The Underworld Podcast - Chinatown’s Gangster Prince: Shrimp Boy

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow possesses one of the best mob nicknames out there. The San Francisco Chinatown gangster went from teenage immigrant hooligan from the streets of Hong Kong to one of the most infamous Asian organized crime figures in America. His story has everything: Chinatown tongs, Hong Kong triad influence, immigrant protection rackets, gambling dens, and the violent gang wars that turned San Francisco’s streets into a battleground. Then comes Shrimp Boy’s strange second act, when he reemerges from prison claiming to be a reformed community leader, even as the FBI is building a sprawling undercover case around him. It all ends in a wild corruption and organized crime scandal involving guns, money laundering, murder allegations, and a California state senator caught in the same net. Subscribe: www.patreon.com/theunderworldpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I can't sleep with Benjamin Boster. 240 in the morning, September 4th, 1977, the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown.

The place is packed. This is a neighborhood that runs on its own clock, the oldest Chinatown and the Americas, a few crowded blocks of the densest real estate in the city, where the waiters and the cooks, the gamblers and the gangsters and the college kids all come off shift around the same. same time and go looking for noodles. The Golden Dragon stays open till dawn, and it's owned by

the Hop Singh Tong, one of the old fraternal brotherhoods that have run this neighborhood since before anyone in the room was born. The Tongs, well, some are community organizations, some are organized crime groups connected to the triads, some are both, but more on that later. Everyone here, though, is just eating noodles and soup. Families finishing a wedding banquet, a couple of tourists, college kids on a road trip, and scattered around the tables, young men from the street gangs that have turned these alleys into a shooting gallery for the last five years. Because you have to understand what Chinatown is in 1977. When the immigration laws in America change in 1965, a whole new wave of Asian immigrants

hits Chinatowns in the U.S. They're not farmers' kids or from the country, they're kids and teenagers from the slums of Hong Kong and, to a lesser extent, Macau. and they arrive in the states and find few opportunities. And the neighborhoods, mostly peaceful since the vicious Tong wars half a century ago, don't have a great place for them. So they form their own street gangs, assert their presence, get involved in the burgeoning underworld of Chinatown,

of gambling and drugs and prostitution and extortion led by the old guard, who have been there for decades, but see some value in the new wild youngsters who don't hesitate to get violent. So they put them on. And the gangs have now spent half a decade killing each other over gambling money and fireworks money and pride, right out in the open in broad daylight on the most crowded streets in the city. Something like 50 people have been killed in those five years, and the cops can barely lay a finger on it because nobody in Chinatown talks to the cops,

even if they could. And at one of the tables tonight, by his own telling, is a 17-year-old kid, fresh off the boat from Hong Kong about a year ago. Small, quiet looking, runs with a young crew tied to the Hop Sing Tong. His grandmother gave him a nickname back home, a humble little name meant to fool the evil spirits into leaving him alone. She called him Shrimp Boy. Three young men walk in the door.

They've got their faces half cover. One of them is carrying a 45, two of them have shotguns, and they've come for the leaders of a rival gang they've been told are eating here. Somebody shouts, and then the room comes apart. The gunmen open fire into a crowded restaurant, not at one table, into the room. Tables go over, glass goes everywhere, people are screaming and crawling and trying to get under anything they can as the bullets keep flying. It lasts seconds, and when it's done and the shooters are gone, five people are dead on the floor of the golden dragon and 11 more are bleeding. The waiter, the tourists, the college kids, and here's the thing,

Not one of the dead is a gangster. The gang members the shooters came for, they hit the floor, they crawl out, and they live. Every single person killed is an innocent bystander who just wanted somewhere to eat at the end of the night. And that small, quiet 17-year-old, he walks out of their alive. His real name is Raymond Chow. And the slaughter he survives that night is the opening scene of one of the strangest criminal lives this country has ever produced. A kid who will climb from this restaurant floor. all the way to the top of a 150-year-old secret society.

He'll become a snitch and then a king who'll get a certificate of honor from the city of San Francisco and a shout-out from a U.S. senator. And he'll end it all with two life sentences for murder and 160 or so other charges, having dragged a sitting California state senator down with him. This is the Underworld podcast. Welcome back to the only podcast that dives into the world of international oneness crime, and the only podcast where the hosts are decently well-adjusted human beings and not insane people. That's me, Danny Gold, and my co-host and Reformed Englishman, world traveler and casual layabout Sean Williams,

who was on his what, like, I guess you were just on your ninth vacation of the year. I don't even know what country you're in right now or like what planet you're on. Yeah, there's a few. Yeah, I got a nice tan, sun's out, out of office was on, as usual. But still podcasting, so some things never die. Yeah, we're just got a passion for me. Just got a good R-D that just get through it. Are you, can you talk about where you're going on Tuesday, or are you going to get arrested by the feds?

This is going to go out. No, let's not talk about that. I'll do it on the next one. Yeah. Yeah, when you're back. I think we should, yeah, when you're back. Anyway, I am unfortunately not at the Spotify office this week, as you guys can tell. so you're going to have to make do with our sort of low quality.

You're like in a statitarian. What are you in right now? Just white walls and keeping you. I mean, so we got given like temporary accommodation after the temporary accommodation after the temp accommodation. So I'm now in my like third white wall dead apartment of this trip so far. I was going to look around and look at something,

but there's nothing. There's nothing there, dude. There's not like a hostage video. It's a white wall. I'll hold up a newspaper or something. I don't know. We'll get there. Only 45.

rates to go. We're going to get through this. We're going to tough it out. As always, we've got bonus episodes for you over at patreon.com. Sistnerworld Podcast. That's where the real heads hang out. Five bucks a month gets you all the bonus stuff. You can also sign up on Spotify or iTunes to get these episodes ad free at a night early usually. Merch, t-shirts, the whole catalog is at underworldpod.com. And you can email us tips, complaints, and offers a free product at the underworldpodcast at gmail.com. I want one of those, um, it's like really hot in New York. So I'm sweating through my apartment. I want one of those like mattress things that tech guys have

where you can cool off your mattress. You know what I'm talking about? They're like $3,000. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I feel like it'll, it's going to solve all the issues in my life. It worked really well beef jerky, you know? We just talked about people just sent us beef jerky.

So I'm, you know, taking a shot in the dark right here. Sleep pod, eight pot. I don't know what the place is called. Whatever, whatever, dude. I don't know, man. I guess the keys you've got to narrow it. down quite a bit. So I guess we need to eventually just start making shows for organized criminals and not just about them. Maybe that would get us more advertising. Talking about that for

years. Okay. So we're all over the place, guys. It's not going to be. It's not going to be our best. So it's letting you guys know that right now. But we're going to start with San Francisco's Chinatown. We've done a ton on Chinatown in New York City, a bunch of really good episodes, which got into the history at the turn of the century, a little bit of the Great Tong Wars in the 1910. 1920s, though I would like to revisit that for a future episode. And then the gang wars of the 70s and 80s, ghost shadows, flying dragons, and even into the emergence of the Vietnamese gang born to kill. Just a real story to history.

