The compelling saga of Nicky Louie, leader of the Ghost Shadows youth gang, which for a brief and bloody time in the 1970s ruled about two hundred yards of sidewalk in New York City's Chinatown. A thousand years of history crushed into an immigrant story. A personal favorite. From the Village Voice, 1977.
Midnight in Chinatown, everyone seems nervous. The old waiters look both ways before going into the gambling joint on Pell Street. Ladies bleary from a ten-hour day working over sewing machines in the sweatshops are hurrying home, and restaurants, usually open until four in the morning, are closing early. At the Sun Sing Theatre on East Broadway, underneath a hand-painted poster of a bleeding kung fu hero, a security guard is fumbling with a padlock. Ask him how business is and he shakes his head, "No good." Ask him why and he points his finger right between your eyes and says, "Bang!"
"Low Tow," which is what the Cantonese call New York's Chinatown, is on edge. A couple of blocks away, in front of the coffee shop at 56 Mott Street, Nicky Louie, the twenty-two-year-old leader of Chinatown's currently most powerful street gang, the fabulously monikered Ghost Shadows, looks no less relaxed. Pacing up and down the ruddy sidewalk in his customary green army fatigue jacket, Nicky has good reason to be watchful. It is only Wednesday, and according to the cops, there have already been two separate assassination attempts on Louie's life this week. Facing such heat, most gang leaders would stay inside and play a few hands of Chinese thirteen-card poker. Or maybe leave town altogether, go up to Toronto or out to Chicago. But not Nicky. When you are the leader of the Shadows, with so much money and turf at risk, it is a matter of face to show your face. You've got to let them know—all those other twenty-two-year-old killers—that Mott Street is yours. Yours and yours alone.
Born Hin Pui Lui in the slums of Hong Kong's Kowloon district, Nicky came to Low Tow in the late 1960s. The old Chinatown people called America "Gum Shan," which means Gold Mountain. But Nicky arrived on a 747 rather than a boat and is a different kind of immigrant. Older neighborhood residents might be content to work out their tiny sliver of the so-called American Dream serving up bowls of yat kaw mein to Queens tourists, but Nicky had different ideas. No way he would end up a faceless waiter ticketed for the TB ward. He was born for greater things. When he got into the gangs half a dozen years ago, first as a foot soldier in the penny-ante protection rings, selling firecrackers to the undershirt-clad Italians on the other side of Canal Street, people say Nicky already had the biggest set of balls in Chinatown. He was the gun-wielding wild man, always up for action, willing to do anything to get attention. His big break came in the winter of 1973, when the Shadows' first chief, twenty-four-year-old Nei Wong, got caught with a Hong Kong cop's girlfriend. The cop, in New York for a surprise visit, ran across Wong and his betrothed in the Chinese Quarter Nightclub beneath the approach ramp to the Manhattan Bridge and blew off both their heads with his police revolver.
Since then Nicky's rise in the Chinatown youth gang world has been startling. He has piloted the once ragtag Shadows from the bleak days when they were extorting a few free meals and dollars from the greasy spoons over on East Broadway to their current haunt, Mott Street, Low Tow's main drag, in other words, the big time.
Controlling Mott Street means that the Shadows get to affiliate themselves with the On Leong tong, the richest and most influential organization ("tong" means association or organization) in Chinatown. In addition to securing the protection racket on Mott, the gang also gets to guard the gambling houses the On Leong operates in the musty lofts and basements along Mott and Bayard streets, some of them taking in as much as $75,000 a week. The Shadows also act as runners in the Chinatown Connection heroin trade, bringing the stuff across the Canadian border and spreading it throughout New York. The money filters down to Nicky and his lieutenants; they, in turn, spread the spoils to the younger Shadows.
For Nicky this adds up to a weekly check that ranges from $200 to $2,000 depending on who you talk to. In any event, it's enough to buy a swift $7,000 Peugeot to tool down Canal Street in.
But tongs are fickle. If another group of Hong Kong teenagers—say their archenemy White Eagles or the hard-charging Flying Dragons, who bide their time taking target practice on the pigeons down by the East River—should show the On Leong that they're smarter or tougher than the Shadows, Nicky's boys could be gone tomorrow.
No one knows this better than Nicky Louie. Two years ago Nicky and the Shadows pushed the surly Eagles off the street. In September, after licking their wounds over in Brooklyn and down in Florida, the Eagles with their leader Paul Ma—Nicky's main rival—returned. And they were not going to be satisfied with crummy Elizabeth Street. Soon the Eagles started appearing on Bayard Street, part of Shadowland. Paul Ma set up his own gambling house on the block, a direct affront to Nicky.
Several weeks ago the Shadows struck back, shooting a bunch of Eagles, including Paul Ma and a gang member's wife, in front of Yuen Yuen Snack Shop on Bayard Street. This set off the most hair-raising month of street-fighting in Chinatown history; no weekend went by without a major incident. The infamous Wong Kee chop-chop was the highlight of the war. According to cops, the Shadows, including Nicky himself, crashed through the door of the Wong Kee Rice Shop on the Italian end of Mott and carved up one Eagle with chef's kitchen cleavers and stabbed another with a fork.
Everyone figures the Eagles will try some kind of revenge, which is the major reason, people say, Nicky has spent the past two weeks pacing up and down in front of 56 Mott. His presence keeps things cool. In the long history of Chinese crime, a saga that goes back at least to the founding of the thousand-year triad 14K, Nicky Louie is the newest legend. He is, as they say, no one to fuck with.
