Interview with Everett De Morier

Everett De Morier, author of "In the Ghost Shadows: The Untold Story of Chinatown’s Most Powerful Crime Boss"

Everett De Morier's Website

In 1997, Everett De Morier had his first nonfiction book published, entitled Crib Notes for the First Year of Marriage: A Survival Guide for Newlyweds, by Fairview Press. During the publicity tour for this title, De Morier appeared on CNN, Fox Headline News, the Extra Help Channel, and many others. Articles on the book appeared in hundreds of Gannet newspapers, The New York Times, and The London Times.

The success of his first book led to a second title in the series, 1998’s Crib Notes for the First Year of Fatherhood: A Survival Guide for New Fathers, also published by Fairview Press. The book was featured in Parenting Magazine and several other periodicals.

In 2015, Blydyn Square Books published De Morier’s first novel, Thirty-three Cecils. It won the top fiction prize at the London Book Festival, was named book of the year by Heroic Magazine, became required high school and college reading and has a regional holiday named after it, Thirty-three Cecils Day, which is celebrated in Binghamton, NY every September 1st. The film rights to Thirty-three Cecils were sold, and the project is in development with Sunset River Productions.

In 2018, Blydyn Square Books released The Invention of Everything: Insights on Life, Food, and One Good Thermos, which included the best-of articles De Morier wrote for 543 Magazine. The promotional tour for this book became the framing device used in the documentary Binghamton: Valley of Creativity which premiered at The Bundy Theatre in 2018.

One-hundred Cecils, a children’s book spinoff from the award-winning novel Thirty-three Cecils, is being released in March of 2025 by Blydyn Square Books.

In the Ghost Shadows; The Untold Story of Chinatown’s Most Powerful Crime Boss, by Peter Chin and Everett De Morier, is being released by Kensington Publishing in February of 2025.

Peter Chin

Peter Chin was born on the outskirts of Hong Kong in 1959 and immigrated to New York City with his mother and sisters in 1967. Changing his name from Chin Chit Chuey to Peter Chin, he became a member of Chinatown’s Ghost Shadows gang in the 1970s and ’80s, where he rose to highest ranks of organized crime. Only in fairy tales can a poor orphan become royalty. But in New York City’s Chinatown, one street kid managed to rise to the top ranks of a criminal gang dynasty.

This is no fairy tale. This really happened . . .

They were the most powerful gang in Chinatown. Like the notorious crime families of the Italian Mob, the Asian youth gang known as the Ghost Shadows carved out their own territory in New York’s underworld and ruled those streets for decades.

Their leader Peter Chin, a young immigrant from the outskirts of Hong Kong, not only found a new family among his fellow gang members but became one of the two most powerful men in Chinatown’s history at that time. He even straddled the line between the city’s Asian Mob and the Italian Mafia, adopted as a “godson” of a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family. Eventually it all came crashing down—when Chin and twenty-four other Ghost Shadows were indicted and imprisoned for racketeering under the RICO Act. But throughout his twenty years in prison, and even since his release, Chin has kept his code of silence . . .

Michael Carter, Co-Host

Michael Carter's Website