Introducing The Chinatown Sting: Lucky Bird

Summary

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos

Episode: Introducing The Chinatown Sting: Lucky Bird

Release Date: September 23, 2025
Host: Lydia Jeancott (Pushkin Industries)
Guests: Tina Wong, Shuyu Wang, Peter Matesser, David Sheehan

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Overview

In this captivating crossover preview, "Hot Money: Agent of Chaos" presents the first episode of Lydia Jeancott’s new investigative podcast, The Chinatown Sting. The story peels back the layers of a groundbreaking 1980s drug case in New York’s Chinatown involving international heroin smuggling, ordinary women as drug mules, and law enforcement’s high-stakes fight in the height of Reagan’s war on drugs. At the center: Tina Wong, an accountant and mother, and her entanglement with Chinatown’s criminal underworld—a tale of luck, betrayal, and the profound need to belong.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The 1988 Chinatown Heroin Sting — Setting the Scene

[02:31]–[04:42]

• U.S. customs agents intercept three parcels from Hong Kong, each containing approx. $7 million in heroin (worth $18 million today).
• Peter Matesser (DEA): “I knew it was going to be a big case because it was a lot of heroin.”
• Agents devise a sting, emptying drugs from parcels and replacing with decoy bricks, hiding transmitters to track the operation.

2. The Operation Unfolds

[07:11]–[10:52]

• Parcels routed to two Chinatown addresses and one in Brooklyn.
• Undercover postal inspectors deliver packages; agents stake out each site.
• Memorable Moment: “One of the guys from DEA took a leak in the East River and… two sanitation police guys came up… ‘Hey, you can’t pee in the river.’” (David Sheehan, [10:21])
• Only the Brooklyn package is picked up, triggering the sting.

3. The Ordinary Women Caught in the Crosshairs

[11:04]–[14:23]

• The Brooklyn recipient: a 38-year-old mom and accountant.
• Law enforcement pressures her to cooperate: “You’re facing 10 years to life… This is your time to help out yourself.” — Peter Matesser ([12:06])
• Key Insight: All the women implicated knew each other from mahjong parlors—a tight-knit, trust-based subculture now leveraged for international smuggling.
• David Sheehan: “We’re going to seize all your assets… take all your kids away… and you’re going to go to jail.” ([14:23])
• Betrayal among friends becomes law enforcement’s main tool.

4. Unpacking Chinatown’s Cultural Backbone

[16:20]–[18:52]

• History professor Ellen Wu and journalist Michael Luo contextualize Chinatowns as products of segregation, U.S. exclusion laws, and the “stranger in the land” mentality.
• Shuyu Wang (attorney): Reflects on firsthand feelings of outsider status and the struggle to belong.

5. Tina Wong — The “Lucky Bird” at the Center

[21:37]–[27:48]

• Court records reveal Tina Wong as both a minor player and the connective tissue of the operation.
• Lydia and Shuyu track Tina down; her unbothered, cool demeanor stands out.
• Tina’s backstory: half-Chinese, half-Portuguese, struggled with outsider status even among new immigrants.
  Notable Quote: “We used to fight. We used to get picked on… Anybody that was Asian used to get picked on… Stupid kid stuff like Ching Chong.” — Tina Wong ([25:57])
• Tina learns mahjong to fit in, becomes part of Chinatown’s “family” circles.

6. The Anatomy of a Smuggling Racket

[28:48]–[33:24]

• Tina’s friend offers her a deal: receive a package, don’t look inside, get paid.
• She insists she isn’t a risk-seeker; motivation is poverty and opportunity.
• Standout Detail: The first thing Tina buys with her drug money: “I bought the most expensive food, like lobster, and took it home and ate it all by myself.” ([31:17])
• The financial reward is short-lived; ultimately, Tina grows uneasy as her involvement deepens and the risk grows.

7. The Broader Context — The War on Drugs

[33:24]–[34:38]

• Reagan-era drug laws increase mandatory minimums.
• Congress hosts hearings on “oriental traffickers” filling an organized crime vacuum.
• Federal enforcement intensifies; Tina wants out before the inevitable crackdown.

