Michael Lewis Interviews His Producer

Push Kim.

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis here with a special episode. While she's been working on this show, my producer, Lydia jen Kott has also been working on a new show of her own. It's called The Chinatown Sting and it's an international crime saga that takes place in the late.

Eighties and early nineteen nineties.

Earlier this week, I talked with LJ about The Chinatown Sting at an event at a coffee shop in Brooklyn called Land to Sea. That's a place that hosts monthly Majong Nights, a game that's a little bit like Domino's and relevant to her show. Here's our conversation and then we'll hear part of the first episode. I hope you'll go subscribe to The Chinatown Sting. All six episodes are out now and it's a great listenin.

So why don't we start? But I want you to just explain. You have to tell the whole story because you don't want to ruin that way.

But how you stumbled into the story like this, how you got this material because the material.

Is great, Okay, So the story is kind of I would say, a family legend of sorts. My partner's mom, who I've known ever since I was little. She's a federal judge.

In Washington, DC, Beryl Howell. Beryl Howell, who I have met separately.

I spoke to this court, the district court, all the judges, and she's an impressive character, a little scary actually.

A little scary.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is the story of her first case. So it's a case that she talked about a lot because the people in it really made an impression on her. And I always kind of wanted to know more about this case and do a story about it, but I didn't think that would be an option because federal judges don't usually give interviews or talked to the media. But after knowing her for years and years and years, I finally just asked, and she said, sure, and tell us.

Such a little bit about the story, because we have to explain why we're playing my gens.

Yes.

Right.

So there's a young federal prosecutor, Beryl Howell, just a few weeks on the job. She has a group of all these women who are in custody. They've all been caught accepting boxes in the mail boxes that have stuffed animals in them, and tea and also millions of dollars worth of heroin. A lot of them have young kids, and she needs to find out why they why they did this, and who they're working for. And they're not talking.

Your boyfriend's mom. Yes, So, I mean, it's interesting.

A prosecutor has this huge effect on people's lives, mainly ends badly for the people who are being prosecuted if it's a federal prosecution, right, the numbers are just shocking. Everybody everybody goes to jail or pleads a guilty kind of thing. And I've always wondered, partly because I watched this now recently with Sam Bagman Freed, how interest did the prosecutors stay in these in the lives of the

It was the people. I don't think it was that the case was so weird. I think it was the people.

Did you have the impression that she had she knew something about what had happened to them?

Did you find yourself telling her things that she didn't know?

She had no idea what happened to them? I think it was insane that she thought that I would be able to find them.

Oh all right, Like at.

Times I was mad at her for being like, oh, you should do this, because I was like, do you realize the chances of me being able to find these people? And then why would they agree to talk to me? Like she had no idea at all.

So, just there are a bunch of There are a bunch of characters, and there are these very kind of awkward conversations on people's doorsteps.

In your podcast, just tell us the story of.

Finding one of the characters and what that was like and how that person responded when you just knocked on their door.

Yeah, so you know, we basically were just looking them up on the white pages. Me and my co reporter show you who's not here in all the different China towns, The three China towns in Manhattan and Queen's and Brooklyn. Each time we brought cookies because we were coming out of nowhere, so we felt like we should not go empty handed. We knocked on the door. We left the cookies in a note, and no one ever responded to

You're so disarming. I love to One of her.

The roles she plays for me is when I'm scared about chasing someone down, and I don't think I think they're going to be mean to me if I get them on the phone, or they're not going to want to talk to me because they'll suspect evil intent. I send her instead, and she completely diffuses the situation. She shows up with their head on a spiked and and so I'd have thought I'm gonna.

Get shot if I ring this doorbell.

I mean, I mean, it's incredibly brave of you to kind of just hunt these people down.

I mean, they all been in jail. And the story was in the past.

I couldn't tell from the the podcast just how reluctant they were to talk about it.

I mean, it's kind of crazy, right to show up. You've had the worst thing, you were prosecuted for this crime. Then the basically like daughter in law of the person who prosecuted you shows up and says, oh, can you tell me your side of the story?

I really want to hear it.

It'll do and it'll do.

A lot of good.

Now.

Yeah, but when I you know, because it could go I could say, oh, I'm you know, Beryl is my almost mother in law, and she could be like, get out of here. But instead she was like, how's Beryl. I've been watching on TV that she's a judge and she retired. How is she doing? So that kind of made it easier.

When I was listening to it, I thought you actually might have a runner here in that you could go to any older prosecutor and say, what's the case That kind of got in your head and you never got out of your head and you wonder what happened.

To the people.

Yes, because the relationship of the prosecutors to the people they're prosecuting is often so it's so warped and distant, and they've had such an effect on that person's life.

You call me.

When I called you, I was trying to pass you to help me with something else while you were doing your own show, and you said you blurted out. I said, how's it going, and you blurted out, it's so hard. And I was a little surprised. Doesn't sound listening to it, it doesn't sound like it was hard. It sounds like it came pretty naturally to you. What did you find difficult about actually being responsible for telling the story?

I think I just really wanted to do justice to everyone in the story. I really wanted everyone you know, they went through the justice system, but I also wanted them to feel like they were treated fairly in the story.

