“Then I heard this really loud noise. Like: bam! The whole building shook. I looked out the window. They had this giant machine out there, with a big metal ball. A goddamn wrecking ball right outside my window, coming right at me. I figured I had two choices then. I could stay quiet and hope the ball didn’t hit me. That way I could save some more stuff. On the other hand, I thought, well, I could die. They could cave the place in on my head. So I went to the window and started screaming, Stop! I’m in here!”
A few hours after the cops from the Seventh Precinct hauled Mark Zero away on criminal trespass charges for unlawfully entering his own building, 172 Stanton Street started to come down. Demolition crews worked through the snowy yet strangely thunder-and-lightning-filled Saturday night. Lit by huge vapor lamps, plumes of water arching across the narrow street, it was quite a sight, in a Dresdenesque sort of way. Apartment after apartment in the five-story tenement was chewed open by a low-slung triceratops-looking device called “the rake.” Bathrooms with archaic pull chain toilets were crunched to dust. Grayish looking walls bearing dozens of coats of paint and crucifixes tumbled. Who knew how many people had lived in those apartments, from what countries they’d come from, what hopes, dreams, and disappointments they’d harbored?
Then the machine got to the fourth floor, in the back, where the plaster was hued electric green, purple, and orange. This was Mark Zero’s apartment. The numerous paintings still hung on the walls were scooped up with the rest of the debris and tossed into a massive dumpster, to be hauled off to a landfill on Varick Avenue in Brooklyn.
Two days later, 172 Stanton Street is a fenced-off vacant lot. Splayed out on the street like a low-rent thieves’ bazaar is a pile of “recovered” items: a few pair of water-logged pants, a flattened cassette player, a 1993 Playboy calendar, a stack of old Cue magazines. Mr. Kleinkopf’s canceled checks flutter in the breeze. Meanwhile, at the Lotus Club, a faux-beatnik café diagonally across from where his home once stood, Mark Zero sits sucking on a Winston Light. Making clear he isn’t comparing his situation to the loss suffered by the poor, now-homeless families of 172 Stanton, Mark Zero reports himself to be “totally devastated, emotionally and physically, absolutely in a daze.”
He is also angry. “They’re saying the building collapsed, like it just keeled over and died. You saw what they had to go through to knock the place down. It took all day and night. There were guys up there with sledgehammers on the roof. What were they doing up there if the building was supposed to be so unsafe? I was in there, it didn’t seem any worse than usual to me. That building did not fall down, it was dragged down.”
This being the Lower East Side, where (wholly justified) paranoia concerning every beady-eyed landlord’s gentrification plans strikes deep, there has been much talk about who decided to pull the plug on 172 Stanton Street and why. There have been several instances of buildings coming down in similar fashion of late, as if late-night condemnation is one more typically heavy-handed Giuliani administration method of so-called urban renewal.
For sure, someone’s gonna get sued. But Mark Zero says no settlement, however large, can make up for his loss. “I’m a collector. I keep everything, even old tapes off my answering machine, you know like Herbert Hunke calling up saying, ‘Like, fuck off, asshole.’ How do you put a dollar value on that?”
Every minute he winces, remembering another irreplaceable item. “My letter of recommendation from Allen Ginsberg, my signed copy of Tulsa, footage of Stiv Bator’s last show. If I’d only gotten another ten minutes in the apartment before they started knocking it down … I could have saved a lot. A whole museum got buried in that building.”
There have been black moments since the building’s demise, times when he contemplated that “this might be the end of Mark Zero,” but the artist finds himself strangely buoyed. Running into 172 Stanton as the wrecking ball flew might well turn out to be his greatest single statement. “Can’t top it for performance art. It shows what I’ll do,” he notes, with a mournful pride. 172 Stanton might still have an artisitic function, Mark Zero says. The blank wall might make an excellent canvas for a video installation. Some footage of Rudolph Giuliani “with flames around his head” would fill the space nicely.
Mark Zero decides he needs some more Winston Lights, so he gets up and moves toward the Lotus Club door, intending to go over to the bodega across the way, like so many times before. “Shit,” he says, stopping. The bodega, open very late, used to be so convenient, right there on the ground floor of 172 Stanton Street. Now that’s gone too.
