Two men identified as shooters were held without bail pending a coroner’s inquest. Bond was posted for the others, including Mock Duck. Although two eyewitnesses placed him at the scene, he was released on $1,000 bail.
Tom Lee served as master of ceremonies at the double funeral of the Yuck brothers on August 10. Carriages lined both sides of Mott Street, and forty policemen were on hand to keep order. But there was no further trouble from the Hip Sings as the cortege passed through Chinatown on its way to Cypress Hills Cemetery. They had already won this round.
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Smarting from the assassination of four of their brethren, the On Leongs didn’t let even a week go by before striking back. And in so doing, they ratcheted up the conflict to a new and previously unseen level of depravity.
The victim this time was forty-two-year-old Hop Lee, an Eleventh Street laundryman. Two policemen walking past his establishment at 1:00 a.m. on August 12 heard a racket coming from inside, and when they broke in, they came on a gruesome scene: four Chinese men had pinned Hop Lee down on his own ironing board, two at his head and two at his feet. And another was butchering him viciously with a huge meat cleaver.
Hop had been asleep, police said later, when five On Leongs forced his door, dragged him from his bed, and stretched him out on the board. They might have killed him with one blow but instead chose torture. The man wielding the cleaver delivered repeated blows to his body and his head. And in an act of pitiless savagery, he severed Hop Lee’s nose from his face.
Hop’s assailants fled at the sight of the police. Two of them, Charlie Joe and Lee Toy, ran upstairs to the roof of the building. After a struggle, Joe was subdued. Lee Toy, the tough who had beaten up Warry Charles in 1891 and Wong Get in 1894, leaped across a five-foot gap to a neighboring building and then jumped to a third whose roof was a twenty-foot drop from the second. He, too, put up a struggle, but he was apprehended. A third, Mon Moon, was more easily captured: he fell down a flight of stairs while escaping, fracturing several ribs.
Poor Hop Lee was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he identified Mon Moon and Charlie Joe, but not Lee Toy, before he died. While the former recuperated at Bellevue, the coroner decided to hold Joe and set $5,000 bail for Lee Toy.
The police were certain the attack was retaliation for the theater massacre. But why Hop Lee was targeted was a mystery. He was no fighting man, nor was he known to have had a hand in the recent killings. But he was a Hip Sing and a friend of Mock Duck’s, and that was apparently enough for the avenging On Leongs.
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Three days after Hop Lee’s murder, Tom Lee was summoned for a chat with Assistant District Attorney J. Frederic Kernochan, a young, Yale-educated attorney and Spanish-American War veteran. Kernochan wanted to discuss the recent clashes of the tongs, and Lee agreed to the meeting. He asked his attorney, David Frank Lloyd, to accompany him.
But there would be no meeting.
It had been months since a threat had been made on Lee’s life, and he had relaxed his vigilance. He went alone to the corner of Centre and Franklin streets, where he was to meet Lloyd, but the lawyer was late. Suddenly Gin Gum and Charlie Boston overtook him and warned him breathlessly that Mock Duck and three other Hip Sings were “laying” for him. Two were waiting in ambush on Leonard Street, and two were posted on Franklin Street. They had somehow found out about the meeting or else had simply followed Lee to Kernochan’s office.
Lee bolted into the nearby police station, his hat flying in the air. He told his story to two officers, who quickly made the rounds with him and discovered two Chinese men hiding behind a truck in the shadow of the court building. The men fled, but Lee was certain one of them was Mock Duck. He told the police he had learned that the $3,000 bounty the Hip Sings had placed on his head in February was still on offer. And he resolved never again to leave his premises without bodyguards.
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Because of the attempt on Tom Lee’s life, the next move belonged to the On Leongs. And this time, the targets were all members of the Huie family. Although the Huies were closely associated with the Hip Sings, not all were members. On Leongs had killed one, Huie Fong, on Mott Street in February.
