CRIME: Tong

(2 of 3)

Tong wars begin quickly, kindled by rivalry between two rich tea- merchants for the favors of one of those slender concubines that so vividly people the imaginations of sightseers; by a trade jealousy; a stolen opium shipment; in short, by almost any obscure betrayal of Oriental honor. Once begun, they are conducted on a system much re- sembling that which governs the game of chess. The purpose of each side is to wipe out the important leaders of the other. Hired assassins do the actual campaigning—tong gunmen who have originated many of the devices in favor with detective story writers. Their knives flicker in bad doorways. Their shapes are seen outlined against a gibbous moon, while they scurry over city roofs at night, or swing down a silk rope-ladder to their victim's window. They are carried up hotel elevators in packing cases; they train cobras to crawl through the speaking-tubes of limousines and bite their enemies on the lip; but the type of crime which entertains them most is the far simpler business of entering some all-night chop-suey restaurant, firing six or seven shots, and departing, while the proprietor splutters out his life upon the greasy floor. Of this daring feat no tongman seems to tire.

The Hip Sings and the On Leongs, the two tongs concerned in the present outbreak, fought in 1910. In 1912 the nephew of On Leong Mayor of Manhattan's Chinatown was killed by two Chinese, both subsequently electrocuted. In 1922 the head of the Hip Sings choked and fell faceforward upon the asphalt of Pell Street, Manhattan, with a bullet in his heart. Another war flickered briefly last year until it was ended by the efforts of Arbitrator Lee Kue Ying, rich merchant. Last week Ying, presumably of natural causes, perished. It was on the afternoon of his death that the wires from Boston began to crackle with Chinese communications.

For the murder of a tong chief, a gunman may receive as much as $10,000; for a pawn or coolie, not more than $500. At the end of a war, the better shots are often rich men. Last week, obedient to the messages from Boston, they began business in a number of cities:

In Baltimore two young Chinese, dressed in department store clothes, entered a restaurant, ordered a meal of rice and soup. The cook, one Charley Lee, withdrew to prepare it. To the proprietor, who sat beaming behind his counter, one of the men beckoned with a rolled newspaper; he approached. When he had come to within a yard of the table, the fellow dropped his paper; the other fired. Lee rushed from the kitchen; the murderers were gone, his employer was dead. A bubble of blood from his lips incarnadined the newspaper.

In Pittsburgh late at night, in a line of smoke-stained houses on a miserable street, the darkness was broken by a single orange oblong, the doorway of a Chinese laundry. Two short, stocky men were perceptible, for a moment, in its glow. They shot the laundryman where he toiled over his ironing board, then stepped back into the darkness.

In St. Louis the Baltimore crime was repeated, this time by five intrepid gunmen.