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

by Dillon, Richard

  The city was not about to surrender its hegemony—even over Chinatown—to the Chinese Empire’s representative, but it did adopt some of Ho Yow’s ideas. When the Chinatown squad smashed the Ross Alley gang, for example, the quartet of burglar-robbers was given the choice of imprisonment or deportation. One chose the latter course and was soon joined by three more felons aboard the Gothic, bound for China. This was a good beginning. By a revival of the half-forgotten McCreary Act, deportation of Chinese criminals was made feasible, and the Consul General prepared a list of potential deportees for the police department. Typical of the kind of men picked up in the ensuing dragnet was an ex-con named Jeong Woo. Walking down Washington Street one lazy day, Jeong felt a gentle but firm pressure on his arm. He saw Detective Chris Cox. “I’d like to talk to you,” said Cox. “Where you takee me?” asked Jeong. Soothingly Cox responded, “We’ll just drop down to the Old Prison where we can talk without fear of interruption. I think you’ll see some of your old friends in China before long, Jeong, my boy.” The face of the highbinder fell. He protested, “Why you takee me? Me been out of San Quentin ten years.” “That’s a fact,” agreed Cox, “and you’ve made lots of trouble during those years. Now you’ve got to go home.”

  Another symptom of the sickness afflicting Chinatown in the mid-’90s was the police shakeup of 1894. A number of men were discharged from the department, for corruption. Chief Crowley, too “sick” to go before the Grand Jury, sent his able aide Captain Isaiah Lees to appear in his place. The captain explained that the evidence against Police Clerk William E. Hall and the others was enough to show their guilt but was not enough for a court conviction. After leaving the Grand Jury room he was pressed by reporters for a fuller explanation. Lees said, “I explained to the Grand Jury the difficulty with which the information was obtained which led to the dismissal of delinquent officers in the department. But I could not go into it all. It would be the part of idiocy for us to give all our sources of information and the methods pursued to obtain evidence against the corrupt ones. This would prevent us from getting any more information from these quarters and the guilty ones might escape. It would be foolish to tip our hands.”

  By the time of the police scandals the Chinatown squad had become a potent factor in controlling crime. It remained so as long as it stayed honest. After the scandal broke, Lieutenant William Price explained how it had come into being:

  When I first went into the Chinatown district in 1888, things were in a very bad condition. There was hardly a day that someone was not killed, even white people killed by accident, as shot was flying everywhere. One afternoon there were seventy-five shots fired on the street from one faction toward another… One night about eleven o’clock I was on the corner of Spofford Alley and Washington Street when the people were coming out of the Chinese theatre. A shot was fired and it struck a woman who was passing… The man who fired the shot was not more than one foot away from me but… turned so quickly and got away in some alley that I could not find him… Once I had two officers with me and there were two more across the street in uniform, though we did not usually wear uniforms in the Chinese Quarter. Notwithstanding all this, the murderer walked deliberately out into the middle of the street, and surrounded as he was by all those officers when it was impossible for a man to escape, he killed his man…

  I went to Chief Crowley and said, “Chief, when any one of these Chinamen commit deeds of violence they run into the numerous small alleys of Chinatown and get beyond our reach, and after being once lost sight of it is impossible to identify them unless by some peculiar mark about them.” [In later years Price used to boast he could tell a hatchet man from a peaceful Chinese by the former’s “fluffed” hair, not so well kept as others, his round, stiff-brimmed felt fedora, and the little piece of red silk he carried on his person somewhere which identified him as one of the bow how doy.]

  These societies are unlawful and organized for unlawful purposes. They do not recognize our laws and to compete with them we have to go beyond our present laws. They are not sufficient. I can put a stop to these societies if you will give me my own way.

  Crowley had responded, “I am under bonds here, of course. They will sue me if I do as you suggest.” But Price had gone to the Chinese Consulate and when officials there spoke to the chief, agreeing to stand by him financially if sued, he came around.