The new attack on the Huies was artfully planned. At 9:00 p.m. on August 20, several On Leongs created a diversion on Mott Street by firing half a dozen shots from a roof directly across from their headquarters. It was a calculated effort to draw the police to Mott, and it worked flawlessly. Captain Eggers’s headman in Chinatown hurried from his post in front of the Chinese Theatre. As he and his men searched for the shooters, the real action was taking place on Pell Street.
With Eggers’s men preoccupied, police from Elizabeth Street—who no longer technically had jurisdiction over Chinatown but who still came when called—got to the third floor of 18 Pell first. They found one Huie clan member clutching his right arm, three more shrieking in agony on the floor, and eight others trying to minister to them. The room was a wreck, and the walls were riddled with bullet holes. An officer fashioned a tourniquet to stop the loss of blood from one man, probably saving his life. He and a kinsman who had been shot were taken to the hospital. Two cousins, neither seriously injured, were treated on the spot; they and five others were held as witnesses.
Eggers was furious. He dressed down his Chinatown squad. The shooting had taken place right under the nose of his headman, but the Sixth Precinct police had beaten his men to the scene. The men of the Sixth, who had seen three Chinese men killed and at least five wounded since they had lost their Chinatown franchise, had ample cause for schadenfreude.
At the arraignment, the On Leong secretary, Lee Loy, blamed the Hip Sings for the dustup. He explained unconvincingly that the Huie cousins were actually friendly with Tom Lee and his men, a fact that had ostensibly earned them the enmity of the Hip Sings. Mock Duck’s version of the story was that the cousins, though not Hip Sings, had refused advances by the On Leongs.
“Aren’t you afraid the On Leong Tong will get you sooner or later?” Mock Duck was asked.
“Not on your life,” he replied. “Look, they’re cowards. They’re afraid of me.”
Indeed they were. But the police did not think retaliation would be long in coming. A sign on the big bulletin board near the corner of Pell and Doyers proclaimed, “Members of the Hip Sing Tong on whose head a price of $1,000 is set are warned to remain off the streets this week.”
It was good advice.
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The massacre at the Chinese Theatre had been a watershed. Up to that point, a few Chinese men had died, but to the casual observer the incidents appeared isolated and could be dismissed as the consequence of personal grudges. But the episode on Doyers Street, and now this most recent attack on the Huies, were clearly gang shootings. There was no denying that a line had been crossed.
New Yorkers knew gang wars when they saw them; they had been going on for half a century. In recent years, the papers had reported often, for example, on the rivalry and turf battles between the Eastman Gang, a group of Jewish thugs deeply involved in prostitution and gambling east of the Bowery, and Paul Kelly’s heavily Italian Five Points Gang, whose territory lay to its west. Less than two years had passed since a battle royal between the two gangs on Rivington and Allen streets, which began over a card game, had ended in carnage. It had taken five hours and all the reserves three police stations could muster to quell it, and it had spawned a great public outcry.
The Doyers Street killings made national news, in part because they occurred against the backdrop of what the New York World called a “great crime wave” that had gripped the city in 1905. “The present outbreak of crime is one of the worst that has occurred in New York in many years,” the paper observed in August as it detailed the major thefts, holdups, and violent crimes of the prior month. Even District Attorney Jerome confirmed an uptick in criminal act
ivity.
New Yorkers were feeling more unsafe than usual, and many blamed the massive influx of newcomers for the trouble. Immigration at the Port of New York, which accounted for about 80 percent of all arrivals in the United States, was at an all-time high; from January to April 1905, nearly 290,000 people came from abroad, an increase of more than 40 percent over the same period in 1904. On one Sunday in May, more than 12,000 foreigners landed at Ellis Island. Most of the blame for the uptick in crime fell on Italians and Jews, so the perception of a spike of violence in Chinatown felt like one more unwelcome appendage of the hydra head.
A gang shooting in Chinatown was as much a worry for the average Chinese as it was for municipal authorities. One could now no longer feel safe even in neutral territory like the Chinese Theatre. And the violence was horrible for business. Chinatown’s white tourists, who spent money on food and souvenirs during their visits, would certainly find other diversions if they feared getting caught in cross fire.
