Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  Mock Duck confirmed that he had quit the Hip Sings. He blamed some of his former brethren for his arrest for the murder of Ah Fee in 1900 and, more recently, for the bribery charge. He was, he said, on bad terms with both of the tongs.

  “I have to be very careful,” he told the Times. “I watch all around me when I go out, and I stay in the house at night,” he added, “so no one can kill me in the dark.”

  He was right to be wary. Several months later, someone tried to burn down his home. Two old petticoats soaked in oil were the cause of the fire at 42 Division Street. The men who found them extinguished the blaze before any damage was done. But oily rags had been discovered in the building on two prior occasions during the previous three weeks, and the police strongly suspected an On Leong plot. When similar cloths were again found outside Mock Duck’s door a day later, and three additional attempts were made in early March 1908, they predicted a full-blown recurrence of the war.

  March also brought justice in both Boston and Philadelphia. In Boston, after a twenty-nine-day trial, nine of the Hip Sings held in the August Chinatown shootings were convicted of murder in the first degree, the tenth having died in jail. Among them was their ringleader, Warry Charles, who had clashed with Lee Toy in New York many years earlier before relocating to Boston. And in Philadelphia, two On Leongs arrested the previous July were slated to be hanged.

  New York was nervous. Commissioner Bingham placed fifty plainclothesmen in Chinatown. And sure enough, ten days later there was a murder on Mott Street. It happened just in front of the Church of the Transfiguration and was actually witnessed by Assistant District Attorney Theodore Ward, who happened to be passing through Chinatown that day.

  The victim was Ing Mow, a tall, lanky Hip Sing. A former laundryman, he had risen in the ranks after Mock Duck left the fold. Ing was walking down Mott when three Chinese men blocked his way. They provoked an altercation, and he was shot behind the ear. He collapsed on the steps of the priest’s house adjoining the church as the shooter jettisoned his gun and the attackers fled. Ward attended Ing until the ambulance arrived, but the Chinese man expired on the way to the hospital.

  The consensus was that Ing was killed because he had helped police uncover evidence that led to the convictions of the Philadelphia murderers. The following day, the New-York Tribune put it this way: “The Hip Sing Tong already has a new and a long bill to present to its most honorable enemy, the On Leong Tong, and yesterday one more item was added to it.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  It would have been easy to conclude from the newspapers that nearly everyone in New York’s Chinatown was either Hip Sing or On Leong. But tong men actually always constituted only a fraction of the Chinese population. They were just the ones who got all the attention.

  The tongs were free to recruit Chinese men of all stripes, but they did not have the advantage of a “built in” pool of members like the geographic and clan societies. To attract and keep members, they had to offer carrots or sticks—or both. As a result of their underworld activities and violent confrontations, membership—when it was known, because they were ostensibly secret societies—carried a certain stigma among other Chinese and certainly in the wider society.

  Leong Gor Yun, in Chinatown Inside Out, offered some insight:

  Chinese of all classes join the tongs mostly for economic protection, sometimes for revenge. Except for the higher-ups and the hatchet-men, most of the tong members are plain victims of exploitation. They do not brag about being tong members, for there is a general feeling among the Chinese that no one would join a tong if he could help it. Among tong members the hatchet-men are considered a bad lot. It is they who start and profit by tong wars, though they take orders from the men at the top.

  Most of the members are recruited among the innocent, quiet Chinese; only when they have been oppressed or exploited to the limit of endurance, will they join either the tong of the oppressor to demand redress, or the rival tong for protection and revenge. Compared to the whole population, tong membership is small.

  In other words, many good men joined the tongs for protection from harassment. They could affiliate with a group that was shaking them down, or they could join a rival organization. In either case, the persecution would stop.

