The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

By Patrick Radden Keefe

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 multi-million dollar business smuggling people.

“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
 
Keefe reveals the inner workings of 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 illegal 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9780385530217

Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of 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, 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 on the origins of the Scorpions’ power ballad, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020. He is the recipient of the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.