Sister Ping

Cheng Chui Ping (; January 9, 1949 – April 24, 2014), also known as Sister Ping , was a Chinese woman who ran a human smuggling operation bringing people from China into the United States between 1984 and 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. In 2006, she was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison, and remained there until her death.

Early life 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. 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.

Smuggling business

Early career 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.

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. 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 Ping used for offloading customers from a larger vessel capsized off the coast of Guatemala, drowning 14. Chinatown's most vicious and feared gang, to transport and guard her customers in the United States. The presence of these gang members guaranteed that Ping got paid the $25,000 to $45,000 fee she demanded for the trip.

Legal pursuit In 1994, Ping was invited to Beijing, China along with other overseas notables of Fujianese descent to celebrate an anniversary celebration of the Communist Party. She was arrested when she arrived but according to police and friends, she paid bribes to escape custody. Later in December 1994, Ping learned of the US indictment and she fled, returning to China where she continued her business.

The FBI and INS spent the following five years attempting to apprehend her, but she was believed to reside mainly in China, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. On April 17, 2000 Interpol searched passenger lists for flights from Hong Kong to New York, they found her son's name. More than 40 agents from the Hong Kong narcotics bureau waited at Hong Kong International Airport, apprehended her at around noon and she was fingerprinted and arrested.

After a jury trial before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York she was convicted in June 2005 on three separate counts, including one count of conspiring to commit illegal human smuggling, hostage taking, money laundering and trafficking in ransom proceeds and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Ping was interviewed in Danbury in June 2013 and said, “Being locked up for over 10 years allowed me to think about my previous life, my heart calmed down and I started to feel that jail was the safest place for me. I keep telling myself not to think much about the future and live life by the moment." She also said "I cannot believe they jailed me for 35 years! 35 years! In a way I was killed by the FBI agents and tainted witnesses."

Ping served part of her sentence in Federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut (BOP #05117-055). In 2013, it was announced that Danbury would be reverted to a male-only facility. In the same year, Ping was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and transferred to the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Texas, to receive cancer treatment.

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. Ping died on April 24, 2014, aged 65, surrounded by her family at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Texas.

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

Cultural references Ping and the Golden Venture are the subject of Patrick Radden Keefe's 2009 book, The Snakehead.

The Golden Venture disaster and the lives of some of the passengers are the subject of Peter Cohn's 2006 documentary Golden Venture.

The 2012 film Premium Rush contains an allusion to Ping. Set in Manhattan, the plot centers around the troubled delivery of a hawala ticket to a snakehead named “Sister Chen” in Chinatown.

The 2021 film Snakehead, written and directed by Evan Jackson Leong, was loosely inspired by Ping.