7
Ghost Shadows on the Chinatown Streets
The compelling saga of Nicky Louie, leader of the Ghost Shadows youth gang, which for a brief and bloody time in the 1970s ruled about two hundred yards of sidewalk in New York City’s Chinatown. A thousand years of history crushed into an immigrant story. A personal favorite. From the Village Voice, 1977.
Midnight in Chinatown, everyone seems nervous. The old waiters look both ways before going into the gambling joint on Pell Street. Ladies bleary from a ten-hour day working over sewing machines in the sweatshops are hurrying home, and restaurants, usually open until four in the morning, are closing early. At the Sun Sing Theatre on East Broadway, underneath a hand-painted poster of a bleeding kung fu hero, a security guard is fumbling with a padlock. Ask him how business is and he shakes his head, “No good.” Ask him why and he points his finger right between your eyes and says, “Bang!”
“Low Tow,” which is what the Cantonese call New York’s Chinatown, is on edge. A couple of blocks away, in front of the coffee shop at 56 Mott Street, Nicky Louie, the twenty-two-year-old leader of Chinatown’s currently most powerful street gang, the fabulously monikered Ghost Shadows, looks no less relaxed. Pacing up and down the ruddy sidewalk in his customary green army fatigue jacket, Nicky has good reason to be watchful. It is only Wednesday, and according to the cops, there have already been two separate assassination attempts on Louie’s life this week. Facing such heat, most gang leaders would stay inside and play a few hands of Chinese thirteen-card poker. Or maybe leave town altogether, go up to Toronto or out to Chicago. But not Nicky. When you are the leader of the Shadows, with so much money and turf at risk, it is a matter of face to show your face. You’ve got to let them know—all those other twenty-two-year-old killers—that Mott Street is yours. Yours and yours alone.
Born Hin Pui Lui in the slums of Hong Kong’s Kowloon district, Nicky came to Low Tow in the late 1960s. The old Chinatown people called America “Gum Shan,” which means Gold Mountain. But Nicky arrived on a 747 rather than a boat and is a different kind of immigrant. Older neighborhood residents might be content to work out their tiny sliver of the so-called American Dream serving up bowls of yat kaw mein to Queens tourists, but Nicky had different ideas. No way he would end up a faceless waiter ticketed for the TB ward. He was born for greater things. When he got into the gangs half a dozen years ago, first as a foot soldier in the penny-ante protection rings, selling firecrackers to the undershirt-clad Italians on the other side of Canal Street, people say Nicky already had the biggest set of balls in Chinatown. He was the gun-wielding wild man, always up for action, willing to do anything to get attention. His big break came in the winter of 1973, when the Shadows’ first chief, twenty-four-year-old Nei Wong, got caught with a Hong Kong cop’s girlfriend. The cop, in New York for a surprise visit, ran across Wong and his betrothed in the Chinese Quarter Nightclub beneath the approach ramp to the Manhattan Bridge and blew off both their heads with his police revolver.
Since then Nicky’s rise in the Chinatown youth gang world has been startling. He has piloted the once ragtag Shadows from the bleak days when they were extorting a few free meals and dollars from the greasy spoons over on East Broadway to their current haunt, Mott Street, Low Tow’s main drag, in other words, the big time.
Controlling Mott Street means that the Shadows get to affiliate themselves with the On Leong tong, the richest and most influential org
anization (“tong” means association or organization) in Chinatown. In addition to securing the protection racket on Mott, the gang also gets to guard the gambling houses the On Leong operates in the musty lofts and basements along Mott and Bayard streets, some of them taking in as much as $75,000 a week. The Shadows also act as runners in the Chinatown Connection heroin trade, bringing the stuff across the Canadian border and spreading it throughout New York. The money filters down to Nicky and his lieutenants; they, in turn, spread the spoils to the younger Shadows.
For Nicky this adds up to a weekly check that ranges from $200 to $2,000 depending on who you talk to. In any event, it’s enough to buy a swift $7,000 Peugeot to tool down Canal Street in.
But tongs are fickle. If another group of Hong Kong teenagers—say their archenemy White Eagles or the hard-charging Flying Dragons, who bide their time taking target practice on the pigeons down by the East River—should show the On Leong that they’re smarter or tougher than the Shadows, Nicky’s boys could be gone tomorrow.
