Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  Less than a month later, Mock Duck was tried for murder a second time. No one accused him of pulling the trigger on Ah Fee, but he was believed to have masterminded the operation.

  Prosecution witnesses placed him at the scene, waiting for Ah Fee and Sin Cue to emerge from the Wo On shop at 19 Pell. Several reported seeing him point to the store and hearing him tell the others to “wait until they come out.” Some recalled he had fired a gun. Mary Mazzocci identified him as her assailant. And his next-door neighbor remembered seeing him remove a bulletproof vest and take a gun from his pocket when he returned to his room shortly after the shooting.

  In all, twenty-seven witnesses were called to make the prosecution’s case or rebut the testimony of defense witnesses. Even Frank Lee, Tom’s younger son, took the stand, ostensibly to confirm that Sin Cue was dead and thus unable to testify, but really to hint that he had been murdered to prevent his appearance.

  Frank Moss cross-examined many of the witnesses, but it was the attorney Glaze who presented the defense’s theory—or rather theories—of the case. His principal argument was that Mock Duck had an alibi: he and a friend were at Fulton Street Market at the time of the shootings. They had gone to buy a terrapin—highly prized in Chinese herbal medicine for its alleged disease-curing properties. As a backup, however, Glaze blamed Sin Cue and Ah Fee for shooting first, which, if true, would have made Sue Sing’s killing of Ah Fee a case of self-defense rather than murder. And if no murder had been committed, then even if the jurors believed Mock Duck had been present on Pell Street, he could not have been an accessory to murder.

  The prosecutor asked several defense witnesses who had recruited them to testify, and the answer was generally Wong Get. Similarly, the defense attorneys pointed the finger at the On Leongs. The implication, of course, was that testimony was induced or compelled in some other way, through threats or blackmail. By the end of the trial, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that many of the witnesses had been bought.

  Moss, clearly worried for his client, revealed his flair for the melodramatic in his summation, painting as gruesome a picture of the death penalty as he could. He enjoined the jury,

  If it be so, that, within a few months from now, in the grounds of Sing Sing, the electric current be turned on, and the blood of Mock Duck be made to seethe in his veins, and his tissues to melt with heat, and his tortured nerves to be wrung in anguish, and his spirit to be sent, unbidden, to the presence of his Maker, will it be, think you, the hand of the jailer that turns on the current, that really does that act? I tell you, gentlemen, that, if that thing happens to this living man, it will be you that will do it, it will be the foreman, Mr. Wolf; the second juror, Mr. Bixby; and the third, Mr. Paspary; and the fourth, Mr. Pine; and every one of you.

  The attorney and social reformer Frank Moss, longtime ally of the Hip Sing Tong, who served the Parkhurst Society, the Lexow Committee, and the district attorney’s office.

  He also attempted to neutralize any anti-Chinese prejudice felt by the jurors by owning up to his own bias:

  I declare to you that, were Mock Duck a white man and the testimony the same, I should submit this case to you without argument. But Mock Duck is not a white man. . . . I realized this morning as I came to court to perform my duty by this man that I had not put out my hand to him, as I would have done, if he had been a man of my own color. . . . I admit it, and yet it is not right, and yet it is in the antagonism of the races. . . . I dwell upon these things because the same God that made you made him, and because there is the same sort of soul that dwells there.

  In his summation, Assistant District Attorney Train made much of the fact that Moss and company had presented two incompatible defenses and two sets of witnesses with conflicting stories to support them. He noted that Mock Duck had initially fled from justice and had not come up with his alibi until seven months after Ah Fee died. He did what he could to discredit the alibi witnesses, dismissing one as immaterial, another as intoxicated, and a third as opium addled and suggesting that others were paid for their testimony.

  Train actively played to latent racism among the jurors, dismissing one Chinese witness as “the chattering Chinaman” and attempting to impeach a white witness who placed Mock Duck at the Fulton Market by stooping to the “they-all-look-alike” argument:

  Could any man, any living man, remember the face of a Chinaman, to whom he had sold a terrapin after eighteen months, when . . . they have a great many Chinese customers?

