Tong Wars

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Tong Wars Page 12

by Scott D Seligman


  The fusillade lasted only a couple of minutes. Police immediately arrested four Hip Sings and held two On Leongs as witnesses. Because the On Leongs were the provocateurs, however, this was further indication of their sweetheart arrangement with the law. Officers confiscated an imposing array of battle armor from the Hip Sings. Four coats of armor—two of steel mesh, one of cloth, and one of human hair—were seized. One vest, made of steel rings woven in a lattice pattern, weighed seventy-five pounds, and while it made its wearer invulnerable to bullets, it also rendered him more or less immobile, which in turn made it easy for the police to nab him. The collection of paraphernalia so unnerved the magistrate at Tombs Police Court the next day that he ordered it removed from his sight.

  None of the Chinese involved sustained injuries, but three white bystanders were hurt. One was wounded in his hip, and another lost part of his ear. But it was John Baldwin, a white man who had been drinking at Kelly’s Saloon at 10 Bowery and had failed to duck for cover, who suffered most. He took a bullet in his abdomen and later died of his injuries.

  For his part, Mock Duck, now recovered from his near-death experience, decided to leave town for a while. In due course, however, he would return. And when he did, he would come girded for battle.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Because of Baldwin’s death, the four Hip Sings, charged initially only with felonious assault, were now accused of murder. And because the life lost was that of a white man, everyone was feeling the heat.

  The Parkhurst Society, according to the New York World, was “prepared to spend every penny in its treasury” to protect the accused Hip Sings and to “expose the alleged conspiracy to send them to the electric chair.” For first-class legal talent, they had to look no further than Frank Moss, still in their corner. Moss continued grandstanding in the same vein as McClintock. In court, he predicted more killings, reserving his most pointed invective for the district attorney and the police:

  There will be murders, shootings and troubles without end if a stop is not put to gambling in Chinatown, and I want the District Attorney’s office to realize it. The control of the gambling privilege is a bone of contention between two great Chinese secret societies, the Hip Sing Tong and the On Leong Tong. The only way to stop this contention is to eliminate the gambling houses in the whole Chinese quarter. I am amazed to see the police and the District Attorney’s office apparently protecting the gambling syndicate in this section.

  Assistant District Attorney Francis P. Garvan, who handled the case for District Attorney William T. Jerome, predictably took umbrage at Moss’s diatribe and challenged him to provide evidence for his accusation. “You appear here in behalf of the On Leong Tong as though you were a paid attorney of that infamous organization,” Moss retorted, oblivious to the fact that precisely the same could be said about his own relationship with the Hip Sing Tong.

  Moss blamed the police for the Bowery shootings, claiming they had ensured an advantage for the On Leongs by a dragnet they had imposed on the Hip Sings. “For a week, every Hip Sing in Chinatown was searched by policemen and plainclothesmen for weapons. The On Leongs pointed them out to the police. Not an On Leong was searched, mind you,” he added. This so-called advantage was belied by the veritable arsenal the police had discovered at Hip Sing headquarters, but Moss didn’t mention that. He also faulted the police for failing to guard the building on the night of the row, claiming they had had ample reason to expect an attack.

  The Parkhursts felt responsible for the whole affair. “In the present crisis we got these Chinamen into trouble,” Moss told the World, “and we are going to stand by them.” But Moss’s Parkhurst colleagues were beginning to get defensive about their reflexive support for the Hip Sings, whose reputation had been taking a drubbing. McClintock assured a New York Sun reporter that the society had not been “taken in” by the Chinese organization. He went on to explain that the Parkhursts had begun their raids at the urging of many Christian Chinese alarmed at the effects of gambling on the Chinese community and who “kindly volunteered to act as gambling house spies.” And then he added, incredibly, that “one morning, the society found that these spies all happened to be Hip Sings.”

