GANGS OF CHINATOWN
Bloody early 1900s battles Vicious syndicates face off
AT THE DAWN of the 20th century, New York’s Chinatown was the scene of a vicious and bloody gang war that has been all but obscured by history.
While the Italian and Irish gang wars of the era have been exhaustively documented, and mined for entertainment value in movies like Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” only now does a new book give Chinatown its due.
“Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York’s Chinatown,” by Scott D. Seligman, tells the blood-soaked story of how two criminal syndicates warred for control of Chinatown in the first decade of the new century.
At stake were the payouts from the many gambling and opium dens as well as the brothels that made Chinatown a major lure not just for other Chinese immigrants but for white New Yorkers, too.
The On Leong tong had a veneer of respectability, headed by a businessman, Tom Lee. He ingratiated himself with the easily corrupted police force of Tammany Hall, and used his 6-foottall nephew, Lee Toy, as an enforcer. The Hip Sing syndicate was a San Francisco transplant of thugs. While On Leong promised protection from the police, the Hip Sing offered protection from themselves. The Hip Sing leader was known widely as Mock Duck, and he took on legendary status as a killer, said by children to possess supernatural abilities.
The On Leong had the cops in their pockets; the Hip Sing won the district attorney’s office to its side.
Both syndicates would throw major banquets well attended by the city’s top officials, who knew they were enjoying a multicourse extravaganza with murderers.
Meanwhile, the killers had a certain cool factor, dressed in Western pinstripes, their collars up and their fedoras pulled low. They came armed with six-shooters and derringers — but meat cleavers were also part of the arsenal.
Hostility between the two factions was decades old at the turn of the century. But that first decade saw three major eruptions of violence that came to be known as the Tong Wars.
The first shot was fired when four On Leong gunmen ambushed a Hip Sing laundryman in the hallway of a tenement in the summer of 1900.
The police wrote it off as a gambling dispute, but it was an execution. Retribution came a month later when six Hip Sing gunman went after two On Leong soldiers on Pell St.
What was remarkable was how out in the open it all was. There seemed no need to confine murder to behind closed doors. A woman and two children injured in that shootout were simply written off as collateral damage.
But one of the shooters was Sai Wing Mock, known as Mock Duck, the leader of the Hip Sing. He now faced a murder charge.
By any means necessary was another tenet of the wars. Burning down a building was of no matter.
When a fire erupted from a pan of cooking oil left on a burner in a Chinatown restaurant, it quickly enveloped the building. Among the fleeing residents, one man leaped from the terrace, only to land squarely on his head. It just so happened the dead man, Sin Cue, was to be the star witness in Duck’s upcoming murder trial. Indeed, Duck was acquitted, but an On Leong bullet through the stomach soon took him down on Pell St. A policeman nabbed the shooter, but the two were suddenly surrounded by Hip Sing gunmen intent on taking their own revenge. The cop retreated with his collar to a doorway, gun drawn. The standoff only ended with the arrival of police reinforcements.
As the body count grew, newspaper accounts warned New Yorkers there was a new menace in town, claiming Chinatown’s secret societies were as bloodthirsty as the Mafia and Black Hand.
In 1904, a large-scale gunfight erupted in front of Hip Sing headquarters on the Bowery. Raiding the building, the cops finally saw the scope of what they were confronting.
They uncovered a major arsenal, including four coats of armor, one made of human hair. Another was constructed with enough steel to weigh 75 pounds. While the vest was invulnerable to bullets, it also made outrunning the cops chancy.
Bodies could turn up anywhere, anytime as the war raged on. The same was true of assassinations.
A Hip Sing man was found on the threshold of his Bronx laundry with his skull crushed. In retaliation, a 58-year-old On Leong man took a bullet through the head on Pell St.
That was merely business as usual. But one massacre was a show-stopper.
On an August night in 1905, a Chinese theater was packed with an audience of 400 taking in the all-male opera “The King’s Daughter.” Suddenly, a Hip Sing man seated in the front row lit a string of firecrackers and tossed it on the stage.
The actors fled as four Hip Sing gunmen in the back rose as one, firing into the crowd. The fusillade of 100 bullets ripped the theater apart, shattering windows and splintering benches.
Panicked theatergoers had to fight through the smoke to escape. But when the police got to the scene, they didn’t find the expect-
ed carnage. Only two civilians died in the melee.
Four On Leong men were dead on the floor in pools of their own blood. Other On Leong soldiers cowered under their seats. The Hip Sing had pulled off a major execution.
This time, the retribution was grotesque. In the wee hours of Aug. 12, two cops walking the beat heard a racket coming from a laundry on 11th St.
Inside, they found a gruesome scene. The owner of the laundry, Hop Lee, a Hip Sing associate, had been pinned down on an ironing board by four On Leong men as a fifth savagely had at him with a meat cleaver.
Incredibly, even with his nose sliced off, Lee lived long enough to make a deathbed identification of two of his assailants.
While open warfare didn’t deter white New Yorkers from enjoying the pleasures, and vices, of Chinatown, the murder of a white woman in 1909 finally scared them away.
The body of Elsie Sigel, a 22-year-old missionary, was found decomposing in a trunk above a chop suey joint on Eighth Ave. She had been murdered in a crime of passion, a one-off, but finally Chinatown lost its allure.
Meanwhile, it was the murder of a Chinese woman that escalated the war within Chinatown. Bow Kum was found in her bed at 21 Mott St., her torso slashed and a 7-inch hunting knife embedded upright on the floor.
Kum had escaped enslavement to a known murderer, Lau Tong, in San Francisco. When he tracked her down, her lover, an On Leong laundryman, refused to either return or pay for her.
Tong’s arrest for the murder brought the Four Brothers, a mostly benign association, into the war. The Hip Sing allied with the Brothers against the On Leong, and murder in Chinatown became almost commonplace.
One of the casualties was Ah Hoon, a comic and an On Leong man. He had a police escort to and from the theater, but was gunned down in the hallway of his apartment building.
At another point, Pell St. became a shooting gallery, as Four Brothers gunmen faced off with On Leong shooters lining the other side.
Then, during a raid on a Seventh Ave. opium den, a cache of letters revealed the existence of a major opium ring throughout the nation’s capitals, one that was aided and abetted by police. Now the feds were on the case.
It took a few years, but by 1913 Chinatown was largely cleansed of its vices. The gambling and opium dens were shuttered, the brothels had long been closed. Now there was nothing worth fighting for.
As a longtime resident put it, “Now Chinamen go to New Jersey for fun.”