Fifty years ago, chances are Nicky might have been lying around the "joss houses" and streetfighting alongside the hatchetmen and gunmen of Chinatown's "tong wars." In those days, the two big tongs, the On Leong and the Hip Sing of Pell Street, battled on the sidewalks over the few available women, the opium trade, and out of sheer boredom. Back then there were legendary boo hoy dow (warriors): like Mock Dock, the great gambler known as "the Philosophical Killer," and Yee Toy, "the Girl-Faced Killer." Most famous of all, however, was the plain-faced Sing Dock, "the Scientific Killer." Once, after hearing of an outbreak of war in New York, he rode in the baggage compartment of a train (Chinese weren't allowed to ride up front) for six weeks from San Francisco. That was when Pell Street was called "Red Street" and the crook on Doyers Street was known as "the Bloody Angle."
Today the Chinatown warrior has changed. The young gangs are not respected tong members, as Sing Dock was. Like most late-twentieth-century gangs, they're in for the bucks and the fact that none of them can figure out what else to do with their lives, especially considering the dismal choices confronting those entering the fiscal crisis job market with little or no English-language skills. There is also the whole style thing. Nicky and the Shadows have eschewed tong warrior black overcoats in favor of pegged pants and puffy hairdos. (Asked if their hair is a Hong Kong fashion, one gang member said, "No, man, it's cause we dig Rod the Mod, man." Meaning Rod Stewart.) In this world everyone must have a good nickname, a nom de street guerre. Hanging with Nicky tonight are old-time Shadows "Mongo," the wild-man enforcer who got his name from Blazing Saddles, and "Japanese," who shaved his head after he heard that things might go easier for him in jail if he looked like a "Muslim." There are some guys with grade-B movie monickers like Lefty and Four-Eyes, but most of the kids go for names like "Stinkybug," "White-Faced Tiger," "Pointy Lips," "Porkupine," and "Nigger Choy." There must be twenty kids called "Apple Head" running around Chinatown.
Strangely enough, the Ghost Shadows themselves got their unbeatable name from that bastion of street culture, the New York Times. It happened about four years ago when the Shadows were functioning as the "junior auxiliary" of the now-defunct Kwon Ying gang of Pell Street. A Times reporter was in Chinatown to cover an incident in which some of the young Kwon Ying were involved. The reporter wanted to know what "Kwon Ying" meant. (It means "not the Eagles," a reference to the rival gang, the White Eagles.) One wiseguy—likely an Eagle—said, "It means ghost shadow." This, unbeknownst to the Times reporter or just about any white person, was a terrible insult. Proceeding from the metaphor that a bamboo stalk is empty in the middle, Chinatown residents have long called white people bak guey, meaning a white piece of empty bamboo, or, more derogatorily, a "white ghost." Blacks are called hak guey, meaning "black ghost." The gist is that these people are incomplete—not all there. Being a "ghost shadow" went double. The Times reporter dutifully filed "ghost shadow" with his copy. The next morning, after reading about themselves in the paper, Nicky Louie and the rest of the Ghost Shadows decided they liked their new name. It was so born to lose.
Yet through all this posturing nomenclature, Nicky has no nickname. He remains, simply, Nicky.
Some say Nicky has nine lives. The estimates of how many slugs he carries around inside his chest vary. According to an ex-gang member, "When he turns over at night, he can hear them bullets clank together."
Last May teenage hit men from the San Francisco–based Wah Ching gang flew across the country just to kill Nicky. Some say it was an Eagle contract. For whatever reason they pumped a dozen bullets into the middle of a Saturday afternoon shopping crowd on Mott Street while Nicky disappeared across Canal Street. The Chings missed everyone and wound up getting pinched by two drug cops who just happened to be eating won ton in the nearby Joy Luck Restaurant.
The ging cha (police) have arrested Nicky for everything from robbery to extortion to murder to rape, but he's never been convicted.
Detective Neal Mauriello, who is assigned full-time to the Fifth Precinct's Chinese gang section, is a smart cop. He realizes he's got a crazy and hopelessly complicated job. Chinatown gangs aren't like the bruisers fighting over street corners and ghetto reps up in the Bronx. There's piles of money and politics behind what Nicky and his guys are doing. And since it's Chinatown, they'd rather do it quietly—which is why the Shadows don't wear dungaree coats with hard-on things like SAVAGE SKULLS emblazoned on the back.
Neal makes it his business to memorize all the faces on Mott Street. He also writes down the names and birthdays of the gang members so he can walk down Mott Street and say, "Hey, happy birthday Pipenose; seen Dice around?" This blows the gang members' minds, Mauriello says. "Because, the world they live in, a Chinese guy is supposed to be invisible. They're supposed to all look alike. That's what we think, right? Well, they know that and that gives them a feeling of safety, like the whities have no idea who we are. I try to break through that curtain. It freaks them out."
About Nicky Louie, Neal, with typical cop insouciance, says, "That kid is okay really. But I've been chasing him for five years and I'll nail him. He knows it, too. We talk about it all the time." Neal remembers the time he came upon Nicky lying facedown in a pool of blood near the Bowery. He said, "Nicky, come on, you're gonna die, tell me who shot you." Nicky looked up at Neal, his eyes blazing arrogance, and said, "Fuck you."
