Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York’s Chinatown

Scott Seligman’s Tong Wars is an excellent read that shed light on the underbelly of New York’s old Chinatown…..

Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlours or opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas and more people were dying every day, as the 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.

TONG WARS is historical true-crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing their lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate them. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next 30 years.

Scott D. Seligman’s account roars through three decades of turmoil, with characters ranging from gangsters and drug lords to reformers and do-gooders to judges, prosecutors, cops and pols of every stripe and colour. A true story set in Prohibition-era Manhattan a generation after Gangs of New York (Miramax, 2002), but fought on the very same turf.