Introducing The Chinatown Sting: Lucky Bird

The China History Podcast

Laszlo Montgomery

Places & Travel, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Here’s a preview of a new podcast, The Chinatown Sting, from our friends at Pushkin Industries.

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 and impacted the history of American Chinatowns themselves, which developed to protect immigrants from a hostile society. 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, Laszla Montgomery here. As a listener of the China history podcast, it's probably
0:05.6	safe to say you're interested in stories about the Chinese American immigrant experience,
0:11.1	lesser-known chapters of cultural history and global issues. The show I'm about to share with you
0:17.1	dives into all these topics. It's called The Chinatown Sting. In the late 1980s,
0:24.7	federal authorities received a tip that billions of dollars with a heroin were being mailed to
0:30.4	New York City inside boxes filled with tea. The investigation would uncover a network of drug
0:36.2	smugglers who used women recruited at Majong parlors in Chinatown,
0:40.3	women like Tina Wong. Tina was a young mother who was asked to accept some packages in the mail.
0:46.7	When the feds were tipped off to her involvement, Tina had two choices, spend decades in prison.
0:53.3	Or risk her life to help the government bring down
0:55.7	the man at the helm. One of New York's most notorious gangsters, Johnny Ang, aka Machine Gun Johnny.
1:03.7	Women like Tina found themselves trapped between federal law enforcement and the threats of gangs
1:09.6	who recruited them. But lurking behind it all
1:13.1	was the history of American Chinatowns themselves, which developed to protect immigrants from a
1:18.6	hostile society. On the Chinatown Sting, host Lydia Kot and reporter Shiu Wang,
1:24.9	interview sources who've never spoken on the record before to reconstruct a
1:29.2	year-long effort to bring down one of the most powerful gangs in Chinatown, no matter the cost.
1:35.9	Okay, here's a preview of the Chinatown Sting. Hope you enjoy it. If you do, find the Chinatown
1:41.6	sting wherever you get your podcast. And if you want to binge the
1:44.5	entire season early and ad-free, join Pushkin Plus. Subscribe on the Chinatownsting show page on Apple
1:51.6	podcasts or at pushkin.fm. slash plus.
1:58.1	On February 9th, 1988, David Sheehan was working his usual shift.
	...

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