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American mobsters – Mock Duck

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No, Mock Duck is not a Chinese restaurant menu item, but rather the name of one of the most notorious Chinese gangsters to ever set foot in the United States.

His real name, Sai Wing Mock, Mock Duck, was born in China in 1879. In the late 1890s, he traveled to the United States and immediately settled in New York City’s Chinatown, where he joined Hip Sing Tong, a small group of Chinese gangsters led by Lem Tong Sing. At that time, Chinatown was controlled by the powerful On Leong Tong, whose boss was the assassin Tom Lee. Soon, Duck put Lem Tong Sing aside as leader of the Hip Sing Tong, and he himself took control. His first act as boss was to demand fifty percent of Tom Lee’s On Leong Tong earnings. This did not sit well with Lee, and as a result, the Tong Wars of the early 20th century began in full force.

Duck, knowing that his Hip Sing Tong couldn’t compete in full gangs against On Leong Tong, joined forces with the Society of Four Brothers to even the numbers a bit. Still, the Tong Wars raged into a bloody mess for three decades, with heavy casualties on all sides.

On January 24, 1906, as a group of On Leong Tong members emerged from a building at 32 Pell Street, a dozen Hip Sing Tong members jumped out of an alley on Doyers Street and fired up to a hundred rounds of ammunition at their rivals. . Two members of On Leong Tong were killed and two were injured. This rampage was reportedly planned by Duck, who ordered murders to be committed, but very rarely became involved in the murders. The only exception was when in 1900, Duck allegedly murdered a New Jersey tailor named Ah See off 23 Mott Street. Duck was tried three times for this murder, but was never convicted.

Duck lived in a top-floor apartment with his family at 21 Pell Street, in the heart of Chinatown. The rest of the apartments in this building also housed members of Hip Sing Tong. There were several attempts on Duck’s life, for which he was forced to wear a “chainmail” vest, in addition to always carrying two pistols and a small ax to protect himself, just in case. He narrowly escaped death, when on January 12, 1912, two members of On Leong Tong quietly entered an apartment at 21 Pell Street and opened fire on a group of Hip Sing Tong members while playing a fan-tan, killing to Lung. You, one of Duck’s main henchmen. Fortunately for Duck, he was out of the building at the time and was not the victim of the shooting, which was obviously intended for him.

Duck was finally arrested by the police in 1912 for the misdemeanor of executing a “game of politics”, more commonly known as the “numbers game”. He was sentenced to two years in Sing Sing Prison, and when he was released in 1914, he returned to Chinatown and assumed a very low profile in the Hip Sing Tong. He briefly made the news in 1932, when, together with the American and Chinese governments, he entered into a truce, officially ending the Chinatown Tong Wars.

Unlike most of his fellow Chinese Tong members, Duck died of natural causes at his Brooklyn home in 1941.

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