A man’s gonna fuck you over if he can. That’s just the way it is.
—STEVEN WONG
As Steve and I drove through Chinatown with the top down in his scarlet upholstered Mercedes, it suddenly hit me that there were at least a dozen gangsters in the immediate vicinity who were trying to kill him. What if Park Lo had got wind of what was up and told his hatchetmen we were on the way to pay him a visit? Those long-coated boys on the corner could be Lotus-gang enforcers. They would be perfectly capable of leaning over and dropping a hand grenade in the front seat with us.
“Hey Steve,” I said, “wouldn’t it be healthier if you drove something that was less of a bull’s-eye?”
Steve pondered my point for a moment, then wheeled into a junkie’s alley and hit the brake. “How many license plates can you remember back there?” he asked. I said I hadn’t noticed one. “Write these down,” he ordered, and listed three plates from memory. Then he burned rubber around the block, came back onto Main Street and double-parked. The license plates he’d dictated were affixed to cars parked ahead of us. He giggled, then punched a code into his cell phone. “Just wait.” He sang a few Cantonese words into the phone, then pointed to each of the cars and told me, one by one, who the owner was, his or her age and address, and whether or not they had any driving points.
“Nobody sneaks up on me. Nobody. Hee, hee, hee.”
We hauled up on the north edge of Chinatown, a block east of Hastings Billiards and out of sight of its picture window. I remarked to Steve that Park was near the end of his days if he was spending his time in the middle of this 24-hour freak show—Main and Hastings being about as bad as it gets in Canada. “I guess he likes the company,” Steve said, and chuckled, looking around at the strung-out junkies, twitching lunatics, and black-and-blue hookers who dominated the corner.
Ahead of us was a beat-up yellow Pinto from which emerged a young man with a punk haircut and bare ankles. He yanked at the crotch seam of his tight jeans, huffed up his big leather jacket and, looking left and right as if staring down the gods that had wrecked his life, embarked on a posturing journey of 20 feet towards us. Coming abreast of Steve’s door he whined disgustedly in Cantonese, then spit into a pile of sodden cardboard in the gutter.
“Park took off,” Steve translated for me. “They think he’s over at the Hoi.”
“The Lotus gambling joint?”
“It’s not Lotus’s, that’s everybody’s,” Steve replied curtly. He got out of the car and raised his chin towards the corner of Gore. Under a jagged neon sign stood three young men, also dressed like hoods from the ’50s. They left their posts and strolled over to us. Steve cracked a joke, apparently at my expense because they looked at me and laughed in my face, an unthinkable act if I had been Chinese. Their tubby boss flicked a hand at his Mercedes, whereupon the kid who’d told us about Park hoisted himself over the door, smooth as a gymnast, and swung down under the wheel without his loafers touching the upholstery. He popped the clutch and burned rubber around the corner, a maneuver which puzzled me until Steve strolled after the car, leading the way into the big-money heart of Chinatown.
This was to be a “face walk.” If there’s one thing that gives you big face in Chinatown, it’s impunity: Steve had publicly killed a Lotus two blocks from here, gotten away with it, and now he was parading around with a ghost-person reporter to show he could get away with anything. Certainly everybody on Gore Avenue took notice of our advance, and went out of their way to make obeisances to Steve when his eyes fell upon them. Even as they haggled with customers at their clothing racks, old women in quilted jackets, baggy slacks, and embroidered Chinese slippers nodded beatifically at Steve. A cook in white, dumping a vat of grease into the street, shouted, “Hello Stevie!!” An elderly man in a T-shirt, pulling a cart through the paint-chipped portal to his grocery, raised his hand like he was hailing the mayor. To each of them Steve called a generous greeting in Cantonese. “Nehih ho ma!!” As soon as his gaze moved on, however, all smiles disappeared and eyes narrowed at his back.
“I guess you’re the man now,” I said.
“Nah, I just help ’em out,” Steven offered modestly. “’cause the cops, they don’t even see when the Lotus and Vietnamese are doing their extorting.”
