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The Snakehead
- An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
- Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss
In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York's Chinatown.
The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people.
As a "snakehead", she built a complex and often vicious global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her.
Indeed, Sister Ping's empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York's fabled Jade Squad and the FBI nearly 10 years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.
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Forget what you think you know about the Mafia. After reading this book, even life-long mob aficionados will have a new perspective on organized crime. Informative, authoritative, and eye-opening, this is the first full-length book devoted exclusively to uncovering the hidden history of how the Mafia came to dominate organized crime in New York City during the 1930s through 1950s.
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Hard one to rate....
- By Jeffery D. Giuliani on 09-24-20
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Gangsters of Harlem
- The Gritty Underworld of New York City's Most Famous Neighborhood
- By: Ron Chepesiuk
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Ron Chepesiuk chronicles the little known history of organized crime in Harlem.
African American organized crime has had as significant an impact on its constituent community as Italian, Jewish, and Irish organized crime has had on theirs. Gangsters are every bit as colorful, intriguing, and powerful as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, and have a fascinating history in gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing. In the late 1800s, Harlem became a highly fashionable neighborhood.
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weak --reader is terrible!
- By Meyer Rosenbloom on 10-18-13
By: Ron Chepesiuk
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The Quiet Don
- The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino
- By: Matt Birkbeck
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Secretive - even reclusive - Russell Bufalino quietly built his organized crime empire in the decades between Prohibition and the Carter presidency. His reach extended far beyond the coal country of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and quaint Amish farms near Lancaster. Bufalino had a hand in global, national, and local politics of the largest American cities, many of its major industries, and controlled the powerful Teamsters Union. His influence also reached the highest levels of Pennsylvania government and halls of Congress, and his legacy left a culture of corruption that continues to this day.
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Important But Edited By Lawyers?
- By Ted on 04-03-14
By: Matt Birkbeck
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The Wonga Coup
- Guns, Thugs, and the Steely Determination to Create Mayhem
- By: Adam Roberts
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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With so little to recommend it, why in March 2004 was Equatorial Guinea the target of a group of salty British, South African, and Zimbabwean mercenaries, traveling on an American-registered ex-National Guard plane specially adapted for military purposes that was originally flown to Africa by American pilots?
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Dictators and dogs of war, beware
- By PearlGirl on 11-05-06
By: Adam Roberts
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L.A. Noir
- The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City
- By: John Buntin
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Midcentury Los Angeles: A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America", a land of sunshine and orange groves, Midwestern values, and Hollywood stars, protected by the world's most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men - one L.A.'s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief - each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.
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A good (but a little corny) history of LA
- By Jimmy on 10-23-12
By: John Buntin
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Havana Nocturne
- How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost It to the Revolution
- By: T. J. English
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Havana Nocturne takes listeners back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders Meyer Lansky and Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Thanks to strong ties with the island's brutal dictator, President Batista, the mob soon owned the biggest luxury hotels and casinos and launched an unprecedented tourist boom. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others.
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Not for reactionaries
- By sunsolid on 02-17-09
By: T. J. English
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Animal
- The Bloody Rise and Fall of the Mob's Most Feared Assassin
- By: Casey Sherman
- Narrated by: Jim Goad
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Joe Barboza knew that there were two requirements for getting inducted into the Mafia. You had to be Sicilian. And you had to commit a contract killing. The New Bedford-born mobster was a proud Portuguese, not Sicilian, but his dream to be part of La Cosa Nostra proved so strong that he thought he could create a loophole. Barboza’s legacy, buried for years thanks to the murders or deaths of its participants, is finally coming to light and being told in its unvarnished brutality by one of America’s most respected true crime writers.
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Well done. 5 stars.
- By robert price on 03-03-19
By: Casey Sherman
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Hunting Evil
- The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice
- By: Guy Walters
- Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
- Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From its haunting chronicle of the monstrous mass murders the Nazis perpetrated and the murky details of their postwar existence to the challenges of hunting them down, Hunting Evil is a monumental work of nonfiction written with the pacing and intrigue of a thriller.
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Eye-opening and riveting
- By Ellen on 10-20-10
By: Guy Walters
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American Mafia
- A History of Its Rise to Power
- By: Thomas Reppetto
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Organized crime - the Italian American kind - has long been a source of popular entertainment and legend. Now Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the Mafia's rise - from the 1880s to the post-World War II era - that is as exciting as it is authoritative. Structuring his narrative around a series of case histories featuring such infamous characters as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience and access to unseen documents to show us a locally grown Mafia.
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Mob at its best
- By Thomas on 02-14-23
By: Thomas Reppetto
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Mafia Summit
- J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob
- By: Gil Reavill
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In a small village in New York, mob bosses from all over the country - Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Cuba boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Paul Castellano - were nabbed by Sergeant Edgar D. Croswell as they gathered to sort out a bloody war of succession. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had adamantly denied the existence of the Mafia, but Robert Kennedy immediately recognized the shattering importance of the Apalachin summit....
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Something I Didn't Know
- By Kevin on 03-29-13
By: Gil Reavill
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Revolution’s End
- The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA
- By: Brad Schreiber
- Narrated by: Brad Schreiber
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Revolution's End fully explains the most famous kidnapping in US history, detailing Patty Hearst's relationship with Donald DeFreeze, known as Cinque, the head of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Not only did the heiress have a sexual relationship with DeFreeze while he was imprisoned, she didn't know he was an informant and a victim of prison behavior modification.
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Interesting spin
- By jay rollins on 08-29-20
By: Brad Schreiber
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Killing Jesus
- A History
- By: Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard
- Narrated by: Bill O'Reilly
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of people have thrilled to best-selling authors Bill O'Reilly and historian Martin Dugard's Killing Kennedy and Killing Lincoln, works of nonfiction that have changed the way we view history. Now the anchor of The O'Reilly Factor details the events leading up to the murder of the most influential man in history: Jesus of Nazareth. Nearly 2,000 years after this beloved and controversial young revolutionary was brutally killed by Roman soldiers, more than 2.2 billion human beings attempt to follow his teachings and believe he is God.
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The Jesus story in context
- By Kimberly on 10-01-13
By: Bill O'Reilly, and others
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The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.
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Too political
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Chatter
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What listeners say about The Snakehead
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- Jonathan r paul
- 10-17-24
worth a quick listen
not any groundbreaking research but a good, quick, and captivating story that's worth to listen
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- Barbara
- 06-22-21
TIME & MONEY WELL SPENT
I will be happy to recommend this book to my associates, family and awesome book club.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jerrell Martin
- 08-20-24
Wow
Growing up I heard stories from my Mother and our cousins that one day they saw a swarm of Asian people, many unclothed running around frantically around Riis Park area in my hometown of Rockaway, Queens. Never knew why until we came across a Documentary on Sister Ping some years ago. This book helps connect the dots and validates the stories of reformed former Asian gangsters
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-24-20
A Busman's Holiday
I joined the INS in 1993. The Golden Venture saga had just begun it's American phase. The case has continued throughout my career although I was not involved in any aspect of it (to my knowledge). I heartily recommend this book to any new immigration officer because they will encounter cases like that described in this book. Excellent reporting.
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2 people found this helpful
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- chris
- 11-23-13
Great read!
If you could sum up The Snakehead in three words, what would they be?
unbelievable true story
Who was your favorite character and why?
n/a
Which scene was your favorite?
intro- smuggling event
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
yes! in fact, i listened to the entire book in 1day!
Any additional comments?
great buy!
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- Randolph Lumm
- 09-22-22
Our immigration system is a mess
Great story! Good discussion on American’s immigration system. It is sad to see how Republicans candidates use people’s hate for immigrates to get elected and how private prisons use it to make money off the government. The book is not political and stays neutral, presenting useful information on our immigration system.
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