American Gangster (14 page)

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 bookkeeping, 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 in-flux 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 slaughterhouse; 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.