Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  Peace, however, would turn out to be the last thing the On Leong Tong would bring to the people of Chinatown. With the profitable monopoly it enjoyed from its perch between the law and the vice dens, the tong itself was the only “despot” in sight. The task of eliminating it—or at least sidelining it—would be taken up by an entirely different organization: a new brotherhood from the West that had appeared in New York and that had cast a jealous eye on the On Leongs’ lucrative franchise.

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  There was an odd math at work. The Exclusion Act had caused the overall Chinese population in the United States to decline by more than 15 percent in the 1890s, and it would continue to diminish for another two decades. But New York, by contrast, saw heady growth in its Chinese inhabitants. According to the federal census, the number of Chinese in New York City more than tripled in the last decade of the century—from just over two thousand to more than six thousand—and this didn’t count those in the suburbs or those missed by the census takers. And what was happening in New York was also happening in Chinatowns throughout the East and the Midwest.

  Although more New York Chinese were marrying and starting families than had previously been the case, this alone could not account for such a dramatic rise. What was really driving the growth was continued migration from the West Coast, on the one hand, and a robust smuggling industry, on the other.

  Smuggling Chinese into the United States was widespread and lucrative. The going rate for illegal entry was about $200 per head, and it was widely believed that Chinese criminal syndicates involved in the illegal business had put government officials at various entry points on their payrolls. Chinese were entering from Canada—where they were still welcome but subject to a “head tax”—as well as from Mexico. Chinese from Cuba were also evading the law; many entered on Spanish passports, ostensibly in transit to other destinations, but quickly disappeared once they had landed. The journalist Wong Chin Foo commented in late 1889 on the appearance in New York of as many as three hundred “strange Chinamen,” mostly from abroad.

  One underworld syndicate deeply involved in the trafficking was a sworn brotherhood called the Hip Sing Tong, which had gotten its start in San Francisco and quickly expanded in the West. The organization, whose name translates as the “Chamber United in Victory,” emerged in the mid-1880s. The Oregonian reported in 1887 that San Francisco had become home to “organized bodies of men . . . who set the laws completely at defiance, and who do not hesitate even at murder. . . . Their organizations are supposed to be for mutual aid, but they are in reality combinations for criminal purposes.” Citing the Hip Sings by name, the paper continued, “The members are bound together by the most solemn oaths . . . to do unquestioningly and unhesitatingly what the society orders. Briefly they are organized criminals who make their own laws and defy those of America.” There was probably little exaggeration in the newspaper’s report.

  The tong began to establish beachheads in the East in the late 1880s. When Joseph Thoms, the medical student, gave the authorities the names of gambling parlors in Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1887, his source had been a Hip Sing, whom Tom Lee and company later paid to leave town so he wouldn’t be available to testify against them. In 1888, Wong Chin Foo reported on “a Chinese organization of so-called anarchists,” already one hundred strong, that was forming on Pell Street, though he didn’t call them by name. And in Philadelphia, Hip Sings tried to bribe and blackmail witnesses in an 1889 court case against three of their number. They also threatened a merchant who identified their gambling bosses to a reporter.

  In New York, the fault line between the Hip Sing upstarts and the more established On Leongs soon began to express itself geographically. Mott Street and Chatham Square merchants like Tom Lee, Wo Kee, and Yuet Sing, On Leongs all, were men of means who dominated the governance of Chinatown and dealt with the wider community, including the political establishment, on its behalf. In contrast to “clean, quiet and orderly” Mott Street, however, was Pell Street—the preserve of the Hip Sings:

  Here is the headquarters of the Highbinders, the famous secret society of thugs and murderers, who caused so much terror in San Francisco, and who have been at the bottom of not a few desperate crimes in New York. There are probably three hundred of these criminals and outcasts, who haunt the dirty basements and tenements . . . gambling, drinking, smoking opium and carrying on wild orgies, which sometimes end in fatal affrays. The respectable element in Chinatown looks down upon these ruffians, but it also fears them. They are known to hold life lightly, and for the smallest sum will hire themselves out to do any desperate deed.

