Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

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  Police questioned several Chinatown residents about Bow Kum and received reports from California, and the day after the funeral they arrested two San Francisco Chinese men. One was Lau Tong, thirty-four, and the other was a twenty-three-year-old laundryman named Lau Shong, his kinsman.

  On the night of the murder, the Laus had been seen in the courtyard under Bow Kum’s window and observed leaving the place together. Bloodstains were discovered on Lau Tong’s shirtsleeve, and there was evidence acid had been used to remove their traces. Suddenly Chin Lem’s story began to seem credible. The two men were interrogated, but neither confessed. On September 10, 1909, both were indicted for murder.

  San Francisco police records revealed that Lau Tong had been accused of eight shootings and had served a prison term. They also testified that Bow Kum had been a virtual slave in his house and had been removed in a police raid instigated by a mission worker. That is when the woman was taken to the mission house, where she ultimately met Chin Lem.

  When Lau Tong learned of Bow Kum’s whereabouts, police discovered, he had hurried to New York to claim her, but when she refused him, he had insisted on compensation instead. He believed Chin Lem owed him for the woman and demanded $3,000; when Chin refused, he threatened to kill them both. It was only after a final meeting on the day of the murder failed to resolve the impasse that Bow Kum had been butchered.

  Lau Tong and Lau Shong were Four Brothers men. When Chin Lem refused to pay, it was deemed not a personal matter but rather an issue for their respective societies to sort out. Chin had presented the problem to the leaders of the On Leong Tong, who determined that because the girl had been procured through the mission and not directly, the demand was without merit and no payment was required.

  The On Leongs’ decision turned out to be not only Bow Kum’s death warrant but also the trigger for out-and-out war. The Second Tong War—known as the Four Brothers’ War—would be fought with revolvers, pistols, and fire and would involve imported hatchet men. The Chinese Theatre would again figure in the action, as would Pell Street and an underground arcade. The whole affair would last only a little over a year, but repeated peacemaking efforts would be required to bring it to an end.

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  Violence broke out on the afternoon of September 12, 1909, even though Chinatown was saturated with patrolmen and detectives, when a thirty-nine-year-old Four Brothers laundryman named Gun Kee was shot in front of On Leong headquarters. His assailant, Lee Wah, was an On Leong and a cousin of Tom Lee’s.

  A policeman saw Lee Wah shoot his victim in the back at close range with a derringer—a pocket pistol. Gun Kee dropped to the pavement, although he suffered only a superficial wound. The officer arrested Lee Wah, who refused to discuss his motive for the shooting, though the police were certain it was related to the Bow Kum murder.

  There was nothing random about the targeting of Gun Kee. Gin Gum said Gun Kee had attempted to assassinate him in the same location when he and several other On Leongs were being examined by the grand jury in the Bow Kum case. And the next day, Lau Tong and Lau Shong had been arraigned at Tombs Police Court for the murder of the young woman. They pleaded not guilty and were held on $3,000 bail each.

  This new outbreak of hostilities had nothing to do with gambling. Indeed, there wasn’t much gambling going on in Chinatown. When Commissioner Bingham promoted thirty-nine-year-old Michael J. Galvin, a seventeen-year veteran on the force, to captain and assigned him to the Sixth Precinct the previous spring, he had made it clear that cleaning up Chinatown was to be Galvin’s highest priority. That meant closing down not only the gambling dens but the “disorderly houses” as well.

  Galvin had set a date after which white females who could not prove they were married to Chinese—the vast majority of Chinatown’s prostitutes fell into this category—had to leave the quarter. This maneuver, although highly questionable legally, was taken seriously, and by July, 125 Chinatown apartments formerly occupied by white women were vacated. The tally had reached 200 by September. In the case of the gambling houses, Galvin’s opening salvo was a symbolic one: he closed down an operation at 14 Mott—On Leong headquarters—and stationed a guard outside. But he also raided a Hip Sing parlor at 22 Pell. By July, fifty-six gambling houses had been closed, about two-thirds Hip Sing clients and the rest On Leong.

