During the height of Mock Duck’s prosperity the agents of the Gerry Society began snooping about his home, investigating the report that Ha Oi, the adopted daughter of the tong leader, was a white child. The courts found that she was the daughter of one Lizzie Smith, who married Wu Ching Mung of San Francisco after the death of her white husband. When Lizzie Smith died Wu Ching married Tai Yu, and when Wu Ching Mung died Tai Yu married Mock Duck, and so Ha Oi came to the house of the Hip Sing chieftain. The child was taken away from him when agents of the Society found her asleep at the foot of a couch on which lay Mock Duck and his cousin with an opium layout between them.
Mock Duck, frantic, went about the streets of Chinatown with tear-filled eyes, begging for help. He took the case to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, but lost, and then in despair he turned his gambling interests over to Wong Get and went on a tour of the American continent. He gambled feverishly in Chicago, San Francisco and throughout the West, and within a year came back to Chinatown with his shirt front blazing with diamonds and thirty thousand dollars in his pockets, and dazzled the quarter by changing his suit three times a day. But prosperity could not quench his thirst for power; guns began to roar and hatchets to flash almost as soon as he returned. He was arrested many times for murder and for gambling, but he was never convicted until 1912, when he was sent to Sing Sing for operating a policy game.
Few men have been shot at oftener than Mock Duck, yet despite the whirl of bullets in which he lived for more than ten years he was never injured but once. That was on November 4, 1904, when three On Leongs suddenly appeared in Pell street as he was taking the air in front of his home. They squatted on the ground, shut their eyes and blazed away, and Mock Duck went down with a bullet in his hip. Policemen came running from Doyers street and from either end of Pell street, but they caught only one of the On Leong gunmen. Him they protected by forming a square with their bodies, and then moved slowly toward Chatham Square and the patrol wagon, surrounded by Hip Sings waving hatchets and pistols and striving desperately to find an opening in the wall of cops through which they could shoot or hack.
Mock Duck was in the Hudson Hospital for three weeks, and then came out whole and healthy and filled with a craving for revenge. And he obtained it. Doyers, Pell and Mott streets echoed to the shots that infuriated Hip Sings fired at fleeing On Leongs, and Mock Duck was in the forefront of every foray until his arrest in 1912. There was not a great deal of evidence against him, and he always insisted that he had been framed, but the courts apparently decided that it was high time something was done about him, so they sent him to prison. Since his imprisonment Mock Duck has not been active; he went to Brooklyn when he was released, and has remained there. In 1918 he made formal proclamation that he was done with tongs and wars; that he had acquired sufficient wealth and adventure and that his face would never again be seen in Chinatown. So far he has kept his word.
MUCH of the history of Doyers street and Chinatown has been enacted around the old Chinese Theater and the Bloody Angle, the latter a sharp bend in Doyers street opposite the old Arcade, which once led to Mott street and was closed by the police because it offered too easy an avenue of escape to the hatchet men of the On Leongs. The police beheve, and can prove it so far as such proof is possible, that more men have been murdered at the Bloody Angle than at any other place of hke area in the world. It was, and is, an ideal place for ambush; the turn is very abrupt, and not even a slant-eyed Chinaman can see around a corner. Armed with snickersnee and hatchet sharpened to a razor’s edge, the tong killer lay in wait for his victim, and having cut him down as he came around the bend, fled through the Arcade, or plunged into the theater and thence into Mott or Pell street through one of the underground passageways.
The Theater is now a mission of the New York Rescue Society, with hymns and sandwiches for the bums instead of the witticisms of the comedian Ah Hoon and the dramatic goings-on of the tragedian Hom Ling, who made special pilgrimages from Canton to play in New York and San Francisco. It was originally opened in 1895, and was the first Chinese theater east of San Francisco—and the last, except for occasional performances by travelling troupes in one of the old Bowery houses under the patronage of the companies which operate the sight-seeing buses. The playhouse became the property of the Rescue Society in August, 1910, after Raymond Hitchcock, the actor, and Joe Humphreys, who officiates as announcer at important prize fights, had taken it over and tried in vain to subject Chinatown to the civilizing influence of the moving picture. The Society investigated only slightly the current tale that the basement had been used for years as a burying ground for tong war victims, and made no alterations in the building except to give it a bath, wall up the entrances to the tunnels and remove the opium bunks from the cellar. The hooks from which the bunks swung are still embedded in the masonry. The paintings on the walls of the auditorium, frescoes depicting scenes of dragon hunting and the triumph of virtue, also remain, and are frequently pointed out by gabby guides as fine examples of Chinese art which had been removed from an ancient temple and brought to America for the delectation of the transplanted Cantonese in the New York colony. As a matter of truth, the pictures were painted by Chin Yin, who lived next door and was calligrapher, house painter, artist and janitor. He received thirty-five dollars for the job.
