Thursday, August 20, 2009
Cheng Chui Ping, also known as Sister Ping, was one of the criminal world’s most unlikely leaders, and yet for almost 20 years she headed a vast Chinese-American criminal underworld who dealt primarily in smuggling people. Patrick Radden Keefe charts Sister Ping’s rise and fall, and chronicles the violent world she commanded in The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream. Then, a look at the film world with our resident entertainment critic David Kipen.