CRIME: Trapped Tong

The Hip Sing Tong is a business, social and fraternal secret organization of American-Chinesewhose several thousand members usually get themselves into the papers only by periodic squabblings with their rivals, the On Leongs. Last week, the Hip Sing Tong made news in another way entirely. Simultaneously one night 50 agents of the Treasury Department’s Narcotics Bureau conducted a nationwide raid in Chicago, San Francisco, Butte, Pittsburgh and New York. Result was a motley crew of 23 suspects who, according to the Narcotics Bureau’s New York head, Major Garland Williams, had used the Tong as the framework of a nationwide narcotics ring doing $1,000,000 worth of business a year.

Organization and origin of last week’s raid read like an early cinema scenario. In the latter part of 1936, a Narcotics Bureau agent—whom Major Williams refused to name last week on the grounds that it might cause reprisals—arrested a Chinese on a minor charge in Seattle. The culprit talked freely about a much more interesting compatriot named Chin Joo Hip in Butte, Mont. Chin Joo Hip, a wrinkled, cadaverous tongman with drooping white mustaches, received a call from the agent, who pretended to be the nephew of a rich Pacific Coast gangster. Presently they were fast friends. When the agent left to go East to buy opium for his “uncle,” he had a warm letter of introduction to a tongsman named Jimmy Wong.

Jimmy Wong introduced the agent to his friend Ko Wing Chuck, treasurer of the Hip Sing Tong. The agent bought a generous supply of opium and went to Chicago. Here the members of the Hip Sing Tong were so entranced by his personality and appetite for opium that, when he capped his friendly gestures by presenting them with a wad of tickets to the Braddock v. Louis prizefight, he was rewarded by being initiated into the Chicago branch of the Tong. He brought along a fellow agent, had him initiated also. By this time, the agent was also expressing an interest in heroin and morphine. This the Tong members were able to supply him through a group of white friends, who apparently had a reciprocal treaty for opium trading with the Tong.

Not until the agents had spent $10,000 and almost two years laying their plans did Government officials give the signal to draw in the net last week. New York and Brooklyn provided the biggest haul—five Tong members, ten of their white friends, and one extraneous Chinese. Two Tongmen were arrested in Chicago, one Yee Haim, ex-national president of the Hip Sings in Pittsburgh, two in San Francisco, and two—Chin Joo Hip and Chin Joo Hip Jr.—in Butte. Perimeter of the wide circle of underworld associations of which Chin Joo Hip was the hub appeared to be tangent to an even more notorious crime ring. One of the four women caught by the Narcotics Department’s dragnet was Mary de Bello whose husband, Thomas (“Tommy the Bull”) Pennachio, is currently serving a 25-year sentence in Sing Sing for compulsory prostitution which he received after Special Rackets Prosecutor Thomas Dewey’s roundup of New York vice gangs last year.