The Rise of the Green Dragons
Why you should care? Because crime can come from anywhere.
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After a series of escalating gun battles at Chinese pool halls and clubs in the fall of 1990 the Green Dragons gathered in mass to settle the score against the White Tigers once and for all on who reigned supreme in Chinatown’s gangland. But FBI agents and NYPD gang squad officers, were tipped off about the impending gang fight, convinced the White Tigers that it was in their best interest not to show.
At the site of which should have been their crowning achievement in the criminal underworld, on the corner of Ithaca and Whitney Avenues in Elmhurst, Queens at 3 pm in the afternoon, 16 members of the Green Dragons were apprehended and arrested on racketeering and murder charges. Law enforcement officials claimed that the White Tiger/Green Dragon rivalry led to numerous assaults and murders, making Chinatown an extremely dangerous place and the Green Dragons one of the most violent gangs in the city.
“The Green Dragons wanted to take over Queens.” John Chu, who was recruited out of high school at the tender of age of 14, tells me. “We didn’t hang around Chinatown. We had beef in Chinatown with the White Tigers. If we went to Chinatown they’d try to kill us.”
But Chinatown’s insularity gave the Green Dragons, who ranged in age from 16- to 23-years-old, a veil of protection for their criminal activities. In the mid-to-late 1980s they extorted money from dozens of Chinese restaurants, kidnapped rivals, committed seven murders and terrorized their community as they waged war with the White Tigers, the gang that ruled Chinatown.
“The White Tigers hung out in Flushing and Elmhurst and so did the Green Dragons.” Chu says. “We kicked the Tigers out. Most of the Korean gangs like Korean Power and 24K used to run away from us. When any other gang came down to Elmhurst we would beat them up. All of them tried to make peace with us. Some respected the Green Dragons some didn’t. To me at that time, I felt like a strong kid and powerful. Fights were over power, respect and territory.”
The foreign born youngsters who joined the Green Dragons went from being alienated kids to feared gangsters in the Chinese community. To them gang life was the epitome of the American Dream. A kind of criminal celebrity. The money, women, guns and cars they attained was preferable to the low-paying jobs they watched their parents work in abundance. But the dream was a fraud as now most members of the gang are doing life in the federal penitentiary. Wiped off the street by the feds the gang is now only a memory. A point in history for those that once were seduced by the life.
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“I lived in Jackson Heights on 82nd Street on top of a Chinese restaurant,” Chu tells me. “We got involved real young. We could leave our parents house, and live in the groups apartments. Four or five dudes at one, four or five at another. One car for the group. We made between $80 and $250 a week. All bills taken care of. For a 14 or 15 year old that’s a lot of money, every kid looks up to you. When you’re that age, and you have a car and money you feel important. You feel you are getting a lot of respect. Plus so many girls want to get with you, like you were someone big-time.”
Chu ended up doing over a decade in federal prison for his crimes, convicted on a kidnapping charge, but many of his fellow Green Dragon gang members are still serving life sentences in the penitentiary for a string of murders including the Tien Chaiu Restaurant homicides on July 16, 1989- where a gang leader ordered his underlings to kill the manager for daring to question him his demands for protection money- and the February 27, 1990, murder of Jin Lee Soek- a Korean Power gang member who ran afoul of the Green Dragons documented in The New York Times, circa 1992.
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In fact, everyone in the gang but their leader, Kin Fei Wong, a 35-year-old Chinese heroin trafficker better known as Foochow Paul was locked up in the feds. Protecting Foochow Paul’s interests, who was from the Fujian province of China, kept the Green Dragons in direct conflict with the White Tigers and the local Asian community, as they robbed gambling parlors, ran up bills at local restaurants which they had no intention of paying, and extorted money from businesses. He used the immigrant Chinese and Southeast Asian teenagers that barely spoke English, as his own personal army
“He was a millionaire,” Chu says. “He used all of us. He was cutthroat. They called him Dai Lo, which means big brother in Chinese. He was doing big drug business. When the case came down he jetted to China. He didn’t give us anything. Not even a fucking lawyer.”
In the last several years the Green Dragons have had a resurgence in popular culture and the news with a movie, Revenge of the Green Dragons, which flopped, and imprisoned members who were convicted when they were juveniles, like Alex Wong, looking to give back their life sentence and return to society. Wong, in his appeal to the court to lower his sentence for the double murder he committed for the Green Dragons as a juvenile told the New York Post, “I remember the blood, the screams. I was an animal. The Green Dragons were animals.”
His codefendant, Roger Kwok, was also re-sentenced to 35 years for an execution-style murder, since the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that juveniles can’t be sentenced to mandatory life without the possibility of parole. In looking back Chu says, “Its not worth it. We were smart guys who just got caught up at a young age. We could have done something with our lives. Instead of wasting them and being in jail for half our lives.” Or in some cases their whole life. Because in the feds life means life.
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