Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  But it was Easter Sunday, and no one was getting married. Each vehicle carried not wedding guests, but half a dozen policemen and one Chinese informant, and each one was assigned to a particular gambling hall. On command, officers wielding crowbars and axes emerged from nine coaches and headed down Mott Street; the rest were dispatched to Pell and Doyers. At the rear, supervising the operation, was the former detective sergeant William Eggers, a twelve-year veteran whom McAdoo had promoted to acting captain and installed as head of a Central Office vice squad.

  Once inside, the officers quickly apprehended the lookouts before any could warn the gamblers, then smashed their way through doors that were several inches thick and heavily reinforced. They hacked holes around the locks, stuck revolvers through them, and forced the Chinese men to let them in.

  The invasion had deliberately been scheduled for a Sunday, when Chinese from outside Manhattan came to town to shop. Many typically stayed on to gamble, so it was a sure bet the fan tan and pi gow parlors would be humming. And the plan had been a well-kept secret. Eggers had not revealed the assignment until all the officers had boarded the coaches and had not let anyone disembark until they had arrived. In other words, there was no possibility that Tom Lee would be warned and able to get word to the gambling bosses to close up shop. The whole maneuver was executed flawlessly and took only about ten minutes from beginning to end.

  A dozen paddy wagons carrying all available police reserves from south of Fourteenth Street were positioned in front of the selected establishments. The reservists quickly disembarked and cordoned off the streets. As hundreds of people, mostly Chinese and Italians, watched from their windows, balconies, rooftops, and fire escapes and white sightseers in several “See Chinatown by Night” coaches gaped, more than two hundred men were detained. Together with a large collection of gambling paraphernalia, a vast cache of revolvers and knives, and wads of cash seized as evidence, they were ferried to seven different Manhattan station houses.

  It was the largest and most spectacular raid ever carried out in Chinatown. In fact, police said, it was the largest of any kind in New York City history.

  The Parkhurst superintendent, Thomas L. McClintock, whose relationship with Commissioner McAdoo was strained in the best of times, crowed that the crucial evidence had been gathered by James Wang, one of “his” Chinese detectives, who had worked hand in glove with Eggers’s staff. Wang, a Methodist lay reader, was a senior Hip Sing with a criminal record, though McClintock didn’t mention that latter fact. But McAdoo wasn’t about to let the Parkhursts claim even partial credit. He insisted they had had nothing to do with the operation. “The initiative was taken here and every movement was planned here. No society or individual outside the Police Department cooperated with, or had anything to do with, this office,” he declared flatly, although this was clearly untrue. Each coach had included a Chinese stool pigeon.

  McAdoo reiterated that he had seen no evidence that any money paid by Chinese gambling lords ever wound up in the pockets of the police. While that might have been technically true, there was the matter of the letter he had received accusing the local detectives of rampant corruption. For that reason, no one at the Sixth Precinct had been told of the foray in advance, even though all the joints raided were under their jurisdiction. Nor were any of those arrested taken to Elizabeth Street.

  Mindful of the ever-present possibility of retaliation, Eggers ordered that two uniformed patrolmen be placed outside Hip Sing headquarters as a precautionary measure. The raid amounted to a major victory for the Hip Sings, but not because all those arrested were On Leongs. Most were surely gamblers not affiliated with either of the secret societies. What the bust had demonstrated was that Tom Lee and company couldn’t be counted on to deliver the protection for which they were charging the gambling halls. The On Leong franchise had therefore been severely undermined.

  The New York police commissioner William McAdoo, later chief of the city magistrates’ courts, ca. 1910.

  But anyone naive enough to think that the gambling problem had been solved would be sadly mistaken. Two hours after the arrests, some of Eggers’s men returned to one of the Mott Street establishments that had been closed down. Gambling had already resumed.

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  A circus-like atmosphere prevailed at Tombs Police Court the next day. Assistant District Attorneys Frank A. Lord and Arthur C. Train appeared for the People, with the attorney Daniel O’Reilly, a former congressman and friend of Tom Lee’s, retained by the On Leong Tong to represent the defendants. Nearly every seat in the courtroom was filled with Chinese men, some prisoners, some spectators.

