After deliberating for several hours, the jurors returned a verdict of not guilty. And the two defendants promptly bowed to them, Chinese-style, in gratitude.
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The war Captain Galvin predicted if the defendants were acquitted would have broken out on January 23, 1910, had twenty-eight-year-old Yoshito Saito been the man his shooter thought he was. The hapless Saito, a Japanese valet, was shot through the back in front of 4 Doyers Street that day by a Four Brothers man named Jung Hing. It was his misfortune to be a dead ringer for an On Leong who had testified against the Laus in the Bow Kum trial.
Jung Hing was five feet six and weighed 125 pounds. He was dressed nattily in up-to-date American clothes, purple socks peering out from above the tops of his leather shoes. He dropped his revolver and fled into No. 4 but was apprehended by a patrolman. Two white lobbygows, hangers-on in the Chinese quarter, identified him, as did the victim before he died.
Although there had been a killing, and although the killer had been aiming for an On Leong, no On Leong had died, so no retaliation was required. The following month, in fact, the On Leongs gave a dinner to celebrate the end of the New Year festival and the peace compact with the Hip Sings, now four years old.
Nearly half of the police headquarters detective staff attended, a strong indication that the On Leongs had made progress in cultivating them. Even though authority over Chinatown had been returned to Elizabeth Street, headquarters police had been drawn into Chinese affairs in the past and could be again. And because the Hip Sings had made it a practice to go right to the top when they wanted the police involved—usually in a raid on an On Leong joint—better relations with Central Office staff were obviously beneficial to the On Leongs as well. Nor was there any downside to sidling up to them.
Thousands of firecrackers heralded the arrival of the guests, all of whom received white carnations to pin to their lapels—emblems of the armistice. But this was an On Leong show; if any Hip Sings or Four Brothers members were on the guest list, there is no record of it. Tom Lee, Charlie Boston, and Gin Gum, the hosts, entertained not only the police but also assistant U.S. attorneys David Frank Lloyd, who served as toastmaster, and Francis P. Garvan, who had prosecuted Ah Fee’s alleged slayers in 1901 and four Hip Sings accused in the Bowery shootings three years later. Other members of the district attorney’s staff were present, as was Judge Foster and the coroner Israel L. Feinberg. It was a lovefest in which one of the guests lauded Tom Lee, who beamed through it all.
The New York Sun provided a succinct, tongue-in-cheek cheat sheet that explained exactly why the On Leongs were cultivating a few of the guests: “There was Coroner Feinberg, who sits on ’em; Magistrate Corrigan, who holds ’em for examination; the fifteen assistants from the District Attorney’s office, who prosecute ’em and several lawyers who defend ’em.” Lloyd couldn’t resist a dig at the police in his remarks, illustrating the rift in the relationship between his office and the police. He observed that if the restaurant’s windows had been open, “certain police captains” would hear him say there would not be half as many violent crimes in Chinatown if the police did not side with one faction over the other.
Not to be outdone, the Hip Sings held their own dinner on Pell a week later. They, too, invited guests from law enforcement, including several assistant district attorneys, police—from both the Sixth Precinct and the Central Office—and of course the Parkhurst Society.
All seemed relatively calm in Chinatown, but a debt between the On Leongs and the Four Brothers remained unpaid. A down payment would shortly be made on that obligation.
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The first victim—and the luckiest—was forty-six-year-old Chu Moy Yen. A Four Brothers man who ranked just under Sam Lock, he didn’t usually venture onto On Leong turf. But on Sunday, April 10, 1910, an errand took him to Mott Street, and when he passed the Port Arthur Restaurant at Nos. 7–9 early that afternoon, he was shot by a tall Chinese who escaped into the building. Chu took two bullets in the right thigh. Although he got a good look at his shooter, he declined to identify him to the police.
