American Gangster

by Mark Jacobson

  It was a society within a society, not that most of the Toy Shans were complaining. They were not eager to mingle with the people they called lo fan (foreign devils) in any event. Determined to survive, they built an extralegal society based on furtive alliances, police bribes, creative bookkeeping, and immigration scams. The aim was to remain invisible and separate. To this day, few people in Chinatown are known by their real names; most received new identities—such as the Lees, Chins, and Wongs—from the family associations, who declared them “cousins” in order to get them into the country.

  In place of the “Western government,” they substituted the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), an organization to which the neighborhood’s sixty-five-odd family and merchant associations belong. To this day every other president of the CCBA has to be a Toy Shan descendant.

  In reality, it was the tongs, Hip Sing and On Leong, Chinatown’s so-called “night mayors,” who dominated much of the economic and social power in the neighborhood. They controlled the illegal activities in a community where everyone felt outside the law. Their spokesmen, with hatchetmen behind them, grew in power at the CCBA. Between themselves, they struck a parity that still holds. On Leong has always had more money and connections, mostly owing to their ongoing relationship with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Party, which has ruled Taiwan since its expulsion from the mainland by Mao’s victorious Communist army in 1949. The more proletarian-minded Hip Sing, which is known as “the friend of the seaman” for its ability to sneak Chinese off boats and into waiter jobs, has more members and branches throughout the United States.

  But in 1965 the Toy Shan traditions were seriously threatened. Federal laws were altered to allow open Chinese immigration to this country. Since then more than two hundred thousand Hong Kong residents have emigrated to America, with more coming all the time. Half settled in the New York area.

  Chinatown is in the midst of a gut-wrenching change. The population is edging toward seventy-five thousand, a fivefold increase since the law change. It’s one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in New York and without a doubt the most densely populated. Once confined to the familiar pentagon bounded by Canal Street, Worth, and the Bowery, Chinatown is now sprawling all over the Lower East Side. Already Mott Street—above Canal up to Grand, once solidly Italian—is 70 percent Chinese. To the east, Division Street and East Broadway, formerly Jewish and Puerto Rican, have become centers of Chinese business and residence. Chinatowns have begun to appear in Flushing, Queens, and parts of Brooklyn.

  Transition is under way. On one hand a good deal of the old Toy Shan separatism remains. Most Chinatown residents do not vote; currently there are fewer than three thousand registered voters in the area. In marked contrast to the Asian community in California, no Oriental has ever held major office in New York. The Chinatown Democratic Club has been repeatedly busted as a gambling house. Chinatown activists say this neglect is responsible for the compromised stand in the zoning fight with the Little Italy Restoration Association, which is seeking to ward off the Chinese in-flux and zone large portions of the area for the dwindling Italian population.

  Yet changes are everywhere. Chinatown now functions for Chinese; it looks like Hong Kong. Investigate the brand-new Silver Palace Restaurant on the Bowery—it breaks the mold of the cramped, no-atmosphere Chinatown restaurant. An escalator whisks you up to a dining room as big as a football field. Almost all the thousand or so people eating there will be Chinese, many middle-class couples who’ve motored in from Queens to try a more adventurous version of Cantonese food than this city is accustomed to. (Many Chinese will tell you that the “exotic” Szechuan and Hunan food is “American” fare.)

  The mass migration has transformed Chinatown into an odd amalgam of boomtown and ghetto. Suddenly half the businesses here are no longer in the hands of the old lo fa kew, the Cantonese Toy Shans. In their place have come Hong Kong entrepreneurs and Taiwanese investors, who are fearful about the future of their island. A Taiwanese combine, the Summit Import Corporation, has already done much to change shopping habits in Chinatown by opening two big supermarkets, Kam Wah on Baxter Street and Kam Kuo on Mott.

  The Taiwanese money is an indication that even though the Nationalists appear on the verge of international political eclipse, their influence in American Chinatowns, especially New York’s, is on the rise. A Taiwan concern is also behind the proposed block-long Golden Pacific National Bank on Canal Street. It’s one of the several new banks opening in this neighborhood of compulsive savers. The gold rush, prodded by extraordinary greed, has pushed real estate values here to fabled heights as Taiwanese businessmen seek to hide capital in the United States. The defeat of South Vietnam, where Chinese interests controlled much of the economy, has brought untold millions into the local market. According to Mott Street scuttlebutt, the day Saigon fell, three Chinese restaurants were supposedly purchased in Chinatown. Tumbledown warehouses on East Broadway are going for Upper East Side prices.