  Galvin was successful where others had failed, but it took a lot out of him. Between the Elsie Sigel and the Bow Kum murder investigations, he was putting in twenty-hour workdays. The chief lost forty pounds during the first few months of his command and suffered a nervous breakdown in August. Warned by his doctor that he must rest or die, he took a leave of absence. By late fall, however, he was back on the job.

  Although many proclaimed the death of the peace treaty, it had not, in fact, been broken with the shooting of Gun Kee. This battle did not concern the Hip Sings; it pitted the On Leongs against an entirely different adversary. And it was an enemy smarting from three perceived wrongs: the refusal of the On Leongs to offer compensation for Bow Kum; the arrest of her two suspected killers; and now the wounding of a Four Brothers man.

  Everyone braced for retaliation. Tom Lee increased his personal detail to six men. The police heard that two cases of derringers had arrived at On Leong headquarters the previous week and that the Hip Sings had received a shipment of their own. So they sent twenty-five uniformed officers and an equal number of plainclothesmen on a house-to-house search for the weapons. On September 13, they forced their way into both headquarters buildings, but the tongs were a step ahead of them. The guns had been distributed before they could be confiscated.

  In mid-October, when the atmosphere was at its most tense, news came from Boston that three of the Hip Sings convicted of first-degree murder there had been put to death in the electric chair. Suddenly the Hip Sings seemed equally likely to strike a blow against the On Leongs. But it was the Four Brothers who acted, and it took only until November 5.

  That evening, two On Leongs slated to testify against the Laus were seriously wounded in Chatham Square. Four out-of-town thugs recruited by the Four Brothers followed them to the foot of Doyers Street, where two drew revolvers and fired. One target was shot through the lung and fell to the pavement. The quartet was arrested and arraigned the same day.

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  Captain Galvin expected another attack but didn’t think it would come until after the trial of Bow Kum’s alleged assassins. He was certain there would be trouble if the suspects were acquitted, and the police had learned that both organizations were seeking to import gunmen from Boston. The Four Brothers had sent Chu Lock—the gambling house owner acquitted of attacking Mock Duck in 1897—there to hire hatchet men. And Boston police reported that a dozen Chinese with criminal records were on their way to New York.

  Galvin hoped to head off another cycle of homicides and thought he saw an opportunity to mediate when the national president of the Four Brothers’ Society, Sam Lock, who had arrived from San Francisco to arrange for the defense of the accused assassins, called on him on November 15. Galvin tried to convene a peace parley, but Tom Lee spurned his invitation. Gin Gum, however, did reassure the New York Times that “we are not making any threats, and if any trouble starts here the On Leong Tong won’t start it.”

  At the end of November, however, the On Leongs did start trouble. They made another move against the Four Brothers, but one that involved neither bullets nor blood: they expelled its members. Membership in the two organizations had always overlapped; there was no perceived conflict, because one was a tong while the other was a clan society, and bad blood between the two groups had not changed that fact. But enmity had gotten so intense since the Bow Kum murder that the powers that be in the On Leong Tong decided to take preemptive action. A poster appeared at On Leong headquarters announcing that fifty-four members had been expelled for nonpayment of dues. The
pretext, of course, was bogus, and nobody was fooled: every name on the list belonged to a Four Brothers man. Some suggested it had been a face-saving move by the On Leongs, who had been tipped off to expect a mass resignation. There was even speculation that those ousted had applied to the Hip Sings for membership.

  A month later, on December 27, two Four Brothers men in their seventies were shot in a room at 30½ Pell Street. One died immediately, and the other, an officer in the society, was fatally wounded after taking three bullets. On his deathbed, he told police that four men had broken into the room and that two had stood by as the others fired. He did not identify them, but all signs pointed to the On Leongs. War between them and the Four Brothers was now in full throttle.

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  Three days later, Ah Hoon got his. He had been flirting with death for several years, and his time had finally come.

