Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  Captain Young had not been told of the raid, and when he saw Wong Get at the station house, he became enraged.

  “You lie when you say you can get no satisfaction here,” he said.

  “I say I don’t,” Wong Get replied sharply. “I have reported gambling places to you, but you never made a raid.”

  “What right did you have to go to Police Headquarters? You can’t prove these Chinamen were gambling. You’re mad because I won’t let you run a game,” he said accusingly, adding, “I’ll fix you.”

  Even though Wong Get identified seven of the arrested men as Hip Sings who had been not gambling but merely gathering evidence, Young insisted on locking up all the men without bail, a spiteful move that infuriated Frank Moss.

  “I am not through with Captain Young yet,” Moss declared threateningly.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  The Hip Sing Tong continued its quest for the appearance of respectability. In late 1896, its attorney submitted articles of incorporation to the Brooklyn Supreme Court, where they were approved on November 5. According to the articles, the organization’s objects were

  to establish and maintain a permanent place of meeting for the members away from the baneful influences of the opium den and gambling joint, where religious observances, social amusements, recreations and intercourse may be enjoyed and the study of the English language pursued.

  To further the suppression through lawful means of gambling, Policy selling, vice and immorality generally among the Chinese of the Cities of New York and Brooklyn, and such other places as the corporation, through its Directors, may hereafter decide to add; and to prosecute through the proper authorities such violations of the laws relating to order and morality as may come to its notice, and in general to raise the tone of the resident Chinese.

  In other words, the charter specified goals that were more or less the polar opposite of what the group actually stood for. Three hundred men were said to have joined, and an organizational meeting was set for January.

  Not to be outdone, the On Leongs secured a charter from Albany as the Chinese Merchants Association on February 4, 1897, two days after Chinese New Year. Boasting more than two hundred members, the On Leongs occupied the top floor of 14 Mott and named Tom Lee as their president, Charlie Boston as their vice president, Lee Loy as secretary, and Chu Gong as treasurer.

  To mark the occasion, the On Leongs secured a permit to set off fifty thousand firecrackers, strung from their building to another across the street. The popping lasted for a full ten minutes and was audible for half a mile. Then the officers appeared, dressed in their finest silk robes, and presided over a seventeen-course dinner at the clubhouse for members and guests, followed by musical entertainment.

  In the following months, the Hip Sings wrapped themselves in the Parkhurst flag at every turn. In April 1897, Dong Fong, the Hip Sing interpreter who had helped secure the arrest of Lee Toy three years earlier, was detained after a fight. Dong assaulted an officer and was arrested for disorderly conduct. In the station house, he threatened to have the policeman dismissed from the force.

  “I know Commissioner Moss,” he boasted, “and I’ll have him broke.”

  Dong might have overestimated Moss’s power, but he wasn’t lying about the relationship. He was, indeed, close to Frank Moss, who mentioned him in a book he published that year:

  He is bold, plucky, resolute and true. His heart is generous, and he would sacrifice himself to serve a friend. . . . In the days of the Lexow Committee, when I pursued my inquiries into the ways and methods of Chinatown, I felt safe when Dong Fong was at my right hand. . . . Dong, I like you, I trust you, I know you will not betray me, and I am not afraid of Chinese blackjacks or daggers in dark hallways when you lead the way.

  In court, the attorney George W. Glaze accused the policeman of arresting Dong precisely because he was a member of the Parkhurst Society. He also defended Dong’s honor, such as it was.

  “Your honor, this man is fighting crime in Chinatown, and is not the kind of a man to get mixed in a brawl,” Glaze assured the judge.

  “Well, I believe the officer,” the judge rejoined, “and I’ll fine Fong $5. And officer, if any trouble is made at Police Headquarters, you may call on me for help.”

  But there was dissent in the Hip Sing ranks. A tong meeting on August 29 degenerated into violence. To all willing to see it—and Frank Moss was not among them—the veil of respectability so useful to the Hip Sings was slipping.