8. The Human Side: Family, Sacrifice, and Consequences

[37:21]–[40:40]

• Tina’s personal life: losing parents to cancer, struggling with jobs, sending her daughter to live with grandparents in Canada for safety.
• The emotional cost: guilt, relief, and survival mesh in Tina’s worldview.
  Notable moment: “Were you enjoying it or were you sad because you were missing her? … Truthfully, I was enjoying.” — Tina ([40:34])

9. The Sting’s Fallout and the Reluctant Witness

[41:06]–[43:30]

• The domino effect: one mother leads agents up the chain, eventually to Tina and her friend.
• Arrested at night, Tina is threatened with losing her child for decades.
• Tina refuses cooperation, even as mounting evidence and pressure threaten her family and life.
  Quote: “They took my daughter's picture… ‘You may not see her for like 25 years.’ … That was kind of a low blow. I don't think they should have did it like that. But that's their way.” — Tina Wong ([41:56])

10. Passing the Torch — The Prosecutor’s Files

[43:30]–[44:49]

• Introduction of Beryl Howell, the eager federal prosecutor behind the case — and coincidentally, Lydia’s boyfriend’s mother.
• Beryl’s old court documents, notebook, and trial materials become the backbone of Lydia’s reporting.
• The sting’s outcome will forever change the lives of all women caught in the investigation — and the prosecutor herself.

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Memorable Quotes

• Peter Matesser (DEA, on sting tech):
  “You’re listening in to, like, a computer almost, and you hear the beep, beep, beep. And then when a rapid beep goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, that means it’s been opened.” ([07:46])

• Tina Wong (on being an outsider):
  “I think they were kind of little racist on me since I wasn’t, you know, like, because I’m only half Chinese. There was a little racism there, but that didn’t stop me.” ([26:55])

• Tina Wong (on luck and money):
  “Getting the money, it was fun, I’m not gonna lie. You don’t think of tomorrow. You just think of that day, you know, and what you could do with it. It’s like being queen for a day.” ([30:58])

• Tina Wong (the threat of sentencing):
  “They took my daughter’s picture off the refrigerator. They go, is this your daughter? I said, yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years. You know, like, that was kind of a low blow.” ([41:56])

• Beryl Howell (prosecutor, on the case files):
  “There are notepads full of her sprawling cursive, all about a legal saga where almost nothing went according to plan.” ([43:33])

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Timeline & Timestamps of Notable Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | Notes | |-----------|---------------------------|-------| | 03:19 | DEA sets up sting | First mention of heroin parcels from HK | | 07:11 | Tech behind the sting | Beeping transmitters explained | | 10:21 | Humorous stakeout story | “Pee in the river” incident | | 14:23 | Law enforcement pressure | Asset seizure & threats | | 25:57 | Tina’s childhood racism | Establishing outsider theme | | 28:48 | Tina’s entry into smuggling| Motive: friendship, poverty | | 30:58 | Enjoying “queen for a day”| Spending drug money | | 40:34 | Sent daughter to Canada | Sacrifice for stability | | 41:56 | Arrest & threat of 25 years| Emotional climax | | 43:30 | Prosecutor’s perspective | Introduction of Beryl Howell |

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Tone & Storytelling Approach

Lydia Jeancott’s narration combines investigative rigor, empathetic interviews, and a deep appreciation of the cultural and historical context. The tone is both journalistic and intimate, bringing listeners directly into Tina’s world—a world shaped by luck, desperation, and the vibrant, sometimes shadowy gravitational force of Chinatown’s immigrant community.

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Final Thoughts

This episode lays the groundwork for a complex true-crime saga that is as much about American cultural fault lines and the search for belonging as it is about drugs and law enforcement. It promises a deep dive into the lives of women like Tina Wong and the web of relationships, power dynamics, and historical context that brought an ordinary community to the center of an international criminal trial.

Transcript

[Shuyu Wang]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Lydia Jeancott]

Pushkin hi everyone, I'm Lydia Jeancott. I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of my new podcast, the Chinatown Sting. 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 bring down one of Chinatown's most notorious gangsters. No matter the cost. Let's get into it. On February 9, 1988, David Sheehan was working his usual shift. He was a U.S. customs agent at JFK Airport. His phone rang.

[David Sheehan]

I was talking to a customs agent in California who says, hey, we just got three shipments of heroin and three different bail parcels. Do you guys want the case? So I said, absolutely, we'll take it.

[Lydia Jeancott]

The parcels were on their way from Hong Kong to New York. Customs agents were looking inside packages more often. Ever since President Reagan and Congress had ramped up the war on drugs. David Sheehan was part of this special task force to combat narcotic smuggling. So they got calls about drugs coming into New York City all the time. This call was special, though, because inside each of these packages was about $7 million worth of heroin. In today's money, that's something like $18 million per package. Peter Matesser was an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He really wanted to know who was waiting for those boxes.

[Peter Matesser]

I knew it was going to be a big case because it was a lot of heroin. And the focus was on China White heroin at the time because a lot was coming into New York. A lot of heroin was coming in from China to Hong Kong, then into New York. And it sounded like a good opportunity to work a big case.

