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Published Jul 2016
368 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
A mesmerizing true story of money, murder, gambling, prostitution, and opium: the Chinese gang wars that engulfed New York's Chinatown from the 1890s through the 1930s.
Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons, and even bombs. Welcome to New York City's Chinatown in 1925.
The Chinese in turn-of-the-last-century New York were mostly immigrant peasants and shopkeepers who worked as laundrymen, cigar makers, and domestics. They gravitated to lower Manhattan and lived as Chinese an existence as possible, their few diversions - gambling, opium, and prostitution - available but, sadly, illegal. It didn't take long before one resourceful merchant saw a golden opportunity to feather his nest by positioning himself squarely between the vice dens and the police charged with shutting them down.
Tong Wars is historical true crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing its lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate it. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next thirty years.
Scott D. Seligman's account roars through three decades of turmoil, with characters ranging from gangsters and drug lords to reformers and do-gooders to judges, prosecutors, cops, and pols of every stripe and color. A true story set in Prohibition-era Manhattan a generation after Gangs of New York, but fought on the very same turf.
"Starred Review. In this entertaining book, Seligman ably demystifies the stereotypes in an age rife with discrimination and unchecked police abuse." - Kirkus
"The best kind of true crime book: a solid social history as well as a gripping narrative of murder and revenge." - Publishers Weekly
"You may think you know the full story of organized crime in America, but until you read this book – you don't." - T.J. English, New York Times best-selling author of Where the Bodies Were Buried and Havana Nocturne
"A great book! Scott Seligman is a riveting storyteller and he brings New York's Chinatown gang wars of the early twentieth century back to life with nuance and strikingly vivid detail." - Tyler Anbinder, author of Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
"New York's early Chinatown has been portrayed unfairly as an exaggerated Yellow Peril den of mysterious Orientals. By diligently and expertly trawling the evidence, however, Scott Seligman has unshrouded the mystery and offered up the gripping story of the men of Chinatown's underworld and their intramural battles over gambling, opium and other vices." - Paul French, author of the New York Times bestselling Midnight in Peking
"Tong Wars pulls no punches. Seligman brings the skills of a scholar and a detective to a story that plays out like a good police procedural novel." - Sue Lee, executive director, Chinese Historical Society of America
"Seligman masterfully examines the undercurrents of 1925 New York Chinatown in an engrossing depiction of a complex time." - Nancy Yao Maasbach , President, Museum of Chinese in America
This information about Tong Wars was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Scott D. Seligman is a historian, retired corporate executive, and career China hand, and he holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard. Fluent in Mandarin and conversant in Cantonese, he lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China and has worked as a legislative assistant in Congress, a businessman in China.
He is the author of many scholarly and business books, including Chinese Business Etiquette and The First Chinese American. He has published articles in the Asian Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the China Business Review, the Jewish Daily Forward, China Heritage Quarterly, and the New York History and Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center blogs.
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