Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (30 page)

One of the intended victims of the tong trial rushed to Crowley’s office, begged for protection, and asked for permission to carry a pistol and wear a coat of mail. He quickly went into hiding. A few days later a man was murdered when he was mistaken for one of the doomed four. Officers Withers and Cook of the Chinatown squad quickly arrested a hatchet man who denied everything though they found his revolver, four chambers emptied, in a ventilation hole of a staircase riser in the building where he lived. Confronted with this evidence, he still came up with the old answer
“No sabe.”

Luck was not with Chun Qui, another of the condemned four. This Hip Sing was murdered in a Sullivan’s Alley gambling den on March 8, 1893. Sergeant Thomas Flanders and his posse seized the killer Han Wong and five Suey Sing accomplices in a very neat piece of police work. The hatchet man had used what would become a favorite tool of many killers, the deadly .44 Colt revolver which took Winchester rifle ammunition. The murder bullet had passed entirely through the victim’s body.

The work of the police was complicated that winter because the Quarter was flooded with about 6,000 coolies from the interior. They were all strangers; the police did not have a line on any of them. At a meeting with Vice Consul King Owyang, Chief Crowley said:

The situation is serious. Ever since we have had a Chinatown we have had highbinders and highbinder wars, resulting in more or less slaughter and trouble, but the present war seems to be one of the worst we have ever had, because of the numbers engaged in it. The Chinatown squad has worked faithfully and hard, but if every policeman on the force were stationed in Chinatown we could not prevent these outbreaks.

What we are now trying to do is to prevent the escape of highbinders once arrested. It has not been the custom for prisonkeepers, who are permitted to take cash bail in cases of arrests for misdemeanors, to require the highest amount of bail fixed by law unless there is some evidence that the case is an aggravated one. The prisonkeepers have been in the habit of accepting the lowest cash bail fixed for the offense. In the same way it has not been the custom of police judges or the clerks of police courts in the absence of judges, to require bonds in the highest amount fixed by law for misdemeanors. The result is that the highbinders have been arrested for vagrancy time and again, but have secured a small cash bail and thereby their liberty to go right back into Chinatown and resume their devilish work. Understand, too, that it is generally the worst of the highbinders that become known to the police and are arrested. If we could only keep them in jail once we have them we might be able to handle their followers.

We have dropped all pretense of handling this dangerous class with gloves. Thursday night Detectives Cox and Glennon and Sergeant Burke and his squad visited the headquarters of the Suey Sing tong on the top floor of the building at the southwest corner of Dupont and Pacific Streets and gutted the place, smashing the joss and destroying the flags and furniture. It has to be done, and the same work will be kept up wherever a highbinder society is known to meet. The conference today was to agree upon bail in cases of arrest. Hereafter no bond will be accepted by any police judge or clerk of the police court for any Chinese arrested unless it is first accepted by the Chinese Consul General and by myself. In future, the highest cash bail will be required in all cases and we hope to be able to stop this war where it is.

The press liked Crowley’s tough line of talk and predicted that no quarter would be given the hatchet men, but also guessed that despite the watchfulness of the police a score of men would be killed by summer in tong warfare. The figure was not to be that high, but there were killings.

Sergeant Burke and his squad continued their wrecking raids on the tongs and also apprehended twenty-three highbinders who had literally taken over two houses of ill fame and were compelling the inmates to entertain them and cook for them. The papers noticed a new willingness on the part of the Chinese in the street to cooperate with the police. But instead of being happy with this development, the press was frightened. It saw the cracks in the conspiracy of silence as warnings of even more deadly warfare—“When the Chinese are willing to join with the whites in prosecuting their own countrymen, the situation is far more serious than the police are willing to admit, yet this is the status of affairs today and the war is only begun.”

