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After two years on the Police Commission, Theodore Roosevelt had been drafted by President William McKinley to serve as assistant secretary of the navy, a position he held for a year before resigning in 1898 to serve with the Rough Riders, which is when he led their famous charge up Cuba’s San Juan Hill. Later that year, he was elected governor of New York. And although he had a good deal on his gubernatorial plate, his antipathy toward Tammany Hall was undiminished, and he still managed to keep an eye on law enforcement in New York City. He took note when Asa B. Gardiner, who had become New York County district attorney when Tammany returned to power in 1898, was hauled up on charges of corruption. Roosevelt removed him from office and appointed the attorney Eugene A. Philbin to the post at the end of 1900.
Philbin had a reputation for rectitude and vowed to make his administration a “strenuous” one. He told reporters he hoped to be guided by Roosevelt’s example, and he didn’t waste time. Within days, he had fired many senior members of the staff he inherited and announced a war on vice, and within months he began indicting gambling bosses and bookmakers and going after corrupt police captains.
Philbin inherited the Chinatown murder cases from his predecessor. The newspapers had made a great deal of them. Gambling and running opium dens were bad enough, but now the Chinese had also begun to kill one another. A strong response was needed, and Philbin decided to use Sue Sing’s trial to go after the Hip Sings, whom he fingered as the source of all the trouble.
One of his deputies, Francis P. Garvan, a twenty-five-year-old Yale-educated attorney, claimed they had amassed evidence that showed that Hip Sings had murdered Ah Fee and allowed that they had gotten help in gathering it from none other than Tom Lee, a “good Chinaman.” Sue Sing pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree to avoid the possibility of a death sentence and was sent to Sing Sing prison for life. But Philbin, convinced the killing had been the work of a syndicate, vowed to go after his cohorts as well.
In the meantime, the Hip Sings put a $3,000 bounty on Tom Lee’s head. After Sue Sing’s sentencing, Lee told Garvan, four Chinese men had begun tailing him, not only at his place of business on Mott, but also at his home on 161st Street. They had even pounded on the door one evening and, after being sent away by Lee’s wife, lurked in the shadows until after midnight. Garvan promised Lee police protection.
“They are after me now,” Lee told a friend. “Some day I go like that,” he added, with an ominous snap of his fingers. Soon afterward, he received a warning from a friend, or perhaps an enemy, in Los Angeles who signed his name only W. The note read, “Be on your guard. Five men, members of the H., are on way to New York to assassinate you.”
Tom Lee knew exactly what H meant. He didn’t stop aiding the new district attorney. But he did take to carrying a loaded gun at all times.
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Philbin and Garvan pursued the Hip Sings relentlessly. Sue Sing gave no help; bound by a blood oath, he refused to implicate any of his associates. But the district attorney’s office got all the information it needed from Tom Lee and company. Philbin issued indictments for felonious assault for the wounding of Mary Mazzocci and the children and for first-degree murder for the killing of Ah Fee. Apart from Sue Sing, now in prison, five Hip Sings, including Mock Duck, were charged.
The men bolted when they learned of the charges; the electric chair, introduced in New York in 1888, was a real possibility if they were convicted of murder. Tom Lee and Sin Cue were determined to track them down, however. Police managed to capture three of the five—one was never apprehended and Mock Duck fled to Buffalo. Tom Lee had him shadowed there and provided information on his whereabouts to the police, whereupon his arrest became a foregone conclusion. So much so that more than two months after the warrant was issued, Mock Duck surrendered himself.
He was already on the judge’s docket for assault when he appeared to answer the charge of first-degree murder, prompting his attorney, Abraham Levy, to ask for a stay of two days before submitting his plea.
“I’ve been working hard to get him tried on the assault charge,” Levy complained to Judge Rufus B. Cowing, “and all that’s resulted is an indictment for murder.”
“You keep on,” Cowing warned before granting the request, “and you’ll get him hanged.”