Fascinating stuff. Some of my favorite episodes. So go back and listen to those if you happen before. But San Francisco, I think the Chinatown there has as much of a story gangster past, albeit one that I don't know as much about. Though I did recently read the Barbary Wars, which is the same guy who wrote the original gangs in New York. and it does have a lot of just absolutely brutal stuff about the Chinatown gangs back then

in San Francisco, just insanely horrific prostitution networks, you know, opium dens, all that. I mean, we're talking gangs and stuff going back like 150 years. I think more so than even New York City when it comes to Chinatown or Chinese gangs, triads, all that. And even today, take for example, like, if you order drugs delivered to you in New York City, it's going to be a Dominican guy in a Yankee hat driving a fake Uber, Tahoe. But if you order drugs delivered to you in San Francisco, it's going to be a 23-year-old Asian guy in an RX-7 with a dragon tattoo down his arm and just a wild haircut. They get active

over there, Sean. That's kind of what I'm trying to say. And nobody gets more active than shrimp boy. And I mean, how could you not with that nickname, right? But also, his story includes like a sitting California state senator getting arrested for trying to buy shoulder-fire missiles from Muslim separatists in the Philippines. So you know there's a lot going on with this guy. guy. Okay, now you're picking my interest. Is that, I'm assuming it's Abu Sayaf or something? I actually met some of those guys. Terrible food.

They would make me want to, terrible food that would make me want to set up my own, you know, caliper. Cali would make you join your own cal. Well, I would assume that they had terrible food because the Philippines food is basically all pork and it's actually delicious. So if you're, you know, a member of ISIS Philippines, like you got, you got, it's noodles. You got no flip. You got nothing.

Do you know what? That's the first time I've thought about that since until now. It's the first thought I had. You make a very good point. I mean, like when I was out there, I was begging them for things that weren't crabs or pork. There was nothing. There were no vegetables. So looking around this like carpeted with beautiful palm trees and verdant hills and not a vegetable in sight.

So I don't know how they don't have scurvy. Maybe that's where they got those wispy little bids. Oh, yeah, England's known for their vegetables. Like, come on, what are you doing here? So a word on lore or two. We used to talk about that all the time, how it's sort of created, how to tell what's true, what's real, between like embellishing law enforcement and lying-ass criminals.

Raymond Chow or Shrimpoy is a guy who at one point told prosecutors he was in charge of all Asian organized crime in San Francisco. He's also a guy who told reporters with like a totally straight face that he never hurt anybody and just wanted to keep kids off the street through the power of meditated. So, you know, it's this guy, a lot of the stories, it's all over the place. He's very press-friendly, loves to tell a good tale, wrote a never-published autobiography. So, you know, grain of salt is all I'm trying to say.

He loved the press, this guy. I have a faint recollection, I think, I don't remember it exactly because my brain is riddled with holes, but I was at a journalism conference at Berkeley once, like back in the vice days. And I think a journalism professor either called Shrimp Boy on the phone when he was in prison and I chat with him for the conference, like live, or just played a tape of it. And it was him saying just like wild confessionary. Is that a word confessionary?

Just wild stuff. Yeah. He's that sort of guy. Like, if he was in New York, he would have been, I think, an icon with a movie made about him that everyone would have talked about. Quick note on sources. There's just, there is a lot there out on on him. There's the best long form stuff, I think, is a 2007,

San Francisco Weekly profile. There's a New York Times Magazine piece from 2015. and then years of like really intricate coverage from all the local San Francisco channels and outlets and websites. And the feds have a giant affidavit that I read through as well. But now we are going to go back to a much simpler time, 150 or 175 years ago. When Sean's views on Asians that he talks about when the cameras are off, they were a lot more popular in California. A century of humiliation, folks. I'm living it.

But a quick refresher, the triads are typically the name that comes up when you think of Chinese organized crime and with good reasons. They're these massive groups spread all over the world with tens of thousands of members, heavy in Hong Kong. They started out as secret societies in the 17th century, and they formed as an act of rebellion against the Qing dynasty, sometimes known as the Manchu dynasty, who had just taken over China. And the Qing dynasty were seen as like these illegitimate leaders

and all these groups, these secret societies, wanted to bring them down. And again, I'm just going to tell this supposed origin story because it involves Shaolin monks, then everyone my age who grew up listening to early 90s rap is obligated to tell stories about Shaolin monks like whenever they pop up. It's like some real jizz-a album intro shit. The legend goes that in 1674,

the second emperor of the dynasty reaches out some Shaolin monks to help him fight off a challenge. They do it, they succeed, and they do it really well, they refuse payment, and their popularity and reputation as fierce honorable warriors grows after they finish the job. This worries the emperor, who sends his men to the job.

their monastery to kill them. I think this actually is the intro to Jizz's album right now that I think about it. You know? The emperor had demons and he sent, you know what I'm talking about? You don't know. No, no. Like that era of rap is, that just goes on. I think our fan base probably knows the exact, like, you know, the Shao, the Emperor sent his ninjas, warriors.

Anyway, only five out of 130 the monks survive. And those five swear revenge and that they'll overthrow the emperor and reestablish the previous dynasty. Each of the five starts a secret group dedicated to the goal and they operate in the shadows against the feudal overlords. And it's actually Europeans who start calling them the triads because their symbol is a triangle where the three sides represent heaven, earth, and man. Others call it the Hong Mun Society. And apparently all Hong Kong triads trace their origin story to that. And then in the future, the emcees come to live out the name and it just goes from there on and on and on. These societies fought the empire and acted as the unofficial government.

where the actual government couldn't rule, sort of like a similar vibe to how the Sicilian mafia came to be in Sicily. And every time these secret societies try to rebel over the next few centuries, they fail, and each failure, these triads would flee the country going to Hong Kong,

Indochina and North America, especially in the 19th century. So by the 1900s, though most of these groups have pretty much done away with all the politics and were focused on the fun stuff, like running criminal enterprises. Yeah, shout out to the next episode

which is going to be about the rise of probably the biggest Chinese secret society slash narco gang during the communist revolution, which was the Green Gang. So yes, this is me telling Danny that I finally made it through that excruciating academic rule that's taken me, I don't know, maybe half the year so far. And on my 12th holiday of the year as well, so go me. I offer to write those episodes like five times. You were like, I want to do the Green Gang.

I really want to do the great thing. It's so interesting. It was like 2024. open the book and then I slam my head into the wall many times. But I've done it now, so we're good to go. That's why you're in that white room with nothing on the walls. Keep just hitting yourself. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've just, I've washed all the red off it. Now, Chinese immigration into the U.S., it really starts in the mid-19th century as immigrants come in to work as laborers and minors, often working in seriously bad conditions and facing like really horrible systemic racism. The first big waves of Chinese immigration to California comes with a goal rush, which is 1849

and after. Then you have the railroads famously. You know, it's overwhelmingly men overwhelmingly from the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province coming to do this brutal labor that nobody else wants to for a fraction of the pay. The first Tong is established in 1860 in California. The tongs are like civic organizations like the Rotary Club or a merchant organization set up so that they could all look out for each other. but they also serve as like protectors in his courts because the Chinese don't trust the official American ones.

They're modeled after the triads and some are triad affiliated, but they're at first kind of legitimate like mutual aid societies and they draw their membership from the railway workers and gold miners. Some of them had been triads themselves and they fled the crackdowns and famines back in China. Of course, as the amount of Chinese immigrants continues to grow in Chinatown's form in cities like any insular ethnic community during the time from the Italians to the Jews to the Irish, somebody needs to control the vice rackets and the tongs step up and they do just that. You've got the gambling houses, prostitution, opium. There's just, there's money to be made there, especially when it's like 95% men, you know? So you have like this Bachelor Society. So the Vice Economy, like I said, heavy on the prostitution.

It's just, it's enormous. Yeah. Isn't Bachelor Society the name of that reality show you're pitching? It's actually about the vacations that you just went on in Instagram with your friends, with your bros. Yes, yeah. Okay, tachshay. So, of course, you have all this money being made and this racket sort of being controlled. And what happens, you have different guys who want to, you know, be the overseers. You have the Tong Wars, which break out in the 1890s.

And Chinatowns actually across the country. In Boston and San Francisco and New York, you have various tongs trying to seize territory and control. You've got newspapers then are full of like these lurid stories about Chinatown Tong violence. Hatchet men were famous. They kill people with hatchets, pistols. opium dens, slave girls, murder alleys. Some of it exaggerated, sensationalized, cartoonish, but some of it very, very real.

There's that show with Warrior. You ever see that? No, no. When's that from? One of the pay channels in the US about, like, fighting, like, the Tong Wars basically in Oakland, in San Francisco, I think. But, like, very kind of giant-west, you know.

Yeah, this came up recently. It looks kind of good, actually. Yeah, I watched it for a bit. It was good. but it's very, very, very similar vibes. And those Tong wars, they eventually settle by like 1920, 1930, but the Tongs do maintain their power in the community. A 1988 paper by the Justice Department described it like this,

quote, during and after this transition, Tong leadership retained a powerful hold on the business and politics of American Chinatowns. Today, some Tongue sponsor a complex mixture of legal and illegal activities and remain essential to Chinese organized crime leaders because of their influence within the Chinese community.

Moreover, a few Tongue leaders are themselves deeply involved in criminal conspiracies. Now, right before the Tong war broke out, the Tongue Wars broke out, the U.S. had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which basically severely restricted Chinese immigrants, and that's followed by the 1924 National Origins Act, which restricts a whole lot of immigration of different groups, including Asians and Chinese. So you don't really have new people coming into the communities besides the ones that are got smuggled in for like 50 years.

So things calm down quite a bit in the mid-20th century after those early. wars with the massacres and the wild violence, but that all changes in 1965 with the Immigration Naturalization Act of 1965, and all of a sudden you have Chinese immigrants jumping from like sometimes as low as a hundred a year or 20,000. You know, that's where we get these quote of poor violent teens mentioned in the cold open. They're from the slums, though, not the farms, right? They arrive at the Chinatown that's overcrowded and short on jobs, and they get mocked by the kids who are born here, the American-born Chinese or the ABCs.

Not to be confused with the ABGs who also have their strongholds in the Bay Area. So, yeah, these kids, they form up their gangs. And in New York, it's like the ghost shadows and the Flying Dragons. And San Francisco, you get the Waching, which means youth of China. They're kind of bunch of fresh off the boat kids hanging around the hopsing Tongues gambling joints. The old Tongs kind of look at these kids, these street kids, and they realize they're going to make perfect muscle. Lookouts for the gambling dens, protection, enforcers, because, you know, then and even now, got all the Chinese business owners paying protection money, but all the rival Tongs, they're

growing their own youth crews to compete and sort of take over that hustle. It's crazy because it happens exactly the same in New York, in Boston, and in San Francisco. You have these same trends happening. And by the early 1970s, Chinatowns are like a low-grade war zone. You've got the Wa Ching, you've got a breakaway crew called the Joe Boys, and you've got Tong affiliate crews like the Hoping boys, which are the youth wing of the Hoping Tong. And they're fighting over. everything that was the same 50 years ago. Gambling, extortion, loan sharking. Seasonally and very lucatively,

illegal Fourth of July fireworks would challenge quaint until you have people who start dying over it. And it's into all of this in 1976 that a 16-year-old kid from Hong Kong walks off a plane. Yes, nice. This is the 90s movie's voice. Yeah, good.

Raymond Chow was born Chow Kwok Chung on December 31st, 1959 in Hong Kong, than a British colony. He has three brothers, two older, one younger. Some other sources say he was born in 1960 in mainland China, but Hong Kong, I think, definitely makes more sense. Now, it's not 100%,

but most stories have him being nicknamed shrimp boy by his grandmother because he's a small kid, but also per the family story, to fool the evil spirits to overlooking him by making him sound like, you know, not important, like nothing, like a shrimp. I swore I've known about this guy for like 15 years,

and I thought it was because he ran like a seafood company, which is something a lot of Asian organized crime was involved with. I don't know. Kind of like that version better in my head, you know. Just kind of life, Sean, isn't it? It's always better in your head. It's like when you have a song you think has like this deep meaning. And then you look it up and there's an interview with a singer and he's like, yeah,

I wrote this song about my friend Carl because he kept getting too drunk and like peeing in the closet. And that's like the entire meaning of the song. Yeah, maybe you're telling me about that's tune in New York when we met and I wonder why you're talking about like Kierkegaard and stuff. because to be fair, it's just called Carl's boozy wee song, wasn't it? I mean, these jokes are just not. You must be jet lagged.

What is going on here, buddy? The jet lag is real. I should be in bed like two hours ago. Put some shades on, man. Yeah, I should have done, actually. But I would have looked too cool. Yeah, we can't have that. No.

According to The New York Times, his dad runs a successful barbershop, but loses it to gambling debts when he's like eight or nine years old. So Shrimp Boys' entire family moves into a shack, which later burns down. And then they move to an even worse shack. Not just a normal shack, a much worse shack. That's how poor he is. He's a small kid, but he's tough, he's violent, he's drawn to the street life, and he gets recruited at nine by local gang members to start faring heroin around.

He also stabs some people up for his gang leader. By his telling, he's a teenage boss running things, getting cash from the gambling dens before he ever leaves Hong Kong. I wonder if he was in like, you know, that old apartment complex in Hong Kong where like you didn't see the sun. Oh my God. Yeah, the Wall, Calum, Ward City. Yeah. Yeah.

I always wonder what I think it doesn't exist anymore. No, they knocked it down. Yeah. Yeah. What a place, huh? He says he comes to San Francisco carrying an actual letter of introduction from his gang boss back home. Again, do we know this is true? Not really.

I mean, it could very well be, but it also could be complete BS, which kind of reminds me of the early episodes we did on when the Russian mafia came to Brooklyn. And a lot of sources would be like, this guy killed 17 Czechoslovians back home and was a vore and was like from the gulags. And then some other source would be like, he actually only ever spent six weeks in prison because he got caught stealing bicycles. But the magazine articles that you read for this like more legit, because I feel like a lot of lazy feature writers just quite random books like the gospel and then hedge with an onto his source. like, well, I mean, like we do in every episode of this show, basically. I mean, they were good, but like the New York Times Magazine article was based on a lot of what he said about himself, which, you know, I feel about stuff like that when it comes

to guys like this. I don't take that as, as like primary source material. So I try in the episode to be like, according to his family, according to him in that regard, because you do have to take that stuff. Especially, you know, these guys are hustlers. Like they're, they're liars for a living. And when they're telling their own story, they're not going to be like, yeah, it was like a pussy back home and just like a weiner kid and I came here and then I wrote you know I'm so like it's just not

going to be um you're either going to get a completely exaggerated version of like how they're just a nice guy who did nothing wrong or how they were like the baddest guy to ever exist essentially why you call it why you called a shrimp well because you know I'm quiet and small yeah oh oh sorry you want and my mom wanted to ward off evil spirits cool okay we got it yeah good quote so he arrives in San Francisco around 1976 at about 16 years old with his family. Third grade education can barely read or write English and he never really will. Almost immediately he falls in with the Hop Singh boys, the street enforcers tied to the Hop Singh Tong. They're shaking down the gambling dens, you know, pimping, the classic sort of apprenticeship that you have when you're a 16 year old

Chinatown gangster. And he stands out fast for one quality above all, which is that he just does not hesitate to get violent and he throws down. There's a story he tells the New York Times Magazine, again, his story that not long after he arrives at 17, somebody drops him at a house in a wealthy part of town and tells him to beat up the guy who lives there to send a message on behalf of some mafia types who hired them. Shrimp Boy says he finishes the beating with the help of two by four in about two minutes and walks away $3,000 richer.

