Snakehead

‘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.’ – TimeIn this thrilling panorama 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 kaleidoscopic 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

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., Essential reading. . . . A rich, beautifully told story, so suspenseful and with so many unexpected twists that in places it reads like a John le Carré novel., A powerful piece of reportage about the violent underworld of New York’s Chinatown, A masterwork . . . In this single tale about a global criminal, Keefe finds a story of quintessentially American hope., Painstakingly reported and vividly told. . . . As immigration reform languishes in Washington . . . everyone involved--from policymakers to activists to the undocumented--would be wise to read The Snakehead.

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the international bestsellers Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (winner of the Orwell Prize), and Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks. He is also the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, about the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.