Mobsters,Gangs, Crooks and Other Creeps - Volume 1 - First excerpt

Ah Hoon - The Murder of Chinese Comedian Ah Hoon

Sometimes a comedian can be dead funny, but after one of his on-stage performances, Chinese comedian Ah Hoon turned up quite dead instead.

The Tong Wars started in Chinatown in 1899, with the powerful On Leong Tong dominating the gambling, and drug interests, in downtown Manhattan. The smaller Hip Sing and the Four Brothers Tongs, joined forces, and engaged in violent confrontations with the On Leong Tong, over the rights to control Chinatown's illegal activities. Almost daily, dead bodies littered the streets of Chinatown, which at the time consisted of Mott, Pell, Chatham Square, and Doyers Streets only.

Ah Hoon was a famous Chinese comedian, who was featured often at the Chinese Theater, at 5-7 Doyers Street, right in the middle of the Tong War Zone. The Chinese Theater was a venue, not only for the Chinese, but for English speaking audiences, who were brave enough to venture into an area where gunpowder permeated the air. Ah Hoon was an associate of the On Leong Tong, and the content of his jokes, in which he constantly disparaged the Hip Sing and Four Brothers Tongs, made it seem like he thought he was bullet-proof.

Things started to get hairy for Ah Hoon, when the Reverend Huie Kim, the pastor of the Christian Morning Star Mission on Doyers Street, warned Ah Hoon that his jokes were not too funny with certain people. The good reverend also told Ah Hoon that Ah Hoon could get badly hurt if he kept telling his jokes on stage, where hundreds of people could hear the many indignities he spewed, disparaging the Hip Sing and Four Brothers Tongs.

Ah Hoon thumbed his nose at the Reverend Huie Kim, and as a result, the Hip Sing and Four Brothers Tongs formerly declared war on the On Leong Tong. Instead of holding back, Ah Hoon stepped up the frequency, and the ferocity, of his jokes on stage. This thoroughly annoyed the Hip Sing and Four Brothers Tongs, so they announced publicly that they were going to kill Ah Hoon. To make sure Ah Hoon got the message, they sent an emissary to Ah Hoon, giving him the exact time and date he was going to be murdered.

Ah Hoon took the threat with a shrug, but it was Hoochy-Coochy Mary, who lived on the floor below Ah Hoon, in a boarding house on Chatham Square, who ran to the police, and begged them to protect the comedian. On December 30, 1909, Police Sergeant John D. Coughlin and two patrolmen accompanied Ah Hoon to his performance at the Chinese Theater. Word had spread quickly on the streets of Chinatown that Ah Hoon was scheduled to be murdered, and as a result, the theater was packed with people hoping to see a live execution, for the price of a simple theater admission. Standing-room-only tickets were also sold out, and there was a huge crowd outside, not too happy at being turned away from witnessing Ah Hoon's dramatic demise.

Seeing the police presence, inside and outside the theater, the Hip Sing Tong decided to back away from their word, and at the end of the show, Ah Hoon, to the chagrin of the crowd, was still alive and joking. Sergeant Coughlin and his two underlings hustled Ah Hoon out of the theater, though a hidden underground tunnel, to his dwelling on Chatham Square. Ah Hoon climbed the stairs of his building, entered his room and locked the door. A group of heavily-armed On Leong bodyguards stood guard outside Ah Hoon's door, while dozens milled on the street outside his building, looking for any impending attack. Ah Hoon went to sleep that night, but he did not wake up the following morning.

Hoochy-Coochy Mary heard a shot in the middle of the night, and she ran upstairs to alert the On Leong bodyguards. When they broke through the door, they found Ah Hoon dead on his bed, with a bullet hole in his chest. What made the matter all the more vexing was that there was only one window in Ah Hoon's room, and it faced a blank building wall five feet away.

The solution to Ah Hoon's death was quite simple, and complicated, at the same time.

So they wouldn't be seen by the On Leong bodyguards, the Hip Sing assassins had slipped into a tenement several buildings down from Ah Hoon's building. They climbed the stairs to the roof, then they jumped across three roofs, to the roof of the building next to Ah Hoon's building. There they lowered the killer on a boatswain's chair tied to a rope, down the narrow alley, until he was parallel to Ah Hoon's window. The killer then quietly entered Ah Hoon's room, and shot the Chinese comedian right through the heart. The deed being done, the killer exited the room in the same manner in which he had entered.