And then about a year after he gets to town, Shrimp Boy is sitting in a restaurant on Washington Street when the world goes sideways, and this is where we get the cold open. To understand what happens at that restaurant at the Golden Dragon, we go back to the fireworks I mentioned. You know how it goes, man, maybe in New York right before July 4th, you and your palace drive over to Pennsylvania, you load up the car trunk with fireworks, you come back to the block, you sell them for two, three, four times the cost of 14-reported Rican Cates who set them off at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. for about seven weeks in a row, and you're forced to just kind of lay there in bed. You can't go back to sleep, Sean, and you're just like thinking about,

where did it all go wrong? Why is this, why am I not sitting on the Mediterranean right now? Maybe the Adriaticse even, just eating tiny fried fish, maybe drinking an apparel spritzer and a groaning. But you're not, Sean, are you? You're in Brooklyn and the fireworks, they just keep going off at 3.15 a.m. even when it's August 12, you know? What poetry you weave sometimes. It's really, it's very beautiful. I mean, I'm sitting in a empty apartment looking at a dog mess bag. So there's where I am, if anyone was to know. Yeah, you just got back from vacation.

You're about to go to a tropical environment to do someone else paying for. Oh, too much information. Oh, yeah. Yeah, people could probably go two or two together from that one that we should talk about because of the feds and because, but either way, I'm sure, I don't think they listen to the, oh, actually, never mind. Now in San Francisco, kids stream at the Chinatown from all over the Bay Area to buy illegal fireworks for the 4th of July, and the sales are run by a

crew called the ping boys. Kids from the Pinguan housing projects, they work under the watching who take a cut. And it's actually, it's real money. Like, it's legit. On July 4th, 1977, a group of Joe boys, that's another gang, they go up to the Pinguan projects, planning to rob the Ping Boys of all their piled up fireworks cash. This is what, the 70s, right? Everything's in cash. They can't find parking, which, you know, I get. So they walk up to the projects on foot and the rival spot them. A gun battle break. breaks out right there. Once over, one Joe Boy is dead and several others owned it. The war, the watching and the Joe Boys and the Tongback crews are fighting. It runs hot over this for years.

It splits right out into the open, you know, down Grand Ave and Pacific and Stockton, the most crowded blocks in the neighborhood. One estimate put something like 50 lives lost over the five years of it. Like this is legit gang war stuff. Daytime shootings on busy streets, guys chasing rivals through produce stalls into park cars, people diving behind doorways while tourists are out buying postcards a block away. You know, it's a tiny, dense patch of the city like a lot of Chinatowns are. A few hundred square yards, really. Everyone knows everybody and everyone's shooting at everyone.

And I think, I assume San Francisco was like New York in that, you know, the early 90s get a lot of attention for the murder rate being as the highest has ever been. But the late 70s in these cities was really, really bad, too. And this was without crack. I mean, there was definitely fights over heroin, but people were just shooting each other all the time back then. Of the fireworks. There was like law enforcement.

It was terrible. Over fireworks, yeah. So I probably should look it up before we started recording. But I assume because the trends follow each other, late 70s, San Francisco also had a pretty high murder rate, almost on par with the crack war era. But underneath that gunfire, right, it's actual business, which is squeezing the neighborhood for money.

All the extortion, all the protection rackets, merchants, the restaurants, the gambling houses, the massage parlors, every single one. They got to pay so that the window doesn't get broken. The customers don't get scared off. The gambling dens are making a ton of cash. Can we be, can we slow into some pie-gal stereotypes of just, you know, these guys gambling? You ever see that clip on YouTube of the meme of the guy who is wearing sunglasses?

It's like 7 o'clock. It's like a gambling den just got busted up. I think it's in a Boston Chinatown. And the guy is like wearing sunglasses and a black leather. their trench coat and they're like, did you know there was a gambling den right here? And the guys, me? No. No idea. I've no way. You ever see what? You know what I'm talking about?

No. It's one of the greatest. Stick it on the lid. I've got to see it. Yeah. Just look it up. It's incredible. So yeah, the kids, they are the enforcers. They go in, they rough up the shopkeepers. They stand guard at the gambling dens to make sure the other tongs don't rob them. And the tongs themselves, they can maintain the air of community leader and respectability while they privately take a cut and basically

they oversee everything. In New York, it led to some conflict, I think, where the street guys were kind of just like, we're actually in charge, not you guys, and the Tongues, the older guys, couldn't control them. That's when you had the infamous Nikki Louie, the ghost, all that sort of stuff. But I don't know if it got to that point in Sipusco,

where they had it locked down much, much more. The Joe boys, they blame the watching leadership, a guy named Michael Hot Dog Louie in particular. And on top of their dead friend, they come to believe that, like, their gang members that died throughout the course this war, their graves are desecrated, which violates a deep underworld code about respecting the dead in their sort of Chinese gang war stuff. So they start planning. You know, you get the James Brown going.

Actually, don't do that deal. We can't get that copyright thing for right now. Yeah, but wait, will there be some like amazing Chinese knockoff version of it? Because that would be perfect for this episode. Payback? Yeah. There might be. I'm sure there is. So the night of September 3rd, 1977, that's when a Joe boys boss gets his boys together, they get the guns together, they plan it so the younger members are the trigger pullers because they won't see a serious time. They get the tip that Michael Louis, hot dog is eating late at that restaurant. About 240 in the morning, September 4th, 1977.

The three guys walk in, masked up, packed restaurant, Sunday into Monday crowd, families, shift workers, terrorist, college kids, all that. Somebody yells, man, with a gun. The actual target, Michael Louie hits the floor, and the gunman just open up right there. They spray the room. we get the cold open. When it's over, five people are dead,

11 more are wounded. I mean, this is, I can't remember the last time five people were killed in a shootout in New York. Yeah. I don't even,

I mean, you got to go back 20 or 30 years. Like this is, we're talking insane stuff. Not one of the dead is a gangster. They're like waiters and tourists and kids fresh out of college visiting San Francisco.

One survivor tells ABC 7 decades later that he grabbed his friends, they all hit the deck and quote, all hell broke loose and they felt the blood coming out of it. I think there's actually a similar shooting that happened in Boston in the 90s, maybe in New York around the time. Like all the teenage Chinatown gangbanger was just wild, wild stuff.

So where is Shrimp Boy in this? By his own account, he's 17 at the time. He's inside the Golden Dragon that night, eating with other Hobsing Boys when the shooting starts and he survives it. And that's reported KDTVU, KTVU, which is San Francisco Channel, NBC, the History Channel, Gangland. They all repeat this. we don't know that that he was there.

But it might well be true. That massacre, front page news around the world. Chinatown business craters. Chamber Kana says it drops by half. The mayor puts up a $100,000 award. San Francisco PD, they revive in old Chinatown gang squad called the Asian gang task force. And eventually gets credited with basically ending open gang warfare in Chinatown by 1983. And seven Joe boys are eventually convicted of the war.

murder. Why do you think this stuff didn't travel like the Italian mafia stories from New York, like, or any other cities in the United States? Because I didn't know anything about this kind of stuff before we did the pod. I don't think we, we would know anything outside America of these gangs. You mean globally? Yeah, yeah. The godfather, Mario Puzzo, right? That was you. And then is that is. Yeah, just good stories. I mean, they were bigger and more violent. and for much longer, the Italian mafia, you know. And they were much, much more powerful. That's true.

I mean, they controlled, they didn't just control local Chinatown politicians. You had, you know, very high up politicians in America being controlled, like, you know, on the take. Like, they were as, and they mixed with all the celebrities and all that sort of, you know, it was just a different level of success and power and violence. Like, these guys were violent, but it was. I mean, the Italian mob, and back then was, you know, dozens of people a year. The mob wars or the Colombo War, I think was, like, it was insane. Yeah. Thank you for answering my question.

