All these premises were occupied by Chinese storekeepers, restaurateurs, laundrymen, and cigar makers who immediately became alarmed. They saw in this rash of furtive activity a scheme to drive them out of business, believing the purchasers to be clearing the way to establish their own shops. And sure enough, lessees soon received notice to accept a 40 percent rent increase or vacate by May 1.
The day after the announcement, the tenants met to decide on a course of action. Wong Tin—known by the name of his business, Tuck Hop—was one of the organizers, even though his grocery at No. 17 was not affected. Although he would not speak openly about what was decided—he was no fan of Tom Lee’s, but neither he nor anyone else dared take Lee on publicly—the group had resolved to fight the move in court and had raised $3,000 for legal defense.
When the new landlords heard this, they realized they had overplayed their hand, and they attempted to calm the angry tenants at a meeting of their own. The matter was ostensibly settled according to a principle laid down by the Six Companies in San Francisco: whenever premises occupied by Chinese were purchased by another Chinese, rent was to remain unchanged for a full year.
But in fact nothing was really settled at all. Despite the agreement, the frightened lessees went ahead and retained counsel. And their attorney, Charles Meyers, went to the authorities with a broadside against Tom Lee. Meyers accused Lee of extortion, alleging he had abused his deputy sheriff position by shaking down Chinatown gambling houses. Lee, Meyers said, was collecting $5 per week for each fan tan table as a “license fee,” the quid pro quo being that the establishments would not be molested by the police, with whom Lee was sharing the receipts. Meyers asserted that Lee earned between $12,000 and $20,000 per year from thirty-seven such establishments. To corroborate his charges, he filed fifteen affidavits by Chinese merchants with the district attorney’s office. And for good measure, he accused Lee of running a gambling house of his own.
In Tammany-era New York, police were assumed to be on the take. But such accusations had never been aired publicly about Tom Lee, and they constituted the first serious challenge to his rule. Before the month of April was over, his deputy sheriff commission was revoked.
Although the threat of eviction had been the apparent trigger, the men of Chinatown had other reasons to be wary of the rise of Lee and the other merchants. Some were suspicious of any who could speak English well; such people could improve their lots with the white establishment in numerous ways at the expense of their language-challenged brethren. Others were envious, believing Lee and his cronies to have prospered on the backs of their countrymen and to be intent on squeezing them out. The New York Sun went so far as to tar Tom Lee as “the Chinese Jay Gould.”
Meyers handed a list of five “known” Chinatown gambling establishments to Captain Jeremiah Petty of the Sixth Precinct’s Elizabeth Street Police Station, which had jurisdiction over Chinatown, and pressured him to shut them down. At least four—and probably all five—were properties owned by Tom Lee and his allies. A forty-two-year veteran with a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, Petty had been given command over the seventy-nine men of the brand-new station the year before, and a few days later he did order a raid on a Chinatown business. But it was Tuck Hop’s at 17 Mott that was hit, not any of the houses on Meyers’s list.
Meyers protested that Tuck Hop, one of his clients, had been compelled by Lee to pay $5 a week, even though he allegedly ran only a grocery store and played only dominoes for private amusement. According to Meyers, Tuck Hop had recently refused to make additional payments to Lee, which was why he was targeted by the police.
Both Tuck Hop and his friend Lee Sing, who was on the premises at the time of the bust, were arrested. The message was clear: Cross Tom Lee and you cross the New York City Police Department. And you do both at your peril.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
If New York was a moral cesspool of gambling houses, saloons, brothels, and opium dens, it was not without those who wanted to clean it up. The late nineteenth century saw the formation of many organizations dedicated to leading sinners back to the light. One such group was the New York YMCA’s Society for the Suppression of Vice. Chartered by the state legislature to “supervise the morality of the public,” it was led by a zealot named Anthony Comstock. A do-gooder best known for agitating against pornography, premarital sex, and adultery, Comstock had taken affidavits from Tom Lee’s accusers that corroborated Meyers’s accusations. He claimed four had personally witnessed Lee accepting illegal payments.
