Introducing The Chinatown Sting: Lucky Bird

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 2 They're now the best network, according to the experts at 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.

Speaker 2 That's your business, supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com.
Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 3 Every business has an ambition.

Speaker 6 PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with business loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide.

Speaker 10 And your customers can pay all the ways they want with PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, and all major cards so you can focus on scaling up.

Speaker 11 When it's time to get growing, there's one platform for all business, PayPal Open.

Speaker 12 Grow today at paypalopen.com.

Speaker 7 Loan subject to approval in available locations.

Speaker 14 There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

Speaker 15 There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

Speaker 14 There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices. There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

Speaker 14 And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it. At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Speaker 14 Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

Speaker 18 Pushkin.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 On February 9th, 1988, David Sheehan was working his usual shift. He was a U.S.
customs agent at JFK Airport.

Speaker 19 His phone rang.

Speaker 18 I was talking to a customs agent in California who says, hey,

Speaker 18 we just got three shipments of heroin.

Speaker 20 and three different bail parcels.

Speaker 18 Do you guys want the case?

Speaker 20 So I said, absolutely, we'll take it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This call was special though, because inside each of these packages was about $7 million worth worth of heroin.

Speaker 1 In today's money, that's something like $18 million per package.

Speaker 1 Peter Matasser was an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He really wanted to know who was waiting for those boxes.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 A lot of heroin was coming in from China to Hong Kong, then into New York.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 22 it sounded like a good opportunity to work a big case.

Speaker 1 On February 17th, the boxes arrived at the airport.

Speaker 1 Peter and David knew they were at the beginning of something big, but they didn't know how big.

Speaker 1 My name is Lydia Jean Kot.

Speaker 1 As a journalist, I often report on law and power.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 A few years ago, I came into possession of a suitcase. It was full of thousands of pages of court documents.

Speaker 1 They were all about a case the prosecutor spent years trying to build against a criminal who refused to be caught.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But that afternoon in 1988, one of these people was just waiting for a box.

Speaker 1 This is the Chinatown Sting.

Speaker 1 Episode 1, Lucky Bird.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, Peter Matesser and the DEA could get to work.

Speaker 1 Step one, take out the heroin and replace it with decoy heroin. It was made out of wooden blocks cut and taped together.

Speaker 22 Except you leave a sample of the heroin in there. We put the

Speaker 22 stuffed animals back in.

Speaker 22 Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it.

Speaker 24 That was our goal.

Speaker 1 So when someone on the receiving end looked inside the boxes, they should notice nothing weird. Step two.

Speaker 1 The feds hid thin wires in a transmitter inside each box.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And this receiver had only two signals.

Speaker 24 It was a slow beep.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 22 investigation could be compromised.

Speaker 1 Step three.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Vans full of agents were waiting nearby, listening in on their little computers and ready to spring into action.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 1 On February 23rd, the mail packages, the vans full of agents, and the undercover postal workers, they were all ready to go.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 22 The thrill of the chase really becomes, you know, it just, it sort of takes you over.

Speaker 1 That day, like on any other day, Chinatown was bustling. The sidewalks were crowded with vendors selling cucumbers, eggplants, bok choy, dried mushrooms.

Speaker 1 People were walking shoulder to shoulder on the main streets. There were neon signs everywhere saying, go this way or go that way.

Speaker 1 And there was always a truck somewhere squeezing its way down these narrow streets full of fresh wares.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 15 We were underneath the highway in Manhattan, the East River Drive,

Speaker 20 and that's where we had 30 agents all lined up ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 19 No answer.

Speaker 1 He left behind mail slips. Peter and David waited to see what would happen next and waited some more.

Speaker 18 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,

Speaker 20 You can't pee in the river.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Maybe someone had tipped them off?

Speaker 1 The whole operation now hinged on the third box, the one that was going to Brooklyn.

Speaker 22 We heard the beep go off.

Speaker 1 Peter Matesser rushed over to the Brooklyn address to meet the agents there.

Speaker 22 We knocked on the door or broke down the door. There's the package open.
The stuffed animals were out.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 25 Read her rights, you know, in

Speaker 22 Cantonese Mandarin. I forgot exactly which one it was.
She was very upset, crying.

Speaker 22 And your goal is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 We can't guarantee you how much jail time you do, but it'll be brought to the attention of the judges

Speaker 22 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

Speaker 20 us, then we help you.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 She had to make an impossible decision as the agents hovered over her. The clock was ticking.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What's important is the chain of events she set off by giving the federal agents the name of her contact.

Speaker 1 Over the next few days, agents were arresting moms like her all over New York City.

Speaker 22 It was like the first time we've ever seen anything like that, really.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Mahjong is a game of luck and skill. You play with domino-like tiles instead of with cards.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Customs agent David Sheehan was doing a lot of that forcing.