Hey, anytime, bud. Cheers. Sometimes you learn things. I was thinking about when you were talking about the gambling as well, the kind of stereotypes about Chinese gambling. And next week's episode has got some kind of hilarious insights into the kind of games that Chinese people are playing for money, which is, you know, some of them are like, pick up stones, chuck the stones on the floor, bet on that. Or let's throw some dice.

Literally anything, anyone's betting on that. There's one about sticks, just chuck a load of sticks on the floor. We'll bet on that. They've all got a name. I would lose money on that, for sure. I think also too, Chinatown was a lot more insular

than, you know, literally was maybe after the early 1900s, right? Language difference. Even the police didn't know what to do because they didn't happen when we spoke the language. So, let alone, reporters are getting good stuff. So I think the insularity is a big, big part of that.

As for Shrimp Boy, he's able to rise a bit in that vacuum of power when all those arrests happened. And he's become kind of a known quantity, like a young up-incomeer. It doesn't last long, though, before he gets caught up. In 1978, he goes down for the first time, strong-arm robbery in Chinatown. And the way he tells it, I don't know, he's always going to have this version where it's not quite his fault.

He's been led to believe he's going to, rob some shady gambling parlor. When he gets there, he realizes that's not the case, but he already has his gun out, so he's just going to go ahead and rob them anyway. Can't put the gun back inside. He gets 11 years, serves about 70 years in four months, where he says he was dealt heroin when he was inside the jail and inside prison. He gets paroled in 1985.

So he comes out just when that power vacuum is kind of kicking off. He gets out and right away gets involved in running an escort service. He's like sitting outside a noodle shop when he notices some hookers nearby. and he convinces them he can help them make more money than their current pimps. So he rents a big house. He sets up shop and he's making tons of cash. From the New York Times, quote, he started rolling profits into a variety of enterprises,

cocaine desk distribution, fencing stolen weapons and Rolexes, jewelry and pills. Shrimpoy talks about that stage of his life as normal people often talk about college. Crazy time. Learned a lot. Needed to grow up and move on. Also just sounds exhausting. I mean, too many phone calls and email. Does email exist at this point?

I don't know. Today, I'll be terrible, like, telegram chats and pop-up ads. I just don't think it's worth the life anymore. I don't know. You sit in the back of a tea shop and you have your people do stuff for you. You know, that's the thing about organized crime that I think people forget. It mostly is a miserable life. I feel like when it comes down to it.

But you can spend a lot of time hanging out with your friends, you know? Maybe at the pork store, maybe just going out at strip club, at the bars. you get to hang out a whole lot with your butts, you know? I mean, that's why people are listening to this show, mate. But, like, that's the underrated aspect. It's not about the money and the power. It's about just like, you know, who else gets to go four or five nights a week and just hang out with their pals? Yeah, yeah.

Sounds lovely, actually. I'm sorry. Sorry, baby. I can't watch the kids. It's business, babe. I got to go. I can't do it. I got to watch the kids.

You got to watch the kids. I can't do it. You know? Yeah. Actually, yeah, you're on to saying there. It's the power of friendship is really what it's all about. Yeah, I'll have a word. All right.

Until they snitch on each other and everyone or try to kill each other, which is always, you know, that's the negative part. So he also gets into a shootout with a guy who had been messing with his sister-in-law, and in 1986, so barely out, he's charged with a whole stack, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, mayhem, a legal firearm possession. There's a great shrimp boy line from a later jet house interview

where a porter asked him about the rumor that he used to chase people to Chinatown with a machine gun and he goes, well, yeah, people shot at me, which, fair. Chinatown gangs, like I said, very wild. He does about three more years and he gets out again around 1989. When he gets out this time, he claims he's going on the straight and narrow path. He takes a job begging groceries at a store in Daily City. The job ends when his boss gets a spooked phone call from the SFPD gang force.

Basically a heads up about who they're hiring so he gets fired. He also says he tries working as a bodyguard at a casino over in Oakland. But wait, am I misunderstanding this? Because why did the cops do that? They're basically making him turn to crime. again. You're just, you're keeping tabs, you know? But yeah, of course it's what's going to happen. They're probably like, with this guy's a gangster. We're going to mess with him as much as possible and try to get him on something. I don't know. But that's the pattern, right? Every single time he gets out, he says, I'm going straight now. And then pretty much right after that, he's locked up again. This time, though, when he gets out in 1989, something is different because waiting for him is a guy with a much bigger idea. The guy's name is Peter Chong and everyone calls him uncle. He's born in 1943, so kind of a generation. older than Chow.

He gets sent at San Francisco from Hong Kong around 1989 as the advance man for a Hong Kong triad called the Woe Hop Toe, with San Francisco as their kind of beachhead for the triad's big push into America. His cover story, which is widely repeated, was that he'd come to set up a Chinese opera enterprise. In reality, the court records would later put him

as the head of the Wo Hop Toe's American operation. I think we briefly mentioned this in an episode way back on White Devil John with Donnie Barstool. who was the white masshole who became a gang boss in Boston's Chinatown. But also really interesting, you had this same sort of thing happen right around the same time, 89, 90, 91, 92 with the Russian mobsters, maybe like a little bit later. They were leaders from sort of overseas, organized crime, you know, foreign ones, Russian, Hong Kong, being sent to America to organize to get things under control,

which is really interesting. Think about it, you really think of American law enforcement, I think, as being a step above law enforcement in these other countries, but there's just, there was so much, there still is, so much money to be made here

that these guys see this as like a foreign operation. They can go, I think Yakuza too, right? Weren't they big in all? Maybe a different era. Was that 70s or 80s when they were getting set up in Hawaii? Mid-80s, early mid-80s,

yeah, they were huge. So that's crazy. I mean, imagine these international forces for the feds in like, like, 82 to like 95 when you're dealing with the expansion of like

massive criminal organization, right? Yakuza, triads and the Russian mafia. Crazy. Yeah. And all of the smaller ones. I mean,

you had the Filipino gangs and Indonesians and Cambodians. I don't know. But those, I mean, that's what I'm saying. Those are small ethnic gangs. It's not the same as like international mega gangs. Right.

Coming. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's always going to be small ethnic gangs, but coming here to set up shop, right? You could do, the law and order organized crime could have been so much better

if they based it in the 80s around this stuff and made it, you know, I'm just saying. That's actually a genuinely good idea for a TV show. Dude, I pitched documentary. I remember my time? Whatever, dude.

I'm done with that. Because the wall hop toe, they're not a street crew, right? It's one of the oldest and heaviest triads in Hong Kong. And the name translates to something like harmoniously united association. So you know they're going to be completely psychotic. It starts in 1908, political, of course, at first. By the second half of the 20th century, they're reckoned to be one of the biggest triads in Hong Kong,

the kind of outfit that internationally runs protection of rackets, gambling. Tens of thousands of members across the broader sort of wall group it belongs to. So when Peter Chong shows up at San Francisco in 1989, he's not just like a young guy or schmuck freelancing, right? He's planting the flag of a serious Hong Kong triad institution in American soil. And he needs a local guy kind of like who knows the ground and can be his muscle. And that is shrimp boy. Chong has got big plans and he takes one look at shrimp boy and he goes, that's my guy right there. He's a force in the Hop Singh.

He's going to be the American lieutenant, right-hand man, and Trimpoe becomes, by his own later courtroom admission, the number two of the Wolop Toes U.S. arm. And they start right away asserting themselves, right? There's a gang war brung with the Hua Ching, and it's not just San Francisco Uncle Chong is big plans for. They want to take all the squabbling tongs and street gangs across American Chinatowns and merge them into one giant super triad.

And he wants to run both the East Coast and the West Coast. Coast Asian heroin trade, which is massive at that time. One organization to rule over them all. San Francisco, New York, Boston, the whole country. They've even got a name for it. Tian Hawi, the Whole Earth Association, which kind of a badass name when you think about it. Yeah, pretty much no noise.