Armed with these allegations, the New York County district attorney, John McKeon, put the matter before a grand jury. Among his charges were the following:
When Chinamen come to New York City and open businesses in Mott Street and vicinity, this man Tom Lee would go to them and say that he was a Deputy Sheriff and would show to them his badge of office. He would tell them that he knew all about the American law and advise them to open gambling places and that they would have the right to do so provided they paid him five dollars a week in advance for every Fan Tan and other gambling table they would use. He told them that for this payment they would have a license and right to play and that as he was a deputy sheriff no one would molest them.
To defend himself, Lee enlisted his friends the attorneys Edmund E. Price and James Cowan, who in turn retained a former assistant district attorney and justice of the superior court. On April 25, the grand jury handed down an indictment against Lee and then adjourned, leaving it to the district attorney to work out the exact language.
While both sides waited for formal charges to be filed, they made their cases in the press. Lee implausibly disavowed any knowledge of gambling and asserted it was jealousy that motivated his detractors. He had made his money, he said, from his various businesses, all legitimate. He also reminded reporters of his own generosity toward his fellow Chinese: he regularly handled insurance and court matters for them, either free of charge or for whatever they could afford. Furthermore, he averred—disingenuously—that his rank as deputy sheriff had been of no value to him and had only exacerbated the enmity of his compatriots.
Meyers described his clients as “respectable Chinese merchants who desired to see all gambling done away with for the sake of the poorer classes of their countrymen who thus squandered their earnings,” an assertion that also strains credulity, because these men would have had no issue with Tom Lee had they not been running illegal establishments of their own. It was a foreshadowing of the ruse the Hip Sing Tong would later use to recruit allies in its war against Lee’s On Leong Tong.
On May 1, Lee was arraigned. He was accused of extorting money from the keepers of a gambling house at 17 Mott and of maintaining a betting parlor himself. The more serious charge—that he had paid off the police—was dropped for lack of evidence. The district attorney asked for $2,000 bail for each charge, but the judge fixed bond at just $750. Lee immediately dispatched a messenger to his bank and, when the funds were produced, handed the cash to the clerk and left the courtroom smiling. Tuck Hop and Lee Sing, among his accusers, were also indicted for keeping gambling establishments. Both would continue to be thorns in Lee’s side for years to come.
Then, on May 12, Ah Chung, who had also been arrested, confessed in writing to keeping an opium joint at 18 Mott Street—Tom Lee’s building. He declared he had paid Lee $10 per month as a “license fee” and agreed to turn evidence to this effect. Ah Chung was no savory character; he had been arrested the previous year for keeping a brothel on Pell Street. But armed with this new accusation, Meyers went before the police court three days later to obtain a second warrant for Lee’s arrest, and the case was heard the following day.
Meyers’s delay proved costly, however, because in the intervening days Ah Chung experienced a change of heart. On the witness stand, he denied ever lodging a complaint against Tom Lee and maintained he had no idea why he was even in court that day.
M
eyers angrily brandished Ah Chung’s earlier affidavit and demanded, “Did you swear to the truth of this statement?”
“Yes, I did,” the Chinese man replied.
“Has anybody representing Tom Lee seen you since you signed this affidavit?”
Ah Chung replied that no one had seen him or spoken with him about the matter.
“Did Lung Chung speak to you about it?”
“I don’t know those who spoke to me,” he replied, glancing at Lee and contradicting himself.
Ah Chung explained that anything to which he might have attested was said because Meyers told him that doing so would get him out of trouble. According to the New York Times, someone had warned him that if he testified he had ever paid a cent to Tom Lee, Lee would “make it hot for him.” With Ah Chung recanting, the case against Lee fell apart, and the judge had no choice but to dismiss the indictment.