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“When there is trouble in Chinatown,” the New York Age declared, “the first thought of the police is, ‘cherchez Mock Duck.’”
By 1905, Mock Duck had become larger than life. The New-York Tribune called him a “bogie man” whom the children of Chinatown had endowed with supernatural attributes. “His big ears can hear a pin drop a block away, his beady eyes can see around the corners ahead of him, he can read the minds that would shoot at him from under blouses [and] no yellow man’s bullet can puncture his thick hide,” it was said.
Mock Duck’s reputation, however, was belied by the fact that there was no proof he had ever murdered anyone. Even the police admitted they couldn’t pin a homicide on him, although they suspected he had masterminded more than one.
“I kill no one. You prove that I kill. I hate nobody, and I am not a bad man,” Mock Duck insisted to the Tribune, which described him as “the picture of injured innocence” in his all-too-frequent appearances before the sergeant at the station house and the magistrate in police court.
But it was not only Mock Duck whose savagery was being exaggerated. One could say the same about the Chinese quarter in general. “Chinatown has been the synonym for vice for many years,” the Buffalo Express wrote. “It is the most vicious of the many vicious districts of New York. It harbors the most dangerous bands of assassins, the most unbridled rings of gamblers and the most daring gangs of opium smugglers and dive keepers that ever flourished in the low life of the metropolis.”
In fact, very little of that was true. There had been just over three thousand arrests in the Sixth Precinct in 1904, but nearly twice that number in the Fifth, Twelfth, and Twenty-second and three times as many in the Nineteenth; all but one of these were in lower Manhattan. That year, ninety-five arrests were made for gambling in the Sixth, a number surpassed in eleven other districts. Opium might have been more specific to the Chinese quarter, but only eighteen arrests were made for violation of the opium law. According to police statistics, 334 Chinese were arrested in New York in 1904, compared with nearly 20,000 Irishmen, more than 13,000 Italians, more than 12,000 Russians, and more than 11,000 Germans. In fact, among the twenty-three categories of “nativity of persons arrested” compiled by the police that year, China ranked second from the bottom. And although Manhattan experienced more than six hundred homicides in 1904, the death toll attributable to the conflict between the Hip Sings and the On Leongs that year had been just one.
Still, it was prejudice and appearances, not facts, that fueled the furor over Chinatown. The Baltimore American correctly complained that New York’s Chinese were getting far more attention than their numbers would suggest they deserved. “The internal politics of the Syrians and the Armenians do not get into the police courts,” it observed, despite their superior numbers. “But as for the Chinese, this handful of strangers, with their queer customs, their strange psychology and their halting efforts to adapt themselves to institutions which are not of their making, have managed in the past six months to involve nearly all the legal machinery of the city, including the District Attorney’s office, the police courts and the detective organization at Police Headquarters, in a little private quarrel of their own.”
But it was more the prejudice of whites than any goings-on in Chinatown that caused New Yorkers to single it out as the city’s most vexing trouble spot. It was not so much that the Chinese themselves had “managed” to involve the legal machinery of the city as it was that that machinery was determined to intrude into Chinese lives. Whites insisted on seeing Chinatown as a quarter shrouded in mystery rather than one troubled by gangs but populated, in the main, by law-abiding people who wished only to be left alone.
When the newspapers wrote about Chinatown, the image presented was of a dangerous and sinister underworld whose perilous alleys crawled with gun-toting, opium-addled gang members. The New York World called it “the worst slum in the city of New York,” a “municipal disfigurement,” a “haven for fugitive criminals,” and “a catch-basin for crime.” It styled the Chinese quarter as “the successor as a crime centre of Five Points and Mulberry Bend,” referring to two of the city’s most notorious rough-and-tumble neighborhoods, both nearby. And it dismissed it as “a place of filth, of squalor, of Oriental tinsel and mystery.”
