Pell Street. Short, narrow, and today almost entirely barbershops — you can get a haircut on this block roughly forty different ways. A century ago it was headquarters for one side of a war, and the war was run by two of the most entertaining criminals New York ever produced.
The man who ran Chinatown was named Tom Lee. He led the On Leong tong from over on Mott, controlled the gambling and the opium, and collected a fee from basically every game of chance in the neighborhood. Then there's the fact that should not be true. Tom Lee was also a sworn deputy sheriff of New York County. Tammany Hall handed the biggest vice lord in Chinatown an actual law-enforcement badge — which meant he could run the crime and manage the police response to the crime, personally, from both sides of the desk. He was reportedly the first Chinese official in the history of the city government. He got there by being its most successful gangster.
His rival lived right around here. Fifteen Pell Street was the
base of the Hip Sing tong, and its front man was a round-faced gambler named Mock Duck. Mock Duck is one of my favorite people in this entire city, because by every account he was a genuinely terrible gangster and it did not matter even slightly. He wore a coat of chain mail under his shirt like a medieval knight. In a gunfight, the record suggests his technique was to squat down low, shut his eye