The original promoters of the theater were hard put to it to make their enterprise pay, for they charged only twenty-five cents admission and required a packed house at every performance to meet their pay rolls. Then, too, they were troubled by the fact that after the tong wars began the On Leongs, Hip Sings and Four Brothers became enamoured of the theater as a place to stage their fights and killings. Frequently the great Hom Ling was compelled to abandon his rantings and flee because an eager Hip Sing had slipped the keen blade of his hatchet across the throat of an On Leong as that worthy sat enjoying the play. Frequently, too, the performance was interrupted by the bark of revolvers, for eventually the Chinese went in for the white devil’s weapons, even if they continued to ignore his law. But they were never good shots; their procedure was to point their guns in the general direction of their intended victim, close their eyes and pull the trigger until there were no more explosions.
Ah Hoon, who is said by Chinese critics of the drama to have been a really gifted comedian, was killed because he insisted upon interpolating in his performances comment on the activities of the quarter; and since he was a member of the On Leong tong and intensely partisan, his quips and pleasantries were generally at the expense of the Four Brothers and Hip Sings. These things rankled, and the Rev. Huie Kim, a Christian and head of the Morning Star Mission in Doyers street, warned Ah Hoon that he was treading on dangerous ground, and publicly said the comedian was a bad man. But Ah Hoon persisted, and when the Four Brothers and Hip Sings declared war upon the On Leongs for other reasons, he put no limit to his jests about the enemies of his tong. So the Hip Sings and Four Brothers decided to kill him, and desiring to be fair, dispatched an emissary who gave him notice; he was told the exact hour and minute he would die, and further, that since he had been so insulting in his remarks, he would be murdered on the stage where he had made them.
On December 30, 1909, after Tom Lee had temporarily abdicated as chief of the On Leongs and had left town for a rest and to escape Hip Sing bullets, a Chinese woman who lived on the floor beneath Ah Hoon went to the police and asked protection for the threatened comedian. Sergeant John D. Coughhn, now Chief Inspector, and two patrolmen accompanied Ah Hoon to the theater, and sat on the stage during the performance, curiously out of place in their blue uniforms. Ah Hoon went through his act in fear and trembling, cutting his lines and cracking no jokes whatever about the Hip Sings and Four Brothers. The theater was crowded, for word of the impending tragedy had spread throughout Chinatown, and outside in the street surged a vast crowd which had come to see the fun and had not been able to buy even standing room. But fearing the police, the Hip Sing killers went back on their sworn word
and did not kill Ah Hoon, and at the end of the show the patrolmen escorted the actor through an underground passageway to his home in Chatham Square. He went to bed, his door locked. The only window of his chamber faced a blank wall, and On Leong hatchet men, heavily armed and clad in their shirts of mail, stood guard in the doorway of the house, while others patrolled the streets. Yet when morning came Ah Hoon was dead. He had been shot through the heart by a Hip Sing killer who was lowered in a boatswain’s chair from the roof, and had got at him through the window. The comedian’s body was found by Hoochy-Coochy Mary, who hved on the floor below and had heard the shot.
The death of Ah Hoon caused the flashing of hatchets and blazing of revolvers all through the Chinese quarter, and added to the woes of the theater owners, for the comedian was popular and had a great following. The climax of the war came on New Year’s Night. The house was filled with spectators, for this was the great Chinese celebration of the year, and a report had been industriously circulated that the warring tongs had arranged a truce. The performance went with verve and fire, but suddenly someone threw a bunch of lighted fire-crackers into the air over a row of orchestra seats. They snapped and popped, and the crowd milled about in a panic. But pistols snapped and popped also during the excitement and when the audience left the building five On Leong men did not move; they had been killed quickly and efficiently under cover of the exploding fireworks. Mock Duck and others of the Hip Sing highbinders were arrested, but no proof was found and they were not punished.
