excelled at the staple enterprise of the Chinatown gang: collecting extortion. Since the dawn of Chinatown, monthly payments of lucky money had been a fact of doing business in the neighborhood, and by the time Ah Kay started collecting protection money for the Fuk Ching the practice had developed its own long-standing and elaborate choreography. If you wanted to open a restaurant in the territory of some tong or gang, you would receive a visit from a contingent of gang members. They would roll into your place of business and often be extremely, almost ostentatiously polite. Provided the business owner was cooperative, the interaction was at least superficially courteous. The particular denomination was often negotiated over tea. The one-time payment to open a restaurant could be as high as $100,000, and bought you the privilege of turning over smaller monthly payments to the gang for the foreseeable future. These were delivered in ceremonial red envelopes, and everyone paid—not just the restaurateurs, but the manicurists and the lawyers, the herbalists and the bookies, the video rental guy and the madam. During the Moon Festival each September, the gangs went door to door selling moon cakes at extortionate prices—$108 or $208, always a denomination ending in 8, for prosperity. At the Chinese New Year they sold orange plants or fireworks, again with an extravagant markup. When they were hungry, they would stroll into restaurants and order up a feast, roughhouse and boast, then simply scrawl the name of the gang on the check, tapping an inexhaustible tab that would never come due.
This was lucrative grazing, and the right to graze in a certain corner of the neighborhood did not come uncontested. For each block they controlled, for each basement mahjong game or walk-up brothel, and above all for control of the local heroin trade, the Fuk Ching had to fight a rival, and in Ah Kay’s early years as a foot soldier they regularly clashed with the Tung Ons and the Flying Dragons. Fuk Ching members fought with knives, machetes, and ballpeen hammers—anything that could shatter bone with one quick, lethal swing, then just as quickly be concealed. They had guns as well, but the male gang membersrarely carried them because of the penalties if they were caught with one in a stop-and-frisk by the cops. Instead they gave the guns to their girlfriends, who were less likely to be searched and held them at the ready. Not unlike Mock Duck in the tong wars, who is said to have closed his eyes while he pulled the trigger, the Fuk Ching were terrible shots. It was not unusual for the FBI to descend on the scene of a noisy gang clash and discover thirty shell casings on the ground and not a single person wounded.
Nevertheless, the Fuk Ching eventually gained control of a series of streets around Eldridge, and in that grove of narrow seven-story brick tenements they established a home base. With their connections to China and Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia, the gang moved into the heroin trade, and Foochow Paul is said to have become a multimillionaire during the 1980s. He bought an apartment in mid-town and property in Fujian and Hong Kong.
From his early days in the gang, Ah Kay knew that he was smarter than most of his lughead, country-boy contemporaries, and he must have observed Foochow Paul’s largesse with a combination of admiration and envy. He was unusually ambitious from the beginning, and excelled as an earner and enforcer. In the spring of 1984, a Fuk Ching member named Steven Lim was rumored to be defecting to the gang’s sworn enemies, the Tung On. On Saint Patrick’s Day, Ah Kay and a couple of associates let themselves into Lim’s apartment. Lim walked out of the bedroom and Ah Kay and the others fired a volley of shots, killing him. As they stood in the hallway they heard a woman scream and realized that Lim was not alone: his girlfriend must be with him. Ah Kay opened the bedroom door and shot her. He
This was lucrative grazing, and the right to graze in a certain corner of the neighborhood did not come uncontested. For each block they controlled, for each basement mahjong game or walk-up brothel, and above all for control of the local heroin trade, the Fuk Ching had to fight a rival, and in Ah Kay’s early years as a foot soldier they regularly clashed with the Tung Ons and the Flying Dragons. Fuk Ching members fought with knives, machetes, and ballpeen hammers—anything that could shatter bone with one quick, lethal swing, then just as quickly be concealed. They had guns as well, but the male gang membersrarely carried them because of the penalties if they were caught with one in a stop-and-frisk by the cops. Instead they gave the guns to their girlfriends, who were less likely to be searched and held them at the ready. Not unlike Mock Duck in the tong wars, who is said to have closed his eyes while he pulled the trigger, the Fuk Ching were terrible shots. It was not unusual for the FBI to descend on the scene of a noisy gang clash and discover thirty shell casings on the ground and not a single person wounded.
Nevertheless, the Fuk Ching eventually gained control of a series of streets around Eldridge, and in that grove of narrow seven-story brick tenements they established a home base. With their connections to China and Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia, the gang moved into the heroin trade, and Foochow Paul is said to have become a multimillionaire during the 1980s. He bought an apartment in mid-town and property in Fujian and Hong Kong.
From his early days in the gang, Ah Kay knew that he was smarter than most of his lughead, country-boy contemporaries, and he must have observed Foochow Paul’s largesse with a combination of admiration and envy. He was unusually ambitious from the beginning, and excelled as an earner and enforcer. In the spring of 1984, a Fuk Ching member named Steven Lim was rumored to be defecting to the gang’s sworn enemies, the Tung On. On Saint Patrick’s Day, Ah Kay and a couple of associates let themselves into Lim’s apartment. Lim walked out of the bedroom and Ah Kay and the others fired a volley of shots, killing him. As they stood in the hallway they heard a woman scream and realized that Lim was not alone: his girlfriend must be with him. Ah Kay opened the bedroom door and shot her. He
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