When the police arrived, they found seven men milling around as if nothing were amiss. Mock Duck was among them, unhurt and seemingly unfazed by the events of the previous few minutes. No one was paying any attention to the men who had been shot, one mortally wounded under a table, the other a corpse perched against a wall. Helping himself to a cup of tea as the officers came in and demanded to know who the dead man was, Mock Duck responded indifferently that he didn’t know him. The police held everyone in the hall as material witnesses and summoned an ambulance for Chong, who was still breathing.
In the meantime, a Hip Sing led officers to the On Leong building, where he identified two of the shooters. The police collared them and brought them to the hospital, where nurses propped Chong up on pillows and he fingered them as his assassins. Back at the police station, the two were placed in a lineup of fourteen men, and several arrested Hip Sings also identified them. Chong died the next day.
The On Leongs were charged with homicide and held on $10,000 bail each, but Mock Duck was accused only of maintaining a gambling house. There was no other charge to level against him; he hadn’t done anything else wrong that day. The evidence, in the form of confiscated gambling paraphernalia, was damning, however, and it seemed an open-and-shut case. He insisted to the coroner that he had arrived on the scene after Liang You was already dead. He paid his $1,000 bond and was released.
The arrest and imprisonment of Charlie Boston, the On Leongs’ number two man, was undoubtedly the main provocation for an attack on such high-ranking Hip Sings. But other hostile acts had contributed to the On Leongs’ outrage. In November, two Hip Sings had murdered a Cleveland On Leong for refusing to pay them protection money. And a relative of Tom Lee’s had been slaughtered in Chicago by a Hip Sing gunman.
Having suffered through tong wars in the past, the police wanted to avert another one if they could. They didn’t know why the Hip Sings had been killed, so they turned reflexively to the old standby of suppressing gambling. Their solution was to launch the largest raid Chinatown had seen in years.
On the morning of January 9, the chief magistrate—and former commissioner of police—William McAdoo issued 221 warrants for the arrest of Chinese gamblers, each made out in the name of “John Doe Chinaman.” At 5:00 p.m., under orders from the police inspector John Daly and Captain Frank A. Tierney, who had been appointed to head the Sixth Precinct in 1911, eighty policemen marched into Chatham Square, sealed off the Chinese quarter, and broke up into twenty-eight squads of two to six men each. The teams then descended, axes, clubs, and crowbars in hand, on an equal number of Pell, Mott, and Doyers Street gambling dens.
They pried open locks, smashed through doors, and shattered glass and discovered not only fan tan and policy paraphernalia but also three roulette wheels, previously unseen in Chinatown. To avoid the appearance of bias, they made sure to include both Mock Duck’s establishment and Tom Lee’s building. By midnight, about seventy-five arrests had been made with the aid of an informant, a Japanese mission worker from Boston who had infiltrated the Chinese quarter and collected evidence, undetected, for a month. Protected from identification by a face mask, he pointed out the proprietors in each house.
But the Third Tong War was on, and seventy-five arrests weren’t going to stop it. Many senior tong men would be caught in the crosshairs in a battle that had begun over control of the opium trade but immediately became more about face than about anything else. It would last nearly a year and a half. The weapons employed would be the most fearsome Chinatown had ever seen. And the coming year would be the bloodiest of all.
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The On Leongs surely expected retaliation for their brazen decapitation of the Hip Sing Tong, and it was not long in coming. At the end of February, seventeen-year-old Eng Hing and thirty-year-old Lee Dock shot Tom Lee’s nephew right in his uncle’s Mott Street building.
The men sneaked through the same underground arcade in which the Four Brothers restaurateur had met his end two years earlier. It was about 8:00 p.m., and with the brims of their slouch hats turned down and their collars turned up, they were not noticed on Mott Street. When they got to No. 18, where several On Leongs were congregating in Lee Po Ming’s fruit store, they flung open the door, dropped to their knees, and opened fire. One target fell to the ground; others drew guns, answered the fire, and pursued the young men, who rushed back to the arcade. One was hit; the other managed to flee.
