Sister Ping was a middle-aged mother in Chinatown who ran several businesses. Part of what I ended up doing was spending years kind of peeling back the layers of this criminal enterprise that she had which wasn't just human smuggling there were all kinds of things she was doing but if you talk to people in the neighborhood they would say oh Sister Ping we love Sister Ping. There was a sense of her as this kind of home-spun hard-working modest self-effacing character.
Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe joins us on the podcast to tell the story of an unlikely criminal mastermind, Sister Ping - a middle-aged, hardworking woman who is highly respected among her community. Originally from Fujian province, China, for years she runs an incredibly lucrative people smuggling business from New York's Chinatown until she comes into trouble with violent gangsters and then later the FBI. In conversation with our host Poppy Damon, they discuss immigration, the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and the questions of who gets to stay. They also speak about Patrick's involvement in the Oscar-nominated documentary starring Nan Goldin and directed by Laura Poitras, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed.
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