Are you not?

But Michael, how do you feel? I mean not if someone asked you in the middle of writing The Big Short, you were you would never be like, oh, it's so hard.

It was excellent promotional work for pushing.

We have just dropped.

We just dropped a re release of The Big Short audio book this week.

Very well done. So what were you asking me?

So?

Yeah, I was saying, did you never feel like this is so hard.

You know, I'm always a little worried that it's slow.

But no, Actually the truth is that by the time I get excited enough to write something, I assume it's interesting. I'm excited because I'm interested, so I assume everybody else could be interested.

Oh yeah, that part so fun. The reporting part is so fun. But then like finding the like you can say what the big short is about in one sentence, I can, yeah, and it's really easy for you.

It takes a while to get there though.

That part from me is really hard.

So that I've just been doing this with the new book.

I'm about to start writing it and and I just figured out last week what it was, and it was.

Just like, Ah, that's it. That's it.

That's the it's And you might never say it to the reader or the listener, but it's they got to be that structure has got to be the point of it's got to be there. So what's the one sentence about the podcast you came up with us? I'm curious, what's the sentence? It's not about majong.

I mean, there's a lot of ma there's a lot of majong.

In it, But do you do you remember what your one sentence was you told yourself.

I mean, I think it's a story about three women who you know, who are opposed to each other and according to the system, only one of them can win, and how do they navigate that?

Oh?

Very well done.

Yeah, your mother was about to collapse and then realize she's your mother and that she shouldn't lead a standing ovation.

It's very good.

Thank you, And I just gotta say I'm proud of you. I'm so proud of you. You did great and it's good. You're going to be doing this forever, and.

I so appreciate you coming to Brooklyn.

It's a mysterious land I've never been. The people are different. You seem to be able to communicate. I'm almost sure.

They understand me, but I think I understand them. But I've got back to Manhattan as fast as possible, and now don't go anywhere. Coming up, we have an excerpt from the first episode of LJ show, The Chinatown Sting.

On February ninth, nineteen eighty eight, David Shean was working his usual shift. He was a US customs agent at JFK report his phone rang.

I was talked then through a customs agent in California. Who says, hey, well just got three shipments of heroin and three different bailed parcels. Do you guys want the case? So I said, absolutely, we'll take it.

The parcels were on their way from Hong Kong to New York. Customs agents were looking inside packages more often ever since President Reagan in Congress had ramped up the war on drugs. David Shechan was part of this special task force to combat narcotic smuggling, so they got calls about drugs coming into New York City all the time. This call was special, though, because inside each of these

I knew it was going to be a big case because there was a lot of heroin and the focus was on China white heroin at the time, because a lot was coming into New York. A lot of heroin was coming in from China to Hong Kong then into New York, and it sounded like a good opportunity to work a big case.

On February seventeenth, the boxes arrived at the airport. Peter and David knew they were at the beginning of something big, but they didn't know how big. My name is Lyddy jin Kot. As a journalist, I often report on law and power. I've written an audiobook about the Supreme Court, covered the federal trial of a crypto billionaire, and investigated

Tape together, except you leave a sample of the heroin in there. We'd put the stuffed animals back in. Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it. That was our goal.

So when someone on the receiving end looked inside the boxes, they should notice nothing weird. Step two, the Feds hit thin wires in a transmitter inside each box. Whoever was looking through the box would break the wires and that would trigger a silent electric signal that would be picked up by these special machines in the hands of law enforcement. And this receiver had only two signals.

It was a slow beep you're listening in to like a computer almost and you hear the beat beat beeping in. When a rapid beep goes beppp beat, that means it's been open.

The dagents set up their trap as fast as they could. They didn't want the people who were waiting for the packages to get suspicious.

They know how long it takes from point A to point B, so as soon as you get a day or two late, you're investiation could be compromised.

Step three. Each of these boxes had to be dropped off at exactly the same time they were to be delivered by postal inspectors who were working undercover. Vans full of agents were waiting nearby, listening in on their little computers and ready to spring into action.

You have to cover all the different parts of the locations because if someone takes the box and runs out the door, then we have Heroin on the street.

On February twenty third, the mail packages, the vans full of agents and the undercover postal workers. They were all ready to go. Two of the packages were addressed to Manhattan's Chinatown and one was going to Brooklyn. Peter and the customs agent David Shan followed the two packages that were going to Chinatown.

The thrill of the chase really becomes just it sort of takes you over.

That day, like on any other day, Chinatown was bustling. The sidewalks were crowded with vendors selling cucumbers, plants, buck joy, dried mushrooms. People were walking shoulder to shoulder on the main streets. There were neon signs everywhere saying go this way or go that way. And there was always a truck somewhere squeezing its way down these narrow streets full

We were underneath the highway in the hand these from the drive war, and that's where we had thirty agents all lined up ready to go with shotguns and rifles and un davy.

There were two wired up packages addressed to two apartment buildings right next door to each other. So the undercover postal inspector buzzed at one address, and then he buzzed at the other. No answer. He left behind mail slips. Peter and David waited to see what would happen next, and waited some more.

