Cheng Chui Ping (; January 9, 1949 – April 24, 2014), also known as Sister Ping (), was a Chinese woman who ran a
human smuggling
People smuggling (also called human smuggling), under U.S. law, is "the facilitation, transportation, attempted transportation or illegal entry of a person or persons across an international border, in violation of one or more countries' laws, ei ...
operation bringing people from
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
into the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
from 1984 to 2000. Operating from
Chinatown, Manhattan
Manhattan's Chinatown () is a Neighborhoods in Manhattan, neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, bordering the Lower East Side to its east, Little Italy, Manhattan, Little Italy to its north, Civic Center, Manhattan, Civic Center to its ...
, Ping oversaw a
snakehead smuggling ring which brought as many as 3,000 Chinese into the United States, earning her more than $40 million.
The
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...
called Ping "one of the first, and ultimately most successful, alien smugglers of all time."
Born and raised in
Fujian
Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capi ...
province, Ping moved to
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...
in 1974, and then
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
in 1981. She was arrested in
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...
in 2000 and extradited to the United States in 2003.
In 2006, she was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison, and remained there until her death.
Early life
Ping was born on January 9, 1949, in
Shengmei,
Mawei
Mawei (; Foochow Romanized: Mā-muōi) is one of 6 urban districts of the prefecture-level city of Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province, China. The district spans an area of 319.66 square kilometers, of which, 275.66 square kilometers is la ...
,
Fuzhou
Fuzhou (; , Fuzhounese: Hokchew, ''Hók-ciŭ''), alternately romanized as Foochow, is the capital and one of the largest cities in Fujian province, China. Along with the many counties of Ningde, those of Fuzhou are considered to constitute t ...
, a poor farming village in northern
Fujian
Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capi ...
,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
. She was one of five children born to her father, Cheng Chai Leung, who was from Shengmei, and her mother, who was from a neighboring village.
Ping was 10 months old when the People's Republic of China was established.
[ Growing up, she attended the village elementary school and worked on the family farm, helping raise pigs and rabbits, chopping wood, and tending a vegetable garden. When she was twelve, she survived the capsizing of a rowboat in which she had been traveling to another village to cut wood for kindling. She recalled of the incident that all of the people in the boat who had been rowing and had been holding an oar when the boat turned over managed to survive, while "the two people who were lazy and sat back while others worked ended up dead. This taught me to work hard."][ During the ]Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal ...
, she became a leader of the Red Guard
Red Guards () were a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized and guided by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 through 1967, during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted.Teiwes According to a Red Guard le ...
in her village.[
When she was fifteen, her father left the family and traveled to the United States as a merchant marine crewman. He stayed in the U.S. for thirteen years, working as a dish-washer and sending money home to the family every few months. He was apprehended by U.S. immigration authorities and deported back to China in 1977. When he returned to China, Ping's father entered into the ]people smuggling
People smuggling (also called human smuggling), under U.S. law, is "the facilitation, transportation, attempted transportation or illegal entry of a person or persons across an international border, in violation of one or more countries' laws, ei ...
business.[
Sister Ping married Cheung Yick, a man from a neighboring village, in 1969.][ They had a daughter, Cheung Hui, in 1973;][ Ping later had three sons.][ The family moved to Hong Kong in 1974, where Ping became a successful businesswoman and opened a factory in Shenzhen, China.] In June 1981, with the help of an elderly couple, Ping successfully applied to be a nanny in New York. The family passed through Canada, and on 17 November 1981, settled in Chinatown, Manhattan
Manhattan's Chinatown () is a Neighborhoods in Manhattan, neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, bordering the Lower East Side to its east, Little Italy, Manhattan, Little Italy to its north, Civic Center, Manhattan, Civic Center to its ...
, in the United States. They opened a shop, the Tak Shun Variety Store, which catered to homesick Fuzhounese immigrants.[ During her time in New York, Ping lived at 14 Monroe Street, ]Knickerbocker Village
Knickerbocker Village Limited is a housing development situated between the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge, in the Two Bridges section of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. Although the location was generally considered to f ...
, a modest lower middle class development.
