“How many games have there been running there during this year, do you know?”
“Sometimes 50 or 60, or less.”
“Do you know whether there are or have been any games running in Tom Lee’s house?”
“On 18 Mott Street, on the second floor; one game in his office room.”
“What is Hip Sing Tong?”
“That is what they call the Workingman’s Society.”
“Is that Tom Lee’s society?”
“No, no. . . . That society the On Leong Tong.”
“Are the two societies friendly?”
“No, no.”
“Did you pay any money to Tom Lee in January?”
“He asked me $16.”
“What was he to give you for that?”
“He say, ‘Anybody want to run a game have to give me that. You see, I got a badge. I got a gold badge. I am the Deputy Sheriff.’”
“Tom Lee said he had a gold badge, he was Deputy Sheriff?”
“Yes; stuck on his suspender.”
“Did you want to run a game?”
“I start a game at 18 Doyers Street, where I live, downstairs in the rear room, and the next morning he come to my room. He said, ‘You give me money.’ I said, ‘How much I have to give you?’ He said, ‘$16 a week.’”
“Did he tell who he gave the money to?”
“He tell me he got to pay somebody.”
“Who came to collect the money?”
“Tom Lee. Sometimes he come with Lee Toy; sometimes he come without, and with—”
“With an officer?”
“He was some policeman downstairs; I didn’t go downstairs looking.”
“You mean to say he left the police officer downstairs?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And came up?”
“Yes, sir; to collect the money.”
Then Wong told a story of a police raid on his fan tan parlor that had taken place despite his payments to Tom Lee for protection. He described a comical scene in which a police detective tried to undo his error.
“I ran that game four weeks, and on Monday evening at 9 o’clock, [John] Farrington, the detective, he come up. My doorkeeper holler, ‘Policeman.’ We shut the door. Farrington pushed the door in, chucked the things all out of the window, smashed up the table, and chased me out.”
“You had paid your money to Tom Lee?”
“I did. Right after that I go to Tom Lee. I say, ‘I pay you all the time. What is the matter? Policeman come in, bust in my house. Toss them people out and send them people out.’ He says, ‘What one?’ ‘Farrington.’ ‘I go see him right away.’ Then, after a while Farrington come back, take some screw driver, and fix that door on again.”
Wong supplied the committee with the names and addresses of several Chinese who ran gambling houses. And finally, Moss made a point of announcing publicly that if anything untoward happened to Wong as a result of his appearance, the committee would protect him.
Everyone got what he wanted out of Wong Get’s testimony. Moss and the committee got on the record one piece of the much larger, citywide puzzle of rampant corruption within the police force. And shining the light of day on Tom Lee and his On Leong Tong was just as useful to Wong and his allies, who hoped more than anything to shunt him aside and take over his empire.
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Wong Get was determined that Lee Toy face justice for the beating he had received at his hands, especially after Lee’s shenanigans had cheated him out of testifying against him. Wong’s legal team, which now included Frank Moss himself, appealed to a second judge, who issued a bench warrant for Lee Toy’s rearrest.
By that time, the man had disappeared, however, and he remained at large for two months. But one day, when he was seen entering 28 Mott to visit his wife and daughter, Wong’s Hip Sing brothers quickly posted twenty-one-year-old Dong Fong, one of their interpreters, in front of the building. After watching all night, Dong went to the Tombs the following morning to demand that the police apprehend Lee. Although they had declined to arrest him in the past, they were obligated by the warrant to apprehend him this time.
When they knocked, Lee Toy’s wife shouted that he was not there. So the officers set about prying the door open with a crowbar, at which point Lee ran to a window and briefly considered a reprise of his famous San Francisco leap. But on the pavement below stood a Hip Sing who threatened to beat him up when he landed. While Lee Toy hesitated, the police broke in, and as the terrified women looked on, he was apprehended and taken to the Tombs. Bail, fixed at $1,000, was quickly furnished.
