Sometimes a comedian can be very funny, but after one of his stage performances, Chinese comedian Ah Hoon turned up pretty dead.
The Tong Wars began in Chinatown in 1899, with the powerful On Leong Tong dominating gambling and drug interests in the Chinatown area of midtown Manhattan. The smaller Hip Sing Tong and the Four Brothers Tongs joined forces and violently clashed with On Leong Tong over the rights to his illegal activities. Corpses literate the streets, on Mott, Pell and Doyers streets almost daily.
Ah Hoon was a famous Chinese comedian who often performed at the Chinese Theater at 5-7 Doyers, right in the middle of the Tong War Zone. The Chinese Theater was a place, not only for Chinese, but also for English-speaking audiences, who were brave enough to venture into an area where gunpowder constantly permeated the air. Hoon was a partner of On Leong Tong, and the content of his jokes, in which he constantly belittled Hip Sing and Four Brothers Tongs, made it seem like he thought he was bulletproof.
Things got tough for Hoon when the Rev. Huie Kim, pastor of Christian Morning Star Mission on Doyers Street, warned him that his jokes weren’t funny with certain people and that he could seriously hurt himself if he kept telling them. jokes on stage Hoon taunted the good reverend, and soon after the Hip Sing and Four Brothers Tongs declared war on On Leong Tong, Hoon increased the frequency and ferocity of his pranks. This did not sit well with Hip Sing and the Four Brothers Tongs, so they publicly announced that they were going to kill Hoon. To make sure that Hoon got the message, they sent an envoy to Hoon to give him the exact time and date that he was to be killed.
Hoon took the threat seriously, but it was Hoochy-Coochy Mary, who lived in the flat below Hoon, in a boarding house in Chatham Square, who rushed to the police and begged them to protect the finger-pointed comedian. On December 30, 1909, Police Sergeant John D. Coughlin and two patrolmen accompanied Hoon to his performance at the Chinese Theater. Word had spread rapidly through the streets of Chinatown, and the theater was packed. The standing room was also sold out, and there was a huge crowd outside, not too happy about being turned away from what they thought would be the extravaganza of a public performance.
Seeing the police presence inside and outside the theater, Hip Sing decided to go back on his word, and at the end of the show, Hoon was still on his feet and bloodless. Sergeant Coughlin and his two subordinates led Hoon out of the theater, through a hidden underground tunnel, to his Chatham Square home. Hoon went up to his room, and a group of heavily armed On Leong Tong assassins stood guard outside his door, while dozens more milled on the street outside his building, watching for any imminent attack. . Hoon went to sleep, but did not wake up the next morning.
Hoochy-Coochy Mary heard a gunshot in the middle of the night and ran upstairs to alert On Leong Tong’s bodyguards. When they broke down the door, they found Hoon dead in his bed, with a bullet through his heart. There was only one window in his room, and it faced a blank wall five feet away. Hip Sing’s killers had broken into a tenement a few buildings down and jumped through three roofs to the roof next to Hoon’s building. The killer was lowered in a boatswain’s chair attached to a rope, down the narrow alleyway to Hoon’s window. The assassin entered the room quietly and shot Hoon to death. He then left the room the same way he had entered it. Hip Sing was so happy about the success of his mission that they held a parade the next day in the streets of Chinatown.
On New Year’s Eve 1910, two days after Hoon’s assassination, the Chinese Theater was again packed to capacity. In the middle of the performance, someone threw bundles of lit firecrackers into the air. People panicked and fled the theater quickly, except for five On Leong Tong members who were shot dead during the fireworks display. No one was arrested for the murders, and the Tong Wars continued for another generation.
