africa. I mean, that really wasn't a great time to be owning a farm in South Africa.

Yeah, what a wild investment. I bet there's more to that story. It kind of sounds like her ships often stopped in Cape Town or right by it. So I wonder if there's something else illicit involved in that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no mention of drugs that I can find with her, which is surprising given what she's doing.

But this FBI report, right, it neatly skips over the fact that for ages, Sister Ping was actually being used as a snitch for other smugglers while running her own operation and a gang of dangerous young men, which kind of begs the question, like, what was the point of running her as an informant in the first place?

Sister Ping goes on trial in 2005, and it splits the city. On one side, there are prosecutors, authorities, and the media saying, like, this woman is evil. She's responsible for the misery and death of so many people. On the other side, there's tons of folks in Chinatown. They come forward to Sister Ping's defense, explaining how she's helped whole generations of Chinese escape poverty. Some Chinese-language newspapers in NYC call her a, quote, immigration hero.

This is another quote. Without Sister Ping, I could never have dreamed of coming here. Zhang Yuanjing, 69, told the New York Times. Sister Ping was very generous and gave liberally to the poor and the needy, another man tells the reporter. She always helped people who were caught in difficult situations. I mean, I guess as always, the truth is somewhere in between.

Yeah, it's sort of like we talked about in the beginning. And I just realized, too, we did another episode. I did an episode on human trafficking in Burma with the Rohingya. And during that story, when I was reporting it out years ago, you had the traffickers who were just some of the most brutally violent people I've ever seen.

reported about or done anything on. And then you had smugglers who were doing the same thing. They were getting people out of these really poverty-stricken, repressed, oppressive areas illegally into places where they could work and do whatever else. And it's just, you know, these kind of, these two...

things operate in the same capacity in a way. They do the same thing, but just completely different methods. And I guess there's a lot of people that operate probably in that gray area. I think you could say that maybe someone charging an exorbitant fee that's tens of thousands of dollars to a dirt poor person could be seen as a trafficker as well. I mean, I guess this is a conversation for the NGOs and the lawyers to have about what those words mean. But I think we just wanted to get across how

what these things mean and how it could sometimes be in a gray area. Yeah, it's tough. Like it's, it's not simple black and white. Um, so sister ping ends up dying from cancer in a federal prison in Texas in 2014, when she was set, she was serving 35 years sentence for a trafficking crimes. Um, and since she died, I mean, trafficking hasn't died down. I mean, smuggling definitely hasn't.

I mean, British listeners or European listeners might remember a 2019 story where 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a shipping container in Essex. Last December, two guys were found guilty of manslaughter for those deaths. There's a great feature about this by the German paper Die Zeit, by the way, which I've put on the reading list for the episodes. Don't worry, it's in English. And...

Of course, like all of these people getting smuggled across borders from Africa into Europe, which we've got an episode on soon. Tons of stuff happening in Cambodia. I mean, not to mention all the stuff that's happening in America, Central America. Like smuggling human trafficking is a lucrative business. It's worth billions a year. And none of these guys are Instagramming these crimes.

I mean, the route from Central America into the U.S. is as brutal as ever. You know, I've done a bunch of work down there and you have large numbers of people from El Salvador, from Guatemala to Honduras trying to come up here. And it's very profitable. The cartels have taken some sort of control or at least charge a tax on it. One Salvadoran coyote, he told me that he has to cut deals with the cartels when his clients, I guess you'd call them, move through their areas. He essentially gives them all a password.

that is agreed upon with the cartel. So if you're going through the area and, you know, the cartels stop you and say, what are you doing here? If you give them the password, they'll let you go because they're getting paid off by the, uh, by the smuggler himself to let them go through. But yeah, it's, you can imagine what happens if you don't pay. I know there's just brutal stories of murder, torture, and rape going on in these areas. People don't,

seem to comprehend how dangerous and how violent it is to move from central america through mexico into the u.s and the people that are that are sending their themselves their families their kids through this they know how violent it is that's part i mean that they're still willing to do that because the situation they're in a lot of people fleeing el salvador i mean that you might consider them economic migrants but they're they're fleeing you know death threats from people that will follow through on it these gangs will follow through so it's uh

It's a pretty harrowing story. And, you know, we interviewed at one point in this documentary, I did a mother and father, you know, we had to protect their identities who were sending their daughters on this route that were like 12 or 13 years old with people. And they know how scary it is. And they're really caught, you know, between two really brutal choices. And they were petrified of what was going to happen, but they felt like they had no choice. Yeah. I mean, I was covering that for my Nigerian stuff out there as well. And these young women who were getting like,

basically tricked by local religious leaders into going into Europe as prostitutes. And I mean, yeah, the desperation involved in these kind of like this kind of industry is pretty unfathomable really. Um, so I mean, yeah, like I'm saying, like the most common form of trafficking or smuggling is actually for sexual exploitation. Um,

And if you go on the internet, actually, just to clear this up, it's so common that there's even another human trafficker from China named Ping on the internet.

a guy called Jing Ping Chen, who was bringing people into Britain in the late 90s. This Ping, who's also a woman, is also thought to have brought almost a quarter of a million Chinese into Europe. And her organization was linked to the bodies of 58 folks found in an airtight truck in Dover, which is like on the coast of Britain in 2000. So, yeah, there's a lot of people doing this, but that's Sister Ping. I mean, she lived quite the American dream, right? I mean, it's interesting reading that.

