Tong wars

Scott D. Seligman

"Reading like a true-crime novel, this history of the vice district and gang wars of New York's Chinatown from the 1890s through the 1930s describes the widespread fight to control the district's gambling, opium and prostitution,"--NoveList. Nothing had worked--not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors and opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York district attorney was running out of ideas, and more people were dying every day as the tong men's weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons, and even bombs. Welcome to New York City's Chinatown in 1925. The Chinese in turn-of-the-last-century New York were mostly immigrant peasants and shopkeepers making an honest living as laundrymen, cigar makers, and domestics. They gravitated to lower...