[Lydia Jeancott]

On February 17, the boxes arrived at the airport. Peter and David knew they were at the beginning of something big, but they didn't know how big. My name is Lydia Jean Kot. As a journalist, I often report on law and power. I've written an audiobook about the Supreme Court, covered the federal trial of a crypto billionaire, and investigated the fallout of the legalization of sports betting. I'm interested in how throughout American history we've used the law as a tool to make our country both more and less. Just a few years ago, I came into possession of a suitcase. It was full of thousands of pages of court documents. They were all about a case a prosecutor spent years trying to build against a criminal who refused to be caught. There was mention of a criminal syndicate powerful enough to take on the Italian mafia. An attempted assassination, a global manhunt, Congressional hearings, international press coverage. A standing room only trial. And none of it would have happened without a group of ordinary people. People who in time, would have to make a decision about who to protect and who to betray. But that afternoon in 1988, one of these people was just waiting for a bo. This is the Chinatown Stang. Episode 1 Lucky Bird Court documents would later describe the exact contents of each box that landed In New York, 20 small bricks made up of white compressed powder wrapped up in either brown tape or duct tape. In one of the packages, the heroin was hidden inside these red and white tea boxes that had Chinese characters on them. In the other two, the heroin was hidden among stuffed animals. Now Peter Mattesser and the DEA could get to work. Step one, take out the heroin and replace it with decoy heroin. It was made out of wooden blocks cut and taped together, except you leave.

[Peter Matesser]

A sample of the heroin in there. We put the stuffed animals back in. Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it. That was our goal.

[Lydia Jeancott]

So when someone on the receiving end looked inside the boxes, they should notice nothing weird. Step two, the feds hid thin wires in a transmitter inside each box. Whoever was looking through the box would break the wires, and that would trigger a silent electric signal that would be picked up by these special machines in the hands of law enforcement. And this receiver had only two signals.

[Peter Matesser]

It was a slow beep. You're listening in to, like a computer almost, and you hear the beep, beep, beep. And then when a rapid beep goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, that means it's been opened.

[Lydia Jeancott]

The DEA agents set up their trap as fast as they could. They didn't want the people who were waiting for the packages to get suspicious.

[Peter Matesser]

They know how long it takes from point A to point B. So as soon as you get a day or two late, your investigation could be compromised.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Step three, each of these boxes had to be dropped off at exactly the same time. They were to be delivered by postal inspectors who were working undercover. Vans full of agents were waiting nearby, listening in on their little computers and. And ready to spring into action.

[Peter Matesser]

You have to cover all the different parts of the locations, because if someone takes the box and runs out the door, then we have heroin on the street.

[Lydia Jeancott]

On February 23, the mail packages, the vans full of agents, and the undercover postal workers, they were all ready to go. Two of the packages were addressed to Manhattan's Chinatown, and one was going to Brooklyn. Peter and the customs agent, David Sheehan followed the two packages that were going to Chinatown.

[Peter Matesser]

The thrill of the chase really becomes. It just. It sort of takes you over.

[Lydia Jeancott]

That day, like on any other day, Chinatown was bustling. The sidewalks were crowded with vendors selling cucumbers, eggplants, bok choy, dried mushrooms. People were walking shoulder to shoulder on the main streets. There are neon signs everywhere saying, go this way or go that way. And There was always a truck somewhere squeezing its way down these narrow streets full of fresh wares. That's all to say Chinatown wasn't an easy place to find parking, especially not for a van full of non Asian undercover federal agents.

[David Sheehan]

We were underneath the highway in a hand days from the drive, and that's where we had 30 agents all lined up ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.

[Lydia Jeancott]

There were two wired up packages addressed to two apartment buildings right next door to each other. So the undercover postal inspector buzzed at one address and then he buzzed at the other. No answer. He left behind mail slips. Peter and David waited to see what would happen next and waited some more.

[David Sheehan]

One of the guys from DEA took a leak in the east river and believe it or not, two sanitation police guys came up to him and said, hey, you can't pee in the river.

[Lydia Jeancott]

David Sheehan could feel his hopes of catching anyone in Chinatown pissing away too. Nobody was coming to collect the packages, even though their street value was supposed to be huge. Maybe someone had tipped them off. The whole operation now hinged on the third boxthe one that was going to Brooklyn.

[Peter Matesser]

We heard the beep go off.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Peter Matesser rushed over to the Brooklyn address to meet the agents there.

[Peter Matesser]

We knocked on the door or broke down the door. There's the package open. The stuffed animals were out.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Peter found himself face to face with a 38 year old woman, a mother of two and an accountant at a bank. Peter explained she was under arrest.

[Peter Matesser]

Read her rights. You know, in Cantonese Mandarin. I forgot exactly which one it was. She was very upset, crying. And your goal is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

[Lydia Jeancott]

By move up the ladder, Peter means this woman might have information that would help the fact figure out who's in charge of importing the heroin. The first rung of the ladder was right here in this house. Peter needed to know the box's next destination. And to find that out, he needed this woman to act totally normal. She needed to call whoever she was going to call after the box's arrival. They needed her to go from being an accomplice to being a cooperating witness quickly.

[Peter Matesser]

I tell her the amount of heroin here you're facing 10 years to life because it's so much heroin. This is your time to help out yourself. We can't guarantee you how much jail time you do, but it'll be brought to the attention of the judges. We'll know how much you've helped out in this case, and it's a courageous decision to make. We try to tell them we think it's the right one to make to help us, and we help you.

[Lydia Jeancott]

But the person this woman was going to call was her friend. If she cooperated, that would mean betraying her friend. But if she didn't cooperate, she might not see her two children grow up. She had to make an impossible decision. As the agents hovered over her, the clock was ticking. This woman agreed to cooperate. Her name is in the court documents, but she never responded to her request for an interview. Anyway, her name's not that important to the story. What's important is the chain of events she set off by giving the federal agents the name of her contact. Over the next few days, agents were arresting moms like her all over New York City.

[Peter Matesser]

It was like the first time we've ever seen anything like that, really. Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these, you know, these large amounts of heroin. And I'm sure they knew it was drugs.

[Lydia Jeancott]

It turned out that all of these women, women who received packages of heroin sent to their homes, all knew each other from playing mahjong. Mahjong is a game of luck and skill. You play with domino, like tiles instead of with cards. They have different designs on them. Stones, bamboos, dragons. And the goal is to end up with four pairs of three tiles and one pair of two tiles. That's called the eyes. Different hands are with different amounts of points. There were mah jong parlors all over Chinatown. These are places where people could play for a bit of money or a lot of money. The parlors were a place to catch up with old friends and make new ones. But now many of these friends were under arrest, and they were being forced to turn on one another. Customs agent David Sheehan was doing a lot of that forcing.

[David Sheehan]

We're going to seize all your assets. We're going to take all your kids away from you, and you're going to go to jail, and they're going to go to foster care and things of that nature.

[Lydia Jeancott]

You know, you're doing that because you really need their help to get to the person at the top, I guess.

[David Sheehan]

Absolutely. Yeah. You need somebody. You need more than one person to.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Cooperate because you need it to be corroborated.

[David Sheehan]

Yes.

[Lydia Jeancott]

After I got that suitcase full of court documents on the Chinatown drug trials, I realized I need help from someone who spoke Cantonese. That's the language that's spoken by many of the people in the documents.

[Shuyu Wang]

My name is Shuyu Wang. I'm a Practicing attorney in the city in New York.

[Lydia Jeancott]

I met Xuyu through a friend of a friend. We met up at a bar and I told her all about the Chinatown case.

[Shuyu Wang]

It was a very interesting story to me personally. I came from the Cantonese area in China, which is like, super close to Hong Kong, where a lot of those people in this story were originally from. My major in college was actually journalism. So that sort of like opened up a part of my brain.

[Lydia Jeancott]

So she joined me in reporting out this story. We went over court documents together, and we visited Chinatown together for months and months. For most of the time that I've lived in New York, Chinatown's been a place where I'd get dinner or drinks with friends. For Shuyu, it was a neighborhood where she got groceries.

[Shuyu Wang]

There's certain ingredients that's a rare find in a non Chinese grocery stores, like chicken feet. There are, like, certain things that I can only get here at a good price.

[Lydia Jeancott]

But we've been learning that Chinatown's a place with 150 years of history. So Chinatowns today we think of as these kind of tourist destinations. And, you know, they're fun places to go to get, you know, tchotchkes or dim sum and have kind of a colorful urban experience or, you know, a fun meal or something. But the reason Chinatowns exist in the first place is really about a history of racial segregation. That's Ellen Wu. She teaches history at Indiana University, Bloomington. And she talked to us about how Chinatowns arose in American cities in the face of anti Asian laws and violence. US Immigration laws also helped create Chinatowns, especially a law called the Chinese Exclusion act, which passed in 1882. Another historian we spoke to is Michael Luo. He's an editor at the New Yorker, and he wrote a book on Chinese immigration called Strangers in the Land.

[Peter Matesser]

It was the justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Field, who wrote the opinion, referred to the Chinese as strangers in the land, talking about how they could never assimilate with our people. And I feel like the stranger label remains imprinted on Asian Americans today.

[Lydia Jeancott]

She says she's felt what Michael Luo is describing, especially when she first moved to the US for law school.

[Shuyu Wang]

So it was kind of like surprised at how friendly people were surrounding me, but also to that I'm sensing like, there are people out there that just kind of like, oh, you're different. And you can tell by their gestures, by their, like, facial expressions, things like that.

[Lydia Jeancott]

As a white person, I've never experienced that, but I do know how bad it feels to be viewed as a stranger. My family moved to the US from Poland when I was eight. My English was kind of weird, but I wanted to fit in so badly. When I look at pictures of myself, it's embarrassing. I was like a parody of what I thought an American kid was supposed to look like. And the more Shuyu and I looked into this Chinatown case, the more, the more we came to see that it's also about someone who is trying in their own way to feel like they belonged.

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[Court/Legal Narrator]

Wong, Tina date of birth 1958 in New York, New York. Chinese female citizen, US height 5 foot 9 inches. Weight 120 pounds. Brown eyes, black hair.

[Lydia Jeancott]

As Shuyu and I went through that suitcase full of documents together, we kept coming across the name of one woman, sometimes called Tina Wong, sometimes called Tina.

[Court/Legal Narrator]

Alse in or about. And between early August 1987 and late December 1987, within the Eastern District of New York and elsewhere, the defendant, Tina Assay, did knowingly and willfully import into the United States from a place outside thereof a quantity of Heroin, a Schedule 1 narcotic drug, controlled substance.

[Lydia Jeancott]

So this is a complaint against Tina Aussay. What situation is Tina in if they have this information?

[Shuyu Wang]

So like, first of all, they got an informant which said, I delivered the packages to Tina. And I'm just quite interested in the last paragraph where they said that they had a recording between informant and the ultimate recipient of the drugs. Tina is kind of like a middleman, just like someone caught in between who gave her the package and who she was supposed to give the package to. And apparently the prosecution had information from both ends. So Tina was kind of trapped in a situation like she can't get away with that.

[Lydia Jeancott]

At first, Tina just seemed like another low level drug smuggler. She was one of about a half a dozen people federal authorities arrested. This was after that accountant in Brooklyn got caught with that wired up package, setting this whole investigation off. But as Shuyu and I went through the court documents, it started to look like Tina was actually at the absolute center of the government's case. Without her, everything might have played out entirely differently. She and I were desperate to talk to Tina. She, like all the women who received mail packages, had never spoken to a reporter before about this time. But I found what I thought was her address. It was in Manhattan. And we rang her bell twice, three times. She was never home. Then we showed up with a box of Italian cookies keys that we had picked up from a bakery nearby. I know that sounds weird, but I Thought it would seem friendlier than showing up with just a microphone.

[Shuyu Wang]

It was a brick apartment building.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Yeah.

[Shuyu Wang]

We entered a building not knowing if Tina is in this room this time. But we went up to her floor, went to her door, the door opened.

[Lydia Jeancott]

This woman was standing there, and I said nothing.

[Shuyu Wang]

Yeah, I think I was the one who broke the silence. Right. So we're the generalists that came here. So I just wonder that if we can have a conversation about this project. She's like, yeah, come on in.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And what were your impressions of her? She looked cool.

[Shuyu Wang]

She's got short haircut, and she's got super thick eyeliners.

[Lydia Jeancott]

I would say. Yeah, she had, like, black eyeliner.

[Shuyu Wang]

And also, she looks totally unbothered, even though we're clearly bothering her and her family. Um, she's kind of like, well, okay, they've been bugging me for long enough. Let's just see what they have to offer.

[Lydia Jeancott]

What do you remember about the apartment?

[Shuyu Wang]

So it's very homey, I would say. And there's a huge cage in the center of the living room. And that might be one of the very first things that you would notice once you step in.

[Lydia Jeancott]

It was an African grey parrot inside. I think the first thing I said right was, tell me about your parrot.

[Tina Wong]

Oh, that's a lucky bird. And I had him for, like, 25 years.

[Lydia Jeancott]

If he says something, I want to record it.

[Tina Wong]

He knows you're a stranger, so he won't talk. But if he gets to know you, then he starts to talk.

[Lydia Jeancott]

We weren't actually there to interview the parrot. We wanted Tina's story. She was born in the 1950s. Right. She was living outside of Chinatown, and at a time when Chinatown was way smaller. She was one of the few Chinese kids. Her dad was Chinese, and her mom was from. Was Portuguese. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tina Wong]

We were like the first Chinese family. I mean, not the first, but the few we used to fight. We used to get picked on a lot. Everybody that was Asian used to get picked on one time or another. Stupid kid stuff like Ching Chong. And then, you know, you fight back.