  If the police operation the day before had been an exercise in military precision, the arraignment was pure bedlam. The immediate problem was trying to figure out who was who. The various name lists compiled by the detectives did not agree with one another, and at least forty men granted bail the previous day did not return to court. Some even sent paid stand-ins. The magistrate turned in despair to James Wang for help identifying the prisoners, and he, in turn, invited Chow Yong, a middle-aged Hip Sing, to assist as the defendants were called up according to the addresses at which they had been arrested. As they marched in single file to the front, each was scrutinized by Chow, who provided names and addresses for some, including Lee Sing, the On Leong accused of shooting Mock Duck.

  When the seven or eight who had been arrested at 17 Mott came to the front, however, the magistrate looked away for a second. The accused men met Chow’s gaze, and each drew a finger across his throat. Chow blanched and immediately proved unable to identify any of them.

  Twenty-one prisoners were named in this way; most were employees of the gambling houses. The others were dismissed, but in the commotion that followed, even three of those identified managed to disappear. The remaining eighteen were held by the judge on $500 bail. After the hearing, Chow was escorted by police to Hip Sing headquarters, and as the New York Sun noted, the Hip Sings celebrated with “two white women of blondine complexion.”

  But their joy didn’t last long. By noontime, placards had been posted on Chinatown buildings placing a $6,000 bounty on the lives of Chow Yong and James Wang.

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  The Parkhursts, on a roll, decided to go for broke. They quietly secured a warrant for Tom Lee’s arrest on the charge that he had collected $15 a week from a man named Tom Wing to permit him to run a fan tan game at 21 Pell. Then the Parkhurst superintendent, McClintock, trapped Commissioner McAdoo into taking Lee into custody by telling him only that he had a warrant for the arrest of a Chinese gambler without specifying who it was. He asked for two officers from headquarters to help him capture the man, and McAdoo assigned two of Eggers’s vice squad detectives to the task. In this way, Lee was detained on April 26, 1905, and released on $500 bail to await trial.

  Later that day, McAdoo summoned Lee and Mock Duck, who had not left town as expected after his release from jail, to police headquarters on Mulberry Street. He proceeded to have the talk with the men that District Attorney Jerome had threatened a month earlier. Captain Eggers was also present, as was Gin Gum, but McClintock was pointedly not invited. McAdoo wasn’t about to give the Parkhursts any further opportunity to steal his thunder.

  “I told them that gambling had to cease in Chinatown, that I did not care for their factions, and that the same law must apply to them as applies to others,” McAdoo said later. “I told them that the practice of carrying pistols had got to cease,” he continued. And McAdoo also mentioned one other significant fact: he had remanded the detectives at Elizabeth Street to patrol duty elsewhere in the city and had put Chinatown under the direct jurisdiction of Captain Eggers and the Central Office.

  Both Mock Duck and Tom Lee came out of the meeting smiling, but Mock Duck had more reason to do so. McAdoo’s decision meant that none of the officers on the On Leong gravy train would be patrolling Chinatown. It also gu
aranteed that the new policemen assigned to Mott and Pell streets would be dependent on informants for the lay of the land. The Hip Sings quickly stepped in to try to fill the vacuum.

  Then it got even worse for the On Leongs. At 1:00 a.m. the following day, two of Eggers’s men broke into 18 Mott, one of Tom Lee’s properties.

  “What do you want?” Gin Gum demanded.

  “We want to search this place,” they said. And then they began pulling down boxes and overturning furniture.

  Gin Gum, who understood English and knew something of the law, was not about to be railroaded. “Where’s your search warrant?” he demanded.

  “Je-rusalem! Hear that Chink talking about warrants!” was the only reply. And then violence broke out. Two tong members trying to protect their premises were pummeled with blackjacks until they bled. The police found guns on two others and arrested them all.

