White Devil. Bob Halloran
care of their own. And John, in turn, would take care of them.
As their armed bodyguard, John traveled with Jackie and Peter all over the country as they tended to a variety of business interests. John enjoyed visiting new cities, but he especially loved the fast-paced energy of New York. Being with the Lau brothers gave John a special status and certain privileges. He was with them when they frequented an underground club at the Hollywood Bowl on Woodhaven Boulevard where high-priced escorts flirted in sexy outfits.
The first time John went to the club, he entered nervously. He was concerned that the off-duty police officers guarding the door would take his gun from him when the alarm went off on the metal detectors, but the cops just waved him through. Once inside, John still had a job to do, so he didn’t drink or pick up women, but he beamed with pride as he looked around and realized that he had made it. He fit in at a place filled with rich and powerful people. He was a little over two years removed from starving on his kitchen floor, and now he had more money than he knew what to do with. John’s primary job was to collect protection money from neighborhood stores, but he made most of his money robbing the gambling dens. He and his crew even robbed the cooks at restaurants on payday for what little money those men had. John also got involved with running drugs, and eventually, selling them himself.
He also learned the fine art of a specific form of extortion known as Wat Yan. It was a simple process of letting rich Asian college students or foreign businessmen get drunk enough to start shooting their mouths off. Once they realized they had insulted the wrong people, they paid whatever it took to escape the consequences.
One night when a few of the other men who lived at Jackie’s house in Queens got into a fight, a New York City SWAT team showed up and stormed the house with guns drawn. Shots were fired and one of Jackie’s men was killed. Jackie was arrested along with his brother Peter who had pulled a gun on the cops and threatened them. One of the very few Asian police officers on the force was able to calm everyone down and avoid further bloodshed. John was not arrested, so it was his responsibility to collect the funds necessary to bail out everyone else. It was part of the code.
“We follow a set of rules,” John explains. “If you’re my brother, that means something. You stick together. God forbid, you get arrested and your bail is twenty thousand dollars. Well, we’re all running around with big, thick, gold bracelets on that are worth eight to ten thousand bucks. You take them off. You trade them in to get the money, and you get your brother out. No thoughts. No nothing. You do it.”
But rules come with consequences, and in John’s Chinese family, the consequences were often severe. One of John’s gang brothers named Tony had escalated the fight at the house that resulted in the SWAT team raid. Tony wasn’t killed for his unintended mistake, but he did have his legs broken. John brought Tony to Chinatown where two other men enforced the order. Tony understood.
John also understood that gang violence and retaliation were simply the result of those gangs playing by the rules. So, when a disc jockey working at Jackie and Peter’s waterfront nightclub was shot in the head and killed in October of 1990, John understood it was a proper response to the BTK shooting at the funeral three months earlier. After all, the DJ was a member of Ghost Shadows. And John wasn’t surprised when one week after the DJ’s murder, three members of BTK were killed execution style right out in front of the Lau’s club.
After his nearly two years of residency-like training was completed in New York, John moved back to Boston’s Chinatown. He quickly learned that the FBI was watching him closely. It was the early fall of 1990, and John was walking down Beach Street in Chinatown when he noticed a dark car driving slowly by him. When the car went by for the third time, John jumped in front of the car, forcing it to stop. John slammed both his palms down onto the hood. The passenger in the front seat of the vehicle rolled down his window and called out to John.
“Uncle Seven’s dead!”
The man spoke unemotionally and John, despite learning someone he greatly respected had died, reacted the same way. He walked over to the passenger side of the car where the man identified himself as an FBI agent and showed John his badge.
“Why you telling me?” John asked. “I don’t know anybody named Uncle Seven.”
“No?” the agent asked, surprised. “Ever been to New York?”
“Nope. Just a Dorchester kid. Never been nowhere.”
At 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