An unarmed, unguarded King of Chinatown had taken a straight chair in the shop, only four feet from the front door. For the first time in months—perhaps years—Pete was briefly defenseless. The timing of the shadowy figures was perfect. In the shop with Pete were two barbers, and one other customer who was having his head shaved.
At approximately 9:10 P.M. the two hatchet men, fedoras pulled low over their faces, strode into the barbershop. At the exact moment that Hunter was fumbling with a handful of coins to pay the newspaper vendor at the New Western Hotel, a pistol shot echoed in the barbershop, followed by three more. Smoke and the smell of cordite filled the room. The men spun on their heels and were gone. In the rear of the shop barbers Wong Chong and Won Chick Cheong were emptying basins of water. They saw nothing.
Hunter came hurrying up the hill, pistol in hand, but he was too late. Much too late. He stared in disbelief at the crumpled form on the blood-soaked floor of the barbershop. Two of the assassins’ bullets had torn into Pete’s head and a third into his chest. Hunter was out of a job, and some Chinese was richer by the price ($3,000) on Little Pete’s head.
Reporters questioned Hunter the next morning. “Of late,” said the bodyguard, “I’d been contemplating giving up my job because of Pete’s recklessness and his often expressed contempt of the value of my service. There is no more danger of my being hurt than there is of you being hurt,’ he would say. But several times men tried to get the drop on Pete. Only last week a man rubbed up against me to see if I had a weapon. I gave him a shove, and four other men showed hostility. I had to hit one on the head with my revolver before he would quit.” Hunter added, “In spite of this, the fact that a price was on his head worried him, and of late he was rather ill tempered.” Hunter could tell them no more.
Even before the Chinatown squad sped to the murder scene Special Officer George Welch arrived. He had been quick enough to see two men flee from the doorway of the barbershop. He pursued them as they ran into Waverly Place. (Waverly was also known as Ho Boon Gai—Fifteen Cent Street—because that was the cost of “haircuts” [shaving] in the many barbershops which lined the street.) Policeman Murty Callinan came up at that moment and Welch pointed to No. 123 Waverly into which the duo had fled. The two officers entered the building, and Callinan arrested two men, Chin Poy and Wing Sing, upon Welch’s identification. In their room Callinan found a chest containing a box of loose pistol cartridges, a dagger with a three-edged blade, and two pairs of homemade “brass” knuckles made of solder.
Sergeant John Mooney and his Chinatown posse arrived shortly after Callinan. Mooney himself picked up the murder weapon—a modern Colt Storekeeper revolver. He found that four chambers were emptied. Mooney had officer Myler arrest the barber Wong Ching as a witness before he could drop from sight. Within a few moments Mooney was joined by Sergeant Wollweber and fourteen more men. Wollweber had his men frisk all the curious Chinese who pushed up close to the barbershop to peer inside; not a weapon was found on anyone. The lone customer, Wong Lung, was detained for questioning although he insisted that he had seen nothing. He was marched off to city prison.
At California Street Station the two suspects were given a thorough grilling. They denied any complicity in, or even knowledge of the crime. In fact they swore that they were unaware of the murder until arrested and that they had neither heard the shots nor left their room that evening. Wing Sing affected a no-sabe attitude but Chin Poy was glib enough. He told his interrogators that he was a cook who had just arrived from Portland two weeks earlier and had been hired by an insurance agent who was living in a local hotel until he could secure a new home. Of Wing Sing, Chin Poy said that he had come to San Francisco from an Alaskan cannery about a month earlier. The police thought that Wing was very well dressed for an ex-laborer. He did not resemble the coolie type of cannery worker who drifted into Chinatown each winter.
Attorneys secured the release of the barber witness on a writ of habeas corpus but the two men from the North were held. The arsenal found in their room, together with Welch’s identification of them as the men he saw fleeing the barbershop area, was damning. They were formally charged with murder. It soon became obvious that the department had the wrong men.
