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She survived a couple of major brushes with the law. In 1989 she was arrested for paying an undercover U.S. policeman to smuggle a group of Fujianese through Canada to New York. Earlier that same year she was carrying $50,000 and an address book that police said had the phone numbers of safe houses around the world. She pleaded guilty to smuggling charges in Buffalo, N.Y., and served four months in prison. A few months earlier her husband had been arrested for trying to smuggle another group across the Canadian border near Niagara Falls in a $59 raft. The raft capsized, and four people drowned. He served nine months.
After getting out of prison she moved to 47 East Broadway, paying $3 million in cash, according to government sources, for a building directly across the street from a branch of the Bank of China, Beijing's central bank. She set up her restaurant in the building, and it quickly became a hub of the illegal Fujian Chinese community. It also became a major competitor of the bank. According to police and a number of Ping's clients, she used her connections in China to begin transferring money from those she smuggled back to their families in China. She proved more efficient than the bank across the street. Says a female immigrant who patronized Ping's service: "The Bank of China took three weeks, charged a bad foreign-exchange rate and delivered the cash in yuan. Sister Ping delivered the money in hours, charged less and paid in American dollars. It was a better service." Steven Wong, an outspoken critic of snakeheads, says that things became so bad that the bank began offering color televisions and prizes to those who used them to transfer money. "Still," he says, "no one came."
Ping's not-so-secret bank was also used to enlarge the smuggling operation, according to the police. Kwong says it enabled the snakeheads to lend money in China to those who couldn't afford the down payment on the trip or who didn't have relatives already in the U.S. to sponsor them. "They charged 30% annual interest, enough to keep someone working to pay it off over a very long time," Kwong says. It also enabled Ping and others to transfer the payments for the smuggling fee immediately after they were made, opening up a whole new pool of financing for would-be immigrants.
By the late '80s, Ping's stature had grown so large that she was probably the best-known and most revered figure in Chinatown. Almost everyone in the Fujianese ghetto owed her something. She and her husband Cheung Yick-tak contributed $10,000 to buy the building that would house the Fujianese association, which police say soon became the center for human smuggling. He sat on the board. Both continued to work each day in the store or restaurant. There were no big cars or flashy clothes. When she traveled she took the subway, seemingly unafraid of the reach of the law.