  He also predicted retaliation against the prosecution’s witnesses if the jury voted to acquit:

  If this man is guiltless, turn him out. . . . Send back to Chinatown this man and the other man. Well, if we do, I do not think that I would give much for the lives of the People’s witnesses in this case. There has not been a shot fired in Chinatown since the 21st of September, 1900. If this man is acquitted, I imagine you will hear more shots.

  In his instructions to the jury, the judge dealt a blow to one of the defense’s two theories—that Sue Sing had acted in self-defense. He stated simply that if the jury accepted that Ah Fee was fleeing from Sue Sing when he was shot in the back, then it had been murder, plain and simple. This left only the alibi defense. But the judge also made clear that a guilty verdict would require the jury to conclude that Mock Duck had aided and abetted Sue Sing in the killing of Ah Fee. They were told if they found he had not been on Pell Street when the murder was committed, they must acquit.

  After nearly two weeks of directly conflicting testimony, the jury could not agree that Mock Duck had planned the assassination. After an overnight session that ran for twenty-one hours, this jury, too, was deadlocked, their vote standing at 11–1. This time, however, the majority favored acquittal.

  Mock Duck was released, but there was still the matter of the assault charge for the shooting of the bystanders. A third trial was scheduled for April 28, but Assistant District Attorney Train decided to drop the charges against all the defendants. Mock Duck had already been tried twice at great expense, and because the evidence for murder and assault was substantially the same, he knew securing a conviction would be difficult. Besides, the accused men had already spent nine months in the Tombs, which was deemed a fair sentence for assault. There was no need for another trial.

  Two weeks later, a banquet for more than a hundred was thrown at the Hung Far Low Restaurant to celebrate the release of Mock Duck and his cohorts. The singing could be heard on the street, and the flag of the Hip Sing Tong was hoisted in front of the building.

  It was the very building at which Sin Cue, whose testimony had been expected to convict Mock Duck, had met his maker.

  Chapter 6

  “A Regular Highbinder, Six-Shooter War Dance on the Bowery”

  At 1:30 in the morning on November 3, 1904, as Mock Duck ascended the steps from the basement of 18 Pell, an assailant emerged from a doorway across the street. Without a word, the gunman crossed and fired two bullets at him at close range. One only grazed him, but the other lodged in his stomach and he collapsed. Had the second missile not been partially deflected by his belt buckle, he would surely have died.

  The drama continued when a policeman, alerted by the shots, grabbed the fleeing attacker. He dragged the man back to Mock Duck, who, though lying in the gutter in agony, was conscious and able to finger him as his assailant. Suddenly they were surrounded by three Hip Sings with revolvers drawn, intent on vengeance against the enemy who had felled their leader. The policeman quickly pulled his prisoner into a doorway for protection, however, and kept the gunmen at bay until a dozen reinforcements arrived and they fled.

  At Hudson Street Hospital, Mock Duck’s wound was deemed serious. One paper even jumped the gun with the headline “Chinaman Murdered.” His shooter was identified as thirty-two-year-old Lee Sing. This was not the portly Lee Sing who had blackened Tom Lee’s eyes in the 1880s; this Lee Sing, a laundryman from Dedham, Massachusetts,
was a recruited assassin. He was locked up at Elizabeth Street pending arraignment. Near the scene of the shooting, police found a six-chambered, .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with a twelve-inch barrel and two empty chambers. They also discovered a hunting knife with an eight-inch blade.

  At the arraignment, Lee Sing refused to say a word. But Thomas L. McClintock, superintendent of the Parkhurst Society, appeared and asked that as an obvious flight risk he be remanded. McClintock told the court he believed the attack had been carried out in revenge for aid Mock Duck had provided the Parkhursts in recent raids of policy games.

  Using information gleaned from Mock Duck and his Hip Sing cohorts, McClintock had goaded the new commissioner of police, William McAdoo, into raiding several Chinatown gambling houses. The Irish-born McAdoo, a former Democratic congressman who had served as assistant secretary of the navy, had taken the job early in 1904. He had been a strong supporter of the mayoral candidate George B. McClellan Jr., a Tammany man and son of the Civil War general and onetime Democratic presidential candidate of the same name. McClellan had beaten Seth Low, who ran for reelection in 1903, when the coalition that had elected Low in 1901 fell apart. Tammany Hall was back in the driver’s seat, where it would remain for a decade.