That night, it was the Hip Sings who celebrated. With Moss’s help, they had trumped the On Leongs and the police by compelling Lee Toy’s arrest through the courts. But it was a minor victory. Far more important was the fact that after Wong Get’s testimony before the Lexow Committee, the Hip Sings had begun to acquire a reputation as “the reformers of Chinatown.” The New York Sun described their members as “the respectable element among the Orientals who are anxious to prevent the spread of vice among their fellow countrymen.” The Hip Sings were touted as the best hope for change in the squalid Chinese quarter.
And, in a perverse way, they probably were.
In the summer of 1894, while the Lexow Committee was in recess, the two tongs fought a proxy war. It was mostly nonviolent, with both managing to get others to do their dirty work. It began in early July, when the New York Sun reported that Tom Lee was in danger of losing his “lucrative and influential job” in Chinatown.
According to the Sun, Lee had become unpopular, and his position was shaky because he had cast unwelcome light on Chinatown and failed to prevent the raid on Wong Get’s fan tan parlor, a lapse that showed him ineffective in keeping the police at bay. The paper claimed a large poster had appeared on a Chinatown bulletin board casting aspersions on Lee’s character and declaring that when he attempted to collect “rent”—which surely meant protection money—he had begun to meet with resistance.
The Sun’s source was undoubtedly a Hip Sing. The Lexow Committee was not the only organ of the white establishment that could be co-opted to strike a blow against Lee and his On Leongs; the press worked just as well, if not better, and the story smacks of having been planted. Nor was it credible. The idea that Lee’s control stemmed from his popularity was preposterous. For all the picnics and fetes Tom Lee organized, it was not admiration that kept him in power. It was fear.
Two could play at the public relations game, however, and the resentful On Leongs resolved to show the world it was the Hip Sings who were dirty. Three weeks later, Lee hosted a Sun reporter in his office, where he and several fellow merchants told the journalist that the Hip Sings had issued a schedule of fees by which protection would be purchased from them during the summer. According to the subsequent article, they were already players in the extortion game and wished to get in even deeper.
They planned, the Sun wrote, to charge gambling parlors $16 per week, opium joints $10, and brothels $3, but there was no pretense that any of this money would go to the police. The Hip Sings were simply threatening to release to the Lexow Committee the locations of those establishments that refused to pay, confident that the committee, in turn, would press the police to shut them down despite their arrangement with the On Leongs. This was extortion, plain and simple, not a fee for service.
Then, in early August, another group of merchants told a journalist that the Hip Sing Tong was a society “organized for the sole purpose of levying blackmail.” The New York chapter, which numbered about a hundred, it was said, was composed of professional hit men, “available for hire to punish any Chinaman’s enemy.” Their price for “doing up”—that is, beating up—a man was $25. Another of their practices was to demand money from reputable Chinese merchants “under threat of personal violence and looting and wrecking his pla
ce of business.”
In other words, the On Leongs were selling protection from the police; the Hip Sings were selling protection from themselves.
According to these merchants, the Hip Sings now boasted that they had become the “Lords of Chinatown,” more powerful than the On Leongs and even the police. “We are determined to break up their power,” they vowed, “if it takes every cent in Chinatown.”
Chapter 4
The Chinese Parkhursts
New York’s newspapers covered the Lexow Committee’s hearings in lurid detail throughout 1894, and the picture that emerged was a wholesale indictment of the New York Police Department. Those sworn to serve and protect were charged with rampant corruption, extortion, blackmail, and worse.
The committee accused police of condoning and profiteering from prostitution and gambling. It revealed the gratuities demanded by officers from brothel and gambling hall owners. It exposed abuses in the electoral process whereby officers had arrested, intimidated, and even brutalized Republican voters, poll watchers, and workers, all in the service of electing Tammany candidates. And it placed blame squarely at the feet of district leaders and police commissioners who abused their authority over appointments and assignments and enriched themselves in the process.
Tammany Hall, while powerful, was not unassailable, and occasionally during its long rule, which would continue well into the twentieth century, New York voters tossed Tammany men out of office. The election of 1894 was such a case. Against the backdrop of bad economic times, the allegations of the Parkhurst Society, coupled with the revelations of the Lexow Committee, were enough to drive voters to clean house. A reformer, William L. Strong, was chosen as mayor. He was the first Republican to occupy the office in two decades.
Mayor Strong set to work cleaning up the city, systematically going after corrupt officials. When it came to dealing with law enforcement, he was presented with a blueprint by the Lexow Committee, whose ten-thousand-page report, conveniently issued on January 17, 1895, in time to be useful to him, contained recommendations for reform.
The committee favored making the Police Commission bipartisan and concentrating executive power in a single commission head. It also called for a civil service system to oversee promotions. Mayor Strong heeded the call and wasted little time ousting the four sitting commissioners, especially after three of them came out against reform. He made new appointments early in 1895.
The most prominent was the U.S. Civil Service commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, a longtime champion of civil service reform. A Manhattan-born aristocrat who had served in the state assembly, he had campaigned unsuccessfully for the office of mayor of New York in 1886. Since 1889, he had put Washington’s new Civil Service Commission, just six years old, on the map. He filled federal jobs according to merit instead of the spoils system. He also took steps to professionalize the federal workforce, despite considerable opposition from Congress, especially when it came to firing patronage employees for corruption or misconduct.
It is easy to understand why Mayor Strong wanted someone with this kind of experience—not to mention someone of Roosevelt’s stature—to transform the discredited police department. For his part, Roosevelt saw the position as a political stepping-stone: he was eager for another opportunity to make his mark against patronage and corruption and to be seen as doing so, especially in his home state. Roosevelt accepted the mayor’s offer, returned to New York, and was sworn in on May 7. He would serve as president of the new police board.
Although technically only first among equals, Roosevelt, because of his outsize personality, was credited with many reforms designed to modernize the operation. His first task was to purge it, as much as possible, of political influence. “I was appointed with the distinct understanding that I was to administer the Police Department with entire disregard of partisan politics, and only from the standpoint of a good citizen interested in promoting the welfare of all good citizens,” he wrote later.
During his relatively brief tenure in the job—by 1897, he had returned to Washington to accept an appointment as assistant secretary of the navy—Roosevelt raised hiring and promotion standards by emphasizing merit and ability over patronage. He punished misconduct without regard to political connections. He became known for late-night rounds to check up on his officers—always with reporters in tow—in which he exposed and disciplined policemen caught sleeping on the job. He also championed modernization efforts such as training officers in marksmanship, establishing a bicycle squad, and installing police call boxes on city streets to allow beat cops to contact their station houses on the fly. His chief misstep—which cost him and the mayor a good deal of popular support—was to shut down city saloons at 1:00 a.m. and on Sundays, enforcing blue laws that had been on the books for years but widely ignored.
Theodore Roosevelt, ca. 1896, during his tenure as New York police commissioner.
Roosevelt made short work of the detective bureau chief, Thomas Byrnes, a thirty-two-year veteran whom Dr. Parkhurst had called as “criminal as any other member of the force.” Byrnes was permitted to retire without facing personal corruption charges. An acting chief was appointed, and acting inspectors were made of Nicholas Brooks—the “bad fellee” who had refused a gratuity from Tom Lee—and John McCullagh—the “good fellee” who had preceded him at the Sixth Precinct and somehow flown under Roosevelt’s radar. And down at Elizabeth Street, Sergeant Robert Young was named acting captain.
The Hip Sings, sensing an opportunity, approached Roosevelt soon after he took office. On July 19, 1895, Warry Charles, who spoke excellent English, complained to him that Elizabeth Street police were not cracking down on Chinatown gambling houses because they were in the pay of the On Leong Tong. He said he could fix the problem if Roosevelt would place two headquarters detectives at his disposal. But he also warned Roosevelt that if he did not cooperate, Charles would provide information to the Parkhurst Society, which would certainly use it to embarrass the police into action.
Roosevelt was having none of it. He might have bristled at the threat, he might have been told Charles was a bad egg—the Chinese man had been indicted for bribery and extortion a couple of years earlier—or he might have felt he had already addressed the problem with the appointment of Young. He referred Charles to an assistant who, in turn, bucked him to someone even lower down. No action was ever taken on the Hip Sing offer.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
In March 1895, Lee Toy finally went on trial for assaulting Wong Get the previous year. Although charges against him had been dropped by two judges and a grand jury had declined to indict him, Frank Moss, now a member of Lee’s legal team, was hell-bent on bringing him to justice. Moss saw corruption in all of the maneuvers that had kept Lee Toy from a conviction. Accordingly, he had gone to a third judge, and this time succeeded in getting him tried. On March 23, Lee Toy was convicted of assault in the third degree, but the jury recommended clemency. He was fined $250, which he paid immediately from a thick wad of bills he kept on his person.
“The conviction of Lee Toy is a victory over the gambling and police ring of Chinatown,” Moss crowed after the verdict. “A man quite prominent in some political movements in this city got to Wong Get and his friends, and by various promises and threats endeavored to induce them to abandon the case, but they would not. The influences [in] back of Lee Toy in this case were surprising, and have demonstrated the power of the gambling ring in Mott Street.”
Tom Lee—who surely had everything to do with any high-level intervention that might have taken place on Lee Toy’s behalf—then threw a banquet for him. Afterward, the guests, treated to the biggest cigars that could be had, blew smoke into the windows of Hip Sing headquarters.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, in the eyes of the Lexow Committee and those of many journalists, Wong Get was a courageous do-gooder who had abandoned his sinful gambling ways. He had placed himself at substantial ri
sk in exposing Tom Lee. And if Wong was a good Christian devoted to ridding the Chinese quarter of vice, then his Hip Sing Tong must be a worthy organization.
This rise to respectability of the Hip Sings—who became known as the Chinese Parkhursts—was telegraphed for all to see when Mayor Strong visited Chinatown on April 4 and became the first mayor ever to make an official visit to the Chinese quarter. Although Strong went at the invitation of Chu Fong, the wealthy On Leong proprietor of the Doyers Street Chinese Theatre, just before dinner, at a posh restaurant at 24 Pell called the Mon Lay Won, it was a Hip Sing who took center stage.
In a small room adjoining the banquet hall decorated with flowers and carved ebony furniture, a slim young Hip Sing gave a welcome speech and ushered the mayor onto a bunk covered in finely woven matting. He then deftly cooked an opium pill and showed the mayor how it was smoked. He even offered him a pipe, though His Honor politely declined to take it.
The young man’s name was Mock Duck. Although he was already well-known to the customs inspectors as “one of the most active smugglers of Chinamen in the city,” it was surely the first time the mayor or any other politician had ever heard his name. It would not, however, be the last. It was a name New Yorkers would hear—and fear—for many years hence.
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For the balance of the 1890s, the tongs struggled with each other, but not yet in deathly fashion. Although there were skirmishes, the short-term prizes were an advantageous position with the police and the favor and respect of the larger community.
In August 1895, officers raided Wong Get’s place at 12 Pell on the suspicion fan tan was being played there. The tip probably came from On Leongs, but by this time the local police had built up enough resentment against Wong Get, who had disparaged them before the Lexow Committee, that they didn’t need any excuse to harass him.
A week later, Wong, who had concluded he would never get a fair shake from the Sixth Precinct, bypassed Elizabeth Street entirely and went directly to police headquarters on Mulberry Street to report a fan tan game at 30 Mott being run under On Leong protection. He claimed his repeated complaints to Captain Young had been ignored. His implication, of course, was that Young and his men were in the pocket of Tom Lee. It was a brilliant assault against both the On Leongs and their police partners, and it had its desired effect. Central Office police, who had no ties to the On Leong Tong, raided the game on August 10, and twenty-eight men were arrested.
Tong Wars Page 8