[Lydia Jeancott]

It's weird now to think of a Chinatown without kids, but for a long time, there just weren't very many Chinese kids in the US Period. The Chinese Exclusion act made it hard for any new Chinese immigrants to come, and it took nearly a century until 1965 for Congress to finally ban immigration quotas based on ethnicity. Tina was seven years old at the time when all these new Chinese immigrants started to show up and Chinatown was becoming a family neighborhood. Tina talked about how it was so great to be included in this new world of all these kids her age, but still she felt a little different from them.

[Tina Wong]

I think they were kind of little racist on me since I wasn't, you know, like, because I'm only half Chinese. There was a little racism there, but that didn't stop me. Yeah. So that's why I learned MJ mahjong. And, you know, when I would play MJ with them and I beat them, then I feel they go, yeah, the jook sing is pretty good.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And jook sing is someone who is American born Chinese.

[Tina Wong]

Yeah.

[Lydia Jeancott]

As an adult, Tina kept playing mahjong. She went to these special places that were kind of like speakeasies. You had to know someone who knew about them and then they could tell you where they were. Tina's favorite was on the second floor of a building on one of Chinatown's main streets, Canal Street.

[Tina Wong]

There's like a Chinese green wall. Paint, smoky, and a lot of mahjong noise.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Is there music playing or is it just people talking in the clack of the tiles?

[Tina Wong]

Yeah, I think it's just the clacking of the tiles. People don't want to hear the music. It might disturb them.

[Lydia Jeancott]

They're focused. And what sort of people were there?

[Tina Wong]

Old people, young people, all kinds.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And how good did you get on, like, a scale of 1 through 10?

[Tina Wong]

I didn't have, like, really good skills, but I had luck.

[Lydia Jeancott]

She was hanging out in these mahjong parlors, and she was getting lucky. Then her best friend from when she was little came up to her and said, you know, I have this proposal for you. I was wondering if you could receive a package in the mail for me. Don't worry about what's in the box, basically. But if you receive this box, it'll be worth your while.

[Tina Wong]

All you gotta do is receive the package. Don't have to open it, don't have to do this. Just accept it, and that's it.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Shuyu, do you remember if Tina ever broke the law before this happened?

[Shuyu Wang]

Gambling? If that counts.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Yeah. She got into some fights. I think she said.

[Shuyu Wang]

Yeah, but like, street fights?

[Lydia Jeancott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, nothing serious.

[Shuyu Wang]

She's not like a risk seeker, I would say, like, she will never voluntarily invite herself into troubles. I think she needed money at a time, just trying to, like, support herself better. It sounded like an easy deal for her.

[Tina Wong]

We're poor kids. We don't have that kind of money. So to have that kind of money, you take a chance. And I think a lot of people would probably have taken the chance.

[Lydia Jeancott]

So after she, you know, told her friend she would do it, she waited a few weeks, right. And then her friend called her and said, you know, the box is gonna ARR, like somewhere in these three days.

[Tina Wong]

Yeah. When it came, I took it home. I put it in my room, and I put it in the closet with my clothes on top.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And then she called her friend and was like, I have the box. What should I do?

[Tina Wong]

They told me to open it. So I opened it, and there was, like, Chinese on the box. I think they were tea boxes.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And her friend said, okay, take one of these tea boxes and bring it to this woman who lived like a seven minute walk away.

[Tina Wong]

I wasn't scared because I didn't really know the magnitude of the danger.

[Lydia Jeancott]

So Tina kept accepting the boxes, Right. Sometimes they came through the mail, Sometimes a friend brought them to her apartment, and she would carry them on.

[Tina Wong]

I was bringing down one box, and it was kind of like, open. So I, like, looked at it, and it was like a. Like a brick when I touched it. It was kind of dusty, and I think I went like this, and it went in my mouth and I said, oh, my God, the taste.

[Shuyu Wang]

Well, it was heroin.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Yeah, it was like $7 million worth of heroin. Her friend gave her a, like a plastic bag or a paper bag full of cash. Yeah, it was a big brick of cash. Wow.

[Shuyu Wang]

So, like as of in a movie.

[Tina Wong]

Getting the money, it was fun, I'm not gonna lie. You don't think of tomorrow. You just think of that day, you know, and what you could do with it. It's like being queen, queen for a day.

[Lydia Jeancott]

What's the first thing you bought?

[Tina Wong]

I don't know. I think I bought the most expensive food, like lobster, and took it home and ate it all by myself.

[Lydia Jeancott]

You ordered a full lobster?