  McAdoo had actually been a controversial choice, because the machine’s political bosses, who always benefited from lax enforcement of the vice laws, feared he might not consent to play the game. Their instincts were correct. McAdoo wasted little time in declaring his intention to purge the force of extortion and bribery and quash the system that permitted the purchase of promotions and appointments. This would seem to align him with the Parkhursts, who had similar goals.

  Armed with warrants they had persuaded a magistrate to issue, the Parkhursts had demanded that McAdoo bypass the Sixth Precinct police, who always seemed to pull their punches when it came to Chinese gamblers, and dispatch headquarters police to accompany them on raids. McAdoo had cooperated. On July 21, 1904, together with a dozen Central Office officers armed with crowbars, axes, revolvers, and billy clubs, six teams of Parkhursts raided policy joints at 20 Doyers Street; 20½ and 23 Pell; and 17, 18, and 30 Mott. The axes came in especially handy at 18 Mott—Tom Lee’s building—where officers had to destroy four sets of doors to reach the inner sanctum. Fifteen Chinese men, all On Leongs, were arrested.

  But the interests of McAdoo and the Parkhursts were actually anything but aligned. “We are after the police in this business,” McClintock revealed to the press. “They not only know nothing about our raids, but they have not been doing anything about these gambling places, and more than that, have actually been ‘in’ with these people. But we will get them in a short time.”

  The Sixth Precinct police were especially embarrassed at this, which had been McClintock’s aim. Captain Francis J. Kear, who had taken command of Elizabeth Street that year, attempted to shift the blame, protesting that his men had arrested more than a hundred Chinese gamblers over the previous six months but had been unable to secure convictions. Nor did McAdoo enjoy being made to look bad. He was no less responsible for the Sixth Precinct than he was for police headquarters, and he quickly became defensive about the insinuation that officers under his command were on the take.

  McAdoo demanded proof. After a tour of Chinatown, he declared, “If Mr. McClintock has any evidence whatever to that effect and will bring it to me, I will take pleasure in bringing the machinery of this department at once against the offender, and if they are proven guilty, I will gladly cooperate with the District Attorney in having them brought to justice and properly punished.”

  Newspapers across the country had a field day with the attack. Most persisted in portraying the Hip Sing as the familiar reformer who desired to clean up Chinatown, and they blamed the assault on nefarious gambling interests intent on foiling his efforts. Others were agnostic as to Mock Duck’s motives but quick to label the episode a gang shooting.

  Several papers suggested the shooting had been retaliation for the deaths of Ah Fee and Sin Cue, but McClintock suggested a more proximate cause: Mock Duck was slated to appear in court that month as chief witness against the gamblers arrested in July, and he had kept out of sight because he knew the On Leongs were determined to stop him. At a secret meeting of the On Leong Tong, McClintock said, lots had been drawn to determine who would make the hit, and Lee Sing and two associates were selected. Out-of-towners were preferable to locals, because they could more easily disappear after a shooting.

  For the first time, the clash between the Hip Sings and the On Leongs was being portrayed as a “tong war” and the highbinders compared to organized criminal gangs of other ethnic groups. “Quite as deadly as the Italian ‘Mafia’ and ‘Black Hand’ and even more thoroughly organized, are the secret Chinese societies,” the New York World explained in something of an overstatement.

  Mock Duck was transferred to Bellevue Hospital, and he eventually recovered. But “somewhere in the dark labyrinths of Chinatown are two cutthroats with .44-caliber revolvers and long, keen knives waiting for Mock Duck to leave the hospital,” the World warned ominously.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  By 1904, some sixty fan tan parlors and thirty lotteries were operating in Chinatown. Tom Lee and his On Leong Tong had raised their rates and were now assessing the fan tan halls $15 per table per week and the policy shops $20. The funds went into a kitty, where they did much more than simply provide insurance against police harassment.