  It was easy to lose sight of Leong’s points—that tong men accounted for a relatively tiny percentage of the Chinese community and that not every tong man was a killer—when the headlines suggested another story. The truth was, most Chinese were hapless bystanders who watched the wars from the sidelines but suffered along with everyone else when all Chinese were tarred by the tongs, when tourists and businesses fled Chinatown, and when draconian solutions to the problem were proposed and carried out.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  The On Leongs continued to feather their nest by cementing their relationships with New York’s powerful. Thomas F. Foley, a Tammany operative and saloon owner known as “Big Tom,” who had attended the 1906 peace banquet, had been sworn in as sheriff of New York County in January, and Tom Lee made sure to show up at his annual picnic. He brought twenty well-dressed Chinese men to show his respect and support for Foley, with whom he had maintained a warm friendship for many years.

  After the repeated attempts to burn him alive, Mock Duck went on the road. The previous year, he had gone to Chicago, where he agitated with his old Hip Sing colleagues to raise the “protection” fee charged local merchants from $20 to $60 a week. In November 1908, however, his destination was Denver. And within days of his appearance, the town seemed on the verge of its first highbinder war. The familiar cause was control of gambling. On November 19, the body of Yee Long was found in an alley in the Chinese quarter. He had been poisoned. As the local police pieced it together, Mock Duck had been summoned by a fan tan operator trying to muscle his way into the lottery business. Yee Long was a casualty of this battle.

  After Denver, Mock Duck went on to San Francisco, and by the spring of 1909 he was back in Gotham, dripping with diamonds. The New York Sun took pains to describe the “dazzling” horseshoe pin that secured his tie, the “blazing” watch charm at his waist, and the four-carat rock on his finger. Word on the street, which he denied, was that he had netted $30,000 from his Denver business.

  Mock Duck was not back in time for the dinner celebrating the third anniversary of the peace accord, nor would he likely have been invited if he had been. Tom Lee, however, was very much in evidence. This feast was again held at the Port Arthur, and the usual luminaries were present, including Judge Foster and the newly appointed assistant U.S. attorney David Frank Lloyd, who had previously represented the On Leongs and who presided at the dinner. The last speaker was the coroner, who noted wryly that “since they have had peace in Chinatown, there has been no call for my services.”

  But there would be soon enough.

  Chapter 11

  The Four Brothers’ War

  On June 18, 1909, the half-clothed, half-decomposed body of Elsie Sigel, a twenty-two-year-old white missionary working in Chinatown, was discovered inside a steamer trunk above a chop suey restaurant on Eighth Avenue. Missing for more than a week, the young granddaughter of a Civil War hero had been strangled with a curtain cord that remained tightly wound around her neck.

  Sigel’s murder was quickly determined to be a crime of passion. A Chinese waiter named Leon Ling was named as a person of interest, because her corpse had been discovered in his room. The two had been having an affair over the strenuous objection of Elsie’s parents. Most damning was the fact that the thirty-year-old Ling had suddenly disappeared, together with a friend.

  The slaying made national news, and a manhunt was begun. New York police arrested Chu Gain, proprietor of the Port Arthur Restaurant, who had also known Sigel intimately and had been a rival for her affections. And Ling’s companion was caught in Amsterdam, New York, and subjected to thirty hours of unremitting interrogation. He was firm i
n fingering Ling as Elsie’s killer and cited jealousy over her relationship with Chu Gain as the motive. But he steadfastly maintained he had no idea where Ling was.

  The police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, took a personal interest in the investigation. He could hardly have done otherwise, so salacious and relentless was the news coverage, and he ordered photographs and descriptions of Ling distributed to police departments across the country. But in early July, Bingham was summarily dismissed, his penchant for reform, his severe management style, and his frequent shake-ups having finally caught up with him. His sudden removal was blamed by some on the inability of the police to capture Elsie’s slayer.

  Ling was never apprehended, but his presumed crime cast a long shadow on Chinatown. The interracial nature of the affair fanned the flames of bigotry and set off a wave of hysteria. Business in Chinatown fell off sharply; Tom Lee claimed it went down 70 percent after the murder. “Sightseers seem afraid to come to Chinatown any more, or the few who do come here hesitate to go into the stores,” he complained to the New York Times. Worse, he reported, vigilantes posing as police officers were attacking Chinese, raiding their stores, and robbing their apartments.

  Sigel’s murder, and the sensational newspaper coverage that followed it, had unleashed a torrent of antipathy toward Chinese everywhere. Fearing for their personal safety, New York Chinatown merchants even sent a delegation to Washington to press China’s chargé d’affaires to request special protection from the federal government. This appeal was passed on to the governor of New York and, in turn, to the newly appointed acting police commissioner, William F. Baker, who was promoted after Bingham’s ouster. And Baker did, indeed, augment the police presence in the Chinese quarter.

  Recognizing the threat posed by the case to the welfare of Chinese in America, Wu Ting Fang, China’s minister to the United States, called on all Chinese to assist in the dragnet. The Oriental Club—an association of New York’s leading Chinese—offered $500 for the arrest and conviction of Elsie’s murderer. And the officers of the Chee Kung Tong—the so-called Chinese Freemasons—felt so compelled to distance themselves from Leon Ling that they sent a letter to the Times stating that although he had once been proposed for membership in their organization, he had never belonged.

  But Ling had been a member of a Chinese association, though not of the Hip Sings or the On Leongs. He had belonged to the Four Brothers’ Society, which was suspected of harboring him. The Four Brothers was not a secret society like the fighting tongs; it was a clan organization, and it normally kept a low profile. But it had the resources and the moxie to defend its interests if these were threatened.

  The group was known formally as the Lung Kong Tin Yee Gong Shaw (after a temple in Guangdong Province) and popularly as the See Sing Tong, meaning the “Four Surnames Society.” It claimed to trace its roots back to seventeenth-century China, although such a beginning is apocryphal. It was an alliance of four numerically small families—the Lau, Kwan, Cheung, and Chu clans—that had been formed in San Francisco and from there established itself in other North American Chinatowns. The New York branch was headquartered at 22 Pell.

  The Hip Sings had clashed with the Four Brothers in 1897 when Mock Duck tried to shake down Chu Lock’s Pell Street gambling house. Most members of the Chu family belonged to the society, including Chu Gain, Ling’s rival for Elsie Sigel’s affections, and Chu Fong, the Hong Kong–born former proprietor of the Doyers Street theater, who was its president. But something heinous was about to happen that would deeply embitter the Four Brothers’ relationship not with the Hip Sings but with the On Leong Tong. And it would also involve a woman.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  While the police were turning Chinatown upside down looking for Leon Ling, five of the nine Boston Hip Sings convicted of the July 1907 murders were sentenced to the electric chair. Nearly everybody feared a new tong war would result. Even with thirty uniformed officers and thirty detectives posted in the Chinese quarter, Tom Lee didn’t feel safe enough to venture outside 18 Mott for several days, and he kept half a dozen men around him at all times. At one point, at the urging of nervous detectives, he retreated to his uptown home.

  Mock Duck, always a person of interest when violence broke out, went to the Elizabeth Street Station voluntarily this time. He wanted the police to know that he was off for Coney Island and intended to keep out of any altercations. He even invited them to send a detective to see him off to prove he was leaving Manhattan. But, although he didn’t say so, he wasn’t out of the game forever. A newspaper report less than a week later suggested Mock Duck had buried the hatchet with the Hip Sings and had been reinstated as a “silent member” of the tong.

  When no trouble broke out, the extra police were withdrawn. But the following month, tragedy struck again when, at 2:00 a.m. on August 15, 1909, a frightened Chinese man named Chin Lem raced into the street from 17 Mott, searching frantically for a policeman.

  “Murder!” he screamed as he spied a bluecoat across the street. He led the officer to an outbuilding in the rear of No. 17 and up a staircase to the second floor. Unlocking a door, he revealed the mutilated body of a round-faced twenty-one-year-old Chinese woman clad in a yellow silk jacket and blue silk trousers. She was lying next to a blood-soaked bunk, a diagonal slash across her abdomen and a bloody, seven-inch hunting knife stuck upright in the floor beside her corpse. Marks on her throat and the condition of her clothing suggested she had been strangled before she was stabbed. Cuts on her hands indicated she had struggled with her assailant. She had also been gored twice through the heart.