[Tina Wong]

Yeah, I think I ordered double lobster.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And then you brought it to your apartment and then you just ate. Ate it by yourself?

[Tina Wong]

Yeah, I watched TV and ate it.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And you're like, life is good.

[Tina Wong]

Yeah, can have this every day because I love lobster.

[Lydia Jeancott]

She hid all of the cash that she was getting in a drawer in her bedroom and used it for all sorts of stuff. The dentist bets on mahjong, jewelry. Tina bought a car, a BMW. And the pinnacle of all of this is when she and her best friend went on a trip to Asia together, A trip that would turn out to be a very big deal in the case later. And on that trip, her world kind of got expanded. She got to see things. She had Never seen before in her life. Like, she talked about how when she and her friend arrived in Indonesia, they saw this huge beach that looked like it was covered with black rock. But when she got closer, she realized those were actually crabs.

[Tina Wong]

There's like a thousand of them. So it looked like the rock is black, but when you go there it's white because all the crabs walk away. It's like thousands.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Was this fun when you're like getting these packages, doing these trips?

[Tina Wong]

It was fun. I feel that if you take any ordinary person and you give them a trip and you take them here and you can go shopping, nobody's gonna say no. I mean, you know, they're not gonna say they didn't have fun.

[Lydia Jeancott]

According to the court docs, Tina made about $15,000 for receiving these boxes. And that's not including other perks like the plane ticket to Asia. But while the money was fun, it wasn't drastically changing her life the way that she imagined it would. And her friend was asking her to do more and more. She was getting bossy. Tina had a bad feeling. Tina was right to be anxious about her luck running out. This was the late 80s. President Ronald Reagan had doubled down on the war on drugs.

[Peter Matesser]

We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We're running up a battle flag. We can fight the drug problem and we can win.

[Lydia Jeancott]

In 1986, Reagan signed the Anti Drug Abuse Act. It created new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. And that same year, Congress began holding hearings.

[David Sheehan]

Today we'll learn more about criminal groups.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Of Asian origin operating in the United States. Drug traffickers love a vacuum.

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As traditional organized crime appears to be.

[Peter Matesser]

Taking less and less of the market.

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Than other trafficking organizations will move in.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And it certainly appears from the intelligence we have that the oriental traffickers are picking up a big piece of that action. All of this was in the distant background of Tina Wong's life. Her reason for wanting to quit the drug trade was closer to home. She was worried that if she kept accepting these packages, she'd put her family in danger. She had a husband and a one year old daughter.

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[Lydia Jeancott]

When tina Wong was 28 years old, she became a mom to a baby girl.

[Tina Wong]

They cleaned her up and they put her in the little basket and they wrapped her up like a sumo, you know, cause they got nails and she was like scratching.

[Lydia Jeancott]

She named her daughter Fallon after that TV show Dynasty which had you, had you heard of that TV show before?

[Shuyu Wang]

I've heard of that But I've never watched it.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Yeah, I had never heard of it, but, yeah, apparently it was like a huge TV show in the 80s, like, number one hit. And it was about this oil tycoon's family, and Fallon was the daughter, and she was like a rich, spoiled rat.

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[Lydia Jeancott]

Holy hell it is.

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[Lydia Jeancott]

I don't, but, yeah. Tina's daughter Fallon was born into a different situation, Right. Tina had had this dream of being a textile designer. And she even got, as a high schooler, into this, like, special program at fit, The College of New York of Art and Design. But then she was on a scholarship, and both. She was like, 16, 17. Both of her parents got cancer one after the other, and she was the person who had to take care of them. And then she missed so much school that she got kicked out of the program after her parents died. She was, like, trying to get steady work. So she would, like, go to bars to work there and have to bring Fallon. And then people would be like, you're a bad mom for bringing your kid to a bar.

[Tina Wong]

Sometime people call me, say, oh, we need a bartender or waitress, you know, for the week or the day I fill in. But it wasn't, you know, often because I had to take care of her because I was still, like, young, and so I. I was, like, not really a best mother, but, you know, I try, you know, you got to think about what you're doing. So I try to work and, you know, make ends meet.

[Lydia Jeancott]

And her husband was working as a cook and sometimes in some gambling parlors.

[Shuyu Wang]

He works, like, super long shifts and long hours. I think at a certain point, like, they had to send her baby to her grandparents who were in Canada at the time, to take care of her so that, like, Tina could go out to work while people would. Where the baby was being taken care of by someone.

[Lydia Jeancott]

They sent Fallon to Canada to be with her grandparents, her husband's parents, so she knew that Fallon would be safe as Tina tried to find study, work, and figure out her life. You know, Tina doesn't speak Chinese, but if she was with her grandparents, then.

