The Gangs of New York
Page 28
“What’s eleven months?” he sneered. “I could do that standin’ on me head!”
ABOUT a year after the murder of Kid Twist, in June, 1909, Monk Eastman was released from Sing Sing by the State Board of Parole under the law which made a convict sentenced for the first time eligible for parole after he had served one-half his sentence. Eastman immediately returned to the East Side, but found himself a king without a kingdom and a general without an army. The death of Kid Twist had completed the demoralization of the Eastman gang, and it had begun to break up into factions, many of them at war with each other. Humpty Jackson and other leaders were in jail, still others had been killed, and some of the smaller gangs had vanished altogether. Even Paul Kelly had seen the handwriting on the wall in the increased activity of the Committee of Fourteen and other reform agencies, and, although he retained many of his downtown connections and was a power there for several years, had transferred his principal headquarters to Harlem. There he made his first experiments in handling labor, an occupation which was to become an important source of revenue for him after he had reformed. He organized the ragpickers on the dumps at East River and 108th street, and became their business agent and walking delegate. Within a few months he called a strike, and three men were murdered in the fighting which followed the attempt of the employers to break the strike by importing downtown gangsters. Members of the Kelly gang then accepted commissions from a clique of real estate agents who coveted the fine old mansions which were still scattered through the district north of Yorkville, along the upper East Side, in the vicinity of 111th street. When the owners would not sell the gangsters began a campaign of systematic destruction and terrorization. They first stole the lead pipe and the outside trimmings; then they punched holes in the roofs, broke windows, destroyed porches and doors with bombs, and in obstinate cases resorted to beating and shooting. After a few weeks of this sort of treatment the property owner was generally glad to sell at whatever price he could get and leave the neighborhood, and the clique immediately remodelled the houses into cheap tenements and filled them with the hordes of Italians that had begun to swarm into the upper East Side.
Eastman tried desperately to reorganize his gang and regain his old position of importance, but he was unable to enlist under his banner more than half a score of his old followers, and so he became a sneak thief, a burglar, a pickpocket, and a dope peddler. He worked quietly for some three years, but in 1912 detectives invaded his apartment in East Thirteenth street and found him smoking opium, and in possession of a complete outfit for the manufacture of the drug. He was sent to prison for eight months by Judge Mayer of the United States District Court. In
September, 1914, Eastman was again arrested in Buffalo and accused of burglary, but was discharged. In June of the following year, however, he was convicted of a robbery in Albany and sent to Dannemora Prison for two years and eleven months. In September, 1917, he was arrested for fighting, but was discharged upon arraignment in Magistrate’s Court. The next day the former gang leader went to Yonkers and enlisted in the 106th Infantry of the New York National Guard under the name of William Delaney. Within a few months he went overseas with his regiment.
The man who had ruled a thousand thugs with an iron hand submitted readily enough to the rigorous discipline of the Army, and served throughout the World War with honor and distinction. Bullets in the mass held no terrors for him after the gun fights of the East Side, and whenever his platoon went over the top Eastman was always in the forefront of the charge. Once when his company was relieved after holding a particularly hot part of the line, Eastman asked his commanding officer for permission to remain with the relieving troops as stretcher bearer; and while the other men of his regiment were resting he served in the front line, carrying wounded men to the rear. Again, when he had been wounded, he eluded his nurses after three days in the hospital and, unarmed and half-clad, made his way to the front and joined his command. Monk Eastman received no decorations for valour, but he won the esteem and confidence of his fellow doughboys and his officers, and when the regiment returned to America the latter signed a petition to Governor Alfred E. Smith to restore the gangster’s citizenship. The captain of his company wrote to the Governor that Eastman “was a quiet and disciplined soldier, and toward all his comrades he evinced the greatest kindness and devotion.”
On May 3, 1919, Governor Smith signed an executive order restoring Monk Eastman to full citizenship, and the former king of the gangsters said that he would go straight. The police obtained a job for him, and he did not again come to their attention until the morning of December 26, 1920, when his body was found lying on the sidewalk in front of the Blue Bird Café at No.
62 East Fourteenth street, near Fourth avenue. He had been shot five times and was dead. A few days later Eastman was buried with full military honors, and in December, 1921, Jerry Bohan, a Prohibition Enforcement Agent, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree and was sentenced to prison for from three to ten years. He was paroled late in 1923. Bohan said that he had quarrelled with Eastman over tipping a waiter, but when detectives began to investigate they found that Monk had been bootlegging and selling dope.
THE WARS OF THE TONGS
DOYERS STREET is a crooked little thoroughfare which runs twistingly, up hill and down, from Chatham Square to Pell street, and with Pell and Mott streets forms New York’s Chinatown, of which it has always been the nerve center and the scene of much of the turbulent life of the quarter. It is an orphan street, ignored by the handbooks and histories of early New York, and there appears to be no record of how and for whom it was named. Perhaps the best guess is that it honors the memory of Anthony H. Doyer, who built a house at No. 3 in 1809, and after Uving there several years removed to Hudson street. In the beginning the thoroughfare was probably Doyer’s Lane or Doyer’s Road, and then it was listed as Doyer’s street. Eventually a careless sign
painter omitted the apostrophe and it became Doyers street, as it is today. A preposterous legend has it that one of the early Doyers buried a treasure of thirty-five million dollars in gold in the walls of his house, and there has been much tapping and digging for hidden chambers, but without success. The vastness of the sum belies the tale, yet it persists, and every few years a claimant to the mythical Doyer fortune appears, speaks his little piece and vanishes when he learns that the records of the Public Administrator do not show the existence of such an estate.
There has never been much reason for Doyers street, although in the early days of the city it may have been of some use as a lane or an alley. It is true that it forms a connecting link between Chatham Square and Pell street, but Pell street itself is but two blocks long and runs into the Bowery a few yards north of the Square. Doyers street is no good for traffic; it is too narrow; it resembles one of those mean byways in what the A.E.F. used to call the foreign sections of French cities. It is little more than two hundred feet in length, and it curves and twists so much that to get from one end of it to the other one could almost follow the directions for reaching the house of Kassim Baba—first to the right and then to the left, and again to the right and again to the left. But instead of the blue cross emblazoned upon the stone pillar of Kassim’s palace there is at the Pell street end of Doyers street the high side wall of the Hip Sing Tong House, plastered over with red and white posters covered with Chinese writings in orange and black. This wall is the community billboard of Chinatown. It was there, during the tong conflicts, that the declarations of war were posted that all men might read save the stupid white devils. Likewise it held the edicts of the Gamblers’ Union, the Bin Ching, a very efficient supervising agency for the tongs in the days when gambling was the principal diversion of the quarter.
A hundred years ago the section now called Chinatown was a district of brick dwellings inhabited principally by solid German families, with a sprinkling of respectable Irish who had little in common with their brawling brethren of the Five Points. But in 1858 a Cantonese, by
name Ah Ken, came to New York and made his home in Mott street and put his slender capital in a small cigar store in Park Row. He prospered, and ten years later appeared Wah Kee, who established a shop at No. 13 Pell street, half a block from Doyers, where he did a good business in curios, vegetables, and preserved fruits and sweets. Most of Wah Kee’s profits, however, came from gambling games and an opium-smoking dive which he operated above his store. Almost immediately he attracted the riff-raff of the Bowery and Chatham Square, and the character of the neighborhood began to change.
Wah Kee’s graft was so excellent, and the police viewed his activities in such a tolerant and reasonable light, that word of his success spread abroad and in two years another Cantonese had set up a shop as a blind for a gambling hell and opium resort at No.
4 Mott street. In 1872 there were twelve Chinamen in the district, and by 1880 the number had increased to seven hundred. Then they came in droves, and it was not long before they had driven out the Irish and Germans and usurped the tenements in Doyers, Mott and Pell streets, while the overflow spread into the Bowery and along the streets southwest of Chatham Square, toward Five Points. In 1910 it was estimated that there were between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Chinese in New York, but now there are probably not more than half that number, for in recent years the colony has been considerably reduced by migrations to New Jersey towns, especially Newark, which has a larger Chinese settlement than the metropolis.
The tong wars appeared to have begun about 1899, and, with the exception of one or two which started over women, were all caused by conflicting gambUng interests. The tongs are as American as chop suey—the latter is said to have been invented by an American dishwasher in a San Francisco restaurant, while the first tong was organized in the Western gold fields about 1860— and finally they became little more than associations for parcelling out gambling and opium smoking privileges. During the height of their power fan tan and pi gow games ran wide open throughout the lengths of Mott, Doyers and Pell streets; practically every store harbored a game of chance, and on quiet nights the fumes of opium, smoked in the basements and in the dingy rooms above the gambhng places, floated down to the streets and mingled with the odors of stale beer, raw whiskey and unwashed men of all races. In the middle nineties there were two hundred gambling games in the small triangular area formed by the three streets of Chinatown, and almost as many opium dens. These dives paid an average of $17.50 a week each to the police, and smaller sums directly to the heads of the tongs, as well as a percentage of winnings to the Gamblers’ Union. The latter sum came out of the pockets of the players and went to the tongs, but was in addition to the regular tribute exacted from the owner of the game. The efficiency with which the Union operated is shown by the following placard which was distributed in Chinatown in 1897, after the police, in a sudden spasm of virtue, had closed the gambling dens for a few weeks:
Notice to Fortune Seekers
The gambling houses are reopened again. As extra expenses must be paid, a new rule has gone into effect. Instead of the old percentage of seven per cent., deducted from all winnings of over fifty cents, a new percentage has been established. Henceforth a percentage of seven per cent, will be deducted from all winnings, and a percentage of fourteen per cent, from all winnings over |25.
Every gambling place must post this notice on the wall where it can be easily seen.
Inspectors of the Gamblers’ Union shall visit all gambling houses to see that this law is enforced, and any failure to comply with said law shall be punished by a fine of $10, half of which shall go to the informer.
Given under our hand and seal in the 17th year of Quong Soi, King, and the 9th month (October).
New York Bin Ching Union,
During this golden age of fan tan and pi gow Tom Lee was head of the On Leongs and boss of all the gambling; the Hip Sings were meek and lowly, and were permitted to operate only a few games. Moreover, Tom Lee controlled the only Chinese votes in New York City, six in number, and when occasion required voted them early and often, so that he was lord of the district and beloved of the politicians. In proof of their high regard they called him Mayor of Chinatown and invested him with the office of Deputy Sheriff of New York County. Thereafter the chieftain of the On Leongs pompously strode the streets with his splendidly burnished star glistening on his blouse, his great body encased in a suit of chain mail, and his hands resting on the shoulders of two retainers who walked by his side. Life was very pleasant for Tom Lee in those days; he was rich and powerful and there was no fly in his ointment save Wong Get, a mild and affable Chinaman who strove for ten years to topple Tom Lee from his pedestal. But Wong Get failed dismally; perhaps because Chinatown laughed at him, for he was a dude. He had cut his hair and wore white man’s clothing, and his countrymen felt that he could not be trusted.
But early in 1900 the quiet and peaceful flow of Tom Lee’s power was rudely interrupted by the appearance of Mock Duck, a bland, fat, moon-faced Uttle man who was ambitious to rule the district as Emperor, and so became the terror of Chinatown. Mock Duck was a curious mixture of bravery and cowardice. He wore the shirt of chain mail with which all of the tong killers of the period protected their precious bodies, he carried two guns and a hatchet, and at times he would fight bravely, squatting on his haunches in the street with both eyes shut, and blazing away at a surrounding circle of On Leongs with an utter disregard of his own safety. He seldom hit what he aimed at, or anything else for that matter, but so long as he could pull the trigger he was dangerous to anyone up, down or sideways within range. At other times Mock Duck got the wind up, and fled pell mell to San Francisco or Chicago—but he always came back, filled with new schemes for the discomfiture of the On Leongs. However, these flights may have been strategical; it is not improbable that in reality Mock Duck was afraid of no one but his wife, Tai Yu. Once she invaded the flat of a Chinese woman in Division street, and finding Mock Duck there led him home by the scruff of the neck, stopping at every street corner to kick and slap him. He had to go blazing away with his two guns for a long time before he could quiet the laughter that this disgraceful incident inspired.
Flag of Truce on the On Leong Tong House in Mott Street
Mock Duck was a notable gambler in a race of gamblers. He would bet on anything; he has been known to wager his entire wealth on whether the number of seeds in an orange picked at random from a fruit cart was odd or even. He even gambled with his religion; hearing much of the power of the Christian God, and, indeed, seeing evidences of it in the prosperity of poorly paid policemen, he emblazoned over the head of his personal joss in his own house the motto from the American dollar, “In God we trust.” Some years later, after the Society for the Prevention of Crime had unwittingly aided him in his schemes against the On Leongs, he replaced the joss in the Hip Sing Tong House with a huge crayon portrait of Frank Moss, counsel for and aid to the celebrated Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst in his pursuit of the devil.
Wong Get was fast growing discouraged with the progress of his fight against Tom Lee when Mock Duck arrived in New York, but he remained a power in the councils of the Hip Sings, and Mock Duck formed an alliance with him. Within a year Mock Duck had obtained control of the tong, and had increased its membership so that he felt strong enough to beard the lord of the On Leongs. He calmly demanded that the potentate of the quarter give him a half interest in the gambling privileges of Chinatown, or prepare to fight. Tom Lee laughed, and all of Chinatown except the men of the Hip Sing tong joined him. But there was no laughter a few weeks later when two of Tom Lee’s votes burned to death in an incendiary fire that destroyed an On Leong boarding house in Pell street, which was not then the street of the Hip Sings as it became later, after the On Leongs had retired into the fastnesses of Mott. Although Mock Duck indignantly disclaimed all knowledge of the catastrophe, it was obvious that he was a power to reckon with, and to teach him a lesson an On Leong hatchet man sallied forth and slew the first Hip Sing he met in Doyers street.