Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues

by Paul Martin

  The most shocking aspect of Chivington’s behavior is the fact that he was an ordained minister. For a man of God, a dedicated Christian, to ignore the key tenets of his faith—virtually every dictum laid down by Jesus himself—baffles the mind. Chivington apparently felt no compassion toward the women and innocent children being gunned down and hacked apart. He had no remorse that the old and infirm were shown no mercy. He reveled in the day’s bloody toll, hoping it would lead to a campaign to “rid the country” of Indians, a shockingly genocidal mindset.24

  The glory of Sand Creek evaporated like morning mist when the true nature of the attack became apparent—exactly as it should have. Otherwise, we would all share in John Chivington’s shame and guilt.

  Fong Ching

  All Fong Ching—also known as “Little Pete”—wanted was a shave. After finishing his dinner at around 9:00 p.m. on the night of January 23, 1897, the diminutive, baby-faced Chinese entrepreneur left his wife and three children in the family residence above their Washington Street shoe factory, located within the teeming confines of San Francisco’s Chinatown. He was headed downstairs to his neighborhood barbershop. Dressed in an expensive, loose-fitting mandarin silk jacket and wearing the traditional Chinese queue, or pigtail, the thirty-two-year-old Little Pete looked every inch the respectable Asian merchant. The only indication that he was not your typical businessman was the presence of his hulking Anglo bodyguard, the capable Ed Murray.

  Down on the street next door to his factory, Little Pete entered the establishment run by his fellow countryman Wong Chung. Little Pete sat down on a straight-backed wooden chair and settled in for his customary Saturday-night grooming. With the queue hairstyle, the front and sides of the head are shaved, while the hair on the back of the head is gathered into a long braid that’s never cut. China’s Manchurian-ruled Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) required the conquered Han Chinese to conform to the distinctive Manchu hairstyle as proof of submission, making the act of cutting off your queue punishable by death.1 Many Chinese immigrants kept their long braids even in America.

  As Wong Chung went about his work, Little Pete glanced at the newspapers lying around the barbershop. An avid horseracing fan, the wealthy manufacturer told his bodyguard to run out to the hotel down the street and pick up a broadsheet with the day’s results. When Murray objected to leaving him unguarded, Little Pete laughed and told him he’d be all right.

  Reluctantly, Murray did as he was instructed. Within seconds of Murray leaving the shop, two Chinese toughs walked in off the street and pumped three bullets into Little Pete, who was still seated in the barber’s chair. One of the bullets struck Little Pete in the corner of his right eye, another pierced his forehead, and the third slug tore into his chest. The two assassins immediately fled into the Chinese quarter’s warren of crowded streets. Hearing the shots, Ed Murray raced back to the barbershop, where he found his employer lying dead on the floor, a pool of blood spreading outward from beneath his head. The pint-size businessman had paid the price for letting his guard down.

  Why someone would want to kill Little Pete was no mystery, and it had nothing to do with making shoes. In addition to running his family business, the man had his hand in every vice operation in the Chinese district, from gambling to prostitution to the protection racket. He’d grown rich from human trafficking and fixing horse races, and he protected his empire with hired cutthroats and liberal bribes handed out to city officials.2 The combination of his legitimate and criminal successes earned him the title “King of Chinatown.” Such prominence naturally stirred up a viper’s nest of jealous foes—enemies who finally caught up with him during his momentary lapse in security.

  In historical context, Little Pete was part of the diaspora of Chinese merchants, farmers, and laborers that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, an exodus sparked by China’s extreme poverty and the ongoing wars and rebellions against the hated Qing Dynasty. After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, Chinese immigrants—nearly all of them men—poured into the state, which was promoted in China as the land of the “Mountain of Gold.” (The majority of these newcomers intended to return to China once they’d made their fortunes.)3 As the main point of entry, San Francisco became home to the country’s first Chinatown, which is still the largest Chinese enclave outside Asia.