  All this has the Toy Shan powers hanging on for dear life. The newcomers, filtered through Hong Kong, come from all over China. The old Toy Shan loyalties don’t apply. These people got here without the help of the associations and owe them little. The tongs and the CCBA are beginning to feel the crunch. They’ve begun to see more and more store owners break away. Suddenly there are publicly funded social service agencies, most prominently the Chinatown Planning Council, to challenge CCBA rulings. And the younger Chinese, sons and daughters of the lo fa kew, have been openly critical.

  But one hundred years of power isn’t something you give up without a fight. Recently the CCBA held a meeting to discuss what to do about Nicky Louie and his Ghost Shadow buddies shooting up the neighborhood. Chinatown has traditionally been one of the safest areas in the city. Crime figures are remarkably low here for a place with so many new immigrants. That’s what made the recent violence all the more shocking. Especially in a neighborhood so dependent on tourism. Although the battles were being waged among the various Shadows, Dragons, and Eagles around, merchants were reporting a 30 percent drop in business. Places that stayed open late were doing even worse.

  The streetfighting is “disfiguring” Chinatown, said one merchant, referring to the April shootout at the Co-Luck Restaurant on the Bowery. That night, according to the cops, a couple of Shadows roared up in a late-model blue Ford, smashed through the glass door, and started spraying .32 automatic slugs in the general direction of some Dragons who were yum cha (drinking tea and talking) in the corner. One of the Dragons, who may not have been a Dragon at all, got clipped in the leg. For the rest of the people in the restaurant, it was grimmer. By the time the Shadows were through, they had managed to hit three New York University law students, a waiter, and a lady from Queens who later died on the floor, her daughter crying over her body. The cops said, “The place looked like a slaughterhouse; there was blood all over the linoleum.”

  Since then Co-Luck has been considered bad luck for prospective buyers. It remains vacant, rare in a neighborhood where no storefront is empty for long. On the door is a sign: CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS.

  “Perhaps we keep it that way,” said a merchant, “as a scar to remind us of our shame.”

  Restaurant owners say there won’t be so many wedding banquets this summer because of an incident in the Hung Gung Restaurant a few months ago. Gang members crashed the banquet hall, stationing sentries outside to make sure no one came or went, and instructed a hundred celebrants to drop their valuables into shopping bags. “It was just like the Wild West,” says someone close to the wedding guests.

  The police don’t see things looking up. In October they made sixty gang-related arrests, the most ever in a single month. They say there are more guns on the street than ever before and estimate gang membership—before the recent crackdown—at about two hundred, an all-time high. The gang kids are younger, too—fourteen-year-olds from Junior High School 65 are common these days.

  Pressured by editorials in
the Chinese press, the CCBA lurched into action. It called a public gathering at which the community would be free to explain its plight to Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morganthau.

  This was quite a change in tactics for the CCBA. Until quite recently one of its major functions had been to keep the lid on Chinatown’s considerable and growing urban problems. The fact that Chinese women sew garments for twelve cents apiece, that more than one-third of the area’s males work as waiters (toiling as much as sixteen hours a day, seven days a week), that Chinatown has the highest rate of TB and mental illness among city neighborhoods—all that was dirty linen better kept under wraps. But Nicky and the Shadows, they make noise. They get picked up for killing people and get their sullen pictures in what the Chinese still call “the Western press.” Keeping that quiet can make you look awfully silly, such as when Joseph Mei, the CCBA vice president, told the New York Times, “We have no problem at all about youth gangs in Chinatown,” the day after Nicky’s people allegedly shot five White Eagles in front of the Yuen Yuen Snack Shop.