One of the guys from da he took a leak in the East River, and believe it or not, two sanitation police guys came up to him and said, hey, you can't pee in the river.

David Shean could feel his hopes of catching anyone in Chinatown pissing away to Nobody was coming to collect the packages, even though their street value was supposed to be huge. Maybe someone had tipped them off. The whole operation now hinged on the third box, the one that was going to Brooklyn.

We heard the beep go off.

Peter Mattessa rushed over to the Brooklyn address to meet the agents.

There. We knocked on the door or broke down the door. There's a package open. The stuffed animals were out.

Peter found himself face to face with a thirty eight year old woman, a mother of two, an accountant at a bank. Peter explained she was under arrest.

Read her rights you know in Cantonese, Amandarin. I forgot exactly which one it was. She was very upset, crying, and your goal is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

By move up the ladder, Peter means this woman might have information that would help the FEDS figure out who's in charge of importing the heroine. The first rung of the ladder was right here in this house. Peter needed to know the box's next destination, and to find that out, she needed this woman to act totally normal. She needed to call whoever she was going to call after the box's arrival. They needed her to go from being an accomplice to being a cooperating witness quickly.

I tell her the a maund of Heroin here, you're facing ten years to life because it's so much Harowin. This is your time to help out yourself. We can't guarantee you how much jail time you do, but it'll be brought to the attention of the judges. Will know how much you've helped out in this case. And it's a courageous decision to make. We try to tell them we think it's the right one to make to help us, and we help you.

But the person this woman was going to call was her friend. If she cooperated, that would mean betraying her friend. But if she didn't cooperate, she might not see her two children grow up. She had to make an impossible decision. As the agents hovered over her, the clock was ticking. This woman agreed to cooperate. Her name is in the court documents, but she never responded to her real quest for an interview. Anyway, her name's not that important to

It was like the first time we've ever seen anything like that. Really, Basically, you're stay at home moms. We're picking up these lodge amounts at heroin, and I'm sure they knew it was drugs.

It turned out that all of these women, women who received packages of heroin sent to their homes, onto each other from playing Mahjong Majong is a game of luck and skill. You play with domino like tiles instead of with cards. They have different designs on them, stones, bamboos, dragons, and the goal is to end up with four pairs of three tiles and one pair of two tiles. That's called the eyes. Different hands are with different amounts of points.

We're going to seize all your assets, we're gonna take all your kids away from you, and you're going to go to jail, and they're going to go to force the care and things of that nature.

You know you're doing that because you really need their help to get to the person at the top.

I guess absolutely, Yeah, you need somebody, and you know you need more than one person to cooperate.

Because you need it to be cooperated. Yes, after I got that suitcase full of court documents on the Chinatown drug trials, I realized I need help from someone who spoke Cantonese. That's the language that's spoken by many of the people in the documents.

My name is Shu yu Wang. I'm a practicing attorney in the city in New York.

I met she You through a friend of a friend. We met up at a bar and I told her all about the Chinatown case.

It was a very interesting story to me personally. I came from the Cantonese area in China, which is like super close to Hong Kong, where a lot of those people in the story were originally from. My major in college was actually journalism, so I sort of like opened up a part of my brain.

So she joined me in reporting out this story. We went over court documents together, and we visited Chinatown together for months and months.

Loved.

Yeah, that's that.

For most of the time that I've lived in New York, Chinatown's been a place where I'd get dinner or drinks with friends. For sure, you was a neighborhood where she got groceries.

You are certain ingredients that's a rare fine in a non Chinese grocery stores, like chicken feet. There are like certain things that I can only get here at a good price.

But we've been learning that Chinatown's a place with one hundred and fifty years of history.

So Chinatowns today we think of as these conturist destinations, and you know, they're fun places to go to get you know, trash keys or jim sum and have kind of a colorful urban experience or you know, a fun meal or something. But the reason Chinatowns exist in the first place is really about a history of racial segregation.

That's Ellen Wu. She teaches history at Indiana University, Bloomington, and she talked to us about how Chinatowns arose in American cities in the face of anti Asian laws and violence. US immigration laws also helped create Chinatowns, especially a law called the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed in eighteen eighty two. Another historian we spoke to is Michael Luo. She's an editor at The New Yorker and he wrote a book on Chinese immigration called Strangers in the Land.

It was the Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Field, who wrote the opinion, referred to the Chinese as strangers in the land, talking about how they could never assimilate with our people. And I feel like the stranger label remains imprinted on Asian Americans today.

She says she's felt what Michael Lewo was describing, especially when she first moved to the US for law school.

So it was kind of like surprised at how friendly people were surrounding me. But also today I'm sensing like your people out there just kind of like, oh, you're different, and you can tell by their gestures, by their facial expressions, things like that.

As a white person, I've never experienced that, but I do know how bad it feels to be viewed as a stranger. My family moved to the US from Poland when I was eight. My English was kind of weird, but I wanted to fit in so badly. When I look at pictures of myself, it's embarrassing. I was like a parody of what I thought an American kid was

You can listen to the rest of this episode of The Chinatown Sting and the full series wherever you listen to podcasts.