The promise of profits that greatly exceeded anything a merchant could earn from legitimate business made many willing to risk arrest and punishment by running illegal games. Typically, such ventures were partnerships: about ten men would get together, each investing a nominal amount. Equipment, rent, and wages had to be paid, with the rest of the cash used to back the bets. But because the operations were subject to police closure and harassment, the gambling bosses soon recognized the need to band together for mutual protection.
By 1886, Tom Lee had organized the Chinese Gamblers’ Union, headquartered at 18 Mott and funded by dues. The organization regulated the number of games in the quarter and adjudicated disputes among owners. But it did far more than that. It also defended its members if they were arrested, bailed them out of jail, paid the police for “protection,” and dealt firmly with informers.
When social reformers provided the Commercial Advertiser with a list of gambling parlors in Chinatown the following year as a means of pressuring the police to shut them down, it so alarmed their owners that the Gamblers’ Union raised $5,000 to neutralize whoever had provided the reporter with the list. It turned out to be Tom Ah Jo, a Brooklyn medical student and enthusiastic Baptist who had anglicized his name as Joseph C. Thoms. The Gamblers’ Union offered him $1,800 not to testify against them. When that failed, they had him arrested by putting a laundryman named Moy Park Sue up to accusing him of larceny. And they were said to have put a bounty of $3,000 on his head.
Thoms believed the threat was real. At his trial in Tombs Police Court, his attorney announced that “Dr. Thoms is now in the custody of this court, and any attempt to molest or injure him will be visited with severe punishment. I make this statement at this time knowing that efforts have been made to kill him or kidnap him.”
The court proceedings bordered on the farcical. They began with the crowing of a cock. Proclaiming that heathen Chinese would not be bound by any oath sworn on the Bible, Thoms’s attorney insisted they be sworn “in the Chinese way,” which he suggested meant burning paper with a “horrible Celestial oath” written on it and chopping off the head of a cock. And he actually had an officer of the court produce a large brown rooster and a cleaver for the ritual, together with a strip of yellow paper emblazoned with Chinese characters for “Supreme Heaven, if I tell a lie may a thunderbolt strike me dead.”
The idea of beheading the rooster was an improvised takeoff on the Hongmen initiation ritual, and the judge overruled the motion, noting wryly that if he permitted such a thing, he would be guilty of cruelty to animals. The witnesses were compelled to kiss the Bible and swear to tell the truth, even though it is highly doubtful non-Christian Chinese witnesses felt bound by such an oath.
Thoms pleaded not guilty, and $1,500 bail was posted on his behalf. But the defamation continued. Several other Chinese came forward with accusations, surely untrue, that Thoms had been selling police protection for illegal business activities—precisely the same accusations that had been leveled against Tom Lee four years earlier. Lee himself told a reporter that Moy Park Sue had offered him $500 to secure the same premises, lending credibility to what was undoubtedly a false accusation.
Thoms’s ordeal was an object lesson. The Gamblers’ Union was willing to use carrots, but it was not averse to using sticks. If Thoms wasn’t prepared to play ball, the gambling bosses had the means and the motivation to deal severely with him—and anyone else who dared challenge their franchise.
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Like gambling, opium was a far more profitable business than cigar making or washing clothes, and like gambling it was illegal. Keeping an opium den, selling the drug, and smoking it were all against the law in 1880s New York, which meant such enterprises were subject to police raids. So Tom Lee also found profit in running interference for those who owned illegal dens. His job was to keep the police away or, failing that, to warn proprietors when a raid was in the offing. Failing that, he was expected to post bail for any dealer who got arrested.
Although opium was an ingredient in many patent medicines Americans took for nervous disorders and other ailments, Chinese were widely blamed for importing and popularizing the far more potent, smokable variety. By the 1880s, the authorities had become alarmed because the narcotic was being smoked by non-Chinese.