An anonymous merchant told a reporter that he had spoken to Pete just before the murder and that the latter had winked slyly at him and showed him $2,000 in gold—the result of a “good business deal.” The informant said the deal was the framing of an honest man for the murder of a Suey Sing while the real culprit, probably a Wah Ting San Fong tong hatchet man, got away. The talkative merchant insisted that Pete was killed by Suey Sings intent on evening up the score. Then, too, Little Pete’s nephew Chung Ying was reported boarding the steamer China in Hong Kong to come to San Francisco to find his uncle’s real murderers. The best evidence that the real murderers had escaped was the chun hing posted by Pete’s widow after the arrest of the suspects. It offered a reward of $2,000 for the capture and conviction of the murderers of Little Pete.
But the police were stuck with Chin Poy and Wing Sing. New witnesses appeared to identify them as the killers. One man, D. S. Hutchings, repeated his story time after time without deviating; right up through the course of the trial his account never varied. Chief Crowley placed great faith in this witness. Hutchings’s story went as follows: “I was in Chinatown on the night of the shooting when Little Pete, otherwise known as Fong Ching, was killed. I saw the defendant [Wing Sing] standing in the door of the barbershop and heard the shots fired... As soon as the shooting was over, the defendant here ran by me. He had on a Chinese-made blouse with long sleeves... I did not see a pistol in his hand and did not see the flash of the shots. As soon as the shooting was over I started toward the barbershop and met this man Sing. He was wearing a fedora hat. There was another man with him, a Chinaman who also had on a fedora hat. [Hutchings never did positively identify the other man as Chin Poy.] When the shooting was finished, the defendant ran away rapidly.”
Hutchings was apparently an honest man. He told the court what he saw as he remembered it. He never did say he actually saw Wing in the act of shooting Pete, for all the coaxing he received in that direction. He refused to incriminate Chin Poy. But he did stress the point that Wing Sing was at the scene of the crime and that he had hurried away immediately after the shooting occurred. Hutchings had had a good vantage point on the northwest corner of Washington and Waverly when the murder was committed and when he saw Wing fleeing from the shop.
The fact that Wing and Chin Poy would hurry away from a shooting was not surprising. Hutchings admitted that practically everybody broke into a run in one direction or another when the shots were fired. He had done so himself. But the two suspects doggedly stuck to their story that they had not even left their lodging that evening. Special Officer Welch could add little information. He had followed two men in fedoras from the scene of the crime and had arrested the only two men in the rooming house who were wearing slouch hats.
Two more men, a Pullman porter named James Briggs and a dishwasher and bartender, James Daly, then came forth to corroborate Hutchings’s testimony. During the trial both Daly and Briggs were able to single out Wing Sing from the numerous Chinese in the courtroom, as the man they had seen fleeing the murder scene. But when Counsel Murphy asked Daly if he had actually seen pistols in the men’s hands he admitted that he had not. He said their hands were concealed by the sleeves of their blouses. “Then, how do you know that one of them dropped a pistol?” asked Murphy. “Because I saw it dropped. The man in front—the smaller of the two—dropped it.” The defense scored by weakening Daly’s testimony at this juncture. Two brothers, Edward and Charles Johnseon, were called as surprise witnesses. They made it clear to the jury that Daly was remembering more and more as time wore on. Immediately after the murder he had said to them, “I was in Chinatown last night and if I had been five minutes earlier, I would have seen the shooting.”
Before the trial of Wing Sing and Chin Poy began, four other Chinese were arrested. The police collected a small arsenal from them—three knives, a cleaver, a .45 Colt, and two hatchets—but could not implicate them. Still another suspect was found in late January—Gee Pon Jin, a Suey Sing member with a reputation for recklessness. He was identified by another new witness, Frank Mason, as one of two men he had seen fleeing the barbershop as he emerged from Ross Alley to see what had happened after he heard the shots.
Crowley, who would have been content with one killer, now found himself with an embarrassment of riches. He had seven suspects. But not one of them was ever to be convicted of a part in the crime. The solution of the murder of Little Pete remains a mystery to this day.
The really hot suspect was never arrested. He was Big Jim. Although he was a See Yup and a social and business rival of Pete, he was thought by most people to have been friendly with him. But many, including Captain Thomas S. Duke of the police department, considered him the chief conspirator in the crime, if not the executioner. The press, on the other hand, felt the friendship between Little Pete and Big Jim to have been genuine and that Big Jim was not implicated. Guilty or not, Big Jim soon found himself in grave danger as a scapegoat at least. Rumor was that there was a price of $5,000 on his head immediately after Pete’s murder. On Wednesday, January 26, in fear for his life at the hands of Little Pete’s hatchet men, he fled the city, taking only his bodyguard along. He hid out on a farm near Fresno, but when word trickled into Fresno’s China Alley that there was $1,000 available for anyone who would do Big Jim in, he did not wait. He left the Fresno area on February 23, on the Oregon express. His departure, though hurried, was a well-kept secret, as he did a masterful job of covering his tracks. While he quietly converted his bulky cash into checks at two different banks—one for $50,000 and the other for $44,000—he let a story circulate that he was going to visit a Northern California mine in which he had an interest. Instead he went straight to Victoria with his white wife and family. There he caught a steamer for China and safety.
Both friends and rivals of Pete’s either fled town or secured bodyguards after his death. One of the former, Ung Hung—nicknamed the Russian—was warned of a $2,500 reward for his life. He had to die, it was said, because he knew too much about the murder. The Russian did not leave town but he did hire Tom Douglass, son of Police Captain Douglass, as his personal bodyguard. Another close friend of Pete’s, Sin Goon, learned that there was a $2,000 price on his head. Like the Russian, he hired a white gunman for a shield.
Just four days after Pete’s death the rumor swept Chinatown that Dong Gong, police interpreter and informant, had been shot to death. A later report had him only shot in the leg. When Sergeant Jesse Cook investigated he found Dong at home unharmed, but under guard. He was a frightened man. He never went out without his bodyguard and was seldom seen in the streets in the future.
While Dr. Morgan was performing the autopsy on Little Pete the Sam Yups were hurriedly holding a powwow. They met in the rooms of the Wah Ting San Fong tong at 820 Jackson Street. Couriers had sped throughout the Quarter to round up members for the strategy meeting. Soon the rooms were crowded. The conference lasted all night and ended with the declaration that some prominent See Yups would have to die to expiate the murder of Little Pete.
Meanwhile the rumor was spreading that Pete’s assassins were after Vice-Consul King Owyang. The latter, an old hand at being death-listed, smiled stoically when he heard of it.
More and more rumors rolled into the police department. Crowley was soon swamped with them: Pete had been murdered for accepting a $40,000 fee for destroying the See Yup Company, and had already been paid $10,000 on account; Vice-Consul Owyang had been backing him, as he had the Sam Yup Company; Pete was to have taken the Sam Yup Company from the defensive in the boycott and put it on the offensive. There were many more and there may have been a grain of truth in each. For one thing, a completely illegal raid reminiscent of the Chinatown squad’s savage forays had made a shambles of the See Yup Company headquarters before Pete’s death. The ax-wielding raiders had been led by a private eye named Ferdinand Callundan. The police had quickly arrested him but the See Yups were convinced that Pete, not Callundan, had brainstormed the raid. Whether he was guilty or not, Pete had found chun hungs posted with rewards for his head. But there had been no takers at the $1,000 price. The figure was doubled but without success. The price was upped to $3,000. This brought results. Pete was shot to death the next night.
Other stories noised abroad were that the Sam Yups had hired hatchet men to man the roofs of Chinatown after Pete’s death and to shoot down a policeman and see to it that the See Yups were blamed. This was a good story. It was so good that it was shortly revived, but with the roles reversed. This time the See Yups were said to be on the roofs and the Sam Yups destined for trouble. Another startling rumor was that certain highbinders were building up a cache of arms and ammunition in a Pacific Street basement. According to the tale, these underground stores were for the use of a subterranean army which would spring up should the fan kwei dare to interfere in the blood bath which would have to follow Pete’s murder. The police found this to be completely untrue.
Both the white community and Chinatown were of two minds over Little Pete’s passing. But it was a eulogy of sorts which The Chinese Recorder printed right after his death: “Little Pete, as he was commonly known, was the most famous man among us. He may have had his faults, and more than the average man, but his good qualities were more than sufficient to counterbalance the evil part of his nature. He has furnished more work to those in need than any man that can be named. When he had no work to give he furnished sustenance to the needy. The list of his bad traits does nowhere contain the word ‘miser.’ It is to be hoped that the police will succeed in catching the murderers and that they will meet with speedy punishment. It is not generally believed, however, that the two men under arrest are the guilty ones.”
But Crowley was not about to accept a Robin Hood characterization of Little Pete. He agreed more with the Call which said: “Little Pete had not been a credit to the city in which he lived.” And with the French language paper l’Impartial which stated that “characters of his stamp will not be missed.” Indeed, Crowley went far in damning Pete. He blamed him for all of the trouble in Chinatown since he had reached a position of power, saying:
Little Pete was unquestionably the cleverest Chinaman on the Pacific Coast and probably in the United States. He was a born organizer and was full of schemes and deviltry. Until his advent there were no highbinder societies or tongs and the Chinese were quiet, orderly and peaceable. He was the first to organize a tong and finally he had fifteen or sixteen of them at his command. They levied blackmail upon houses of ill fame and upon inoffensive merchants, and by that means Little Pete became a rich man.
He was at the bottom of every blackmailing scheme and held absolute power over the highbinders of Chinatown. Four years ago when Sergeant Price and his squad demolished the headquarters of the different tongs it was Little Pete who instigated the damage suits against me and the squad in the United States District Court because, as he said, it would deter me from any further attempts to repeat the dose. In that, Little Pete made a mistake and he came to recognize the fact.
Five years ago I prevailed upon the Six Companies to employ eight responsible Chinese to act as policemen, and each of the eight carried a tag signed by me, showing their authority. By that means I thought they would be able to keep the Six Companies and myself posted as to any proposed action of the highbinders to commit murder. I have found out my mistake, as they have been utterly useless, and I will ask the Six Companies to discontinue employing them.
It has always been the case that while there was an extra force of police in Chinatown there was no shooting, but as soon as the extra force was withdrawn trouble recommenced. I have about twenty men in Chinat
own now and I will keep them there… till the present trouble blows over. I can do no more with the force at my command.
Crowley’s mention of Sergeant Price, who had earned the title the American Terror from the Chinese as a result of his ax raids, sent newsmen scurrying to him for interviews. Price had no reluctance to comment, and had his own ready prescription for ending the reign of terror in Chinatown:
I regard the situation here as most serious but do not look for any great trouble until after the funeral. I understand that the Sam Yup men have imported the most desperate rascals belonging to the highbinder tongs found in the interior and coast towns to carry on the feud. One thing is certain; there was a time when I knew every highbinder in Chinatown and where nearly every individual could be found. But I can’t now. The streets are filled with strange faces. At one time I arrested thirty-five men in one day and did not make a single mistake. I was always careful not to arrest innocent men and give cause for complaint. Why, once we smashed eight thousand dollars’ worth of property in breaking up a tong meeting. It was a long time before they dared to come together again. But, you see, all these clubs are incorporated now. That is what balks us in disturbing them. When we do manage to get through to where the rascals are playing forbidden games and hatching deviltry of all kinds, they have had plenty of time to start in on some innocent game. When the police leave they return to what they were doing before.
Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown Page 30