  Ah Hoon, an On Leong, was a comedian at the Chinese Theatre, where he doubled as assistant manager. He was no favorite of the Hip Sings; they had been the butt of some of his jokes, and they had allegedly marked him for death shortly after he arrived from San Francisco in 1906. The thirty-five-year-old comic lived at 10 Chatham Square, a communal residence for actors and musicians who worked in the theater a few doors away. He died at about 2:00 a.m. in the hallway outside his fourth-floor room from a single shot to the head.

  There were two theories as to why Ah Hoon was chosen. He had been a member of the Four Brothers in San Francisco and by one account had been warned to renounce his On Leong membership in New York. But the police had a more plausible notion: Ah Hoon was murdered in retaliation for the killing of the two elderly Four Brothers men and probably by shooters imported from Boston.

  Ah Hoon had known he was a marked man. A death threat had been pinned to his door the day before. He had even made plans to leave town and appealed for police protection in the meantime. Captain Galvin had assigned two detectives to escort him to and from the theater and also staked out the hall itself, where it was believed a strike might occur.

  On the night of his death, Ah Hoon was nervous. He didn’t eat dinner, and he cut his act short. Nothing happened at the theater, but to be safe, the police saw him home by way of a back exit. They escorted him through backyards to the rear entrance of 10 Chatham Square and then up the back stairs to the fourth floor. They did not leave until he was safely in his room for the night. The murder occurred when he emerged several minutes later to clean up at the washstand across the hall. Nobody saw the shooter.

  A year after the slaying of Ah Hoon, the crook in Doyers Street was first referred to as the Bloody Angle of Chinatown. But because Ah Hoon didn’t die there—he didn’t even set foot on Doyers the night he was murdered—the term had to refer to other events on that short alley, whose obtuse angle prevents a straight line of sight from its Pell Street end to Chatham Square. Although legend has long held that tong men used the Doyers Street bend for cover, sneaking up on one another to deal unexpected deathblows, that does not seem actually to have happened. There were far more face-offs on Mott and Pell streets than ever took place on Doyers, which was ostensibly neutral territory. Doyers did, however, provide a convenient exit for the Hip Sing killers involved in the 1905 Chinese Theatre massacre, and that incident might have been the source of the nickname.

  In the wake of Ah Hoon’s murder, the newspapers were full of dire proclamations that New York’s tong war had been renewed and that the truce had been broken. And there was indeed a war on, but it wasn’t a renewal, because the Hip Sings were not involved. But with the assassination of Ah Hoon, everybody knew there would be more trouble between the On Leongs and the Four Brothers.

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  With the rise to prominence of the Four Brothers came hints the Hip Sings were in decline. The latter’s New York branch had been tapped for substantial financial support for their accused Boston brothers, and the attorneys’ fees, especially through the lengthy appeals process, had been burdensome. This expense, coupled with a severe drop in income after Captain Galvin closed the gambling halls and ejected the prostitutes, had made a huge dent in the tong’s treasury. The Hip Sings had also lost members—and their dues—after the departure of Mock Duck.

  Perhaps because of this reversal in their fortunes, the Hip Sings decided to ally with the Four Brothers against their common antagonist. In early 1910, cooperation between the two groups was formalized. On January 3, a notice appeared on Chinatown bulletin boards that translates as follows:

  All the companies and tongs on Pell and Doyers Streets, namely the Four Brothers’ Society, the Hip Sing Tong and all the minor family [associations] in the neighborhood, have openly declared war against the great On Leong Tong of Mott Street. A few days ago, members of the On Leong Tong crept up to the rooms of two old men—the two oldest men in the Four Brothers’ Society; men who did not fight and were poor and could not carry a gun—and murdered them in cold blood.

  This would have posed a major challenge to the On Leong Tong had anything come of it, but nothing much did. One sign of it, though, was that not only did Sam Lock, the senior Four Brothers functionary from San Francisco, attend the trial of Lau Tong and Lau Shong, but Mock Duck did as well. After returning from the West briefly in the spring of 1909, he had gone back to Denver to tend to unfinished business that, ironically, also involved an indentured Chinese woman. He had paid $4,000 for Lilly Yem, who, like Bow Kum, had fled into the arms of Christian mission workers, and he had gone back to reclaim his “property.” But he was now back in New York and back in the good graces of the Hip Sing Tong.

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  The attorney Terence J. McManus appeared for the defendants in the Bow Kum murder trial at the criminal branch of the New York County Supreme Court. The prosecutor, however, was the perennial Frank Moss, recently appointed first assistant district attorney. He was now working under the direction of Charles S. Whitman, the former magistrate and newly elected district attorney of New York County.

  Moss began by telling the jury that the murder of Bow Kum had been one of the most brutal his office had ever prosecuted. After testimony from the coroner and several policemen, he called Charlie Boston, now the On Leong Tong president, as his first Chinese witness. He wasn’t accustomed to getting support from the On Leongs, but in this case he knew he could count on a cooperative witness.

  The stocky Boston, outfitted in Chinese robes, testified that the two defendants had approached him prior to the murder and asked him to urge Chin Lem to come to terms. He said he had gone to see the couple and that Bow Kum herself had expressed willingness to commit to paying Lau Tong $1,500 at some future date but that Chin Lem had refused. When Boston was asked about his own organization and he responded that the On Leong Tong was a merchant association that had nothing to do with gambling, however, there was an audible titter in the audience.

  Chin Lem, the sometime laundryman who brought Bow Kum to New York.

  On cross-examination, Boston revealed that the On Leongs had convened a meeting to discuss strategies for getting Chin Lem acquitted. He stated that Tom Lee had pledged money to defend Chin Lem but had vowed he would not be party to framing anyone else for the crime.

  The principal prosecution witness was Chin Lem himself, decked out in stylish Western clothing, his cropped hair parted to one side. He related how he had met Bow Kum, married her, and brought her to New York and how agents of the Four Brothers had come to reclaim her or, failing that, to demand compensation. But he didn’t acquit himself well under cross-examination, which lasted a full hour. The defense made every effort to discredit him and pin the murder on him. McManus got him to admit that he had not found employment in New York and, when he couldn’t account for how he had supported himself since his arrival, implied he had used Bow Kum’s favors to earn his living. In the process, he established that Chin Lem had not married Bow Kum legally, because he had another wife in China
.

  “You know under American laws you couldn’t have two wives?” McManus asked.

  “I go under Chinese laws,” Chin Lem replied.

  “Isn’t it a fact that she wanted to leave you and go to Boston because you were forcing her to lead an immoral life?” he probed.

  “No,” the witness protested. But the attorney’s point was made.

  McManus made much of the fact that Chin Lem’s hands had been bloodstained when he reported the murder and that he owned knives similar to the one found next to the body.

  The next day, Moss put up a parade of witnesses, all friends of Chin Lem’s. So many placed the defendants at the scene of the murder in precisely the same way that the defense attorney wondered out loud whether they had been holding a mass meeting with a brass band while they waited outside the building for the crime to be committed. It was far more likely, of course, that the only meeting that took place was the one at On Leong headquarters at which the strategy for Chin Lem’s defense, as well as the amount to pay the witnesses, was decided.

  The defense presented its entire case in a day. The thrust was that the defendants were innocents being scapegoated by the On Leong Tong in order to shift the blame from Chin Lem. Lau Tong testified that he didn’t know Chin Lem, had never seen Bow Kum, hadn’t heard of her death until the morning after. Lau Shong claimed he had been unaware of the murder until his arrest. A parade of alibi witnesses, white and Chinese, supported the testimony of both that they had been elsewhere on the night the young woman died.

  After summations, the case went to the jurors. As the New York Times put it, “A bewildered jury, after being shown a preliminary glimpse at the jealousies and ethics of a strange people, had the choice between two absolutely contradictory lines of evidence.” This was often the case in Chinese trials. Honesty didn’t come into the picture when friends’ lives and liberty were at stake or when one side or another was willing to pay handsomely for helpful testimony.