Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Under Mayor Mitchel and Commissioner Arthur Woods, a lot of progress was made in reforming and professionalizing the police department and fighting crime citywide. Woods, a Harvard graduate and a sociologist, kept politics out of the department. He instituted a merit system and got his officers pay raises and longer vacations. In his first three years, homicides took a nosedive—from 265 in 1913 to 186 in 1916. “While it is impossible to attribute this to any one cause,” he said, “the fact remains that the decrease has been regular and has . . . been concurrent with our practical elimination of organized bands of gangsters and gunmen and our sustained efforts to prevent the illegal carrying of revolvers and other dangerous weapons.”

  The quiet in Chinatown about which Tom Lee had complained, which was part and parcel of Woods’s efforts, continued in the run-up to World War I. Even after Mitchel lost to John F. Hylan in 1917 and Tammany Hall returned to power, Chinatown remained at peace for several years.

  After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, a draft was instituted for men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Even noncitizens were required to register, although they were exempt from induction into the service. Chinese who were citizens, however, were fair game. Fully 30 percent of America’s Chinese were native born by 1920, and more than a hundred Chinese New Yorkers fought under the Stars and Stripes. Chinese men did not generally see combat; most were assigned to officers’ messes and other menial tasks, but they had nonetheless served, if only food. Nationwide, the On Leong Tong contributed thirty-eight men to the war effort.

  Chinatown also did its part in other ways. A wire service photograph that appeared in newspapers around the country in 1917 showed the New York On Leong president, Lou Fook, signing an application for a $50 Liberty Bond, and he was not alone. Chinese merchants throughout the country were doing the same, even though few of them were actually American citizens. The New York World carried a notice in April 1918 of a Chinese American Liberty Loan Rally on Mott Street, which featured music and “entertainment of the Orient showing real American patriotism.”

  In April 1919, Hip Sings, On Leongs, and Four Brothers men met together to plan a welcome for the Chinese New Yorkers who had served the United States in World War I. There was even a bona fide local Chinese hero: the California-born Sing Kee, an On Leong who had moved to New York early in the decade. The only American of Chinese descent to receive the Distinguished Service Cross, he had been honored for “extraordinary heroism” by operating his regiment’s message center single-handedly even as Germans gassed and bombarded it. He and others were feted with a parade down Fifth Avenue and a huge Chinatown feast.

  The opening of the new On Leong Tong headquarters at 41 Mott Street, completed in 1921 at a cost of $150,000. The building was mortgaged a decade later to raise funds for members put out of work by the Great Depression.

  It wasn’t exactly a lovefest, but nor was it war. In late 1921, when the On Leongs brought two thousand of their brethren from around the nation to Manhattan for an eleven-day celebration to dedicate their sumptuous new $150,000 headquarters building at 41 Mott, local Hip Sings were among the guests. And when Dr. Fong Foo Leung, former president of the Hip Sing Tong, died of cancer in July 1922, the On Leongs sent a ten-foot floral tribute.

  “Chinatown is a joke! Not enough pep to chase a cat,” a veteran patrolman remarked early in 1922. “Five years ago there was a lot of queer doings down here, but Doyers Street now is just like a sidewalk in Woodlawn Cemetery. Opium? Not enough to fill a pipe. Gunmen? Well, they may come down here but they don’t operate on my beat, see?” He attributed the cessation of the violence to the well-publicized execution of Eng Hing and Lee Dock seven years earlier. “That’s it—the electric chair. That’s what scared the bad men.”

  The newspapers had the same impression: that it had been the example of the two dead prisoners that had stopped the killing. But memories were short. The peace agreement had actually predated their execution by two years. In the aftermath of World War I, the tongs had remained relatively quiet; they went about their business and actually cooperated from time to time. And even when provocations did occur, no broad conflict broke out.

