Gangs of Old Shanghai – The Giraldi Gang

Today’s gang of old Shanghai is the Giraldi gang – that’s the gang of White Russians around Shura Giraldi who some might remember as the hermaphrodite nightclub owner in Midnight in Peking. Shura allegedly robbed, burgled, fenced and procured his way to great wealth in the Peking Badlands but invested the money in Shanghai’s Frenchtown. Ultimately, in the 1950s, he was reduced to being shipped back to an uncertain fate in the USSR – here he is, with a last remaining young friend, in the Talati Hotel on Tianjin’s old Victoria Road (now Jiefang Road and the First Business Hotel) before being deported to Russia in the mid-1950s….