Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  Riley decided to undertake raids personally. His first foray took him to half a dozen Hip Sing–run resorts, and to show that he was not in the pocket of the On Leongs, he hit two of theirs next. On the evening of October 2, spying an “icebox” door ajar at 11 Mott, he slipped inside and discovered forty Chinese gamblers at play. Although he was in civilian clothes, he was recognized.

  As Chinese men scurried for the exits, he demanded, “Who owns all this?” Everyone there knew it was Charlie Boston’s place, but nobody dared open his mouth. So when he got no answer, Riley announced, “If nobody owns all this, it must be abandoned property.” And with that, he let the Chinese men leave, blew his whistle, and ordered his policemen to confiscate the eight fan tan tables, twelve thousand policy tickets, and two iron safes in the room. A repeat performance at his next stop, 16 Mott, yielded seven fan tan tables and the attendant paraphernalia.

  Captain Dominick Riley, ca. 1910–1915. His tenure in the Sixth Precinct proved too much for him and marked the end of his career in the police department.

  Riley’s tenure at the Sixth Precinct was intense, but it was also very short. Like Captain Galvin before him, he couldn’t handle the pressure. The eighteen-hour days were too much for him, and on the evening of November 9, not even two months into his assignment, he collapsed on the job. He was taken home to Brooklyn, and although his condition was not judged grave, it marked the end of his career in the police department.

  Chinatown had done him in.

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  The first trial of Eng Hing and Lee Dock, the Hip Sings charged with the murder of Tom Lee’s nephew, had ended in a hung jury. But the men were convicted in a second trial early in 1913 and sent to Sing Sing, where they were scheduled for electrocution. The executions were postponed, however, because of pending appeals. In late November, their attorney, Terence J. McManus—who had represented the Four Brothers men accused of killing Bow Kum—announced he would submit evidence to the state Supreme Court that two of the witnesses against the men had perjured themselves at the behest of the On Leong Tong.

  McManus had engaged a private investigator who had befriended, and then secretly recorded, a twenty-seven-year-old white Chinatown hanger-on known as Rubber. His real name was Frank Treglia, and he was a private detective in the employ of the On Leong Tong. The investigator installed a Dictograph in a Thirty-fourth Street apartment and connected it by wire to an adjoining room, where two stenographers were hiding. He then invited Rubber there for a party. Rubber supplied the opium, and the investigator brought two young, attractive girls who had been instructed to flatter him and get him to talk.

  After a few tokes of the pipe, Rubber got expansive and began to discuss the trial. The girls steered him to the subject of “Chinese Flossie” Wong and Grace Mack, two white women whose testimony had helped convict the defendants.

  “The girls went down there and they never seen a thing,” Rubber volunteered. “They just went down there and swore that they seen these Chinamen.”

  “And they didn’t see them? But who told the girls to tell that?”

  “The Chinamen did that. . . . The girls lived with On Leong Tong men . . . and they were got to swear that they saw these young men shoot, and they did swear. They naturally knew that it was one of the On Leong Tongs that shot him, and it makes no difference to them as long as he is arrested whether he is guilty or not.”

  “But what about these girls?”

  “They testify to everything,” Rubber declared. “Them girls have been witnesses in every case in which they could be.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “Because in every case they can be brought up here. They can be taught. It can be explained to them.”

  The two women who had apparently lied under oath were also secretly taped on another occasion, and McManus submitted all the Dictograph records as evidence. In December, he asked for a new trial on the grounds that the testimony that had convicted his clients had been perjured.

  Surprisingly, this plea was denied, but the defendants were accorded a series of reprieves to permit their lawyers to marshal additional evidence for a second application. A motion was heard by Judge Thomas C. T. Crain at the Court of General Sessions in early October 1914; Grace Mack appeared and admitted she had lied but said she had done so out of fear for her life. “That,” she explained, “is the reason other white girls in Chinatown do not come forward and tell the truth.”