  “There is trouble in the Hip Sing Tong,” the New York Sun warned. “The organization is composed of Chinamen who pose as reformers, but who, the merchants of Chinatown say, are not reformers. The society was organized for the purpose of suppressing vice, but it seems to have a rocky road to travel, its members being continually in hot water and quarrelling with one another.” But the Sun, which offered the most in-depth reporting about Chinatown of all the New York papers during this period, was on both sides of the argument about the Hip Sings. Later the very same month, it published a paean to Mock Duck, calling him “a shining light in the Hip Sing Tong” who “is a regular Parkhurst.”

  Iconic turn-of-the-century photo portrait of the Hip Sing kingpin Mock Duck.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Young Mock Duck, who was rising rapidly in the Hip Sing hierarchy, claimed to have been born in San Francisco in 1879, though there are no records to prove it. He was slim and delicate, almost girlish in demeanor, with a wide face, slender shoulders, and a flat, narrow torso. He wore size 6 shoes, weighed 125 pounds, was under five feet six, and looked anything but menacing. But his benign, youthful appearance belied what one observer warned was “the spirit of a tiger.”

  The “shining light” was actually spearheading a drive to consolidate Hip Sing control over Pell Street, which his tong viewed as its rightful territory. He knew it would have been foolhardy to take on the On Leongs directly in light of the latter’s strong relationship with the police department, so he sought out an easier mark: the Four Brothers’ Society, which was a clan association rather than a secret society. Most such organizations were set up by and for people with one surname; the Four Brothers’ Society was unusual in that it brought four numerically small families together under one umbrella. In New York’s Chinatown, the Chu family dominated its leadership.

  On September 21, Mock Duck visited a gambling house at 22 Pell Street to shake down Chu Lock, the owner. The Hip Sings were demanding $10 a week in protection money. When Chu’s henchmen kicked him down the stairs and into the street, Mock Duck went to the police to report the establishment. But by the time officers reached Pell Street, Chu had removed all incriminating evidence from the premises.

  The following week, a brawl ensued at the same location, and knives were drawn. Chu Lock’s brother was wounded in the fray, as was Mock Duck himself. He sustained a large gash in his left leg, and another Hip Sing was stabbed in the shoulder. A spate of court cases followed: Chu Lock was accused of felonious assault, and he, in turn, accused the Hip Sings of perjury; a grand jury also handed down an indictment against Mock Duck, Dong Fong, and a third man for felonious assault. But no convictions followed.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Late in 1897, Tom Lee gave a dinner for Tammany Hall. It was a clever move, because Tammany operatives were poised to retake the city government. Local government’s reach was also about to grow significantly: to ensure the metropolis’s continued economic and commercial primacy, voters had approved, and Albany had mandated, the consolidation of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx into the City of Greater New York. The new entity would be born at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day.

  Mayor Strong, who had opposed the consolidation, had not sought reelection. His replacement was Robert Anderson Van Wyck, a Tammany man who had campaigned on the slogan “To Hell with Reform” and defeated his Republican opponent handily. Van
Wyck declined Lee’s invitation, but some seventy others spent the evening of November 23 in Chinatown. The New-York Tribune explained that the leading lights of the Chinese quarter, weary of having their vice dens raided, wished to get off on the right foot with the new administration. And because Tammany was returning, they had every reason to expect an easier time of things.

  The guests were given royal treatment. They were greeted by firecrackers and treated to dinner at the Mon Lay Won. Popularly known as the Chinese Delmonico, it was the grandest eatery in the Chinese quarter. They sampled shark’s fin and bird’s nest soup and three kinds of Chinese spirits. And afterward, they were treated to a performance at the Chinese Theatre.

  Lower Mott Street, ca. 1900. At the far right is 14 Mott, headquarters of the On Leong Tong, whose sign is visible on the top floor. Next to it is No. 16, the headquarters of the Chung Hwa Gong Shaw, also known as Chinatown’s City Hall, which included the Joss House. To its left, an awning protrudes at No. 18, a property owned by Tom Lee.

  But Lee did not neglect his Chinatown constituency. A year later, renovations bankrolled by the Lee family were completed on the Joss House in Chinatown’s City Hall at 16 Mott. The new worship space was richly decorated with paintings and tapestries and appointed with carved ebony altar fittings and furniture. At a $20-a-plate celebration, Tom Lee delivered a paean to his adopted country and to the position of the Chinese within it: “We are living here in the new white light of freedom, enlightened, yet not enthralled. We are of this great people a part, a body; we will never bring them harm, nor trouble, nor disgrace, but happiness.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  In the public relations war against the Hip Sing Tong, the On Leongs struck a major blow with the 1898 publication of a book called New York’s Chinatown. Its author, Louis J. Beck, a white journalist and private detective, set out to provide an impartial look at the everyday life of the city’s Chinese. Beck had a keen eye for detail, and he presented a comprehensive account of the people, customs, and institutions of the Chinese quarter, including descriptions of opium dens and fan tan houses, an accounting of Chinatown organizations, and profiles of its leading lights. Nothing like it had ever appeared before.

  Beck’s principal sources, however, were On Leongs, whom he portrayed in glowing terms, making no mention of their association with vice. Not so the Hip Sing Tong, about whom he had no illusions. He had no doubt that it was little more than a criminal enterprise and gave no credence to the idea that it stood for reform.

  The Hip Sings, Beck reported, had about 450 members in 1898, “every one of whom is an expert in crime, as understood in this country, and fully eligible to a residence in state’s prison or a seat in the chair of electrocution.” But he allowed that some Chinese had a different view of them. “They are not looked upon as criminals by the Chinese whose moral ethics differ so widely from those of Western civilization. They go and come among their countrymen with entire freedom, though well-known and their nefarious business thoroughly understood.”

  Beck called highbinders like the Hip Sings “cold-blooded, pitiless and cruel,” with “no hesitation at shedding blood, or even committing murder.” He added, “In fact, for pay, the highbinder is ready to perpetrate any villainy, from perjury up to murder, and his oath-bound fellows, under pain of death, must protect him should he fall in the meshes of the law in the practice of his unholy vocation.”

  Beck didn’t so much exaggerate the Hip Sings’ faults as ignore those of their rivals. The On Leongs were certainly guilty of graft and adept at trumping up charges and bearing false witness against their enemies. Although they preferred to pay hired guns to do their dirty work—the Hip Sings were more likely to rely on their own members when blood was to be shed—the only real difference was that the On Leongs cut the police in on the booty to ensure protection of their clients, while the Hip Sings reported those who refused to pay to the Parkhursts or else threatened nonpayers with violence they would inflict themselves.

  Both strategies were effective, and both were profitable. Whose would prevail remained to be seen, but getting there would cost both tongs dearly in treasure, angst, and carnage. The bloodbath was about to begin. Where it would end was anyone’s guess.

  Chapter 5

  The War Begins

  Shortly after the turn of the century, the killing began.

  The first to die was Lung Kin, a Hip Sing. An Amsterdam Avenue laundryman paying his usual Sunday visit to Chinatown, he fell victim to a pistol shot by thirty-one-year-old Gong Wing Chung, also a washerman, on the evening of August 12, 1900, in the dreary hallway of a tenement at 9 Pell.

  With a bullet lodged in his abdomen, Lung Kin was rushed to Hudson Street Hospital, where he bled to death. His assailants—Sin Cue and three others, in addition to Gong—were promptly arrested and found in possession of revolvers, blackjacks, brass knuckles, daggers, and other deadly weapons. Police spirited them off to the Elizabeth Street stationhouse as a large crowd of whites massed on Pell Street, shouting “lynch the Chinks” and scorning the prisoners as “Boxers,” a reference to the violent, antiforeign militiamen then in rebellion in China whose killing of Americans and other foreigners had recently been trumpeted in the newspapers.

  According to the rumor mill, Gong had lost heavily at fan tan that evening and claimed Lung had cheated him. But this was no gambling row. It was a well-planned execution of a Hip Sing by a member of what the papers called the “Mongolian Order of the Masons.” Although strictly speaking that was a reference to the Loon Yee Tong, what was surely meant was the On Leong Tong. The confusion was easy to understand: both organizations were under the thumb of Tom Lee.

  The plan, police learned, had been to kill four Hip Sings, but the others had escaped. And the confiscated weapons were all brand-new, leading them to believe that the On Leongs had been gearing up for battle. No such group of armed criminals had ever been caught in Chinatown before.

  Lung Kin’s assassination initiated the First Tong War, a battle for control of graft in Chinatown. It would be fought with revolvers, truncheons, and cleavers on Pell and Mott streets, on the Bowery, and in the Doyers Street theater. The combatants would use ambushes and arson and would make threats against jurors and attacks on witnesses. And the conflict would last for six long years.

  Charged with homicide, Gong was remanded, although he never actually stood trial. While incarcerated in the Tombs, he was judged mad and was committed to New York State’s Matteawan Asylum for Insane Criminals. The others, charged with felonious assault and carrying concealed weapons, were released on bail.

  Just over a month after Gong’s arraignment, the Hip Sings took revenge. When Sin Cue visited Pell Street on September 21 with his friend Ah Fee, a Newark tailor who was also an On Leong, the pair stopped at the Wo On Chinese Merchandise Shop at the corner of Pell and Doyers to buy wrapping paper. Emerging from the store at 4:00 p.m., they were ambushed by half a dozen armed Hip Sings waiting on Pell. One threw pepper in Sin Cue’s face, and another began to beat him with an iron bar.

  Sin Cue and Ah Fee fled up Pell Street, hotly pursued by Sue Sing, a thirty-eight-year-old Hip Sing laundryman, and by Mock Duck. The latter chased Sin Cue, who was short and stout, into No. 23, firing at him through the double doors with a six-shooter. He missed his target, but a stray bullet struck a bystander, twenty-four-year-old Mary Mazzocci, who was sitting on the front stoop with two children who were also slightly injured.

  Sue Sing fired at Ah Fee as he chased him up Pell. One bullet struck the On Leong in the back and passed through his right lung before it exited. Ah Fee managed to stagger around the corner onto Mott Street, but when he got to No. 24, he dropped to the pavement. A nearby policeman ran to him; as he lifted the man’s coat and vest, blood gushed out.

  “I go die,” Ah Fee cried out.

  The officer ran to one of the call boxes installed by order of Commissioner Roosevelt and summoned an a
mbulance. Most of the assailants had scattered, but Sue Sing, who had discarded his empty six-shooter—standard tong practice was to get rid of evidence as soon as possible—was captured by another bluecoat and placed under arrest.

  Ah Fee had no pulse when the ambulance arrived. He was revived at Hudson Street Hospital, but when the police learned the surgeons didn’t think he would last the night, they dragged Sue Sing to the hospital. Ah Fee identified him as the man who had shot him, although he declined to explain why. Nor was Sue Sing, arraigned the next day and held without bail, talking. Ah Fee died at half past ten.

  Pell and Doyers streets, 1900. Ah Fee was shot after he emerged from the Wo On Chinese Merchandise Shop at 19 Pell Street, whose sign and doorway are visible at the far right.

  Tom Lee confirmed to the press that the murder stemmed from discord between the two Chinatown societies but claimed ignorance of the reason Ah Fee had been targeted. Lee was surely being disingenuous. Both men were on the Hip Sing hit list, Sin Cue for his role in Lung Kin’s murder and Ah Fee because he was an alibi witness for Gong Wing Chung, Lung’s shooter. Ah Fee’s assassination was a calculated Hip Sing effort to ensure Gong’s conviction by eliminating a witness who could place him elsewhere, and Tom Lee certainly knew it.