No one knows this better than Nicky Louie. Two years ago Nicky and the Shadows pushed the surly Eagles off the street. In September, after licking their wounds over in Brooklyn and down in Florida, the Eagles with their leader Paul Ma—Nicky’s main rival—returned. And they were not going to be satisfied with crummy Elizabeth Street. Soon the Eagles started appearing on Bayard Street, part of Shadowland. Paul Ma set up his own gambling house on the block, a direct affront to Nicky.
Several weeks ago the Shadows struck back, shooting a bunch of Eagles, including Paul Ma and a gang member’s wife, in front of Yuen Yuen Snack Shop on Bayard Street. This set off the most hair-raising month of street-fighting in Chinatown history; no weekend went by without a major incident. The infamous Wong Kee chop-chop was the highlight of the war. According to cops, the Shadows, including Nicky himself, crashed through the door of the Wong Kee Rice Shop on the Italian end of Mott and carved up one Eagle with chef’s kitchen cleavers and stabbed another with a fork.
Everyone figures the Eagles will try some kind of revenge, which is the major reason, people say, Nicky has spent the past two weeks pacing up and down in front of 56 Mott. His presence keeps things cool. In the long history of Chinese crime, a saga that goes back at least to the founding of the thousand-year triad 14K, Nicky Louie is the newest legend. He is, as they say, no one to fuck with.
Fifty years ago, chances are Nicky might have been lying around the “joss houses” and streetfighting alongside the hatchetmen and gunmen of Chinatown’s “tong wars.” In those days, the two big tongs, the On Leong and the Hip Sing of Pell Street, battled on the sidewalks over the few available women, the opium trade, and out of sheer boredom. Back then there were legendary boo hoy dow (warriors): like Mock Dock, the great gambler known as “the Philosophical Killer,” and Yee Toy, “the Girl-Faced Killer.” Most famous of all, however, was the plain-faced Sing Dock, “the Scientific Killer.” Once, after hearing of an outbreak of war in New York, he rode in the baggage compartment of a train (Chinese weren’t allowed to ride up front) for six weeks from San Francisco. That was when Pell Street was called “Red Street” and the crook on Doyers Street was known as “the Bloody Angle.”
Today the Chinatown warrior has changed. The young gangs are not respected tong members, as Sing Dock was. Like most late-twentieth-century gangs, they’re in for the bucks and the fact that none of them can figure out what else to do with their lives, especially considering the dismal choices confronting those entering the fiscal crisis job market with little or no English-language skills. There is also the whole style thing. Nicky and the Shadows have eschewed tong warrior black overcoats in favor of pegged pants and puffy hairdos. (Asked if their hair is a Hong Kong fashion, one gang member said, “No, man, it’s cause we dig Rod the Mod, man.” Meaning Rod Stewart.) In this world everyone must have a good nickname, a nom de street guerre. Hanging with Nicky tonight are old-time Shadows “Mongo,” the wild-man enforcer who got his name from Blazing Saddles, and “Japanese,” who shaved his head after he heard that things might go easier for him in jail if he looked like a “Muslim.” There are some guys with grade-B movie monickers like Lefty and Four-Eyes, but most of the kids go for names like “Stinkybug,” “White-Faced Tiger,” “Pointy Lips,” “Porkupine,” and “Nigger Choy.” There must be twenty kids called “Apple Head” running around Chinatown.
Strangely enough, the Ghost Shadows themselves got their unbeatable name from that bastion of street culture, the New York Times. It happened about four years ago when the Shadows were functioning as the “junior auxiliary” of the now-defunct Kwon Ying gang of Pell Street. A Times re-porter was in Chinatown to cover an incident in which some of the young Kwon Ying were involved. The reporter wanted to know what “Kwon Ying” meant. (It means “not the Eagles,” a reference to the rival gang, the White Eagles.) One wiseguy—likely an Eagle—said, “It means ghost shadow.” This, unbeknownst to the Times reporter or just about any white person, was a terrible insult. Proceeding from the metaphor that a bamboo stalk is empty in the middle, Chinatown residents have long called white people bak guey, meaning a white piece of empty bamboo, or, more derogatorily, a “white ghost.” Blacks are called hak guey, meaning “black ghost.” The gist is that these people are incomplete—not all there. Being a “ghost shadow” went double. The Times reporter dutifully filed “ghost shadow” with his copy. The next morning, after reading about themselves in the paper, Nicky Louie and the rest of the Ghost Shadows decided they liked their new name. It was so born to lose.
