But the situation was more complex than it appeared. Cheong Fook turned out to be a member of the Tung On Society, an organization with roots in China made up primarily of sailors. And it appeared that his alleged slayer, Tei Get, was a member of the same group. Eddie Gong—the national Hip Sing secretary who had just authored a tell-all book on the tong wars—told police it had been a private dispute. But it appeared that the Tung On Society had become a new player in the complex and seemingly perpetual fight.
A treaty was signed on June 7, copies of which were posted in Chinatown and telegraphed to other cities. But the ink was scarcely dry when a report came of the murder of Charles Wong, twenty-five, in his Harlem laundry. Wong had left the Hip Sings two weeks earlier and joined the On Leong Tong; his killing was likely a result of his defection, which was as intolerable on the local level as it was on the national level with Chin Jack Lem.
Tong leaders disavowed the violence, but it now appeared as if they had truly lost control. In previous times, they had had the ability to sign agreements and calm things down, even if things didn’t stay calm. Now even this authority was in doubt. When news came of the killing of a Hip Sing in Minneapolis and alleged orders by branches in Pittsburgh and Chicago to renew warfare, New York Hip Sing leaders warned their members that the treaty did not seem to be holding and that they should therefore again be on their guard against On Leongs.
Once again the kingpins were hauled back to a parley—this time by the Chinese consul—and after two hours they succumbed to pressure and signed yet another accord to supersede the previous one. It bore the same date and included this text, translated for the press by Consul Young:
The On Leong Merchants Association and the Hip Sing Association have on account of misunderstandings broken peaceful relations. Now, as the result of the mediation of Consul-General Young and the directors of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, they have settled their differences and resumed peace. This is to notify all Chinese citizens that their minds may be relieved and that they may continue the pursuits of their various occupations. Signed and sealed this seventh day of June, 1930.
The new agreement was referred to as the Kellogg Peace Pact—a jocular reference to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement sponsored by France and the United States concluded two years earlier in which signatory states renounced the use of war as an instrument of national policy.
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In July, Chinese were slaughtering one another again. A Chinese theater was once again a killing field; this one was located on the Bowery. In the middle of a play on July 9, five shots were fired from the rear of the house. The hall quickly emptied, and when police arrived, they found the body of Chang Wah Hung in one of the seats.
But this time there was a change in the cast of characters. Chang was neither a Hip Sing nor an On Leong. He was president of the Tung On Society—the same group to which both Tei Get and his recent victim, Cheong Fook, belonged. The man suspected of his murder, however, was an On Leong. In retaliation, two On Leongs were killed on Mott Street by Tung Ons, and bullets were fired into the windows of On Leong Tong headquarters. The following night, nine bombs containing enough nitroglycerine to blow up an entire city block were found in a rooming house in a Chinese neighborhood in Brooklyn.
The cause of the trouble was an opium deal gone bad. The Tung Ons had failed to deliver $140,000 worth of the drug promised to the On Leongs. Four Tung Ons were later arrested in New York for offering young men a $500 bounty for each On Leong corpse they could produce.
But this was not to say all was well between the Hip Sings and their traditional rival. More shootings followed, and although no one was killed, Eddie Gong told police he believed the On Leongs were out to murder as many Hip Sings as they could. Once again, Commissioner Mulrooney and District Attorney Crain delivered an ultimatum. Mulrooney summoned a dozen leaders from the On Leongs, the Hip Sings, the Tung Ons, and several other groups and assembled them in his office on August 18. He told them he would recognize no further treaties and oversee no further mediation efforts. He would, however, ask federal authorities to begin mass deportations in a week’s time if the trouble didn’t stop.
But there was another treaty, negotiated under orders from the Chinese minister in Washington and slated to be signed on August 19. This pact was to have six signatories—On Leongs, Hip Sings, Tung Ons, and three smaller organizations. It stated explicitly that in the event of a violation, the signatories would cooperate with police to punish the offender. But it took until September 2 to be ratified. The sticking point had been a demand that each group put up $50,000 in “earnest money” to be forfeited to charity in the event of a violation. It was ultimately dropped because the smaller organizations could not afford it.
The final twenty-article agreement, placed in U.S. Attorney Charles H. Tuttle’s safe, contained a provision appointing a committee of representatives of all the signatories, chaired by the Chinese consul, to settle disagreements. In the event they became deadlocked, the police commissioner, Mulrooney, would cast the deciding vote.
The New York Sun was perhaps to be forgiven for its skepticism: “In spite of the fact that assassination has invariably followed other such treaty-makings, either very soon afterward or within no great period of time, the white peacemakers appeared to think they had solved the problem, just as General Sessions Judge Warren W. Foster thought he had solved it well nigh twenty years ago. No such opinion is current throughout Chinatown, however, among men who know the tongs and their ways.”
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But a year of quiet followed. Even before the stock market crashed, Manhattan’s Chinatown had slowly been morphing into a center for legitimate business and tourism, vice having, in the main, moved out. “Sightseeing buses dump their customers for a roam through three or four streets and then the tourists go back home to tell what a wicked place they saw,” the New York Sun wrote in 1931. “But there is little really bad in the Chinatown of New York today.” Whether because gambling was mostly gone or because the Great Depression had taken its toll, the Sun now found the Mott Street area “quiet as a side street in Brooklyn.”