  This informal division of Chinatown’s turf would continue for decades. But the establishment of the Hip Sings in New York was very bad news for Tom Lee and his allies. They would become permanent—and deadly—nemeses.

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  In addition to being Tom Lee’s nephew, Lee Toy was his right-hand man. He ran a gambling hall at 18 Mott, one of his uncle’s properties. And he managed his uncle’s business with the other betting parlors and the police.

  Sometimes known as Black Devil Toy, Lee Toy was nearly six feet tall, broad shouldered, and muscular, with the sinews of a cat. A tough, rough-hewn man, he had served seven years for larceny in a California penitentiary before coming to New York. He was said to have leaped from a fourth-floor window to escape pursuing police, using an umbrella to break his fall. And he sported a makeshift coat of mail under his tunic to protect him from the bullets and knives of those who wished him ill, who were many.

  Lee Toy was Tom Lee’s enforcer.

  Lee Toy, Tom Lee’s nephew and enforcer, ca. 1896.

  When the gambling bosses got word that two important Hip Sing men had informed New York newspapers about the locations of Chinatown casinos, they wasted no time going after the pair. On October 9, 1891, Lee Toy and an associate confronted one of them, Chin Tin, on the corner of Pell and Doyers, cursed him, and struck him repeatedly. When the other, Warry Charles, came to his aid, he too was beaten up. Charles managed to break free and summon two policemen, but as soon as the officers recognized Lee Toy, they dismissed Charles, insisting he was not seriously hurt. Nor, at Elizabeth Street, was Charles able to persuade the sergeant on duty to issue a warrant for Lee Toy’s arrest. As his uncle’s number two, Lee Toy was well-known to the police, who gave him wide berth.

  Charles was assaulted a second time when he unwisely passed in front of 18 Mott that same week. This time he was hit with a slingshot by another of Tom Lee’s associates, Lee Quon Jung, a.k.a. Charlie Boston—a nickname derived from his earlier residence in that city. Charles was taken to the hospital, where a surgeon sewed up a wound over his eye and a gash in his scalp. Boston was locked up and in court the next day was represented by Edmund E. Price, Tom Lee’s lawyer. Price had also defended Boston earlier that year against a charge of opium smuggling, one of his main businesses.

  But the On Leongs weren’t done with Chin Tin, either. Just as they had done to Joseph Thoms three years earlier, they found someone to accuse him of extortion—in this case, a fruit vendor who did business in front of 20 Mott, where Chin Tin leased the ground floor. Chin was arrested, and at trial, in consideration of a $1,000 payment from the On Leongs, the peddler testified that Chin had demanded $4 from him and told him he couldn’t sell there anymore if he didn’t pay up.

  The defense alleged a conspiracy against Chin and Charles. It also put up a witness who testified that Lee Toy had offered $3,000 for Charles’s murder, $2,000 for killing Chin Tin, $1,000 if Chin Tin was imprisoned for ten years, and $500 if the prison term was less than that. The judge was convinced, and he dismissed the charges against the supposed extortionist.

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  On April 8, 1894, police raided a gambling house at 14 Pell. Most of the patrons fled, but twenty-five-year-old Wong Get had too much money on the table to give it up easily. As the officer s
eized the cash and ordered him out of the room, Wong protested in English that there were other Chinatown establishments that never seemed to be molested and that he was willing to lead the officer to one.

  Wong had emigrated from China in 1882 at age thirteen. A quick study, he had learned to speak English fluently in San Francisco. After nearly a decade there, he had come to New York, joined the Hip Sings, and quickly set about opening a gambling house of his own.