Like Patrick Radden Keefe's book and seeing how we have this concept of the American dream as something just progresses in a straight line, right? The tight, nice little narrative, the movie kind of story. Kids get more American and the third generation gets even more American, whatever that means, than the parents. But like the reality is messy, I guess. And there are so many enclaves and languages and pressures and gangs in the States, any nation on earth.

So like for many of my millions of migrants, I guess the American dream is it's kind of maze that they're wandering through. And it's not so easy to pick it apart. Like we're talking about smuggling and trafficking. Yeah.

It sounds kind of like you're just mad that nobody talks about the British dream. I'll have to come back to you on what the hell that would even be these days. A couple of pints and a bunch of fried food, is that it? That's what I'm planning on. I mean, I'm going to get a German passport, so that's my British dream. Yeah. Thank you guys again for tuning in.

patreon.com slash the underworld podcast for bonus episodes which are mostly interviews uh we should have our merch page back up thanks to the good folks at podcast one who i think we probably mentioned this in a couple early episodes we're with that network right now they are fantastic individuals and yeah thanks for sticking with us

The 2020 presidential campaign in the United States was a pretty wild spectacle to watch, no matter what your political perspective may be. But there was one particular bit of rhetoric that jumped out at me. It was a criticism of Donald Trump leveled by Bernie Sanders that made use of a well-known historical tidbit. Here's what Sanders had to say.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs. The senator was riffing on one of the best known stories from the history of ancient Rome.

That is that during a great fire that consumed the Roman capital in the year 64 AD, the self-absorbed Emperor Nero not only did nothing to help, but laughed and played the fiddle while his city burned. It's the kind of story that many people know, even if they know absolutely nothing else about Roman history.

For a whole lot of people, the history of Rome is basically just Julius Caesar, beware the Ides of March, and Nero fiddled as Rome burned. So, in a way, it's not surprising that this story has proved so enduring. It's just too perfectly symbolic.

If you need a historical example of the ruling elite being hopelessly and heartlessly out of touch, I mean, this is it. Nothing quite says, I could care less, like playing a jaunty little tune on the fiddle. But we really should ask, is any of this true?

Did the emperor of Rome really sit back and put on an impromptu hoedown as his city crumbled beneath his feet? Well, here's the thing. If he did, there was no way he played the fiddle. In 64 AD, the violin hadn't even been invented yet. The instrument as we know it today wouldn't come into being for another 1400 years at least.

To give you some historical context, Nero playing the fiddle is basically the same as Charlemagne shredding the electric guitar. In 64 AD, the violin was an impossibly futuristic instrument. But we do know that Nero was an amateur musician and was particularly fond of an instrument known as the lyre, which was a small Greek harp.

He was known to put on long recitals for his advisors where attendance was mandatory. So the original story was that Nero actually played the lyre and sang as the great fire ravaged Rome. But there's good reason to doubt that story too.

The most trustworthy Roman sources inform us that the Emperor Nero wasn't even in Rome when the Great Fire broke out. In fact, we're told that the Emperor rushed back to the city as soon as he was informed so he could personally oversee the relief effort.

So Nero didn't fiddle as Rome burned, and he didn't play the liar. He didn't sing. He didn't sit back all smug and laugh as his people suffered. He learned about the fire through messengers and did his best to respond. Now, that doesn't mean that Nero was somehow a good emperor or even a good guy. In fact, he was probably one of the worst messengers.

But the fiddle, well, that just wasn't a thing. Nero fiddling as Rome burned is a perfect example of what I call a historical myth, a little legend that got wrapped up in the transmission of our history and often gets repeated as a historical fact.

My name is Sebastian Major, and on the podcast Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told. The podcast is one part storytelling and one part historical detective work.

I do my best to bring these weird stories from our past to life, while also asking probing questions about whether or not we should believe them, and how these misunderstandings took root in the first place. On Our Fake History, the goal is to celebrate everything that's weird and wonderful about the past, while also thinking critically and trying to grab on to the slippery concept known as the truth.

If Our Fake History sounds like it's for you, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.