Lee Kay, a thirty-two-year-old nephew of old Tom Lee’s, took a bullet in his stomach, although the intended target had probably been Lee Po Ming, vice president of the tong, whose demise would have been a more suitable answer to the assassination of the top Hip Sing men. Lee Kay was brought to the hospital, unconscious, together with his wounded shooter, Eng Hing, who himself had taken bullets in the left arm and the back. The second bullet had passed perilously close to Eng’s lung, but the wound was not fatal. The police arrested two of Eng’s attackers and charged them with felonious assault; each was held on $3,000 bail. Officers later apprehended Lee Dock, the other Hip Sing shooter, who was identified by Lee Kay from his hospital bed and held without bail.
If the attack had been calculated to alarm Tom Lee, it had its desired effect. Whether the intended victim had been his associate or his nephew, it was still bad news for him. He had not appeared in public since the shooting of the senior Hip Sings, because he fully understood that his head would be the most fitting price of all that the Hip Sings could exact for the murder of their leaders. He telephoned Elizabeth Street twice to ask for protection, claiming he expected to be gunned down before morning. Then he barricaded himself inside his Chinatown quarters, which had been fitted up like an arsenal.
A couple of weeks later, three top On Leongs narrowly escaped injury in a copycat attack. They had just entered a grocery at 11 Mott when four men, shielding their faces with large umbrellas, suddenly opened the door and began firing into the store. After about twenty shots, they fled, wounding one Chinese and one Italian man but no tong elders. The police arrested a pair of Hip Sings for the shootings.
The first week of April 1912 was Holy Week, and Father Ernest Coppo, pastor of Mott Street’s Church of the Transfiguration, was worried his parishioners might get caught in cross fire on their way to or from worship. Through the good offices of some Chinatown leaders, he secured a temporary truce from the tongs. A cease-fire would prevail from April 3 to April 17, and the traditional geographic boundaries—Mott for the On Leongs, Pell for the Hip Sings—would be suspended, with free passage permitted to all. The agreement was posted for all to see, and there were no notable violations.
Mock Duck, 1905. He was arrested for running a gambling establishment in 1912 and sentenced to one to two years in Sing Sing prison.
June brought Mock Duck’s trial on the gambling allegation, the only charge the district attorney had been able to pin on him from the night the Hip Sing leaders were assassinated. Police testified that when they arrived, he was counting out a roll of bills and that he had admitted that both the money and the gambling house were his. A translator took the stand to confirm that signs removed from the premises identified three people, including Wong Get and Mock Duck, as co-owners of the resort.
Mock Duck claimed he had been at the gambling parlor because Chong Pon Sing, the assassinated Hip Sing president—the true proprietor of the place, he maintained—owed him a couple of hundred dollars. It never hurt to blame someone who was dead. He discovered when he arrived that Chong had been shot, he testified, but finding money on the table, he had helped himself to two $20 bills, which he claimed Chong had promised him earlier that evening.
He denied his name had appeared on the list of proprietors and maintained he had not understood when the police asked him whether he owned the place. His explanation for why his private papers had been found there was that, being illiterate, he had left them with Chong, who regularly helped him with correspondence. T
his couldn’t have been true; he had been able to read English well enough when he visited the New York Times in 1907 to taunt it over a false report of his arrest in Boston. But to bolster his case that he was illiterate in both Chinese and English, and that despite having been born in San Francisco he could not understand the latter well, he testified through an interpreter throughout the trial. His testimony strained credulity, however, and it is doubtful many in the courtroom believed him. The jury did not; they voted to convict the wily defendant.
Before sentencing, the judge—who had earlier tried Mock Duck twice for homicide—remarked that the man led a charmed life: “He seems never to be able to get within the clutches of the law, and yet he is the most notorious Chinaman probably in the city.” But this time, Mock Duck’s luck failed him. The judge sentenced him to the maximum term for a first offender: not less than one year, nor more than two, in Sing Sing prison.
