Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (28 page)

When the police tried to get to the bottom of the riot, everyone in the neighbor-hood feigned innocence or refused to talk. Eventually it was decided that the trio was the same as that which had robbed a similar gaming room three weeks earlier. The response of the squad to the increasing violence was to clamp down on the Quarter. They closed the opium dens for a time, and the city put through an ordinance making it illegal to station guards or “look-see” men outside gambling houses. But tong violence not only continued, it increased its tempo. The next February saw a gang of highbinders creating a riot in the Chinese theatre on Jackson Street. The melee was brought under control by the two special officers stationed there but they feared the hatchet men would return for revenge. They were correct. Shortly after midnight a group of tong ruffians slipped into the alley entrance of the theatre to close in on the pair of special patrolmen. But they met a squad of regular police, lying in ambush. The hatchet men disappeared into the night.

By the mid-’80s the tong men were so cocksure that they drove the Chinese interpreter for the United States Customs Service out of the city, sent threatening letters to Assistant United States District Attorney MacAllister, and marched up and down the streets, armed to the teeth with concealed weapons, bullying the Chinese prostitutes who were at the moment being examined in a United States District Court case. They caused a riot in both Chinese theatres one night when the cobblers’ guild took over the playhouses for an anniversary celebration. This fight ended in the streets, with the mob throwing gravel, mud and cobbles at one another and at policemen. One of the rioters arrested by Officer Shaw was a burly fellow who insolently gave his name as Fat Choy (Good Fortune—as in the Chinese New Year’s greeting.
Gung hoy fat choy).
The Quarter was on the verge of anarchy.

Chief Crowley responded with his usual, if not always well-oriented, firmness. He began a program of rotating his Chinatown squad personnel. The chief’s idea was to give each officer some knowledge of Chinatown crime and criminals. He kept only one of the old-timers on the squad to teach the new men the ropes. When he had his new Chinatown squad lined up for the first time Crowley addressed the detail:

“I want you to do the best you can with these Chinese. Keep your men constantly on the alert and make the rounds frequently, for I’ve a notion that they watch for the coming of the officers and open up their gambling houses after they have gone by. If the courts only sustain us in this last case [he was referring to a new anti-iron door ordinance] the work will be much easier... I want you to understand that you can have all the men you need to enforce the law. Get all the extra men you want from Captain Douglass—his entire watch if you need it. Mac [MacLaughlin] here will show you about. I repeat, I want you to do the very best you can at this work.”

Winter always brought the Chinatown squad more trouble as Chinese from the countryside flocked to the city to hole up until spring. The winter of 1885-1886 was particularly bad. Most of those who came to town were broke. Attendance at the theatres was light, the pawnshops were full to overflowing, and some of the gambling houses actually had to close their ironclad doors for lack of trade. With so many men drifting aimlessly about Chinatown with nothing but time on their hands, violence seemed unavoidable. Yet the police held the drifters in check except for the stabbing of a woman in Cum Cook Alley.

The Chinatown squad at this time found some firm allies in the officers of the Customs House Chinese Bureau. They cracked down hard on the slave-girl trade in 1887, arresting a supposedly wealthy merchant, Wong Ah Hung, in the process. He had hardly set foot upon the Embarcadero before they were ransacking his luggage and the baggage of his female accomplice Fong Chum Shee. Wong had long been suspected of smuggling girls; now proof was available. Documents found in the luggage and translated by Customs House interpreter Lee Kan offered evidence enough for a Grand Jury indictment against the slave runner. Indicted, Wong had to pay $5,000 bail on each charge. When the
City of Peking
arrived in port, Customs Inspector Scott had his men search the baggage of Lee Ming Hing. In this merchant’s gear agents found letters to a notorious slave dealer, Lee Shuey, memoranda, accounts, prices of women and drafts for the purchase of “nice young girls.” The confiscated papers revealed that girls who were bought for $540 each in China were currently bringing $705 on the San Francisco market, although some purchasers were driving hard bargains. Chue Chung Shee, for example, got a halfdozen girls for only $1,846, or less than $308 a head.

Among the confiscated material were instruction sheets and “catechisms” of questions and answers which the girls memorized in order to reply correctly to Customs agents when they sought to enter San Francisco as returning, native-born, California Chinawomen. One set of instructions began in this fashion: “Get certificates [of previous residence, i.e., re-entry permits] with the correct measurements and descriptions of body marks; learn the questions to answers; learn the streets of the city in Chinatown [the girls were often supplied with street maps in Chinese] and the house and number of the streets. If you buy a certificate stating you lived in the country you must learn how much the fare is [to San Francisco] and what kind of work you did there. Learn some English words… When you come, have courage and don’t be afraid. Then the officers will not be suspicious or detect you... I send you one dollar in small denominations and you better learn this—what the half dollar is, what the quarter dollar is, what ten cents is and what five cents are, in English....”

Meanwhile back in the alleys the death toll mounted. The Bo Sin Seer tong and the Gi Sin Seer tong were at one another’s throats. When Lung Chee and Lee Ah Way were shot in December, 1887, a well-known but discreetly anonymous Chinese detective told the press that the crimes were Gi Sin Seer responses to the murder of Jo Sam Chong, alias Sara Chung, in November. But there were no clues and the police remained in the dark while the press direly—and as it turned out accurately—predicted a duplication in Chinatown of the historic vendettas of Corsica.

It is difficult to say whether Chinatown’s hatchet men would kill for nothing. But there is evidence that they would commit murder for forty cents. Lum Ah Tie shot Sam Chung over that sum in a domino game. Of course Lum already bore a grudge against Sam who had frustrated him in an attempt to extort cash from a Chinese woman. In any case, killings continued apace although the Chinese Consul General issued a proclamation to his subjects, offering a $200 reward for the capture of anyone firing a revolver in Chinatown. Chief Crowley’s response to the repeated attacks was to increase the Chinatown squad’s strength from 7 men to 15. This show of force may have been responsible for the failure of a predicted tong battle to take place on December 8, 1887. The word was all over town that a full-scale tong war was to be waged that day; stores were shuttered early and sidewalks were strangely deserted. Crowley had trebled his Chinatown detail for the occasion, stationing men at the entrance to such favorite runways of the tongmen as Washington Alley, and breaking up any knots of men forming on the sidewalks of Chinatown, however peaceful their appearance. A
Call
reporter described the scene: “A dense fog settled over the city and in Chinatown was advantageous for any affray, as it was impossible to see further than a hundred yards but the wily Mongol saw too many police and little chance to escape. Some officers are of the opinion that more shooting will take place when least expected.”

Apparently Chinese Consul Frederick Bee and Brigade Assistant Adjutant General Sproul of the California Militia were of this opinion. The former set up a curfew for his subjects, and Sproul offered Chief Crowley the services of the State Militia against the hatchet men if he felt they were needed. This action of Sproul’s led to another rumor that the consignment of 53,000 rounds of ammunition for the Second Brigade, deposited in city prison, had been put there to be used by National Guard troopers against riotous highbinders. “Bosh!” said the
Call,
pointing out that it was just a routine delivery of ammunition to the one building safe enough to hold it. (San Francisco’s armories were flimsy wooden firetraps.)

Other measures taken included the hiring of extra guards by butcher shops and other commercial houses and the issuance of a proclamation by the Six Companies, holding each family responsible for any murders committed by its members, with a large money penalty. Hostilities tapered off and the expected battle was never fought.

However, another cold-blooded murder during the bloody month of December, 1887, kept the police busy. Lee Wey, a clerk in the merchandise store of Chung Woo & Company, sold a bag of rice to a customer. It was still the tradition then for an employee to carry a purchaser’s bulky or heavy goods, so Lee Wey shouldered the bag and carried it to the customer’s tenement. He had climbed the stairs to the first landing when his companion pulled out a pistol and shot him in the left side. The sound of the gunshot and Lee Wey’s shrieks of pain attracted many neighbors. Lee sank to the floor, the bag of rice falling on his legs. Somehow he fought his way to his feet and managed to stagger back to the store and fall inside it. The proprietor rushed to help him and called two police officers. The latter carried the wounded man to an adjoining room where he accused the rice buyer of shooting him. Within a few minutes a crowd of men gathered. Some of them tried to force their way into the room where the wounded man lay, and the two policemen had to disperse the crowd and arrest several men. A Chinese detective described the shooting as the most cold-blooded and senseless in Chinatown’s history. He blamed the ruthless Gi Sin Seer tong. At 11:30 that night Officers McManus and Bermingham trapped the killer. One of the tips which from time to time leaked through the wall of silence around Chinatown led them to a Stockton Street garret. There, hiding under a bench, was the gunman. A search of his person turned up a large knife but not the murder weapon.

Considerable excitement was engendered in Chinatown the following year when the papers broke the story of the murder plot in Victoria, Canada, involving Lum Hip, the “salaried soldier” who planned to liquidate one of Her Majesty’s Customs House officers in that British Columbian port.

The last year of the decade saw Lee Meriwether, Special Agent, United States Department of Labor, nosing about Chinatown. Meriwether was even more confused than Crowley at first. He considered Chinatown’s tongs to be nothing more than labor unions. But even with this naivete he was forced to report to Washington, “It is said that a Chinaman who disregards an order of his union is severely punished.” Meriwether was more intelligent when he suggested that the reluctance of the Chinese to be photographed was not due to superstition about the evil eye, but rather to their unwillingness to let the police acquire a well-stocked gallery of portraits for identification purposes.

The scales finally fell from Meriwether’s eyes when he ran up against the Chee Kong tong which Ah Fook headed. The agent was wise enough to see that it was no labor union, and he did not need the advice of friends to penetrate the flimsy disguise of the secret society as a “Chinese Masonic Lodge.” He observed: “A member of a Chinese union who disobeys orders is black-listed. If he makes himself especially obnoxious his name is handed to the Chee Kongs; then that Chinaman disappears. Nobody knows what has become of him. Perhaps he has returned to China or gone to the Eastern states, or perhaps he is dead. People do not know and do not care. Thus it is that the Chinese unions are enabled to enforce implicit obedience to their every mandate.” The nearest practice in San Francisco’s Caucasian society which Agent Meriwether could think of was shanghaiing. He knew that shanghaiers were sometimes used in labor troubles: “White unions attempt something of the kind. The only difference is that they do not carry it to such an extent. The white scab is not blotted off the face of the earth, as is the Chinese, but he is ‘shanghaied,’ boycotted, and perhaps beaten and badly bruised, until he comes to his senses.. . .”

Meriwether informed Washington of the gravity of the situation, saying in part: “Those familiar with its secret workings say that the Chee Kongs, or highbinders, as they are commonly called, are a set of thugs and blackmailers. Ah Fook levies a tribute of $5 a week on each gambling establishment in Chinatown. If a Chinaman is to be got rid of, the highbinders—for a consideration—will undertake the task of removing him. An officer of the secret police, from whom I obtained much information concerning the Chee Kongs, was himself blacklisted, a reward of $800 set on his head. Being a cool man and a good shot, and always well armed, he has thus far escaped, although two or three night attacks and broken bones have resulted in the attempt of the highbinders to remove their enemy....”