Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown

by Dillon, Richard

  Ah Tuck was taking an evening stroll down Commercial Street when a Hop Sing named Ah Lee sprang from a doorway and opened fire on him. Ah Tuck fled with his attacker in pursuit, firing wildly and scattering spectators. Suddenly the pursuer noticed that he, too, was being pursued. He ducked into Oneida Place, leaped into a bunk, and threw the bedclothes over himself. Two policemen broke into the room and yanked him from the bed. He quickly told them that he had been asleep there all evening. He clung to this story although he was gasping for breath and dripping with perspiration from his sprint. The inmates of the house told the officers that he did not belong there (which took real courage during those dark days), so the Hop Sing was taken to city prison.

  The city’s substitute for the foundered Bingham Ordinance was an effective and drastic one. It was the transformation of the regular Chinatown patrol into a “flying squad” such as usually dealt with riots. This reorganization was actually under way as early as 1888, under Sergeant William Price, but it was accelerated in the ’90s. The technique, as developed by Price, was to make a series of sudden descents on tong headquarters, putting them to the hatchet. When Sergeant James Gillin smashed the rooms of the Bing On and Suey On tongs, Reverend Masters exulted: “As the officers went from tong to tong, Chinatown went wild with joy. The Chinese Consulate, the Six Companies, and the merchants expressed their satisfaction that the first blow had been struck at this bloody despotism under which men had groaned so long. Hundreds of Chinese who had been enforced members and had joined the societies from fear rather than love felt a sense of relief.” The tongs speedily replied to this frontal assault. The Chee Kong tong—the only one as yet incorporated under the laws of California—filed a suit for damages when their rooms fell under Gillin’s axes. Masters now groaned, “A victory for the highbinders in a court of law would be a calamity. Another vigilance committee will be necessary if the highbinder is ever protected by our courts.” Even though Chinese businessmen offered to indemnify Crowley for any losses he might sustain in court, the chief stopped the hunt for the time being.

  Reverend Masters, casting about for some alternative action to keep the tongs off balance, revived the idea of a Chinese detective force. He reminded the chief of the efficient work of the Chinese police in Hong Kong. But Crowley remembered better how timid and ineffectual they had been in the past experiments in San Francisco. He let the idea alone, although the Six Companies mustered a new all-Chinese police force of its own to help the regulars.

  Peace was to be only a dream in the 1890s. War broke out in earnest in late 1892, when a pretty, seventeen-year-old slave girl was shot and seriously wounded in Cum Cook Alley. A prominent cutthroat of a new and modest-sized tong, the Mock Chin, did the honors. He was Chin Ah Chong and his secret society was so small it did not even have a meeting place. But its “soldiers” were as desperate as any boo how doy prowling the streets. Chin was attracted to the girl, but was thrown out of her house by bouncers when he pestered her with his attentions. He did not forget this, nor did he forgive it. Chin Ah Chung began a campaign of terrorization and soon had the girl paying him most of her earnings. Next he began on her sister. The slave girl was on her way to a little restaurant in Cum Cook Alley when Chin seized her roughly by the arm and demanded more money. When she told him that she had none with her but that she would go back to her house to get some he angrily thrust her away and shot her. Police officers rushed her to Receiving Hospital where doctors were astounded to find that her wound was painful rather than serious, although inflicted with a .45-caliber slug. Her miraculous escape from death was due to her wearing the traditional quilted costume of Old China. The heavy padding had slowed the pistol ball down so that it had done very little real damage. This incident pointed up the efficiency of the similarly quilted bulletproof vests worn by hatchet men. These were almost as effective against daggers and pistol balls as against the searching winds and cold tule fogs of San Francisco’s winters. Even better protection was furnished by those of chain mail imported from China at a cost of $250 each.

  Next to die was a supposedly peaceful and quiet shrimp dealer who turned out to be a Suey On tong member and who was shot down by a Bo Sin Seer hatchet man. The latter was captured but his accomplice escaped. Police could not track down another bloodthirsty’ individual who shot his prey in broad daylight the next morning. He fired three bullets into his victim, calmly replaced the smoking pistol inside his blouse, and sauntered off. He was never seen again.

  Chief Crowley, although stung by the lawsuits and uproar over his earlier raids, was eager to show off his new aggressive countermeasures to Chinatown crime. He called a press conference, and when reporters arrived at his office they found him studying a map of Chinatown. He touched an electric button and Captain William Douglass appeared. “Captain,” said Crowley, “you will take the proper steps to prevent another encounter in Chinatown. These highbinder murders must cease, even if it takes the whole force to guard Chinatown. Place officers in the outlying sections so that none who shoot can escape by flight. Do you understand?” “Aye, aye, sir,” replied the captain, commander of the department’s first division.

  The reporters hustled up to Chinatown to see exactly what measures Douglass would employ. They found that he had reinforced his two plain-clothes squads in the Quarter with a dozen uniformed men. That evening 7 highbinders were backed up against a wall, with their hands high, and searched. All 7 were found to be packing .45 Colts. They were disarmed and quickly put in the lockup on charges of carrying concealed weapons.