  Not even the cold-blooded murder of Ko Low, the national president of the Hip Sing Tong, was sufficient to start a new confrontation, despite predictions to the contrary from all quarters. Forty-two-year-old Ko Low was gunned down on Pell Street on the night of August 7, 1922. He had been dining at the Chinese Delmonico with two Chinese men and two white women. Just before the party left the restaurant, one of the men excused himself, went out on the restaurant’s balcony—most Chinatown restaurants were on the second floor, and most had shallow balconies protruding over the sidewalk—and mopped his brow with his handkerchief. It was probably a signal. When Ko Low, immaculately well-groomed in his freshly pressed English tweeds, emerged on the arms of the two women and headed toward his home at the corner of Doyers Street, two gunmen, one armed with a Luger automatic pistol, fired a dozen bullets at him.

  Only one hit Ko Low, but it caused a mortal wound. He declined to describe his assailant to the police on the way to Beekman Street Hospital, and he died the next morning. But it was clear the shooting had been personal: neither the $1,000 in cash nor the thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry Ko Low sported on his person was touched.

  The newspapers assumed On Leongs were behind the hit; the New York Times even jumped the gun with an article headlined “Tong War On.” But if the papers rushed to judgment, the Hip Sings did not. Lee Yee Hong, the local president, wisely chose to investigate before pointing fingers.

  Aided by Chinese informers, police detained two Brooklynites: thirty-two-year-old Tom Yee, a student; and James Chuck, thirty-three, owner of a chop suey restaurant. Both were identified by witnesses. Yee had suffered two fractured ribs at the end of June at the hands of one of Ko Low’s cousins and had just been released from the hospital. He wasn’t an On Leong. Revenge was assumed to be his motive.

  Ko Low’s funeral was nearly as elaborate as Tom Lee’s had been. After lying in state at Hip Sing headquarters, he, too, enjoyed a grandiose procession out of Chinatown, which swarmed with police. To demonstrate that they had not been involved, the On Leongs sent an ostentatious display of flowers. And any doubt was removed when notices appeared on the bulletin board at the corner of Pell and Doyers bearing the seals of both the Hip Sing and the On Leong tongs. The dual proclamation was unprecedented. It declared that the death of Ko Low had been discussed amicably by the two societies, which had jointly concluded it had not been a result of enmity between them.

  A cache of weapons seized by police from Hip Sing Tong headquarters in a preemptive raid on December 1, 1922.

  The police, however, were not convinced that fresh attacks were off the table. Undercover officers in Chinatown noted that Lee Yee Hong never appeared without two bodyguards and that he had ceased to use the main entrance to Hip Sing headquarters. Lee had taken to coming and going via the roofs of neighboring buildings, which suggested he was anticipating trouble. And when the police noticed Hip Sing men furtively ferrying bundles into their headquarters by night, they were nearly certain something was up.

  On December 1, local police and federal officials staged a preemptive raid on Hip Sing headquarters. They arrested Lee Yee Hong and his bodyguards and confiscated more than fifteen pistols, a box of daggers and brass knuckles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. And in a hollowed-out idol in the assembly room, they found fourteen packages of opium and a hundred poppy heads, from which the drug is extracted. More opium was found under the floorboards. Officials valued the cache in the thousands of dollars.

  Perhaps because the Hip Sings had been disarmed, or more likely because there was no will on either side for more conflict, there would be no new tong war in New York.

  For the time being.

  Chapter 14

  The Defection of Chin
Jack Lem

  By the 1920s, the On Leongs and the Hip Sings had established branches in most of the cities of the East and the Midwest with significant Chinese populations. Both tongs had formed chapters in Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Washington, Minneapolis, Newark, and Schenectady. The On Leongs were also active in Boston, Baltimore, Hartford, Detroit, Providence, and at least half a dozen other cities. The Hip Sing Tong, of course, remained strong in the West, from whence it had come; Hip Sing branches existed in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Boise, Butte, and Spokane, among other places. The New York–born On Leong Tong, by contrast, had never attempted to expand beyond the Midwest.

  Members of these local organizations were linked together in a network under the aegis of national umbrella organizations, which governed the tongs, organized annual conventions in various cities around the country, adjudicated differences, and generally performed a coordinating role. The downside of closely linked branches, however, was that conflict in one city could easily foment trouble in another. The various local On Leong branches had inherited enmity for Hip Sings—and vice versa—from their New York brethren, and the result was a tinderbox that could easily be set aflame by an incendiary event anywhere in the network. As the individual branches became larger, they acted more independently. Brush fires became more frequent, and the national leadership had a harder time extinguishing them. Finally, they lost the ability to do so.

  The spark that caused the fourth and final tong war was a defection, but the conflict would take on a life of its own, spread to a dozen cities, and continue, in fits and starts, for nearly a decade. Persistent but uncoordinated flare-ups throughout the East and the Midwest, sometimes employing imported hit men and automatic weapons, would produce more carnage than any of the previous three wars. Reining it in would prove too much for any single police department, prosecutor, or mediator, and even for the national tong leaders. And it would grow so large and so out of control that it would ultimately trigger spectacular and unprecedented intervention by an impatient federal government fed up with the tongs and all too willing to summarily rid the country of Chinese, tong members or not, to stop the violence.

  When the peace that prevailed until 1924 finally ended, it wasn’t the New York branches of the tongs that broke it. The instigator of the Fourth Tong War was a hard-boiled restaurateur and sometime opium dealer named Chin Jack Lem. A big fish in the On Leong pond, he had directed the Chicago branch for nearly two decades and had once headed the national organization as well.

  In April 1924, when the On Leongs held their annual convention in Pittsburgh, Chin and thirteen others were ousted from the tong in a bitter factional dispute that involved accusations of mishandled funds. Resentful but undaunted, Chin secretly applied to the Hip Sing Tong for membership, promising he could bring a hundred On Leongs along with him, including the entire membership of the Pittsburgh and Cleveland chapters, who he insisted were loyal to him.

  The Hip Sings were divided. Chin was privy to all the On Leongs’ secrets and vulnerabilities, so everybody knew the tong could not sit idly by and allow him to join the enemy camp. A vote was put off until the annual Hip Sing convention, slated for September in Spokane, and in the interim Chin and his followers relocated to Cleveland. But their application to the Hip Sings became known, and the On Leongs mobilized for battle. They went after the recently ousted president of their Cleveland branch, a member of Chin’s faction. Ambushed in front of his Ontario Street store, he took five bullets but miraculously did not die of his wounds.

  Then Wong Sing, the treasurer of the Cleveland On Leongs, who remained loyal to the tong, filed a complaint with the police against Chin Jack Lem and his men. He accused them of attempting to force him at gunpoint to sign over local tong property valued at $70,000. This was plausible, given Chin’s boast that he could essentially replace the On Leong marquee in Cleveland with a Hip Sing sign if the tong accepted him. He was indicted on July 1 and released, but he jumped his $500 bail and returned to Chicago. Shortly afterward, an anonymous letter arrived at Cleveland On Leong headquarters. It was a death threat against On Leong officers in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.

  The radioactive question of admission of the expelled On Leongs was high on the Hip Sings’ convention agenda. The head of the New York branch opposed accepting them, it was whispered, because he had been bribed to vote no by the On Leongs, who were desperate to derail the defection. But his delegation overruled him, and New York voted yes, which turned out to be the majority position. The Hip Sings would accept the refugees, a verdict that amounted to a declaration of war.

  Everyone saw it coming, and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in New York even tried to broker a peace resolution in advance of a breakout of hostilities, but the Hip Sings wouldn’t sign. New York police summoned the leaders of both tongs to headquarters, but the Hip Sings didn’t show. They were gearing up for war.

  The opening salvo of the Fourth Tong War was the murder of a New York On Leong at a Delancey Street restaurant on October 8. On the eleventh, a Hip Sing laundryman was shot in Brooklyn, a Dayton tong man was slain, and another was shot in Chicago. On October 12, the body of a Chinese man who had been shot, strangled, and clubbed to death was discovered on a New Jersey roadside fifteen miles from Manhattan. This prompted Newark police to raid every house in the city’s Chinese quarter. Similar reports of violence came in from Pittsburgh, Boston, and Schenectady and, within the next few days, from Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee as well.

  On October 15, Chin Jack Lem, armed with an automatic weapon, was apprehended in Chicago. He needed it for protection, he explained to the police, because the On Leong Tong had put a $15,000 price on his head, and he flashed a badge to prove he had been appointed a deputy sheriff and could legally carry a gun. But he was still wanted in Cleveland, so he was arrested. Inexplicably, however, he was then released on $5,000 bail, and he disappeared again. Both the appointment and the release were, no doubt, evidence of the powerful friends in the Chicago firmament Chin had cultivated over the many years he had ruled the On Leongs there.

  Chin Jack Lem, expelled On Leong kingpin who joined the Hip Sings and single-handedly caused the Fourth Tong War.

  Over the next couple of days, a thirty-year-old New York On Leong was mortally wounded in his Allen Street flat, and a sixty-four-year-old On Leong was slashed to death in the chop suey restaurant he managed in Queens. It was a gruesome scene: his head had nearly been detached from his body, which bore fourteen slash marks left by a meat cleaver. A Hip Sing arrested in Yonkers in connection with that killing told police that a cook in the restaurant had offered him $500 to assist him in the murder.

  In New York, the Chinese consul, Ziang-Ling Chang, huddled with the police commissioner, Richard E. Enright, who had briefly manned the Elizabeth Street Station in 1910 and been appointed commissioner in 1918 after twenty-two years on the force. Together with the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, they made several efforts to organize a parley.

  Peace agreements, of course, had come and gone over the years and never seemed to stick. But a truce still seemed the best hope for stopping the bloodshed, because the authorities didn’t really know what else to do. This battle had nothing to do with gambling, drugs, or women, so going after the vice dens wouldn’t accomplish anything. By the end of the month, they had achieved a two-week armistice, which was to extend to November 13 and apply not just to New York but to the rest of the country as well. Although four bullets fired just outside the negotiation venue killed a Hip Sing and broke up the meeting, the agreement was eventually signed.

  Then New York police got word that Chin Jack Lem was heading for Manhattan. Five plainclothesmen posted at Pennsylvania Station spotted him on his arrival on November 9 and nabbed him. He was arraigned the next day and held on $20,000 bail, pending receipt of extradition papers from Cleveland. Following his detention, Consul General Chang announ
ced that the two tongs had agreed to extend the cease-fire for another two weeks.

  The police thought his capture might end the war. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  On the morning of October 26, 1924, a taxicab pulled up to the corner of Pell and the Bowery and unloaded three suspicious-looking Chinese men. At the sight of two police detectives, they fled, and the officers, believing they were tong gunmen, pursued and nabbed them. Shortly afterward, another cab discharged seven Chinese passengers at the corner of Mott and Pell. Some of the men were in very poor shape and had to be carried on the backs of the others. They, too, were chased, and after several shots were fired, they were arrested.

  At the police station, the men admitted they were all Hip Sings. Only three were local, however; the other seven were imported hit men, brought in to supplement the depleted ranks of Hip Sing shooters. But they had not been recruited from Boston, Philadelphia, or any of the usual locations. A month earlier, these men had all been in Hong Kong. Summoned to New York—probably by the national Hip Sing association—to fight the On Leongs, paid $200 apiece, and promised two meals a day and work once they reached America, they had stowed away on a cargo ship, the SS Gaelic Prince, packed two to a wooden crate.

  The men, near collapse from malnutrition and beriberi, were taken to the hospital. Only half were thought likely to survive. One died that same night, and another succumbed a few days later. The three accused of smuggling them in were indicted by a federal grand jury.

  The Hip Sings were reaching far and wide not only for foot soldiers but also for munitions. Acting on a tip, police raided an uptown Chinese eatery on October 28. They arrested Long Wong Chue, a Hip Sing waiter, and confiscated two tear gas grenades that had been shipped to him from a manufacturer in Pittsburgh. Long denied the weapons were intended for use against the On Leongs; he said they were samples he intended to ship to China, but the police didn’t believe him. They knew Long; he had been arrested the previous month for running an opium den and was out on $1,000 bail.