that point, the agent pulled out a surveillance photo of John in New York wearing the exact jacket he was wearing now.
“Wanna change your answer?” the agent asked.
“You wanna go fuck yourself?” John replied.
With that as his exit line, John put both hands on the roof of the car and did a short drumbeat. He walked away with his head held high and his chest puffed out. He thought about his clever response to the agent, and he smiled. He realized he was important enough to be harassed by the FBI, and his smile grew. Yes, it was another good day in Chinatown.
THE ROOM WAS DARK, and the young Asian men in it were unnerved by the mystery created by the blackness, the smell of incense, the sharp knives, and the distinctive sound of a live chicken. Red wine was poured into a porcelain bowl and placed in the middle of a tall round table. Each man was told to cut his own finger with a knife until several droplets of blood dripped into the bowl. As the men followed the order, someone raised a small hatchet in the darkness, and swung down with enough fury and force to successfully behead the chicken. The body of the bird was tipped upside down until much of its blood spilled into the bowl, and the men were given one final order. Those who showed any reluctance had a cleaver pressed against the back of their heads. That was enough motivation to convince each man to do as commanded. They drank the mixture of human and chicken blood. Thus, the initiation ceremony was complete, and they were all new members of the Ping On gang in Boston’s Chinatown.
This had long been the initiation ceremony for all new members. In 1990, however, when John returned from New York and pledged his allegiance to Ping On, blood rituals like this were no longer typical. John needed only to be sponsored, and Peter Lau took care of that. Lau flew up from New York and vouched for John to a man named Bai Ming, and that was good enough for entry into the gang. Bai Ming had recently become next in line to take over Ping On, which would make him the most powerful man in Boston’s Chinatown, but to assume control, two things had to happen. First, the current leader would have to abdicate the throne, and a bloody war had to be won. When it was over, only one man would be standing, and John Willis, the loyal soldier, would be standing right next to him. The last leader of Ping On was Bai Ming. The first was Stephen Tse. In between, there were several who were killed while wearing the crown.
Stephen Tse, also known as Sky Dragon, was the godfather of Chinatown. He came to the United States from Hong Kong in the early 1970s, settling first in New York before moving to Boston. After serving a short sentence for a home invasion in Brookline, Massachusetts, he was released from jail in 1977, and immediately joined the Hung Mun tong, which presented itself as a social club but was really a base of operation for organized crime in Chinatown. Sky Dragon began recruiting lieutenants to carry out his extortion orders and run his gambling dens, which eventually led to the formation of Ping On. His rise to power was swift, in part because in 1979 Boston’s Ghost Shadows were needed in New York to participate in an ongoing gang war. When the Ghost Shadows took their eye off the ball in Boston, Sky Dragon seized control.
Sky Dragon built his criminal empire by modeling Ping On after centuries-old triads, or underground criminal societies that had their roots in China. Sky Dragon was a ranking member of the 14K triad in Hong Kong, and his reputation was solidified in 1983 when he was one of several triad kingpins who met in Hong Kong and agreed to an international brotherhood of cooperation. Peter Chin, head of the Ghost Shadows in New York, and Danny Mo, leader of the Kung Lok triad in Toronto, were also at the summit. They burned yellow paper to indicate the start of a new venture, and together they began an extremely lucrative heroin trafficking business.
Sky Dragon was able to rise to power primarily through intimidation and threats of violence. The dozens of young men he recruited and united were enough to demonstrate a show of force throughout Chinatown that left businessmen, pimps, and prostitutes very little choice. The power of Ping On was in the numbers, and as a result, Sky Dragon’s extortion of legal and illegal businesses required mostly threats and very little violence. With an army on his side, Sky Dragon could walk into any business or approach any individual and ask: “What’s it worth to you to refuse me?”
Businessmen were quick to understand the logic behind the system. Extortion became an overhead expense, and protection money was an investment in a security system. Businessmen who paid had nothing to worry about. Those who refused would be taking the risk that seventy gang kids might bust up their shops and restaurants, or they might ruin businesses by simply hanging out in front of them, thereby scaring away customers. Pimps and illegal gamblers couldn’t stand up to seventy gang kids either, and no one was willing to solicit the help of the police.
“In Chinese culture,” John explains, “it’s been happening for a thousand years. Organizations protect and take care of their people. Well, in Chinatown, we did the same thing. We protected, took care of the people. And the people know who they are. When they needed money to open a business, they came to the gangsters. They didn’t go to the bank. When they needed to, you know, put in a new addition on their house, they came to the gangsters. When they wanted to build a bigger restaurant, you know, out in the suburbs, they came to the gangsters. And that’s fine. And everybody paid their money. It may be something we would perceive as really screwed up, like extortion and different shit amongst businesses, like it’s all these people preying on the weak, but that isn’t the way it was.”
Sky Dragon ran Boston’s Chinatown in relative anonymity for several years. He appeared to local law enforcement as a law-abiding citizen who simply managed the Kung Fu restaurant on Tyler Street. Even the members of his gang tended to hold one or more low-paying jobs, which was not a common trait among criminals outside of Chinatown.
It was an intentional effort on Sky Dragon’s part to hide his gang activity from the police. It worked quite well until a witness testified before President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime in 1984 that Sky Dragon was the head of Ping On, which the witness described as a “hard-core” gang with nearly one hundred members. The witness identified himself as a former member of the Ghost Shadows. Fearing for his life, the witness gave his testimony from behind a wooden screen, and kept his face buried beneath a hood, and only agreed to speak if his voice were altered.
The witness told the commission that Ping On was involved in everything from racketeering and prostitution to gambling and loansharking. The commission responded by calling Sky Dragon in to testify. He refused. He explained that Ping On’s “ritualistic vows of secrecy” forbade him from speaking, and he invoked his Fifth Amendment right eighty times. Of course, in acknowledging the vows of secrecy, he effectively admitted his role in the gang.
Sky Dragon wasn’t just loyal to an oath, however. He also told a judge that the tendency of the gang to “resort to violence against those violating such vows” made it unwise for him to testify. Sky Dragon may have been concerned about a small Asian man who burst into his Kung Fu restaurant wielding a gun and threatening to wipe out the place, or he may have believed the Boston police detective who told him there was a $10,000 bounty on his head. Either way, Sky Dragon wasn’t talking. Even the leader of the gang was afraid of reprisal from the gang.
Sky Dragon was offered immunity and given the chance to join the Witness Protection Program, but he told the commission he would rather go to prison, and so he did. Sky Dragon was held in civil contempt and sent to the Essex County House of Correction in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Sky Dragon served sixteen months of a maximum eighteen-month sentence.
While he was away, his criminal enterprise suffered and an influx of new gangs infiltrated Ping On territory. The Ghost Shadows moved back into Boston. Immediately upon Sky Dragon’s release from prison, they put out an order to have him assassinated. Local police inadvertently foiled the plot when they noticed a
