Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  Dr. Carlton Simon, special deputy police commissioner, told reporters that if one of the bombs had ignited in a confined space, everyone in the room would surely have been killed.

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  A few days before the two-week extension was due to expire, the Reverend Lee Tow, a sixty-one-year-old Baptist minister and former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, joined an effort by Christian Chinese to end the turmoil. But during a passionate speech at the Port Arthur Restaurant, Lee was suddenly stricken with paralysis. He never regained consciousness and was regarded as another martyr in the war of the tongs, which resumed with a vengeance on Thanksgiving Day.

  That day, the son of an On Leong perished in his Brooklyn laundry in a volley of bullets shot from automatic weapons by Hip Sing assailants. The next day, two more New Yorkers fell: a forty-three-year-old Hip Sing laundryman and a forty-year-old On Leong, stabbed in his Eldridge Street bed. He had struggled with his assailant and plunged through a window to his death.

  In the meantime, Chin Jack Lem was fighting extradition. He was being sought by two states: by Ohio for extortion, and by both Ohio and Illinois for jumping bail. Governor Al Smith of New York signed extradition papers for Ohio, but Chin’s lawyers initially blocked the move. Finally, on November 29, the prisoner was handed over to the custody of Cleveland detectives. Before they even left the courthouse, however, they were served with a writ from the state Supreme Court admitting Chin to $30,000 bail—even though he had already jumped bail twice. The argument was that he should first be sent back to Chicago, the jurisdiction from which he had fled to New York.

  Hostilities continued, fueled by the defections, which were intolerable to the On Leongs, and sustained by the imperative of retaliating for every killing. Rumors of hatchet men pouring into New York from other cities abounded. One held that Hip Sings were importing seventy gunmen. Eng Ying “Eddie” Gong, the national Hip Sing secretary who had relocated to New York in 1921, dismissed the report out of hand. “It is ridiculous to think that we would pay $200 cash to bring 70 men from the Pacific coast,” he said, although the Hip Sings had in fact already imported shooters from much farther away than that. “We have no money in our organization,” he continued, “but if gunmen are being imported, it behooves us to be on the alert.” So he applied to the New York police for protection. So did Henry Moy and Charlie Boston, now the top local On Leongs. All also acquired bulletproof vests.

  While Chin remained in New York, the seven accused of cooperating with him in the Cleveland extortion attempt were convicted. Their sentences varied from three to twenty-five years. A week later, all his legal remedies exhausted, Chin was finally extradited to Ohio, shackled hand and foot to a detective. When he got to Cleveland, he appeared in court in a heavy steel vest and pleaded not guilty. Astoundingly, he was not remanded but again freed—this time on $15,000 bond.

  The killings continued. In Chicago, the going rate for murder for hire was $1,000 a head; if one succeeded only in wounding a victim, $350 would be paid by the rival tong. Shooting up someone’s place of business fetched $50. The head of Chicago’s dominant Moy clan was shot on Christmas Day by two Hip Sings. Another Chicago Chinese was found slain on January 3, 1925. This was followed by an attack by assailants wielding sawed-off shotguns on two Chicago laundrymen while they were ironing.

  In New York, it was open season on the Chin family. On December 14, 1924, forty-year-old Chin Song, a fruit vendor who belonged to neither tong, had his head blown off in his Mott Street room. Then, on January 4, 1925, Chin Hing, a Hip Sing restaurant worker, was gunned down by an On Leong, and three days later a Chinese dentist and Columbia graduate, thirty-five-year-old Dr. Wah S. Chan, was discovered in his Mott Street office, his jugular vein severed. Chan was not a tong man either, but all the victims were members of the Chin clan, which was not coincidental: so was Chin Jack Lem.

  He finally went on trial on February 9 with the indispensable Wong Get as his interpreter. His defense was that he had not been in Cleveland when the alleged extortion took place, which was true. But he was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in the Ohio Penitentiary by a judge who called him “a thoroughly desperate character and a bad man.” Chin Jack Lem was taken to the county jail and his bond increased to $25,000, pending an appeal. Unable to make bail this time, he was incarcerated in the Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus on February 23.

  “The verdict means the end of warfare between the two tongs, which in the last six months has cost 41 lives,” William P. Lee, secretary of the Chicago On Leongs, told the press. Like earlier predictions, it was overly optimistic. But the judgment—coupled with a brutal cleaver attack on a Hip Sing on Orchard Street on March 3 and the March 20 shooting death of an On Leong baker—did result in the convening of yet another peace parley, this one entirely Chinese-driven.

  Nineteen members of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association from different cities converged on New York to assist the Chinese consul, Ziang-Ling Chang, in mediation, and after two weeks of shuttle diplomacy an agreement “for lasting peace between the On Leongs and Hip Sings in all parts of the United States” was reached. It was signed on March 26, 1925, at Chinatown’s City Hall by the heads of both tongs as twenty New York policemen looked on and another hundred patrolled the streets, just in case.

