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

by Dillon, Richard

  At the last trial you could not submit your case to your attorneys but tried to again interfere with justice. I hope, for the glory of this State, that others who are your accomplices will have to join you in the investigation brought about by the Grand Jury.

  You have been the studied traducer of every official from myself down. You did this to create the impression that there was no justice for a man without money. If you had left gambling debts alone and had not made yourself the subagent of shysters, you would have been a prosperous businessman.

  Pete bore this scathing denunciation without flinching. His face was a mask. The crafty King of Chinatown was turning new ideas over and over in his mind and seeking new ways out of his predicament. His agents used every means to attempt to circumvent the law. A request for postponement of sentence having been refused, Lowenthal next made a motion for a new trial. Toohy told him that if he could find one shred of error to warrant a new trial, he should have it. Lowenthal argued that the verdict was based on hearsay evidence. He read part of Chief Crowley’s testimony as an example. But he was overruled by the court on all points.

  When the Judge asked Little Pete if he had anything to say as to why sentence should not be passed upon him, Pete answered by requesting that the court not pronounce sentence in the absence of Hall MacAllister whom he had retained to argue a motion for a new trial. He asked that MacAllister be sent for, but Judge Toohy declined to permit any further delays. Notice of appeal was given, and Little Pete was removed to the county jail to await trial for the attempted bribery of Juror Feder. On September 7, 1887, he stoically went off to Folsom Prison to begin serving a sentence of five years.

  Although safely put away in Folsom, Little Pete’s power was not entirely broken. Of all the Oriental prisoners in State penal institutions he alone was allowed to keep the queue of which he was so vain and which was contrary to institutional rules. However, his being sent to prison did cause astonishment in most Chinese quarters and consternation in some. His power at fixing raps had seemed supreme.

  District Attorney Stonehill complained loudly to the supervisors about the lengthiness of such trials as those of Lee Chuck and Little Pete. Both had had multiple trials up to a month each in length. Stonehill’s complaint reminded the public of Lee Chuck who had been pushed pretty much into the background by a troubled Little Pete. On August 23, 1886, Lee was held to answer before Superior Court Justice Rix. On January 23 of the next year the trial began before Judge Toohy, and on February 4 Lee Chuck was found guilty of murder. He was sentenced on March 29 to be hanged—the only hatchet-man murderer of six then in detention to be given the death penalty. For the others the sentences were life imprisonments. Lee Chuck, too, had to undergo a tongue lashing from Judge Toohy:

  On the 28th of July, 1886, having with settled determination and malice aforethought first accoutred yourself in a coat of mail, two large revolvers and a brace of huge pistols... in company with other Chinamen no better than yourself, you tarried in a place of ambush on Washington Street at a point about four hundred yards from where you now stand. This was just before noon on that summer day .. . your unsuspecting victim Yen Yuen, passing from his shop to his dinner, was shot down in cold blood, without the slightest provocation by you and your dastardly accomplices. Your helpless countryman, who never did you wrong, was slain in a manner which denoted that you were endowed with more sanguinary cruelty than generally falls to the lot of ordinary assassins. As he lay, gasping in the throes of death… you and your gang of cutthroats perforated his prostrate body with bullets… you next sought safety in flight to some refuge where you might at once begin the training of false witnesses to prove your innocence of this atrocious crime… The judgment of the law and the sentence of the court is now, here in open court and in your presence, pronounced against you, which is that you, Lee Chuck, suffer the punishment of death and that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead.

  The same maneuvers which were tried in Little Pete’s case were used in Lee Chuck’s. His case was appealed to the Supreme Court and a new trial granted, but with the same result as the first. He was found guilty after six hours of deliberation by the jury. Judge Toohy refused a motion for a new trial and an insanity plea, too, but the case was again appealed and Lee Chuck was given a third chance. This time he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. But on February 10, 1892, Lee Chuck was pronounced insane. He was committed to Agnews Asylum. There he remained until May 30, 1904, when Governor George C. Pardee agreed to pardon him on condition that he be deported. (He was now said to have recovered his mind.) The steamship companies balked at taking him aboard, however, fearing that the Chinese Government would not permit him to land. So Lee Chuck was returned to prison and in the spring of 1905, had to be recommitted to Agnews Asylum.