  The meeting was held in the CCBA’s dank auditorium (underneath an alternating string of American and Nationalist Chinese flags). Yut Yee, the seventy-year-old CCBA president, who reportedly has been known to fall asleep during meetings, was unusually awake that night. He said, “Chinatown will become a dead city” if the violence continues. He urged residents to come forward and “report cases of crimes: We must be witnesses.” This seemed unlikely, for in a culture where the character for “revenge” means literally “report a crime,” the act of informing tends to be a complicated business. This confuses and angers the lo fan cops, who say that even though just about every restaurant in Chinatown has been robbed or extorted from in the past few years, the incidence of reporting the crimes is almost nil. Despite the fact that gang members have been arrested for more than a dozen murders in Manhattan, there has been only one conviction: that of Yut Wai Tom, an Eagle who made the mistake of putting a bullet through the throat of a Shadow in front of a couple of Puerto Rican witnesses.

  Morganthau sighed during the debate of Chinese businessmen, looked at his watch, said he’d “help,” and left. By this time, however, many people were openly restive. “My God, when will this bullshit stop?” asked a younger merchant.

  No one talked about the tongs and their relationship to the gangs. How could they? Of the seven permanent members of the CCBA inner voting circle, one is the On Leong, another the Hip Sing. No wonder people tend to get cynical whenever the CCBA calls a meeting at which the tong interests are at stake. Perhaps that’s why, when a Chinese reporter asked what the D.A. was planning to do to help the community, one of Morganthau’s people said, “What do you want? We showed up, didn’t we?”

  But, if you wanted to see changing Chinatown in action, really all you had to do was watch Benny Eng. Benny is director of the Hip Sing Credit Fund (which drug cops figure is a laundry room for dirty money). He is also an officer of the Chinese-American Restaurant Association, an organization that deserves blame for keeping waiter wages in Chinatown at about fifty dollars a week for the past twenty years.

  As people entered the CCBA hall, Little Benny—as he is called, in deference to Big Benny Ong, the old Hip Sing bossman recently arrested while sneaking out of the tong’s venerable gambling house at 9 Pell Street—greeted everyone with a grave face. “So happy you are interested in the security of Chinatown,” Little Benny said. But later, after the meeting, Benny, now attired in a natty hat and overcoat, could be seen nodding respectfully to the skinny-legged honcho pacing in front of 56 Mott Street.

  Part Two

  A pockmark-faced guy who nowadays spends ten hours a day laying bowls of congee in front of customers at a Mott Street rice shop remembers the day the White Eagles, the original Chinatown youth gang, ripped off their first cha shu baos (pork buns).

  “It was maybe ten years ago. We were hanging out in Columbus Park, you know, by the courthouse, feeling real stupid. Most of us had just got to Chinatown. We couldn’t speak English worth a shit. The juk sing (American-born Chinese, a.k.a. ABCs, or American Born Chinese) were playing basketball, but they wouldn’t let us play. We didn’t know how to anyway. I remember one of our guys said, ‘Shit, in Hong Kong my old man was a civil servant—he made some bread. Then he listened to my goddamned uncle and came over here. Now he’s working as a waiter all day. The guy’s got TB, I can hear him coughing. And I ain’t got enough money for a goddamned cha shu baos.’”

  Even then the juk tuk (Hong Kong–born Chinese) were sharp to the short end of the stick; they looked around the Toy Shan ghetto and sized up the possibilities for a sixteen-year-old immigrant. The chances had a familiar ring—what the tourists call “a Chinaman’s chance,” which, of course, is no chance at all. There might be moments of revenge, like lacing a lo fan’s sweet-and-sour with enormous hunks of ginger to watch his lips pucker. But you knew you’d wind up frustrated, throwing quarters into the “Dancing Chicken” machine at the Chinatown Arcade. You’d watch that stupid Pavlovian-conditioned chicken come out of its feeder to dance and you’d know you were watching yourself.

  So the eight or nine kids who would become the nucleus of the White Eagles walked up the narrow street past the Italian funeral parlor and into the pastry shop, where they stole dozens of cha shu baos, which they ate—and got so sick they threw up all over the sidewalk.

  Within the next week the Eagles got hold of their first pieces—a pair of automatics—and began to terrorize Toy Shan. They beat the daylights out of the snooty ABCs, who were just a bunch of pussies anyway. They ripped off restaurants. They got tough with the old men’s gambling houses.

