American Gangster (15 page)

Morganthau sighed during the debate of Chinese businessmen, looked at his watch, said he'd “help,” and left. By this time, however, many people were openly restive. “My God, when will this bullshit stop?” asked a younger merchant.

No one talked about the tongs and their relationship to the gangs. How could they? Of the seven permanent members of the CCBA inner voting circle, one is the On Leong, another the Hip Sing. No wonder people tend to get cynical whenever the CCBA calls a meeting at which the tong interests are at stake. Perhaps that's why, when a Chinese reporter asked what the D.A. was planning to do to help the community, one of Morganthau's people said, “What do you want? We showed up, didn't we?”

But, if you wanted to see changing Chinatown in action, really all you had to do was watch Benny Eng. Benny is director of the Hip Sing Credit Fund (which drug cops figure is a laundry room for dirty money). He is also an officer of the Chinese-American Restaurant Association, an organization that deserves blame for keeping waiter wages in Chinatown at about fifty dollars a week for the past twenty years.

As people entered the CCBA hall, Little Benny—as he is called, in deference to Big Benny Ong, the old Hip Sing bossman recently arrested while sneaking out of the tong's venerable gambling house at 9 Pell Street—greeted everyone with a grave face. “So happy you are interested in the security of Chinatown,” Little Benny said. But later, after the meeting, Benny, now
attired in a natty hat and overcoat, could be seen nodding respectfully to the skinny-legged honcho pacing in front of 56 Mott Street.

A pockmark-faced guy who nowadays spends ten hours a day laying bowls of congee in front of customers at a Mott Street rice shop remembers the day the White Eagles, the original Chinatown youth gang, ripped off their first
cha shu baos
(pork buns).

“It was maybe ten years ago. We were hanging out in Columbus Park, you know, by the courthouse, feeling real stupid. Most of us had just got to Chinatown. We couldn't speak English worth a shit. The
juk sing
(American-born Chinese, a.k.a. ABCs, or American Born Chinese) were playing basketball, but they wouldn't let us play. We didn't know how to anyway. I remember one of our guys said, ‘Shit, in Hong Kong my old man was a civil servant—he made some bread. Then he listened to my goddamned uncle and came over here. Now he's working as a waiter all day. The guy's got TB, I can hear him coughing. And I ain't got enough money for a goddamned
cha shu baos
.'”

Even then the
juk tuk
(Hong Kong–born Chinese) were sharp to the short end of the stick; they looked around the Toy Shan ghetto and sized up the possibilities for a sixteen-year-old immigrant. The chances had a familiar ring—what the tourists call “a Chinaman's chance,” which, of course, is no chance at all. There might be moments of revenge, like lacing a
lo fan
's sweet-and-sour with enormous hunks of ginger to watch his lips pucker. But you knew you'd wind up frustrated, throwing quarters into the “Dancing Chicken” machine at the Chinatown Arcade. You'd watch that stupid Pavlovian-conditioned chicken come out of its feeder to dance and you'd know you were watching yourself.

So the eight or nine kids who would become the nucleus of the White Eagles walked up the narrow street past the Italian funeral parlor and into the pastry shop, where they stole dozens of
cha shu baos
, which they ate—and got so sick they threw up all over the sidewalk.

Within the next week the Eagles got hold of their first pieces—a pair of automatics—and began to terrorize Toy Shan. They beat the daylights out of the snooty ABCs, who were just a bunch of pussies anyway. They ripped off restaurants. They got tough with the old men's gambling houses.

It seemed so easy. In Hong Kong, try anything shifty and the cops would bust up your ass. They would search an entire block, throwing pregnant women down the stairs if they got in the way, just to find a guy they suspected of boosting a pocketbook from the lobby of the Hyatt Regency. Here the cops were all roundeyes—they don't know or care about Chinese. Besides, the old guys kept them paid off. The fringe benefits included street status, fast cars to cruise uptown and watch the
lo-fan
freaks, days to work on your “tans” at Coney listening to the new Hong Kong–Filipino platters, plenty of time to go bowling, and the pick of the girls—in general, the old equation of living quick, dying young, and leaving a beautiful corpse.

It took the Toy Shans a while to comprehend what was happening in their village. By the late sixties, several
juk tuk
“clubs” began to appear. Foremost was the Continentals, a bunch who spent a good deal of time looking in the mirror, practicing complex handshakes, and running around ripping the insignias off Lincoln Continentals. In the beginning the family associations did their best. They marshaled the new kids into New Year's dragon-dancing. For the older, more sullen ones, they established martial arts clubs. But these kids didn't seem interested in discipline; besides, they smoked too many cigarettes. That's when the tongs intervened. Within weeks of the first extortion report, several White Eagles and representatives of the On Leong tong were sitting in a Mott Street restaurant talking it over. When they were done, a pact was sealed that would establish the youth gang as a permanent fixture of “New Chinatown.”

It was agreed that the Eagles would stop random mayhem around the community and begin to work for the On Leong. They would “guard” the tong-sponsored gambling houses and make sure that no one ripped off restaurants that paid regular “dues.” In return, the Eagles' leaders would receive a kind of salary, free meals in various noodle houses, and no-rent apartments in the Chinatown area.

It seemed a brilliant arrangement, especially for the tongs. The On Leongs and Hip Sings no longer struck fear in the heart of Chinatown. With warriors like Sing Dock barely a misty reminiscence, the tongs had become paunchy, middle-aged businessmen who spent most of their time competing for black-mushroom contracts. The Eagles brought them the muscle they felt they would need in changing times. It was like having your own private army, just like the good old days.

But the tongs weren't used to this kind of warrior. The kids mounted a six-foot-tall statue of a white eagle on top of their tenement at Mott and Pell. One night ten of them piled into a taxicab and went uptown to see
Superfly;
afterward they shot up Pell Street with tiny .22s for the sheer exhilaration of it. They went into tailor shops, scowled, and came away with two-hundred-dollar suits. Once Paul Ma—Eagle supreme commander—showed up for an arraignment wearing a silk shirt open down the front so everyone could see his bullet holes.

During eight or so years on top in Chinatown, the Eagles set the style for the Chinese youth gang. Part was savagery. Eagle recruiting practices were brutal—coercion was often used to replenish their street army. They kidnapped merchants' daughters and held them for ransom. They also set the example of using expensive and high-powered guns. No Saturday-night specials in Chinatown. The gangs used Mausers, Lugers, and an occasional M-14. One cop says, “You know, I've been on the force for twenty-two years, and I never saw nothing that gave me nightmares like watching a fifteen-year-old kid run down Bayard Street carrying a Thompson submachine gun.”

But there was another side to this. A new style was emerging in Chinatown. Chinese kids have had a tough time of it in schools like Seward Park. Blacks and Puerto Ricans as well as meanies from Little Italy would vamp Chinese students for sport. Groups like the Eagles were intent on changing this. It was a question of cool. In the beginning they copied the swagger and lingo of the blacks—it is remarkable how closely a Chinese teenager can imitate black speech. From the Puerto Ricans they borrowed souped-up car styling as well as the nonfashion of wearing army fatigues, which they added to their already zooty Hong Kong–cut shirts.

But it was Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong sex-symbol kung fu star, who did the most for the Chinese street presence. Gang kids ran around Chinatown carrying
nunchahas
—kung fu fighting sticks—which few of them knew how to use, and postured like deadly white cranes. When “Kung-Fu Fighting” became a number one hit on WWRL, being Chinese was in. They became people not to mess with (although the police report there has never been a gang incident in which martial arts were used). “It was like magic,” says one ex-Continental. “I used to walk by the Smith projects where the blacks live, and those brothers would throw dirty diapers out the window at me and call me Chinaman. Now they call me
Mr. Chinaman
.”

The image of the Chinese schoolgirl was changing, too. Overnight they entered the style show on the subway. A lot of the fashion—airblown hairstyles, mucho makeup, and tiny “Apple jacket” tops—came from the Puerto Ricans. Classy tweezed Oriental eyebrows produced a new “dragon lady” look. Openly sexual, some of the Hong Kong girls formed auxiliary groups. Streaking their hair blond or red to show that their boyfriends were gangsters, they were “ol' ladies,” expected to dab their men's wounds with elixirs swiped from Chinese apothecaries. Who can blame them? More than half of Chinatown's women work in the three-hundred-odd garment factories in the area, buzzing through the polyester twelve hours a day, trying to crack a hundred dollars a week. Hanging with the bad kids risked an occasional gang bang, but it was a better risk than dying in a sweatshop.

It seemed only a matter of time before the youth gangs would get into dope, especially since drug dealing has been the key staple of the Chinese underworld for centuries. The present-day version of the Chinatown connection dates back to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Several Nationalist units were cut off in the poppy-rich area known as the Golden Triangle near the Burmese/Thai/Laotian border as the rest of Chiang Kaishek's army fled to Taiwan. A large smuggling route was then established, with the Nationalist government reaping the benefits. This was not unprecedented, as many historians cite Chiang's involvement with the notorious dope-peddling Shanghai-based Green Gang during the 1920s.

According to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, with Mao's take-over on the mainland, several KMT officials with drug-selling connections
soon found their way to New York, where they eased into the On Leong power structure. It wasn't long after that, the DEA says, that the On Leong people went across Canal Street to strike a bargain with Italian organized crime. Soon a new adage was added to Mafia parlance: “If you want the stuff, get yourself a good gook.”

The connection—which is believed to be kept running by a manager of an On Leong restaurant who is also believed to be the only Chinese ever admitted to the Carlo Gambino crime family—works well. While most of the country is flooded with Mexican smack, in New York the percentage of Golden Triangle poppy runs high. The dope money is the lucrative tip of Chinatown's pyramid crime structure. DEA people say the gangs are used as runners to pick up dope in the Chinese community in Toronto and then body-carry it across the border. But they may play a greater role. Chinese dope hustlers have always felt on uneasy ground when dealing with flashy uptown pushers. Now, however, street sources say the gutterwise gangs are dealing directly with black and Puerto Rican dealers.

Then again, junk has always been an issue in Chinatown. Even now you can walk by the senior citizen home on East Broadway and see eighty-year-old Chinese men and women who still suffer from the effects of long-ago opium addiction and live out their lives on methadone. They're probably the oldest addicts in America. The specter of the opium days is still horrifying down here, where landlords continue to find ornate pipes in basements.

That's why the sight of fourteen-year-old Eagles nodding on Mott Street during the smack influx of the early '70s was so galling to the old men. It was a final indiscretion, a final lack of discipline. Actually, the Eagles had been tempting fate for some time. They insulted tong elders in public. They extorted from restaurants they were supposed to be protecting. They mugged big winners outside of the gambling houses. It was playing havoc with the tong's business as usual. Often the old men threatened to bring in sharpshooting hit men from Taiwan to calm the kids down.

So in 1974, when Quat Kay Kee, an aging street hustler looking for a handle in the tong hierarchy, told the On Leong of a new and remarkable gang leader, the old men were ready to listen. Nicky Louie and his Ghost
Shadows were not only tougher than the Eagles, but they knew how to do business. To show their style, Nicky and his top gun, Philip Han (known as Halfbreed), supposedly put on masks and pulled off a ballsy submachinegun holdup at the Eagle-guarded gambling house in the local VFW post, knocking off a pair of sentries to boot.

Soon after, in another gambling house, a drunken Eagle poured a water glass of tea down the brocade jacket of an On Leong elder. The word came down: the tong was formally withdrawing its support of the Eagles; the Shadows could make their move. A few nights later, the 4:00 a.m. quiet on Mott Street was broken by Shadows honking the horns of their hopped-up cars. They rode around the block, screeching their tires. The Eagles tumbled out of bed clutching their pieces. The shooting woke up half the neighborhood. Amazingly, no one was injured. But the change had come. The Eagles fled to Brooklyn. And Nicky Louie was pacing back and forth on Mott Street.

A relationship was forged. For the most part, Nicky's Shadows have been model rulers during their stay on Mott Street. “I'm a businessman, and I know how to stay in business,” Nicky once told Neal Mauriello. The gang takes its cut and protects the status quo. Would-be neighborhood reformers have learned to be fearful of visits from gun-wielding gang members; one lawyer who spoke out against the Chinatown establishment woke up the next morning to find Mott Street plastered with wall posters telling him to get out of town.