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The Snakehead

An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Narrator Feodor Chin

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Length 12 hours 57 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 CWA GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION

‘Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown, complete with gun battles, a ruthless kingpin and a mountain of cash. Except that it’s all true.’ – Time

In this thrilling story of real-life events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown, managed a multimillion-dollar business smuggling people.

In The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe reveals the inner workings of Cheng Chui Ping aka Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of undocumented immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them.

Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a true crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.

‘A powerful piece of reportage about the violent underworld of New York’s Chinatown’ - The Times

Politics & Economy True Crime Nonfiction

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of five books, including Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, which received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year, and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. The recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, he is also the creator and host of the 8-part podcast "Wind of Change," about the strange intersection of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian and has been downloaded more than 10 million times. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.