  By 1852, around twenty thousand Chinese had arrived in California, most of them heading on to the gold fields. By the late 1860s, Chinese immigration to the United States had topped sixty thousand, including some twelve thousand laborers recruited to help build the transcontinental railroad. By the 1880s, over a hundred thousand Chinese had arrived in this country.4 The rising tide of Asian immigration worried white Americans, who feared losing their jobs or having their wages undercut. Assimilation was all but impossible, and discrimination against the Chinese was particularly virulent. It peaked in 1882, when the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting further immigration of Chinese laborers and preventing the Chinese from becoming naturalized citizens (the law remained on the books until 1943). For crooks such as Little Pete, however, the act simply created a new stream of income: smuggling illegal immigrants, including hundreds of Chinese “slave girls,” or prostitutes.5

  Except for the murder and mayhem he was responsible for, Little Pete could have been admired for his record of hard-won self-improvement. Born near Canton, China, in 1864, the boy known as Fong Ching immigrated to San Francisco with his father when he was ten years old. A bright child, he soon became proficient in English through his studies at grammar school and the Methodist Chinese Mission. By the age of sixteen, he was working as an errand boy in a Chinatown shoe factory and helping to support several relatives.

  Always ambitious, Fong Ching saved and borrowed enough money to begin making shoes on his own. Eventually his business grew to encompass a factory employing more than forty workers, including his brother and an uncle.6 To pass his shoes off as an American brand, he named his manufacturing operation F. C. [for Fong Ching] Peters & Company, which, combined with the man’s small stature, is how he ended up with the nickname Little Pete. The company became the largest of its kind in Chinatown, shipping its products all over the state and earning its owner a substantial income. But for some reason, his legitimate business achievements didn’t satisfy Little Pete. That’s when he began branching out into seamier endeavors.

  A big part of Little Pete’s criminal success came from his understanding of the American legal system. He quickly learned that a few hundred dollars in the right pockets could do wonders in tipping things in his favor. It was something he’d picked up while working for one of the Six Companies, the Chinese benevolent associations formed to assist immigrants in their new homeland. Each of the Six Companies served people from a specific region of China.7 While still a teenager, Little Pete had become an interpreter for the Sam Yup Company, which introduced him to the ways of the San Francisco police and courts—both their prescribed functions and those that took place behind closed doors.

  The Six Companies represented the most public of the countless Chinese community organizations. There were also dozens of so-called secret societies, or tongs, representing a tangled mix of political, geographical, and occupational loyalties.8 The tongs included mutual aid groups, social clubs, administrative bodies, and—perhaps best known to white Americans—criminal gangs. (Such gangs were smaller, localized versions of the much older Chinese Triads, anti-Manchu political societies that grew into powerful international crime syndicates.) The criminal tongs thrived on extortion, demanding tribute money from honest merchants as well as the owners of gambling halls, brothels, and opium dens. And the gangs fought furiously among themselves to protect their turf.

  Like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story, the Chinese tong members were defined by their allegiances. Regional loyalties fueled the first outbreak of violence between the tongs.9 Rival groups of gold miners settling in the town of Weaverville, California, were soon
at each other’s throats. In 1854, open warfare broke out, with miners from Canton and Hong Kong hacking on one another with medieval pikes and swords that they’d paid local blacksmiths to craft. The fighting soon spread to other parts of the state, establishing a predilection for violence that became the hallmark of the criminal tongs.

  In San Francisco, the powerful Chee Kung Tong—the mother of all Chinese secret societies in this country—owned a three-story building housing a large hall where initiation ceremonies were regularly held involving swords, exposed necks, and blood oaths. The Chee Kung Tong’s unifying purpose was opposition to China’s Manchu rulers. By the 1880s, the tong claimed forty-five hundred members in San Francisco and a total of fifteen thousand members throughout the United States.10 There were also numerous splinter groups with a few hundred members each. One of these, the Gi Sin Seer Tong, was founded by Little Pete to help him protect his growing criminal empire.