  The chief had allowed Price to reorganize the Chinatown squad of 7 or 8 officers. With this force Price gave all of Chinatown’s myriad societies a careful scrutiny. When he was ready, Price struck. He enlarged his force to 16 uniformed men and a police surgeon, armed them with axes, and set off. He marched them from one tong to another and literally cut them to pieces. He bragged that he broke up $180,000 worth of property and did not leave a piece of furniture over five inches in length. “Wherever we went, we got arms, ammunition, bowie knifes two feet long in the blade, iron bars done up in braided cord, and so forth. Also chain and steel armor.”

  Price began the technique of kicking downstairs any members found in tong quarters, a procedure in which he was soon excelled by his brother officers, mainly Sergeant Jesse Cook. The better class of Chinese—even those forced into tong membership by fear or other circumstance—praised his drastic action and secretly informed him of tongs he had missed. Informants came to his home secretly by night. He was able to close in on the Hop Sing tong, giving its officials one hour’s notice to remove their furnishings. They ignored his threat, so he led his infantry in and tore the interior of the four-story building to pieces, smashing seven josses in the process. With no place to meet, the tong men had to disperse. Price recalled his next move. “I then went around to all the stores, houses of prostitution… and notified these people that if I found out that they were aiding these highbinder societies in any way, manner or form, by giving them money, I would demolish their places. If they wanted protection, I would furnish it to them. If one officer would not do, we would give them forty.” Price was sued for his blitzkrieg raid on the tongs, but he just laughed and said, “All the prosecutors make out of me is the experience they desire.”

  His ruthlessness paid off. Although there were some thirty tong murders in Chinatown’s streets and alleys between 1880 and 1898, for about three years after Price’s initial raids there was not a tong killing in the Quarter. But his strong measures were not always kept up after his transfer to other duty, and corruption as well as flaccidity crept into the squad. It had deteriorated so much at one point that the chief felt it safe to tell only the sergeant in command of the exact locality of the gambling den or tong to be raided. Even so, the Chinese were rarely taken by surprise. The 1897 Grand Jury’s raids on gambling hells were frustrated, for example, by the eternal vigilance of the sentinels and the multiplicity of trap doors and secret panels through which players and gambling devices were spirited away. Of course there was more to it than the leaks in the squad. When Immigration Commissioner Hart North asked “Do any of the white men who are employed by the Chinese as guards, and so on, ever render any aid to the highbinders?” Lieutenant Price made this point. “They destroy the whole business because they will never give any information to anybody. They are working for those people and shield them. Of course the worst houses pay these guards the most money, so naturally they are willing and glad to work for them. This ought to be done away with, by all means. Some of them collect seven or eight hundred dollars a month and would not give it up. As soon as an officer appears, and these guards do not like him, you cannot turn a corner before signals are given. The highbinders also are assisted by Chinatown guides....”

  When heads rolled in 1894, they rolled on the Chinatown squad too. The press claimed that Chinese gamblers subsidized the squad’s sergeants by the most systematic method of corrupting officials ever brought to light in the city. With all Chinatown under tribute to the police to the tune of $500 a week, the pockets of the half-dozen policemen were jingling. The
Chinese were willing to pay much more liberally than the white gamblers of South of Market. The Quarter was split into 5 divisions. Each of these were presided over by a Chinese boss and all 5 formed a sort of board of corruption. The bosses collected a certain amount from each gambling house and held weekly meetings at which the money was divided between themselves and the squad sergeant who in turn paid off his men.

  But the Chinese gamblers did not trust the patrolmen “in their employ.” They kept the Chinatown squad under surveillance, using a well-organized squad of spotters. This counterespionage corps tailed even the heads of the department. All the gambling houses were wired with alarms, and as soon as a “tipper-offer” officer appeared the panic button was pushed. This did not close the doors of the dens; ax-splintered doors were expensive and hard to replace. Instead the doors were thrown wide open and groups innocently playing dominoes replaced the tan gamesters. When the all-clear signal was sounded and the coast was clear again the “stage set” would be struck and out would come the sticks and buttons and a return to normality.