  Among the terms were pledges by the On Leongs not to bring further charges against Hip Sing men and not to provide additional witnesses against them in court proceedings. They also agreed to refrain from molesting their former brethren who had joined the other tong. For their part, the Hip Sings were enjoined from organizing in certain cities. The On Leongs had insisted on this because they did not wish to see their rivals make additional inroads into territory in which they had traditionally held sway.

  After the signing, senior members of both tongs not seen in public for months because they were obvious targets emerged from their hiding places. Banquets were planned—each tong gave a dinner for the peacemakers—and peace did, indeed, break out.

  For five months.

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  The 1925 agreement didn’t end the conflict; there was still plenty more carnage ahead. What it did end was declared wars between the tongs. But relations would remain so tenuous and fragile that just about any incident could prove incendiary.

  Trouble broke out again in late August 1925. This time it started in Boston, where an On Leong felt a Hip Sing had been too attentive to his wife. The two exchanged gunfire, and both were wounded. News of the shooting spread rapidly, although the personal nature of the quarrel wasn’t part of the message. And shortly after word reached New York, an On Leong cook was felled by a vengeful Hip Sing in the basement of a Doyers Street chop suey joint. Homicides followed in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Baltimore, and Minneapolis, and Chinese elsewhere were nervous. Washington, D.C., police arrested forty-eight Chinese in a weekend raid and placed detectives in the capital’s tiny Chinatown. At a Jersey City subway station, police nabbed three Chinese for carrying revolvers. And a Newark Hip Sing was so petrified by repeated, ominous thumping on his door that he bounded through a window, severely lacerating himself in the process.

  The peace agreement had been held together only by what one newspaper called “gossamer threads,” and while the Boston incident was the proximate cause of its violation, its demise was probably inevitable. The key point of dissatisfaction on the part of the Hip Sings was the territorial restriction. The two tongs were about even in number in New York and Chicago, but the On Leongs were particularly powerful in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, St. Louis, and Boston, and they wished to preserve their prerogatives in those cities and in the East generally. Under the treaty, the Hip Sings were permitted to organize in additional locations in the West, but they chafed at being enjoined from expanding in eastern cities, especially Boston. They had, in fact, quietly begun to establish themselves there
in violation of their pledge.

  After the fighting resumed, Hip Sing and On Leong leaders in New York stoked the coals with telegrams warning their brethren around the country to be alert for enemies. In the vain hope of containing the nascent resumption of the war, police in several cities strengthened their presence in their respective Chinatowns. Within just a couple of days, more than a hundred Chinese were arrested in eight cities.

  Because the agreement did not appear to be holding, the authorities turned up the heat. First, immigration officials in Washington announced that all Chinese incarcerated for tong shootings would be deported upon the expiration of their prison terms. Then Philadelphia police began rounding up all Chinese who could not produce registration certificates, which had been required of all alien Chinese in America since 1892. Seventy-five men were hauled into police headquarters, although all but fifteen were eventually released. And in New York, bluecoats and plainclothesmen flooded Chinatown; 150 reinforcements were sent in to augment the regular police presence, and patrolmen were stationed fifteen feet apart. A house-to-house search for weapons was also undertaken.

  New York police attempted to bring the two sides together for another summit. Detectives fetched the tong leaders, who sat in separate rooms at police headquarters for four hours as two police captains ferried between them. Suspicion and enmity ran so deep, however, that they were unable to persuade the delegates even to sit in each other’s presence, let alone to renew the shattered truce. In the end, they secured only a promise to meet the following day at the office of the district attorney. And even that was achieved only by threatening them with arrest for conspiracy.

  The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association summoned Meihong Soohoo for the next day’s discussions. Soohoo, founder of the Boston chapter of the On Leong Tong, was also its national president; his imprimatur would be necessary for a new treaty. District Attorney Joab H. Banton, a Tammany appointee, presided over the meeting, which also included Soohoo’s Hip Sing counterpart and attorneys for both tongs. The one point on which both sides concurred at once was that the breach had come not as a result of a declaration of war but rather as the unfortunate consequence of a personal quarrel.

  After two hours, agreement was secured to form a joint committee to fix responsibility for violation of the treaty. The two sides also came together on what Banton called “practically a truce” that was to last until Monday, August 31. That day, a smaller group reconvened and decided to scrap the earlier agreement and go back to the drawing board. Because there had been dissatisfaction with the terms of the March 26 accord, this seemed the only way forward. They pledged to cease hostilities until a new accord was drafted. And they issued a general call to tong branch leaders throughout the country to meet in New York with Chang Lee Kee, president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, to ratify it.

  Barely two days later, however, nineteen-year-old Sam Wing, who had arrived with several other On Leong gunmen a few days earlier, fatally shot Tom Wong, a Hip Sing, in his Brooklyn laundry. Revenge was swift; the following day, a fifty-year-old On Leong laundryman was killed in Manhattan by a Hip Sing who also wounded his two sons.

  The district attorney would not comment publicly on these shootings. But he did reveal his intention to proceed speedily with the cases against the gunmen and his plan to call yet another conference. Wong Get, asked point-blank whether he considered the truce to have been broken, also declined to offer an opinion. But the On Leongs, who had borne the brunt of the recent killings, saw an opportunity to seize the high ground. The tong secretary issued a statement pointing out that since the renewal of hostilities five On Leongs had been slain, but the tong had attempted no reprisals. “We shall not do so,” he announced, “unless driven to it in self-defense.”

  On September 8, with the police commissioner, Richard E. Enright, and the Chinese consul at his elbow, Banton assembled the parties for a “final ultimatum.” He spoke for the five district attorneys of the city and intimated that he had the federal government behind him as well. “I am appealing to you for the sake of the reputation of the good Chinese in this country, whose rights are being jeopardized by the tong men,” he said, quite accurately. “It is the duty of the leaders of the Chinese here to tell the contending tongs that they must live in peace in this country or get out of it.”

  Such appeals had proven futile in the past, however, and Washington was getting impatient. Federal officials had already vowed to begin deporting imprisoned tong men when their sentences were up. But with the obvious failure of the tongs, the consul, the Benevolent Association, and the police to stop the shooting, they were poised to up the ante.

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  The evening after Banton’s “final ultimatum,” two Hip Sings lay dead in New York. Exasperated, the police decided to make good on the threat to hold the tong chiefs accountable for further violence. Accordingly, Lee Gee Min, the national secretary of the On Leong Tong, and Henry Moy, the local secretary, were arrested and accused of complicity in one of the deaths. It was the first time tong leaders not on the scene had been held personally responsible for a murder.

  At the arraignment, however, the gaping flaw in the strategy became clear. Counsel for the defense called the arrest “the most outrageous ever made in New York,” because there was no evidence the men had had any involvement in the shooting or in planning for it. The magistrate agreed and discharged the tong officers.

  New York police, who couldn’t think of anything else to do, then returned to staging raids on Chinatown. They confiscated weapons and opium and made a few arrests of men carrying pistols. In one altercation, detectives exchanged fire with several men on a Mott Street rooftop. And the violence elsewhere continued: a Hip Sing was killed in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and an On Leong severely beaten in Chicago.

  With local authorities at their wit’s end and the Chinese killings front-page news throughout the country, the federal government concluded it was time to step in. In a drastic measure, Emory R. Buckner, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declared his intention to deport every Chinese found who was unable to prove his eligibility to remain in the United States. On September 11, he warned the tong bosses that “every Chinaman we mark for deportation will go back to the Orient and all the funds and power you have, all the lawyers and pull you may think you have, will not stop us.”

  Under the terms of the 1902 Scott Act, which extended earlier Chinese exclusion legislation indefinitely, each alien Chinese residing in America was required to register with the U.S. government and receive a certificate to be carried on his or her person at all times. Because registration required applicants to prove they had entered the country legally, however, many Chinese could not qualify and therefore did not attempt to register.

  Buckner threatened to use this fact to begin wholesale deportation of Chinese in order to suppress the tongs, although it was a blunt instrument that could not help but target multitudes of peaceful, non-tong members as well. He was not bluffing, however; nor was he acting alone. He had secured the cooperation of the U.S. commissioner general of immigration and four departments of the federal government. He had Washington, fed up with the machinations of the Chinese tongs, squarely behind him.

  The raids began late on September 11 and extended into the wee hours. Federal agents acting under Buckner’s orders rounded up Chinese who could not immediately produce residence permits and brought them in paddy wagons to Manhattan’s Federal Building. After the first few dozen arrests, of course, word spread and the streets quickly emptied of people. Chinese fled to Newark, Jersey City, Hoboken, Long Island City, the Bronx, and elsewhere. A total of sixty-eight were caught, however, and were brought before officials and questioned individually through interpreters.

  Six were able to prove they were legal residents, and another fourteen claimed they could do so if permitted to fetch their papers. Five others were turned over to
the police for carrying weapons. Most of those remaining were Chinese seamen who had overstayed the sixty-day limit allowed for foreign sailors. They were placed under arrest, arraigned, and sent to Ellis Island, where they were held without bail to await deportation.

  The federal government’s heavy-handed intervention provided the impetus the tong leaders needed to come to terms. On September 14, at the Chinese consulate on Astor Place, the two tongs concluded a new peace compact. One sticking point, whether individuals would be permitted to defect from one tong to another, was resolved by a commitment to official notifications between tongs before transfers would be valid. The agreement was sealed at midnight and the news wired immediately to local tong headquarters across the country.

  But the Feds didn’t care. The raids continued. Local police placed a cordon around Chinatown, and federal agents descended on restaurants, gambling houses, joss houses, theaters, and tenements. If Chinese stayed off the streets, they would drag them from their beds. Everyone they found who looked Chinese was picked up; six hundred more were detained. The lights at the Federal Building burned through the night as each was examined by a federal officer.

  In the end, 134 were found to be in violation of the Scott Act and taken to the Tombs to await expulsion. “The violators of the immigration laws are the trouble makers through whom the tongs have fought their recent wars,” the New York Post declared, citing not a shred of evidence for this preposterous claim. The fact was, there was no shortage of legal residents among the tong men and no proof that it was men who were out of status who were the “trouble makers.”