New York’s Chinese population now numbered about eighty-four hundred. Most of those not unemployed were running or working in restaurants, laundries, and other businesses elsewhere in Manhattan or the other boroughs. Chinatown, however, remained the focal point of the community. Most Chinese organizations kept their headquarters there, including the On Leongs at 41 Mott and the Hip Sings at 13 Pell. And in 1931, both decided to hold their national conventions there.
In fact, they held their caucuses at precisely the same time. The Hip Sings deliberately changed the date of their fourteenth annual national meeting, which was to have been held earlier, to coincide with the twenty-seventh gathering of the On Leongs on April 27. It was a provocative act. Never before had both tongs met in the same city at the same time, and the police braced for trouble as several thousand Chinese of both stripes from dozens of cities descended on lower Manhattan. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted ominously that the tongs would be meeting “a knife’s throw from each other.”
The convocations, used to plan programs, discuss problems, and elect officers, generally lasted for a few weeks. That year both tongs would deliberate above all else not on how to annihilate each other but on the grim question of how to provide relief for those of their brethren who had lost their livelihoods in the Great Depression.
The Hip Sing Tong and the On Leong Tong both held conventions in New York City in 1931. This April 27, 1931, photograph shows the Hip Sings on parade down Pell Street, considered Hip Sing territory. An On Leong banner, partially obscured but visible in the background, was seen by the Hip Sings as a deliberate provocation.
Tens of thousands of red, white, blue, green, and yellow electric bulbs were strung across Pell, Mott, and Doyers streets, and innumerable Chinese and Amer
ican flags and buntings hung from balconies and were draped around window frames. Looking up, one saw buildings festooned with colorful banners welcoming delegates; looking down, one could not help but notice dozens of policemen, revolvers at the hip, intent on preventing them from slaughtering one another.
The first issue that arose was whether the Hip Sing parade, with its thousand banner-wielding tong men and dragon dancers, would be permitted to pass in front of On Leong headquarters. There was a long delay as the marshals discussed with police whether it would be too confrontational an act, but in the end the procession did pass 41 Mott, and while they encountered no cheering crowds there—indeed, one newspaper noted a “distinct and sinister feeling of antipathy”—there was also no foul play.
The On Leongs, however, had hung a banner across Pell Street, traditionally Hip Sing territory, a predictably incendiary move, and the Hip Sings sent a note to the On Leongs asking that it be removed. The plea was ignored, of course, because its very purpose had been to tweak the Hip Sings’ noses. A Hip Sing vice president approached a police officer to complain about it, but the On Leongs had trumped them: they had secured a permit for the banner.
Both tongs held banquets on the evening of April 27, and many of their members attended a performance afterward at the Chinese Theatre on the Bowery. Somewhere between eight and nine hundred people, including about fifty women and a hundred children, were there. Police did arrest three men for carrying loaded revolvers under their overcoats, but otherwise there was no trouble. The quadrupled police guard in Chinatown might have had something to do with it. The New York Sun described the scene at the theater:
. . . eight gigantic cops whose shoulders loomed over the heads of the tallest Chinese in the theater. Their nightsticks, significantly battered and scarred, zipped and zuttered as they twirled them. They lounged in the tiny lobby and every tongman who entered passed under the cold blue eye of a policeman big enough to pick him up and snap him in two. Another cop strolled the sidewalk in front of the theater. Three or four haunted the dark corners in the alley back of the long, narrow building. . . . There were cops back stage, outside front and back and in the lobby, and half a dozen cold-eyed detectives gave the impression of being everywhere.
The reality was that the tongs were in no mood, and no position, for violent confrontation. They had serious issues to resolve and were truthful when they assured authorities they had no plans to attack each other. With a quarter of the Chinese in America unemployed, both tongs were focused on how to provide food and shelter for these unfortunates and how to go about settling their debts. Delivering calculated insults like the Hip Sing parade on Mott Street and the On Leong banner on Pell was as far as anybody was prepared to go.
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At 9:30 p.m. on February 28, 1932, a Chinese man was shot through the fleshy part of his neck as he stepped out the door of 64 Mulberry Street in Newark. The bullet had come from a shooter in a passing automobile. Had it deviated from its course, the victim would surely have died. His assailant, another Chinese, fled the scene.
The man was taken to Newark City Hospital for treatment of his wound, which turned out to be superficial, and then to police headquarters for questioning. He spoke English well. He gave his name to the police as Mock Sai Wing and would say no more, although he did allow that it was a Hip Sing who had shot him and that he had done so over a gambling debt.
The police detectives thought they recognized him, however. Although he wouldn’t admit it, they were pretty certain he was Mock Duck, the legendary scourge of New York’s Chinatown from the previous generation who had dropped out of view after his release from Sing Sing nearly twenty years earlier.
There had actually been a few sightings of Mock Duck in the interim. He and his wife had attended the funeral of Gin Gum, his stepfather-in-law, in 1915, and he was said a few years later to be running a small business on Pell Street. He had been named in a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1928 as a mediator between warring factions within the local Hip Sing chapter. And it had been he who had signed the letter to the On Leongs asking them to remove their banner from Pell Street the previous year. Mock Duck had otherwise played no public role in years, however, and many thought he had died.
But Mock Duck hadn’t died, and Mock Sai Wing was just playing with the police. Sai Wing was his formal name; the two were one and the same.
The police made an attempt to arrest the shooter, but they were less concerned about finding him than they were that the reemergence of Mock Duck—and especially a wounded Mock Duck with a new grievance—might spell wider trouble. But in fact this was hardly a “reemergence.” Mock Duck might have been keeping a low profile, but the police soon discovered he had been quietly calling the shots as national president of the Hip Sing Tong since 1929. From a hideaway in Coney Island, he had dictated the tong’s nationwide strategy in the most recent war. Now that they knew he was back in charge, police feared that the longtime Hip Sing warrior might have more mischief up his sleeve.
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Amity—or at least quiet—prevailed for the balance of 1932 as problems far larger than control of Pell and Mott streets loomed. Many Chinese were finding it impossible to make a living in a depressed America and needed help. And all eyes were on China, which Japan had invaded late the previous year. In the face of war and civil unrest in their ancestral homeland, the tong men were first and foremost patriotic Chinese, concerned about the future of their native land and the family members they had left behind.
The greatest contribution Chinese in America could make to the cause was to dig into their pockets, and despite the bad economic times the tongs did their share. Funds over and above those needed for basic activities and salaries were divided between assistance to needy countrymen in America and relief for areas of China laid waste by Japanese forces.
Putting aside their differences, the two tongs had even joined together to participate in the new Patriotic League of Chinese. Money was collected by Eddie Gong of the Hip Sings, who met regularly with the On Leong brass, an arrangement unthinkable in earlier times. By mid-March, New York’s Chinese had already raised $1 million, and similar efforts were taking place elsewhere. “There are no tongs as far as we are concerned now,” Gong declared expansively. “We are all Chinese who feel that we must support our country.”
Even the Chinese New Year celebration of January 1933 was amicable. Although the tongs did not join in a single ceremony, they actually paid their respects to each other, after a fashion. Both sponsored dragon dances; these were typically used to raise funds for charitable efforts. Houses along the parade routes hung red envelopes filled with cash outside for the dragons to collect. But this year, the Hip Sing dragon also danced up Mott Street, and the On Leong beast ventured onto Pell. It even bowed three times in front of Hip Sing headquarters in an unmistakable gesture of respect.
A 1933 photograph of Eng Ying “Eddie” Gong (fourth from left), national secretary of the Hip Sing Tong, posing with fellow tong members. A portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-sen is visible on the wall at right.
When, on July 21, a Hip Sing man was shot and killed in a Boston opium den, the local branch handled the death with restraint. It appealed to New York, where tong elders asked a mediator, George Chintong, English secretary of the Benevolent Association, to determine whether the assailant had been an On Leong. Chintong declared his expectation that peace would be maintained until the investigation was concluded, but he was wrong in predicting forbearance.
News came from Pittsburgh on July 23 of the assassination of a Chinese there. And then, shortly after midnight on July 29, despite an augmented police presence in Chinatown, forty-year-old Wing Gin, an On Leong carpenter, was shot seven times as he mounted the stairway of a tenement at 15–17 Doyers Street. Wing died soon after reaching the hospital. Police nabbed forty-six-year-old Lee Bow as he fled the scene. Lee denied being a member of any tong, but the police
were pretty certain he was a Hip Sing.
Later that day, Sing Kee, the local On Leong secretary and decorated World War I veteran, appeared at the police station. “There is trouble in Chinatown,” he said flatly. Asked to elaborate, he replied, simply, “Use your own imagination.” But the situation didn’t require imagination. The drill was all too familiar. The police stationed every available man—thirty detectives and fifty-one bluecoats—in Chinatown. And they notified the U.S. attorney George Z. Medalie, whose predecessors had ordered the rounding up and deportation of illegal immigrants, to brace himself for a renewal of Tong warfare.
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Just as the earthly remains of Wing Gin were making their way to Brooklyn’s Evergreens Cemetery, Medalie, in what had become a grindingly familiar ritual, asked the police to bring the leaders of the two tongs to his office for a talk. Mindful of the fact that the efforts of his predecessors to give civics lessons to men barred from citizenship had proven quite useless, however, he had a different tack in mind. When Sing Kee and George Howe, secretary of the Hip Sings, appeared at the Federal Building late in the afternoon of July 31, 1933, they were told that although they were not personally under suspicion, they might possess information that could be helpful in stopping the problem. Each was then served with a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury.
The ostensible purpose of the grand jury inquiry, which began the next day, was to determine whether the recent killings were connected with violations of the immigration or narcotics laws, both areas under federal jurisdiction. Howe, in response to a subpoena, had brought along membership records and other official documents related to the Hip Sing Tong, and the On Leongs were instructed to produce similar papers the following day.
Tong Wars Page 29