Sister Ping

Cheng Chui Ping (traditional Chinese: 鄭翠萍; simplified Chinese: 郑翠萍; January 9, 1949 – April 24, 2014), also known as Sister Ping (Chinese: 萍姐), was a Chinese woman who ran a human smuggling operation bringing people from China into the United States from 1984 to 2000. Operating from Chinatown, Manhattan, Ping oversaw a snakehead smuggling ring which brought as many as 3,000 Chinese into the United States, earning her more than $40 million. The United States Department of Justice called Ping “one of the first, and ultimately most successful, alien smugglers of all time.”

Born and raised in Fujian province, Ping moved to Hong Kong in 1974, and then New York City in 1981. She was arrested in Hong Kong in 2000 and extradited to the United States in 2003. In 2006, she was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison, and remained there until her death.

Ping was born on January 9, 1949, in Shengmei, Mawei, Fuzhou, a poor farming village in northern Fujian, China. She was one of five children born to her father, Cheng Chai Leung, who was from Shengmei, and her mother, who was from a neighboring village. Ping was 10 months old when the People’s Republic of China was established. Growing up, she attended the village elementary school and worked on the family farm, helping raise pigs and rabbits, chopping wood, and tending a vegetable garden. When she was twelve, she survived the capsizing of a rowboat in which she had been traveling to another village to cut wood for kindling. She recalled of the incident that all of the people in the boat who had been rowing and had been holding an oar when the boat turned over managed to survive, while “the two people who were lazy and sat back while others worked ended up dead. This taught me to work hard.” During the Cultural Revolution, she became a leader of the Red Guard in her village.

When she was fifteen, her father left the family and traveled to the United States as a merchant marine crewman. He stayed in the U.S. for thirteen years, working as a dish-washer and sending money home to the family every few months. He was apprehended by U.S. immigration authorities and deported back to China in 1977. When he returned to China, Ping’s father entered into the people smuggling business.

Sister Ping married Cheung Yick, a man from a neighboring village, in 1969. They had a daughter, Cheung Hui, in 1973; Ping later had three sons. The family moved to Hong Kong in 1974, where Ping became a successful businesswoman and opened a factory in Shenzhen, China. In June 1981, with the help of an elderly couple, Ping successfully applied to be a nanny in New York. The family passed through Canada, and on 17 November 1981, settled in Chinatown, Manhattan, in the United States. They opened a shop, the Tak Shun Variety Store, which catered to homesick Fuzhounese immigrants. During her time in New York, Ping lived at 14 Monroe Street, Knickerbocker Village, a modest lower middle class development.

Sister Ping began her smuggling career in the early 1980s as a one-woman operation, smuggling handfuls of fellow villagers from China into the United States a few at a time by commercial airline using forged identification documents. She charged $35,000 or more to transport interested immigrants into the United States.

In the spring of 1989, evidence against Sister Ping was gathered in a sting by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Toronto International Airport. Several months later, Ping was arrested and pleaded guilty to illegal human smuggling. She was sentenced to six months in prison in Butler County, Pennsylvania. As she spoke little English, she was isolated from other prisoners and readily agreed to provide a Chinese-speaking FBI agent with information on Chinatown’s underworld, she received a reduced sentence and served four months.

Business picked up after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 when the U.S. government offered Chinese students present in the United States at the time the opportunity to stay. Thousands flooded into the country from abroad using false papers to establish a claim to residency under the new rule.

On June 6, 1993, the Golden Venture ship ran aground in Queens, New York, with 286 illegal immigrants on board. One of the criminal leaders, Guo Liang Chi, claimed Ping as an investor. However, there are doubts about Guo Liang Chi’s claim because he wanted to blame another person to reduce his federal sentence on other crimes that he committed over the years. In December 1994, an indictment was brought before a Manhattan federal court, stating that Ping had smuggled around 3,000 Fujianese to the United States since 1984 with the help of the American-Chinese gang Fuk Ching. Sometimes hundreds of people were smuggled in at a time via cargo ship and imprisoned below deck for months at a time with little food and water. In 1998, one of the smaller boats Sister Ping used for offloading customers from a larger vessel capsized off the coast of Guatemala, drowning fourteen.

Death

Ping’s health had deteriorated in prison, with high cholesterol and blood lipids; she lost 17 pounds in the last two years of her life. Aged 65, Ping died quietly at noon on April 24, 2014, surrounded by her family at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Texas.

Her funeral took place on May 23, 2014, at the Boe Fook Funeral Home on Canal Street in Manhattan with thousands of mourners.

Her body was laid to rest at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

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The Case of the Snakehead Queen
Chinese Human Smuggler Gets 35 Years

03/17/06

She was once one of the most powerful underworld figures in New York. To her associates and followers, she was “the Mother of all Snakeheads” (that’s criminal slang for human smugglers). In Chinatown, she was affectionately called “Sister Ping.” Now, following Thursday’s sentencing in a U.S. District Court, Cheng Chui Ping faces 35 years in jail.

Her crimes? Extensive…and lucrative. For more than a decade, Cheng smuggled as many as 3,000 illegal immigrants from her native China into the U.S.—collecting more than $40 million from immigrants by charging upwards of $40,000.

Her methods? Brutal. Cheng allowed some customers to pay part of their fee, but once in the U.S. they were held or threatened with violence until the balance was paid. Cheng often employed the notoriously violent Fuk Chin Gang for muscle.

Conditions aboard the smuggling vessels were often inhumane. In June 1993, a rickety cargo ship named the Golden Venture (pictured above) carrying some 300 illegal immigrants ran aground off the coast of Queens, New York, after a miserable three-month voyage. Ten immigrants, including one of Sister Ping’s customers, drowned while trying to swim to safety.

We knew about Cheng before the Golden Venture tragedy. In fact, she had been arrested for alien smuggling and had been an informant against other smugglers. All the while, she continued to run her own operations. It was our efforts to break the Fuk Chin Gang that led to Cheng’s downfall. Some members of the gang cooperated with our investigation into her activities, leading to her indictment in 1994.

Cheng—once an illegal immigrant herself—started her smuggling service shortly after she entered the U.S. in 1981. Her business flourished and she joined with other snakeheads to buy ships that could carry more desperate immigrants at a time. During the early 1990s, she ruled her enterprise from a variety store in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Using her illegal proceeds, she also ran a legitimate travel agency and real estate company. Many customers were illegal aliens she’d smuggled into the country. At the height of her operations, she owned restaurants, a clothing store, and real estate in Chinatown, as well as apartments in Hong Kong and a farm in South Africa.

After her indictment, Cheng fled to China, where she continued to run a smuggling operation. In April 2000, Hong Kong police on the lookout for the FBI arrested her at the airport. Cheng fought extradition to this country, but was eventually delivered to the U.S. in July 2003. By the time she arrived here, we had put together a witness list of 25 people for her trial from around the world, including Guatemala, Canada, the U.S., and Hong Kong. She was convicted in New York less than two years later on multiple counts, including money laundering, conspiracy to commit alien smuggling, and other smuggling-related offenses.

Thanks to the work of the Hong Kong Police, our New York field office, our Legal Attaché in Hong Kong, and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, justice has finally been served for the many victims of Sister Ping.