Retaliation took only a couple of hours. Even though Chinatown was immediately flooded with police after the attack, Chu Hen, an undersized but powerful Pell Street laundryman, a Four Brothers member, and a Chu kinsman, still managed to shoot and kill Chung Fook, an On Leong, at the foot of Mott Street. Chu, who inadvertently fled into the arms of a policeman and was immediately arrested, had been taking no chances: his torso was wrapped in several layers of protective fabric, one of steel, three of leather, and an outer covering of silk.
The Port Arthur Restaurant on Mott Street in April 1910 after the shooting of Chu Moy Yen. The building to its immediate right, No. 11, was owned by Charlie Boston and housed a brothel. It was nearly blown up in 1912 in an effort to assassinate a senior On Leong officer.
Captain Richard E. Enright, a fourteen-year veteran who was named acting head of Elizabeth Street when Captain Galvin was transferred to Coney Island for his health by Commissioner William F. Baker, sent out all his reserves and requested backup from other stations. More than a hundred extra police flooded the quarter, and visitors were urged to stay out of Chinatown. Everyone waited for the next shoe to drop.
Several newspapers blamed the outbreak on the killing of Bow Kum. Others cited the suppression of Chinatown gambling and the Elsie Sigel murder. They also pointed to tensions stemming from the recent decrease in the Chinatown population. An informal census by Captain Galvin the previous year had suggested that in the wake of the closing of the gambling halls and the exile of the single white women, more than half the residents of the Chinese quarter had relocated, leaving little more than a thousand Chinese where twice that number had lived. And the decrease even in Chinese visitors to the quarter—most white tourists had stopped coming after the Elsie Sigel murder—was pronounced: out-of-towners had dwindled from five to six thousand every Sunday to fewer than a thousand. The New-York Tribune went so far as to predict that Chinatown would pass into history within six months.
Following the Sunday shootings, two Chinese merchants not connected with either of the feuding parties asked Judge Foster to mediate once again. The On Leongs were said to be willing; the conflict had been unwanted and bad for business, and they were eager for a settlement. But the Four Brothers refused. “I am willing to do all in my power to aid in restoring peace in Chinatown,” Foster told the New York Times. “But the difficulty is that the Four Brothers is reluctant to be a party to such a conference. A few days will show what can be done.”
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It actually took more than a few days to show what could be done, and it wasn’t much. Mediation lasted for the rest of April. Terence J. McManus, attorney for the Four Brothers, submitted a draft peace protocol on April 13, but no approval was forthcoming from the On Leongs.
Judge Foster, however, was not alone in his labors. Even as McManus set to work on a new treaty, parallel negotiations that did not require interpretation had begun. The Chinese minister in Washington sent the first secretary of the Chinese legation to New York to broker a settlement. Together with Yung Yu Yang, China’s New York consul as of late the previous year, he met on April 14 with Tom Lee and Mott Street merchants and then headed over to Four Brothers headquarters. He told the newspapers that the legation was taking no sides in the matter. “All that is wished,” he said, “is to have peace and to enforce justice.”
But peace was problematical because the Four Brothers’ Society was itself divided. By April 21, the two tongs were on the brink of an agreement. But when a placard announcing the impending accord was posted in Chinatown, it was ripped down by a young Four Brothers man in a calculated insult to the leadership of both tongs. This clear sign of generational dissent gave the On Leongs an opening to assert that if the Four Brothers could not control its own men, signing a treaty with it would be pointless. They no
w insisted on a bond from the Four Brothers as insurance against misbehavior by its younger members.
Under these conditions, despite the best efforts of the diplomats and intense pressure from Chinatown merchants, negotiations fell through and more bloodshed seemed inevitable. The Four Brothers outnumbered the On Leongs—it was said to boast a thousand members to the On Leongs’ three hundred—and it believed there was still a score to be settled.
Captain Enright’s tenure at Elizabeth Street had been temporary; his permanent replacement, a police veteran named William H. “Big Bill” Hodgins, arrived in mid-April. The rotund, Irish-born Hodgins, who enjoyed a reputation for being tough on street gangs, visited Tom Lee to talk the Four Brothers matter over with him, but when it was clear there would be no agreement, he doubled down the police detail in the quarter. There were so many officers on the streets that the New York Times commented that policemen “almost elbowed each other.”
Hodgins got nowhere with Tom Lee, because Lee was right to fear the schism in the Four Brothers’ Society. The organization had essentially split into two factions. The younger members—the ones, as a practical matter, who did all the shooting—were no longer loyal to the leadership, and they made up nearly half of the organization. Anathema to the On Leongs and distrusted by the senior Four Brothers men, they were in no position to make peace, even if they had wanted to. And because any pact acceptable to the On Leongs would have to be honored by both Four Brothers factions, no accord was forthcoming.
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On June 10, 1910, Chu Hen, the Four Brothers man in the makeshift bulletproof vest charged with the April 10 retaliatory shooting of Chung Fook, was acquitted by a jury after three hours of deliberation. The verdict, reached in spite of sworn testimony by six white witnesses, enraged the On Leong Tong. But for the Four Brothers, it was cause for merriment. The society decided to hold a huge banquet to celebrate Chu Hen’s freedom and the ostensible two thousandth anniversary of its founding in China.
The Four Brothers members were well aware such a gathering would be provocative, because Chu Hen’s release was deeply offensive to the On Leongs. It was also dangerous, because such a large gathering offered their enemies a golden opportunity to strike. All seemed peaceful as the guests arrived at the venue, and even “Big Bill” Hodgins, on hand on Pell Street with two officers because he anticipated trouble, remarked on the quiet.
Suddenly, however, Pell Street became a shooting gallery. Half a dozen On Leongs rushed around the corner from Mott and began to fire at the guests. They were aiming for Chu Hen, the guest of honor, but he was not hit. At the first sound of gunfire, several Four Brothers men drew their own guns and gave nearly as good as they got. Broken shopwindows, shattered window casings, and nicks in the iron balconies and fire hydrants bore witness to the fracas. The victims, however, were all Four Brothers men.
The skirmish lasted less than two minutes and ended as suddenly as it had begun. Eight arrests were made. Within half an hour, a hundred uniformed policemen had invaded Chinatown, a cordon was drawn around the quarter, and visitors were barred. But there was no further trouble that night, and the banquet went on as planned.
A couple of weeks later, fifty-year-old Chu On, like his kinsmen a Four Brothers member, made the mistake of shopping on Mott Street. He had been away from New York for several months and had returned the previous day. He brushed aside warnings to avoid Mott because he didn’t think anyone there would recognize him. But as he passed in front of No. 11, five shots rang out, fatally wounding him. The police were reasonably sure he had been involved in the shooting of Ah Hoon, the On Leong actor, half a year before, which would explain both his exile and the reason he was targeted.
Pell Street, ca. 1910, showing the Mon Lay Won (Chinese Delmonico) Restaurant at No. 24. Two Four Brothers men were wounded outside the establishment on June 26, 1910, and it was the site of a celebratory banquet later that year when the tongs signed a peace agreement.
And August saw a repeat of the Chu On incident. This time, the victim was forty-nine-year-old Chu Hin, a prosperous merchant who ran a restaurant in an underground arcade that had opened three years earlier. The passageway began at 11 Doyers Street and ended at 20 Mott; the two lots were back-to-back. Chu had played a prominent role in the Four Brothers’ councils of war and knew he was a marked man; several months earlier, a threatening note had been pinned to the door of his eatery.
He had managed to stay out of sight after that, but shortly before 8:00 p.m. on August 16 he ventured into the Mott Street half of the arcade, which proved his undoing. This stretch was considered On Leong territory. Five shots were fired—so rapidly that they sounded like one continuous round—and four bullets lodged in Chu’s skull. He was dead before he hit the ground.
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An unidentified Chinese merchant explained to the New-York Tribune why the Four Brothers had gotten the worst of the recent battles. “The On Leongs have regular gun men who receive $30 a month besides room and board. The Four Brothers consider this dispute a family calamity and have to serve as volunteers in the fight. Accordingly, they are not so effective in their battle.”