Standing idle in a doorway to a seedy appliance shop, a gray-suited man of about 40 raised a hand that cupped a cigarette. Steve casually inspected the surrounding corners and walked up to him. They talked seriously for a minute, then both looked at me and laughed—again, motive for murder if I had been Chinese. I had to forcibly remind myself that all behavior is tactical, all form is strategy. I was winning, Steve had already lost.
He finished his conference with the man and came back to us, leading our formation onto bustling Pender, clearing the sidewalk like a v-plow. “You know, Park’s kind’ve on my own time, my boss just wants me to find Phu,” I confided to Steve as if he were my sympathetic coproducer. I looked at the members of Steve’s crew and raised my eyebrows hopefully. “Any one of your guys would be okay, actually. He just wants a Gum Wah to explain things.”
“Nah, they won’t say nothin’ for ya—I know that. But don’t worry, I’ll get together with your boss and tell him how we want it done. Then Phu’ll know it’s settled.” Steve stopped beneath the orange awning to a herb shop, punched some numbers on his cell, waited, then left a stern message in Cantonese. “Okay, right now Phu’s avoiding me,” Steve confessed when he got off, sinking my heart. “But he’ll do it. ’cause once he said yes to you, he knows that’s my face.” He handed me the cell and told me to call Paperny and arrange a meeting next week at Tsunami Sushi on Robson Street. “We treat people right, then they treat us right. That’s our deal.”
“That’s our deal,” I said.
Five minutes into our zigzag march though the ghetto, a few doors south of the corner of Main and Pender, I heard the distinctive sound of big-stakes gambling, a furious clacking that resembles marbles raining on Formica—pai gow dominoes being dealt in the Hoi Ming Gwok one floor up. Steve and his boys turned into the black lacquered doorway and I followed them up the creaky steps to a ticket booth, above which was a sign that read, in Chinese and English, “Members Only.” An old fellow in the booth waved us into the gambling parlor, a dingy room dominated by green felt tables and a big altar to Kwan Kung on the smoke-cured wall. All four tables were in play, with 20 hands moving fast beneath the fluorescent lights. None of the hands belonged to Park. “Probably OD’d on the way here,” Steve harrumphed, obviously embarrassed by the failure of his spy corps—a dangerous lapse in his business. Smiling obsequiously, the booth attendant padded by us in house slippers and knocked at an office door beside the cashier’s pen. Meanwhile the gamblers either ignored Steve or acknowledged him with only slightly raised chins, their expressionless eyes impolitely studying my face. The house crowd ranged from rough-looking hoods in their teens to late-middle-aged burghers in suits. Three sportily attired couples in their late 20s sat at a table beneath Kwan Kung playing fan-tan. They looked like Hong Kong tourists, and probably were.
Finally, a genial fellow came out of the office smiling—Sloppy Jang. I recognized him from a previous visit I’d made here in the company of a New York cop during the Asian-crime conference. Sloppy lost his smile as our eyes met. Steve walked up to him, put his arm around the old fellow and turned him aside, probing, I assumed, for Park’s whereabouts. While they talked I assessed the lighting in the room—it seemed adequate for the camera I’d booked to barge in next week. Not that I expected any dramatic raids to follow the exposé. Illegal gambling was so ubiquitous in Chinatown, and so much a part of its culture, that the police had all but given up busting the “entertainment societies” that ran the tables.
“You ever play?” Steve asked, coming to my side.
“I can’t afford more than fifty,” I told him, reaching for my wallet.
He shoved my arm aside. “Your money’s no good here.” He sat down on a stool between an old gent with bushy brows that hung over his eyes and a teen with a couple of vicious scars thick as fingers on his cheek. One of Steve’s servants came back with a tray of 50- and 100-dollar chips. Steve set aside a few hundred for my nut. “I’ll bet for you,” Steve said. “You win, you win; you lose, I lose.”
The dealer mixed the 32 dominoes flat on the table with crisscrossing hands, then stacked them quickly into a black brick of eight rows. Everybody anted up a hundred and was slid four of the laquered tiles. The players took a quick peek and threw in another hundred in chips. The old fellow with the grotesque brows then rattled around three dice in a tin cup and slammed it, open end down, on the table. Steve bumped the table a hundred, everybody flipped over their dominoes, and the guy with the brows scooped up $900. The hand had taken 30 seconds.
