The Snakehead (2025)

The Snakehead investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal, a middle-aged woman from New York’s Chinatown who manages a multi-million dollar business smuggling people and providing safe passage to America. The Snakehead is a crime story and an exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.
The book tells the story of charismatic middle-aged grandmother Sister Ping who runs her complex empire from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown. Keefe recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them.