The Four Brothers’ Society had an additional problem: its war chest depleted by legal fees and the costs of fighting, it had been forced to dun its members to fund the conflict. Because its membership was limited to people who belonged to its four clans, recruiting additional associates was next to impossible. Nor was it in the business, as the tongs were, of shaking down vice dens. Existing members were called on to pony up as much as $50 apiece to underwrite the war. But the On Leongs were hurting too. The downturn in business and the departure of the gambling dens meant a decline in revenues available to defray the heavy costs of war.
The result was heightened efforts to broker a cease-fire, and finally, after months of talks, a notice appeared on the bulletin board outside Chinatown’s City Hall on Sunday, December 18, 1910, announcing a temporary cease-fire. It was to be in force until the following Saturday. The proclamation was issued in the name of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and the Chinese consul. They had been working with the two adversaries in secret and now believed a permanent treaty was achievable within the week.
It took a little longer than that, but before year’s end an accord was struck, probably due as much to exhaustion and lack of funds as to pressure from local merchants. On December 29, delegates from the two organizations—the Four Brothers factions had apparently found a way to speak with one voice again—affixed their signatures with writing brushes to a six-foot parchment that reestablished friendly relations between them. A toast followed, punctuated by a noisy volley of firecrackers and a tune from a Chinese band.
The agreement extended to branches of the two groups throughout the United States. It mandated that if future killings occurred, the murderers be surrendered to police. Blood retribution was to be forsworn in favor of financial settlements achieved through mediation. Other provisions included agreement not to interfere in pending court cases, to return confiscated property, and to settle outstanding debts—including a refund of dues to those Four Brothers men who had been ejected from the On Leong Tong.
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The Four Brothers’ War was over. But why had it lasted as long as it did? The peace accord “might have been accomplished long ago,” one of the Chinese merchants who had advocated negotiations observed caustically, “but the police did not want peace, nor did the lawyers.”
This comment was probably unfair. Certainly the attorneys could count on more business when tong men were constantly being arrested, arraigned, and tried for assault and murder and when peace talks were protracted. But there is no evidence that the lawyers ever intentionally slowed down or complicated the process for their own gain, and no one else ever accused them of this.
As for the police, they certainly had had a vested interest in keepin
g gambling going when a cut of the revenues made its way into their pockets. The merchant’s criticism might have been appropriate to the First Tong War, in which the illicit income of the police from the gambling bosses was at stake, but not to the most recent conflict. There wasn’t much betting going on in Chinatown, and in any case the Four Brothers’ War hadn’t been about gambling.
It had broken out over a private dispute about a woman and had been sustained by attempts to manipulate the trial of her alleged assassins. It had persisted because of a lack of trust that an agreement would be honored. Fatigue and the expense of keeping up hostilities had finally brought both sides to the table. It is hard to see what reason the police or municipal higher-ups would have had to keep this particular fight going.
But there was something else at stake in this war and, indeed, to a greater or lesser extent in all of the clashes in Chinatown. When one tong man was wronged or killed by a member of another tong, retribution was always required in order to preserve “face,” a deeply important concept among Chinese and other Asians. Face was a tit-for-tat construct that had everything to do with honor and prestige, and holding one’s head up in the society was deemed so important that it justified the expenditure of vast sums and, if necessary, the taking of lives.
In the context of the tong wars, saving face meant never absorbing the last blow. When Chu Hen killed Chung Fook, for example, avenging his death became imperative for the On Leongs. The fact that a jury acquitted him of the crime was not only irrelevant; it was galling. If they couldn’t get the courts to dispense what they believed to be justice, then the On Leongs had to strike back at the Four Brothers themselves in order to save face, which is why they launched the Pell Street attack at the banquet thrown in Chu Hen’s honor. They didn’t get Chu’s head, which would certainly have been the most desirable and appropriate prize, but that of any Four Brothers man might do, because their basic quarrel was with the organization, not just the individual.
Tong Wars Page 21