Introducing THE CHINATOWN STING

Here’s a preview of a new podcast, The Chinatown Sting from our friends at Pushkin Industries. In the late 1980s, a group of women connected through the mahjong parlors in Manhattan’s Chinatown were caught in a massive undercover drug bust. But this bust was just the beginning of an even bigger case. Host Lidia Jean Kott and co-reporter Shuyu Wang interview sources who’ve never spoken on record before, including witnesses, defendants, and federal prosecutors, to reconstruct a case that still has repercussions today. In this episode, we meet Tina Wong, a young mother who found herself in the middle of the operation with two choices—go to prison, or risk her life to bring down the man at the helm. Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get podcasts and binge the entire season, ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Sign up on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus

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• 1:03Speaker 01

  Hey everyone, Chris here. As an infamous America listener, chances are you're drawn to crime stories which reveal lesser-known parts of American history and the collateral damage that comes from the inner workings of the criminal underworld. The show I'm about to share with you does exactly that. There are lots of stories out there about well-known gangsters and mobsters. We've told many of their stories on this show. But there are surprisingly few stories told about the powerful gangs who ruled Manhattan's Chinatown in the 1980s. On Chinatown Sting, host Lydia Jean Kott and co-reporter Xu Yu interview sources who've never spoken on the record to reconstruct a years-long effort to bring down one of the most powerful gangs in Chinatown, no matter the cost.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  In the late 1980s, federal authorities received a tip that billions of dollars' worth of heroin was being mailed to New York City inside boxes filled with tea. The investigation would uncover a network of drug smugglers who used women who were recruited at mahjong parlors in Chinatown. Women like Tina Wong. Tina was a young mother who was asked to accept some packages in the mail. She'd be paid for it. When the feds were tipped off to her involvement, Tina had two choices. Spend years in prison, or risk her life to help the government bring down the man at the helm, one of New York's most notorious gangsters, Johnny Ang, aka Machine Gun Johnny. Here's a full episode preview of The Chinatown Sting.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  I hope you enjoy it. And if you do, find The Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to binge the entire season early and ad-free, join Pushkin Plus. Subscribe on the Chinatown Sting show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  On February 9th, 1988, David Sheehan was working his usual shift. He was a US Customs Agent at JFK Airport. His phone rang.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  I was talking to a Customs Agent in California who says, "Hey, we just got three shipments of heroin and three different mail parcels. Do you guys want the case?" So I said, "Absolutely, we'll take it."

• 3:26Speaker 02

  The parcels were on their way from Hong Kong to New York. Customs agents were looking inside packages more often, ever since President Reagan and Congress had ramped up the war on drugs. David Sheehan was part of this special task force to combat narcotic smuggling. So they got calls about drugs coming into New York City all the time. This call was special, though, because inside each of these packages was about $7 million worth of heroin.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  In today's money, that's something like $18 million per package.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Peter Mettaser was an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He really wanted to know who was waiting for those boxes.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  I knew it was going to be a big case because there was a lot of heroin. And the focus was on China white heroin at the time because a lot was coming into New York. A lot of heroin was coming in from China to Hong Kong, then into New York. And it sounded like a good opportunity to work a big case.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  On February 17th, the boxes arrived at the airport.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Peter and David knew they were at the beginning of something big, but they didn't know how big.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  My name is Lydia Jean Kott. As a journalist, I often report on law and power. I've written an audiobook about the Supreme Court, covered the federal trial of a crypto billionaire, and investigated the fallout of the legalization of sports betting. I'm interested in how, throughout American history, we've used the law as a tool to make our country both more and less just. A few years ago, I came into possession of a suitcase. It was full of thousands of pages of court documents. They were all about a case a prosecutor spent years trying to build against a criminal who refused to be caught. There was mention of a criminal syndicate powerful enough to take on the Italian mafia,