  Even with this augmented police force in Chinatown, one tong dared another to meet it in battle on Jackson Street. But an officer was tipped off and a squad arrived early. The officers found only 6 On Yick toughs, who fled when they saw the bluecoats. The Chinatown squad followed them and trapped 4 in On Yick tong headquarters. Two were caught in the act of pulling off their coats of mail—padded blouses with a layer of woven steel links inside—weighing more than twenty-one pounds. The police tested them and found them impossible to penetrate with either knife blade or bullet. Three of the apprehended men had Colt revolvers. The fourth and more pacific of the lot, carried only a knife with an eight-inch, razor-sharp blade. One more hatchet man was caught that night in Sullivan’s Alley. He was a wiry little fellow who looked all swollen up, such was the character of his peculiar coat of mail. His armor was made up of nothing more than multitudinous layers of newspaper wrapped around his middle.

  Up to this time the police were in the dark as to the reason for the particular war which was breaking out, but soon walls all over Chinatown were covered with posters in Chinese. These showed that the Sam Yup Company was the target. A Kwong Duck tong publicly announced its severance of any and all connections with the company and other signs proclaimed that the On Yick tong would no longer pay “tribute” to the Sam Yup Company. The Consul General of China soon got into the act by posting his own bills which ordered all Chinese, and particularly tong members, to conduct themselves in a quiet and peaceful manner. To show that their contempt for the Consulate was as complete as their disdain for the moral rule of the Six Companies, the tong men disfigured the consular posters with obscene inscriptions.

  As if Crowley did not have enough trouble in trying to keep warlike Chinatown disarmed, the press and public began to clamor for a crackdown on opium dens in the early ’90s. The Californian Illustrated Magazine, to document the evil, sent a four-man camera party to photograph the cul-de-sacs for the first time by night. Detective Chris Cox led the way. As usual, proprietors of the dens blew out the lights when uninvited guests arrived. But the cameramen took flash pictures and scared many addicts in the process. The Call leaped into the muckraking crusade by compiling a veritable catalogue of many of the 300 opium dens in the City. It singled out those it considered especially vicious, like Blind Annie’s Cellar, which was a resort of white girls and (supposedly) under police protection. Although the city had ena
cted an ordinance which set up penalties of a $1,000 fine and 6 months in jail for keeping or visiting a den, reporters had no trouble in tailing visitors. The latter varied from “dude fiends,” well-dressed ladies and gentlemen with diamond studs, to “20-cent-habit” addicts. These men could only afford twenty cents worth—one lichee nut shell of the drug—per day. On two occasions policemen were logged as entering dens.

  When reporters descended into Blind Annie’s they found it a foul-smelling place full of cats. There were only two white girls there; “Evil-looking women but still young,” a reporter noted. Annie sat in a corner on a greasy mat. Tiers of bunks lined the walls, each having a supply of ah pin yin (opium), a dong (nut-oil lamp), needle, pipe and bowl. One of the girls volunteered that she never smoked more than twenty pills on any one visit. She explained, “That isn’t enough to put me under the influence but it braces me up after a hard day and that’s all I care about… It’d soon grow if I’d let it, but I’m not going to be a fiend. I’ve hit the pipes these five years now and I’m not a fiend yet. You don’t catch this girl getting to be a hophead.” But as she spoke her eyelids were growing heavy. “Guess I’ve taken a bit too much this time,” she apologized. “I’ll sleep it off a bit before I go.”

  The guide led the reporters aside. “She’s good till morning,” he explained. “She always talks that way about taking a little too much but she never quits till sleep comes on.”

  The reporters stared as two girls dropped nickels on a tray before Blind Annie. The old hag muttered “T’anks,” then turned her sightless eyes on the men and asked, “Don’t the gentlemen want to smoke?” Muttering “No, thanks,” the press party broke up and the men went to their offices to write their experience. Many of the articles signed off in this fashion: “These are the facts regarding Chinatown. If the police have been in ignorance of these dens, as Chief Crowley has declared himself to be, at least they need no longer be in ignorance.” True. Anyone with the price of a newspaper now knew the extent of the opium rottenness in Chinatown.

  The press was not quite fair with Crowley. He had to operate within the law. When Captain John Short and his men arrested one opium peddler six times over, he did not even bother to change his beat, but returned each time to Stevenson Street after getting off with a $20 fine. He was neither keeping nor visiting an opium den—just selling it on the street.

  Although Chinatown was terrorized by the tongs, the conspiracy of silence was never so complete that the police did not have stool pigeons to alert them of trouble. Dong Gong, a special officer of the force was a combination informer and detective, and Wong Sue also wore a star. But most of the tipsters were faceless, nameless men of the alleys. The press had its own informers in the Quarter, too, and one let out the story on the secret joint meeting of the Bing On and Suey On tongs in February, 1893. At this affair two men were sentenced to immediate death and two to deferred execution. Ten men from each of the usually rival tongs met in a room at 821 Washington Street, uneasy and watchful. They were not as frightened of a raid by the Chinatown squad as they were of treachery from their new “friends.” Most wore mail under their regular clothing and carried hidden knives, hatchets or guns. Lots were drawn to see which society should furnish the soldiers to exterminate their common enemies; four Suey Ons and one Bing On were chosen. Next, four names of victims were drawn by lot from a considerable “waiting list.” The crimes of the quartet against the fighting tongs were: informing the police of tong meeting places; refusing to swear to false certificates for slave girls; refusing to help land new slave girls from a ship; going to school to learn English; and talking to policemen. These death sentences were not just idle threats. Ten days earlier Chin Doo Doo had landed on a false certificate, then had refused to pay the fees asked by his perjuring friends. He was gunned down before he had a chance to enjoy his stay in San Francisco.

  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 Ch
inese 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.