Speaker 18 We're going to seize all your assets.

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 21 foster care and

Speaker 18 things of that nature, you know.

Speaker 1 You're doing that because you really need their help to get to the person at the top, I guess.

Speaker 20 Absolutely.

Speaker 18 Yeah, you need somebody.

Speaker 18 You know, you need more than one person to cooperate.

Speaker 1 Because you need it to be corroborated?

Speaker 20 Yes.

Speaker 1 After I got that suitcase full of court documents on the Chinatown drug trials, I realized I need help from someone who spoke Cantonese.

Speaker 1 That's the language that's spoken by many of the people in the documents.

Speaker 26 My name is Shu Yu Wang. I'm a practicing attorney in the city in New York.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 My major in college was actually journalism. So that sort of like opened up a part of my brain.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 1 But we've been learning that Chinatown is a place with 150 years of history.

Speaker 29 So Chinatowns today we think of as these kind of tourist destinations.

Speaker 29 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

Speaker 1 U.S. immigration laws also helped create Chinatowns, especially a law called the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed in 1882.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 30 And I feel like the stranger label remains imprinted on Asian Americans today.

Speaker 1 She says she's felt what Michael Luo is describing, especially when she first moved to the US for law school.

Speaker 31 So it was kind of like surprised at how friendly people were surrounding me.

Speaker 26 But also to that end, I'm sensing like there are people out there that's just kind of like, oh, you're different.

Speaker 26 And you can tell by their gestures, by their like facial expressions, things like that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 2 They're now the best network, according to the experts at 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 17 consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Speaker 20 Cheaper?

Speaker 17 OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Speaker 12 Better?

Speaker 17 In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

Speaker 20 This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Speaker 17 Right Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash strategic.
That's oracle.com slash strategic.

Speaker 3 Every business has an ambition.

Speaker 6 PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with business loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide.

Speaker 10 And your customers can pay all the ways they want with PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, and all major cards so you can focus on scaling up.

Speaker 11 When it's time to get growing, growing, there's one platform for all business.

Speaker 12 PayPal Open. Grow today at paypalopen.com.

Speaker 7 Loan subject to approval in available locations.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 So this is a complaint against Tina Ause.

Speaker 1 What situation is Tina in if they have this information?

Speaker 26 So like, first of all, they got an informant which said, I delivered the packages to Tina.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 27 And apparently the prosecution had information from both ends.

Speaker 26 So Tina was kind of trapped in the situation, like she can't get away with that.

Speaker 1 At first, Tina just seemed like another low-level drug smuggler. She was one of about a half a dozen people federal authorities arrested.

Speaker 1 This was after that accountant in Brooklyn got caught with that wired up package, setting this whole investigation off.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Without her, everything might have played out entirely differently.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It was in Manhattan, and we rang her bell. Twice, three times, she was never home.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 19 It was a brick apartment building. Yeah.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 1 The door opened, this woman was standing there, and I said nothing.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I think I was the one who broke the silence, right? So we're the journalists that came here.

Speaker 32 So I just wondered if we can have a conversation about this project.

Speaker 1 Leave from lunch.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 23 She's like, yeah, come on in.

Speaker 1 And what were your impressions of her?

Speaker 24 She looked cool.

Speaker 26 She's got short haircut and she's got super

Speaker 21 thick eyeliners, I would say.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she had like black eyeliner.

Speaker 26 And also, she looks totally unbothered.

Speaker 23 Even though we're clearly bothering her and her family,

Speaker 26 she's kind of like, well, okay, they've been bugging me for long enough. Let's just see what they have to offer.

Speaker 1 What do you remember about the apartment?

Speaker 26 So it's very homey, I would say.

Speaker 26 And there's a huge cage in the center of the living room.

Speaker 26 And that might be one of the very first things that you would notice once you step in.

Speaker 1 It was an African gray parrot inside? I think the first thing I said, right, was, tell me about your parrot.

Speaker 16 Oh, that's a lucky bird. And I had him for

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 1 we weren't actually there to interview the parrot we wanted tina's story

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 16 We were like the first Chinese family. I mean, not the first, but the few.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Like Qing Chang, and then, you know, you fight back.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 I think they were kind of a little racist on me since I wasn't, you know, like, because I'm only half Chinese.

Speaker 16 You know, there was a little racism there, but that didn't stop me.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so that's why I learned MJ, Mahjong.

Speaker 23 And,

Speaker 16 you know.

Speaker 16 When I would play MJ with them and I beat them, then I feel that they go, yeah, the Jook Singh

Speaker 20 is pretty good.

Speaker 1 And Jook Sing is someone who is American-born Chinese.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 1 As an adult, Tina kept playing mahjong. She went to these special places that were kind of like speakeasies.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 It's like a

Speaker 16 Chinese green wall paint,

Speaker 16 smoky,

Speaker 23 and

Speaker 16 a lot of mahjong noise.

Speaker 1 Is there music playing, or is it just people talking and the clack of the tiles?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think it's just the clacking of the tiles. People don't want to hear the music, it might disturb them.

Speaker 1 They're focused. And what sort of people were there?

Speaker 16 Old people, young people, all kinds.

Speaker 1 And how good did you get on like a scale one through ten?

Speaker 16 I didn't have like really good skills, but I had luck.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 1 Shuyu, do you remember if Tina ever broke the law before this happened?

Speaker 28 Gambling, if that counts.

Speaker 1 Yeah. She got into some fights, I think she said.

Speaker 19 Yeah, but like street fights.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, nothing serious.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 It sounded like an easy deal for her.

Speaker 16 We're poor kids. We don't have that kind of money.
So, to have that kind of money, you take a chance.

Speaker 16 And I think

Speaker 16 a lot of people would probably have taken the chance.

Speaker 1 So, after she, you know, told her friend she would do it, she waited a few weeks. Right.

Speaker 1 And then her friend called her and said, you know, the box is going to arrive like somewhere in these three days.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 1 And then she called her friend and was like, I have the box, what should I do?

Speaker 16 They told me to open it, so I opened it, and there was like Chinese on the box. I think they were tea boxes.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 I wasn't scared because I didn't really know the magnitude of the danger.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 I was bringing down one box and it was kind of like open. So I like looked at it and it was like a

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 28 Well, it was heroin.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was like $7 million worth of heroin.

Speaker 19 Her friend gave her a

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 16 getting the money

Speaker 16 it was fun i'm not gonna lie

Speaker 16 you don't think of tomorrow you just think of that day

Speaker 16 you know and what you could do with it

Speaker 26 it's like being queen queen for a day what's the first thing you bought

Speaker 16 I don't know, I think I bought the most expensive food, like lobster, and took it home and ate it all by myself.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 16 and you were like life is good yeah i can have this every day

Speaker 21 because i love lobster

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And on that trip, her world kind of got expanded. She got to see things she had never seen before in her life.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But when she got closer, she realized those were actually crabs.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 1 Was this fun when you're like getting these packages, doing these trips?

Speaker 27 It was fun.

Speaker 16 I feel that if you take any ordinary person

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Tina had a bad feeling.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 34 We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We're running up a battle flag.

Speaker 34 We can fight the drug problem and we can win.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 35 Today we'll learn more about criminal groups of Asian origin operating in the the United States.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 37 And it certainly appears from the intelligence we have that the Oriental traffickers are picking up a big piece of that action.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best network based on analysis by OOCHLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 3 Every business has an ambition.

Speaker 6 PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with business loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide.

Speaker 5 And your customers can pay all the ways they want with PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, and all major cards so you can focus on scaling up.

Speaker 11 When it's time to get growing, there's one platform for all business, PayPal Open.

Speaker 12 Grow today at PayPalOpen.com.

Speaker 7 Loan subject to approval in available locations.

Speaker 31 Top Reasons Technology Pros want to move to Ohio, a thriving tech industry with high-paying jobs for programmers, developers, database architects, and more.

Speaker 31 Ohio is the silicon heartland with the top tech brands and thousands of startups too. Shorter commute times mean more time for you.

Speaker 31 And since your dollar goes further in Ohio, it's like a cheat code for success. The tech career you want and a life you'll love.
Have it all in the heart of it all. Learn more at callohiohome.com.

Speaker 1 When Tina Wong was 28 years old, she became a mom to a baby girl.

Speaker 16 They cleaned her up

Speaker 16 and they put her in the little basket and they wrapped her up like a sumo.

Speaker 16 You know, because they got nails and she was like scratching.

Speaker 1 She named her daughter Fallon after that TV show Dynasty, which had you, had you heard of that TV show before?

Speaker 26 I've heard of that, but I've never watched it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And Fallon was the daughter, and she was like a rich, spoiled brat.

Speaker 36 Your father's money is not a gift, it's a responsibility.

Speaker 1 Oh, the hell it is.

Speaker 8 You want to feel guilty for being born rich.

Speaker 34 I don't.

Speaker 1 But yeah, Tina's daughter, Fallon, was born into a different situation.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 Sometimes people call me and say, oh, we need a bartender or waitress, you know, for the week or the day.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 You know, you got to think about what you're doing. So I try.
to work and

Speaker 16 you know

Speaker 1 make ends meet and her husband was working as a cook and sometimes in some gambling parlors.

Speaker 19 He works like super long shifts and long hours.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, Tina doesn't speak Chinese, but if she was with her

Speaker 26 grandparents, then Fallon could pick up some Chinese.

Speaker 1 Wait, did you say she that your parents did the same thing?

Speaker 26 Yeah, I gone through basically the same thing as Fallon.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 21 Yes. It's about the same time.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And after feeling like she had been doing a bad job, Tina felt like this huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

Speaker 1 Were you enjoying it or were you like sad because you were missing her both?

Speaker 16 Truthfully, I was enjoying it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Five months went by. Then came the sting.
The day DEA agents raided that house in Brooklyn.

Speaker 1 As we already heard, agent Pete Matesser found that accountant, the mother of two, standing in front of an open box of stuffed animals.

Speaker 21 She was very upset, crying, and your goal is to try to...

Speaker 22 calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 26 That was the moment, maybe, that she realized that she was not really being paranoid and everything she did has a consequence.

Speaker 1 Tina's worst fears were now coming true.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 a low blow. I don't think they should have did it like that, but.
That's their way, so.

Speaker 1 Their way was to keep building a case against whoever was at the top, the person really behind the boxes of heroin.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Was there a part of you that's like, I'm not going to cooperate?

Speaker 21 Yes.

Speaker 16 Did I wasn't going to cooperate? No, I wasn't going to cooperate with them.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because she and all the women like her were now in the crosshairs of a young and determined federal prosecutor.

Speaker 1 Her job was to bring down a drug kingpin, and she saw all these female witnesses in custody as a huge opportunity.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 1 Her name is Beryl Howell. She's the reason I'm able to report on this case.
I've known Beryl for years.

Speaker 1 She is my boyfriend's mother.

Speaker 23 These are briefs that I filed.

Speaker 21 Government was always blue.

Speaker 15 What is that?

Speaker 32 More trial notebook stuff.

Speaker 1 Witness list.

Speaker 32 Oh my god, Beryl.

Speaker 1 Beryl is the one who gave me that suitcase full of court documents. Years worth of filings, interviews, openings, closings, rebuttals.

Speaker 1 There are notepads full of her sprawling cursive, all about a legal saga, where almost nothing went according to plan.

Speaker 1 The case that started with the Chinatown Sting would change Beryl's life, and Tina Wong's life, and Chinatown.

Speaker 1 And it was just getting underway.

Speaker 1 Coming up on the season of the Chinatown Sting.

Speaker 33 When people came here, they were strangers in a foreign land and they didn't speak the language, didn't read English.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 16 Well, I always know that a good friendship, nothing can break it.

Speaker 39 There's a difference between hearing things and thinking you're not hearing the truth versus thinking you're not hearing the whole story.

Speaker 39 I wasn't sure I was ever hearing the whole story from Tina Wong.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Additional production by Sonia Gerwit.

Speaker 1 Our editor is Julia Barton. With additional editing by Karen Shikurji.

Speaker 1 Our story consultant is Rong Shaoqing.

Speaker 1 Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by John Sung.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 For more information about this episode, check out our show notes or visit pushkin.fm slash chinatown.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can find the Chinatown Sting anywhere you get your podcasts. Pushkin Plus subscribers can binge the entire season right now ad-free.

Speaker 1 Sign up on the Chinatown Sting showpage on Apple or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

Speaker 31 Top reasons advanced manufacturing pros want to move to Ohio. So many advancement opportunities for technicians, machinists, managers, operators, and more.

Speaker 31 How about a powered-up paycheck and an amped-up career? Plus, the energy of big-time sports. And after work, plenty of ways to unplug.

Speaker 31 The career you want and a life you'll love. Have it all in the heart of it all.
Build your future at callohiohome.com.

Speaker 3 Every business has an ambition.

Speaker 6 PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with business loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide.

Speaker 9 And your customers can pay all the ways they want with PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, and all major cards.

Speaker 10 So you can focus on scaling up.

Speaker 11 When it's time to get growing, there's one platform for all business: PayPal Open.

Speaker 12 Grow today at paypalopen.com.

Speaker 7 Loan subject to approval in available locations.

Speaker 40 Ah, smart water alkaline with antioxidant. Pure, crisp taste, perfectly refreshing.

Speaker 30 Whoa, that is refreshing.

Speaker 31 And a 9.5 plus pH.

Speaker 40 For those who move, those who push further, those with a taste for taste.

Speaker 30 Exactly.

Speaker 6 I did take a spin class today after work.

Speaker 38 Look at you.

Speaker 19 Restoring like a pro.

Speaker 14 I mean, I also sat down halfway through.

Speaker 19 Eh, close enough.

Speaker 40 Smart water alkaline with antioxidants. For those with a taste for taste, grab yours today.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.