  But the state produced Lillie Wilson, another white woman, to impeach Grace Mack. In the end, the judge decided that even given the new evidence, the case against the defendants remained strong, and he denied the appeal. On the specific allegation that On Leongs had coached and threatened witnesses, he wrote, “If On Leong Tong influence was exerted to further the conviction of the defendants, Hip Sing Tong efforts have been made to secure their acquittal and discharge.” Whether or not the judge was being fair, he was surely correct in this observation.

  The executions were rescheduled for November 2, 1914—but the attorneys got Governor Martin H. Glynn of New York to delay them again. And on January 28, 1915, just a few days before the prisoners were to be put to death, the lawyers again went before Judge Crain to seek a new trial.

  “We believe absolutely that they are innocent men, and we will not remit our efforts until we have done everything to save their lives.” The speaker was none other than Frank Moss, who, even as late as 1915, had not ended his blind, two-decade-long love affair with the Hip Sing Tong, despite repeated demonstrations that it was entirely unworthy of his admiration or protection and the fact that even his former colleagues at the Parkhurst Society were apparently no longer supporting it. Moss had been working with the other attorneys on the appeals throughout the previous year.

  Moss produced four new witnesses—all white—to poke holes in the case. But the judge wasn’t moved, and he offered another insight about the perjury allegation:

  Now, if the On Leong Tong were desirous of convicting the Hip Sing Tong men in order to revenge the killing of Lee Kay, without any definite knowledge on the part of the On Leong Tong as to particular individuals who had done the shooting, it appears to me that they would have picked out men prominent in the Hip Sing Tong society, and that they would not have chosen as a party to wrongfully accuse, a young man like Eng Hing . . . and a man like Lee Dock, who, while a member of that Tong, was an inconspicuous member, who had only recently arrived from Philadelphia.

  Their motion denied and their appeals exhausted, the defendants had only one avenue left: executive clemency. Moss took the lead in contacting the governor. The petition, submitted in November 1914, included letters of support for the defendants, affidavits of witnesses, and even a record of Gin Gum’s 1898 California forgery conviction, because it had been he who had allegedly suborned perjury on the part of the witnesses in the original trials.

  Nothing if not persistent, and determined to fight to the bitter end, Moss followed up the clemency plea with a telegram seeking a last-minute stay. He was able to secure a respite until early February, but that was as far as the governor was willing to go. Eng Hing and Lee Dock finally ran out of luck early in the morning of February 5, 1915, when, at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, each received three lethal 1,850-volt shocks in the electric chair.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Upon Captain Riley’s departure, Commissioner Waldo brought the seventeen-year veteran Lieutenant John L. Falconer to Elizabeth Street and promoted him to captain. But Falconer himself soon had a new boss. On December 31, 1913, the last day of his administration, Mayor Kline finally removed Rhinelander Waldo and installed Waldo’s deputy, Douglas Imrie McKay, as police commissioner. But Alderman John P. Mitchel had succeeded Kline as mayor, and McKay didn’t get along with him any better than Baker had, so he lasted only five months in the job. He was a reformer, however, and during his short time in office he made a valian
t effort to suppress street gangs and eliminate vice.

  Taking his cue from McKay, Captain Falconer sought to crack down hard on Chinatown. In February 1914, after McKay heard a rumor of an imminent resumption of tong hostilities, Falconer initiated a raid on a Hip Sing lodging house at 16 Bowery. His men weren’t looking for gambling gear, though; they were seeking weapons. And they discovered a cache of hatchets, daggers, and revolvers and five hundred pounds of cartridges. Two Hip Sings were arrested.

  That was just the beginning. Falconer was relentless. In the first year and a half of his two years at the Sixth Precinct, he destroyed more than a hundred fan tan tables. He posted detectives everywhere and recruited not only a Chinese plainclothesman but two Japanese stool pigeons to infiltrate the gambling halls. Under the pressure of unremitting raids and destruction of property, many den owners took the path of least resistance. They picked up stakes and moved. Newark, New Jersey, was a favorite destination.

  With their departure went a lot of local business, because without gambling once again Manhattan’s Chinese quarter ceased to be the weekend destination for the area’s Chinese that it had been. There was an attendant downturn in the opium business and in prostitution as well. Even the white tourist trade, which had rebounded since the Elsie Sigel murder but still subsisted on its ability to show outsiders the squalid side of Chinatown life, suffered. And by mid-1915, the police reckoned as many as two thousand Chinese had moved out of the quarter. More than a few tenements once filled with Chinese men were now being rented to immigrant Italian and Jewish families. As the New York Sun put it, “Chinatown is being renovated, disinfected, civilized, Christianized and consequently evacuated,” adding that “chop suey is giving way to spaghetti and gefuelte fisch.”

  Among those lamenting the decline was old Tom Lee. “Things very dull,” he said with a sigh to a New-York Tribune reporter. “No business. No white people come to visit. Chinamen all leaving. Laundrymen used to come Saturday night. See friends, smoke pipe, gamble little, maybe. Now Chinamen go to New Jersey for fun. Stores all closing. Never saw things so dull. Soon be no Chinatown at all.”

  Tom Lee, ca. 1913.

  Lee placed the blame squarely at the feet of overzealous policemen. “It is not because gambling has ceased,” he said. “The Chinese stopped that and were glad to do it. It only brought trouble and death. But it is because the police will not leave us alone that Chinatown is dying. Here, there and in Pell Street and in Doyers, shops have been closed. The merchants are driven out by the police when they are trying to conduct an honorable business.”

  Under Falconer, the police had gotten so aggressive that some Chinese began to push back. In April 1915, the Mott Street merchants Hor Pooh and Yee Loy went to court to get a restraining order against Commissioner Arthur Woods—another reformer, who had been appointed by Mayor Mitchel to succeed McKay—as well as Inspector George R. Wakefield and Captain Falconer. They accused the officials of harassment by constantly dispatching detectives to “inspect” their places of business. Counsel for the city countered by documenting several raids there during the previous six months that had yielded gambling paraphernalia. The judge ruled against the two Chinese, and his decision was affirmed on appeal without explanation.

  A similar suit was filed by Lee Yick You, whose Wing Woh Chong Company at 34 Pell, in business for thirty years, had also become a frequent target of police persecution. In excellent English, he told the judge that police were camping out in front of his store, interrogating his customers, and unlawfully searching his premises at all hours of the day and night. Officers had threatened him and intimidated his subordinates but had never accused him of any illegal acts. The judge, however, who had been told by someone that the “interference had been dropped,” also denied the application.

  In late October, an association of thirty Chinatown property owners—many if not most of them white—lodged a formal protest with the mayor. Their ox, too, was getting gored by the police, because harassment was causing high vacancy rates in Chinatown, and because each time doors were smashed or windows broken in a police raid, it was their property that got destroyed. City hall quickly bucked the complaint to police headquarters, which ostensibly launched an investigation, but there is no record of any action by the police on the complaint apart from a hearing by the third deputy police commissioner. Nor could the mayor’s office have reasonably expected that those who were complaining would get satisfaction when he sent them right back to the police department, the very source of their troubles.

  The police had begun to behave as if all Chinese were criminals. Innocent Chinese were being harassed, and all routes to redress seemed blocked. Not even the courts, which consistently sided with the police, seemed to offer the Chinese meaningful recourse.

  The government was speaking with one voice. It was sick and tired of the tong wars. If eliminating them meant abusing the innocent majority and even destroying Chinatown in the process, then so be it.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Time was catching up with the old lions of the On Leong Tong. Although only fifty-two, Gin Gum, the longtime secretary, consigliere, interpreter, spokesman, and peace negotiator, succumbed in mid-1915, not to a Hip Sing bullet, but to a weak heart. He died in his room at 24 Mott during a national On Leong convention in Philadelphia. When fellow tong men learned of his death, many stopped in New York to pay their respects before heading for home.

  The On Leong Tong organized the funeral, the largest Chinatown had seen in many years, and in deference to the wishes of his widow, Josephine, a Christian service was arranged. Branch by branch, On Leongs approached and bowed deeply as a sign of respect for their old comrade. All Chinatown watched as the 128-carriage cortege passed onto the Bowery on its way to Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. Ten coaches were actually chartered by the Hip Sing Tong, and one carried the On Leongs’ archenemy, Mock Duck, who had become Gin Gum’s stepson-in-law two years earlier. Out of deference to the On Leongs, he and his wife, Frances, did not attend the service, but they did join the procession. He explained, “We can pay honor to Gin Gum at the cemetery.”

  Tom Lee wasn’t well, either. In 1913, his son Frank, who had left in 1906, returned to New York to visit his aging father, now in his mid-sixties. Frank had gone to China to study and had remained there, engaged in Baptist educational work until 1911, when he was appointed to Guangdong Province’s Foreign Affairs Bureau. Frank had joined Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang Party, and when Sun fled China in 1913 to escape political enemies, Frank arranged for a one-year stay in America as a commercial commissioner. He had married and was a father of three, and he surely wanted his father and his brother, Tom junior—a sometime circus acrobat turned chauffeur—to meet his family.

  Old Tom remained active through 1916, but by early 1917, after the death of his wife, he was so feeble that few were permitted to see him. And on January 10, 1918, nearing seventy, the genteel mayor for life of New York’s Chinatown passed away quietly in his bed, ending a reign of nearly four decades.

  Lee’s body, in a silk brocade shroud, was laid out in a metal casket in his third-floor office at 18 Mott. It rested on a crepe-swathed bier flanked by candelabra. Bouquets filled the chamber and overflowed into two adjacent rooms. For two days, mourners from all walks of New York life—merchants and waiters, bankers and laundrymen, Caucasians and Chinese, Hip Sings, On Leongs, and Four Brothers men—lined up to pay their respects to the man whose word had been law in the Chinese colony for as long as anyone could remember. Among the callers were leading lights of the Tammany organization such as “Big Tom” Foley, former sheriff and leader of the Second Assembly District; and Al Smith, who would go on to become governor of New York in 1923 and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1928.

  Business was suspended in Chinatown for the funeral of “Mayor” Tom Lee. His January 14, 1918, cortege, the largest ever seen in Chinatown, included three marching bands, five
buses, and 150 carriages.

  The funeral was put off until January 14 to give mourners from afar time to get to New York. A brief service by the New York chapter of the Chee Kung Tong—the Chinese Masons—which Lee had helped found as the Loon Yee Tong so many years earlier, was held in the morning. This was followed by a Christian ceremony organized by his sons. Then, as the casket was carried down the narrow staircase to the street by members of the Lee clan, an Italian brass band struck up a rendition of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  Business was suspended in Chinatown when Tom Lee’s funeral procession, which outshone all that had preceded it, left Mott Street at 2:00 p.m. Thousands lined the streets as three marching bands, five buses, and 150 carriages made two passes through the Chinese quarter. Then, headed by a hearse drawn by six black horses, the cortege took off for the Williamsburg Bridge and went on to Cypress Hills.

  Tom Lee had never been universally liked, but he had been deeply respected. The newspapers ran numerous obituaries following his death, but perhaps none was so moving as this tribute, a wire dispatch that appeared in several papers around the country:

  Now that the last columns have been written of his gorgeous Chinese funeral, two generations of reporters who covered Chinatown affairs are recalling the calm counsel that old Tom Lee always had to offer on every conceivable twist and turn of life. If this Chinese patriarch had been born an American, everyone who really knew him believes he would have filled the real mayor’s chair much better than many men who do not wear queues.

  But now the mayor was gone, and so was the old Chinatown.