Introducing The Chinatown Sting: Lucky Bird

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Pushkin.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Lydia Jean Cott.

I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of my new podcast, The Chinatown Sting.

It's about a woman living in Manhattan's Chinatown in the 1980s.

After she agrees to receive a package in the mail for her best friend, she finds herself caught in a criminal case.

It's led by a prosecutor determined to bring down one of Chinatown's most notorious gangsters, no matter the cost.

Let's get into it.

On February 9th, 1988, David Sheehan was working his usual shift.

He was a U.S.

customs agent at JFK Airport.

His phone rang.

I was talking to a customs agent in California who says, hey,

we just got three shipments of heroin.

and three different bail parcels.

Do you guys want the case?

So I said, absolutely, we'll take it.

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 worth of heroin.

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

Peter Matasser was an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

He really wanted to know who was waiting for those boxes.

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.

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

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

My name is Lydia Jean Kot.

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 the 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, 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.

This is the Chinatown Sting.

Episode 1, Lucky Bird.

Court documents would later describe the exact contents of each box that landed in New York.

20 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 heroine was hidden among stuffed animals.

Now, Peter Matesser 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.

Except you leave a sample of the heroin in there.

We put the

stuffed animals back in.

Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it.

That was our goal.

So when someone on the receiving end looked inside the boxes, they should notice nothing weird.

Step two.

The feds hid thin wires in a transmitter inside each box.

Whoever was looking through the box would break the 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.

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 open.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We were underneath the highway in Manhattan, 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.

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.

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.

David Sheehan 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.

We heard the beep go off.

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

We knocked on the door or broke down the door.

There's the package open.

The stuffed animals were out.

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.

Read her rights, you know, in

Cantonese 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.

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.

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

will 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.

But the person this woman was going to call 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.

This woman agreed to cooperate.

Her name is in the court documents, but she never responded to a request for an interview.

Anyway, her name is 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Absolutely.

Yeah, you need somebody.

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

Because you need it to be corroborated?

Yes.

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.

My name is Shu Yu Wang.

I'm a practicing attorney in the city in New York.

I met Xu Yu through a friend of a friend.

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

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 the story were originally from.

My major in college was actually journalism.

So that sort of like opened up a part of my brain.

So Xi Yu joined me in reporting out this story.

We went over court documents together and we visited Chinatown together for months and months.

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.

There are certain ingredients that's a rare find in non-Chinese grocery stores, like chicken feet.

There are like certain things that I can only get here at a good price.

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

So Chinatowns today we think of as these kind of tourist destinations.

you know they're fun places to go to get you know tosh keys 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 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

U.S.

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

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.

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.

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

So it was kind of like surprised at how friendly people were surrounding me.

But also to that end, I'm sensing like there are people out there that's just kind of like, oh, you're different.

And you can tell by their gestures, by their like facial expressions, things like that.

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.

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

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Wong, Tina.

Date of birth, 1958 in New York, New York.

Chinese female.

Citizen, U.S.

Height, 5'9 inches.

Weight, 120 pounds, brown eyes, black hair.

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.

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

So this is a complaint against Tina Ause.

What situation is Tina in if they have this information?

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 the 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 package to.

And apparently the prosecution had information from both ends.

So Tina was kind of trapped in the situation, like she can't get away with that.

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.

Shu 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.

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.

It was a brick apartment building.

Yeah.

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

The door opened, this woman was standing there, and I said nothing.

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

So we're the journalists that came here.

So I just wondered if we can have a conversation about this project.

Leave from lunch.

Yeah.

She's like, yeah, come on in.

And what were your impressions of her?

She looked cool.

She's got short haircut and she's got super

thick eyeliners, I would say.

Yeah, she had like black eyeliner.

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.

What do you remember about the apartment?

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.

It was an African gray parrot inside?

I think the first thing I said, right, was, tell me about your parrot.

Oh, that's a lucky bird.

And I had him for

like 25 years if he says something i want to record it well he he knows you're a stranger so he won't talk but if he gets to know you then he starts to talk

we weren't actually there to interview the parrot we wanted tina's story

she was born in the 1950s right she was living outside of chinatown at a time when chinatown was way smaller she was one of the few chinese kids yeah her um dad was chinese and her mom was from Portuguese.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We were like the first Chinese family.