  Little Pete’s long years of imprisonment did not make him repentant or honest; they only made him wary. He was more careful and more cautious, but unchastened. He made his way back to Chinatown after serving his term, and it did not take him long to regain a position of power. His name was in the news in February, 1893, when Yick Kee refused to accept a bribe of $80 from him or from one of his cohorts to swear that a slave girl who was trying to land was the wife of one of his partners. His declining led Pete to raise the offer to $80 for himself and $80 for his firm. When he again refused, Pete offered $100 and $100. He then warned the obstinate Yick Kee not to interfere and swore that he would land the woman if it cost him $5,000. But Yick Kee testified against the slave girl. As a result, at a joint meeting of the Bing On and Suey On tongs a death sentence was pronounced upon Yick and another merchant. The police refused to divulge the second man’s name in hopes of safeguarding his life, but he fatalistically made plans for his death and said that he would do all he could to help the police, since he was to be killed in any case. Hia information was that two Customs officers could be prevailed upon to land Chinese prostitutes and that certain whites and Chinese whom he knew gave false certificates in behalf of such women for $30 each.

  The next year saw great preparations in the city for San Francisco’s exposition, the Midwinter Fair, in Golden Gate Park. When the Gaelic arrived in port she bore 103 Chinese, mostly women, for the Chinese pavilion. The press was suspicious. The girls’ chaperone turned out to be Chung Ying, a cousin of Little Pete’s. The newspapers protested the landing of these people without examinations or certificates, since they were sure they meant to desert the Fair and enjoy comfortable and illegal lives in Chinatown. The Call said: “The fact that Little Pete, who has been known here for years as the head and front of almost every crooked piece of work of any magnitude in which the Chinese have engaged, is engineering the importation of the Midwinter Fair Chinese is, alone, enough to make the Customs officials believe that a repetition of the [Chicago] World’s Fair business is intended. The Customs officials believe that Little Pete or his agents or his cousins in China have collected, for every one of the Chinese brought here for the Fair, a fee....”

  Sam Ruddell, Deputy Surveyor of the Port, inspected the Gaelic’s passengers with Collector of the Port John H. Wise. “I’m satisfied, Mr. Collector,” said Ruddell, “that all of these people have come to stay.” The collector swore. “But, Sam,” he said, “what can I do? Congress has said they can come in. Even if Little Pete is bringing them over, what can we do?” Each knew the answer—nothing.

  The newspapers prophesied that the illegal immigrants would comply with the McCreary Registration Act later in order to save themselves trouble, while Little Pete would grow richer day by day. In June of 1894, the Treasury Department sent Special Agent John Phoenix to the Chinese village of the fairgrounds. He found that all but 37 of the 257 Chinese had already disappeared. The papers said, in effect, “We told you so” and guessed that Pete had netted $50,000 through his female imports.

  Little Pete was a fan of expositions. When a slave girl fled to the security of the Presbyterian Mission in
1895, she turned out to be an actress imported by Pete for the Atlanta Exposition. After doing business in Georgia for a brief time she had been removed to a den in Chinatown. The girl named Pete’s associates in the slave-girl traffic—an unsavory group that included Madame Choy, Chan Yeung, Charley Ah Him and Tom Hung. Charley was a knowing ex-interpreter in Los Angeles courts. Tom was a genuine kwei chan, or villain—an ex-convict (manslaughter) and blackmailer who lived with an elderly madame, Dan Pak Tsin, in the Church Alley den she ran for him and his brother. Hung was a braggart who claimed that he had enough money to win any court case and a quack con man who sold an opium-cure concoction as a front. Hung was an interpreter for the Bing Kong tong and a member of at least two other tongs. Trying to get the runaway girl back from the mission by means of shysters and legal trickery, he applied for a writ of habeas corpus, swearing that she was being unlawfully detained. Miss Williams fought the case successfully and Hung—or one of his gang—retaliated by shooting at a window of the mission.

  That same year of 1895, the police heard a rumor that Pete was behind the murder of Chew Ging, a member of the Suey Sing tong. The tong claimed that Little Pete had hired a decoy named Do Ming, who was actually arrested for the murder, in order to get the heat off the real killer whose identity was unknown. They were probably right; the police had to let Do go for lack of evidence. Undoubtedly the real assassin made his escape.