Eagerly abetting this skewed view were some white hangers-on in Chinatown—sometimes known as lobbygows, a term of uncertain origin—who ran evening coach tours of the quarter and weren’t above staging visits to fake gambling and opium joints, and interviews with “debased” white women of Chinatown to satisfy the prurient interests of their slumming uptown clients. Chuck Connors, one such figure, was a Tammany operative seen by outsiders as “the mayor of Chinatown” even though no Chinese would ever have called him that. He was a useful conduit to the white establishment, because he knew everybody and his fund-raisers gave him excellent access to the rich and powerful. But he made a living showing white New Yorkers and tourists the seedy and exotic Chinatown they wanted to see.
Of more immediate import than the view of the newspapers and the public was the attitude of the police, and it was, in the main, a deeply racist one. When he looked at Chinatown, Commissioner McAdoo did not see tinsel and mystery. He saw only “an ulcer spot on the face of the city which would be much better off if the whole place could be leveled and rebuilt.”
New York had had half a century’s worth of experience with organized crime, and the criminal wrongdoings of the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrant gangs were far more heinous than the tong killings in Chinatown. But the Irish-born McAdoo didn’t even accept that organized Italian crime existed. “That there is such a thing as a thoroughly organized, widely separated secret society which directs its operations in all parts of the United States from some great head centre, such as the Mafia or Black Hand is pictured, I have never believed,” McAdoo wrote.
But he had no doubt about the tongs: “They have a sort of trust, so as to handle the profits of Chinatown, by which they grant permission to gamble, insure protection from the police, create the impression that they have a ‘pull’ with the head ‘Melican’ men, furnish lawyers for defendants in court, and give wise advice out of court.” In McAdoo’s view, they were “dirty, sordid, and mean, vicious and criminal,” and “grafted on Western civilization.”
Evening coach tours of Chinatown were popular with tourists, as this 1905 advertisement shows. Tong wars threatened this profitable enterprise.
The situation in Chinatown was also a major concern for China’s diplomats. Misbehavior among Chinese in America—almost all of whom remained subjects of the emperor—reflected poorly on China. On August 21, Shah Kai-Fu, the Chinese consul, paid a call on the district attorney to see if he could stop the warfare.
Jerome told him to discuss the matter with Commissioner McAdoo.
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The fact that the level of crime in Chinatown had been gre
atly overstated was no guarantee that things there would stay quiet. After the attack on the Huie cousins, retaliation was a foregone conclusion, and Chinatown was put on virtual lockdown. Uniformed headquarters police were stationed about fifty feet apart on the principal thoroughfares, and detectives, as well as private agents employed by Consul Shah, were everywhere, watching everyone.
Local pawnshops and hardware stores nearly sold out of armaments, especially large-caliber revolvers, which many Chinese preferred, and a police dragnet in which about five hundred Chinese were searched yielded several hundred weapons, including meat cleavers and even a crude switchblade. The On Leong heavyweight Lee Toy was among those frisked, and when police found a .44-caliber revolver on him with every chamber loaded, they arrested him.
Everyone braced for bloodshed, but nothing happened for several days—due, no doubt, to the crackdown. The tong men were too canny to misbehave while under a microscope. On August 27, Captain Eggers’s men heard there was likely to be trouble at the Chinese Theatre once again. It seemed like good information; it was the Hip Sings’ turn to strike, and Mock Duck had again been seen in the vicinity. Eggers added five plainclothesmen to the uniformed officers already posted at the stage, in the aisles, and in front of the hall and ordered that every member of the audience be searched that night. When no guns were found, he permitted the show to go on but kept several men inside the theater just in case.
Tensions remained high, however, and there was no shortage of other rumors. Mock Duck told Eggers’s men that On Leong spies posing as laundry supply dealers were staking out Hip Sing–owned laundries uptown for future attacks. And on August 28, Gin Gum went to the Sixth Precinct—which might have lacked authority in Chinatown for the moment but was still where the On Leongs had the best relations—and told the acting captain, Patrick J. Tracy, whom McAdoo had recently named to head Elizabeth Street, that five Hip Sing assassins “armed to the teeth” were en route from Philadelphia. He had learned via long-distance telephone that the men, sent to murder Tom Lee and as many of his followers as possible, were coming by train.
Tong Wars Page 15