• 5:36Speaker 02

  an attempted assassination, a global manhunt, congressional hearings, international press coverage, a standing-room-only trial. And none of it would have happened without a group of ordinary people. People who, in time, would have to make a decision about who to protect and who to betray. But that afternoon in 1988, one of these people was just waiting for a box.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  This is The Chinatown Sting. Episode 1: Lucky Bird.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Court documents would later describe the exact contents of each box that landed in New York. Twenty small bricks, made up of white compressed powder, wrapped up in either brown tape or duct tape. In one of the packages, the heroin was hidden inside these red and white tea boxes that had Chinese characters on them. In the other two, the heroin was hidden among stuffed animals. Now Peter McTesser and the DEA could get to work. Step one: take out the heroin and replace it with decoy heroin. It was made out of wooden blocks, cut and taped together.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Except you leave a sample of the heroin in there. We'd put the stuffed animals back in. Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it. That was our goal.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  So when someone on the receiving end looked inside the boxes, they should notice nothing weird. Step two: the feds hid thin wires and a transmitter inside each box. Whoever was looking through the box would break the wires, and that would trigger a silent electric signal that would be picked up by these special machines in the hands of law enforcement. And this receiver had only two signals.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  It was a slow beep. You're listening in to like a computer almost, and you hear the beep, beep, beep. And then when a rapid beep goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, that means it's been opened.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  The DEA agents set up their trap as fast as they could. They didn't want the people who were waiting for the packages to get suspicious.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  They know how long it takes from point A to point B. So as soon as you get a day or two late, you know, your investigation could be compromised.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Step three: each of these boxes had to be dropped off at exactly the same time. They were to be delivered by postal inspectors who were working undercover. Vans full of agents were waiting nearby, listening in on their little computers and ready to spring into action.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  You have to cover all the different parts of the locations, because if someone takes the box and runs out the door, then we have heroin on the street.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  On February 23rd, the mail packages, the vans full of agents, and the undercover postal workers, they were all ready to go. Two of the packages were addressed to Manhattan's Chinatown, and one was going to Brooklyn. Peter and the customs agent, David Sheehan, followed the two packages that were going to Chinatown.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  The thrill of the chase really becomes, you know, it just, it sort of takes you over.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  That day, like on any other day, Chinatown was bustling. The sidewalks were crowded with vendors selling cucumbers, eggplants, bok choy, dried mushrooms. People were walking shoulder to shoulder on the main streets. There were neon signs everywhere saying, "Go this way or go that way." And there was always a truck somewhere squeezing its way down these narrow streets full of fresh wares. That's all to say Chinatown wasn't an easy place to find parking, especially not for a van full of non-Asian undercover federal agents.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  We were underneath the highway in the hand, the East River Drive. And that's where we had 30 agents all lined up, ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  There were two wired-up packages addressed to two apartment buildings right next door to each other. So the undercover postal inspector buzzed at one address, and then he buzzed at the other. No answer. He left behind mail slips. Peter and David waited to see what would happen next, and waited some more.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  One of the guys from DEA took a leak in the East River. And believe it or not, two sanitation police guys came up to him and said, "Hey, you can't pee in the river."

• 10:23Speaker 02

  David Sheen could feel his hopes of catching anyone in Chinatown pissing away, too. Nobody was coming to collect the packages, even though their street value was supposed to be huge. Maybe someone had tipped them off? The whole operation now hinged on the third box, the one that was going to Brooklyn.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  We heard the beep go off.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Peter Meteser rushed over to the Brooklyn address to meet the agents there.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  We knocked on the door or broke down the door. There's the package open, the stuffed animals were out.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Peter found himself face to face with a 38-year-old woman, a mother of two, an accountant at a bank. Peter explained she was under arrest.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Read her rights, you know, in Cantonese and Mandarin. I forgot exactly which one it was. She was very upset, crying. And your goal is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  By "move up the ladder," Peter means this woman might have information that would help the feds figure out who's in charge of importing the heroin. The first rung of the ladder was right here, in this house. Peter needed to know the box's next destination. And to find that out, he needed this woman to act totally normal. She needed to call whoever she was going to call after the box's arrival. They needed her to go from being an accomplice to being a cooperating witness, quickly.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  I tell her, "The amount of heroin here you're facing, 10 years to life, because it's so much heroin. This is your time to help out yourself. We can't guarantee you how much jail time you do, but it'll be brought to the attention of the judges. We'll know how much you've helped out in this case. And it's a courageous decision to make." We try to tell them, "We think it's the right one to make, to help us, then we help you."