  Fifty cents of each payment was earmarked for the Chung Hwa Gong Shaw, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Headquartered in the Joss House at 16 Mott, it was the de facto governing body of the community and largely a New York branch of the Six Companies, though it was bankrolled locally. It was an authoritarian organization whose officers were not popularly elected but rather chosen by Chinatown’s rich and powerful.

  Another half dollar went to the On Leong Tong, the gambling proprietors’ guild, and seventy-five cents went to support the Chinese Hospital on nearby Park Street. A fifty-cent cut was also paid to the Merchants Association. Although the On Leongs often went by this English name, this was a different group.

  And, of course, untold sums wound up in the pockets of Tammany higher-ups and New York’s Finest.

  The system amounted to what George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall ward boss and sometime armchair political philosopher, liked to call “honest graft.” A New York state assemblyman and senator who became a millionaire by buying up property based on insider information and reselling it after it had appreciated, Plunkitt drew a distinction between “looters” and “politicians.” “The looter goes in for himself alone without considerin’ his organization or his city,” he said. “The politician looks after his own interests, the organization’s interests, and the city’s interests all at the same time.”

  Tom Lee had never been guilty of considering only his own interests. He was certainly intent on personal enrichment; he didn’t get to be one of Chinatown’s wealthiest men solely by selling cigars. And he was not above ordering hits on his enemies when his interests were challenged. But he also had the greater good of the Chinese community in mind and had since his arrival in the late 1870s.

  Mock Duck and the Hip Sings, by contrast, appear to have had more in common with Plunkitt’s looters. They were out only for themselves, and any protection money they collected from illegal businesses went nowhere but into their own treasury; nothing was earmarked for the Chinese Hospital. As the “good Chinamen” mask slipped further from the organization’s public face, the image emerged of a gang of blackmailers and desperadoes interested in little more than self-enrichment.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  The trouble in New York’s Chinatown was beginning to raise alarms in several quarters. In San Francisco, the Six Companies discussed appointing a tribunal to resolve the feud and considered asking the Chinese legation in Washington to intercede. The
Chinese consul in New York posted a placard calling on both camps to lay down their arms. And the New York World even suggested the federal government get involved.

  McClintock quoted to the New York Sun a missive the On Leongs had sent the Hip Sings a month earlier, in October 1904:

  We invite you to meet and talk over our trouble together at the Chinese Joss House on the ninth day of the present month at 7 o’clock. We want to stop the trouble and enjoy peace. We want a committee of six merchants representing your society to come to the Joss House and make a settlement regarding this trouble so that gambling in Chinatown can proceed as usual and the percentages can be received by the Joss House to enable us to raise the bones of the dead Chinamen here and return them to China as heretofore.

  He—and the Hip Sings—saw the statement as a damning acknowledgment by the On Leongs that they were indeed involved in gambling and a bald-faced tactic aimed at obtaining a roster of Hip Sing members, ignoring the possibility that it might actually have been a good faith effort to stop the conflict. In all likelihood, the On Leongs were prepared to make concessions in exchange for peace. They had more to lose than the Hip Sings did, and war was costly.

  If it was an olive branch, it was a failure. It elicited no response. And later that month, the night after Mock Duck was released from the hospital, the Hip Sing Tong banner that flew outside the brotherhood’s headquarters at 12 Bowery was torn from its moorings and stolen. There was no mistaking the provocative nature of the act. It put the Hip Sings on high alert as they anticipated another move against Mock Duck, who, in addition to earning On Leong enmity for past acts, had become a double threat as the chief witness against Lee Sing, his shooter.

  They didn’t have to wait long. In the wee hours of November 26, pistol shots, shrieks, and cries were heard as the two factions exchanged gunfire in what the New York Sun branded “a regular highbinder, six-shooter war dance on the Bowery.” The fracas, played out in front of Hip Sing headquarters, occurred as several Hip Sings returned from the Chinese Theatre. Mock Duck, the likely target, was not there, but his absence did not stop the attack.