We were playing a sudden-death version of pai gow, with the dice determining wild-card value to certain pairs. There are dozens of versions of the game, with point and pairing combinations so complicated that unless you grew up playing it you could never become a master. I knew its rudiments, partly from watching it being played up and down the West Coast and partly from reading a report prepared by the Smithsonian Institute back in 1893, at the height of what was known as the Tong Wars. The U.S. government had funded the study so that law enforcement could understand what was taking place behind the locked doors of the gambling dens, the control of which was being bloodily fought over by armies of tong hatchetmen in New York and San Francisco.
Pai gow was reputedly invented by Kwan Kung or one of his two blood brothers to keep their soldiers awake during night watches, and many of its longer versions replicated the trio’s waxing and waning fortunes in war. It was also a kind of game-poem reflecting Chinese religious and political symbology. The number of spots on the dominoes and their red and white colors were divided into basic sets of pairs, the man or “civil” series, and the mo or “military” series, with the civil, in accordance with Confucian doctrine, valued higher than the military. The three highest-ranking pairs of the civil series were called, not surprisingly, Heaven, Earth, and Man—t’in, ti, and yan.
Pai gow was dominant in most Chinese gambling parlors, but the far simpler fan-tan was a close second, as it was in the Hoi Ming. It was played with a random amount of buttons poured into a bowl by the house and then withdrawn in batches of four. After each withdrawal players bet on the number of buttons they guessed would be left at the last draw—none, one, two, or three. The stakes were the same as pai gow and a player could win or lose a fortune in no time.
If only gangsters gambled at these games the drain on the community would have been less severe, but the Hoi Ming and places like it were patronized as much by the poor, the middle class, and the legitimately wealthy as by gang members. Vancouver’s pai gow parlors ran 16 to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and new haunts were now blooming in Chinatown’s suburban annex, Richmond. People sometimes dropped $100,000 at the tables, loans were arranged by gang members at 70 percent a month, and poor men promised to pay off debts by working three jobs—or, as Steve and I had discussed, traveling to Asia and returning with paintings.*
I’d heard varied explanations offered as the cause of the Chinese passion for gambling. One, alluded to by Frank Chin in his explanation of the massacre at the Wah Mee gambling parlor, linked the national pastime to the unending wars the Chinese had endured over their 3,500-year history. In war, luck (or joss) counted almost as much as prowess, and the Chinese came to worship joss as an immanent force in the universe, an intervening god who serendipitously meddled in life’s affairs. Luck determined whether one lived or died in battle, whether one was born to a rich household or a poor one, whether a person lived under the thumb of a warlord who ignored the law, or a rare leader who administered it. Ultimately, the Chinese came to believe in luck as much as in hard work; ergo, their reverence for the god of luck, war, and gambling—the ubiquitous Kwan Kung. In a way, gambling was the invisible will of God made visible, and thus Chinatown’s gambling parlors were like dark shrines where people prayed as fervently as they did in Buddhist temples.
Steve stood up from the table. He’d lost about three grand in five minutes, and it didn’t faze him at all. “Ah, sometimes it goes like that,” he said, and laughed.
“So who runs the Hoi Ming if not the Lotus?” I asked as we walked down the stairs.
“Nobody. Sloppy runs it.”
“Yeah, but come on, Steve.” I slapped his shoulder. “Some gang’s gotta be in charge of helping out the losers.”
“Well, the Lotus thought this was theirs until that stuff at the Goldstone. But we don’t run anything. You go in, people know you, that’s all. They get down in the dumps, they know who to talk to.”
“So you give them loans?”
“Not me. I don’t do nothing like that. But yeah, I know for sure some people take advantage of that. It’s too bad,” he said, walking to his waiting car on the curb. “If they were smart they’d never go into them places. Sometimes it’s even worse for ’em if they win—then they get extorted by the Lotus. The guys that do that are scumbags. But the way they look at it, it’s just statistics. Half the people’s below average, okay? So if you can’t take advantage of that you must be one of ’em. Hee, hee, hee.”
Back in the car, Steve checked his pager. “Ah, I gotta take some guys to the airport,” he said. “But you come around the pool hall anytime. Between friends, eh? No cameras there. You just tell this stuff about the Lotus and leave me out of it.”
