When I think of gang wars in New York, what immediately comes to mind is The Godfather and Mafia soldiers going to the mattresses; if I think about it a little longer I might remember Herbert Asbury and the battles between the Short Tails and the Dead Rabbits chronicled in The Gangs of New York. I had no idea there were equally violent conflicts in the early 20th century between the Hip Sing tong and the On Leong tong over gambling, opium and prostitution in New York City’s Chinatown. Author Scott Seligman is described as “fluent in Mandarin and conversant in Cantonese” in his dust cover biography, which must have been a huge help in putting together the Tong Wars story; Seligman notes that the was no standard spelling for Chinese words; newspaper reports and court records just made their best guess. Further, some Chinese adopted the western mode of putting their family name second, others went by nicknames, and some even used their place of business as a personal name.

Seligman notes “tong” means “chamber”, and most tongs started out as benevolent societies much like the Masons or the Oddfellows or the Elks. That changed – at least, the nonChinese perception changed; most Chinese seemed to feel that if a man wanted to relax by gambling a little, having a whore, and smoking a pipe of opium after a hard day at the laundry that was nobody’s business but his own. The tongs saw themselves as facilitating this arrangement, which they did by bribing New York City police to look the other way. Bribes took money, and the tongs got it by levying “protection” on Chinese businesses. Alas, there were some people who did think gambling, prostitution and drugs were vices that should be suppressed; the Parkhurst Society, named after a prominent New York City clergyman, set off to suppress them, convincing police to stage raids and district attorneys to prosecute. The tongs reacted by going after each other in an attempt to keep their shares of a diminishing pot.

The carnage was awesome. Tong members stabbed, hatcheted, shot, poisoned and dynamited each other; from Selgiman’s account it was usually relatively low ranking members that got hit. In that sense it wasn’t like Mafia struggles for control of an organization where leaders were targets; instead the violence centered on the concept of “face”; if the Hip Sings killed an On Leong, the On Leongs had to retaliate with an equivalent murder or be shamed. There were numerous attempts at stopping the violence, both by the authorities and by the Chinese themselves; nothing really worked. Widely publicized peace treaties were painfully negotiated and didn’t even last for a day; there were arrests, imprisonments, deportations and electrocutions but they didn’t slow things down either. It was The Great Depression and the consequent drying up of the cash pool plus a patriotic response to the Japanese invasion of China that finally got the tongs to sign a lasting treaty, in 1933. There was still a murder now and then, but they were now most likely for good American reasons of personal animosity rather than tong rivalry, and the tong leaders were always quick to smooth things over.

Fascinating; Seligman is an engaging writer and manages to keep the characters and chronology straight. This is helped by a list of dramatis personae at the beginning of the book and a glossary and gazetteer at the end, plus a map of Chinatown with locations identified. Photographs of the participants and Chinatown scenes, end notes (by page number), references and a good index. Instructive history. ( )