  Wong led the policeman around the corner and brought him to Tom Lee’s building, where there were three games going on. As they approached, however, a crowd of gamblers emerged and, sizing up the situation, began thrashing and kicking him. The officer just looked on without interfering. As Wong fled for his life, Lee Toy chased him down Mott Street, beating him mercilessly with a blackjack—a leather-wrapped iron club. When they got to the corner, however, another bluecoat grabbed Lee Toy and arrested him.

  Wong had been pummeled all over his body, and blood flowed freely from cuts in three places. Even after several days, he was in too much pain to appear in Tombs Police Court, and so Lee Toy’s hearing was postponed. It was finally called for April 23, and that day Lee and his attorney—Edmund E. Price, of course—appeared in court promptly at 10:00 a.m. When the plaintiff failed to appear, the judge dismissed the charges.

  Wong Get’s attorney, however, had been told the hearing had been called for 2:00 p.m., so when he arrived with his client, the case had been thrown out and the judge had gone home. The lawyer naively assumed a miscommunication, but there had been no mistake. It had all surely been a setup. And a prominent attorney and social reformer named Frank Moss, who had come to court that day, declared as much.

  “It is a clear case of corruption,” Moss told a New York World reporter. “Tom Lee controls the police in Chinatown. He orders them to make arrests or raids as he pleases. This case of Wong was dangerous to them, and it was necessary to use every trick to get [Lee] Toy off. There is a system of corruption in Chinatown as deep as in Tammany’s strongest districts,” he declared. “Gambling is carried out under police protection.”

  Moss’s presence in court that day had been no coincidence. He was looking for someone who might help expose that “system of corruption” whereby the police protected, rather than shut down, Chinese gambling houses. It would have to be an insider, someone who understood the seamy underside of Chinatown. And he thought he had found just such a person in Wong Get.

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  The rotten system that Tammany Hall had built, in which politicians, police, and criminals were interconnected and mutually dependent, cried out for reform. And one of the first to sound the cry—loudly, and for all to hear—was the Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, who, in 1891, had been drafted to head the Society for the Prevention of Crime. Cleaning up the political leadership of the city and cracking down on widespread police corruption were the principal goals of this civic group, which had been organized in 1877 but had not made much of an impact in its first decade and a half.

  A minister of New England Puritan stock called to serve Manhattan’s Madison Square Presbyterian Church as pastor in 1880, the goateed Parkhurst was a firebrand. Certain that God was squarely on his side, and supported in his crusade by the attorneys Frank Moss and William T. Jerome, both reformers, Republicans, and opponents of vice, he was unafraid of taking on the Tammany establishment. From his pulpit, Dr. Parkhurst launched a full-frontal attack on Tammany politicians and their henchmen. His personal influence was so profound and his imprint so deep that his group soon became known popularly as the Parkhurst Society.

  Parkhurst’s opening salvo was an 1892 sermon that startled his congregation and shocked the city with its brazenness. “The mayor and those associated with him are polluted harpies,” he declared. “Under the pretense of governing the city they are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals. They are a lying, rum-soaked and libidinous lot. While we fight iniquity they shield and patronize it; while we try to convert criminals they manufacture them; and they have a hundred dollars invested in the manufacturing business to every one invested in converting machinery. Police and criminals all stand in with each other. It is simply one solid gang of criminals,” he added, “one half in office and the other half out.”

  Challenged for proof, Parkhurst resolved to experience Manhattan’s vice district firsthand. Exchanging his clerical garb for a pair of loud trousers and a flannel shirt—the disguise was necessary, lest he be arrested and intentionally embarrassed by the police, whom he had already thoroughly alienated—he visited brothels and saloons, tattoo parlors and rathskellers. For a week, he surveyed New York at its lowest and most desperate. He even spent an evening in the Chinese quarter, observing “dope fiends” splayed about on cots in a Doyers Street opium den and watching a dozen fan tan players wager their earnings in a gambling house on Pell.

  Armed with firsthand observations of the hell that was New York’s underworld and ably assisted by the portly Moss and the energetic Jerome, Parkhurst ratcheted up the pressure for reform through his sermons and writings. He made no headway with the Democrats in Albany, but in late 1893, after Republicans gained control of the legislature, he provoked the state senate into investigating municipal police corruption.