One upshot of the whole affair was that Lee moved his family uptown, out of Chinatown entirely. But the Boston Herald’s observation that “Tom has lost his badge . . . and his power in Chinatown is a thing of the past” would prove to be dead wrong on both counts.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
The attack on Tom Lee left Chinatown irretrievably divided. On June 6, 1883, a few weeks after the Manchu government established a New York consulate, some local Chinese entertained the new consul general, Au Yang Ming, at a dinner in the Chinese quarter. Although it was a lavish banquet, several merchants refused to attend, claiming it was an insult to invite the diplomat to Mott Street and that an uptown banquet would have been more appropriate. Six boycotters were named in the newspaper, including Wo Kee and Tom Lee.
In an interview with the New York Herald, however, the journalist Wong Chin Foo revealed that the dispute ran far deeper than the appropriate location for the reception. “Au Yang Ming . . . came to New York utterly ignorant of the fact that the Chinese here are divided into two factions, each one fighting bitterly against the other,” he said. Wong was explicit in naming Tuck Hop and Lee Sing as heads of one and Tom Lee as the boss of the other.
Not all of Lee’s Loon Yee Tong members were loyal to him, either. On July 15, there was a secret meeting to consider ousting him from the leadership, to no avail. But popular or unpopular, Lee continued to be a force to be reckoned with. He played a prominent role in the community, spoke for it to the outside world, and had close relations with the police and the political establishment. Newspapers quoted him as the “Mayor of Mott Street.” He continued to look out for his allies and to discharge his responsibilities to those from whom he accepted payoffs, friend or not.
Those remunerations came not only from gambling bosses but also from those who ran bordellos and opium dens; most forms of vice existed in the Chinese quarter. Lee bailed out Chin Tin, whose wife ran a brothel into which young girls were allegedly lured and then drugged. Chin was no friend of Lee’s, but he was being assessed $60 a month for police protection and was thus entitled to it. Lee also posted bond when Wo Kee was charged with running a gambling house and selling illegal lottery tickets. And when twenty-nine opium smokers were arrested in a raid on an Elizabeth Street den, Lee hastened to the Tombs, lower Manhattan’s jail, to reassure the fourteen Chinese among them that his attorney would soon secure their release.
Formally known as the New York City Halls of Justice and House of Detention, the Tombs got its nickname from its resemblance to an Egyptian mausoleum but earned it in other ways as well. Constructed in 1838, the massive granite quadrangle occupied an entire city block and housed the police, the courts, and jails for men, boys, and women. The gloomy structure had been built for two hundred prisoners but was forced to accommodate many more than that. Built on marshland, it had a well-deserved reputation for being dungeon-like: damp and unsanitary and poorly ventilated and lit.
A working relationship with the Tombs’ warden would be an important asset for the leader of the Chinese community. Lee saw his opportunity and stepped up. In late 1885, together with two other naturalized Chinese, he attended a meeting of the Second Assembly District’s County Democracy Campaign Club. It was a gathering organized to support Thomas P. “Fatty” Walsh, a Tammany ward leader who would soon be appointed warden.
The “Tombs,” lower Manhattan’s jail, earned its nickname because of its resemblance to an Egyptian mausoleum. Built in 1838 and demolished in 1902, it also housed the city’s police court.
Getting favors out of any official was no easy task for the largely disenfranchised Chinese community, but offering financial support was the best way available to them to build relationships. Tom Lee not only gave Walsh a sizable donation; he worked assiduously to curry favor with New York’s power elite more generally. He even raised eyebrows on a cruise up the Hudson organized by the Second District assemblyman, Tommy Maher, a liquor dealer, when he plunked a fistful of money on the counter to buy drinks for a crowd of Fourth and Sixth Ward residents. Seeing this, Maher’s brother wondered under his breath whether Lee himself planned to run for office in the district.
