Waverly Place. The Street of Painted Balconies. Look up — red, green, gold, those beautiful curved eaves. If you look at the top of the building at number one twenty-five, that's the Tin How Temple, the oldest Chinese temple in the United States. Still operating. Still burning incense. Been here since eighteen fifty-two.
In the eighteen eighties, this alley was controlled by men who settled disputes with hatchets.
The tongs were Chinese secret societies, and not all of them were criminal — many ran legitimate mutual aid organizations. But the criminal tongs controlled Chinatown's gambling, its opium trade, and its trafficking operations. When disputes broke out, they didn't negotiate. They hired highbinders — professional assassins named for binding their queues on top of their heads so opponents couldn't grab them in a fight. The weapon of choice was a hatchet. Quiet, cheap, and it fit inside a sleeve.
The most powerful tong boss in San Francisco was a man named Fung Jing Toy — kno
wn as Little Pete. And Little Pete was prepared for trouble. He wore a thirty-five-pound chain mail vest under his suit. He wore a steel-reinforced hat on his head. He carried two pistols. He traveled with two German shepherds and a personal bodyguard. He had survived an ambush in eighteen eighty-six because the bullets bounced off his armor. After that, people called him invincible.
On January t