  Besides the Suey Sings, Little Pete had other rivals and enemies. Lee Gee and Lee Hoy were competitors in the slave-girl trade, and from him they picked up the custom of forging Revenue Agent B. M. Thomas’s name to revenue stamps on opium. Another rival, though not really an enemy, was Chen Hen Shin, alias Chin Tan Sun or Big Jim. He ran gambling dens in Chinatown and Oakland and owned banks, restaurants and other property in San Francisco plus property in China. Big Jim was even better off financially than Pete (Pete’s income had fallen off during his stretch in Folsom), and was often described as a millionaire. He was the inventor of the “no-see-’um” lottery. His Chinatown office had a blind, windowless face on the street—the facade being broken only by a small aperture. Money was pushed through this hole by customers and tickets pushed back out by a hidden cashier. The buyer never saw the vendor, and thus could not identify him in court. One May evening the department decided to put an end to Big Jim’s operation. A detective pushed some money through the opening. When the hand came out with the tickets, the officer snapped one of a pair of handcuffs over its wrist and hung on. He braced himself against the building but the hand got away. There must have been a half-dozen men pulling on the unfortunate member. Big Jim courteously returned the detective’s property, pushing the manacles gingerly through the opening after they had been worked off the trapped teller’s wrist.

  Expositions and the slave trade were not Little Pete’s only hobbies. When he was thirty-one he became a horseracing fan and enjoyed the easy money he made at it. He took in $100,000 within a few weeks. He would bet up to $6,000 a day and would seldom lose any large amount on any one race. His profits came to be enormous, even after he had greased the palms of innumerable fixed jockeys, bookmakers, hostlers and stableboys of all categories. It was no surprise, therefore, that Pete developed a sure-fire system of picking winners, even in a closely matched race of favorites. He generously shared his track knowledge with others, giving his friends good tips on the horses. A typical race fixed by Pete was the one in which all the experts had figured Wheel of Fortune as a sure thing. But Pete put his money on a horse named Rosebud. Miraculously—or so it seemed—the judgment of the green track fan from Chinatown proved to be superior to that of race-goers of many years’ standing. Rosebud came in well ahead of the favorite—ridden by Pete’s good friend Jockey Chorn.

  It was not until March, 1896, that bookmakers and public alike realized that they were being systematically plundered at the Bay District track. They could not figure out just who was responsible or how it was being done. They did not yet suspect the Chinese newcomer. But Pete, if he did not know horses, knew people and their weak points. He had made “arrangements” with as many as ten jockeys. It was Jockey Arthur Hinrichs, a mild-looking, blue-eyed lad from St. Louis, who informed on Pete. Hinrichs was an artist in the saddle and a demon finisher in the stretch, but he ratted on Pete, claiming that he was not getting his share; he was probably panicky because he had double-crossed his fixed comrades of the track. In a race in which Pete had selected Jerry Chorn to win, the greedy Hinrichs declined to lay back. Instead, he whipped up his 10-to-1 shot and came home in first place past a startled Chorn. Hinrichs had $800 of his own money on the nose of his own mount. The other jockeys were so bitter about his double-dealing that he thought it best to hire a bodyguard.

  Finally Hinrichs’s nerve deserted him entirely and he confessed to Tom Williams, president of the Jockey club. Hippolyte Chevalier, Chorn and Hinrichs usually rode the three fastest horses in any race, so Pete “fixed” all three possible winners, arranging in advance who would come in first. Because he knew that suspicions would be aroused if he was seen talking to the horsemen, he used Dow Williams as a gobetween, telling him the horse chosen to win on a particular day and having the trainer whisper the password to the jockeys at the last moment.

  Tales of Pete’s big winnings had begun to spread even before Hinrichs confessed, but he laughed them off, saying each time, “I backed two or three in the race but only won a trifle.” Elated at his success, Little Pete tried his hand at bookmaking, but was only partially successful. One or two of the horses laid up in his book as “dead ones” suddenly revived and his book lost heavily.

  When Hinrichs confessed, Williams called a meeting of the board of stewards. After hearing the evidence, that body directed that the California Jockey club expel Chorn, Chevalier and Pete from the tracks for conspiracy and fraud, and refuse permission to Hinrichs to ride in any races. Pete’s bribes ruined a number of reputations and probably lives. Hinrichs, Chevalier and Chorn were ruined as jockeys.

  Supposedly Pete was tabu at all tracks after this, but following his death, James B. Ranier, a trainer, came forward to reveal that the track boycott on Pete had never been effective. He said:

  I understand that someone got hold of part of the story so I thought it best to make a clean breast of it. After Pete got ruled off, I operated for him on the race track, and while he was not betting heavily—only a hundred or two at a time—he was working in other ways. At his suggestion I bought three horses. I bought them at a good price on the condition that the people in whose names they stood would go on racing them in their colors but at my orders... If Fete had lived only a week longer the bookkeepers out on the track next Saturday would not have had sufficient money to pay their carfares home. We would have cleaned up at least two hundred thousand dollars. Why, I gave his widow eighteen hundred dollars today—the proceeds of one winning on one of our horses on Friday in Oakland… Pete’s play was this. He gave me a note or power of attorney six months ago, saying “Anything this man does or says for me I will stand by.” Well, I always had some money on hand to treat the “push” and the jockeys and I would put up champagne for the high-toned ones and perhaps steer them into good feminine company. Then when my man was mellow I would suggest he wasn’t riding for his health and that all I wanted him to do was to ride one race for me—he to get fifty percent of the money. They all knew Little Pete would divide fairly .. .

  One crackerjack jock came into town, and when I broached the proposition to him and showed him Little Pete’s note he was a little leery. He said he never did business with any but the principals. “Very well,” I said... I took him to Chinatown and got Pete and introduced them… when I next saw the jockey... he said, “It’s all right. Whenever you want me to ride for you just give me the word.”

  I tell you, we have five of them—the jockeys—sure. It was the greatest thing ever done. There was no playing for place, but just straight money. The names of th
e jockeys are known everywhere and the alleged owners of the horses are some of the biggest people on the turf.

  I have documentary evidence of what I saw, including some interesting letters. My arrangement with Little Pete was to be paid for running expenses and wages for the time being. We were looking for the big cleanup on Saturday. When that came I was to have fifty percent of the total profits… and I would have got it sure. Pete was square….

  With Lee Chuck in the insane asylum after being released from Folsom, Little Pete had to look for a new bodyguard. He chose well in selecting Ed Murray. The strapping Murray was to be his shadow and the start of a vogue among highbinders. Pete’s idea was that any hatchet man would think twice before gunning down a white man to get at his Chinese enemy. If one did, he just might have a lynch mob of fan kwei after him. The killing of whites would certainly mean an end to the casual attitude of the public which permitted Chinatown crime to flourish. White bodyguards for the Mandarins, as Chinese big businessmen and bosses came to be called, became quite a fad.

  C. H. Hunter later replaced Murray as Pete’s bodyguard. And on the evening of January 23, 1897—exactly eleven years to the day after Detective Glennon warned Lee Chuck of the plot on his life—Little Pete made his second major mistake. His first had been to try to bribe Officer Martin in the Lee Chuck case. His second—and last—was to let his Chinese bodyguards off for a pre-Chinese New Year’s revel and to separate himself briefly from Hunter.

  From his home upstairs over his shoe factory Pete sent Hunter on an errand, saying “I’ll go downstairs and get shaved while you are gone.” Hunter advised him not to be so rash but Pete laughed. “That’s all right, I’ll take care of myself.” It was about 9:05 P.M. Pete proceeded downstairs, secure in his own building and with his bodyguard only a few blocks away on a ten-minute errand. He walked through the ground floor and turned into the barbershop next door. In the meantime Hunter sauntered down to the New Western Hotel to pick up a copy of the Sporting World so that Pete could learn the results of the day’s races. He passed within a few feet of two young men idling against the corner of a building; he may even have brushed against them. Once he was well past, the two loungers separated themselves from the black shadows, straightened up, and reached inside their blouses and drew out pistols. They hurried to the doorway of the barbershop. Their long, patient tailing of Pete had paid off at last.