"That's Nicky," said Mauriello, shaking his head with a smile, because what else can you say or do when confronted with someone who lives his ethic to the end like that? (Of course, Louie would survive his wounds and be back on the streets within weeks.) It is more than that, because, as Mauriello, from an immigrant culture himself, says, "That's not just Nicky Louie, some kid gangster telling me to fuck myself. There's a lot of history behind that ‘fuck you.' "
Toy Shan is a village in the mountainous region of Canton from which the great majority of those who settled New York's Chinatown came in the mid-1800s. It's possible that this Toy Shan settlement in New York was as closed a community as has ever existed in urban America. Much of this is bounded in mutual racism, including the horrendous series of "exclusion acts" that severely limited Chinese immigration to the United States for the better part of a century.
Probably the most draconian of these "yellow peril" fear laws prohibited immigration of Chinese women to the United States. Males were allowed, in small numbers, to enter the country to maintain existing businesses. But they could not raise families or live anything approaching a normal life. Chinatowns became essentially male-only gulags of indentured restaurant workers and the like. By the 1940s, when the laws finally began to ease, the ratio of men to women in Chinatown ranged as high as ten to one. The havoc these laws wreaked on the Toy Shan consciousness is difficult to overestimate. Drinking and gambling, both venerable Chinese passions, became endemic. Apart from the neighborhood gambling dens where one could lose a month's pay in an hour of fan tan playing, Chinese faces became familiar at the city's racetracks—probably the only place they were, outside restaurants and laundries—which prompted wags to dub the Belmont subway special "the Shanghai Express." Prostitutes from uptown were frequent visitors to Toy Shan back then. Chatham Square was one of the best nonhotel beats in the city. "The money's always been good down there," said one current lady of the night. "They come in, say nothing because they can't speak English, shoot their load, and go."
It was a society within a society, not that most of the Toy Shans were complaining. They were not eager to mingle with the people they called lo fan (foreign devils) in any event. Determined to survive, they built an extralegal society based on furtive alliances, police bribes, creative book-keeping, and immigration scams. The aim was to remain invisible and separate. To this day, few people in Chinatown are known by their real names; most received new identities—such as the Lees, Chins, and Wongs—from the family associations, who declared them "cousins" in order to get them into the country.
In place of the "Western government," they substituted the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), an organization to which the neighborhood's sixty-five-odd family and merchant associations belong. To this day every other president of the CCBA has to be a Toy Shan descendant.
In reality, it was the tongs, Hip Sing and On Leong, Chinatown's so-called "night mayors," who dominated much of the economic and social power in the neighborhood. They controlled the illegal activities in a community where everyone felt outside the law. Their spokesmen, with hatchetmen behind them, grew in power at the CCBA. Between themselves, they struck a parity that still holds. On Leong has always had more money and connections, mostly owing to their ongoing relationship with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Party, which has ruled Taiwan since its expulsion from the mainland by Mao's victorious Communist army in 1949. The more proletarian-minded Hip Sing, which is known as "the friend of the seaman" for its ability to sneak Chinese off boats and into waiter jobs, has more members and branches throughout the United States.
But in 1965 the Toy Shan traditions were seriously threatened. Federal laws were altered to allow open Chinese immigration to this country. Since then more than two hundred thousand Hong Kong residents have emigrated to America, with more coming all the time. Half settled in the New York area.
Chinatown is in the midst of a gut-wrenching change. The population is edging toward seventy-five thousand, a fivefold increase since the law change. It's one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in New York and without a doubt the most densely populated. Once confined to the familiar pentagon bounded by Canal Street, Worth, and the Bowery, Chinatown is now sprawling all over the Lower East Side. Already Mott Street—above Canal up to Grand, once solidly Italian—is 70 percent Chinese. To the east, Division Street and East Broadway, formerly Jewish and Puerto Rican, have become centers of Chinese business and residence. Chinatowns have begun to appear in Flushing, Queens, and parts of Brooklyn.
Transition is under way. On one hand a good deal of the old Toy Shan separatism remains. Most Chinatown residents do not vote; currently there are fewer than three thousand registered voters in the area. In marked contrast to the Asian community in California, no Oriental has ever held major office in New York. The Chinatown Democratic Club has been repeatedly busted as a gambling house. Chinatown activists say this neglect is responsible for the compromised stand in the zoning fight with the Little Italy Restoration Association, which is seeking to ward off the Chinese influx and zone large portions of the area for the dwindling Italian population.
Yet changes are everywhere. Chinatown now functions for Chinese; it looks like Hong Kong. Investigate the brand-new Silver Palace Restaurant on the Bowery—it breaks the mold of the cramped, no-atmosphere Chinatown restaurant. An escalator whisks you up to a dining room as big as a football field. Almost all the thousand or so people eating there will be Chinese, many middle-class couples who've motored in from Queens to try a more adventurous version of Cantonese food than this city is accustomed to. (Many Chinese will tell you that the "exotic" Szechuan and Hunan food is "American" fare.)
The mass migration has transformed Chinatown into an odd amalgam of boomtown and ghetto. Suddenly half the businesses here are no longer in the hands of the old lo fa kew, the Cantonese Toy Shans. In their place have come Hong Kong entrepreneurs and Taiwanese investors, who are fearful about the future of their island. A Taiwanese combine, the Summit Import Corporation, has already done much to change shopping habits in Chinatown by opening two big supermarkets, Kam Wah on Baxter Street and Kam Kuo on Mott.
The Taiwanese money is an indication that even though the Nationalists appear on the verge of international political eclipse, their influence in American Chinatowns, especially New York's, is on the rise. A Taiwan concern is also behind the proposed block-long Golden Pacific National Bank on Canal Street. It's one of the several new banks opening in this neighborhood of compulsive savers. The gold rush, prodded by extraordinary greed, has pushed real estate values here to fabled heights as Taiwanese businessmen seek to hide capital in the United States. The defeat of South Vietnam, where Chinese interests controlled much of the economy, has brought untold millions into the local market. According to Mott Street scuttlebutt, the day Saigon fell, three Chinese restaurants were supposedly purchased in Chinatown. Tumbledown warehouses on East Broadway are going for Upper East Side prices.
All this has the Toy Shan powers hanging on for dear life. The newcomers, filtered through Hong Kong, come from all over China. The old Toy Shan loyalties don't apply. These people got here without the help of the associations and owe them little. The tongs and the CCBA are beginning to feel the crunch. They've begun to see more and more store owners break away. Suddenly there are publicly funded social service agencies, most prominently the Chinatown Planning Council, to challenge CCBA rulings. And the younger Chinese, sons and daughters of the lo fa kew, have been openly critical.
But one hundred years of power isn't something you give up without a fight. Recently the CCBA held a meeting to discuss what to do about Nicky Louie and his Ghost Shadow buddies shooting up the neighborhood. Chinatown has traditionally been one of the safest areas in the city. Crime figures are remarkably low here for a place with so many new immigrants. That's what made the recent violence all the more shocking. Especially in a neighborhood so dependent on tourism. Although the battles were being waged among the various Shadows, Dragons, and Eagles around, merchants were reporting a 30 percent drop in business. Places that stayed open late were doing even worse.
The streetfighting is "disfiguring" Chinatown, said one merchant, referring to the April shootout at the Co-Luck Restaurant on the Bowery. That night, according to the cops, a couple of Shadows roared up in a late-model blue Ford, smashed through the glass door, and started spraying .32 automatic slugs in the general direction of some Dragons who were yum cha (drinking tea and talking) in the corner. One of the Dragons, who may not have been a Dragon at all, got clipped in the leg. For the rest of the people in the restaurant, it was grimmer. By the time the Shadows were through, they had managed to hit three New York University law students, a waiter, and a lady from Queens who later died on the floor, her daughter crying over her body. The cops said, "The place looked like a slaughter-house; there was blood all over the linoleum."
Since then Co-Luck has been considered bad luck for prospective buyers. It remains vacant, rare in a neighborhood where no storefront is empty for long. On the door is a sign: CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS.
"Perhaps we keep it that way," said a merchant, "as a scar to remind us of our shame."
Restaurant owners say there won't be so many wedding banquets this summer because of an incident in the Hung Gung Restaurant a few months ago. Gang members crashed the banquet hall, stationing sentries outside to make sure no one came or went, and instructed a hundred celebrants to drop their valuables into shopping bags. "It was just like the Wild West," says someone close to the wedding guests.
The police don't see things looking up. In October they made sixty gang-related arrests, the most ever in a single month. They say there are more guns on the street than ever before and estimate gang membership—before the recent crackdown—at about two hundred, an all-time high. The gang kids are younger, too—fourteen-year-olds from Junior High School 65 are common these days.
Pressured by editorials in the Chinese press, the CCBA lurched into action. It called a public gathering at which the community would be free to explain its plight to Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morganthau.
This was quite a change in tactics for the CCBA. Until quite recently one of its major functions had been to keep the lid on Chinatown's considerable and growing urban problems. The fact that Chinese women sew garments for twelve cents apiece, that more than one-third of the area's males work as waiters (toiling as much as sixteen hours a day, seven days a week), that Chinatown has the highest rate of TB and mental illness among city neighborhoods—all that was dirty linen better kept under wraps. But Nicky and the Shadows, they make noise. They get picked up for killing people and get their sullen pictures in what the Chinese still call "the Western press." Keeping that quiet can make you look awfully silly, such as when Joseph Mei, the CCBA vice president, told the New York Times, "We have no problem at all about youth gangs in Chinatown," the day after Nicky's people allegedly shot five White Eagles in front of the Yuen Yuen Snack Shop.
The meeting was held in the CCBA's dank auditorium (underneath an alternating string of American and Nationalist Chinese flags). Yut Yee, the seventy-year-old CCBA president, who reportedly has been known to fall asleep during meetings, was unusually awake that night. He said, "Chinatown will become a dead city" if the violence continues. He urged residents to come forward and "report cases of crimes: We must be witnesses." This seemed unlikely, for in a culture where the character for "revenge" means literally "report a crime," the act of informing tends to be a complicated business. This confuses and angers the lo fan cops, who say that even though just about every restaurant in Chinatown has been robbed or extorted from in the past few years, the incidence of reporting the crimes is almost nil. Despite the fact that gang members have been arrested for more than a dozen murders in Manhattan, there has been only one conviction: that of Yut Wai Tom, an Eagle who made the mistake of putting a bullet through the throat of a Shadow in front of a couple of Puerto Rican witnesses.
Morganthau sighed during the debate of Chinese businessmen, looked at his watch, said he'd "help," and left. By this time, however, many people were openly restive. "My God, when will this bullshit stop?" asked a younger merchant.
No one talked about the tongs and their relationship to the gangs. How could they? Of the seven permanent members of the CCBA inner voting circle, one is the On Leong, another the Hip Sing. No wonder people tend to get cynical whenever the CCBA calls a meeting at which the tong interests are at stake. Perhaps that's why, when a Chinese reporter asked what the D.A. was planning to do to help the community, one of Morganthau's people said, "What do you want? We showed up, didn't we?"
But, if you wanted to see changing Chinatown in action, really all you had to do was watch Benny Eng. Benny is director of the Hip Sing Credit Fund (which drug cops figure is a laundry room for dirty money). He is also an officer of the Chinese-American Restaurant Association, an organization that deserves blame for keeping waiter wages in Chinatown at about fifty dollars a week for the past twenty years.
As people entered the CCBA hall, Little Benny—as he is called, in deference to Big Benny Ong, the old Hip Sing bossman recently arrested while sneaking out of the tong's venerable gambling house at 9 Pell Street—greeted everyone with a grave face. "So happy you are interested in the security of Chinatown," Little Benny said. But later, after the meeting, Benny, now attired in a natty hat and overcoat, could be seen nodding respectfully to the skinny-legged honcho pacing in front of 56 Mott Street.
A pockmark-faced guy who nowadays spends ten hours a day laying bowls of congee in front of customers at a Mott Street rice shop remembers the day the White Eagles, the original Chinatown youth gang, ripped off their first cha shu baos (pork buns).
"It was maybe ten years ago. We were hanging out in Columbus Park, you know, by the courthouse, feeling real stupid. Most of us had just got to Chinatown. We couldn't speak English worth a shit. The juk sing (American-born Chinese, a.k.a. ABCs, or American Born Chinese) were playing basketball, but they wouldn't let us play. We didn't know how to anyway. I remember one of our guys said, ‘Shit, in Hong Kong my old man was a civil servant—he made some bread. Then he listened to my goddamned uncle and came over here. Now he's working as a waiter all day. The guy's got TB, I can hear him coughing. And I ain't got enough money for a goddamned cha shu baos.'"
Even then the juk tuk (Hong Kong–born Chinese) were sharp to the short end of the stick; they looked around the Toy Shan ghetto and sized up the possibilities for a sixteen-year-old immigrant. The chances had a familiar ring—what the tourists call "a Chinaman's chance," which, of course, is no chance at all. There might be moments of revenge, like lacing a lo fan's sweet-and-sour with enormous hunks of ginger to watch his lips pucker. But you knew you'd wind up frustrated, throwing quarters into the "Dancing Chicken" machine at the Chinatown Arcade. You'd watch that stupid Pavlovian-conditioned chicken come out of its feeder to dance and you'd know you were watching yourself.
So the eight or nine kids who would become the nucleus of the White Eagles walked up the narrow street past the Italian funeral parlor and into the pastry shop, where they stole dozens of cha shu baos, which they ate—and got so sick they threw up all over the sidewalk.
Within the next week the Eagles got hold of their first pieces—a pair of automatics—and began to terrorize Toy Shan. They beat the daylights out of the snooty ABCs, who were just a bunch of pussies anyway. They ripped off restaurants. They got tough with the old men's gambling houses.
It seemed so easy. In Hong Kong, try anything shifty and the cops would bust up your ass. They would search an entire block, throwing pregnant women down the stairs if they got in the way, just to find a guy they suspected of boosting a pocketbook from the lobby of the Hyatt Regency. Here the cops were all roundeyes—they don't know or care about Chinese. Besides, the old guys kept them paid off. The fringe benefits included street status, fast cars to cruise uptown and watch the lo-fan freaks, days to work on your "tans" at Coney listening to the new Hong Kong–Filipino platters, plenty of time to go bowling, and the pick of the girls—in general, the old equation of living quick, dying young, and leaving a beautiful corpse.
It took the Toy Shans a while to comprehend what was happening in their village. By the late sixties, several juk tuk "clubs" began to appear. Foremost was the Continentals, a bunch who spent a good deal of time looking in the mirror, practicing complex handshakes, and running around ripping the insignias off Lincoln Continentals. In the beginning the family associations did their best. They marshaled the new kids into New Year's dragon-dancing. For the older, more sullen ones, they established martial arts clubs. But these kids didn't seem interested in discipline; besides, they smoked too many cigarettes. That's when the tongs intervened. Within weeks of the first extortion report, several White Eagles and representatives of the On Leong tong were sitting in a Mott Street restaurant talking it over. When they were done, a pact was sealed that would establish the youth gang as a permanent fixture of "New Chinatown."
It was agreed that the Eagles would stop random mayhem around the community and begin to work for the On Leong. They would "guard" the tong-sponsored gambling houses and make sure that no one ripped off restaurants that paid regular "dues." In return, the Eagles' leaders would receive a kind of salary, free meals in various noodle houses, and no-rent apartments in the Chinatown area.
It seemed a brilliant arrangement, especially for the tongs. The On Leongs and Hip Sings no longer struck fear in the heart of Chinatown. With warriors like Sing Dock barely a misty reminiscence, the tongs had become paunchy, middle-aged businessmen who spent most of their time competing for black-mushroom contracts. The Eagles brought them the muscle they felt they would need in changing times. It was like having your own private army, just like the good old days.
But the tongs weren't used to this kind of warrior. The kids mounted a six-foot-tall statue of a white eagle on top of their tenement at Mott and Pell. One night ten of them piled into a taxicab and went uptown to see Superfly; afterward they shot up Pell Street with tiny .22s for the sheer exhilaration of it. They went into tailor shops, scowled, and came away with two-hundred-dollar suits. Once Paul Ma—Eagle supreme commander—showed up for an arraignment wearing a silk shirt open down the front so everyone could see his bullet holes.
During eight or so years on top in Chinatown, the Eagles set the style for the Chinese youth gang. Part was savagery. Eagle recruiting practices were brutal—coercion was often used to replenish their street army. They kidnapped merchants' daughters and held them for ransom. They also set the example of using expensive and high-powered guns. No Saturday-night specials in Chinatown. The gangs used Mausers, Lugers, and an occasional M-14. One cop says, "You know, I've been on the force for twenty-two years, and I never saw nothing that gave me nightmares like watching a fifteen-year-old kid run down Bayard Street carrying a Thompson submachine gun."
But there was another side to this. A new style was emerging in China-town. Chinese kids have had a tough time of it in schools like Seward Park. Blacks and Puerto Ricans as well as meanies from Little Italy would vamp Chinese students for sport. Groups like the Eagles were intent on changing this. It was a question of cool. In the beginning they copied the swagger and lingo of the blacks—it is remarkable how closely a Chinese teenager can imitate black speech. From the Puerto Ricans they borrowed souped-up car styling as well as the nonfashion of wearing army fatigues, which they added to their already zooty Hong Kong–cut shirts.
But it was Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong sex-symbol kung fu star, who did the most for the Chinese street presence. Gang kids ran around Chinatown carrying nunchahas—kung fu fighting sticks—which few of them knew how to use, and postured like deadly white cranes. When "Kung-Fu Fighting" became a number one hit on WWRL, being Chinese was in. They became people not to mess with (although the police report there has never been a gang incident in which martial arts were used). "It was like magic," says one ex-Continental. "I used to walk by the Smith projects where the blacks live, and those brothers would throw dirty diapers out the window at me and call me Chinaman. Now they call me Mr. Chinaman."
The image of the Chinese schoolgirl was changing, too. Overnight they entered the style show on the subway. A lot of the fashion—airblown hairstyles, mucho makeup, and tiny "Apple jacket" tops—came from the Puerto Ricans. Classy tweezed Oriental eyebrows produced a new "dragon lady" look. Openly sexual, some of the Hong Kong girls formed auxiliary groups. Streaking their hair blond or red to show that their boyfriends were gangsters, they were "ol' ladies," expected to dab their men's wounds with elixirs swiped from Chinese apothecaries. Who can blame them? More than half of Chinatown's women work in the three-hundred-odd garment factories in the area, buzzing through the polyester twelve hours a day, trying to crack a hundred dollars a week. Hanging with the bad kids risked an occasional gang bang, but it was a better risk than dying in a sweatshop.
It seemed only a matter of time before the youth gangs would get into dope, especially since drug dealing has been the key staple of the Chinese underworld for centuries. The present-day version of the Chinatown connection dates back to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Several Nationalist units were cut off in the poppy-rich area known as the Golden Triangle near the Burmese/Thai/Laotian border as the rest of Chiang Kaishek's army fled to Taiwan. A large smuggling route was then established, with the Nationalist government reaping the benefits. This was not unprecedented, as many historians cite Chiang's involvement with the notorious dope-peddling Shanghai-based Green Gang during the 1920s.
According to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, with Mao's takeover on the mainland, several KMT officials with drug-selling connections soon found their way to New York, where they eased into the On Leong power structure. It wasn't long after that, the DEA says, that the On Leong people went across Canal Street to strike a bargain with Italian organized crime. Soon a new adage was added to Mafia parlance: "If you want the stuff, get yourself a good gook."
The connection—which is believed to be kept running by a manager of an On Leong restaurant who is also believed to be the only Chinese ever admitted to the Carlo Gambino crime family—works well. While most of the country is flooded with Mexican smack, in New York the percentage of Golden Triangle poppy runs high. The dope money is the lucrative tip of Chinatown's pyramid crime structure. DEA people say the gangs are used as runners to pick up dope in the Chinese community in Toronto and then body-carry it across the border. But they may play a greater role. Chinese dope hustlers have always felt on uneasy ground when dealing with flashy uptown pushers. Now, however, street sources say the gutterwise gangs are dealing directly with black and Puerto Rican dealers.
Then again, junk has always been an issue in Chinatown. Even now you can walk by the senior citizen home on East Broadway and see eighty-year-old Chinese men and women who still suffer from the effects of long-ago opium addiction and live out their lives on methadone. They're probably the oldest addicts in America. The specter of the opium days is still horrifying down here, where landlords continue to find ornate pipes in basements.
That's why the sight of fourteen-year-old Eagles nodding on Mott Street during the smack influx of the early '70s was so galling to the old men. It was a final indiscretion, a final lack of discipline. Actually, the Eagles had been tempting fate for some time. They insulted tong elders in public. They extorted from restaurants they were supposed to be protecting. They mugged big winners outside of the gambling houses. It was playing havoc with the tong's business as usual. Often the old men threatened to bring in sharpshooting hit men from Taiwan to calm the kids down.
So in 1974, when Quat Kay Kee, an aging street hustler looking for a handle in the tong hierarchy, told the On Leong of a new and remarkable gang leader, the old men were ready to listen. Nicky Louie and his Ghost Shadows were not only tougher than the Eagles, but they knew how to do business. To show their style, Nicky and his top gun, Philip Han (known as Halfbreed), supposedly put on masks and pulled off a ballsy submachine-gun holdup at the Eagle-guarded gambling house in the local VFW post, knocking off a pair of sentries to boot.
Soon after, in another gambling house, a drunken Eagle poured a water glass of tea down the brocade jacket of an On Leong elder. The word came down: the tong was formally withdrawing its support of the Eagles; the Shadows could make their move. A few nights later, the 4:00 A.M. quiet on Mott Street was broken by Shadows honking the horns of their hopped-up cars. They rode around the block, screeching their tires. The Eagles tumbled out of bed clutching their pieces. The shooting woke up half the neighborhood. Amazingly, no one was injured. But the change had come. The Eagles fled to Brooklyn. And Nicky Louie was pacing back and forth on Mott Street.
A relationship was forged. For the most part, Nicky's Shadows have been model rulers during their stay on Mott Street. "I'm a businessman, and I know how to stay in business," Nicky once told Neal Mauriello. The gang takes its cut and protects the status quo. Would-be neighborhood reformers have learned to be fearful of visits from gun-wielding gang members; one lawyer who spoke out against the Chinatown establishment woke up the next morning to find Mott Street plastered with wall posters telling him to get out of town.
It is a strange reign of terror that could flourish only in a limbo-land like Chinatown. One hundred years of neglect have distorted the links to the lo fan power. The cops and tongs have maintained a nonaggression pact well oiled with palm grease. One On Leong insider says, "Those guys are crooks. I was pit boss at a gambling house and gave two hundred a week to the same sergeant for two years." It goes on. Fifth Precinct cops are not allowed to make gambling arrests unless they actually see money on the table. But since the chance of a lo fan getting into a Chinese gambling house unnoticed is akin to a snowcone in hell, they might as well not bother. "When you do raid the houses, it's almost like they've been tipped," says one detective. "By the time you get through all the trick doors, there's no one there but a couple of one-hundred-year-old men smoking cigarettes."
For years there was only one Chinese cop, the fabulous Johnny Kai. Kai walked a thin line between American and Chinese law and did a good job for both. Today, however, with the Chinese making up the majority of the Fifth's constituency and youth crime skyrocketing, there is still only one Chinese cop on the beat, Barry Eng, who once said with a straight face, "Of course, everyone knows the associations disowned the youth gangs a long time ago."
One thing that Nicky Louie makes fairly clear is that he is not interested in talking to reporters, especially this reporter. No, he says, when approached in front of 56 Mott Street, he is not up for a little yum cha to discuss his life and times. Avoiding eye contact, he claims to speak "no English!" For sure he doesn't want his picture in the paper. In fact, he says, he doesn't even know who the fuck this Nicky Louie is and, in any event, he is not him. So maybe you should get the fuck away, like now.
Not that you could blame the Ghost Shadow for wanting to keep a low profile. The past several months have been a kind of hell for the gang leader. It was only a few Saturdays ago that he reportedly saw an old Eagle enemy gesturing in his direction from across the street. Nicky was being fingered. He stood like a freeze frame, looking at the two strangers drawing down on him. One had a Mauser, the other a Colt .38. The first gunshot whistled by his ear and broke him out of his trance. He ran down Mott, pushing aside the tourists and the old ladies, turning down Canal until he was safe, panting against a wall.
That afternoon haunted Nicky. Battling Paul Ma made sense. But these unknown hitmen had no reason to shoot except money.
It was scary; things were getting out of control. Eagle Yut Wai Tom had been convicted—the first gang kid to be sent up for murder. Word was around that Tom had cracked up when he got to Rikers Island. The cops were doing a suicide watch on him. Quat Kay Kee, Nicky's old sponsor at On Leong, had been flipping out, too. Shot at in the Wiseman Bar on Bayard Street by a group of Eagles wearing ratty wigs they had bought from a hasidic shop on East Broadway, Quat railed that he'd tell all. He managed to compose himself just before the drug cops got there with their tape recorders.
Being a Chinatown warlord was a tough gig. To keep up their street army, the Shadows had been forced to recruit younger and younger kids. But what exactly do you say to a fourteen-year-old when you're a twenty-two-year-old legend? The young Shadows were griping about their wages. In the early part of the year some of the kids had broken away from Nicky to ally themselves with the scuzzy Wah Chings. For a couple of nights in January, they had actually succeeded in pushing Nicky off the street. It took all of his negotiating prowess to fix things again.
For months he'd let it be known that he was tired of being a youth-gang leader, but the tong gave little indication that they'd allow him to move up in the organization. Quitting was out of the question. First of all, he knew too much and had far too many enemies. It wouldn't be enough to leave Chinatown, or even New York City. Anyplace there was On Leong—like Toronto or Chicago—or Hip Sing, which is just about everywhere, he'd be known and fair game. Anyway, if he did get out, what was waiting? He knew lots of ex-gang guys who'd "retired" and now broke their humps for their families in the old restaurant grind.
Ironically, it was the old men who provided Nicky and the other gang kids with an escape from street-fighting. Despite Chinatown's traditional reluctance to look for outside help, poverty money is beginning to find its way down here. Funding scams may not be as venerable as gambling houses, but in a modern world, there must be modern hustles. People had been telling the old men about a Harlem incident in which the hak guey youth gangs had given up their arms. The federal government had laid a sizable chunk of cash on groups promising to reform the kids. The old men saw an opening; if they could get the gangs to call "peace," they could get the uptight merchants off their backs as well as pick up a large grant.
The plan was laid out to Nicky. He liked it and promised to set it up. He contacted Eagle Paul Ma and Dragon Mike Chen—who hated each other more than they both hated Nicky—and got them to say "Cool."
Next step was to make it respectable. The gangs contacted one of the old Continentals, now a well-known Chinatown social worker, and told him they wanted to give up their evil ways. The worker, eager to be known as the man who stopped Chinatown gang warfare, went for it. Everything was set.
But somewhere along the line, Nicky began to forget that it was all a scam. Suddenly he liked the idea of "reforming," learning English for real and getting a decent job. And he wasn't the only one. Around lo tow, guys were still packing rods, but they also were talking about what they'd do when they went "legit."
The first "peace" meeting was at the Kuo Wah Restaurant on Mott Street. Kids embraced each other, saying it was crazy for Chinese guys to kill other Chinese guys. Nicky sat down with Paul Ma. They'd been trying to wipe each other out for years; but now they spent hours reminiscing about their favorite extortion spots on Mott Street.
The old men were flabbergasted. What a double cross! If these kids were on the level, then the whole vice structure could go down the tubes. Then again, it could be a trick. The gangs might be pulling a power play to cut Chinatown up for themselves. Either was disaster. After that the tongs did everything they could to sabotage the peace. They spread mistrust among the merchants; they tried to bribe the gang leaders. The old men unsuccessfully tried to cancel the press conference formally announcing the "peace." But, on August 12, Nicky and the other gang leaders read their joint statement. They didn't expect to be forgiven, but then again they weren't apologizing. They had become wiser; being a gangster wasn't so great. Other kids shouldn't get into it. It was moving; several of the old family association leaders wept. Even Nicky looked a little misty.
But time had run out on Nicky's peace: the old Toy Shan forces of secrecy and mistrust were working overtime. The merchants, brutalized so often, never believed the gangs were sincere and offered no support. The social service agencies failed to come up with concrete programs. The cops offered a ten-day amnesty period for the gang kids to turn in their guns, nothing else. "Oh yeah," said one Shadow. "I'm gonna turn in my gun so they can do a ballistic and fingerprint check on it? Sure." No weapons were turned in.
Of course, it is not possible to know if Nicky was ever truly sincere about declaring peace in Chinatown. The cops, cynics that they are, said, "They might have called it peace, but they spelled it ‘p-i-e-c-e.' " Still, no one disputes the fact that three weeks went by without anyone getting shot at around Mott and Bayard. Nicky must have known it was over the night the Eagles ripped off a restaurant at the other end of Mott Street. He ran over to find Paul Ma and see what was up. An Eagle told him that Paul was "out" and laughed. After that, Nicky kicked chairs in a Mott Street rice shop. Gang members say the sear was back in his eye. By then it was just a matter of time. Within the next week the Shadows, Eagles, and Dragons were shooting at each other; the two-month-long war would prove to be the bloodiest in Chinatown history.
The tongs, fearing total loss of control, responded to the madness by calling in some old friends from across Canal Street. According to the Chinese newspapers, a couple of Shadows walked into the wrong restaurant at the wrong time. Five smashnoses imported from Mulberry Street were waiting for them. Reportedly the kids wound up in a meat grinder, their remains dumped into a plastic bag and driven to Newark.
This got the gangs' attention. Except for a few gun violations, the cops say Chinatown's been quiet for the past few weeks. However, reports of gang extortions in local Massapequa and northern New Jersey Chinese restaurants have begun to come in.
But in fanning out of Chinatown, the gangs broke a New York City rule: Don't mess with the rich white people. Someone goofed when they rubbed out the young couple who ran the Szechuan D'or on East Fortieth Street. It mobilized whole armies of uptown cops. Determined to strike Chinese crime at its root, the police have shut down the gambling and extortion rackets in Chinatown. This has caused widespread panic. Word is, big gamblers walk around in a daze at the OTB, trying to latch on to private pi gow games uptown. Nicky and the Shadows, seeing no percentage in hanging around for the onslaught, split for greener fields in the On Leong–run towns of Toronto and Chicago.
No one, of course, expects this to last. Balances of power are constantly shifting downtown. Just the other day the cops busted Flying Dragon Mike Chen with a 12-gauge shotgun and 150 rounds of ammunition hidden in the ceiling of his apartment. Paul Ma, Philip Han, and Big Benny Ong are on their way to the slammer. And some even say that the good people at Hip Sing could stage a takeover in Benny's absence.
But much more remains the same. Go tonight to a restaurant on Mott Street and look out the window. Across the street you're likely to see a good-looking skinny guy in a green fatigue jacket pacing back and forth. Nicky Louie is back in town, vigilant as ever. Look into his eyes and wonder what he's thinking. But, then, remember … it's Chinatown.