  That, of course, was not the way it had happened, and McClintock surely knew it. The Parkhursts had been aware from the very beginning, when Frank Moss recruited Wong Get, that they were working with the Hip Sing Tong. They had simply refused to acknowledge the true nature of their partners. The Sun went on to point out that although McClintock was aware that Hip Sings elsewhere were “thugs, murderers, dealers in slaves and blackmailers,” he believed the New York variety were “worthy persons.” The newspaper wasn’t buying it. “Something in the Atlantic breeze may soften the nature of the sternest Hip Sing and make his heart pure,” it wrote sardonically.

  In fact, the cozy relationship between the Hip Sings and the Parkhursts had just about run its course. McClintock and his reformers would stick with the tong for the next couple of years, but their support would recede noticeably and eventually disappear entirely. To most observers, the Hip Sings had shown their true colors. Only Frank Moss would stubbornly remain a friend and a true believer.

  “I do not want to say that the police can’t stop gambling among the Chinese,” District Attorney Jerome said in response to Moss’s allegation, “but it would be an exceedingly difficult task.” He had good cause for this observation. Police corruption notwithstanding, the fact was that obtaining convictions of Chinatown gambling bosses was fraught with difficulty. Infiltration of the betting parlors was impossible; there were no Chinese on the police force to do it. Chinese stool pigeons could sometimes be recruited, but they often had their own agendas, and besides, judges and juries tended to devalue or discount the testimony of Chinese, much of which was assumed to be bought and paid for. Convictions usually required testimony by the arresting officers that they had actually seen money change hands, and the cash had usually vanished by the time the police came in.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  The next move belonged to the Hip Sings, and they saw their opening when the On Leongs ventured outside the jurisdiction of the Elizabeth Street Station. In late 1904, an On Leong rented a room on the fourth floor of 34 Bayard Street. He claimed to represent a group of Chinese Christians who needed a meeting room and paid a month’s rent in advance, and then he proceeded to fit the hall out, which included stringing a wire from the fourth floor down to the front entrance to permit a security guard to send a signal upstairs if he spotted trouble. Nobody thought to ask what a group of praying Christians would need with an early warning system.

  The Hip Sings got wind of the arrangement and immediately informed McClintock. He, in turn, staged the raid with officers from the Eldridge Street Station, which had authority over Bayard Street and no known relationship with the On Leongs. It took three round-trips of a patrol wagon to shuttle all fifty-six On Leong gamblers who were arrested to court, where all but two were discharged—the guard and the gamekeeper.

  The newspapers declared that the Hip Sings now had the On Leongs on the run, having made it extremely difficult for them to keep protecting gambling parlors. The Sun observed that, going forward, the On Leongs had only two choices: cut the Hip Sings in on the graft or continue the shooting. It was an astute analysis. Unfortunately, they would choose the latter before they got around to the former.

  Two weeks after the Bayard Street raid, the On Leongs were out for revenge. But their plans did not call for assault or murder. What they had in mind was humiliation: a simple prank slated for Christmas night.

  Ah Lah and two other On Leongs disguised themselves as out-of-town laundrymen and lured fifteen Hip Sings into a fan tan game. They had secured the basement of 5 Mott, and they watched in silence as the Hip Sings took the necessary precautions—setting up a trip wire at the top of the cellar stairs to slow intruders and warn gamblers of imminent danger.

  At abou
t 2:00 a.m., a confederate reported the game to Elizabeth Street, and a squad of policemen was dispatched to break it up. The wire did its job, causing two plainclothesmen to stumble down the steps and alerting the gamblers to their presence. Money and fan tan accoutrements went flying as the gamblers searched frantically for a way out. Then one of the On Leongs helpfully pulled on an iron ring and opened a trapdoor in the floor. Without a word, the Hip Sings plunged through the opening, one by one—into two feet of standing water.

  As the last man disappeared down the hatch, Ah Lah banged the trapdoor shut, and he and his two brothers stood on top of it, confining the captive gamblers below. When the police finally entered, they noticed the hatchway. They assumed it was an opening to an escape tunnel—Chinatown was rumored to be honeycombed with such passageways—and figured anyone who had fled the game was probably long gone. They decided to have a look anyway, however, and when they opened the hatch, they discovered a pit about five feet deep, filled with fifteen angry Hip Sings, dripping and cursing.

  All eighteen men were arraigned in Tombs Police Court the next day, but because the officers had not actually seen money change hands, all but the one who had acted as “banker” were released. But the attorney engaged by the Hip Sings predicted, “There’ll be three On Leong Tong gamblers who will lay pretty low for a while.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  As Lee Sing cooled his heels in the Tombs waiting to be tried for shooting Mock Duck, the On Leongs did everything they could think of to get him released. Late in November 1904, Detective Michael Powers, who, with Detective Patrick Carr, had apprehended him, received an anonymous letter warning him not to testify at Lee’s trial:

  You can never convict Lee Sing. Before he would be convicted one hundred Chinamen would be killed. Mock Duck would never testify against him. And if Carr and Powers persist in their attempt to convict this man they would be done away with.

  But death threats weren’t the only tactic the On Leongs employed. In early December, they attempted to sow enough doubt about Lee Sing’s guilt as to obviate the need for a trial. Their strategy was to blame a man named Lu Chow, who had a bad reputation and who had conveniently already returned to China, for the shooting. They provided witnesses to swear that Mock Duck had been quarreling with Lu over a white woman just prior to the shooting and that Lu had drawn a revolver and shot him twice before disappearing.

  The trial went on in January, with Frank Moss appearing for the Hip Sings and Edmund E. Price representing the defendant. Mock Duck wasn’t in town to testify, and the other prosecution witnesses were not convincing. The defense put enough people on the stand to corroborate the presence—and motive—of Lu Chow to plant seeds of doubt in the judge’s mind. In the end, after eight hearings, he threw the case out.

  It was surely a case of abject perjury, but who could prove it? Unaccustomed to the rule of law—the legal system in their home country was eminently corruptible—the Chinese tong men saw the courtroom less as a forum for the dispassionate administration of justice than as an opportunity to score points against their enemies. They could hardly be blamed for doubting a system in which their testimony was distrusted and in which judges and juries alike often held deep-seated prejudices against them. Recruiting, coaching, and paying witnesses posed no moral dilemma for them. At the end of the day, it was just another cost of doing business.

  Chapter 7

  A Price on Tom Lee’s Head

  At 1:00 a.m. on the last day of January 1905, another Hip Sing fell.

  A cold wind was blowing down Mott Street, and all was quiet, save the sound of a Chinese flute emanating from a third-floor window above the Joss House. But just as forty-year-old Huie Fong, a Hip Sing, rounded the corner from Chatham Square, the melody changed abruptly. It was a signal.

  A man swiftly emerged from a candy shop in the basement of No. 16, headed up the stairs to the pavement, crossed the street, and followed Huie Fong into No. 17. It was an odd place for a Hip Sing to be headed at such a time of night, because No. 17 was an On Leong preserve, but someone apparently was expecting him. Suddenly the music stopped, and three staccato gunshots were heard.

  A police detective two doors away rushed to the scene and found Huie Fong gasping for breath and “flopping like a landed trout,” blood gushing from two holes in his chest. He spotted a Chinese man fleeing the scene and managed to restrain him. Reinforcements came, and Huie was carried to the street, but, unable to talk, he could not identify his attacker. He perished before the ambulance arrived. The man in custody admitted nothing; he just repeated the sentence “They wait for him!” suggesting that Huie had been lured there by someone else. He volunteered that his name was Yee Lee and that he was an On Leong laundryman.

  Smarting from the Bayard Street incident, the On Leongs had declared that “for every raid, there would be a dead Hip Sing.” There had been raids in the neighborhood two days earlier, and the police believed Huie Fong’s assassination was retribution. They arrested Yee Lee, who was unarmed, and charged him with complicity in a murder.

  At Yee’s arraignment the next day, Lee Loy, secretary of the On Leong Tong and another of Tom Lee’s cousins, testified for the defense. Lee Loy, forty-five, had come to America at age nineteen, lived in Oregon for more than fifteen years, and then made his way eastward, working as a laundryman in small upstate towns before moving to the city. And in open court, he accused the Hip Sings of putting a price on the heads of the leaders of the On Leong Tong.