  Shortly after the Chinatown squad scandal broke, the corruption syndrome reappeared and this time in the Customs House. Customs Inspector Richard Williams was summarily dismissed from the service on charges of sneaking girls ashore to the Jackson Street slave mart, and Interpreter Louis Quong was suspended. Perhaps because he did not have enough faith in the Chinese Bureau after these developments, United States Commissioner of Immigration Hart H. North, when he wanted expertise on crime along Dupont Gai, turned to Lieutenant Price.

  Price evaluated the situation at the time of the police and Customs scandals. He told him first that the merchants were not yet brave enough to cut loose from their enforced tong connections. He cited one man, Fong Wing, as an example. Fong had paid protection money to all of the tongs to absolutely guarantee the safety of his skin. (But even this did not work and he was shot down in Waverly Place by someone he had overlooked or offended.) Price went into details.

  The merchants are obliged to belong to these societies for the sake of protection. They cannot get out of it. Although belonging to the society, they are always willing to furnish me with information to aid in my breaking them, but they would not be seen speaking to me on the street. They are members of the highbinder societies in fact but not in spirit. But the merchants are so entirely under the control of these societies and are so dominated by fear that any demand that is made upon them they pay without question. I’ll tell you of an instance of this. There was a butcher on Washington Street. One evening he threw a little clean water out onto the street. A Chinese highbinder who was standing nearby got the water on the sleeve of his coat. I happened to be there at the time and when I had passed by, this highbinder went to the butcher and demanded a hundred dollars for the offense, and said he would call again. I told the butcher not to pay the money but to make an arrangement to meet him at a certain place and I would be there. ? He promised to do so, and would you believe it, before I got back there he had paid the highbinder the hundred dollars? That is too show you that anything the highbinders demand they get.

  As if to disown themselves from their corruption-tainted predecessors, certain Chinatown squad sergeants went out of their way after the scandals broke in order to do an excessively brutal policing job on Chinatown. For a time Sergeants Witham, Gillin and Esola were more the terrors of Chinatown than the tong killers. They did an efficient job of erasing tong headquarters and gambling hells from the face of Chinatown. They had learned well from the example of Sergeants Burke and Price. They were so thorough that they soon had five damage suits simmering against them in the United States District Court. Some of the injured people were innocent, for the squad did step out of line as it overcompensated after the bribery scandals broke. Bystanders were roughed up; property was wantonly destroyed even if only thought to be connected with a tong or gambling den. But the raids continued. The Chinese Consulate tipped Sergeant C. H. Witham off to the location of seventeen tongs. He gave them twenty-four hours to vacate their premises. Of those who were tardy, Witham wryly reported to the chief, “We gave them very material assistance in removing not only their furniture but themselves.”

  Sergeant James W. Gillin, when in command of the Chinatown squad further refined the techniques of the other sergeants. He had patrolmen Lynch and Ellis report to a Market Street costumer before one of his raids. They were decked out in slouch hats, Chinese blouses and breeches, and their skins were dyed an almond hue. Gillin toyed with the idea of disguising himself but he was too vain of his red beard to shave it off and knew no way to camouflage it. So good was Ellis’s disguise that a hoodlum called him a coolie and chucked a rock at him. He could only dodge, swear silently under his breath, and grip his club the more tightly up his sleeve. He and Lynch met in Washington Alley, gained entrance to a fan-tan den, pulled off their hats and false queues, and arrested eighteen gamblers.

  The squad used disguise several times thereafter with varying effectiveness. Officer Galloway got inside a new club which fronted as a merchants’ association and was able to let his comrades through the barred door to seize twenty visitors, but in another raid Officer Morton had his disguise penetrated after he had sneaked into the Oriental Pacific Club—one of Little Pete’s properties. He was assaulted by some of the gamblers and roughed up. By clubbing his pistol he drove them off, and blowing his whistle, secured reinforcements waiting in the alley outside. Morton’s maneuver netted about $300 in cash, sixty players and a complete fan-tan outfit.

