The same principle had applied in the First Tong War, when On Leong toughs butchered poor Hop Lee on his ironing board. Hop Lee hadn’t had anything to do with the Doyers Street theater killings that preceded his death, but he was a Hip Sing and one of Mock Duck’s associates, and that was sufficient. When he was killed, On Leong face was preserved. Unfortunately for all concerned, preserving face in this context was generally a zero-sum game, and one blow automatically begat the next one.
Face, according to Lin Yutang, a famous Chinese author and linguist writing in the 1930s,
is what men fight for and what many women die for. . . . It protracts lawsuits, breaks up family fortunes, causes murders and suicides . . . and it is prized above all earthly possessions. It is more powerful than fate and favour, and more respected than the Constitution. . . . It is that hollow thing which men in China live by.
Lin observed that in matters in which face is at stake, “nothing really prevents the parties from coming together except a nice way of getting out of it, or probably the proper wording of an apology.” In the world of the tongs, however, the all-too-frequent search for “a nice way of getting out of it” generally proved a tortuous, repetitive, and costly process.
As Leong Gor Yun noted, “Starting a war was simple enough, but there was no stopping it until the rivals convinced themselves that they had had revenge and the war funds were exhausted. . . . Each tong would go through a ‘face-saving’ process, half-heartedly threatening to renew war, but in the end they would arrange a peace banquet and issue a joint peace statement.” In other words, once face had been saved—and money used up—there was no more point in conflict.
So it was with the Four Brothers and the On Leongs. The obligatory banquet that followed the signing of the accord provided an auspicious beginning to the New Year. Peace in Chinatown was not destined to last long, but the feast did mark the end of any significant role for the Four Brothers’ Society, whose members were undoubtedly delighted to go back to being a fraternal, mutual aid organization.
From here on in, the battle would once again be a two-tong affair.
Chapter 12
Mock Duck’s Luck Runs Out
On January 25, 1911, federal customs agents undertook a sting operation against two Seventh Avenue opium joints. Customs had been aware for months that tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of the drug was being smuggled into the country and winding up in Chinese hands in several eastern cities. A tip had led agents to these two establishments, which purported to be tea and cigar shops.
To obtain evidence, undercover officers had cultivated scraggly beards, turned up their coat collars, and dabbed talcum powder on dirty faces to make themselves look like “hop fiends.” Both stores sold them lychee nutshells in which cooked opium had been substituted for nut meat. Each “nut” cost fifty cents.
On the day of the raid—part of a nationwide war on the illicit opium trade—agents with search warrants surrounded the buildings and entered, revolvers drawn. Four Chinese men drew their own guns but were subdued without any shots being fired. A total of $10,000 worth of raw and cooked opium was seized, in addition to paraphernalia for processing the drug.
The more telling find, however, was a cache of letters, telegrams, ledgers, and memoranda. These hinted strongly at broad police involvement in the sordid business. Several of the documents, signed by various public officials, were letters written to the On Leong Tong kingpin Charlie Boston, a proprietor of both shops, thanking him for favors received. From police captains in Philadelphia, Boston, and Pittsburgh, there were letters of introduction written for Boston. There were also lists of New York police officials. Taken together, they suggested the existence of a broad smuggling and distribution network that extended to the nation’s major cities, made possible by tacit police cooperation.
The federal agents had purposely not called on municipal police for assistance in the raids; they did not even inform the West Thirty-seventh Street Police Station, which had jurisdiction over that area, until after the fact. Given possible police complicity in the illegal activity, which they would have had every reason to suspect, this was prudent. Even after securing the premises, they did not allow the local police access.
Neither Charlie Boston nor the On Leong Tong was new to the opium business. As early as 1883, Tom Lee had been accused of collecting a “license fee” from local opium joints. But Boston was far more involved than that. He wasn’t just taxing the joints; he was operating them, and his customers were by no means all Chinese. By 1899, he was running a place on Broadway between Sixty-sixth and Sixty-seventh streets where New Yorkers of all stripes might come in for a relaxing smoke.
The stakes, however, had recently been raised. Opium had previously been regulated at the state level and merely taxed by the federal government, but in 1909 importing it had become a federal crime. At the urging of the Roosevelt administration and in response to pressure from social reformers, temperance advocates, and missionaries, Congress had passed the Opium Exclusion Act. The new law banned the importation, possession, and use of opium for smoking—the type favored by Chinese. It did not, however, address opium used for medicinal purposes, which was more common among white Americans.
The U.S. attorney’s office had a field day sorting through the confiscated correspondence. The process took days because some documents required translation. When the newspapers discovered that police officials in Boston and Pittsburgh had been implicated, they contacted their departments and printed their predictable denials. Some items shed light on how opium was getting past customs officials at the borders. Others were letters written to Charlie Boston from white women; the district attorney refused to talk about them, but the implication was that there was material in them of prurient interest. Boston, who also ran a brothel, was well-known for his eye for the ladies.
The pieces of the puzzle, once assembled, suggested the existence of a national syndicate headed by Charlie Boston that managed the smuggling and sale of opium, importing the contraband via San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and over the Canadian border. But when federal agents, armed with a warrant, set out to arrest him, they were told he had fled to Philadelphia.
He hadn’t. And after a five-day manhunt, they nabbed him on Mott Street in front of On Leong headquarters. The tong boss was dressed stylishly in Western attire, with a peaked cap pulled down over his eyes and three large diamond rings adorning his thick fingers. After a short struggle—he asked for his overcoat and for a minute to confer with Tom Lee but was denied both—they whisked him away at gunpoint to the Tombs, where he was charged with smuggling. Charlie Boston’s capture was considered one of the most important arrests of a Chinese ever made in New York City.
At the Tombs, Boston admitted to partnership in the two shops that were raided but would say nothing about the sale of opium. He was arraigned the next day and released on $2,500 bail. On February 20, he was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to smuggle opium.
Although protection payments to the On Leong Tong by proprietors of local opium dens had been mentioned occasionally in the press, this was the first indication the tong leadership was involved in importing and distributing the drug. Perhaps more shocking was the suggestion that it was more than a local business. Charlie Boston was overseeing a nationwide syndicate.
The On Leongs initially suspected the tip to customs had come from the Four Brothers’ Society while they were still at war with it but soon concluded it had actually been the Hip Sings, who had been attempting to break into the lucrative opium business themselves. On the strength of his police connections, Charlie Boston had presumed to dictate the terms of entry to the rival tong, reserving the lion’s share of the New York business for himself. Dissatisfied with their share of the spoils, the Hip Sings had decided to fight back. And just as they had done in the 1890s, they attempted to get others—in this case, the federal government—to do their dirty work. With
Boston out of the way, there would be one fewer obstacle to overcome in their entry into the opium trade.
Nobody expected peace to hold for long after Charlie Boston’s arrest. He was too important a figure. Then there was the fact that the documents seized at his so-called tea and cigar shops included detailed records of payments to hired assassins in the recent tong war shootings.
The only real question in anyone’s mind was when their services would be needed again.
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Gambling was once again flourishing in New York. And it was the new mayor who brought it back.
William Jay Gaynor became mayor on January 1, 1910, with the support of Tammany Hall. A former state Supreme Court justice, he defeated two opponents for the office. Gaynor was his own man, however, and he didn’t play the game exactly as Tammany had hoped; he was a reformer who appointed technocrats from the civil service list rather than offering patronage jobs to Tammany hopefuls. Although he was no fan of gambling, his unorthodox approach to controlling it turned out to be the best thing to happen to the gambling bosses in a long time.
Gaynor was first and foremost a civil libertarian and a strong opponent of police lawlessness. As a judge, he did what he could to put an end to warrantless raids and police brutality. He could not abide the Reverend Parkhurst, and even before he became mayor, he urged Mayor McClellan to oust Theodore Bingham, whom he accused of running roughshod over the law in his crusade against crime.
Many said Mayor Gaynor was his own police commissioner; among these was William F. Baker, who had been appointed to that job before Gaynor’s arrival but had served most of his term under him. Baker, predictably, was no fan. Several years after he left office, he described the gambling situation under Gaynor.
“After Gaynor got in he said he wanted government by law and not by men. He warned me not to make arrests without legal evidence and not to enter houses without warrants.” As a result, Baker recalled, “the gambling houses multiplied so fast that you could not keep track of them.” But what really annoyed Baker was the June 1910 order forcing all police to wear uniforms. Gaynor issued it because he believed it was plainclothesmen who were chiefly responsible for collecting graft payments from lawbreakers. But its effect was to deprive the police of a key means of collecting evidence against gambling bosses.
“I think that order made more for chaos in the department than anything ever did,” Baker recalled. “You know what chance we had to get evidence against a gambling house with uniformed men? That order played right into the hands of the gamblers.”
Plainclothesmen had, of course, never been very effective in Chinatown, but under Mayor Gaynor gambling made a comeback there as well as elsewhere in the city. And more gambling, of course, meant more revenue for the tongs.
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To everyone’s surprise, things remained peaceful for nearly a year after Charlie Boston’s arrest. The tongs even cooperated on a fair and a parade in April 1911 to raise money for famine relief in China. Hip Sings, On Leongs, and Four Brothers men marched “as though they had never sought each other’s vitals,” the New York Sun observed sardonically, and more than $7,500 was raised. Even a Fourth of July parade involving all three tongs was peaceful.
There was still some fighting going on, but it was mainly intramural. Relations had soured between Sing Dock and Yee Toy, Hip Sing partners in crime—literally—in both the Chinese Theatre and the Boston killings. Without quitting the Hip Sings, Sing Dock organized a new alliance within the Chee Kung Tong. Known as the Kim Lan Association (literally the “Golden Orchid Society”), it was described as the “cadet branch” of the Chinese Freemasons. The new group attracted about two hundred members, many of whom were disenchanted former Hip Sings. None of this sat well with “Girl Face” Yee Toy, who remained the key Hip Sing hit man, and after a heated argument he shot Sing Dock, unarmed at the time, in the stomach at close range. The wound was lethal, but the assassination did not provoke retaliation from the On Leongs, because they were not involved.
The federal case against Charlie Boston took time to prepare. He finally went on trial in mid-December, nearly a year after his arrest. His plea of not guilty was based on the argument that despite what he had said during his interrogation, the establishments had not, in fact, belonged to him. Several municipal officials were subpoenaed to testify as government witnesses, because among the confiscated papers were letters and courtesy cards they had sent to Boston. Such cards, issued by government officials to friends and family, did not render recipients immune to arrest but did serve as subtle reminders that those possessing them had close contacts in government. When found in the possession of someone accused of a federal crime, they were, at minimum, somewhat embarrassing to the givers.
Atlanta penitentiary record of the physical examination of Lee Quon Jung, a.k.a. Charlie Boston, shortly after his incarceration in December 1911.
Before the names of Charlie Boston’s government contacts could be read aloud in court, however, the tong kingpin suddenly changed his plea to guilty. Lobbied by his associates, who realized that further scrutiny of the web of relationships the On Leongs had built up with police and politicians over the years could lead to additional revelations terribly detrimental to their friends and to their businesses, Boston relented and took one for the team. On December 12, he was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison, to be followed by three years’ probation. A week later, he entered the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia.
Some of Boston’s Canadian accomplices had been arrested as well, so the Customs Office was satisfied his drug empire had been destroyed. But his conviction dealt a serious blow to the On Leong Tong in other ways. He had been a strong financial backer of the organization: an important source of funds during the Four Brothers’ War and of bail money whenever members were arrested. And the connections he had assiduously cultivated with government officials were among the tong’s most valuable assets.
The prospect of revenge was on everyone’s mind. And given Charlie Boston’s status, many assumed that when it came, it was likely to be spectacular. They would not be disappointed. The seeds of the Third Tong War had been planted.
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Retaliation did not come immediately, however, thanks in part to events unfolding halfway around the world. Revolutionary forces in China were on the brink of overthrowing the Manchu overlords who had ruled their country since the mid-seventeenth century. An uprising in the central Chinese city of Wuchang on October 10 had launched a military offensive, and a rival government had been established. In a matter of months, the boy emperor Pu Yi would abdicate the throne, the Qing dynasty would fall, and the era of Republican government would begin.
In mid-December 1911, however, the revolutionaries were in dire need of funds, and they appealed for support to Chinese subjects everywhere, especially those living abroad. New York’s community was determined to do its part, and at a meeting on December 12, the very day of Charlie Boston’s conviction, the Hip Sing, Four Brothers, and On Leong tongs pledged $1,000 each to the cause.
At the meeting, Tom Lee spoke with what the New York Sun called “almost fraternal affection” for his counterparts in the other two tongs. He even had kind words for Mock Duck’s patriotism. Also present was Wong Get, who had gone back to China again but had returned by 1910 and who, like Mock Duck, had reestablished himself in the Hip Sing hierarchy.
“Brethren, we have buried the hatchet in the breast of the Manchu dynasty,” Lee told the gathering to a round of applause. What he did not say was that there were closer breasts destined for On Leong hatchets and that additional burials were not far off.
There would be one final display of comity before all hell broke loose, however. On January 1, 1912, Chinatown celebrated the birth of the Republic of China. One hundred thousand firecrackers, imported from China for the occasion, were exploded throughout the quarter.
As thousands watched, Tom Lee led a procession to Chinatown City Hall, where a new Chinese flag hung for all to see and a painting of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of the revolution, replaced the image of Confucius. Determined to take no chances, the police frisked everyone who looked as if he might be a gunman, just in case. But it was a day of national pride and celebration, not one to be marred by parochial grievances.
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A bitter wind was blowing and the streets were deserted at 7:30 p.m. on January 5 when four men left On Leong headquarters and headed for Pell Street. Dressed in American clothing, their coat collars turned up against the breeze, they stole silently down Pell, each with a hand hidden beneath his coat. The quartet came to a stop in front of No. 21, where the lookout for the gambling parlor within had temporarily abandoned his position. There was no one to warn those inside that danger was afoot.
The men entered silently through a small foyer that opened to a large room in which about twenty Chinese men were gambling at four tables. The sentry was watching the games and had his back to the door, so he didn’t see them come in. On the far left, at the table closest to the door, sat Liang You, vice president of the Hip Sing Tong, dealing fan tan. At the table behind him stood Chong Pon Sing, the tong president, playing pi gow. And the dealer at his table was none other than Mock Duck, one of the proprietors of the establishment.
The On Leongs wasted no time. They drew Smith & Wesson revolvers from under their coats and shot into the crowd. Some twenty bullets were fired, five of which penetrated the body of fifty-year-old Liang You, who slumped down, lifeless, against the wall behind him. And Chong Pon Sing, also fifty, took missiles in his chest, arm, and abdomen and dropped to the floor, fatally wounded. The shooters then discarded their revolvers and disappeared into the winter night.
Tong Wars Page 22