Introducing: The Chinatown Sting
Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Here's a preview of a new Pushkin podcast, The Chinatown Sting. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing the series right here for Bad Women listeners to enjoy.
In the late 1980s, federal authorities laid a trap. They’d gotten a tip that huge amounts of heroin were being mailed to New York City inside boxes filled with tea. The investigation would uncover a network of drug smugglers who used women recruited at mahjong parlors in Chinatown. Host Lidia Jean Kott and co-reporter Shuyu Wang interview sources who’ve never spoken on record before, including federal prosecutors, to reconstruct a years-long effort to bring down one of the most powerful gangsters in Chinatown.
The Chinatown Sting drops weekly on Tuesdays starting September 16.
Get early, ad-free access to the entire season of The Chinatown Sting by subscribing to Pushkin+. Subscribers also get bonus episodes, exclusive binges, full audiobooks, and early ad-free listening for all Pushkin shows.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:07.0 | In New York City, in 1988, |
| 0:11.0 | In New York City, in 1988, federal authorities laid a trap. |
| 0:17.0 | They'd gotten a tip that a vast amount of heroin was being mailed to the city, inside boxes filled with tea. |
| 0:26.4 | All you got to do is receive the package. Don't have to open it, just accept it, and that's it. |
| 0:31.4 | It was a slow beep. You're listening in and you hear the beep, beat, beep, and then when a rapid beep, beep, beep, beep, |
| 0:40.0 | that means it's been open. |
| 0:42.0 | This sting was huge. |
| 0:44.5 | We probably had about 30 agents. |
| 0:46.5 | We had undercover postal agents in uniform, attempt to deliver the package at each location. |
| 0:53.6 | That day, the feds caught low-level drug carriers, mostly women, who played Mahjong |
| 0:59.3 | together in Chinatown. |
| 1:01.0 | I would play MJ with them, Majong, and I beat them. |
| 1:06.5 | Read of her rights, you know, in Cantonese and Mandarin. |
| 1:10.7 | I figured out exactly which one it was. She was very upset, crying. |
| 1:15.7 | They took my daughter's picture off the refrigerator. They go, is this your daughter? I said yes. |
| 1:21.0 | They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years. |
| 1:27.4 | My name is Lydia Jean-Kal. |
| 1:29.9 | For the last few years, I've been trying to unravel |
| 1:32.2 | what happened to a group of moms who played Mahjong in Chinatown, |
| 1:36.2 | had they got pulled into a criminal underworld. |
| 1:39.6 | To escape, they were forced to play the highest stakes game of their lives. |
... |
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