Smuggling business
Early career
Sister Ping began her smuggling career in the early 1980s as a one-woman operation, smuggling handfuls of fellow villagers from China into the United States a few at a time by commercial airline
An airline is a company that provides air transport services for traveling passengers and freight. Airlines use aircraft to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for codeshare agreements, in which ...
using forged identification documents. She charged $35,000 or more to transport interested immigrants into the United States.
In the spring of 1989, evidence against Sister Ping was gathered in a sting by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Toronto International Airport. Several months later, Ping was arrested and pleaded guilty to illegal human smuggling. She was sentenced to six months in prison in Butler County, Pennsylvania. As she spoke little English, she was isolated from other prisoners and readily agreed to provide a Chinese-speaking FBI agent with information on Chinatown's underworld, she received a reduced sentence and served four months.
Business picked up after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth ...
when the U.S. government offered Chinese students present in the United States at the time the opportunity to stay. Thousands flooded into the country from abroad using false papers to establish a claim to residency under the new rule.
Mass operations by cargo ship
On June 6, 1993, the ''Golden Venture
''Golden Venture'' was a cargo ship that smuggled 286 undocumented immigrants from China (mostly Fuzhou people from Fujian province) along with 13 crew members that ran aground on the beach at Fort Tilden on the Rockaway peninsula of Queens, New Y ...
'' ship ran aground in Queens, New York, with 286 illegal immigrants on board. One of the criminal leaders, Guo Liang Chi, claimed Ping as an investor. However, there are doubts about Guo Liang Chi's claim because he wanted to blame another person to reduce his federal sentence on other crimes that he committed over the years. In December 1994, an indictment was brought before a Manhattan federal court, stating that Ping had smuggled around 3,000 Fujianese to the United States since 1984 with the help of the American-Chinese gang Fuk Ching. Sometimes hundreds of people were smuggled in at a time via cargo ship
A cargo ship or freighter is a merchant ship that carries cargo, goods, and materials from one port to another. Thousands of cargo carriers ply the world's seas and oceans each year, handling the bulk of international trade. Cargo ships are usu ...
and imprisoned below deck for months at a time with little food and water. In 1998, one of the smaller boats Sister Ping used for offloading customers from a larger vessel capsized off the coast of Guatemala, drowning fourteen.[
]
International network and collections
Sister Ping hired scores of people in several different countries to move her human cargo for her, hold them hostage until their smuggling fees were paid, and collect those fees from them. Sometimes her customers were lucky and arrived safely in the United States where they paid the exorbitant fees Sister Ping charged, and were released.
To ensure her customers paid their smuggling fees, Sister Ping hired armed thugs from the Fuk Ching, Chinatown's most vicious and feared gang, to transport and guard her customers in the United States. The presence of these gang members guaranteed that Sister Ping got paid the $25,000 to $45,000 fee she demanded for the trip.
Sister Ping also ran a money transmitting business out of her Chinatown variety store.
Scope and notoriety
Individuals who conducted such Chinese illegal human smuggling operations are known as " snakeheads" from the Chinese translation for human-smuggler. Almost all of the immigrants whom Sister Ping harbored came from Fujian province. She was renowned as the most notorious snakehead, operating the largest, most sophisticated operation of its kind, which became international in scale. The U.S. Department of Justice declared at her sentencing that "Sister Ping is one of the first, and ultimately most successful, human smugglers of all time." It is estimated that Ping amassed around $40 million.
Legal pursuit
In 1994, Sister Ping was invited to Beijing, China along with other overseas notables of Fujianese descent to celebrate an anniversary celebration of the Communist Party
A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A ...
. She was arrested when she arrived but according to police and friends, she paid bribes to escape custody. Later in December 1994, Ping learned of the US indictment and she fled, returning to China where she continued her business.
