by Huang, Yunte
To the crime bosses in Honolulu, bullwhip-toting Chang Apana was a veritable thorn in their side. They slept restlessly, plagued by the need to get rid of this wiry, tenacious Chinaman. As George Kelai, a former HPD officer who had once worked with Apana, recalled in a later interview, “They threaten his life. They wanna kill him because he was spoiling lotta business.”11 Apana once climbed up walls like a pre–Spider-Man sleuth and slipped into an opium dive in the rear of a tenement building on Pauahi Street. The dark room was over-crowded with Chinese dopers. Some, lying in double bunks with their heads and shoulders propped up on pillows, were busy inhaling the bubbling dope’s blue fumes through bamboo pipes. Others were sleeping off their debauches, dreaming of Elysium. In corners, on the matted floors, or even under the bunks, these poppy-soaked figures, emaciated and ragged, filled every inch of the room, reeking of stink and squalor.12
Apana’s surprise entrance did not disturb any of the euphoric dopers, but it did catch the attention of the dive’s proprietor and his hired guards. Among the latter was a notorious character named Pak Chew, aka “the man with a rubber stomach.” Well trained in martial arts, Chew was said to be able to poke his forefinger through a half-inch board and to crack open a coconut with his bare fist. His biggest stunt was to let anyone make a punching bag out of his stomach; even the most determined puncher would fail to make him blink. On this day, Chew and other hatchetmen were ready for Apana. Using the darkness as cover, four of them snuck up on Apana from behind. The ensuing scuffle woke the dopers and sent them running for the door. A table went over and dark opium wads flew out of a tray, scattering like ping-pong balls on the floor. Apana tried to fight off the strangle-hold of Chew’s claws while dodging the punches raining down from the other assailants. He finally freed one hand and reached for the bullwhip coiled around his waist. When his opponents saw the dreaded weapon, they fought desperately to subdue him. Together they grabbed Apana, who weighed only 130 pounds, lifted him up, and hurled him out the second-floor window. Miraculously, Apana landed on his feet and walked away like the proverbial cat.13
A few days later, a scene unfolded on the dock just after sunset. A few swimmers still dallied in the water that minutes before had shone with the last rays of a golden dusk. A slice of moon now hovered in the corner of the sky. A See Yup Man, seemingly reluctant to call it a day, hung around the pier, dangling two baskets of coconuts on a bamboo shoulder pole. With an oversize straw hat covering most of his face, he wore a sweat-stained blue shirt and a pair of soiled trousers, a man indistinguishable from Chang Apana undercover. A cargo ship had just arrived from Hong Kong, and the HPD had received a tip that there was contraband aboard.
A team of stevedores were coming down the planks, carrying heavy boxes on their backs. Throwing off his disguise, Apana walked toward the stacked boxes. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a horse and buggy charging at him. It came too fast to dodge, and he was knocked to the ground. As the wheels caught him underneath the carriage, he lost consciousness. The police squad arrived just in time to seize the contraband and arrest the smugglers who had made the attempt on Apana’s life. And the See Yup Man survived, with broken ribs and legs, to fight another day.
8
Desperadoes
DURING THE 1900 CHINATOWN FIRE, RESIDENTS WERE EVACUATED UNDER POLICE DIRECTION (Courtesy of Hawaii State Archives)
When he goes there, he’s going to pick up those fellas, and he never miss.
—HPD Officer George Kelai, referring to Chang Apana1
A MASTER OF DISGUISE, Chang Apana shared with his fictional double, Charlie Chan, the exceptional ability to outwit opponents. Like his cinematic twin, he also showed a steely determination to hunt down the guilty. The comparison, however, cannot stretch too far. Unlike the portly detective whose body severely impedes his mobility, Apana had a physical side to his modus operandi. His thin and wiry body was the frame of a rough-and-tumble paniolo. His were the early days of law enforcement in Hawaii, when brute physical strength was more critical than fast-flying bullets.