[Shuyu Wang]

Fallon could pick up some Chinese.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Wait, did you say she. That your parents did the same thing?

[Shuyu Wang]

Yeah, I gone through basically the same thing as Fallon. My extended family is, like, very closely, like, supporting each other. So they also sent me back to my grandparents when I was about, like, 10 months old. 11 months old. Yes, about the same time.

[Lydia Jeancott]

So Tina knew That Fallon was being well taken care of as she and her husband tried to sort out how to provide for her. And after feeling like she had been doing a bad job, Tina felt like this huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Were you enjoying it or were you, like, sad because you were missing her? Both.

[Tina Wong]

Truthfully, I was enjoying.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Was after her daughter was sent away that Tina started accepting these boxes. But then she could feel her luck running out. She told her friend she wasn't going to do this work anymore. Five months went by. Then came the sting. The day DEA agents raided that house in Brooklyn, as we already heard, Agent Pete Matesser found that accountant, the mother of two, standing in front of an open box of stuffed animals.

[Peter Matesser]

She was very upset, crying, and your goal is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

[Lydia Jeancott]

This woman led the agents up the ladder to the woman who had recruited her. And that woman gave up the names of Tina's best friend. And Tina.

[Court/Legal Narrator]

On March 1, 1988, an arrest warrant was issued in the Eastern district of New York for Tina Wong for importation of Heroin. At approximately 9pm, Wong was arrested at her residence.

[Shuyu Wang]

That was the moment maybe that she realized that she was not really being paranoid and everything she did has a consequence.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Tina's worst fears were now coming true.

[Tina Wong]

They took my daughter's picture off the refrigerator. They go, is this your daughter? I said, yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years. You know, like, that was kind of a low blow. I don't think they should have did it like that. But that's their way.

[Lydia Jeancott]

So their way was to keep building a case against whoever was at the top, the person really behind the boxes of heroin. To do that, they needed Tina to tell them everything about what she had done and who else was involved. This time, though, they. It wasn't going to be so easy. Was there a part of you that's like, I'm not going to cooperate?

[Tina Wong]

Yes, that I wasn't going to cooperate. No, I wasn't going to cooperate with them.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Tina had much more valuable information about this scheme than the accountant. But she also had no intention of sharing what she knew. And that was going to be a big problem because she and all the women like her were now in the crosshairs of a young and determined federal prosecutor. Her job was to bring down a drug kingpin, and she saw all these female witnesses in custody as a huge opportunity. It was fairly early in my career as a prosecutor, and it was like one of those cases that I started in general crimes and then took with me to Narcotics as I worked my way up the chain. Her name is Beryl Howell. She's the reason I'm able to report on this case. I've known Beryl for years. She's my boyfriend's mother.

[Shuyu Wang]

These are briefs that I filed.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Government was always blue. What is that? More trial notebook stuff. Witness list. Oh, my God. Beryl. Beryl is the one who gave me that suitcase full of court documents. Years worth of filings, interviews, openings, closings, rebuttals. There are notepads full of her sprawling cursive, all about a legal saga where almost nothing went according to plan. The case that started with the Chinatown Sting would change Beryl's life and Tina Wong's life and Chinatown. And it was just getting underway. Coming up on this season of the Chinatown Sting. When people came here, there were strangers.

[Tina Wong]

In a foreign land, and they didn't speak the language, didn't read English. So this was the one place they could go to for any kind of assistance.

[Lydia Jeancott]

Once you join a gang, you feel.

[Tina Wong]

Like you have the whole gang behind you. Well, I always know that a good friendship, nothing can break it.

[Lydia Jeancott]

There's a difference between hearing things and thinking you're not hearing the truth versus thinking you're not hearing the whole story. I wasn't sure I was ever hearing the whole story from Tina Wong. The Chinatown Stang is written and produced by me, Lydia Jean Khat, and reported by me and Shu Yu Wang. Our senior producer is Emily Martinez. Additional production by Sonia Gerwitt. Our editor is Julia Barton with additional editing by Karen Shakurji. Our story consultant is Rong Xiao Cheng. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by John Sung. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Our fact checker is Kate Furby, and our show art was designed by Sean Carney. All voiceover work by Tali Leong. For more information about this episode, check out our show notes or visit Pushkin fm. Chinatown. The Chinatown Sting is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin Podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can find the Chinatown Sting anywhere you get your podcasts. Pushkin plus subscribers can binge the entire season right now ad free. Sign up on the Chinatown Stang show page on Apple or@Pushkin FM.

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[Lydia Jeancott]

Happiness and one of my favorite ways.

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