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 kids' stuff.

Like Qing Chang, and then, you know, you fight back.

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 U.S.

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.

I think they were kind of a little racist on me since I wasn't, you know, like, because I'm only half Chinese.

You know, 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 that they go, yeah, the Jook Singh

is pretty good.

And Jook Sing is someone who is American-born Chinese.

Yeah.

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.

It's like a

Chinese green wall paint,

smoky,

and

a lot of mahjong noise.

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

Yeah, I think it's just the clacking of the tiles.

People don't want to hear the music, it might disturb them.

They're focused.

And what sort of people were there?

Old people, young people, all kinds.

And how good did you get on like a scale one through ten?

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

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.

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.

it.

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

Gambling, if that counts.

Yeah.

She got into some fights, I think she said.

Yeah, but like street fights.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, nothing serious.

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 a time.

Just trying to like support herself better.

It sounded like an easy deal for her.

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

a lot of people would probably have taken the chance.

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

Right.

And then her friend called her and said, you know, the box is going to arrive like somewhere in these three days.

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.

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

They told me to open it, so I opened it, and there was like Chinese on the box.

I think they were tea boxes.

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.

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

So Tina kept accepting the boxes.

Sometimes they came through the mail.

Sometimes a friend brought them to her apartment and she would carry them on.

I was bringing down one box and it was kind of 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.

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 of in a movie

getting the money

it was fun i'm not gonna lie

you don't think of tomorrow you just think of that day

you know and what you could do with it

it's like being queen queen for a day what's the first thing you bought

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

You ordered a full lobster yeah i think i ordered double lobster and then you brought it to your apartment and then you just ate it by yourself yeah i watched tv and ate it

and you were like life is good yeah i can have this every day

because i love lobster

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, Betson 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.

There's like a thousand of them, so they look like the rock is black, but when you go there, it's white because all the crabs look like walk away.

It's like thousands.

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

It was fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1986, Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act.

It created new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes.

And that same year, Congress began holding hearings.

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

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.

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.

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T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at an OOCLA speed test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCHLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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

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.

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

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

Yeah, I had never heard of it.

But yeah, apparently it was like a huge TV show in the 80s, 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.

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

Oh, the 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.

Right.

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 in 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.

Sometimes people call me and 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 and her husband was working as a cook and sometimes in some gambling parlors.

He works like super long shifts and long hours.

I think at a certain point, like they had to send their 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.

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 study work and figure out her life.

You know, Tina doesn't speak Chinese, but if she was with her

grandparents, then Fallon could pick up some Chinese.

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

Yeah, I gone 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.

Yes.

It's about the same time.

So Tina knew that Fallon was 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.

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

Truthfully, I was enjoying it.

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 Matesser found that accountant, the mother of two, standing in front of an open box of stuffed animals.

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.

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.

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 p.m., Wong was arrested at her residence.

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

Tina's worst fears were now coming true.

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.

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?

Yes.

Did I wasn't going to cooperate?

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

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.

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.

Her name is Beryl Howell.

She's the reason I'm able to report on this case.

I've known Beryl for years.

She is my boyfriend's mother.

These are briefs that I filed.

Government was always blue.

What is that?

More trial notebook stuff.

Witness list.

Oh my god, Beryl.

Beryl is 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.

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.

Coming up on the season of the Chinatown Sting.

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 their one place they could go to for any kind of assistance.

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

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

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.

The Chinatown Sting is written and produced by me, Lydia Jean Cott, and reported by me and Shu Yu Wang.

Our senior producer is Emily Martinez.

Additional production by Sonia Gerwit.

Our editor is Julia Barton.

With additional editing by Karen Shikurji.

Our story consultant is Rong Shaoqing.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Our music was composed by John Sung.

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 Leong.

For more information about this episode, check out our show notes or visit pushkin.fm slash 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.

You can find the Chinatown Sting anywhere you get your podcasts.

Pushkin Plus subscribers can binge the entire season right now ad-free.

Sign up on the Chinatown Sting showpage on Apple or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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