The federal government had not outlawed opium—that would come later—but it did tax it heavily. Raw opium was assessed at $10 per pound in 1884. Because Canada taxed it at half that rate, much of the substance entered the United States illegally over the northern border. The drug, imported from Asia, was often processed in British Columbia and smuggled in, depriving the American government of the duty. Much of New York’s opium came across the St. Lawrence River into upstate cities and towns. But it was also shipped directly into U.S. ports under the false bottoms of packing crates, in the folds of sails, in the soles of Chinese shoes, in barrels of pickled fish, and in a thousand other hiding places.
A New York Chinatown opium joint, photographed ca. 1895 by the muckraking photojournalist Jacob A. Riis.
The reporter Wong Chin Foo wrote that a couple of dozen Chinese firms in New York dealt in refined opium, wholesale and retail, and sold it to whites and Chinese alike. He also counted eleven private “joints” where Chinese might smoke it for $2.25 an ounce. Many of these declined to admit whites in hopes that a lower profile might make it less likely that the police would molest them. One such shop could sell ten to twelve four-ounce cans on a Sunday—when business was best—at a profit of several dollars per can. According to Wong’s arithmetic, the place grossed nearly $250,000 in a year.
Although opium could be smoked in the privacy of one’s quarters, dens were popular because they offered all the equipment and comforts a smoker could desire. A typical opium den was a dim room with any windows covered, because the drug rendered one sensitive to light. The chamber was divided into stalls, each furnished with a mat, a pillow, and a tray to hold the necessities: a wooden pipe about two feet long, a needle, a jar, and an oil lamp. A sweet, musky, vaguely floral aroma would hang in the air.
A hop fiend—as someone with an opium habit was called—would purchase a lump of the drug, already boiled into a dark, molasses-like mass. He would wind it around the needle and suspend it over the flame from the lamp. After a couple of minutes, when it took on a rich, amber color, he would stuff it into the pipe. Then he would recline and suck in the smoke, holding it in his lungs as long as possible before exhaling. Within a minute or two, the portion would be exhausted, and the process would be repeated; intoxication required several rounds. In a little while, he would fall into a deep, trancelike stupor. If he had come in the evening after work, he would probably sleep until daybreak.
It was easy for the police to turn a blind eye when only Chinese were involved, but even payoffs couldn’t protect the dens in the spring of 1883 when the Young Men’s Association of Mott Street’s Catholic Church of the Transfiguration alleged that lecherous Chinese men were plying young white girls with it and then forcing them into prostitution. It was a false charge, but local papers took it at face value, and the police had no choice but to act. The crackdown that followed placed Chinatown under siege. The opium dens were forced to close, or at the very least to admit only Chinese men known to the owners. Things eventually cooled off, but Chinatown opium resorts continued to be raided from time to time, which meant ongoing business for Tom Lee and his associates. Securing the release of dealers who were arrested was part and parcel of his responsibilities as Chinatown’s grafter in chief.
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Citywide, more than $3 million was paid by gambling house keepers each year for protection. It was done through the so-called Gambling Commission that included municipal officials and state senators. The commission met weekly, and the New York Times believed there wasn’t a betting parlor in the city unknown to it. A would-be proprietor would approach his precinct captain w
ith a request to open and an initiation fee of $300. The captain would investigate whether the applicant was likely to be able to pay promptly, and a week later would notify him of the commission’s decision. If the application was approved, the captain would keep the money. In the rare instance in which one was denied, the deposit was refunded. It was all very businesslike.
Gambling parlors were charged monthly fees on a sliding scale, with poolrooms at the top of the heap, assessed at $300 per month, all the way down to policy shops, which paid $50. By one estimate, there were more than two thousand gambling halls in New York. Any could be closed for nonpayment on short notice by police officers who owed their jobs to city officials and took their orders from them.
When it came to the Chinese community, however, the powers that be were hard-pressed to regulate the games unaided. Fan tan and pi gow parlors came and went without notice. Intelligence was not forthcoming from closemouthed Chinese patrons, and there were no Chinese on the police force to serve as undercover informants. The police didn’t really understand the nature of the games at all. This was the gap Tom Lee and his men filled. They stood between the gamblers and the authorities, able to communicate and do business with both. And for this service, they earned their tribute.
