The Snakehead

The sweeping history of the American dream, Manhattan's Chinatown underbelly, and the grandma mastermind behind one of the largest human smuggling rings.

''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 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.

Autorentext
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the bestsellers Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (a collection of his New Yorker stories), and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (named one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times and now streaming as a limited series on Disney+), as well as two previous critically-acclaimed books, The Snakehead and Chatter. He is the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020, and the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He lives in New York.

Klappentext

The sweeping history of the American dream, Manhattan's Chinatown underbelly, and the grandma mastermind behind one of the largest human smuggling rings.