Introducing: The Chinatown Sting
What Happened in Nashville
iHeartPodcasts
4.0 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2025
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Here’s a preview of a podcast we think you'll enjoy. From our friends at Pushkin Industries, this is The Chinatown Sting. 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. Listen to The Chinatown Sting on the iHeartRadio app or 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 | Hi everyone. I'm Lydia Jean-Cott. I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of my new podcast, The Chinatowns Dang. 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. It's led by a prosecutor, determined to |
| 0:23.1 | bring down one of Chinatown's most notorious gangsters, no matter the cost. Let's get into it. |
| 0:32.0 | In New York City, in 1988, federal authorities laid a trap. They'd gotten a tip that a vast amount of heroin was being mailed to the city, inside boxes filled with tea. |
| 0:46.0 | All you got to do is receive the package. |
| 0:47.9 | Don't have to open it, just accept it, and that's it. |
| 0:51.0 | It was a slow beep. |
| 0:53.0 | You're listening in, and you hear the beep, beep, and then when a rapid beep goes, beep, beep, beep, that means it's been open. |
| 1:01.6 | This sting was huge. |
| 1:04.1 | We probably had about 30 agents. |
| 1:06.2 | We had undercover postal agents in uniform, attempt to deliver the package at each location. |
| 1:13.3 | That day, the feds caught low-level drug couriers, mostly women, who played Mahjong |
| 1:18.9 | together in Chinatown. |
| 1:20.7 | I would play MJ with them, Majong, and I beat them. |
| 1:26.1 | Read of her rights, you know, in Cantonese and Mandarin. |
| 1:30.3 | I figured out exactly which one it was. |
| 1:33.0 | She was very upset, crying. |
| 1:35.4 | They took my daughter's picture off the refrigerator. |
| 1:38.3 | They go, is this your daughter? |
| 1:40.0 | I said yes. |
| 1:40.9 | They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years. |
| 1:47.1 | My name is Lydia Jing Ka. |
| 1:49.6 | For the last few years, I've been trying to unravel |
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