Even before the sentence was pronounced, the defense attorneys announced their intention to appeal. They petitioned the New York Supreme Court for a “certificate of reasonable doubt,” a document normally issued to keep a client out of jail in cases in which error by the trial court is likely to result in a verdict being overturned on appeal. The basis for the appeal was that the rules of the Chinese policy game differed from the American kind, and it was thus supposedly not covered by the statute under which Mock Duck had been convicted. On July 6, a certificate was granted, entitling the defendant to a new hearing. But because the appellate court was out of session, he was freed on $3,500 bail until a trial could be scheduled. Chinatown immediately buzzed with the rumor that Mock Duck would head for San Francisco and then China rather than risk prison time.
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A few days after Mock Duck’s conviction, the On Leongs eliminated Yee Toy, a.k.a. “Girl Face,” the Hip Sings’ chief gunman. Yee was one of the men indicted in the 1906 murder of two On Leongs on Pell Street, one of the organizers of the Chinese Theatre and Boston massacres, and the cold-blooded murderer of Sing Dock, his brother Hip Sing. As he emerged from the Chinese Delmonico at 24 Pell, someone appeared from the doorway of No. 18 and, in full view of a policeman, shot him five times at close range, piercing his hand, abdomen, and chest.
The shooter was a China-born cook named Jung Hing. He took off for Mott Street but as he rounded the corner had the misfortune to run right into another officer. There was little doubt he was the assassin. Not only had the shooting been witnessed by an officer, but six others—several of whom were white—picked him out of a lineup.
Jung Hing, however, was no On Leong. He was the same man who had killed a Japanese valet in error for the Four Brothers in 1910. But this time, he was identified as a member of the Kim Lan Association, the branch of the Chee Kung Tong started the previous year by the late Sing Dock. And while it is possible he acted to avenge the murder of Sing Dock, the “Scientific Killer” slain in cold blood by Yee Toy the previous year, it is also likely he did it for a reward. The New-York Tribune reported that the bounty offered by the On Leong Tong for killing a Hip Sing, normally $500, had been raised to $4,000 for whoever took down the hated Yee Toy. And should the killer be sent to the electric chair for the crime, his family would reap the benefit.
The Hip Sings saw On Leong fingerprints all over the murder and were not about to take the loss of their deadliest hatchet man lying down, especially on top of the recent slaughter of their two top men. Regardless of who had pulled the trigger, they were certain On Leongs had bankrolled the killing, and they decided on a shocking and novel response: they set out to blow up On Leong headquarters.
On June 23, 1912, someone with a passkey infiltrated the On Leong clubhouse and, undetected, planted dynamite beneath the altar of the Joss Hall used for worship and club rituals. The explosive was rigged with a timer set to go off shortly after 10:00 p.m., when offerings were usually made to Guan Gong, the patron deity. Something went amiss, however, and it detonated about half an hour early, while the room was still deserted.
The explosion caused panic on Mott Street. A celebration of the Feast of Saint Gonzaga at the Catholic church ended abruptly when the startled musicians cast their instruments aside and fled. A rumor passed that dozens of On Leongs had been killed, but the truth was otherwise. Although the explosion created a great hole in the floor below the altar and destroyed much of the Joss Hall and the room below it, no one was actually injured.
Nor did a second bomb find its target in the wee hours of July 1, when “Big Lou”—Louis Ling Hoa, then president of the On Leong Tong—left 11 Mott three minutes before it exploded in the building’s ground-floor hallway. The On Leongs rented rooms in the rear of No. 11 from Charlie Boston, who owned the building, and often used them to meet in council, as they had that night. “Big Lou,” at six feet the tallest Chinese in the quarter, had been worried by the recent spate of violence against senior tong men, because at his height any gunman would find him hard to miss. He traveled only with bodyguards and had been granted a police escort as well.
Gunpowder might have been a Chinese invention, but no Chinese in New York was known to have expertise in explosives; tong men had theretofore employed only knives, hatchets, and guns. So the On Leongs concluded the Hip Sings had probably hired Italian hit men for the job, explosives being “the Italian method of warfare,” the New York Sun advised readers. Eddie Gong, a senior Hip Sing, wrote years later that Yee Toy, who had been experimenting with explosives, was responsible, but Yee Toy’s murder had actually preceded the bombings.
Against the possibility that the explosions had indeed been the work of non-Chinese, Gin Gum posted a notice in several English-language newspapers offering a reward for the arrest of the person or persons responsible:
FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD will be paid to the party or parties securing the arrest and conviction of the cowardly assassins who on the night of the 23rd day of June, 1912, placed and exploded a bomb on the premises known as 14 Mott Street, in the city of New York, on the top floor thereof, and for the arrest and conviction of the assassins who placed and exploded a bomb on the morning of July 1, 1912 in the premises of 11 Mott Street, in the city and county of New York. Any person with information relating to these outrages may apply to Gin Gum, Secretary of the Chinese Merchants Association of the City of New York, No. 24 [sic] Mott Street, New York City.
The police believed the bombings were reprisals for the murder of Yee Toy and other senior Hip Sings. They also feared that the introduction of this new weapon might herald a more terrifying and deadly phase in the war of the tongs.
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“There’s a monkey dead in 13 Doyers.”
That’s what Moe Harris, a white resident of the Chinese quarter, told a beat officer on the evening of July 15, 1912. The officer understood the racist slur as a code word for a Chinese; had he meant a white man, Harris would simply have said “a man dead.” The policeman followed the informer into the building, where they passed through several narrow halls until they came to a door that was ajar.
Inside was the half-naked body of Hun Kem Yun, the Hip Sings’ chief gunman since the death of Yee Toy. An expert fan tan dealer, he had been one of Mock Duck’s most trusted comrades. Hun hadn’t been seen in Chinatown for days. Bullets had pierced his arm, his heart, and his temple.
Hun had known he was on the On Leongs’ hit list. Indeed, he was walking around with the evidence. His autopsy revealed that apart from the fatal blows administered that evening, he had been nursing an older bullet wound for weeks. The police believed he had been involved in the attempt to blow up On Leong headquarters and been “on ice” since then, but the On Leongs, bent on retribution, had discovered his hiding place and struck. Because 13 Doyers backed up to On Leong territory, police speculated his assassin had climbed onto the roof of the building and descended via the fire escape.
Another Hip Sing met his doom before the end of the month. Thi
rty-year-old Jow Chuck, a cook, had joined the tong after resigning from the On Leong Tong, which might have been his undoing. The tongs did not take kindly to resignations, still less to defections. He was peeling potatoes in the back of a restaurant at 11 Pell when a marksman hit him from a Doyers Street building behind the eatery. Five bullets sailed through the kitchen window; two entered his neck, and a third pierced his head. The police assumed On Leongs had eliminated him out of concern over possible betrayal of their secrets.
The next big melee, which the New York Herald labeled the “most spectacular and disastrous battle in the history of Chinatown,” occurred on Pell Street in mid-October, soon after the Hip Sing gunman Louie Way was released from Sing Sing.
Louie Way had been involved in the attempted murder of the On Leong treasurer, Chu Gong, on Pell Street in 1905. He had been convicted only of assault in the first degree, however, and only, the Hip Sings believed, because the On Leongs had fabricated evidence against him. A little more than two years into his nine-and-a-half-year sentence, he had been pronounced insane and transferred to Dannemora State Hospital to serve out a shortened term. After unsuccessful attempts to secure a new trial and, failing that, to be deported to China, he was finally released in mid-August 1912, having served just over six years.
Sane or not, he didn’t waste much time exacting revenge. Just before 3:00 p.m. on October 14, Louie Way stepped out of Hip Sing headquarters and shot an On Leong emerging from 23 Pell Street. Within five minutes, a no-holds-barred gunfight broke out. Three bands of On Leongs opened fire simultaneously from different locations along Pell, and Hip Sings responded in kind. One Hip Sing shooter, perched on the balcony of the Chinese Delmonico, fell dead in the first volley of shots. Another dropped to the street as he fired.
Tong Wars Page 23