Using the trappings of power and the prerogatives of one’s office to line one’s pockets was a time-honored Chinese tradition. Tom Lee would have found little about this system unfamiliar, even on his first day in town. Lee and his contemporaries would certainly have been acquainted, for example, with the story of He Shen, a Manchu who won the favor of an eighteenth-century Qing emperor, received several titles, and enriched himself and his family through graft and extortion of public funds. Or those of Wei Zhongxian and Liu Jin, eunuchs who rose to high rank during the Ming dynasty and became fabulously wealthy by using their positions for personal gain. These were historical figures. But Chinese literature and theater were also chock-full of stories of corrupt officials. Such people were not admired, but they were certainly feared, and they felt little shame in their actions. Indeed, in China, one might be thought a fool not to use one’s position to enrich oneself, one’s family, and one’s cronies.
Tom Lee provided a valuable service. For a modest fee, he offered the gambling bosses a way to operate illegally and yet avoid arrest. If that meant compromising underpaid police officers or paying off corrupt political bosses in the higher echelons of Tammany Hall, it was certainly no moral concern of his.
For the balance of the 1880s, Lee consciously pursued the image of a well-connected, law-abiding pillar of New York society. The less attention paid to his relationships with gamblers and opium merchants, the better. He used his influence in myriad ways to improve the lives of New York’s Chinese. He participated in politics, adopted charitable causes, entertained the rich and powerful, and played the patriarch in the life events of the Chinese community.
In 1888, he worked energetically for the election of Benjamin Harrison as president. Although Lee was very close to Tammany Hall Democrats, he and the rest of the Chinese community had a strong reason to back the Republican in this national election. President Grover Cleveland, running for reelection, had lobbied for, and signed, the Scott Act, which prohibited Chinese laborers who left the country from returning. General Harrison, on the other hand, had voted against the Exclusion Act and other anti-Chinese measures while in the Senate. Still hopeful that the political will could be found to repeal the hated Exclusion Act, Lee arranged to place collection boxes in Chinese restaurants and laundries to raise funds for Harrison’s campaign. He also joined the community’s wealthiest merchants and ponied up $10,000 of his own money, and he personally delivered the funds to Republican Party headquarters on Fifth Avenue.
In early 1889, when flooding of the Yellow River decimated the wheat crop in China’s Shandong Province, Lee raised more than $1,200 for famine relief. He topped the list of New York Chinese donors with a personal contribution. But his philanthropy wasn’t limited to Chinese causes. Two months later, he helped drum up support in Chinatown for victims of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood by translating and disseminating news to ensure local Chinese understood the extent of the disaster. Here, too, he headed the list of subscribers.
When Yuet Sing, a wealthy merchant, decided to take a young bride in 1888, it was Lee who toasted the couple at their wedding ceremony at the new Joss House. Lee was one of four Loon Yee Tong dignitaries who led the cortege at the funeral of a retired general who had fought the French in Tonkin (Vietnam) in the early 1880s. On another occasion, he appeared astride a white horse in the elaborate funeral procession of the secretary of the tong.
When Lee took sick in 1887, felled by a pulmonary hemorrhage—he was a chronic smoker, though of cigars and cigarettes rather than opium—his infirmity merited a report in the New York Times. A stream of well-wishers called at his home. Under the care of a Columbia-educated physician and nursed by his wife, however, he made a full recovery.
The New York World observed that Tom Lee was “a powerful Republican factor in the affairs of the Twenty-First Assembly District.” Indeed, he was, although he always maintained strong ties with Democrats as well. At the dawn of the 1890s, there was no more influential person in New York’s Chinese quarter.
Chapter 3
“A Clear Case of Corruption”
Captain John H. McCullagh Jr. had a well-deserved reputation for being tough on crime.