During one raid on a Japanese gambling ring, an expert Japanese wrestler—as if out of a comic—threw Apana and another officer over his shoulder and onto the ground. Weeks later, Sheriff Chillingworth, a tall and muscular man who knew a thing or two about wrestling, tangled with another gambler who turned out to be an even more daunting opponent. According to a Pacific Commercial Advertiser article, Chillingworth tackled the Japanese, who was about as tall as he was. “The fellow at once showed that he was skilled in the art of wrestling, for the instant Chillingworth extended his hand to grasp him, the Japanese caught his wrist and turning his back toward him, made as if to throw him over his shoulder.” The article continues:
Chillingworth knows several of the tricks of the profession, and luckily escaped the throw, with the result that both went to the ground together, where each attempted to be the upper man. They struggled, both applying every muscle. Both finally got to their feet, and the scientific battle went on again. Now it was Chillingworth, now it was the Japanese. The deputy attempted to catch the bullet head of the Jap between his hand and elbow and bend it over almost to the breaking point, but so surely as Chillingworth made the attempt he was balked by a counter move at his wrist.
When Chillingworth finally subdued his opponent with an expert throw, he was immediately grabbed by a fellow officer who mistook him for the Japanese, for by this time, Chillingworth’s coat had become totally soiled in the hands-on combat.2
Apana had his fair share of physical fights. As described in the previous chapter, he was no stranger to being hurled from an upstairs window or run over by a buggy; his encounters with danger and death were hardly infrequent. According to the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Apana had a confrontation in March 1905 with a Chinese named Lee Leon, who subsequently sued Apana “for $2,000 damages on account of assault and battery with fists, hands, and feet.” The plaintiff claimed that the officer had beaten him up so badly that he “was laid up for a month and incurred a doctor’s bill of $100, besides detention from business.”3 The cause of that fight remains unknown, but Apana’s other confrontations, often with criminal desperadoes, are well documented.
Chillingworth once assigned Apana to capture two fugitive lepers. Apprehending lepers was, in the words of John Jardine, a veteran HPD detective, “one of the most controversial duties ever given the police in Hawaii.”4 As Apana later recalled, his knees did quake a little when he got the assignment.5 Leprosy, one of the oldest known human diseases—in fact, older than the Bible—had long been the unspoken dark secret of Hawaii. Jack London incurred no small fury and animosity from the islanders in 1909 after he published stories about Hawaiian lepers. Leprosy first appeared in the islands as early as 1830. The natives called it mai pake (Chinese sickness), because they believed that a Chinese had brought the malady to Hawaii. By 1865, leprosy had become so serious a threat that the Hawaiian legislature passed an act to prevent its spread. In 1866, the year of Mark Twain’s visit, the government schooner Warwick began transporting lepers to a newly created lazaretto on an isolated peninsula on the island of Molokai. The dreaded journey was Hawaii’s Bridge of Sighs, a hopeless one-way trip. Even after Norwegian scientist Armauer Hansen identified the bacillus Mycobacterium leprae in 1868, there was still no cure for leprosy and very little knowledge of how the disease was transmitted. By the end of the 1860s, more than a thousand lepers had been sent to Molokai, where they would wait helplessly while the cursed disease slowly ate away their bodies—peeling off their skin, disfiguring their faces, and extinguishing their vision. They would die in agony, forgotten by the world.6
Dreading such a horrible fate, some lepers tried to put up resistance or evade capture by the police. The most infamous among these fugitives was a paniolo named Koolau. In 1893, immediately following the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, the thirty-one-year-old Koolau was helping the haole government round up known lepers on the island of Kauai. When he discovered that he h
ad contracted the disease, he agreed to go to Molokai under the condition that his healthy wife, Piilani, could live with him on the leper colony. But at the last minute, she was held back by government officials, and Koolau leaped overboard and swam back to shore. He then fled with his wife, their young son, and a small band of lepers into the almost-inaccessible Kalalau Valley. For three years, they hid in the valley and resisted capture. Armed with a single rifle, Koolau held off the sheriff’s posses and killed several deputies. Then his child succumbed to leprosy, and the grieving couple buried him there. Two months later, Koolau died and was buried in a grave dug by his wife with a small knife. Jack London, whose 1909 story, “Koolau the Leper,” has immortalized the character, heard the tale from Bert Stolz, a young crewman working on the deck of his yacht, the Snark. Bert’s father, Louis H. Stolz, was one of the deputy sheriffs shot by Koolau on the perilous ridges of Kalalau.7
The two Japanese lepers Apana had to capture were almost as dangerous as Koolau. The Kokuma couple, who had successfully evaded the police and had put out the word that any attempt to take them would mean a fight to the death, were hiding out on Dillingham Ranch, at upland Kawaihapai.