  “This is one of the most unwarranted and unprovoked assaults I ever heard of,” protested the attorney David Frank Lloyd, who had stepped down from his position as assistant district attorney and was now in private practice, appearing as an attorney for the On Leongs. “Two officers of the law have entered private property without warrant and have beaten two inoffensive citizens. I intend to bring a charge of felonious assault against these men. I have five white witnesses who say that it is the most uncalled for outrage they have ever seen in Chinatown,” he added, mindful that testimony of white witnesses always carried more weight than that of Chinese. By way of defense, the policemen insisted they had seen two “highbinders” sneak into 18 Mott and that Gin Gum and his colleagues had made “threatening gestures” in their direction.

  On Tuesday, May 9, the magistrate made progress in clearing his docket. He dismissed the case of the eighteen On Leongs left over from the Easter Sunday arrests after District Attorney Jerome asserted it would be difficult to secure convictions. He also dismissed the cases against the two On Leongs arrested at their headquarters for possessing guns. The third case heard that day was Tom Lee’s, which was also dismissed, probably for lack of evidence.

  Dong Fong, the Hip Sing who had shot Tom Lee’s cousin Lee Yu, was not so fortunate. He had been incarcerated at the Tombs since his arraignment at the end of February. He finally went on trial in mid-May, charged with shooting with intent to kill. The Parkhurst Society superintendent, McClintock, had provided an alibi, claiming he had been with Dong at the time of the shooting and that Dong hadn’t been involved. Dong, however, pleaded guilty, possibly in exchange for a lighter sentence but otherwise casting serious doubt on McClintock’s rectitude. He was sent to Sing Sing for not less than one and a half, nor more than five, years.

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  Tom Lee had lain low since the disastrous Easter raid and his subsequent arrest, but he hadn’t been idle, and he was nothing if not resourceful. The Hip Sings had benefited when authority over Chinatown was transferred from Elizabeth Street to the Central Office; any relationships Lee had with Sixth Precinct detectives were useless under such a regime. But cooperating with the police had been Lee’s idea in the first place, and if Chinatown had new overlords, he wasn’t about to cede them to Hip Sing upstarts without a fight.

  Accordingly, he sent Chu Gong and Lee Loy out to gather evidence the police might use. They peeked through gratings and keyholes and amassed a list of a dozen gambling houses in Hip Sing territory. And then he sent Gin Gum to police headquarters to tell Eggers and his men all about them.

  Eggers saw his mission as cleaning up Chinatown; he didn’t much care where he got his information or whose ox was getting gored. He certainly had no loyalty to the Hip Sings, who regularly provided the Parkhursts with ammunition they used to bludgeon Commissioner McAdoo, his boss, and the police generally. So he was perfectly willing to sit down with Tom Lee, who suggested timing the next raid for Decoration Day, as Memorial Day was then called, because legal holidays always brought more gamblers than usual to Chinatown.

  In the afternoon of May 30, 1905, Eggers dispatched twenty-five plainclothesmen to Chinatown and put them in charge of fifty uniformed officers. Squads of police borrowed from seven precincts surrounded Pell Street, the Hip Sings’ preserve. Then they tightened their cordon and invaded several gambling halls. Gambling and opium paraphernalia were seized. Eggers ordered that every table, chair, and piece of equipment not needed as evidence be destroyed, so after the prisoners were taken into custody, ax-wielding officers reduced the contents of the gambling halls to kindling. This had never been done to the On Leongs, and the Hip Sings were especially resentful over it. At one point, Chu Gong asked an officer if he might borrow an ax and inflict some of the damage himself.

  In the end, sixty men, including James Wang, were arrested in the largest daylight raid Chinatown had ever seen. Most were discharged, but twenty-six of them, identified as proprietors by On Leong informants, were locked up at the Sixth Precinct.

  Tom Lee made it his business to be far away as all of this took place. A reporter found him at his uptown home. Asked if he had had anything to do with the events of the day in Chinatown, he replied obliquely, “Fine day for Decoration Day; fine day to plant flowers on graves.”

  Less than a month later, the On Leongs struck a second blow at James Wang, on whose life they had earlier placed a bounty. They accused him of extortion. As part and parcel of his role as stool pigeon in the Easter operation, Wang had assisted in identifying the arrested Chinese. Two of them, both On Leongs, later told Assistant District Attorney Frank A. Lord that Wang had shaken them down. After their arrest, they said, he had offered to guarantee their freedom by failing to identify them at the arraignment. For this service, he had demanded, and received, $40 a head. Lord had Wang arrested again. The On Leongs had succeeded in turning his most cherished victory—the Easter Sunday raid—into a resounding personal defeat.

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  The police did not often visit the Doyers Street Chinese Theatre, also known as the Chinese Opera House. There was no need, because bad things didn’t happen there. No vice was associated with it, and there had always been a tacit understanding that it constituted neutral ground where Hip Sing and On Leong alike could enjoy a Chinese play after a day’s work. Americans visited from time to time, but few were drawn to what one called the “strange, curious and grotesque mixture of barbaric costumes, wild contortions and horrible sounds” that characterized Chinese opera.

  On August 6, 1905, the all-male troupe presented a Cantonese drama called The King’s Daughter. It was very popular, so the performance in the four-hundred-seat theater that Sunday night was standing-room only. Nobody in the all-Chinese audience paid much attention when several Hip Sing men quietly took seats in both the front and the back of the hall before the performance began. Nor would anyone have suspected that concealed under their garments were .44-caliber revolvers.

  Suddenly, during a dramatic moment in the play, a Hip Sing jumped from his seat near the front, lit a string of firecrackers, and tossed them onto the stage. The startled actors fled immediately, at which point four Hip Sings in the back rose simultaneously, drew their guns, and shot into the crowd. Panic-stricken theatergoers crawled under seats or dashed for the doors. Their mission accomplished, the men fled, still brandishing their weapons. Thanks to the angle in Doyers Street, they were quickly out of sight.

  The fusillade of more than a hundred bullets shattered windows, knocked plaster from walls, and splintered benches. And although it appeared as though the gunmen had fired indiscriminately, they had actually selected their targets carefully. When police forced their way into the smoke-filled auditorium, they discovered four On Leong men lying on the floor in puddles of their own blood and a score of others cowering under the benches.

  A view of the outside of the Doyers Street Chinese Theatre—a.k.a. the Chinese Opera House—ca. 1908. In 1905, it was the scene of a Hip Sing massacre of On Leong enemies.

  The
officers summoned two ambulances to ferry the wounded to Hudson Street Hospital. A forty-one-year-old restaurateur, shot in the right temple, died on the way, as did Yuck Li, a thirty-nine-year-old grocer shot in the chest. Yuck’s brother, Yuck Yu, a thirty-seven-year-old laundryman, succumbed to a chest wound after reaching the hospital. Only one On Leong, shot in the abdomen, survived, and not for long.

  Soon a squad of police descended on Hip Sing headquarters on the Bowery. They arrested three men inside and another four found hiding on the roof. Two had revolvers that had recently been fired; they were taken to the hospital and identified by the wounded survivor before he died. A little later, officers collared Mock Duck, courtesy of an On Leong informer. As he was led away, several men cursed him. “They have threatened to stab me,” he complained to the arresting officers, who were unable to understand the Chinese epithets.

  Police continued to make arrests until twenty-one Hip Sings were in custody, but they missed the two who had actually planned the executions. One, San Francisco–born Sing Dock, was known as the “Scientific Killer” because of his methodical approach to his chosen occupation. Small in stature, with a lifelong fascination for firearms, he had joined the Hip Sing Tong in California at the age of nineteen. The other was Yee Toy, who had also come from San Francisco. He had taken a job as a cook for a wealthy family when he got to New York. Yee’s boldness was belied by his slight build. Known by the sobriquet “Girl Face” because of his effeminate features, he, too, knew how to handle a gun. But both Sing Dock and Yee Toy were overlooked by police after the shooting.

  The On Leongs had been expecting trouble. A week earlier, Lee Toy had told a reporter he had heard that a dozen of them had been targeted by the Hip Sings for some sort of surprise attack. But no one had expected the theater, theretofore neutral ground, to be the scene of the carnage. Gin Gum told police that the men who were shot had been witnesses against Mock Duck and that the attack was an act of revenge. He also said he had seen Mock Duck lead gunmen through the theater before the shooting and leave before the play began, which was probably a lie; if true, it would certainly have put the On Leongs on alert.