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''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.
About the author
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.