The posse consisted of Captain Robert Parker Waipa, Apana, and two other officers. They arrived at the foot of the high slopes of Kawaihapai in the early morning. Through a thin layer of fog, they could see, about a mile up, a rambling plantation house. In order to surprise the Kokumas, the team split up and crawled through the brush of the mountainside. It had rained overnight, and the ground was muddy and slippery. Apana was first to get up there, his clothes all wet and soiled. Approaching the house with quiet steps, he surprised Mr. Kokuma coming out of the outhouse, still tying his pants as he walked. At the sight of the officer, Kokuma rushed for a rifle stashed near the front door, but Apana cut him off. The two men immediately became locked in battle. Kokuma somehow got hold of a sickle, and he started slashing and thrusting like a madman. Apana was cut several times across the arms and face. At last he knocked the sickle out of the leper’s hand and handcuffed him.
Before his teammates arrived, Apana proceeded to look for Kokuma’s wife. The fight outside had already roused her from sleep. As Apana entered the house, she, like her husband, made a run for a rifle leaning against a wall. As she dashed by him, Apana grabbed her flowing hair and pulled her back. Enraged, she turned around and attacked him like a wildcat. The fight, as Apana later declared, was “more terrible than with her husband.” When his fellow officers at last came to his aid, Apana was about to “sink with exhaustion.” The two lepers, according to a police report, were arrested, taken to the police station, and later deported to Molokai.8
Fortunately, unlike Koolau, Apana himself did not contract leprosy, despite such close encounters. But the Kokuma confrontation left a permanent imprint on him. Photos from his later years clearly show a scar above his right eyebrow, a souvenir from the sickle attack.
Apana’s bravado and bravery would soon win the confidence of his superiors. At some point, he was promoted from street officer to detective, despite the fact that he had no formal education and could read no English or Chinese. Becoming a detective sealed Apana’s fame in the annals of history.
9
Double Murder
HONOLULU POLICE DETECTIVE DIVISION, ON THE STEPS OF THE OLD DOWNTOWN STATION; IN FRONT ROW, FAR RIGHT, IS CHANG APANA. AUGUST 6, 1911 (Courtesy of Honolulu Police Department)
Murder like potato chip—cannot stop at just one.
—Charlie Chan
IN A DRAMATIC chapter of the first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key (published in 1925), the young Bostonian John Quincy is chased by a criminal gang late at night through a maze of mean alleys in downtown Honolulu, in a neighborhood known as the River District. Spanning the banks of the Nu’uanu Stream—crime-infested Chinatown to its west and equally rough sections of Iwilei to its east—the River District appears to the blue-blooded Bostonian as a nightmare:
There in crazy alleys that have no names, no sidewalks, no beginning and no end, five races live together in the dark. Some houses were above the walk level, some below, all were out of alignment. John Quincy felt he had wandered into a futurist drawing. As he paused he heard the whine and clatter of Chinese music, the clicking of a typewriter, the rasp of a cheap phonograph playing American jazz, the distant scream of an auto horn, a child wailing Japanese lamentations…. Odd painted faces loomed in the dusk: pasty-white faces with just a suggestion of queer costumes beneath. A babel of tongues, queer eyes that glittered, once a lean hand on his arm.1
John Quincy is almost shanghaied.