The Boston piece especially involves trying to fold in local players, and one Boston boss refuses. There's a bot's assassination attempt that helps blow the whole thing open and bring down the federal heat who kind of wise up to everything after that shooting. I think we go into details on that in the White Devil John episode. However, like, however exactly in our raffles, by 1992, the feds have a big, big racketeering case ready to go. Shrimpoy also gets arrested in 1992 in an airport for drug trafficking after reported snitch,

who he then orders beaten. He also eventually swept up in that massive racketeering case that year or I think a year later. That also goes after Peter Chong tied to the wall hop toe, Asian gangs on both coast, murder for higher allegations, extortion, firearms, racketeering, like the warks, everything. Chong,

sensing it coming, he flees to Hong Kong days ahead of the indictment. And I think even though it was British then, I don't think they extradited like that, you know, or if they did, it was a serious, serious effort. The case gets split up, but Shrimp Boys hit with a RICO

in 1992. The trial actually ends in a mistrial, a hung jury, which briefly must have felt like a very big win because the feds do not often lose when they take stuff the trial, especially when it's RICO. But then he gets convicted on six federal gun trafficking counts. The judge drops the hammer 20 plus years. I mean, rough, really, really rough. That is, if he's going to do the whole time, which he is not. I mean, I should have said before, but it would have been a hung trial no matter what happened, right?

Hey, it's pretty good actually The jet lag must be wearing off Because now you're coming in hot Yeah, yeah, give me another five minutes And then I'll be dead So yeah, he's not gonna serve that time Because in 1998, Peter Uncle Chong The shock collar who fled first to, actually he fled to Macau

I'm sorry, then to Hong Kong Is arrested and then in 2000 He finally gets extraded back to the US And Trimpoid decides it's time to flip on him Around 2002 Yeah, I mean you just kind of sort of nodded to this before but Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997,

so they weren't willing or able to extradite, but then afterwards the Chinese actually get this guy and extra diet to the US. So it's just really interesting. I mean, it kind of like goes alongside what we're going to talk about next week as well with how the French and the French concession in Shanghai used gangsters and sort of shipped them in where they wanted to.

But yeah, it's pretty interesting. how the British couldn't get a handle on these guys or didn't want to. Shrimpoy cuts a deal with the feds, pleads guilty to federal racketeering, reportedly including murder for hire, conspiracy distribute heroin and arson, and in 2002, he takes the stand and testifies against his old boss. He kind of saw it as like, you know, Chong just basically abandoned him and fled and then tried to have his people pin everything on Shrimpoy, even leaning on on Trimboy's own defense lawyer.

So as far as he was concerned, he's not betraying him. he was betrayed first. I kind of feel like that's what people who flip say a lot, but, you know, it seems somewhat legit. Yeah. Chong gets convicted and gets 15 years.

Shrimpoy walks free in 2003. But when he gets out, the government doesn't restore his immigration status and doesn't put him in witness protection. So this legendary sort of all-powerful crime figure comes out of prison in 2003. He's broke, green card issues,

and he's crashing on the couch with relatives and a girlfriend. And a record. So you know what that means. it is time, Sean, to turn over a new leaf. He is a changed man. Look at the range man. Now, according to shrimp boy, now really a shrimp man when you actually kind of think about it.

He says he finds peace through meditation and through Buddhism, which is similar actually to many white girls in their 30s when they give up a life of crime or just doing too much below in nightclub bathrooms. I've actually tried to find peace through meditation and it hasn't worked out for me. I even did that class with David Lynch. I still have no peace of mind. but I'm trying to find it through a luxury apartment building and spending $250 on dinner.

So we'll see if that works out. I mean, has that just ruled us out about half of the companies that advertise on podcast these days? But yeah, but shout out to my Berlin psychiatrist who had an unexpectedly pleasant reunion last week. I can't wait to see where this is. Some very juicy anecdotes about high-profile politicians has also taught me a great meditation technique

I thus found out was created by a Nazi so that made me feel a little bit dirty afterwards but you know if you go to Germany what do you expect really? I'm pretty sure. Wasn't, isn't like the modern example of yoga? Wasn't it created by like a white German guy in like the 1930s or 20s? Yeah, Pilates.

Yeah. No, not Pilates, no yoga. Like the modern rendition of yoga. There's a story, there's a couple of stories out there that it was, I don't know it was a Nazi, but it was like, I think Dutch or German, something like that in like the 1930s or 1930s. or 1940s or like, you know, probably.

I don't know that. But Pilates is definitely a German guy. Look at it. Someone fact check that. Dale fact check that. Does Dale ever jump in and be like, not true? Dale, that's not true. Jump in.

Let's start doing that. I'd be like, not true. But Shrimp boy, Sean, where is shrimp boy right now? He's in San Francisco. And in San Francisco, they will buy any redemption arc in the world over there. If it's for a good cause, if it's for progress, you can just be like, oh, yeah, I'm a change man. Yeah.

Doesn't matter. will throw tens of thousands of dollars at you for your redemption arc. He starts speaking at high schools. He's at middle schools, at-risk youth programs, telling kids not to grow up to be like him. He teams up with the local politician to put on talks about Chinese culture and heritage. He becomes a fixture on that sort of, you know, circuit, whatever you want, NGO, whatever, do-goeter circuit. He's rocking bespoke suits.

He's got a pocket square. He's got a shaved head. He's got swagger. He's got that really thin mustache. kind of got the reformed gangster with a heart of gold thing going on. You know, he's seen it always come back to war in their youth. And, you know, they love him. The politicians, the establishment, the NGOs.

It's actually like a, there's so many those groups in, like, California, man. There's a big one with, like, the Salvadoran gangsters, too. I love those groups, man. Look, some of them, like, street and interrupt all the sort of stuff. I don't want to say, like, they're all actually just using it to recruit people to get into gang life. There are some that do really good work. just a whole lot more that are, you know, using it as cover. In 2006, San Francisco supervisor Fiona Ma gives him a certificate of honor from the city.

When the SF Chronicle later asked her about it, she says, Shrimp Boy, quote, learned his lesson the hard way and wants to be a positive influence on the lives of young people. In 2012, the U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein recognizes him as a former offender who became an asset to the community. and the same year, an assemblyman gives him a change agent award. Mayor Ed Lee praises his willingness to give back. In 2009, he stands in front of City Hall and says, quote, all the criminal past I had, I cannot deny that. But today, I do not represent crime.

I do not represent violence and gangs. I don't know. I might be wrong here, but I feel like this is foreshadowing something, Danny. I don't know. I'm sensing. Sean, I might have laid it on a little too heavy, to be honest with you. And that's on me. should have gone a little back and forth.

Like maybe he's actually doing good. Maybe he's not. I just, you know, I'm too cynical sometimes. It's late at night. It's hot. I'm just being kind of a dick. You know, I just, I went,

I went too hard. That's on me for not suspenseful storytelling, you know, whatever. Anyway, he's working on a, he's working on a memoir at that time. I'm sure there's like movies

being talked to, all that sort of stuff. That is, of course, the surface. But underneath the surface, Sean, you know, what's really going on?

February 27th, 2006. So this is a little back in time. It's a gray Monday afternoon in San Francisco's Chinatown. There's a cramped little import export shop. A 56-year-old man named Alan Leong is doing what he does most days. It's one of those shops that only really exist in immigrant neighborhoods. There's paperwork everywhere. Clutter.

There's boxes and goods going to and arriving from Hong Kong. It's a small family shop. His wife's there. So is an old friend. Just passing the time. Leon's like a respected guy, an elder. Old school community figure. He hosts these sort of Chinatown banquets that you hear about, marches in the Chinatown New Year's parade and the Chinese New Year's parade.

But he's not just a quiet shopkeeper. He's the Dragonhead, the elected leader of the Ghekong Tong, which is one of the oldest Chinese fraternal societies in America. In English, it goes by the Chinese Freemasons, though it has nothing to do with Western Freemasonry. It grows out of an old imperial Chinese secret brotherhood called the Hongmen, which besides being a common typo in Sean's internet searches, is also the name of a group that goes back. back to the days of trying to overthrow the Xin Qing Dynasty. I think we made the Hongman joke before, haven't we? Yeah, maybe. Maybe about half a dozen times.

Yeah, that's going to keep, it's a good one. You might have made it about yourself, I think, in a Monk Eastman episode maybe. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we've done it, I've done it about you, you've done it about me, I've done it about me, you've done about you. It's never getting old either. Who doesn't like a hung man? No, no. Fun fact, though, their headquarters is in the heart.

part of Chinatown, it's sheltered Sonia Tseng, who's the father of modern China, who we talked about on the Eastman episode, and you're probably going to talk about, I think, next week, which he used that sort of network across North America to raise money for the 1911 revolution that finally toppled the King, Ching, one of the dynasties. Qing, Qing Dynasty, yeah, yeah. I think I spelled it four different ways on Instagram, like Q, S-A-C-A, like it's the same one. I've just spelled it four different times in this episode.

recently though at this time Alan Leung despite being the dragonhead has been running scared for weeks now his grown son has been driving him from work waiting around so the old man doesn't walk to his car alone Lung has been telling people he thinks someone wants him dead he even tells it to an FBI agent

who floats the idea that maybe Leung should start wearing a wire but he says no which makes what happens next pretty suspicious because that afternoon a guy walks from the shop mask on yells robbery and shoots him right in front of his wife. Obviously, robbery is suspicious, but the guy does not take anything,

which, as all good criminals know, defeats the purpose of a robbery. The young goes down, friend runs out the door, shooter walks straight into Chinatown, disappears. The boss of the Tong lies dead on the floor of a shop.

Police cannot figure anything out, and the murder goes unsolved for years. But six months after he's gunned down, a new man slides into the dead man's chair and becomes the dragonhead of the 150-year-old brotherhood, a dapper little guy, barely five feet and a half feet tall. Can you guess who it was? Sean Williams? I don't know.

You've really left me wondering. Could it be? No, no, no, no. You tell me. I don't want to get it wrong. It is, in fact, shrimp boy, who Google a picture of him. He does look the part. I mean, he's got the dragon tattoo.

He really does look the part. He could play himself in a movie. of being a gangster. Yeah, he's got the John Waters mustache, which you mentioned, which is a great look for, I can't pull it off, but for an Asian gangster, it is a fantastic look.

According testimony at a later trial, Leung had refused Shrimp Boy a roughly $100,000 loan out of the Tong's funds and wouldn't share the group's money the way Shrimp Boy wanted. Another gangster testified that Shrimp Boy complained about Leung for two months before the killing, and the hit by the cooperator's account, took three tries before it finally worked.

One informant says, Trimpoi gave the order in a sauna in an Oakland massage parlor, telling him to, quote, coordinate with Raymond Lay to get rid of Amm Young. Wait, so it took three tries before they decided to get a guy to walk straight up to him and shout robbery and shoot him in the face.

What were the first two attempts, like attacking him with a spoon in a crowded restaurant? Think it was like Roadrunner type stuff. Like, they just painted a tunnel on a wall. I think he was going to walk into the tunnel. I don't know. It doesn't go into details.

Maybe they just aborted all their points. plans beforehand. Who knows? They did shoot him in front of two when this is, which probably is like, that's not your first, uh, plan. You know, that's not plan A, right? No. No. So at this time, in public, Shrimp Boys, this reform community leader running a historic cultural brotherhood. In private, according to the government, he's running a criminal faction through the tongue, money laundering, stolen high-end liquor, Johnny Walker blue and Hennessy, stolen cigarettes, drugs moving in the background. Soon enough, the feds get suspicious. They send an undercover agent.

His persona is like a New York gangster, a finance guy looking to launder cashmate through gambling, and he starts whining and dining, Shrim Boy. And this is a year's long process, right? He's wearing a wire. The agent uses the name David Jordan, and he presents himself as like a legit Costa Nostra guy from the East Coast, a mob guy looking for ways to launder profits, do business, make connections in San Francisco. Now, Trim Boy is careful, right?

He's not stupid. He's been around for decades. He's been locked up plenty. He's been the trial plenty. He's not something like two-bit street thug, right? So on the recordings, he keeps trying to hold the actual crime at arms land. He tells the agent he doesn't want to know the specifics. He doesn't want to get his hands dirty.

Quote the SF gate. In prosecution documents alone, there are 25 instances where Chao said, that's a shrimp boy, said he wants nothing to do with crime and four times that he discourages the undercover agent from illegal activity, including dealing heroin, his attorney said at a news conference last week. Chow also demurred when credited with introductions that led to allege money laundering or drug deals with others, his attorney said. That's terrible, dude.

I don't want to know. That's illegal stuff. Chow told the agent posing as a mafia, so on February 14th, 2013, when asked what he thought the agent, when asked what he thought the agent and George Niai, a member of the Guy Kung Tong and a Chow associate who now faces criminal charges were up to. But he does take money to launder through Tong, millions apparently, and he takes cash payments for himself tens of thousands. Instead, according to prosecutors, it's more like, I don't.

do crimes anymore. I don't want to know. I can introduce you to people if you want to thank me okay, but I don't want to be involved. I'm not touching anything. Also, here are the guys who can help. And then, of course, the envelope comes. That's like that, like, you in journalism now, isn't it? Yeah, basically. I don't want to be involved. If you give you an envelope for cash, I will get involved. Dude, the envelope thing in like, it's just a, it's a cultural thing in, in, in, in with, yeah. It's like, there are some New York politicians that have gotten bagged up for just taking envelopes of money that are just like the funniest stories ever

where they pretend like it's not wrong and they're just getting like thousands in cash. It's like hilarious stuff, dude. But it's a, it's a, it's a, you know, big thing. So this is like a reoccurring thing that happens. The undercover agent gives shrimp boy money after deals or introductions. Shrimp boy protest, I don't want it, I don't need it.

He says, he doesn't want it, blah, blah, blah. He says it's legitimate, doesn't do it anymore. And then according to the government, he ends up taking the money anyway. That's poor guy. I mean, the whole world is just begging him to be a gangster and all he wants to do is his shady tongue. You know, I am getting a little bit more sympathetic right now.

It's hard. It's like if you've got bad habits, someone keeps trying to get you to do it, you're going to, you know, someone just keeps sticking that vape in your face, Sean, when you're out at night. Eventually, you're going to hit that vape, you know? He's like that, but with crime, doing crimes. It's like you in Pines. Oh, is it? Right. Okay.

I don't know. I wanted to say something sleazy-sier and d. dirtier, but I was like, I'm going to tone it down. That's not good. That's not funny. I should have said, I don't know, heroin and strippers, but. Just heroin and strippers. Yeah, it's always the heroin and the strippers. Yeah. This guy.

His explanation for the cash later on is that it's a gift, a show of respect between brothers, which, like I said, Chinese culture, kind of, kind of big. He tells a reporter paraphrasing closely, in our culture, we do that all the time. People give me red envelopes, my elders put money in my pocket. And as other explanation, this is really. is that David Jordan was just an investor who wanted to help him publish his memoir. The memoir, by the way, is titled

Son of the Underworld, later retitled something like Shrimpoy, Life of Crime, Violence, and Redemption inside the Chinatown Underworld. So part of his defense for taking the laundered FBI money is that it was a book advance for my book about my crimes. As far as I know, there is a manuscript,

it's unpublished, and I want it. So if you're out there, get it to us. Please. Read the whole thing, and I won't have the right episodes for like a month and a half. It'll be great. But yes, we are not finished yet because the feds are going to get into the actual real crooks. And I'm not talking about those crooks in Congress on.

I'm talking about the actual real crooks. The most corrupt out there. That's right. Local California politicians. The federal investigation that starts in Chinatown eventually overlaps with a political wheeler and dealer named Keith Jackson, who's wearing two hats at once. He's a paid consultant to Shrimp Boys Tong. And he's the chief fundraiser for a guy named,

named a politician, Leland Yi's campaigns. Two completely separate worlds. Remember this, Chinatown Tong, Sacramento Politics, Jackson has a foot in each. Also, I would genuinely like to know our Chinese families pick their Western names. Like, I had a kid in my class who was called Hinching, but he wanted to be called George.

And I knew someone in New York who said her name was peach. But in fairness, she did say that was because she had a big round face like a peach. That was the explanation she gave. They're called nickname, Sean, and they exist in other cultures as well. Yeah, but that's so weird. I don't know. Maybe I'm too tired.

I'm not really getting it, but yeah, that was so funny when she said there. Anyway, moving on. Yeah, let's move on, shall we? So this guy, Yi is like a mover and a shaker type, you know, city politics, I guess state too. He becomes a bridge between undercover money, political access, campaign finance schemes, and Chinatown circles, which is important distinction we have to make because if you read the headlines about shrimp boy, all this stuff gets mentioned,

they're not members him and he are the same gang, Jackson, right? There's not like, it's not Senator Leland Yee, who eventually becomes a state senator, made guy in the shrimp boy family reporting for duty. You know, he's just like a guy who is connected to him through this guy, Jackson, who is the former president of the San Francisco School Board, like I said,

well-known political insulted fundraiser, an associate of the Tongue. So the person he raises money for is this guy, State Senator Leland Yee, who was like a serious, prominent politician, San Francisco Democrat, leading advocate for gun control and for open, transparent government. Ironic, John, foreshadowing was well. So he's running for California Secretary of State at the time, but he doesn't have the cash. He had run for mayor of San Francisco in 2011, got fifth, walked away with like $70,000 in campaign debt. He has to clear that before he can mount the statewide run. He's desperate for cash.

And that's how, according to a 137-page FBI affidavit, State Senator Leleney and to brokering an arms deal with an undercover federal agent, not just guns, the agent talks about wanting to spend up to $2, 2.5 million on automatic weapons, M16 equivalents, and shoulder-fired missiles. And he, through his fixer, Keith Jackson, allegedly offers to connect the agent to an international arms dealer and walks him through the whole plan. They're going to source the weapons from a Muslim separatist group into Philippines, ship them into a U.S. port.

It might have been the milf. I don't know. Yeah, who doesn't like the milf? I mean, I've spent a lot of time. Were they around back then? Yeah, they would have been around. Yeah, they've been around for a long time. I probably didn't think to,

I don't think that was a term back then in the 90s. 2000s, yeah, actually. I was going to say they probably didn't think to their Google results for them. What's it? What's the actual acronym stand for? The Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Yeah. Yeah.

Guys, Google them. Don't search for videos, though, if you're under a team and listening to this podcast. There we go. But, yeah, have they really been around that long? Yeah. I mean, they've been dicked over for that long. I think they're like 70s or 80s.

Yeah, they've been around forever. Yeah. Did you say they've been dicked over for that long? They're like a jihadi group. Aren't you supposed to dick? Oh, dick the milk, all right. Yeah, that's good. No, no, that actually wasn't supposed to be a joke.

But here we go. I'm going to just end the shenanigans right now. It's Formula 1984, Danny. Yeah. Okay. I'm in support of dicking over. I'm in support of dicking over the milk. They're bad guys, Sean.

They're not nice. No, they're not. Well, they were nice to me, but, you know, that was. Yeah, you're a sucker for anyone. Anyone who shakes her hand and gives you a terrible meal. Bland noodles. And you're like, oh, yeah, I'm, I'm, uh, why don't we, why don't we be nice to them?

Okay. He also takes other cash for like boring corruption stuff. His later plea covers things like taking thousands of dollars in exchange for making call, setting up meetings, providing an official state, California State Senate certificate honoring Shrimp Boys Tong as well. I feel like we should have another episode just about this guy now?

I mean, he's backing the Caliphate so he can clear his own debts. I mean, if nothing else, this is bullsey stuff. So Shrimp Boys' whole role in this thing is that he basically like opens the door. You know, he's the one the agent walks through to get to Jackson, who then walks it over to Yee. But the E-stuff is so wild

that I wanted to include it and it does get wrapped up in the same investigation in trial. So the feds, they get Shrimpoy on tape. Obviously, that guy's wearing a wire. They get Ye on tape. They get dozens of people caught up in this vast, multifaceted criminal conspiracy.

I think it's like five conspiracies at once in the charges. And on the morning of March 26, 2014, they move in and do raids across the Bay Area in Sacramento. The FBI arrest State Senator Lee Yee at his home. They get shrimp boy. They arrest Keith Jackson. There's 26 people. The indictment, I think, eventually names 29 defendants, hit with everything from firearms trafficking, money laundering, murder for hire, drug distribution, contraband cigarettes, all sorts of fraud.

They raid the Tongue headquarters. Ye folds. He pleads guilty in 2015 to a racketeering conspiracy. February 2016, a federal judge sentences him to five years in prison. Keith Jackson, he gets nine years. Shrimpoy, though, does not fold this time. He takes the trial and he takes the stand in his own defense for three days, and he's a compelling, charming witness.

He admits the battle days. He says, quote, I sold drugs. I rob people from little hustler. become the bigger hustler. But the murders, the ongoing racketeering, he says he never does that. He says he genuinely reformed in 2003. He says the cash from the agent was love and respect and a book investment, not payment for crimes, and he insists he didn't kill anyone.

Yeah, I don't know. I reckon a lawyer might have told him not to use the old love and respect line there, but he's doing, he's doing all right. On January 8th, 2016, he gets convicted of 162 counts. 162 racketeering, that murder, murder and aided racketeering, conspiracy to murder,

another former associate who'd been found shot dead in 2013, money laundering, trafficking, stolen goods, all of it. He stares straight ahead, shows no reaction

as the count after count, after count comes in of him being guilty. Several of his co-defense that actually flipped and testified against him. He gets sentenced

to two life terms. As of this recording, I believe, he's serving life without the possibility of parole at a federal penitentiary, I think USP

terrorolics, in Indiana, pretty gnarly one. His memoir is still unpublished, locked up under a restraining order because the government doesn't want him profiting from it until they recover a couple hundred grand and seized assets and fines. But the government and Trimp Boy,

most likely, if I had to guess, they just definitely want me and Sean. Sean specifically to profit off the story. So hit that Patreon, folks, and get us that manuscript. And if you made it this far, look, we weren't bad enough out. We can't win everyone, right?

We weren't bad at a thousand. The neurons weren't firing. It's been a long couple weeks. The Knicks one, I've been going to the World Cup. Sean was in Amsterdam doing God knows what. Love those tiny little bit of bollum. Hopefully, Dale has cleaned it up enough that it's not as painful for you guys to listen to as it was for us to hear ourselves talk. And next week, we'll bring it up.

That would do. That would do. Yeah, we'll just apologize the entire time for how bad. It wasn't that. Maybe it was. I don't know. Anyway. Guys, thanks for tuning in.

and yeah, Shrimp.