  To fill out the ranks of the Gi Sin Seer Tong, Little Pete recruited the worst of the city’s boo how doy, the killers known as “highbinders” by white Americans. The highbinders were the foot soldiers in the constant warfare between Chinatown’s rival gangs, a competition that left stacks of mutilated corpses littering the district’s back streets and alleyways. Old photographs of weapons confiscated from the highbinders are enough to give you a chill—a fearsome collection of knives, swords, cleavers, clubs, hammers, and other implements designed for slicing, dicing, and tenderizing. Of these, the hatchet was the weapon of choice, a fact that gave the highbinders their other label: hatchet men. Whenever one tong angered another, the hatchet men were deployed to settle things in the accepted fashion: by waylaying a rival gang member in a dark alley and reducing him to a bloody lump of meat (and sometimes scalping him for good measure). Despite the gruesomeness of the crimes, white San Franciscans largely looked the other way, as long as the tongs kept their butchery among themselves.11

  Little Pete was the instigator of many such gang slayings. By the late 1880s, his dominance of Chinatown was so complete that newspapers claimed there wasn’t a lottery ticket sold, a shipment of opium smuggled, a trick turned in a backstreet bordello, or a game of fan-tan played without his taking a cut.12 Death threats from rival tongs continually swirled around Little Pete. He responded by hiring the town’s most lethal boo how doy—a feral character named Lee Chuck—as his personal bodyguard. Little Pete outfitted Lee Chuck and himself with chain-mail shirts, and he acquired a small arsenal of pistols for protection. The arrangement worked well until Lee Chuck got himself into trouble with the law.

  In July 1886, Lee Chuck received a tip that a member of the rival Bo Sin Seer Tong—a thug name Yen Yuen—intended to kill him. Figuring that a vigorous offense was the best defense, Lee Chuck waylaid Yen Yuen in Chinatown’s Spofford Alley and shot him five times, just to make certain he was sufficiently dead. Lee Chuck bolted from the scene but was quickly caught and brought to trial on murder charges. Hoping to free his henchman, Little Pete offered the arresting officer $400 to swear that Lee Chuck had acted in self-defense. The upshot was that Lee Chuck was convicted and sentenced to fifty years in prison, while Little Pete was charged with attempted bribery. Following three trials—during which it came out that the Chinatown boss had spent $75,000 over the years in bribing public officials and buying off jurors—Little Pete was convicted and sentenced to five years in Folsom State Prison.13

  Little Pete served his term without incident and returned to Chinatown, where his criminal empire was still intact. After lording it over the other tongs for several more years, Little Pete finally made one enemy too many. One of his rivals—it was never proven just who it was—got fed up and offered a $3,000 reward to anyone who managed to kill Little Pete. The two men who caught Little Pete unawares as he sat in Wong Chung’s barbershop may have claimed that reward, although that, too, is unknown. Two men were arrested after the shooting, but no one was ever convicted for the murder. Little Pete’s wife even offered a $2,000 reward for the capture and conviction of her husband’s assassins. In April 1898, a highbinder named Lem Sier was shot and killed in Sullivan Alley. Authorities announced that he was the man who had fired the bullets that ended Little Pete’s reign as the King of Chinatown, but some speculated that the real killers had hopped a boat back to China immediately after the shooting.14

  The petite crime boss who ruled the Chinese underworld for so many years provided one last spectacle following his death. Little Pete’s funeral was said to have been the largest and gaudiest San Francisco has ever known.15 The January 27, 1897, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle captured the gist of the surreal proceedings in its multideck headline: “Barbaric Pomp for Little Pete; Weird Mingling of Funeral Ceremonies; Beethoven and the Tomtom; Disorderly Crowds at the Cemetery; after a Splendid Pageant the Body Was Not Buried at All.”16

  More than thirty thousand Chinese attended the funeral—essentially all of Chinatown—split between those loyal to Little Pete and rivals who cheered his demise.17 A large crowd of white San Franciscans, along with thousands of tourists, also showed up to see the “heathen rascal” to his grave. What they witnessed was a parade featuring splashy floral arrangements, fluttering fistfuls of fake money, and a writhing seventy-foot-long paper dragon. Colorfully robed priests chanted against a cacophony of wailing hired mourners, brass bands, clanging gongs, thumping drums, and exploding fireworks. Walking behind the hearse, which was pulled by six black horses, were members of the family and close friends, followed by nearly a hundred carriages filled with other attendees. A police escort led the procession through the packed streets on the way to the cemetery, where things quickly got out of hand thanks to an unruly crowd of Americans.

