Prosecutors said the woman ran a multimillion-dollar ring using the violent Fuk Ching Chinese street gang that crammed immigrants into planes, cars and trucks with fake floors and ships with dungeon-like conditions where one bathroom served hundreds of people.
Mourned by the thousands of Chinese who now call Canada and the US their home and vilified by the police in North America, a woman who helped smuggled thousands of illegal immigrants into North America died last week in a Texas prison.
At the height of her prowess in moving people, Cheng Chui Ping the one-time queen of Manhattan’s Chinatown used her underground bank in New York to funnel US$40 million in illegal earnings back to China.
She had turned a mom-and-pop migrant smuggling sideline into a vast global empire with links to organized crime, especially with the notorious Fuk Ching triad and became known as the “Mother of all Snakeheads” – a term used to describe those involved with human smuggling.
Brian McAdam, a former Canadian Immigration Control Officer based in Hong Kong was among the first to warn Ottawa about her exploits.
McAdam was based in Hong Kong in 1991 when he learned about Ping aka ” Big Sister Ping” who was bringing in large numbers of illegal immigrants to North America.
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