Introducing The Chinatown Sting: Lucky Bird

Deep Cover

Pushkin Industries

True Crime, History

4.3 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Here’s a preview of a new Pushkin podcast, The Chinatown Sting, that I'm really excited about. In the late 1980s, a group of women connected through the mahjong parlors in Manhattan’s Chinatown were caught in a massive undercover drug bust. But this bust was just the beginning of an even bigger case. Host Lidia Jean Kott and co-reporter Shuyu Wang interview sources who’ve never spoken on record before, including witnesses, defendants, and federal prosecutors, to reconstruct a case that still has repercussions today. In this episode, we meet Tina Wong, a young mother who found herself in the middle of the operation with two choices—go to prison, or risk her life to bring down the man at the helm.

Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get podcasts and binge the entire season, ad-free, with a Pushkin+ subscription—sign up on The Chinatown Sting Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:13.5	Hey, Jake here.
0:15.6	Years ago, I heard a pitch for this show, and it blew me away.
0:20.0	And now, that show, it's happened. It's finally
0:23.7	here. And if you're a fan of deep cover, I think you're really going to enjoy this. It's a new
0:30.0	podcast from Pushkin. It's called The Chinatown Sting. In 1987, Tina Wong was a new mother living in Manhattan's Chinatown.
0:41.6	After her friend asked her to receive a mysterious package in the mail, Tina found herself
0:47.0	at the center of an international drug smuggling operation involving billions of dollars
0:52.9	worth of heroin. Tina, she had two choices. A. spend decades in
0:59.1	prison, or B, risk her life to help the government bring down the man at the center of all this,
1:05.6	one of New York City's most notorious gangsters, Johnny Ng, aka Machine Gun Johnny.
1:13.1	On the Chinatown sting, reporters Lydia Jean Cott and Shu Yu Wang speak with prosecutors,
1:20.2	DEA agents, historians, and former gangsters to tell the untold story of a case that changed Chinatown and the network of women
1:30.5	at the center who found themselves playing the ultimate high stakes game.
1:36.2	I hope you enjoy this preview. If you do, find the Chinatown sting wherever you get your
1:41.8	podcasts. And if you want to binge the entire season early and ad-free, join Pushkin Plus.
1:49.9	Subscribe on the Chinatown Sting show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.
1:55.8	slash plus.
1:59.8	On February 9th, 1988, David Sheehan was working his usual shift.
2:05.5	He was a U.S. customs agent at JFK Airport.
2:08.9	His phone rang.
2:12.0	I was talking to a customs agent in California who says, hey, we just got three shipments of heroin
	...

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