During the late 1980s, a cohort of women who frequented Mahjong parlours in Manhattan’s Chinatown were recruited for a vast heroin trafficking ring. After they were caught, prosecutors tapped them as witnesses, hoping they’d inform on their recruiters. The ultimate goal was to convict the scheme’s supposed mastermind, Johnny Eng.
In The Chinatown Sting, Lidia Jean Kott and Shuyu Wang dive into this underground world, painting a vivid portrait of the Manhattan Chinatown across the decades, and interviewing the major players of a case that changed lives, a neighbourhood, and the law.
The best scoop of Pushkin’s fascinating podcast? Judge Beryl Howell, one of the case’s lead prosecutors, and who just so happens to be Kott’s boyfriend’s mother. Kott has known Howell since she was a child, having grown up on the same street; she was even Kott’s inspiration for becoming a law reporter. As such, Howell is a frequent voice on the series, offering illuminating insight into the Chinatown case.
Besides the hosts, the other most frequent voice belongs to Tina Wong, one of the women recruited to receive heroin in the mail. The Chinatown Sting cultivates a connection between Howell and Wong worthy of Al Pacino/Robert De Niro in Heat, which proves to be one of the richest through lines in the series. The two were both in their early thirties when Wong was first arrested; she had an infant daughter at home, and Howell went into labour with her first child the very evening that she finished prosecuting Eng.
Kott describes being nervous that Wong wouldn’t want to talk to her once she discovered her connection to Howell. In fact, the opposite is true. Wong is intrigued by how Howell is after all these years, and actually still holds her in quite high regard, understanding that she was just doing her job when she prosecuted her. And in turn, Howell speaks admiringly of Wong’s bravery in informing on some scary, dangerous people; Wong was even shot in the back as a warning from Eng’s gang, but continued to cooperate with the authorities regardless.
The relationship between the two women proves to be a vital, grounding anchor throughout the series – vital because, besides the incredible access that Kott has to the relevant figures, the other chief distinguishing feature of The Chinatown Sting is its sprawling scope. Wong’s trial, and the others that followed, make up a surprisingly small percentage of the podcast’s duration. The rest is an unusual but admirable wealth of contextualisation. Across these six episodes, we learn about Chinatowns through the ages, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mahjong, Reagan’s war on drugs, Chinese gangs, mandatory minimums… the list goes on.
Additionally, Kott’s warm curiosity as an interviewer leads to a host of interesting tangents. More than simply getting the facts, she really wants to know what the experience was like for all the people she manages to talk to. Not just what happened to them, but what they were thinking and feeling at the time. To tell some parts of the story, Kott gets Wang to interview her about her reporting process, and Wang uses her own background as a trial lawyer to add further insight.
The flip side to all these contextual nuggets is that they can leave the podcast feeling a little unfocused. Now and then, the abundance of material feels like more of a curse than a blessing, weighing down any sense of storytelling propulsion. While much of the material is edifying enough to make that seem a sacrifice worth making, some of it could certainly have been trimmed — for instance, just because it shares a setting with the case at hand, we really didn’t need several dramatic readings from one contributor’s novel.
More often than not, the podcast succeeds in getting the balance right. However much it might sometimes leave you wishing for a little extra narrative discipline, The Chinatown Sting’s dedication to both context and curiosity makes it an informative, engaging listen.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.