As a rookie policeman, the Irish-born McCullagh had cut his teeth in some of Manhattan’s toughest neighborhoods and had built an impressive résumé by breaking up street gangs. He had left his father’s farm to join the force in 1864—hence his nickname, “Farmer John”—and was seen as a rising star in the department. He was promoted to sergeant two years later and made captain in 1872. And in 1883, he had been given command of the still-new Sixth Precinct, which he took over from his mentor, Captain Jeremiah Petty. In his seven years there, he brought a measure of order to the vice-ridden cesspool that was widely known by the sobriquet “the Bloody Sixth.”
None of this meant that McCullagh himself was actually honest. He was a creature of his times. He had surely paid for his promotions, and during earlier assignments he had been tried twice for misconduct, both times for attempting to blackmail brothel keepers to pay him off if they wished to remain open. When he got to Chinatown, he proved all too ready to enter into a sweetheart arrangement with Tom Lee’s Gamblers’ Union, which, the New York Herald observed, considered him a “good fellee” because he was willing to play ball.
Members of the Gamblers’ Union had recently been paying $8 per table per week on the understanding that a third of the money would go to Tom Lee, with much of the balance handed over to the police to prevent raids, or at the very least to ensure advance notification of searches so they might clear their tables and lock up their cash before the police arrived. The reporter Wong Chin Foo estimated that this franchise netted Lee up to $10,000 a year. How much of the rest was going into McCullagh’s pocket was never clear, but it was surely a considerable sum. When Farmer John died suddenly in 1893, his estate was valued at more than $100,000—none too shabby for a man whom the city paid only $1,800 a year.
After the New York Herald printed an embarrassing report in January 1891 alleging that street gambling in Chatham Square was going on directly under the noses of the local police, McCullagh’s tenure in the Bloody Sixth was abruptly cut short. He was hauled before the publicity-averse police commissioners, who felt compelled to act against him. In less than a week, he was exiled to a command in the Bronx, trading places with Captain Nicholas Brooks, who became the new overseer of the Elizabeth Street Station in his stead.
Brooks, for his part, was something of a prig. A twenty-year veteran when he was promoted to captain in 1887, he was said by the New York Times to make “an honest, conservative and urbane police captain,” and by all accounts he did. His worst offenses during his long career were
sitting while on patrol and conversing while on duty. Although Tammany Hall approved of Brooks—the Tammany Times, its in-house paper, praised him as “proof of what may be accomplished by attention to business and fidelity to duty”—there was never a hint of scandal about the man.
Tom Lee immediately sought authorization from the gambling bosses to spend $1,500 from their $10,000 treasury to get on a “pleasant footing” with the new captain. He called on Brooks and was received politely, but the latter made it clear he would not be party to any such arrangement. He was determined to be a bad “fellee.” He later denied ever meeting Lee. Unable to come to terms with the new captain, Lee ordered Chinatown’s betting parlors temporarily closed, lest they be raided.
They stayed shuttered for several months, and when they reopened later that year, a few changes had been mandated in the rules that governed them. An October 1891 circular that survives suggests strongly that an accommodation was reached with the police or the Tammany higher-ups, probably an upward adjustment in the amount of protection money they received, although there is no evidence Brooks was in on it. The notice mandated new rates the casinos were to collect from their gamblers. It read, in part:
Readers: Because of cheating and excessive expenses, we hereby propose that for payouts of more than 25 cents, commissions will be doubled, as customary. Any gambling hall that fails to follow this regulation will be fined $10. Whoever reports the violation will receive a $5 reward, with the balance given to our organization. . . . This announcement is posted to avoid any future misunderstanding. Your cooperation is appreciated.
Given under our hand and seal in the ninth month of the 17th year of the reign of the Emperor Guangxu.
Although the circular was signed by the New York Bin Ching Union—a name meaning “Upholding Fairness” not heard before or afterward—it was surely another term for the Gamblers’ Union, and even that name soon fell into disuse in favor of the On Leong Tong, which translates roughly as the “Chamber of Peaceful Conscientiousness.” The new moniker was derived from a Chinese proverb about “eliminating despots and bringing peace to the people” that had been used by rebels in China for many generations.
Tong Wars Page 6