The FBI
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...
and INS INS or Ins or ''variant'', may refer to:
Places
* Ins, Switzerland, a municipality
* Creech Air Force Base (IATA airport code INS)
* Indonesia, ITF and UNDP code INS
Biology
*'' Ins'', a New World genus of bee flies
* INS, the gene for the insul ...
spent the following five years attempting to apprehend her, but she was believed to reside mainly in China, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. On April 17, 2000 Interpol
The International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO; french: link=no, Organisation internationale de police criminelle), commonly known as Interpol ( , ), is an international organization that facilitates worldwide police cooperation and cri ...
searched passenger lists for flights from Hong Kong to New York, they found her son's name. More than 40 agents from the Hong Kong narcotics bureau waited at the airport, apprehended her at around noon and she was fingerprinted and arrested. At the time Ping was carrying three passports, including a fake Belize one with her photo but in the name of Lilly Zheng. She fought extradition but was eventually sent back to New York in July 2003 and held at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn
After a jury trial before the she was convicted in June 2005 on three separate counts, including one count of conspiring to commit illegal human smuggling, hostage taking, money laundering
Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin of money, obtained from illicit activities such as drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement or gambling, by converting it into a legitimate source. It is a crime in many jurisdictions ...
and trafficking in ransom
Ransom is the practice of holding a prisoner or item to extort money or property to secure their release, or the sum of money involved in such a practice.
When ransom means "payment", the word comes via Old French ''rançon'' from Latin ''red ...
proceeds and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Ping was interviewed in Danbury in June 2013 and said, “Being locked up for over 10 years allowed me to think about my previous life, my heart calmed down and I started to feel that jail was the safest place for me. I keep telling myself not to think much about the future and live life by the moment." She also said "I cannot believe they jailed me for 35 years! 35 years! In a way I was killed by the FBI agents and tainted witnesses.".
Sister Ping served part of her sentence in Federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut (BOP #05117-055). In 2013, it was announced that Danbury would be reverted to a male-only facility. In the same year, Ping was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer arises when cell (biology), cells in the pancreas, a glandular organ behind the stomach, begin to multiply out of control and form a Neoplasm, mass. These cancerous cells have the malignant, ability to invade other parts of t ...
and transferred to the Federal Medical Center, Carswell
The Federal Medical Center, Carswell (FMC Carswell) is a United States federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, Incarceration of women in the United States, for female inmates of all security levels, primarily with special medical and mental health ne ...
, in Texas, to receive cancer treatment.
Death
Ping's health had deteriorated in prison, with high cholesterol and blood lipids; she lost 17 pounds in the last two years of her life. Aged 65, Ping died quietly at noon on April 24, 2014, surrounded by her family at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell
The Federal Medical Center, Carswell (FMC Carswell) is a United States federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, Incarceration of women in the United States, for female inmates of all security levels, primarily with special medical and mental health ne ...
, in Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...
.
Her funeral took place on May 23, 2014, at the Boe Fook Funeral Home on Canal Street in Manhattan with thousands of mourners.
Her body was laid to rest at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla.
Cultural references
Sister Ping and the ''Golden Venture'' are the subject of Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe (born 1976) is an American writer and investigative journalist. He is the author of five books—''Chatter,'' ''The Snakehead,'' '' Say Nothing,'' '' Empire of Pain,'' and ''Rogues''—and has written extensively for many pub ...
's 2009 book, ''The Snakehead''.
The ''Golden Venture'' disaster and the lives of some of the passengers are the subject of Peter Cohn's 2006 documentary ''Golden Venture''.
The 2021 film ''Snakehead'', written and directed by Evan Jackson Leong
Evan Jackson Leong (or Evan Leong) is a director and documentary filmmaker. Leong is likely most known for his documentary '' Linsanity'' about Jeremy Lin, which made its world premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. He has also directed th ...
, was loosely inspired by Sister Ping.
References
External links
New Yorker Article
Website for ''The Snakehead'' book.
Website for ''The Snakehead'' movie.
*
*
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ping, Sister
1949 births
2014 deaths
Red Guards
Chinese smugglers
Chinese female criminals
Chinese-American culture in New York City
Chinese money launderers
People's Republic of China emigrants to the United States
American crime bosses
American gangsters of Chinese descent
American female organized crime figures
Gangsters from New York City
People extradited from Hong Kong
People extradited to the United States
Female organized crime figures
People from Fuzhou
American people of Chinese descent
Deaths from cancer in Texas
Prisoners who died in United States federal government detention
Burials at Kensico Cemetery