Foreshadowing the hard-boiled streets of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or the symbolic underworld of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Honolulu’s rough neighborhoods, described poetically by Earl Biggers as if he had seen them in an opium-induced dream, were the locus operandi of newly promoted Detective Chang Apana. Even the names of these areas betrayed their infamy: Tin Can Alley, Blood Town, Mosquito Flats, and Hell’s Half Acre. Whores, pimps, thugs, footpads, bootleggers, dopers, and gamblers swarmed these blocks of slums. In his later years, with a twinkle in his eyes, Apana would reminisce about the time when the Iwilei section was the mecca of crime and the saloons were wide open. “Those were the days,” Apana said, “when the police patrol wagon was busy and the riot calls were frequent.”2
Sometime in the early 1910s, Apana joined the crime-busting squad, a team led by Captain Arthur McDuffie and comprising half a dozen detectives and officers, including John Kellett, George Nakea, Oliver Barboza, Kam Kwai, and driver Henry Kualii. Like Steve McGarrett’s Hawaii Five-O quartet a half-century later, McDuffie’s group would cruise around town in a black Packard, scouting for trouble. Their car had a special device that enabled the driver to open all four doors at the same time with a click, and the team members would simultaneously leap out into action.3
The cases they took up ranged from bootlegging and drug trafficking to missing persons to homicide. With no need for dramatic embellishment, some of these cases would be readymade material for Charlie Chan novels, or, later, Hawaii Five-O episodes. (As we will see later, Biggers was first inspired by an obscure article about an opium arrest made by Apana.) In a few cases, missing persons would never be found, despite the team’s efforts; in many others, dangerous jailbreakers would be apprehended and killers swiftly brought to justice.
One year, just as the islands were preparing for the big Independence Day celebration, a popular mainland girl named Frances Ash was reported missing from Waikiki Beach. “The news of the disappearance reached the police station early in the morning,” read the front-page article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “and Chief of Detectives Arthur McDuffie, together with his aides, John Kellett and Apana, came out in a high-powered machine.”4 They searched every hotel room along the beachfront and sent a team of lifeguards, including the brother of famed surfer Duke Kahanamoku, into the water with canoes and surfboards to look for the girl. The search went on for days, but no trace of Miss Ash was ever found.
While such a case required substantial organizational legwork for Apana and his colleagues, others demanded courage, as in the ability to stare down the barrel of a gun and not blink. Apana once joined McDuffie and Kellett in capturing a Korean who had broken out of jail. “They finally located their quarry, hiding under a house,” read a police report. “When he was ordered to come out he replied with a fusillade of shots, one of the shots boring the palm of Kellett’s hand, the others missing by narrow margin, the other two officers.” In a lull between shots fired by the escaped felon and the officers, Apana snuck around the side of the house, while the other two officers held the fugitive at bay. When Apana pounced on the prisoner, the Korean’s gun went off, sending a bullet into Apana’s left arm. He was in the midst of a life-or-death struggle when the other officers came to his rescue and subdued the fugitive. Apana took only a week in the hospital to recuperate from the gun wound.5
Newspaper reports confi
rm that Apana’s life was anything but boring. On the morning of May 1, 1913, for example, McDuffie, Kellett, and Apana came upon a scene of utter horror at a Chinese store in Kalihi: The bodies of Lim Ah Kim and his new young wife, Lum Shee, were lying on the floor in a crimson pool. Their throats were slashed, and they had suffered multiple stab wounds. The stench of death permeated the store, which had doubled as a residence. A black cat, too frightened to mew, shivered in the corner behind a rice sack, its dark fur stained with blood not yet coagulated. Mr. Lim had been a prominent merchant. His wife, a beautiful twenty-year-old, was pregnant. The cash register had been rifled, a steel safe damaged, and the bedroom drawers ransacked. The officers also found bloodstained footprints on the floor; some indistinct bloody fingerprints on the bed, the safe, and a number of other places; and a heavy hammer bearing the marks of a bloody hand. All signs pointed to robbery as the most likely motive.
Police followed a tip to a nearby gambling room, located in a small shack within a few feet of the store. Declared by neighbors as the rendezvous of soldiers attached to the military post at Fort Shafter, the room had windows covered with khaki uniforms. The murdered storekeeper reportedly had just been paid for the groceries furnished to Fort Shafter’s messes, and he was thought to have carried about $600 in cash. But further investigation by McDuffie and his team found no evidence linking the gamblers to the carnage.6 Other neighbors, however, told police that four Filipinos had been seen near the store on the day of the murder. A description of the men was given to the police: one of the quartet was said to have been wearing a grayish sweater with a red border.