Yet through all this posturing nomenclature, Nicky has no nickname. He remains, simply, Nicky.
Some say Nicky has nine lives. The estimates of how many slugs he carries around inside his chest vary. According to an ex-gang member, “When he turns over at night, he can hear them bullets clank together.”
Last May teenage hit men from the San Francisco–based Wah Ching gang flew across the country just to kill Nicky. Some say it was an Eagle contract. For whatever reason they pumped a dozen bullets into the middle of a Saturday afternoon shopping crowd on Mott Street while Nicky disappeared across Canal Street. The Chings missed everyone and wound up getting pinched by two drug cops who just happened to be eating won ton in the nearby Joy Luck Restaurant.
The ging cha (police) have arrested Nicky for everything from robbery to extortion to murder to rape, but he’s never been convicted.
Detective Neal Mauriello, who is assigned full-time to the Fifth Precinct’s Chinese gang section, is a smart cop. He realizes he’s got a crazy and hopelessly complicated job. Chinatown gangs aren’t like the bruisers fighting over street corners and ghetto reps up in the Bronx. There’s piles of money and politics behind what Nicky and his guys are doing. And since it’s Chinatown, they’d rather do it quietly—which is why the Shadows don’t wear dungaree coats with hard-on things like savage skulls emblazoned on the back.
Neal makes it his business to memorize all the faces on Mott Street. He also writes down the names and birthdays of the gang members so he can walk down Mott Street and say, “Hey, happy birthday Pipenose; seen Dice around?” This blows the gang members’ minds, Mauriello says. “Because, the world they live in, a Chinese guy is supposed to be invisible. They’re supposed to all look alike. That’s what we think, right? Well, they know that and that gives them a feeling of safety, like the whities have no idea who we are. I try to break through that curtain. It freaks them out.”
About Nicky Louie, Neal, with typical cop insouciance, says, “That kid is okay really. But I’ve been chasing him for five years and I’ll nail him. He knows it, too. We talk about it all the time.” Neal remembers the time he came upon Nicky lying facedown in a pool of blood near the Bowery. He said, “Nicky, come on, you’re gonna die, tell me who shot you.” Nicky looked up at Neal, his eyes blazing arrogance, and said, “Fuck you.”
“That’s Nicky,” said Mauriello, shaking his head with a smile, because what else can you say or do when confronted with
someone who lives his ethic to the end like that? (Of course, Louie would survive his wounds and be back on the streets within weeks.) It is more than that, because, as Mauriello, from an immigrant culture himself, says, “That’s not just Nicky Louie, some kid gangster telling me to fuck myself. There’s a lot of history behind that ‘fuck you.’”
Toy Shan is a village in the mountainous region of Canton from which the great majority of those who settled New York’s Chinatown came in the mid-1800s. It’s possible that this Toy Shan settlement in New York was as closed a community as has ever existed in urban America. Much of this is bounded in mutual racism, including the horrendous series of “exclusion acts” that severely limited Chinese immigration to the United States for the better part of a century.
Probably the most draconian of these “yellow peril” fear laws prohibited immigration of Chinese women to the United States. Males were allowed, in small numbers, to enter the country to maintain existing businesses. But they could not raise families or live anything approaching a normal life. Chinatowns became essentially male-only gulags of indentured restaurant workers and the like. By the 1940s, when the laws finally began to ease, the ratio of men to women in Chinatown ranged as high as ten to one. The havoc these laws wreaked on the Toy Shan consciousness is difficult to overestimate. Drinking and gambling, both venerable Chinese passions, became endemic. Apart from the neighborhood gambling dens where one could lose a month’s pay in an hour of fan tan playing, Chinese faces became familiar at the city’s racetracks—probably the only place they were, outside restaurants and laundries—which prompted wags to dub the Belmont subway special “the Shanghai Express.” Prostitutes from uptown were frequent visitors to Toy Shan back then. Chatham Square was one of the best nonhotel beats in the city. “The money’s always been good down there,” said one current lady of the night. “They come in, say nothing because they can’t speak English, shoot their load, and go.”
American Gangster Page 10