I toyed with the idea of placing a camera on a roof across Robson Street for the Tsunami Sushi summit, but David Paperny didn’t seem to relish being filmed while Steve and I shucked and jived like gangster buddies. Indeed, in one of our conferences in the CBC line-up room he warned me about crossing a line that I would find it hard to recross when all this blew up in Steve’s face—an ethical concern that irritated me. In theory, the only reason I was swerving all over that line was to fit the final piece into the project and put a stop to Steve’s rising arc. This was war, and in war all arts are martial.
Of course, I was also having a thrill-seeker’s ball on my tour of Lotus-run places the police hadn’t yet learned about. There was a luxury massage parlor called the Coin Cache, which had just opened a mere two blocks from City Hall, employing women smuggled from Southeast Asia. They worked a week or so in Vancouver entertaining Chinese businessmen and then were shipped on to New York or Houston. There was a tony karaoke club called The Scene, down by the docks on Powell Street, with private rooms above the stage that rented for $1,000 a night; it was frequented by the Hong Kong entertainers brought over by the Lotus as well as by up-and-comers in gangs like the Big Circle Boys. Steve urged me to pass these locations on to the police—which I did without hesitation. In return I was rewarded with information about some parts of Steve’s life that I hadn’t remotely suspected.
He was atypical for a Chinese mobster in that he did business with select white heroin traffickers, who themselves were anomalous in that they hung around almost exclusively with Asian mobsters. There was Chuck Gough, a heavyset middle-aged heroin dealer who spoke fluent Cantonese, wrote Chinese flawlessly, and was a frequent flyer to Hong Kong, along with Chuck’s compadre, a lean career criminal named James Patrick Newson—called “Sonny” by the Chinese, apparently because his temper (when he lost it) reminded them of the psycho killer Son of Sam. Sonny’s reach extended to the Philippines, where a coup-plagued government, ubiquitous corruption, and guerrilla wars created abundant opportunities for drug traffickers.
And then there was Steve’s amazingly busy sex life. His cell phone tweeted hourly with calls from the boudoirs of a legion of female admirers. Ignoring his physical package, women seemed to find his pheromones so irresistible that they gladly threw themselves into his crowded stable of mistresses. His number one girlfriend for years was the beautiful Laura, an operator in Vancouver’s white-hot real estate market. Another, Patsy Chan, was married to the multimillionaire owner of Kouzins Security, the protector of 14K drug bosses on their visits to town. Lily Lee lived in Calgary and occasionally flew in to see Steve under the noses of the other two. A fourth, Suzie, also married and in her 40s, every so often made the trip to Vancouver from New York, although she was in the jade trade and perhaps had other business in town besides sex with Steve.
The pleasure I took in hanging out with Steve is hard to excuse, especially since I knew all along the suffering he was causing. A couple of days after my sojourn at the Hoi Ming, David Paperny and I interviewed a couple named Keith and Louisa Surges, whose adopted son, Joey, became thoroughly corrupted by the Gum Wah’s machinations at 12 years old. They told their story sitting in front of a picture of Joey, whom they had brought over from Macau after Joey’s father had murdered his mother. The couple enrolled Joey in an ESL program, hired a tutor, got him involved in soccer and basketball, and set him up with a paper route. The boy might have recovered from his trauma had not Steve’s recruiters sniffed out his insecurity and begun to circle. Soon Joey was arrested for setting fire to a Lotus vehicle, then for shoplifting scams that also involved arson, and, as he turned 13, for street fights with Los Diablos. When his adopted parents tried to ground him, they received calls from little gangsters who threatened swords and lightning upon the household. When they begged Joey to tell his friends to stop calling, he gave them a gangster look that froze their blood. In 18 months Joey changed from a little boy to a hard-core teenage criminal. The couple became terrified for the safety of their two other children and in February 1989 they went to the Department of Immigration and filled out the papers to have him sent back to Macau.