  Reporter Frank Norris documented the “unspeakable shamelessness” of the white spectators that day. Wanting to glimpse Little Pete’s face through the window in his casket, “a mob of red-faced, pushing women thronged about the coffin and interrupted everything that went on. There was confusion and cries in Cantonese and English.”18 After the flustered Chinese cut the ceremonies short and left the cemetery, a horde of Americans “descended upon the raised platform, where the funeral meats were placed—pigs and sheep roasted whole, and chickens and bowls of gin and rice. Four men seized a roast pig by either leg and made off with it. . . . Then the crowd found amusement in throwing bowlfuls of gin at each other. The roast chickens were hurled back and forth in the air. The women scrambled for the China bowls for souvenirs.”19

  Even for an unrepentant criminal, it was a disrespectful send-off, although Little Pete wasn’t actually buried that day. His remains were carried back to the city, and the family eventually transported them to China for interment, a common practice among Chinese immigrants at that time. Following Little Pete’s death, the warfare between the tongs continued, and other leaders rose up to claim the mantle of Chinatown’s top crime lord. The last of the really big old-time tong chieftains was Wong Doo King, a man newspapers called “the most notorious highbinder in America” before he was ordered to leave the country in 1915.20

  While smaller, less influential tongs continued to exist, the criminal gangs had lost their grip on San Francisco’s Chinese community by the early 1920s. Several factors contributed to the decline of the city’s fighting tongs. The great earthquake and fire of 1906 leveled Chinatown, destroying its rat’s nest of whorehouses, opium dens, gambling parlors, and tong hangouts. As the city was rebuilt, those centers of crime weren’t resurrected, and law enforcement in the district was stepped up dramatically.

  Also, a new generation of American-born Chinese refused to cower in fear of the old criminal gangs. At the same time, tourism began to replace sin as the chief appeal of the Chinese quarter. After a rowdy half-century or more, the honest, decent, law-abiding citizens of Chinatown finally became masters of their own home. Gradually, the memory of Little Pete and his hatchet-wielding minions receded into the sepia-tinted realms of yesteryear. And no one with the slightest sense of decency lamented its
passing.

  (Note: While it’s true the traditional fighting tongs faded away, it’s also an ugly reality that Asian youth gangs have sprung up in many large cities since the mid-1960s, some of them linked to their big brothers, the Chinese Triads.21 Crime marches on.)

  Belle Sorensen Gunness

  Gunness with children Philip, Myrtle, and Lucy

  The little Norwegian girl swept her huge, marveling blue eyes over the glass candy case, a smile of anticipation lighting her pretty face. Clutching her penny tightly, the towheaded six year old carefully considered the tempting assortment of sweets on display—licorice drops, wild cherry lozenges, tiny root beer barrels, peppermint sticks in gay swirling colors. The girl’s parents stood nearby, watching patiently as their daughter decided what to buy. For a Chicago immigrant family in 1896, a Saturday afternoon trip to the candy store was one of the few indulgences they could afford.

  Behind the counter, a thickset matron awaited the girl’s decision. A tight smile seemed to be all the woman could muster by way of cordiality. Thirty-six-year-old Belle Sorensen had little reason to smile. The confectionary shop she’d opened after her marriage wasn’t doing too well, despite its location amid Chicago’s thriving Norwegian community. For over half a century, working-class Norwegians had been immigrating to the Windy City in search of a better life. Sorensen herself had come to America from Norway, but she discovered that making a go of it in her new homeland was tougher than she’d expected. She was, however, a resourceful woman. Even as she scooped out a penny’s worth of licorice drops for her angelic young customer, she was contemplating a new career, one destined to reward her handsomely. In a matter of months, the stolid shopkeeper would embark on a decade-long crime spree, a rampage of exceptional deviousness and nightmarish brutality.1