But before any trials could begin, just after 7:00 a.m. on June 3, a fire broke out at 16 Pell. A pan of grease ignited in the kitchen of the Hung Far Low Restaurant on the second floor and spread rapidly to the two upper floors of the rickety old structure, which housed the sleeping quarters of several On Leong Tong members. Firemen were summoned, and sleepers were roused. Most managed to escape, but three men died in the fire. The first two were found prostrate next to their bunks; the third had managed to get to the balcony of the third floor before being overcome by heat and smoke. To the horror of those gathered outside, he then plunged headlong into the street, landing squarely on his skull. He died instantly.
The man was thirty-nine-year-old Sin Cue, Ah Fee’s companion and one of Lung Kin’s attackers. He was also the district attorney’s principal witness against Mock Duck.
The authorities believed the fire had been an accident, but the On Leongs knew better. The Hip Sings needed Sin Cue out of the way so he couldn’t testify against their brothers. And indeed, when Wong Get saw his dead body that morning, a broad smile crossed his face.
Assistant District Attorney Garvan acknowledged that the loss of Sin Cue dealt a serious blow to the case but not, he believed, a fatal one. “I think we can convict the prisoners, but it will not be without considerable difficulty,” he told the press.
He had no idea how difficult it would prove to be.
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The election of Mayor Van Wyck in 1897 had signaled a return to Tammany business as usual. Although it posed a setback to the reformers, it didn’t stop their efforts to combat corruption. In 1900, at a meeting of prominent New Yorkers, the “Committee of Fifteen” was established to investigate the citywide rise in prostitution and gambling and propose legislative remedies.
The nonpartisan, blue-ribbon panel of men-about-town was chaired by William H. Baldwin Jr., president of the Long Island Rail Road, and included luminaries like the bankers Jacob Schiff and George Foster Peabody. They hired investigators and dispatched them to brothels, opium dens, and gambling parlors across the city. Acting on tips from concerned citizens, the sleuths gathered a great deal of detailed information.
When it came to Chinatown, however, they found it quite as opaque as earlier reformers had. Unable to pose as Chinese or speak their language, they had little means of penetrating the inner sanctums of the Chinese quarter on their own. Fortunately for them, however, a couple of would-be Virgils were more than happy to take their inspectors by the hand and guide them in their descent into Chinatown’s version of hell.
One was Wong Get, the darling of the Parkhurst and Lexow committees. The Hip Sings’ alliances with these groups had paid off in spades, and they weren’t about to pass up yet another stick with which to bludgeon the hated On Leongs. Together with Wong Aloy, an associate who also spoke English quite well, he offered the investigators information about Chinatown vice and a guided tour.
Among the places Wong Aloy led Arthur E. Wilson, one of the committee’s undercover investigators, was Mike Callahan’s saloon at 12 Chatham Square. Although not run by Chinese, it catered to many Chinese patrons. In a rear chamber, where young women were known to “expose their limbs using vulgar and profane talk,” Wilson was solicited by a Miss Annie Gilroy, who lived at 11 Mott, an On Leong hangout owned by Charlie Boston. Later he reported,
This woman solicited me to go there with Mr. Wong Aloy and my friend Rogers, telling me that there I could have sexual intercourse for $3 each man. She said that she would have some very pretty girls from the age of 18 to 20 years of age. She stated to me that
the police received protection money from each girl who occupied rooms in the above named houses. All the protection was generally paid to wardmen or somebody deputized by the Captain or wardman to collect. They pay from $12 to $20 per month each girl. She told me that if I wished to call there any night she would have the girls who lived in rooms at the same address, 11 Mott Street, call in her room and have a good time. She would also have a Chinese girl there and would have her strip and show me what a Chinese woman looked like.
This Miss Gilroy stated to me her nerves were all racked and her nervous system gone from the excessive use of opium. She said she had cohabited with four different Chinamen of high rank. She also told me that if I wanted to go to an opium den where society women from uptown districts—some of them were women from families of refinement—she would be pleased to take me and my friends there providing Wong Aloy would be with the party. She said I could see the women reclining on couches under the influence of opium and generally they had the bosoms of their dress open and also I would be able to observe the familiarity often and Chinamen who visit this opium den with these women.