And yet, cruising with Steve, I kept catching glimpses of a precriminal persona inside the Triad braggart who ripped off drug shipments, shot a partner in cold blood, corrupted scores of youths, and informed on compatriots. Steve was violent but not sadistic; calculating and brutal, but not gratuitously cruel. Hadn’t he said that he let Jimmy Wu go because he was just “a small kid” and there was “no use beating the shit out of him”? The schoolteacher in me really believed that behind every young gangster—even one who ate up and spit out 13-year-olds—lay a history that made his criminal actions comprehensible, if not forgivable.
A psychoanalyst would no doubt tell me that I saw myself in Steve, that I was trying to kill him and love him at the same time. Or that the vicarious thrill I was getting from riding shotgun with the chief was a substitute for what I might have experienced if 25 percent of my genes had had their way. It’s not inconceivable that I could have raced off down Steve’s criminal road under other circumstances—if, say, I were not a smart white kid in a high school where minority fellows, pulling the kind of stunts I pulled, were regularly shunted off to criminal court and then jailed. I might have ended up there anyway. Perhaps my parents had their own mishegoss—Yiddish for individual craziness—but they were basically good people who were vastly relieved when I wound up merely being a misfit who took off for northern B.C. rather than a miscreant who joined the boys at Hymie’s.
The turning point came for me at 18, when my folks sent me to a psychologist to talk things through. After a year of therapy, we worked out a plausible diagnosis: I was an active personality who became easily bored and then became depressed; in order to relieve the depression I became more active, taking risks whose consequences made me feel even worse. Once I recognized I was just trying to get away from depression, I consciously set about taking my mind off my feelings in an orderly way.
I have since learned that newsrooms and Formula One racetracks are full of type-A depressives who distract themselves from their unexplained blues in an orderly, if hyperactive, way. Prisons, on the other hand, are filled with type-A depressives who work things out in a very disorderly way. Most of them have lived through episodes of traumatic abuse that so compounded their initial condition that by their mid-teens their ups and downs went off the chart, top and bottom. Usually they fell in with other type-A depressives and entered the reinforcing subculture of a gang. By the time they turned 18 their hyperactive criminal pattern was set.
Steve fit the pattern. Day in and day out he never rested because to rest meant, I surmised, to dive into the depression borne of the traumas he began telling me he’d experienced in New York’s Chinatown.
Interpol lists Steve’s place of birth as Hong Kong Island, but as a toddler he lived across the water in the heart of 14K territory—a rabbit-warren apartment block in Mongkok, at the north end of Kowloon Peninsula, near where the 1956 riots had occurred. Back in the mid-′60s, when Steve took his first steps, Mongkok was among the most densely populated areas of Hong Kong, its sun-starved, garbage-strewn streets walled in by shabby, mildew-stained concrete buildings. His mother and father, Yue Kim and Cheung Ing, ran a handbag stall on what was then colloquially known as “Women’s Street,” part of the cacophonous Tung Choi open-air market, which sold household wares and women’s clothing. Steve lived above the market’s noise and filth, just east of Nathan Road, in a two-room apartment with his parents and three older brothers. A couple of blocks west of Nathan Road was another kind of filth—the brothel capital of Hong Kong, run by the 14K, which enslaved young women to work its whorehouse cubicles.
Many poor Cantonese parents working 16-hour days send their children away to live with relatives. Years before Steve was born his parents had sent their eldest child, a daughter, to live in New York’s Chinatown with godparents who had just emigrated there. When Yue and Cheung immigrated to Vancouver in 1968, they promptly sent their four boys to New York as well. By then Steve’s older sister had married the owner of a bean sprout factory on Pell Street, and Steve, Donald, Robert, and Stanley were put to work in her husband’s cellar. Except for brief stays in Jamaica, Queens, when his mother came to visit, the bean sprout sweatshop was where Steve worked from the time he was four until he was 11, living in appalling neglect in a roach- and rat-infested back room, working long hours before and after school, thinning and boxing sprouts and suffering harsh discipline at the hand of his overseeing brother-in-law.
As in Hong Kong, most businesses paid two sets of taxes: one to the government and one to the criminals. Around Pell Street, the collection of these taxes was the responsibility of the Hip Sing tong’s army of enforcers, the Flying Dragons. Tax collection was done in the wide open. The smartly dressed young extortionists would visit the sweatshop once a week and were treated with fawning respect by Steve’s brother-in-law. Regally they would drift in, take their red envelopes, and drift out, driving away in sleek cars with beautiful girls at their sides. To Steve in his Dickensian surroundings, the glamorous young men seemed to float above life, offering a promise of an easy existence that was as devoid of consequences as it was of loneliness and boredom.
When Steve was a child, the half-square-mile of Chinatown between Canal Street and Chatham Square was divided between three tongs. The Hip Sing ruled Pell, the On Leung and their Ghost Shadow gang ruled Mott Street, and the Tung On ruled Division Street, with soldiers composed mostly of Sun Yee On Triad members from Hong Kong. The modern gangs who enforced tong rule were not very different from the earlier gangs of hatchetmen who had made Chinatown into the murder capital of early-20th-century America. And the tongs were exactly as they had been 80 years ago, when they fought pitched battles in the streets over their block-sized empires of gambling, opium, and slave girls. Still xenophobic, feudal, and criminal beneath their old image of “benevolence,” they initiated new members in a ceremony that included 36 oaths sworn before Kwan Kung, a bowing to the gods of hell, and a promise of death by a myriad of swords as the penalty for betrayal.
I used to drive my cab through Chinatown every shift in those days and, for all I know, I could have seen the little Stevie Wong in the seedy-looking, dangerous neighborhood. The open Tong Wars may have ended in the 1930s, but, unfortunately for Steve, and unbeknownst to me and most New Yorkers, Chinatown was then going through a transition that was ushering in a new era of violence. Liberal immigration laws, passed in 1965, had swollen Chinatown with a whole new generation of gamblers and entrepreneurs, and the tongs had started hiring and organizing the youth gangs flourishing in the alleys. By the early ’70s the Hip Sing’s Flying Dragons of Pell Street and the On Leung’s Ghost Shadows of Mott Street were at war. God help one or another gang member caught alone on the enemy’s street. Guns were everywhere, and reinforcements were always within earshot. A Ghost Shadow shot down by a Flying Dragon on a disputed corner would cause friends of both victim and assailant to swarm to the spot and open up at each other from behind cars, with shop windows shattering and pedestrians running for cover.
The “godfather of Chinatown” during the last year Steve lived full-time in New York was Benny Ong, known as “Uncle Seven” because he was his parents’ seventh child. Ong, who had spent 17 years in jail for second-degree murder, succeeded his brother as “adviser for life” of the Hip Sing in 1974. When Ong gave up his post by dying in 1995, at 86, the funeral went on for three days, supplying the FBI with an opportunity to take surveillance photos of the Chinese gangsters who had come to pay their respects, many of whom stood in a line during the service, their fingers held high in ritual poses that signified their rank in the tong.
The funeral-goers were among the wealthiest Chinese businessmen in the city, their incomes deriving from both legitimate and illegitimate ventures, including real estate and gambling, banking and extortion, import firms and prostitution, textiles and people smuggling, and of course, heroin. During Steve’s years in New York, the heroin trade began to pass from the purview of the Italian Mafia to the Chinese mafia, the war in Southeast Asia being the catalyst. With CIA help, pro-American Vietnamese and Laotian warlords funded their armies (and their extravagant lifestyles) by establishing a network that started in the KMT-dominated poppy fields and laboratories of the Golden Triangle and ended in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, with New York being the largest market for the drug. Between 1971 and 1974, Chinese heroin increased from 8 percent of the U.S. market to over 30 percent, with Vancouver one of North America’s main ports of entry. By 1990, China white had risen to 50 percent of the total.
“I seen lots of gang stuff when I was in New York,” Steve told me in Fraser Billiards while we rested between games over cups of gunpowder tea and mandarin oranges wrapped in red netting. “That was the first time I ever saw a bulletproof vest. They was wearing it right in the streets. They had every kind of gun.”
Steve took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, gathered the discarded netting from our oranges and began cutting the diamonds up into little pieces. “You gotta do this,” he informed me. “Otherwise the birds in the dump stick their heads in and get stuck and strangle. Or if it gets in the water, the fish get caught.”
“I didn’t know you were an environmentalist, Steve.”
“Yeah, because I like birds and fish. I tell that to all my guys.”
I laughed so hard orange spittle hit my knees. “This is great, Steve! Gum Wah’s a green gang!”
He didn’t crack a smile.
“What else they been telling you about me?” Steve asked, meaning the cops.
I was tempted to tell him that a word frequently used to describe him was “asshole”—cop slang for a violent criminal with no ethics, not even the criminal kind. “When they talk about you they use that expression ‘Man of Honor,’” I lied. “But that’s a Mafia term, not a Chinese term. What do the Chinese call it?”
“Yo mien tzu. Means big face. Same thing. Respect.”
“So did you first get your face from joining the Flying Dragons?” I asked.
“Well, I got in trouble there, yeah. But I’m only eleven when I come back here, right? What am I gonna be doing joining a New York gang? But Chinatown’s so small, eh? Everybody knows everything. But nobody sees anything. That’s how the gangs operate.”
“So what are you saying? You just ran errands for the Dragons?”
“Do you know Hip Sing headquarters?” Steve was addressing my question obliquely, referring to the old brick building on the corner of Doyers, with its bright green fire escape and the green and gold sign out front. I told him I had driven my taxi by that place every Saturday and hadn’t a clue what was going on inside.
“Okay, well, the place my brother-in-law owned, Hip Sing was maybe a block away from it. You maybe didn’t know what was going on inside, but everybody in Chinatown did.”
“Including the heroin?”
“They wouldn’t think nothing about it if they did, because Chinese people over here, they don’t use heroin. How many Chinese heroin addicts you know? Very few. The junkies in New York is the spics, the coloreds, and the white people.”
“So the big Chinese drug dealers don’t worry about bringing the stuff over because their own people don’t use it?”
“That could be one reason, eh? It’s just something that the spics and the coloreds want to buy, so why not sell it to ’em? If their own kids were shooting up they wouldn’t sell it, because Chinese is always big on families. But if they can make some money off what the whites wanna do and the spics and niggers—If they wanna do it, they’re gonna do it anyway, so give it to them. You got your friends in the Lotus’ll tell you that, too, eh?”
He smiled at me crookedly, pocketing his knife and the snipped-up netting. He raised his eyebrows, expecting a response.
“My friends? You mean Goathead and those guys?”
“Whoever you know that’s Lotus that I heard,” he said, inclining his head to the boys playing pool.
“I don’t know about the Lotus being my friends, Steve,” I advised him. “They’re kids, I’m forty. Anyway, I don’t play favorites with the gangs, if that’s what you mean. Yeah, I listen to all sides, you, the cops, the Lotus—”
“The Lotus got no side,” he insisted. “They started all this, they pulled the guns and set fire to my guy’s house. If one of my guys is gonna talk to you, I don’t wanna see one of their guys fucking lying on television. That’s understood.”
The memories of New York seemed to have excited his mean mishegoss. I decided to distract him with a couple of gossipy tidbits. The Triad bosses Steve protected often went dancing at a high-class nightclub on Pender Street called Ming’s. The daughter of the owner was hooked up with a police officer we both knew. It meant nothing, but it was the kind of intelligence Steve relished. I also told him that the drug dealer David Lim had recently been roughed up by a couple of plainclothes officers during an arrest. Lim deserved it—there were witnesses who said he’d tried to pin one of the cop’s heads in a wrestling hold—but I didn’t tell Steve that part. After I gave him these morsels, I asked, quid pro quo, why he’d aligned himself with the 14K. When all he did was shrug and grunt, I said, “You can’t let anybody know what I just told you. I’m trusting you on it.”
Steve sipped his tea and then looked down at the swirling green liquid. “Where I’m from, it’s 14K,” he said softly. “I told you that, eh? Some groups is bigger, but they got the power.”
“Because they run the heroin trade.”
“Not just the heroin—everything. They got so many guys at the airports and this and this. Everybody’ll tell you that. Anybody wants to do anything—I don’t care if it’s Wah Ching or whoever—they may tell you different, but they gotta deal with them. Who do you think they’re gonna go to?”
“So do they come to you as a connection? Are you the guy who puts them in touch—the officer who makes the business arrangements?”
“You know what the cops don’t understand?” he asked, avoiding a direct answer. “The cops got surveillance to see who’s big-time in the gang—they think it’s like the movies where everybody comes up and kisses his fucking ass. But you go to Ming’s—the big man, he’s the one goes around giving everybody a big hug. If I’m a nobody and I come up and give you a hug, you’re gonna punch me down. But if I’m a big guy, I’ll hug anybody I want. They gotta lose face and take it because I can do anything I want.”
“Okay, so if you’re the businessman,” I said, addressing something that had been on my mind for a while, “if you’re that guy who’s giving everybody the hugs, how come you’re the guy doing all the fighting? How come you street-fight like a 49, Steve, if you’re this sophisticated businessman in town here?”
“See, that’s what you think from reading the book or talking to cops,” he replied, hitting his hand against my briefcase, which still held Morgan’s Triad Societies in Hong Kong. “Every man stands up for himself!” he enunciated, startling me by thumping my sternum with his forefinger. “Whatever you are, unless you stand up for yourself nobody’s gonna do business with you. The real fucking businessman, he’s the one everybody’s afraid of because they know him, okay? That’s why I got to where I’m at.”
“Which is what?” I asked quietly.
“It’s not like what you think. Here I’m the head of our own group.”
“Yeah, I know that, the dai lo.”
“We don’t use that—that’s the word the cops use.”
“So what do you use? Dragon Head?”
“Chinese, we say Shan Chu. Over here, that’s what they call me because they know I’m over in Asia all the time. It’s like, maybe you’re one thing there, but when you’re on your own boat, you’re captain, eh? Hong Kong I’m something else, because so many guys is higher, eh? So when they come over, I’m here to protect them, make sure nobody interferes with what they want done. And if some scumbag gets in the way, too bad.”
“You’re their Red Pole enforcer.”
He shied away from a direct reponse again. “You can do two things,” he said. “You can be one thing when no one else is around to do it. You can tell ’em what’s what, which group is which and this and this. You know who does that, don’t you? The adviser.”
“The White Paper Fan.”
“What we say here is Rashu, or Pak Tzs Sin is what they say in Hong Kong. I told you that.”
Those were the words he’d used during our first conversation in his house. I hadn’t understood what he’d meant then, but I’d been doing my homework in Morgan. Pak Tzs Sin was Cantonese for White Paper Fan.
“Is that your rank, or just where you got your nickname?” I asked, because when we’d first walked in one of his oldest boys had called out through the window of a car: “Tzs Sin!” Steve had turned around, then gone back to the street to talk with him.
“That’s what a few guys call me,” Steve replied to my question. “All I’m gonna say is I got the rights to say, ‘I don’t care what you heard, that guy’s a scumbag.’ And I don’t have to worry about the scumbag coming to blow my fucking head off, because I got the rights to say that, eh? That’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s why I come up through the ranks, to do that, so when they come over here, they’re not blind. They don’t care if him and me hate each other’s face. If the guy’s gonna help, they wanna know, and I gotta say so.”
“You’re their impartial adviser.”
“I just do what keeps ’em from making any mistakes when they come over. Tell ’em what’s what and protect them. That’s what I do on this end. I don’t even care if you tell the cops that. Fuck, they already know it.”
At one of the tables somebody made the break with a particularly loud crack. I stood up, thinking, Whether you’re a Red Pole or the youngest White Paper Fan in the 14K, or both, Steve, the cops know some of it, but not all of it.
*The illegal gambling in Chinatown was in addition to the legal wagering that took place in the government-run Gateway Casino, just half a block from the Hoi Ming. In 1990, receipts at the Gateway were higher than for any other casino in the city, even though Chinatown stood in the middle of Canada’s poorest neighborhood. And what went on in Vancouver went on in most other Chinatowns. In 1992, journalist Gwen Kinkaid reported in Chinatown: Portrait of a Closed Society that New York City cops estimated some illegal Chinese casinos took in a million dollars a week each in profits, with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the tables at any one time. Meanwhile, the legal off-track betting outlet in Chatham Square, the heart of New York’s Chinatown, was the top revenue producer of the city’s 96 outlets—a position it had held for nine years running. “No matter where they go, Chinese gamble,” Justin Yu, the onetime head of Chinatown’s journalists’ union, told Kinkaid.