Underworld of 1930s Shanghai explored
In the 1930s, Shanghai was an outpost of wealth, culture and vice in a country riven by civil war.
Within the port city’s borders was a smaller island, the International Settlement, created by Britain in the 19th century as a beachhead for the opium trade it forced upon the Chinese.
The Settlement and its adjacent neighborhoods, the French Concession and Badlands, were hemmed in by a China “constantly on the point of collapse, about to fragment into a hundred warring states.”
Its denizens were “the paperless, the refugee, the fleeing; those who sought adventure far from the Great Depression and poverty; the desperate who sought sanctuary from fascism and communism; those who sought to build criminal empires; and those who wished to forget,” writes British-born author Paul French in his new nonfiction book, “City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai.”
French, an Edgar Award winner for his 2011 book, “Midnight in Peking,” and a veteran China hand, conjures out of old records, newspaper clippings and survivors’ memories a true story of two antiheroes, men who had lived several lives by the time they got to Shanghai.
Lucky Jack Riley, born Fahnie Albert Becker, survived an orphanage upbringing and escaped Oklahoma by enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Discharged, he took up taxi driving in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then, drawn into a gambling heist gone bad, landed in the state penitentiary on a kidnapping charge.
Starting pitcher on the prison baseball team, Becker walked away during an out-of-pen game and fled.
Washing up in Shanghai, he conceives a brilliant plan to smuggle slot machines into the gambling-mad city. Becker • “City of Devils: The
Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai” (Picador, 299 pages, $28) by Paul French
becomes Jack Riley, the Slots King of Shanghai.
Joe Farren was born Josef Pollak, a Viennese Jew desperate to escape the ghetto. Josef “learns to dance, slicks down his hair with pomade, keeps his fingers clean” and meets a White Russian named Nellie.
They merge into a graceful exhibition dance team and join entertainers on a Far East tour; when the troupe leaves Shanghai, Joe and Nellie stay. Farren will eventually run “the biggest, fanciest, richest nightclub and casino Shanghai has ever seen,” French writes.
Riley and Farren become lords of the city’s nightlife and pay princely sums to the authorities to stave off gambling raids.
Jack and Joe stay up all night and in the morning they count the money; fantastic amounts of money, but never enough. They start smuggling dope, mostly heroin, on the side. The profits roll in until the battle now raging between the Japanese and the free Chinese spills into the city — the Japanese invent a provocation and put in motion the takeover of Shanghai.
The author peoples the stage with mobsers and musicians, girlfriends and sailors, dope dealers and addicts. Front and center are Riley and Farren. They’re criminals but they’re not cruel; French creates sympathy in the reader for two renegades with nowhere else to go.