  It seemed so easy. In Hong Kong, try anything shifty and the cops would bust up your ass. They would search an entire block, throwing pregnant women down the stairs if they got in the way, just to find a guy they suspected of boosting a pocketbook from the lobby of the Hyatt Regency. Here the cops were all roundeyes—they don’t know or care about Chinese. Besides, the old guys kept them paid off. The fringe benefits included street status, fast cars to cruise uptown and watch the lo-fan freaks, days to work on your “tans” at Coney listening to the new Hong Kong–Filipino platters, plenty of time to go bowling, and the pick of the girls—in general, the old equation of living quick, dying young, and leaving a beautiful corpse.

  It took the Toy Shans a while to comprehend what was happening in their village. By the late sixties, several juk tuk “clubs” began to appear. Foremost was the Continentals, a bunch who spent a good deal of time looking in the mirror, practicing complex handshakes, and running around ripping the insignias off Lincoln Continentals. In the beginning the family associations did their best. They marshaled the new kids into New Year’s dragon-dancing. For the older, more sullen ones, they established martial arts clubs. But these kids didn’t seem interested in discipline; besides, they smoked too many cigarettes. That’s when the tongs intervened. Within weeks of the first extortion report, several White Eagles and representatives of the On Leong tong were sitting in a Mott Street restaurant talking it over. When they were done, a pact was sealed that would establish the youth gang as a permanent fixture of “New Chinatown.”

  It was agreed that the Eagles would stop random mayhem around the community and begin to work for the On Leong. They would “guard” the tong-sponsored gambling houses and make sure that no one ripped off restaurants that paid regular “dues.” In return, the Eagles’ leaders would receive a kind of salary, free meals in various noodle houses, and no-rent apartments in the Chinatown area.

  It seemed a brilliant arrangement, especially for the tongs. The On Leongs and Hip Sings no longer struck fear in the heart of Chinatown. With warriors like Sing Dock barely a misty reminiscence, the tongs had become paunchy, middle-aged businessmen who spent most of their time competing for black-mushroom contracts. The Eagles brought them the muscle they felt they would need in changing times. It was like having your own private army, just like the good old d
ays.

  But the tongs weren’t used to this kind of warrior. The kids mounted a six-foot-tall statue of a white eagle on top of their tenement at Mott and Pell. One night ten of them piled into a taxicab and went uptown to see Superfly; afterward they shot up Pell Street with tiny .22s for the sheer exhilaration of it. They went into tailor shops, scowled, and came away with two-hundred-dollar suits. Once Paul Ma—Eagle supreme commander—showed up for an arraignment wearing a silk shirt open down the front so everyone could see his bullet holes.

  During eight or so years on top in Chinatown, the Eagles set the style for the Chinese youth gang. Part was savagery. Eagle recruiting practices were brutal—coercion was often used to replenish their street army. They kidnapped merchants’ daughters and held them for ransom. They also set the example of using expensive and high-powered guns. No Saturday-night specials in Chinatown. The gangs used Mausers, Lugers, and an occasional M-14. One cop says, “You know, I’ve been on the force for twenty-two years, and I never saw nothing that gave me nightmares like watching a fifteen-year-old kid run down Bayard Street carrying a Thompson submachine gun.”

  But there was another side to this. A new style was emerging in Chinatown. Chinese kids have had a tough time of it in schools like Seward Park. Blacks and Puerto Ricans as well as meanies from Little Italy would vamp Chinese students for sport. Groups like the Eagles were intent on changing this. It was a question of cool. In the beginning they copied the swagger and lingo of the blacks—it is remarkable how closely a Chinese teenager can imitate black speech. From the Puerto Ricans they borrowed souped-up car styling as well as the nonfashion of wearing army fatigues, which they added to their already zooty Hong Kong–cut shirts.

  But it was Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong sex-symbol kung fu star, who did the most for the Chinese street presence. Gang kids ran around Chinatown carrying nunchahas—kung fu fighting sticks—which few of them knew how to use, and postured like deadly white cranes. When “Kung-Fu Fighting” became a number one hit on WWRL, being Chinese was in. They became people not to mess with (although the police report there has never been a gang incident in which martial arts were used). “It was like magic,” says one ex-Continental. “I used to walk by the Smith projects where the blacks live, and those brothers would throw dirty diapers out the window at me and call me Chinaman. Now they call me Mr. Chinaman.”