  It wouldn’t have been hard to see this coming. The On Leongs had been brazen in their attempt on the life of Mock Duck, now at the apex of the local Hip Sing pyramid. So it was only fair for the Hip Sings to return the favor. In early February 1905, immediately before the Chinese New Year, Chinatown had been plastered with red signs once again offering a $3,000 reward for Tom Lee’s demise.

  “Four highbinders from Boston are here to kill Tom Lee and to earn the reward,” Lee Loy told the court. “Not only is a price put on Tom Lee’s head, but a price of $1,000 each is paid for me to be killed and three others, all officers of our society.” The others, identified later, were Charlie Boston, Chu Gong, and a man named Gin Gum.

  China-born Gin Gum had appeared in New York around 1900 after he was released from jail. He had worked as a cook in San Francisco before being sentenced to three years at San Quentin for passing a forged check. When his appeal was finally heard by the California Supreme Court, he had already served most of his sentence in Alameda County Jail, so he was released. He joined the On Leong Tong in New York and rose quickly in its ranks. A proficient English speaker, he had already become indispensable.

  Tom Lee applied to his friends in the police department for protection. Three officers were detailed to guard On Leong headquarters at 14 Mott, and four were posted in front of Lee’s office at No. 18, in addition to the four Chinese bodyguards already there. But Lee didn’t let the threat interfere with Chinese New Year festivities, and the On Leong open house was held as usual on February 3. Chinatown was draped with the customary colorful pennants, and the crackling of firecrackers and the beating of gongs and drums could be heard as Chinese exchanged visits, presented youngsters with red envelopes stuffed with “lucky money,” and offered New Year’s greetings to friends and acquaintances.

  Lee even sat for a holiday interview with the New York World. He made several points, mostly about the tactics and methods of the Hip Sings, which the paper quoted, using spellings intended to mimic a Chinese accent:

  The ’Melican people blame all the Chinese for the deaths in our village. Only a few highbinders and Hip Sing men are responsible, and I try to keep the highbinders out of our village. The Hip Sings have a “system,” which is to watch where a Chinaman opens a laundry. Then they open one next door by paying a month’s rent and threaten to cut down prices unless $100 is paid for them to move. They say, “I washee shirt seven cents, you chargee ten. I dlive you out. I stay. You pay h
undled dollals I leave.”

  He continued:

  We have clubs where the laundryman who works six days can go one day and play games like what you call checkers and dominoes. If some of our clubs do have a game like white clubs, the Hips demand one-half of the receipts or they will tell the Parkhurst Society.

  Of course, Lee made no reference to the fact that his On Leongs had been doing the same thing for years, the only differences being that the tax was far less than 50 percent and that the police got a cut of the take. But if the reporter had any doubt about the resolve of local police to protect Tom Lee from harm, he needed only to look out the window at the swarm of officers outside the building.

  The Sun reported a rumor that the Hip Sings had offered to stop informing in exchange for a lump sum payment of $10,000. Such an arrangement would ostensibly put the entire conflict to rest. But the On Leongs, who could have afforded it, didn’t trust them to live up to their word. “They argue that if they pay up, the Hip Sings will be back again in a few months for another payment,” the Sun wrote, and they were surely correct.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Four days into the Year of the Snake, at 8:00 a.m., Ching Gong’s nephew found his uncle’s body lying across the threshold of the door that led to the sleeping cubbyhole in his Bronx laundry. His skull had been crushed.

  Like most of New York’s Chinese by this time, Ching didn’t live in Chinatown. Of the estimated seven thousand Chinese in Greater New York in 1905, fewer than two thousand now resided in the Mott Street area, which had been evolving from the home of the Chinese community to its marketplace. Chinese visited at night and on Sundays to purchase supplies and foodstuffs, patronize the restaurants and opium dens, attend club meetings, and gamble, but most didn’t live there. Laundrymen in particular had to set up shop where their customers lived, and this meant spreading throughout Manhattan, the other boroughs, and New Jersey.

 

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