“Of the 9,000 Chinamen in New York, only 50 have taken the trouble to become citizens and voters. Deputy Sheriff Tom Lee is the unopposed leader of this small band,” the San Francisco Bulletin reported, omitting the fact that naturalization had not been an option for any others since passage of the Exclusion Act. “He is a political power in the Fourth and Sixth wards, for these 50 voters will, to a man, support any candidate that he favors. The politicians know this, hence Tom’s importance.” But giving them money didn’t hurt, either.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
If the intent of charging Tom Lee with operating a gambling house had been to warn him off the business, it was an abysmal failure. By early 1884, he was rumored to “control” sixteen such establishments in Little China, although he did not own them so much as tax them.
Apart from prostitutes and opium, gambling was the chief form of recreation for the men of Chinatown, who were mainly bachelors or married men whose families had remained in China. Few wives came to America, and single Chinese women seldom made the journey unless betrothed or—more commonly—recruited or sold into the sex trade. Lacking access to spouses, children, and grandchildren, lonely immigrant men turned to games of chance, both for entertainment and in the vain hope they might strike it rich and stage a triumphant return home. Gambling, although illegal in America, carried no stigma among the Chinese.
In what little leisure time they had—generally evenings and Sundays—they enjoyed three popular games of chance: fan tan, the “spread and turn over” game; pi gow, a dominoes-like pastime; and pak kop piu, the “white pigeon ticket” lottery that Americans referred to as policy. All were illegal and subject to police raids, so games were organized clandestinely and played in cellars and back rooms. Chinese learned of them through word of mouth or from Chinese-speaking street touts who beckoned them inside.
The gaming rooms were cheap to set up; a table, some stools, and a sign that spelled out the rules were all you needed. Fan tan was played on a mat and required only a cup, a square tin, a pointer, some slips of paper or chips, and about four hundred copper or brass buttons or coins. Pi gow and policy required even less—thirty-two Chinese tiles in the first instance, and a bowl and slips of paper in the second. Only a small staff was required to run the games, keep the accounts, and man the door, both to troll for customers and to sound early warning if a policeman was sighted.
Fan tan was a simple game of chance. The dealer sat on a stool, a cashier by his side, and gamblers stood around the flanks of the table or perched on wooden stools. The four edges of the tin were labeled with the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. The dealer would grab a handful of coins and place them under the cup, and each player would select one of the four numbers on which to place his money or his marker, a slip of paper or a chip. The choice represented his guess as to how many coins would be left after the dealer removed them with his pointer, four at a ti
me, until four or fewer remained.
A dollar placed on the winning number would fetch $3, less 7 percent for the house. Losers were not necessarily required to settle immediately; if they were known to the house, they could pay up the next day if they wished.
Pi gow, once dubbed “dominoes with Chinese complications,” was fairly straightforward. Players were dealt four dominoes, which they used to create a “front hand” and a “rear hand” of two tiles each. The goal was for the dots on the two tiles to total nine or something close to it and to beat the house in the process. And policy was a numbers game. Eighty Chinese characters taken from a classical text were written on slips of paper and placed in a bowl, and twenty were removed. Gamblers guessed which would be drawn by marking them off in red on a sheet of paper. A dollar bet would fetch $20 if one successfully guessed six characters, or $200 if one guessed seven, and so on. Two drawings took place per day.
A used policy slip from Lone Tai (Lian Tai), a gambling establishment at 18 Mott Street at the turn of the century. Policy—or pak kop piu—was a popular Chinese lottery game.
Gambling offered a far faster, if unlikely, pathway to riches than working in a laundry. It was a compulsion in the humdrum lives of many Chinese men. “The Celestial is a shameless and inveterate gambler,” wrote George Washington Walling, a former New York police chief, in 1887, and he got no argument from the journalist Wong Chin Foo, who wrote, “Lock up the Fan Tan players, chain them with heavy chains, gag and blindfold them, place half a dozen millstones upon their necks, give them nothing but water and tea to eat—they will bet with their fingers or toes in the dark cells, just as if nothing had happened.” Whites and Chinese alike felt the generalization was justified.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Tong Wars Page 5