  Police detectives posted in Chinatown on July 6, 1909, in anticipation of a new tong war.

  The policeman took Chin, a thirty-one-year-old out-of-work laundryman, to the station house, where he told Michael J. Galvin, who had been made captain shortly before Commissioner Bingham’s departure, that he lived across the street from the crime scene at 22 Mott in rooms belonging to the On Leong Tong, which he had recently joined. There police found a trunk, two new Colt revolvers, and six long, horn-handled hunting knives resembling the one found near the body. Inside the trunk were the dead woman’s clothes, some jewelry, and photographs of herself with Chin Lem. And across the street, in the room where the body lay, were several letters, including dunning notices demanding payment for jewelry.

  Chin Lem told the captain he had left the woman in her room while he went to play cards and had found her dead upon his return. Her name, he said, was Bow Kum, and she was his wife. Fighting tears, he related that she had been living in a San Francisco mission when they met and that she had rejected another suitor—a man named Lau Tong—before agreeing to marry him. He had come to New York first and sent for her later.

  Three weeks earlier, Lau Tong had shown up and demanded $3,000, insisting she belonged to him. Chin Lem, he had asserted, had had no right to take her without compensation. Chin blamed Lau for her murder. Asked to explain why his own bloody handprint had been found on one of the house’s wooden shutters, Chin explained he had bloodied it when he raised the young woman’s head to determine whether she was still alive.

  Over the next several days, police set about unraveling Bow Kum’s tragic story. Born in China, she had been brought to San Francisco to work as a servant but had been sold upon arrival. Rescued by Donaldina Cameron, a well-known Bay Area missionary, she had been taken to the Presbyterian Home, where she remained for six months. Eventually, she was permitted to leave to marry Chin Lem, then a successful laundry owner, who had asked for her hand. It seemed that Lau Tong had not been her suitor so much as her owner and that he was seeking restitution of his property, which he claimed included Bow Kum and her jewelry.

  The police asked why the couple did not share quarters, and Chin Lem did not offer a reassuring explanation: he said she had previously lived with him but had moved to No. 17, which explained why some of her belongings were still in his room but cast doubt on the
nature of the relationship. They suspected Bow Kum had been working as a prostitute. Word on the street in Chinatown was that “many men had been attentive” to the young woman, and the fact that the couple lived apart seemed to bear this out.

  Chin Lem was held on $5,000 bail as a material witness and a suspicious person but was not accused of murder. He made no effort to secure bond and was remanded to the Tombs, where he was watched carefully, lest he bite off his fingernails. The police planned to have a chemist examine the dried blood on them the following day to see if it was a match with that of the dead woman.

  The signs pointed to another crime of passion, with Chin Lem as Bow Kum’s killer. The police were unable to connect anyone else to the murder, and Lau Tong, the man Chin accused, had apparently not been seen in Chinatown. But unless they could uncover concrete evidence, they had little hope of securing a conviction.

  The only known portrait of Bow Kum, whose murder launched New York’s second major tong clash, the Four Brothers’ War.

  The On Leongs raised several thousand dollars for Chin Lem’s defense and hired an attorney. By August 18, they had collected enough to secure bail as well, and he was released. After conferring with his fellow tong men, he announced that several witnesses had come forward and would be able to identify the killer on sight, a story immediately dismissed by Captain Galvin, who believed, as most observers certainly must also have, that it was merely a ploy hatched by the On Leongs to clear their compatriot.

  Gin Gum, Chin Lem’s brother On Leong, arranged for a proper burial for poor Bow Kum. The next day, accompanied in the coffin by some dainty edibles, a deck of cards, a comb, a brush, and a mirror, the body of the hapless girl was taken by coach to Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn and interred there. Chin Lem alone cried bitterly over her casket.