Annoyed that such things should happen in their house of entertainment, the owners of the theater announced that they would close the place. There were conferences, and finally, early in 1910, it was agreed that the truce of 1906 should be again put into effect so far as the theater was concerned, and that it would not be sporting to do any more killing within the building. But the Bloody Angle and the remainder of Doyers street were not mentioned, and the hatchet and gun men who had been making a shambles of the playhouse now waited outside for their victims, so that the audiences were as small as ever. Then various white devils took over the theater, and when Hitchcock and Humphrey failed to prosper with a motion picture show it was evident that the Chinese playhouse could no longer endure. So it became a mission and the home of the white man’s god, and therefore of no further interest to the Chinese.
The tong war in which Ah Hoon was killed, and which brought about the abandonment of the theater by the Chinese, was caused by the murder of little Sweet Flower, otherwise Bow Kum, a slave girl who had been sold by her father in Canton for a few dollars and brought to the United States, where she brought three thousand dollars in the open market in San Francisco. Low Hee Tong, high in the councils of the Four Brothers and their allies the Hip Sings, was the purchaser, and lived with the girl for four years. Then he got into trouble with the police, and when he could not produce a marriage license Bow Kum was taken away from him and put in a Christian mission to be saved from sin. Then came Tchin Len, an industrious truck gardener, who married her and brought her to New York. Low Hee Tong pressed Tchin Len to return the money which he had invested in the girl, but the gardener refused to pay, whereupon Low Hee Tong set forth his grievances in a letter to the Four Brothers and Hip Sings in New York. His tong leaders felt that the claim was justified, and in his behalf made solemn demand upon the On Leong tong, of which Tchin Len was a member. The On Leongs ignored the demand, and the Four Brothers and Hip Sings immediately broke out the red flag of the highbinder from the tong houses in Pell street and declared war in posters of violent hue emblazoned upon the billboards. A few days later, on August 15, 1909, a hatchet man slipped into the home of Tchin Len at No. 17 Mott street and stabbed Bow Kum to the heart, also cutting off her fingers and slashing her innumerable times across the body.
Then the killing began. This was probably the most disastrous war the tongs ever fought in New York, with a casualty list of about fifty dead and several times that number wounded, and with considerable destruction of property by bombs, for by that time the Chinese had begun to experiment with dynamite and the results were fearful. Old Tom Lee counseled peace before the white devils interfered and drove both tongs out of the city, but the younger, hot-blooded Hip Sings, Four Brothers and On Leongs swore by the bones of their ancestors that they would not stop until they had exterminated their enemies. Finally Captain William Hodgins of the Elizabeth street station, backed by Chinese merchants who were members of none of the warring tongs, induced the chieftains to listen to peace proposals. He went first to the On Leongs, and they told him that nothing would please them more than to make peace with their brethren, but first the Hip Sings and the Four Brothers must give them a Chinese flag, a roast pig and ten thousand packages of firecrackers. This was about the same as if the Ku Klux Klan were required to celebrate Yom Kippur, give their nightgowns to the Knights of Columbus and grovel before the Pope, so the Hip Sings and Four Brothers squawked with rage and the shooting and cutting went merrily on for another year. Late in 1910 the trouble was finally settled by a committee of forty appointed by the Chinese Minister in Washington, and composed principally of Chinese merchants, teachers and students. The truce thus arranged granted no humiliating demands from either side, and although it was rejected by the Four Brothers, it remained in effect until 1912, when a new tong, the Kim Lan Wui Saw, appeared in Chinatown and declared war on both the On Leongs and the Hip Sings, who vowed that the Four Brothers had fomented the disturbance. The ancient rivals combined to exterminate the upstarts, and were proceeding satisfactorily when the Chinese government again interfered, and with the aid of the New York
police compelled the tongs to agree to a new treaty. It was signed on May 22, 1913, by the Chinese Merchants’ Association, the On Leong tong, the Hip Sing tong and the Kim Lan Wui Saw, but not by the obstinate Four Brothers.
This treaty kept Chinatown in peace, to the great profit and prosperity of all factions, until 1924, when another war began because several members of the On Leong tong, expelled from that organization, found refuge with the Hip Sings, taking with them, according to the On Leongs, a considerable sum of On Leong money. The fighting continued sporadically for several months, but never reached the proportions of the earlier conflicts. So far as New York was concerned, most of the killing was not in Chinatown, but among Chinese laundrymen and restaurant owners in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Only a few men were murdered in Mott, Doyers and Pell streets. There was also a big war in the West in 1921, in which the Suey Ying, Bing Kong, Suey Don and Jung Ying tongs participated, but none had members in the east and New York was not affected.
THE gangs did very little fighting in Chinatown, but the quarter was thickly sprinkled with resorts run by white men, wherein the gangsters found repose and recreation. Scotchy Lavelle, who had abandoned the arduous life of a river pirate to become bouncer at Callahan’s Dance Hall at Chatham Square and Doyers street, opened his own dive at No. 14 Doyers street about the time Monk Eastman appeared in gangland. Across the street from Callahan’s was the place operated by Barney Flynn, who became very popular with his Irish customers when, having commissioned an artist to paint a portrait of George Washington, he refused to accept the work until several dead Englishmen had been painted at the General’s feet. At No. 6 Doyers street was the Chatham Club, where Irving Berlin occasionally sang and waited on table, coming by special permission of Nigger Mike Salter, in whose resort at No. 12 Pell street he worked as a singing waiter in the days before he discovered ragtime. Lavelle’s is said to have witnessed the birth of the famihar phrase, “Who wants the handsome waiter?” A curio store now occupies the front room of the old Chatham Club, but the exterior of the building remains unchanged; it is a curious, many-gabled structure, unbehevably dingy and dirty and tricked out in amazing architectural doodads.
These dives, especially the Chatham Club, Barney Flynn’s and Nigger Mike’s, were also the headquarters of the white parasites who had drifted into Chinatown and earned precarious livings as Lobbygow
s, or guides to the quarter. Big Mike Abrams was one of the notorious figures of the district during the late nineties. Big Mike had formerly operated opium smoking dens in Pell street and at Coney Island, but in his later years he roamed the Chinese area and devoted himself principally to beating Chinamen occasionally accepting slugging and shooting commissions and acting as stall for a gang of pickpockets. It was Big Mike’s proud boast, a short while before he died, that no fewer than ten Chinamen had met death at his hand. Three he had decapitated with a clasp knife in Pell street before a horrified assemblage of their own people. But Big Mike lost much of his fearsomeness when a Hip Sing hatchet man known as Sassy Sam, fortified by rice brandy and rose wine, chased him the length of Pell street with a long, curved sword. Soon afterward Big Mike removed the head of Ling Tchen and the Hip Sings took counsel on the affair, for Ling Tchen was one of the chief men of the tong and his murder called for action. Within a month Big Mike was found dead in bed, his room filled with gas which had seeped through a line of slender garden hose that stretched from an opened jet in the hall to the keyhole of the sleeping chamber.
The most celebrated of all the white hangers-on in Chinatown was Chuck Connors, who was born in Mott street of a respectable Irish family and christened George Washington Connors. He acquired his sobriquet by his fondness for chuck steak, which in the wild days of his youth he cooked on a stick over gutter fires. A great deal was written about him in the newspapers of the period, especially after he had become the acknowledged King of the Lobbygows, and he was variously called the Sage of Doyers street and the Bowery Philosopher. He was one of the originators of the dese, dem and dose school of linguistic expression, and achieved a considerable reputation as a wit and story teller. In his teens and early twenties Chuck was a lightweight pugilist of much promise, but in his later years he became a bar fly and a tramp; he used to sit absolutely motionless for hours at a time in a chair tilted against a wall of the Chatham Club, while crowds of tourists gaped at him in awe.
The Gangs of New York Page 29