Most of the women involved in the trade Miss Gilroy and her friends were plying were white. It could hardly have been otherwise, because the ratio of Chinese men to Chinese women in New York State in 1900 was nearly five thousand to one, a consequence of the Page Act, passed by Congress in 1875 specifically to deny entry to prostitutes from Asia. The few Chinese prostitutes who made it to America would typically work in bordellos for four or five years until the fees for their passage, payments to those who brought them, and any disbursements made to their parents to “purchase” them were all repaid and a profit had been earned at their expense. After this, if they had not died of venereal disease or succumbed to some other dread ailment, they would be free to wed, work elsewhere, or return to China. Many did remain and marry, their fortunes somewhat improved by the overall paucity of Chinese women in America.
A list of Chinatown gambling houses provided to the Committee of Fifteen by the Hip Sings Wong Get and Wong Aloy, 1901.
According to Leong Gor Yun in Chinatown Inside Out, as a rule, the Chinese prostitutes “are owned by powerful tong members, and even if independent, have to be on good terms with them. In general they have to give right of way to tong men to avoid trouble,” he added, meaning they had to service their Chinese keepers before anyone else. “Prostitution yields a sufficient income (though much less than gambling) to keep the tongs interested and in control,” Leong observed, “but on the whole it is only a secondary cause of war.”
Freelance white hookers plied their trade on the streets of Chinatown, visiting laundries early in the mornings, when the washermen were not busy, or cheap restaurants, where they might score a meal and a tip in exchange for their favors. But there were also brothels, and some were run by Chinese. The pimps charged $1 per call: fifty cents for the bed and fifty cents for the house. The girls kept anything they could get over that amount.
Wong Aloy took Wilson to see the bawdy houses up close. Wilson described how all were protected by Chinese guards whose job was to sound warning at the first sign of danger. The services rendered by the tong men included only protection against harassment from rival gangs and rowdies, however, not from the police. The payoff to the authorities, according to Wilson, came directly from the girls.
Wong Aloy did as fine a job of duping Committee of Fifteen investigators as Wong Get and Mock Duck had done earlier with the Parkhursts. “Wong Aloy is a man who can be depended upon as he showed enthusiasm and a zealousness on these visits last night,” Wilson cooed. “He said his main object was to destroy the gambling houses and stop his countrymen from being robbed by Chinese expert gamblers, also of having police levy tribute and blackmail upon gambling houses and houses of prostitution.”
What he didn’t say was that if the On Leongs’ hold on the gambling parlors could be broken, the way would be clear for Wong’s Hip Sing brethren to pick up the slack.
The Committee of Fifteen’s report did not name specific establishments. It focused broadly on the overall problem and possible solutions and did not result in the closing of any Chinatown vice dens. But it did shine more light on the nexus between the police and the underworld, and its findings—like those of the Lexow Committee before it—helped put Tammany Hall out of office again.
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A former mayor of Brooklyn and more recently the president of Columbia University, the reformist Seth Low was chosen mayor of New York in 1901 with the support of his own Republican Party and anti-Tammany Democrats. His administration took office on New Year’s Day 1902. The Chinese New Year celebration that followed by a month offered the On Leongs a made-to-order opportunity to entertain the newly powerful. On February 17, they hosted a banquet at their headquarters and invited just about everyone they could think of who might prove useful.
Vilified in the 1890s as the evil lords of Chinatown, Tom Lee and his On Leongs were making progress in the new century reclaiming their reputation as upstanding citizens. It was the Hip Sings who were now generally identified as highbinders—that is, gangsters. The On Leong Tong, otherwise known as the Chinese Merchants Association, was coming to be seen more as Chinatown’s chamber of commerce. Its members were said to be the most respectable and well-to-do men in the community, so their banquet was well attended.
Although Mayor Low, who had accepted their invitation, failed to show up, the attendees constituted a veritable Who’s Who of local law enforcement and the judiciary, including a few surprising guests whose pasts suggested they might be less than friendly to Tom Lee. Among those from the police department were Colonel John N. Partridge, newly appointed to the office of police commissioner, and his deputies. There was Judge Warren W. Foster of the Court of General Sessions, who was destined to play a major role in mediating the tong wars. Also present was the Parkhurst and Lexow Committee alumnus William T. Jerome, who replaced Eugene A. Philbin as New York County district attorney. These men had been no lovers of the On Leong Tong. The Chinese consul general was also on hand. And Tom Lee had graciously invited the four attorneys defending Mock Duck as well, though all declined.
The dinner was inaugurated with a fusillade of 100,000 firecrackers strung across Mott Street. The more than one hundred guests were seated at small, round linen-draped tables and served a twenty-seven-course meal. Tom Lee’s son Frank gave a speech, and the elder Lee followed Chinese custom and made the rounds of the room, toasting guests at each table. Attendees received small preserve dishes as favors; the most honored got ivory chopsticks. And after the meal, Colonel Partridge and his party were given a tour of Chinatown.
The evening was a roaring success. “When the city officials separated,” the New-York Tribune noted, “they did so with the feeling that they could teach the yellow man little of the art of hospitality.”
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The day after the banquet, Mock Duck went on trial for the murder of Ah Fee. Assistant District Attorney Arthur C. Train, one of Jerome’s deputies, appeared for the People. He, too, had been a guest of the On Leongs’ the night before.
The Hip Sings were willing to pay for top legal talent to defend Mock Duck, who had emerged as leader of the New York branch of the tong, now outranking even Wong Get. The attorneys Abraham Levy and George W. Glaze were on the defense team, as was the redoubtable Frank Moss.
The first hurdle was swearing in a jury. During hour after hour of voir dire, each prospective juror was asked whether he had any “objections to Chinamen,” and many did. Adolph Bauch was excused after he admitted his prejudice would influence his verdict. John French quoted Bret Harte: “For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, the heathen Chinee is peculiar.” He, too, was discharged, as were a Mr. Dougherty, who felt there should be a law keeping “Chinamen” at home so there would be more work for American washerwomen, and George Carter, a tailor who disdained all Ch
inese as heathens. Frank Fisher, a divinity student, on the other hand, said he would “believe a Chinaman a great deal sooner” than some white men he knew. He was accepted.
“If this jury business keeps on,” one of the weary prosecutors quipped, “we may have to hire Mr. Duck to plead guilty or commit suicide.”
The jury box was eventually filled, but on February 21 a white prosecution witness named Emma Wing reported she had been threatened. When she appeared in the Criminal Courts Building, she said, a man named Lee Lang told her he would cut out her heart if she dared testify she had witnessed the killing. Lee, in the courtroom as a spectator that day, was immediately taken into custody and held on $500 bond and was eventually convicted of witness tampering.
Nor was that the only such case. Another white witness, a wrestler named Leo Pardello, handed Train a note he had received whose upper half was saturated with blood. It bore the dateline “Hell, February 21” and read,
You last Friday make witness for the District Attorney against my brother, Mock Duck. You lie; police lie; District Attorney lie; everybody lie. You when go for witness you make big mistake. You die, die to-day. Pepper in your eyes and bullet in your heart. You no go alive. Chinese and Chinese fight: that is our business. No good business for white man. Well, best thing you die so you make no more witness for Chinese.
The letter was signed, simply, “One, Two Three,” which might have been triad-related code words, and the district attorney’s office pledged to investigate its origins. Whether any jurors received similar threats is unknown. For whatever reason, however, Mock Duck’s trial ended in a hung jury. After deliberating for seven hours, the panel, which favored conviction by a vote of 10–2, was deadlocked.
But it wasn’t over for Mock Duck. He was sent back to the Tombs to await a new trial.
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Tong Wars Page 10