  The Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, ca. 1896. The Presbyterian pastor spearheaded a hard-hitting attack on Tammany Hall politicians.

  The vehicle created for this purpose was a special committee of the senate chaired by the Brooklyn-born Clarence Lexow, a Republican attorney and a Progressive. It was popularly known simply as the Lexow Committee. Moss and Jerome were recruited to serve as associate counsels, and beginning in 1894, the body heard lurid testimony on police involvement in extortion, election fraud, bribery, voter intimidation, and counterfeiting. All of New York watched as the newspapers cheerfully trumpeted news of the hearings.

  One piece of the puzzle was the nexus between the police and New York’s Chinese, and it was the search for a witness who might testify about the unholy alliance between officers of the Sixth Precinct and Tom Lee and his men that had brought Frank Moss, in his capacity as counsel to the Lexow Committee, to Tombs Police Court on April 23. When the judge dismissed the charges against Lee Toy, Moss approached Wong Get, whose body still bore the bruises he had received at Lee Toy’s hands. Moss knew exposing Tom Lee would require a fearless and credible witness who knew his way around Chinatown and had enmity for Lee and his henchmen. Wong Get seemed made to order for the task.

  Wong, too, sensed an opportunity. He easily persuaded Moss that he had repudiated his former dissolute life and shared his desire, and that of the committee, to rid the Chinese quarter of vice. Here, ostensibly, was a “good Chinaman,” a reformer who would make an excellent witness. And the fact that he was quite handsome, spoke good English, and was known for Sunday psalm singing at Chinatown’s Christian missions only added to his allure and credibility.

  Moss so fervently wished to expose Tom Lee and the police that he was more than willing to overlook the fact that Wong Get’s abandonment of his former life, which had conveniently taken place just about a month or two earlier, might not be sincere. He arranged for Wong to testify as the star witness at the committee’s thirty-third hearing, the only one that would touch on the Chinese community. But Wong hadn’t needed much persuading. He was more than happy to bear witness against Tom Lee, who had been reappointed deputy sheriff early in 1894. And there was much to tell.

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  The Albany-based Lexow Committee needed a location in New York City for its hearings, and it was given the use of one of thirty opulent hearing rooms at the New York County Courthouse at 52 Chambers Street. The room was unusually packed on June 27, 1894. The spectators included women, uniformed police officers, and even Chinese men in their native attire, all anomalies among the usual collection of white men in frock coats and starched collars one saw at the courthouse. Wong Get,
the only Chinese witness and the only one slated to testify about Chinatown, sat in the front row, just behind the rail, in anticipation.

  There was considerable irony in the choice of venue. The neoclassical confection of pediments and pilasters that had taken twenty years to complete and cost taxpayers more than $10 million had been dubbed the Tweed Courthouse, in homage to William M. “Boss” Tweed, who had headed Tammany Hall for nearly two decades. Ten years into the building’s construction, the New York Times had exposed how Tweed and his cronies had skimmed millions of dollars off civic projects like 52 Chambers, whose original budget had been a mere $250,000. In 1873, in a hearing room in the still-unfinished structure, Tweed himself had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to twelve years in prison. His “palace of plunder” had become not only a symbol of his unethical rule but also the setting for his demise.

  Wong Get, longtime secretary, consigliere, interpreter, spokesman, and peace negotiator for the Hip Sing Tong, ca. 1906.

  Wong Get, who did not require an interpreter, took the stand after lunch. Frank Moss asked most of the questions.

  “Is not Tom Lee generally considered or called the boss of Chinatown?” Moss asked the witness.

  “They all call him the boss; he is captain for Chinatown. They call him mayor and captain,” Wong replied.

  “What do they do in Chinatown Sundays?”

  “Oh, they have a lot of games; Fan Tan games, I know.”