The next incident of the tong war was a bizarre press conference called by ex-interpreter Kwan Mow, alias Kwan Yik Nam, another of those earmarked for death by the Suey Sings and Bing Ons. “By the heavens and the earth,” shouted Kwan, “I swear that I am an innocent man and a Christian.” He held his hand rigidly aloft as he took this oath. “They want to kill me,” he continued. “The gamblers are after me and call me a stool pigeon to Chief Crowley.” His eyes bulged and his lips twisted in a savage furor. “May my enemies be killed! And die, die, die in the street and lie low, low, low!” Kwan was far braver now, trapped in a Clay Street office, than when he had been in court. There he had fainted dead away in the corridor after being threatened for not securing the landing of slave girls. “The gamblers are after me,” he cried again, “they want to kill me because I opposed the women’s landing. Fong Hon is no merchant as he claims, he is a gambler and has been arrested for selling and dealing in lottery tickets… The gamblers are after me for another thing. They say I go to Chief Crowley and tell him all I know about
tan
and lottery and highbinders. They call me a stool pigeon.” He crashed his fist on the desk. “Yes, I
do
know Chief Crowley. I do go to see him. He is my friend. I
like
him.

The chief gave his men orders to use their clubs more liberally on highbinders, or even idlers found around highbinder haunts. But with all their vigilance and diligence, Bok Ah Chung—a Suey Sing hood from Portland—was riddled with bullets at noon and within one hundred feet of the little Waverly Place police substation the chief had set up in the heart of Chinatown. It was an insolent dare of the hatchet men. While the police could not prevent the assassination, at least they captured his murderer. He was a Hop Sing hoodlum named Li Gun. The
Call
prophesied, “He will swing for his deed, for he was caught red-handed.” When the Chinese Vice-Consul tried to question him in his cell he got nowhere. All he could tell Crowley was that the man was a notorious liar, which the chief already knew. The Vice-Consul, King Owyang, praised arresting officers Phillips and Kaskell and promised them a $600 reward upon the conviction of Li.

After the murder Sergeant Burke immediately set Crowley’s get-tough policy in motion again. Highbinders were hauled in for vagrancy, the highest bail was demanded, and no bonds allowed unless approved by the Consul General. The squad raided a house of ill fame and seized seven girls. The owner was taken aback when the desk sergeant answered his usual question “How much bailee?” with “Just two hundred and fifty dollars each.” The small businessman choked and asked, “How so much?” “Well,” said the sergeant, “there’s two hundred each for visiting a house of ill fame and fifty each for vagrancy.” The Chinese emptied a sack of coins on the sergeant’s desk, counted out $1,750, and marched his chattels home.

The cuffs, kicks and clubbings of the Chinatown squad seemed to be working wonders. “I never saw so few highbinders on the streets,” said Burke. “They know when to remain in their hiding places. But I would not be surprised to find more of them on the streets after darkness sets in.” Some honest Chinese were clubbed in error, although Crowley’s order was clear enough—”Be careful not to club a reputable Chinese, but show no mercy to a highbinder.”

Sergeant Burke was impressed with the cooperation he was beginning to get from the mass of Chinese. The Six Companies put up handbills all over Chinatown. These ordered all shopkeepers who were members of tongs to quit in just thirty days or be classed as highbinders themselves and dealt with accordingly. The Consul General proved to be a staunch ally. He wrote to China for permission to confiscate the property of all known highbinders. But most surprising was the Vigilante-like attitude of the crowd which witnessed the cowardly killing of Bok Ah Chung. As Li Gun was led away they shouted “Hang him! Hang him!” Burke was amazed. “During all the years I have been in Chinatown,” he said, “I never heard such a cry before and I honestly believe that if the murderer had been handed over to them they would have lynched him.”

The courts went along with Crowley. One man, arrested on a concealed-weapons charge, pleaded that he was a labor boss in Alaska and needed a gun for protection. Instead of being left off as he expected, he received a lecture from Judge Henry L. Joachimson who pointed out the dual roles many Chinese were playing—respectable by day, hatchet man by night. Thanks to some character witnesses, the Alaskan got off with the lowest penalty under the ordinance but it was still a $250 fine or a day in jail for every dollar.

Sergeant Burke and his Chinatown squad now took axes to the flagpoles of the Suey Sing and Hop Sing tongs, transforming them into rooftop piles of kindling. It was Burke’s belief that the tong members would take the destruction of their flags and flagpoles as an omen of the ultimate destruction of their secret societies.

Burke’s orders to his squad were, “Whenever and wherever a known highbinder is, club him!” A hot-tempered Irishman, it is not remarkable that now and again Burke lost control of himself. When he axed the joss room of the Hop Sing tong his patience was completely exhausted. He had his squad kick and club two highbinders all the way down the stairs to the street three stories below. Burke swung his baton at one of the men again and again, swearing, “Get out of here you heathen cutthroat! You son of a bitch of a highbinder, get out!” Later in the day he sent Officer Withers back to the wrecked Hop Sing tong. Withers found that six men had drifted back, and he went through the whole operation again, kicking them downstairs and shouting, “Get out and stay out!”

During this period the San Francisco Grand Jury had to work overtime. On one day alone—March 15, 1893—it indicted nine hatchet men for murder.

The Chinatown squad signified its approval by raiding and demolishing the headquarters of the Suey Ying tong after forcing the fifteen members there to run a gantlet of billy clubs. With axes, sledges and hatchets the squad reduced the furnishings of the rooms to rubble.

At this juncture Vice-Consul Owyang reported that the merchants of the Quarter had resolved not to pay any more tribute to the tongs nor to let them have any rooms in their buildings, nor furnish them with bail or bondsmen. But the police doubted that many merchants would have the courage to go so far so fast. Nevertheless, the heads of the Six Companies solemnly announced that there would be no more tong wars in Chinatown. They reported that the Hop Sing tong was in such financial trouble that it could not pay its own salaried soldiers for their killings, and that the Suey Sings had given assurances they would make no more trouble. With a show of spunk the Six Companies told the American public that if the highbinders did not behave and go to work the respectable Chinese element would find means to convict them in court. In an editorial in one of the Chinese-language newspapers, in explaining the difficulty of eradicating them, a writer compared the tongs to lawless elements in the Caucasian American community—singling out the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia—and then added, “I am not defending the Chinese highbinders; not a bit of it. We all wish that every highbinder on earth could be caught and hanged or beheaded.” A white merchant reported that some of his Chinese colleagues had told him that they wished the city could take all hatchet men to some vacant lot and allow them to blaze away at each other until they killed each other off. The Vice-Consul expressed his regret at tong depredations but also his pride at the increasing assistance being given the police by law-abiding Chinese He admitted that Chinatown was ready to form a committee of Vigilantes if necessary, but ridiculed the tales that all Chinatown was an armed camp. “Why, for the past two weeks a squad of only six men has been raiding Chinatown [tongs]. They were only a half-dozen men surrounded by thousands of Chinese and yet there has never been a hand raised against an officer of the law nor a complaint made by the Chinese officials although we know of scores of cases where innocent men were badly beaten. We realized that in order to reach the guilty some innocent men would have to suffer, as is nearly always the case....”

A Chinese vigilance committee actually was formed at this time—the Wai Leong Rung Sur—and was soon under tong fire. In April
chun hungs
appeared on walls, placing prices on the heads of the society’s officers—-especially Chun Ti Chu, a prime mover in its organization as well as president of the Sam Yup Company. Detective Chris Cox described Chun as a fighter and a fine pistol shot who was more than a match for any three or four highbinders. Three hundred dollars was the sum on Chun’s head, and posters denounced him for counseling the Chinese not to secure Geary Act registration certificates. (This was the blunder which cost the Six Companies so much of its prestige.) Police tore these down quickly, but they were replaced by much more insulting circulars:

THE PRESIDENT OF THE SAM YUP COMPANY CONTAINS TWELVE STINK POTS, WHICE ARE INEXPLICABLE. HE HAS NO LITERARY TALENT. HE BOUGHT HIS POSITION WITH MONEY. HIS FATHER IS A REFORMED THIEF. HIS MOTHER’S FIRST HUSBAND WAS A FUNG AND HER SECOND A CHUNG [illegitimate]. HE SHIELDS GUILTY CRIMINALS AND TRIES TO FREE THEM. HE PROVOKED PEOPLE TO ANGER AT A MEETING AND TRIED TO ESCAPE. THEREFORE, ALL PERSONS HAD BETTER CLOSE THEIR NOSES BEFORE PASSING HIS DOOR.

The rewards were ostensibly offered by a new secret society, the Sing Ping Kung Sur, but Vice-Consul King said no such tong existed. He labeled the broadsides a bluff on the part of the hatchet men, to cow ignorant or timorous merchants.

Another
chun hung
was soon pasted up all over the Quarter. It read: