The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (13 page)

Another area in which the Tongs frequently operate is the dangerous world of people trafficking. Given the nature of the business there are no accurate statistics available as to how many illegal immigrants are present in the United States at any one time but it has been estimated that approximately 11 percent of Chinese people living in New York's Chinatown are working there illegally. The lure of the rich pickings to be had in America is, no doubt, partly responsible for this – after all, the average farmer in rural China probably makes less in one year than the average American citizen makes in a week.

Tongs can smuggle people into America in many different ways, though two of the most popular routes in the past have either been via Mexico or Canada. The Tongs will supply their ‘cargo' with false visas and identity papers which, naturally, come at a very high price. There are undoubtedly more clandestine ways of smuggling people into the country, though once again there is very little information available on the precise way in which this is done. That said, there is evidence to suggest that international smuggling rings often work together in groups, passing illegal immigrants from one country to another across the globe until they reach their desired destination. In this way hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens make their way into America every year, with a fair number of Tongs using these routes to smuggle in criminal associates who can be of use to them in their illegal activities. The fees for this type of operation are enormous and whole families will save up their money for years in order to send just one member of their group to America – hopefully to earn enough money to then send back home. However, in practice this rarely happens as, more often than not, once the illegal immigrant has reached the United States, the Tongs make certain that they take a percentage of any income he, or in some cases she, makes.

Once successfully smuggled into the country, the illegal immigrants are normally ‘housed' by the Tongs, which in effect means that they are almost certainly imprisoned until a job can be found for them, working in a sweatshop or in another Tong-run business where a constant eye can be kept on them. After all, for the Tongs, these immigrants are an investment on which a return must be made. For the women who have been smuggled in, the situation can be even worse. Frequently they find themselves being sexually abused whilst being transported or sold into prostitution once they reach America.

The Tongs also frequently combine their people smuggling operations with that other, most lucrative pastime, drug smuggling. Marijuana, amphetamines and heroin are the Tong drugs of choice, with the latter being the most lucrative and, therefore, the most popular. Although previously the so-called ‘Golden Triangle' of heroin production comprised of Thailand, Burma and Laos, these days China is also part of the equation. For the Tongs and all the other operatives involved, this is big business and the methods they use vary dramatically. While heroin can be smuggled into the country in large consignments hidden in shipments of legal merchandise, this is a high-risk strategy as a consignment intercepted by the authorities represents a major loss in revenue. A more popular way of smuggling drugs is by way of drug couriers and ‘foreigners' (non-Chinese people) will often become involved in this process. The most likely candidates for the job are Filipinos and Thais, desperate to make money for their families. There are countless ways in which drugs can be hidden and smuggled; any number of objects, such as children's toys, souvenir ornaments or religious artifacts, can be hollowed out and used to hide small packages. Alternatively, drugs can be stuffed into condoms and swallowed by the drug courier, or ‘mule', although, as has been seen on numerous occasions, this can result in the condom splitting and the death of the mule.

Perhaps the strangest fact of all when one considers the criminal nature of the Tongs is just how little their ways have changed over the past hundred years. Illegal gambling, drug smuggling, people trafficking – these were all as much a part and parcel of Tong activity back in the nineteenth century as they are today. More than any other secret society still in existence, the Tongs have remained practically as they were at their inception and will probably go on operating in much the same way for the forseeable future.

They beat me and they beat me with the long, flat blackjack. I screamed to God in pain. My dress worked itself up. I tried to pull it down. They beat my arms until I had no feeling in them. After a while the first man beating my arm grew numb from tiredness. The other man who was holding me was given the blackjack. Then he began beat me […] All of this on account we want to register.

Part of the testimony given by F
ANNIE
L
OU
H
AMER
to the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic Nominating Convention in Atlantic City

O
f all the secret societies named in this book it is the Ku Klux Klan which, with its white robes and hoods that supposedly represent the ghostly forms of fallen soldiers returning from the American Civil War, has become (with the exception of the Nazi swastika) the most evil of twentieth-century icons. Far from being mere apparitions or harmless ghouls, over the years the Ku Klux Klan has become one of the most pervasive threats to American civil liberties, numbering amongst its targets not only the African-American community, but also Jews, homosexuals, feminists, anti-Christian liberals and foreign-born citizens.

Established at the end of the American Civil War on December 24, 1865, in the small town of Pulaski, Tennessee, the Ku Klux Klan was formed by six disenfranchised southern men who had all, at one time or another, been officers in the defeated Confederate Army. Disgusted by the idea that the black population was no longer bound in servitude to their white masters, the group's plan was to establish a secret brotherhood comprising Protestant, white-supremacist individuals eager to enjoy the benefits of a secret organization that was hell-bent on redressing what they viewed as a social injustice. Naming their group the Ku Klux Klan after the Greek word for ‘circle' (kyklos) and then adding an alternative spelling of ‘clan' for its alliterative value, the group set about capitalizing on their victims' superstitious natures by choosing a costume of white robes, masks and hoods, leading members of the black community to believe that they were the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers who lived in hell and rode out at night in search of water. The ruse worked; the KKK's prey were terrified and duly subdued.

The KKK could not have chosen a better time in history to form their society for, as Stanley F. Horn in his book
Invisible Empire
succinctly puts it, the time was ‘rotten-ripe' for the establishment of an institution such as the Klan. After all, the black population was not yet accustomed to its new-found freedoms and there were plenty of southerners both willing and able to snub the victorious north. Eyewitness accounts of KKK outrages are plentiful, the black civil-rights leader, Malcolm X having written in his autobiography:

When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my father was away, preaching in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because ‘the good Christian white people' were not going to stand for my father's ‘spreading trouble' among the ‘good' Negroes of Omaha with the ‘back to Africa' preachings of Marcus Garvey.
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Soon, the association that had begun as a small group of discontented white men within one town, started to grow in number and spread further afield (in particular to Nashville), until in April 1867 General Nathan Bedford Forrest was elected Grand Wizard. On assuming his new role, Forrest immediately began sectioning off Ku Klux Klan territory and appointing Grand Dragons, Giants, Cyclopses and Night Hawks (names given to denote varying degrees of authority within the Klan), not to mention the Ghouls who were the bedrock of the society. Each had its own dominion, province or den, and each was governed by a set of strict rules, though naturally in a set-up such as this, participants were answerable only to themselves. Indeed these groups believed they were superior to the civilian authorities such as the police, and were not averse to using violence whenever they chose.

They beat, shot, stabbed and hanged their victims without a hint of conscience, forming vigilante groups to target non-white people who were suspected of breaking the law (although their supposed ‘crimes' might be as innocuous as appearing not to show enough respect to their white neighbors), who belonged to political organizations or who were audacious enough to purchase their own land or business. The KKK also aimed their focus on any whites who were thought to be aiding and abetting their black neighbors. This could include white teachers who taught in black schools, white businessmen working with black colleagues, or anyone found ‘guilty' of giving a black person preferential treatment over a white person.

Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan Samuel Green, seen here flanked by other Klansmen, became responsible for a resurgence in Klan activity after the Second World War, although his reign was short-lived as he died in 1949.

Nor did state government intervene for, despite the Civil War having abolished slavery, southern states would still not allow their black citizens the ballot, a constitutional injustice that infuriated the majority of northerners. President Andrew Johnson even moved to invalidate every state government in the south with the exception of Tennessee. Far from alleviating the problem, however, this only served to reinforce support for the Ku Klux Klan. Membership soared, violence escalated. In 1871, in Mississippi, a handful of black political activists were put on trial for making inflammatory speeches and causing civil unrest. To show their support, groups of black men and women assembled outside the court, a gathering that attracted the attention of the Klan. Within minutes violence broke out, gunshots were fired and several black citizens were murdered. When the disturbance outside the court had died down, those on trial were taken from the jail and hanged.

Despite the fact that the society was growing in stature as a political force, by 1869 there were signs that the Klan was experiencing serious internal problems and no longer able to control all its various factions. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that each enclave was autonomous, answerable to no greater authority, and that the basis of the Klan's existence was violence and misrule. Nevertheless, this did not make the problem any easier to manage, and in January 1869, General Forrest made the decision to disband the organization and destroy all Klan documents. Most sections of the KKK followed his orders, with the Klan closing its ‘offices' in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee. The KKK was no longer required, or so it seemed, and when, in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the last of his federal troops from the south, this only seemed to reinforce the point. Local government was firmly back in the hands of local-born white southern Democrats; the black population knew its place and remained there with barely a whisper of insurrection. All were seemingly at peace, but this state of affairs was not to last and nowhere was this more apparent than within the pages of a 1905 book by Thomas Dixon, Jnr., titled
The Clansman: An Historic Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,
which, ten years later, was made into a film by the renowned director D. W. Griffith under the title
Birth of a Nation
. The film was a triumphant success, grossing in the region of US $18 million, but this achievement pales into insignificance when one compares the true effect of the film; an effect which, barely ten years later, led to the reestablishment of the KKK.

In the autumn of 1915, in the Piedmont Hotel, Atlanta, a man by the name of William J. Simmons gathered around him a small group of men (two of whom had been original Klan members), primarily to recreate the original order. Simmons had arranged it so that he and this group of dedicated followers later decamped to Stone Mountain (approximately 16 miles [26 km] outside of the city), at the top of which they built a temporary altar out of stones. Beside this they erected a wooden cross that had been padded with fabric and doused in petrol. Simmons set the cross alight, and the Ku Klux Klan was reborn. Days later, Griffith's
Birth of a Nation
opened in Atlanta. It was an opportunity too good to miss and Simmons immediately placed an advertisement in a local newspaper, next to one for the film, announcing the reestablishment of ‘The World's Greatest Secret, Social, Patriotic, Fraternal, Beneficiary Order.'
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