The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (10 page)

In addition to these laudable activities, the tongs served another function. Dating back to the nineteenth century, when the Chinese in America were mainly male sojourners, the tongs oversaw the vice industries: the brothels, the opium dens, and above all the gambling parlors. These activities were just another business interest, albeit an especially lucrative one, and to stay profitable and orderly they needed to be policed with a firm hand. The tongs did this, and did it well, and for tolerating and regulating the unsavory side of the local economy, they drew substantial commissions, which they funneled back into the community. In this manner these fraternal organizations became deeply entrenched in San Francisco and New York, welcoming migrants to the United States and accruing the loyalty of generations of new arrivals. They became a dominant fact in Chinatown’s political and economic landscape—the bedrock of the local civil society. And before long they had history on their side. After all, the two oldest tongs in New York, the
On Leong and the Hip Sing, predated the Communist government in Beijing by half a century. When New York’s tongs were first established, an emperor ruled China.

That history was not without friction, of course, and at the turn of the twentieth century, the On Leong and the Hip Sing went to war. Because the rackets they controlled were lucrative, the tongs were seized by a feudal preoccupation with territory, and their skirmishes were extraordinarily violent. In
The Gangs of New York
, Herbert Asbury’s colorful, apocryphal account, the “fat, moon-faced” Hip Sing named Mock Duck wore a chain-mail shirt and dispatched On Leong members with two guns, “squatting on his haunches in the street with both eyes shut, and blazing away.” The short elbow crook of Doyers Street became known as the Bloody Angle for the massacres that unfolded there. It was Chinatown’s cleaver-wielding assassins during these years that gave us the expression
hatchet man
.

By the time the teenaged Benny Ong arrived from China, the worst of the tong wars were over. But clashes continued as the tongs jockeyed over control of one illicit enterprise or another, and in 1935 Ong was arrested along with several Hip Sing associates after they stuck up a gambling operation. The robbery had gone awry, and shots were fired. Ong was found guilty of murder and served seventeen years in an upstate prison.

“Is it true that you were convicted in the 1970s of bribery?” the investigator asked.

“Invoke the Fifth Amendment again,” Ong said.

Upon his release in 1952, Ong was welcomed back to the Hip Sing and began a fast ascent through the organization. By 1977, when he was caught on a wiretap bragging about payments he made to an immigration official, he was the leader of the Hip Sing and had assumed the grandiose title he would hold for the rest of his days: adviser for life to the tong. Law enforcement had begun to refer to him as something else: the Godfather of Chinatown.

“Have you ever heard of a street gang called the Flying Dragons?”

“Fifth Amendment.”

As leader of the Hip Sing, Ong oversaw both the licit and the illicit activities of the organization. But during the 1970s, perhaps in an effort to legitimize the tong, he pioneered a new model, which would soon be adopted by tongs throughout New York. He subcontracted the gambling rackets, debt collection, and other illegal activities to an enforcement cadre, in this case a street gang called the Flying Dragons. In order to remain viable as ostensibly legitimate organizations, the tongs needed some measure of plausible deniability when it came to some of their traditional revenue streams. So in a fiction designed more to avoid prosecution than to actually persuade anyone—because at least in Chinatown, the truth was never in doubt—the tongs began to distance themselves from the traditional vice crimes that had been their bread and butter for nearly a century. Despite his murder conviction and his racketeering, Ong reinvented himself as a legitimate businessman, the head of a prominent and powerful civic organization. The Flying Dragons did the dirty work in order to keep Ong and the organization clean. The rival On Leong association also sought legitimacy. Its head, Eddie Chan, invested in a jewelry store, a funeral parlor, and restaurants and reportedly hired a PR firm, all the while outsourcing the tong’s criminal activity to his own affiliated gang, the Ghost Shadows.

It was an effective ambiguity. Inside the neighborhood, it was known that the tong’s word in all things should be taken seriously, because it was backed by a roving gang of armed thugs. But on the occasions when violence did break out, the tong could simply deny the relationship. In 1982 an associate of Ong’s left the Hip Sing and started a rival tong, whose members congregated at the Golden Star Tea Room, on East Broadway. One December night four masked gunmen burst into the restaurant and began firing indiscriminately, killing three customers, including a thirteen-year-old boy. Benny Ong denied any role in the shooting at the time and insisted that the Hip Sing and the Flying Dragons were separate entities. In a later interview with
New York
magazine,
he was more candid about the incident: “Sixty year I build up respect,” he said, “and he think he knock me down in one day?”

But to the Senate investigator from Washington, Benny Ong said nothing, invoking the Fifth Amendment again and again. Eventually the investigator lost patience. “Do you intend to invoke your Fifth Amendment rights in response to any further questions that we may have for you today about organized crime activity in New York?” he asked.

“Yes,” the old man said. And with that, he shuffled out of the room.

When Ong died, just three years later, his funeral was the largest in Chinatown’s history: over a hundred limousines lined the narrow streets around Mott and Mulberry; traffic backed up along Canal Street all the way to the East River. Thousands of mourners paid their respects before his solid bronze casket. The president of Taiwan sent a wreath. High above, on a terrace of the new courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, federal agents snapped photographs with a long lens.

Ong’s funeral brought into uncomfortably close proximity the disparate power brokers in Chinatown: politicians mourning alongside teenage gunslingers, business leaders paying their respects under the gaze of the FBI. Ong’s life captured the contradictory role played not just by the tongs but by the snakeheads as well. Ong defended the Chinatown community, and he exploited it. He nurtured it, and he devoured it. It was a fine balance, dependent in part on the tolerance of Chinatown’s residents and a traditional cultural acceptance of corruption and extortion, but also on the reluctance of the local population to go to law enforcement. “The Chinese community is afraid of the tongs and the gangs more than they are afraid of the American police,” a former Ghost Shadow once testified.

Tong leaders of Ong’s generation kept their youth gangs in relatively tight check. The police referred to the gangs as the “youth wing” or “standing army” of the tongs. However much they denied it, the elders exercised command and control over these armed teenagers, and that control kept a lid on the neighborhood. But even as Ong talked with the
Senate investigator, the world that he had inhabited and helped to create was spinning out of control. A series of changes had uncoupled the street gangs from their tong masters and ushered in a decade of gang warfare unlike any Chinatown had seen since the fabled tong wars nearly a century earlier. “There are no norms anymore, no rules, no values,” the Taiwanese American criminologist Ko-lin Chin observed in 1991. “The code has broken down.”

T
he great Fujianese influx of the 1980s coincided with a series of developments that together would spark a severe crime epidemic in Lower Manhattan, although it went largely unnoticed outside the Chinatown community. Whereas the population in the neighborhood had remained somewhat constant during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Chinatown was flooded with new immigrants throughout the eighties. They came from Fujian, and also from Vietnam—refugees from the war, many of them ethnic Chinese who had grown up amid the brutality of the waning years of the conflict.

Meanwhile, Turkey had cracked down on poppy farming during the 1970s, and the French connection, which had supplied the majority of America’s heroin, was dismantled. The center of gravity for global opiate production shifted to the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. The Italian Mob had traditionally controlled the drug trade in New York, but Asian gangs had easy access to China White (as the heroin from the Golden Triangle was known), and the population explosion in Chinatown combined with the profit opportunities associated with the drug trade led to a sudden profusion of gangs. Whereas traditionally a handful of Cantonese gangs, each affiliated with a major tong, had bickered over territory in the neighborhood, suddenly it seemed that a new gang started up every week. Nor was it ABCs, or American-born Chinese, starting the gangs; immigrants who had arrived mere months before hatched fledgling criminal enterprises. The 1960 census showed 20,000 Chinese living
in New York City. By the mid-eighties, the population had swelled to more than 200,000, and Chinatown soon burst its boundaries. Along with the eastern expansion of the neighborhood by the Fujianese, satellite Chinatowns sprang up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and in Elmhurst and Flushing, Queens, in the low-rise, low-rent neighborhoods surrounding Shea Stadium, along the trajectory of the Number 7 train, which soon became known as the Orient Express. Competition for turf was so intense that entrepreneurial gangs laid claim to the tiniest of territories, sometimes waging all-out bloody war over a single city block. The Italian Mob, doomed by high-profile prosecutions, a low birthrate, and flight to the suburbs, found that whole blocks of the Lower East Side that had historically belonged to the Cosa Nostra were being swallowed up by ragtag bands of gun-toting Chinese teenagers. “You gotta be strong with the Chinese,” one Gambino family capo exclaimed, a little defensively, on a wiretap. “You gotta push their skinny asses into a chair and stick your fingers in their face. ‘Keep your fucking chopsticks outta my place, you little slant cocksucker. You savvy?’”

The new gangs were much more violent than their predecessors. Without adult supervision by the tongs, they fell into bloody feuds based not just on real estate but on the most petty of pretexts. An insufficiently deferential facial expression on a Friday night at a bowling alley could result in shots fired. The police often came to the aid of teenagers who had been beaten and stabbed on a busy sidewalk, only to learn that the victim had no gang connection and the whole incident was a case of mistaken identity: the assailants had thought he was somebody else. A gang of Vietnamese teenagers who, in a chilling appropriation of the stock phrase of American GIs, called themselves Born To Kill, or BTK, became known for upping the ante on indiscriminate brutality. They worked for various tongs, or even for other gangs, in a freelance capacity, when there was truly dirty work to be done. A BTK funeral at a cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, was interrupted once when several mourners dropped the flowers they had brought, produced automatic
weapons, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, prompting some of the mourners to take cover by jumping into the open grave and others, who had come to the funeral armed, to fire back.

Because much of the gang violence was Chinese-on-Chinese, and many of the victims were undocumented immigrants who could disappear from the streets without anyone so much as filing a police report, it took some time before the authorities came to appreciate the extent of the brutal anarchy that had taken hold. On the Fourth of July, 1991, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Rhona Lantin came to New York City for a girls’ night out with old friends from high school. Lantin lived in Maryland and worked as an economist at the Department of Agriculture in Washington. As a graduate student at the University of Maryland, she had met and fallen in love with a fellow student named Patrick, and the two were engaged to be married the following spring. It was a warm, beautiful night in the city, and Lantin and her friends watched the fireworks over New York Harbor, then all six of them piled into a Ford Explorer and drove to Chinatown for a late-night snack. The narrow streets and sidewalks were crowded with merrymakers, and the Explorer slowed to the halting pace of Chinatown traffic. Inching north along Mulberry, none of the passengers would have realized it, but they had entered the heart of Ghost Shadows territory. At around 11:30, as they reached the intersection with Bayard, several shots rang out and a single bullet pierced the windshield and struck Rhona Lantin in the head. It was a stray bullet in a gang shootout; the killer, a teenaged Ghost Shadow, would eventually be convicted of “depraved indifference” murder. The morning after the shooting, Lantin died in the hospital. For police and prosecutors in New York, the randomness of the killing—and the fact that the victim was not Chinese or Vietnamese, that she was a tourist—brought home the urgent realization that the violence of the Chinatown gangs was no longer purely indigenous or contained. It had become an epidemic.

Part of the unruliness of the gangs was simple immaturity. Many of the members had barely reached puberty—they were twelve, fourteen,
sixteen. The snakehead trade and America’s accommodating asylum policies meant that thousands of new children arrived in Chinatown every year. Many of them had been uprooted from a claustrophobic, sheltered childhood of agrarian poverty only to be thrust into the riotous urban scrum of Chinatown. They lived in cramped quarters with older relatives who were largely absent, working day and night to pay off snakehead debts or raise money to send for more relatives. They spoke little or no English and attended substandard schools. It was from these schools that the gangs plucked their recruits.

“I would have my kids go to a high school in Chinatown and look for the turkey right off the boat,” David Chong recalled. Chong was a New York cop who infiltrated the Flying Dragons in the 1980s. He was so effective that he soon became a
dai lo
, “big brother,” or leader, in the gang, running his own crew of twelve. “You want him in ninth or tenth grade, he can’t speak English, he’s got a stupid haircut. And when you find this kid, you go beat the shit out of him. Tease him, beat him up, knock him around. We isolate this kid; he’s our target. What will happen, one day I’ll make sure I’m around when this kid is getting beaten up, and I’ll stop it with the snap of my finger. He’ll look at me—he’ll see that I have a fancy car, fancy girls, I’m wearing a beeper—and I’ll turn around and say, Hey kid, how come these people are beating on you?’ I’m gonna be this kid’s hero, this kid’s guru—I’m gonna be his
dai lo.”