• 12:22Speaker 02

  But the person this woman was going to call was her friend. If she cooperated, that would mean betraying her friend. But if she didn't cooperate, she might not see her two children grow up. She had to make an impossible decision as the agents hovered over her. The clock was ticking.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  This woman agreed to cooperate. Her name is in the court documents, but she never responded to her request for an interview. Anyway, her name's not that important to the story. What's important is the chain of events she set off by giving the federal agents the name of her contact.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Over the next few days, agents were arresting moms like her all over New York City.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  It was like the first time we've ever seen anything like that, really. Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these, you know, these large amounts of heroin. And I'm sure they knew it was drugs.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  It turned out that all of these women, women who received packages of heroin sent to their homes, all knew each other from playing mahjong.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Mahjong is a game of luck and skill. You play with domino-like tiles instead of with cards. They have different designs on them: stones, bamboos, dragons. And the goal is to end up with four pairs of three tiles and one pair of two tiles. That's called the eyes. Different hands are with different amounts of points. There were mahjong parlors all over Chinatown. These are places where people could play for a bit of money or a lot of money. The parlors were a place to catch up with old friends and make new ones. But now, many of these friends were under arrest. And they were being forced to turn on one another.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Customs agent David Sheehan was doing a lot of that forcing.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  We're going to seize all your assets. We're going to take all your kids away from you. And you're going to go to jail, and they're going to go to foster care and things of that nature, you know?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  You're doing that because you really need their help to get to the person at the top, I guess.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, you need somebody. You know, you need more than one person to cooperate.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Because you need it to be corroborated?

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  After I got that suitcase full of court documents on the Chinatown drug trials, I realized I need help from someone who spoke Cantonese. That's the language that's spoken by many of the people in the documents.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  My name's Shuyu Wang. I'm a practicing attorney in the city of New York.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  I met Shuyu through a friend of a friend. We met up at a bar and I told her all about the Chinatown case.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  It was a very interesting story to me personally. I came from the Cantonese area in China, which is like super close to Hong Kong, where a lot of those people in this story were originally from. My major in college was actually journalism. So that sort of like opened up a part of my brain.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  So Shuyu joined me in reporting out this story. We went over court documents together and we visited Chinatown together for months and months.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  For most of the time that I've lived in New York, Chinatown's been a place where I'd get dinner or drinks with friends. For Shuyu, it was a neighborhood where she got groceries.

• 15:53Speaker 05

  There are certain ingredients that's a rare find in a non-Chinese grocery stores, like chicken feet. There are like certain things that I can only get here at a good price.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  But we've been learning that Chinatown's a place with 150 years of history.

• 16:14Speaker 06

  So Chinatowns today, we think of as these tourist destinations. And you know, they're fun places to go to get, you know, tchotchkes or dim sum and have kind of a colorful urban experience or, you know, a fun meal or something. But the reason Chinatowns exist in the first place is really about a history of racial segregation.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  That's Ellen Wu. She teaches history at Indiana University Bloomington. And she talked to us about how Chinatowns arose in American cities in the face of anti-Asian laws and violence.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  U.S. immigration laws also helped create Chinatowns, especially a law called the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed in 1882.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Another historian we spoke to is Michael Luo. He's an editor at The New Yorker, and he wrote a book on Chinese immigration called Strangers in the Land.

• 17:08Speaker 07

  It was the Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Field, who wrote the opinion, referred to the Chinese as strangers in the land, talking about how they could never assimilate with our people. And I feel like the stranger label remains imprinted on Asian-Americans today.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Shuyu says she's felt what Michael Luo was describing, especially when she first moved to the US for law school.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  So I was kind of surprised at how friendly people were surrounding me, but also to that I'm sensing like there are people out there that are just kind of like, "Oh, you're different." And you can tell by their gestures, by their facial expressions, things like that.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  As a white person, I've never experienced that. But I do know how bad it feels to be viewed as a stranger. My family moved to the US from Poland when I was eight. My English was kind of weird, but I wanted to fit in so badly. When I look at pictures of myself, it's embarrassing. I was like a parody of what I thought an American kid was supposed to look like.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And the more Shuyu and I looked into this Chinatown case, the more we came to see that it's also about someone who is trying, in their own way, to feel like they belonged.

• 18:45Speaker 08

  Wong Tina. Date of birth? 1958, in New York, New York. Chinese female. Citizen? US. Height? 5'9". Weight? 120 pounds. Brown eyes. Black hair.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  As Shuyu and I went through that suitcase full of documents together, we kept coming across the name of one woman, sometimes called Tina Wong, sometimes called Tina Ase.

• 19:12Speaker 08

  In or about in between early August 1987 and late December 1987, within the Eastern District of New York and elsewhere, the defendant, Tina Ase, did knowingly and willfully import into the United States from a place outside thereof, a quantity of heroin, a Schedule I narcotic drug-controlled substance.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  So this is a complaint against Tina Ase. What situation is Tina in if they have this information?

• 19:44Speaker 05

  So like, first of all, they got an informant, which said, "I delivered the packages to Tina." And I'm just quite interested in the last paragraph, where they said that they had a recording between informant and the ultimate recipient of the drugs. Tina is kind of like a middleman, just like someone caught in between, who gave her the package and who she was supposed to give the packages to. And apparently, the prosecution had information from both ends. So Tina was kind of trapped in a situation. Like, she can't get away with it.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  At first, Tina just seemed like another low-level drug smuggler. She was one of about a half a dozen people federal authorities arrested. This was after that accountant in Brooklyn got caught with that wired-up package, setting this whole investigation off. But as Shuyu and I went through the court documents, it started to look like Tina was actually at the absolute center of the government's case. Without her, everything might have played out entirely differently. Shuyu and I were desperate to talk to Tina. She, like all the women who received mail packages, had never spoken to a reporter before about this time. But I found what I thought was her address. It was in Manhattan, and we rang her bell. Twice, three times, she was never home.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Then, we showed up with a box of Italian cookies that we had picked up from a bakery nearby. I know that sounds weird, but I thought it would seem friendlier than showing up with just a microphone.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  It was a brick apartment building.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  We entered the building not knowing if Tina is in this room this time, but we went up to her floor, went to her door.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  The door opened. This woman was standing there. And I said, "Nothing."

• 21:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think I was the one who broke the silence, right?

• 21:30Speaker 00

  So, we're the gentlemen that came here. So, I just wondered if we can have a session about this project. You from?

• 21:41Speaker 05

  She's like, "Yeah, come on in."

• 21:43Speaker 02

  And what were your impressions of her?

• 21:46Speaker 05

  She looked cool. She's got short haircut. And she's got super thick eyeliner, I would say.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, she had like black eyeliner.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  And also, she looks totally unbothered, even though we're clearly bothering her and her family. She's kind of like, "Well, okay, they've been bugging me for long enough. Let's just see what they have to offer."

• 22:07Speaker 02

  What do you remember about the apartment?

• 22:10Speaker 05

  So, it's very homey, I would say. And there's a huge cage in the center of the living room. And that might be one of the very first things that you would notice once you step in.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  It was an African gray parrot inside. I think the first thing I said, right, was, "Tell me about your parrot."

• 22:28Speaker 09

  Oh, that's a lucky bird. And I had him for like 25 years.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  If he says something, I want to record it.

• 22:38Speaker 09

  Well, he knows you're strangers, so he won't talk. But if he gets to know you, then he starts to talk.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  We weren't actually there to interview the parrot. We wanted Tina's story.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  She was born in the 1950s.

• 22:52Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  She was living outside of Chinatown at a time when Chinatown was way smaller. She was one of the few Chinese kids.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Her dad was Chinese and her mom was Portuguese. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 09

  We were like the first Chinese fam-- I mean, not the first, but the few. We used to fight. We used to get picked on a lot. Everybody that was Asian used to get picked on one time or another. Stupid kid stuff. Like ching chong. And then, you know, you fight back.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  It's weird now to think of a Chinatown without kids. But for a long time, there just weren't very many Chinese kids in the US, period. The Chinese Exclusion Act made it hard for any new Chinese immigrants to come. And it took nearly a century, until 1965, for Congress to finally ban immigration quotas based on ethnicity. Tina was seven years old at the time when all these new Chinese immigrants started to show up, and Chinatown was becoming a family neighborhood. Tina talked about how it was so great to be included in this new world of all these kids her age, but still, she felt a little different from them.

• 24:03Speaker 09

  I think they were kind of a little racist on me, since I wasn't, you know, like, because I'm only half-Chinese. There was a little racism there, but that didn't stop me. Yeah, so that's why I learned MJ, mahjong. And, you know, when I would play MJ with them, and I beat them, then I feel, then they go, "Yeah, the Juk Sing is pretty good."

• 24:34Speaker 02

  And Juk Sing is someone who is American-born Chinese?

• 24:38Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  As an adult, Tina kept playing mahjong. She went to these special places that were kind of like speakeasies. You had to know someone who knew about them, and then they could tell you where they were. Tina's favorite was on the second floor of a building on one of Chinatown's main streets, Canal Street.

• 24:56Speaker 09

  It's like a Chinese green wall paint, smoky, and a lot of mahjong noise.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Is there music playing, or is it just people talking in the clack of the tiles?

• 25:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think it's just the clacking of the tiles. People don't want to hear the music, it might disturb them.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  They're focused. And what sort of people were there?

• 25:20Speaker 09

  Old people, young people, all kinds.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  And how good did you get, on like a scale of 1 through 10?

• 25:28Speaker 09

  I didn't have, like, really good skills, but I had luck.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  She was hanging out in these mahjong parlors and she was getting lucky. Then, her best friend from when she was little came up to her and said, "You know, I have this proposal for you. I was wondering if you could receive a package in the mail for me. Don't worry about what's in the box, basically, but if you receive this box, it'll be worth your while."

• 25:56Speaker 09

  All you gotta do is receive the package. Don't have to open it, don't have to do this. Just accept it and that's it.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Shuyu, do you remember if Tina ever broke the law before this happened?

• 26:10Speaker 05

  Gambling, if that counts.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, she got into some fights, I think she said.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, but like, street fights.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, nothing serious.

• 26:18Speaker 05

  She's not like a risk seeker. I would say like she will never voluntarily invite herself into troubles. I think she needed money at the time, just trying to like, support herself better. It sounded like an easy deal for her.

• 26:35Speaker 09

  We're poor kids, we don't have that kind of money. So, to have that kind of money, you take a chance. And I think, um, a lot of people would probably have to take the chance.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  So after she, you know, told her friend she would do it, she waited a few weeks.

• 26:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  And then her friend called her and said, "You know, the box is gonna arrive like somewhere in these three days."

• 26:58Speaker 09

  Yeah, when it came, I took it home. I put it in my room and I put it in the closet with my clothes on top.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  And then she called her friend and was like, "I have the box, what should I do?"

• 27:07Speaker 09

  They told me to open it, so I opened it. And there was like Chinese on the box. I think they were tea boxes.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  And her friend said, "Okay, take one of these tea boxes and bring it to this woman who lived like a seven-minute walk away."

• 27:21Speaker 09

  I wasn't scared because I didn't really know the magnitude of the danger.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  So Tina kept accepting the boxes.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Sometimes they came through the mail. Sometimes a friend brought them to her apartment and she would carry them on.

• 27:35Speaker 09

  I was bringing down one box and it was kinda like open. So I like looked at it and it was like a... Like a brick. When I touched it, it was kind of dusty. And I think I went like this and it went in my mouth. And I said, oh, my God, the taste.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Well, it was heroin. Yeah, it was like $7 million worth of heroin. Her friend gave her a, like, a plastic bag or a paper bag. Full of cash? Yeah, it was a big brick of cash. Wow, so like, as if in a movie.

• 28:07Speaker 09

  Getting the money. It was fun, I'm not gonna lie. You don't think of tomorrow, just think of that day. You know? And what you could do with it. It's like being queen, queen for a day.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  What's the first thing you bought?

• 28:24Speaker 09

  Hmm, I don't know. I think I bought the most expensive food, like lobster, and took it home and ate it all by myself.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  You ordered a full lobster?

• 28:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think I ordered a double lobster.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  And then you brought it to your apartment? And then you just ate it by yourself?

• 28:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, I watched TV and ate it.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  And you were like, life is good.

• 28:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, I can have this every day.

• 28:50Speaker 09

  Because I love lobster.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  She hid all of the cash that she was getting in a drawer in her bedroom and used it for all sorts of stuff. The dentist, bets on mahjong, jewelry. Tina bought a car, a BMW. And the pinnacle of all of this is when she and her best friend went on a trip to Asia together, a trip that would turn out to be a very big deal in the case later. And on that trip, her world kind of got expanded. She got to see things she had never seen before in her life. Like, she talked about how when she and her friend arrived in Indonesia, they saw this huge beach that looked like it was covered with black rock. But when she got closer, she realized those were actually crabs.

• 29:30Speaker 09

  It's like a thousand of them. So it looked like the rock is black. But when you go there, it's white because all the crabs, like, walk away. It's like thousands.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Was this fun? When you're, like, getting these packages, doing these trips?

• 29:43Speaker 09

  It was fun.

• 29:45Speaker 09

  I feel that if you take any ordinary person and you give them a trip and you take them here and you can go shopping, nobody's gonna say no. I mean, you know, they're not gonna say they didn't have fun.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  According to the court docs, Tina made about $15,000 for receiving these boxes. And that's not including other perks, like the plane ticket to Asia. But while the money was fun, it wasn't drastically changing her life the way that she imagined it would. And her friend was asking her to do more and more. She was getting bossy. Tina had a bad feeling.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Tina was right to be anxious about her luck running out. This was the late 80s. President Ronald Reagan had doubled down on the war on drugs.

• 30:33Speaker 10

  We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We're running up a battle flag. We can fight the drug problem, and we can win.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  In 1986, Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act that created new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. And that same year, Congress began holding hearings.

• 30:57Speaker 11

  Today, we'll learn more about criminal groups of Asian origin operating in the United States.

• 31:04Speaker 12

  Drug traffickers love a vacuum. As traditional organized crime appears to be taking less and less of the market, then other trafficking organizations will move in. And it certainly appears from the intelligence we have that the oriental traffickers are picking up a big piece of that action.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  All of this was in the distant background of Tina Wong's life. Her reason for wanting to quit the drug trade was closer to home. She was worried that if she kept accepting these packages, she'd put her family in danger. She had a husband and a one-year-old daughter.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  When Tina Wong was 28 years old, she became a mom to a baby girl.

• 31:54Speaker 09

  They cleaned her up, and they put her in the little basket. And they wrapped her up like a sumo, you know, because they got nails, and she was like scratching.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  She named her daughter Fallon after that TV show Dynasty, which had you heard of that TV show before?

• 32:14Speaker 05

  I've heard of that, but I've never watched it.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  I had, yeah, I had never heard of it. But yeah, apparently it was like a huge TV show in the eighties, like number one hit. And it was about this oil tycoons family. And Fallon was the daughter and she was like a rich spoiled brat.

• 32:30Speaker 13

  Your father's money is not a gift, it's a responsibility.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Oh, hell, it is. You want to feel guilty for being born rich? I don't. But yeah, Tina's daughter Fallon was born into a different situation.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Tina had had this dream of being a textile designer. And she even got, as a high schooler, into this like special program at FIT, the College of New York of Art and Design. But then she was on a scholarship and both, she was like 16, 17. Both of her parents got cancer, one after the other. And she was the person who had to take care of them. And then she missed so much school that she got kicked out of the program. After her parents died, she was like trying to get steady work. So she would like go to bars to work there and have to bring Fallon. And then people would be like, you're a bad mom for bringing your kid to a bar.

• 33:15Speaker 09

  Sometime people call me, say, oh, we need a bartender or waitress, you know, for the week or the day. I fill in, but it wasn't, you know, often because I had to take care of her. Because I was still like young and so I was like not really a best mother. But, you know, I try. You know, you got to think about what you're doing. So I try to work and, you know, make ends meet.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  And her husband was working as a cook and sometimes in some gambling parlors.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  He works like super long shifts and long hours. I think at a certain point, like they had to send her baby to her grandparents who were in Canada at the time to take care of her. So that like Tina could go out to work while people would, where the baby was being taken care of by someone.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  They sent Fallon to Canada to be with her grandparents, her husband's parents. So she knew that Fallon would be safe as Tina tried to find steady work and figure out her life. You know, Tina doesn't speak Chinese, but if she was with her grandparents, then...

• 34:23Speaker 05

  Then Fallon could pick up some Chinese.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Wait, did you say, Shu, that your parents did the same thing?

• 34:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I got through basically the same thing as Fallon. My extended family is like very closely like supporting each other. So they also sent me back to my grandparents when I was about like 10 months old, 11 months old. Are you serious? Yes, about the same time.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  So Tina knew that Fallon was being well taken care of as she and her husband tried to sort out how to provide for her. And after feeling like she had been doing a bad job, Tina felt like this huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Were you enjoying it or were you like sad because you were missing her, both?

• 35:02Speaker 09

  Truthfully, I was enjoying it.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  It was after her daughter was sent away that Tina started accepting these boxes. But then she could feel her luck running out. She told her friend she wasn't going to do this work anymore. Five months went by. Then came the sting. The day DEA agents raided that house in Brooklyn. As we already heard, Agent Pete Meteser found that accountant, the mother of two, standing in front of an open box of stuffed animals.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  She was very upset, crying. And your goal is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  This woman led the agents up the ladder to the woman who had recruited her. And that woman gave up the names of Tina's best friend and Tina.

• 35:56Speaker 08

  On March 1st, 1988, an arrest warrant was issued in the Eastern District of New York for Tina Wong for importation of heroin. At approximately 9:00 PM, Wong was arrested at her residence.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  That was the moment maybe that she realized that she was not really being paranoid and everything she did has a consequence.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Tina's worst fears were now coming true.

• 36:24Speaker 09

  They took my daughter's picture off the refrigerator. They go, "Is this your daughter?" I said, "Yes." They go, "Oh, you may not see her for like 25 years." You know, like, that was kind of a low blow. I don't think they should have did it like that. But that's their way, so.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Their way was to keep building a case against whoever was at the top, the person really behind the boxes of heroin. To do that, they needed Tina to tell them everything about what she had done and who else was involved. This time, though, it wasn't going to be so easy. Was there a part of you that's like, "I'm not going to cooperate"?

• 37:03Speaker 09

  Yes, that I wasn't going to cooperate? No, I wasn't going to cooperate with them.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Tina had much more valuable information about this scheme than the accountant. But she also had no intention of sharing what she knew. And that was going to be a big problem. Because she and all the women like her were now in the crosshairs of a young and determined federal prosecutor. Her job was to bring down a drug kingpin, and she saw all these female witnesses in custody as a huge opportunity.

• 37:36Speaker 14

  It was fairly early in my career as a prosecutor. And it was like one of those cases that I started in general crimes and then took with me to narcotics as I worked my way up the chain.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Her name is Beryl Howell. She's the reason I'm able to report on this case. I've known Beryl for years. She's my boyfriend's mother.

• 37:58Speaker 14

  These are briefs that I filed. Government is always blue. Whoop, what's that? More trial notebook stuff.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Witness list? Oh, my God, Beryl!

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Beryl's the one who gave me that suitcase full of court documents. Years' worth of filings, interviews, openings, closings, rebuttals. There are notepads full of her sprawling cursive, all about a legal saga where almost nothing went according to plan.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  The case that started with the Chinatown sting would change Beryl's life and Tina Wong's life and Chinatown. And it was just getting underway.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Coming up on this season of The Chinatown Sting.

• 38:52Speaker 15

  When people came here, they were strangers in a foreign land and they didn't speak the language, didn't read English. So this was the one place they could go to for any kind of assistance.

• 39:06Speaker 16

  Once you join a gang, you feel like you have the whole gang behind you.

• 39:12Speaker 09

  Well, I always know that a good friendship, nothing can break it.

• 39:16Speaker 14

  There's a difference between hearing things and thinking you're not hearing the truth versus thinking you're not hearing the whole story. I wasn't sure I was ever hearing the whole story from Tina Wong.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  The Chinatown Sting is written and produced by me, Lydia Jing-Kott, and reported by me and Shu Yu Wang. Our senior producer is Emily Martinez. Additional production by Sonia Gurwitt. Our editor is Julia Barton, with additional editing by Karen Shakurji. Our story consultant is Rong Xiaocheng. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by John Sun. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Our fact checker is Kate Furby. And our show art was designed by Sean Carney. All voiceover work by Tali Liang. For more information about this episode, check out our show notes

• 40:21Speaker 02

  or visit pushkin.fm/chinatown. The Chinatown Sting is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  That was a preview of The Chinatown Sting. Find The Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcasts.