Tong Wars of New York City

Beginning in the 1890s and persisting for the next three decades, two rival Chinese gangs—known as tongs—duked it out in an ongoing bloodfest in New York’s Chinatown, vying for control of the opium trade, illegal gambling and prostitution.

On Leong vs Hip Song Tong Gangs

Led by Tom Lee and his six-foot-tall enforcer, Lee Toy, the On Leong gang leader ingratiated himself with the easily corruptible police force of Tammany Hall, which was an Irish Catholic-dominated fraternal society that mushroomed into the dominant political force in New York politics. On the other side of the conflict was the Hip Sing Tong led by Mock Duck, and while the On Leong promised protection from the police, the Hip Sing offered protection from themselves.

The warring killers possessed a certain cool factor, so says historian and author Scott D. Seligman, for their street soldiers dressed in Western pinstripes with fedoras pulled low. While the On Leong gang had the cops in their pockets, the Hip Sing had the clout of the district attorney’s office to spring their soldiers from prison time after tit-for-tat killing sprees raged on the streets of Chinatown.

Leader Indicted and Tong Gangs in Decline

When Mock Duck was indicted for murder after one particularly brazen street fight, fire erupted in the kitchen of a Chinatown restaurant, quickly enveloping the building in flames. Among the fleeing victims, one man leaped in panic from a second-floor balcony, and when his body was identified, the dead man was to be the star witness in Duck’s upcoming murder trial.

As the bodies continued to pile up, newspaper accounts of the bloodshed began to erode New Yorker’s thirst for the illegal pleasures of Chinatown. In 1913, during a raid on a Seventh Avenue opium den, a number of confiscated letters revealed the existence of a major opium ring in Washington, D.C., all of it aided and abetted by crooked police.

Once the feds got involved, the vice trades of New York’s Chinatown began to shutter their doors, and with nothing left to fight over, the tongs of New York faded into the bloody backdrop of yesteryear.