  At the end of the decade, Lieutenant Price hit upon the idea of equipping two men of the squad with cameras. They “shot” all well-known highbinders, and the photographs were placed in an album at police headquarters—a tong rogues’ gallery. These Chinese were notified to leave town or be arrested for vagrancy. Many were taken in by this latest tactic and did leave, reducing further the population of boo how doy.

  It was Sergeant Gillin who not only wrecked local tongs but ousted highbinders drifting in from interior cities for the Chinese New Year’s celebrations in San Francisco. Among them were a large number of undesirables run out of the State Capital by a committee of safety.

  It was Gillin who rated the tongs publicly in terms of their bloodthirstiness in 1895. He gave the Bing On and Gee Sin Seer top honors. Of each tong he said, “Its hatchet men bear a reputation for absolute disregard for life and law.” Gillin was tough and courageous. The very day after being sued for $5,000 damages for his raids he descended upon thirteen more tongs. He was praised by the public. (The only violence was a rash of robberies and raids on some whorehouses by Alaska fishermen who doubled as highbinders during their winter layovers in San Francisco.) But he shrugged off the praise, saying, “The highbinders are such a bloodthirsty lot that no dependence can be placed on them and they may break out again at any time.”

  Of all the Chinatown squad sergeants, Jesse Cook was the most hated. When he had been only two months in the Quarter he had already earned a bad reputation for poking Chinese in the ribs gratuitously with his stick. He also punched a number in the face. He paid little heed to the first part of Crowley’s edict—”Be careful not to club a reputable Chinese, but show no mercy to a highbinder.” When he led raids on gambling dens and was unable to make any arrests he took his anger out on anyone at hand, beating up on the closest Chinese. All Chinatown and the city at large was shocked when he threw a Chinese down a staircase of a joss house next door to a gambling house. Cook claimed that the man was a lookout who had “slipped” on the stairs. In so doing the man collected a broken arm, bruises and internal injuries. Complaints poured in against the sergeant who apparently felt that he was a law unto himself. (For all his threats and violence, he took fewer cases to police court than any of the other sergeants handling the squad.) Heading the complaints of individuals were those of the Consulate General and the Six Companies. Representing the latter, Jee Chong Tone said, “This beating o
f Chinese in the street and in the stores has to be stopped. Gambling and other crimes against the law should be suppressed, and we will help the authorities, but beating a suspected Chinese because there is no evidence against him has to be stopped. I am free to confess that Sergeant Cook is the most brutal officer we have ever had in Chinatown.” Cook was relieved of his post.

  Another more successful and less brutal Chinatown squad sergeant was Patrick Shea. He was most effective in stamping out gambling. He usually bagged a half dozen or so players when he raided a den, but on January 4, 1898, he astounded the department by marching in eighty offenders at one time. He also enriched the city treasury by $500, since the Chinese gamblers never defended themselves, preferring to pay their $5 or so in fines and then hurry back to another game elsewhere.

  The public’s attention was turned away from the troubles of the squad when another tong war broke out. When a Bing On man sold a slave girl to a member of the Wah Ting San Fung tong but was not paid the full amount agreed upon he turned the bill over to his collection agency—the tong. The Wah Tings treated the demand with contempt. They heaped insult upon insult, saying the girl was not worth $1,000—not even $500—and if the Bing On tong wanted to make something of it they were welcome to try at their own peril. The Bing Ons decided to wipe out the debt in blood. The police learned that something was up but not exactly what. Merchants on Jackson Street between Dupont and Stockton were observed hurriedly securing the iron shutters over their shop windows, so there was no doubt as to the location of the chosen battlefield. Consul General Chang tried to stop the fray by ordering the new Six Companies’ police to locate all ex-convicts and turn them over to regular patrolmen for arrest and/or deportation. He quickly posted a large proclamation bearing his consular seal which read: