The Underworld Podcast - The Last Street Boss of Chinatown: Ghost Shadows Peter Chin

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

The Ghost Shadows are said to have been the wildest of Chinatown's gun-toting teenage gangs in the 1970's and 1980's, engaging in countless shootouts with their rivals the Flying Dragons and the White Eagles. And that was before they linked up with one of the Triad-connected tongs to run the neighborhood protection and gambling rackets, earning millions every year despite being barely out of their teens. MAGICMIND LIMITED TIME OFFER: up to 48% off your first subscription or 20% off one time purchases with code UNDERWORLD at checkout You can claim it at: https://magicmind.com/underworld PROMO CODE: UNDERWORLD When they finally went down on RICO charges in the mid 80's, they were tied to 13 murders. But it wasn't the rival gangs that tore the Ghost Shadows apart; it was a power struggle between the street generals that proved to be the biggest challenge. And it's then when Peter Chin arrived on the scene to claim the role of Dai Lo, or big brother. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. August 1978, New York City. Nikki Louis might be the first gangster to really scare New York City's Chinatown in some time. He's wild, quick to shoot, and he's the boss of the Ghost Shadows, who despite being a bunch of low-rent burglars only a few, years earlier, have now become the dominant gang in the neighborhood. Most of that is thanks to Nikki's sheer determination and fearlessness. Now, the ghost shadows are in control of Maastry,

and that means hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in protection money from all the illegal casinos operating there. On this night, he's playing Majong in the back of a barbershop with some friends. Nicky's actually not been seen around too much lately. There's a war that going on in the narrow, crowded streets of Chinatown. But it's not other gangs like the White Eagles or the Flying Dragons that are gunning for Nikki. It's his own gang. See, Nicky's made some mistakes lately. First, he puts a hit out on a prominent activist in Chinatown, someone who spoke out against the gangs. The hit fails, and it's all over the news, leading to the police ramping up their efforts to target the ghost

Shadows. They do the unthinkable and shut down all the casinos on Mott Street, and with that, dry up a major part of the Ghost Shadows income. Less money to go around makes for pissed off soldiers. Some of those soldiers press Nikki on what was going on with the gang's finances. Nikki doesn't like that, and he has one of the guys more loyal to him, but a gun to the other guy's head. The Ghost Shadows then split into two factions and start gunning for each other. Shootout All up and down Mott Street. A standoff leads to a ceasefire, but now the street is split in two. And the anti-Nicky faction realizes they need to kill him before he kills them.

Nicky's the boss man, the die low, the big brother. But underneath him, in the gang's hierarchy, are five generals. One of them, Peter Chin, volunteers for the job. But when Nicky is spotted at this Majong game, another soldier tells Chin he's going to be the one to do it. Nikki's sitting in the barbershop with his back to the door. A mistake. One that's going to cost him. The 17-year-old sneaks into the barbershop and pulls out of 38,

puts it up to Nicky's head, and pulls the trigger. Nikki's shot in the face, but he runs from the barbershop with a kid following, shooting him a few more times. He catches him and starts beating his head in with a gun when he's out of bullets. But Nikki is tough. He wrestles the kid off him, staggers a few blocks, trailing, the whole way and finally collapses outside the NYPD's fifth precinct. He survives.

When he regains consciousness two days later, he declines the comment on the crime. Says that NYPD detective investigating it, quote, Nikki's already too old for the youth gangs. I'd say it's time for him to retire. Nikki flees for Chicago, giving up the ghost shadows, and the five generals form a council to rule over the new iteration of the most powerful gang in New York City's Chinatown. But pretty soon, those five generals are going to split and turn on each other.

And only one of them is going to claim the throne as the new DiLow. And that's Peter Chin. This is The Underworld Podcast. Welcome back to The Underworld Podcast, a radio program, nay, an audio experience, that takes you the listener on a journey through the International Criminal Underworld, hence the title. It is brought to you by myself, Danny Gold, as well as my co-host, Sean Williams. And every week, we trade off leading these episodes.

And as always, you can get bonus episodes and ad-free ones by signing up at patreon.com slash the Underworld podcast or right here on Spotify or Apple. Somebody actually complained about the amount of ads for the first time in a while last week. So let me just reiterate our point that, you know, we're doing this. We do this for the money. Not for the love. So it's either, you know, ad-free on Patreon or we're going to bombard you. with ads. Anyway, I am still in Porto-Westcondido on the Wauhock and coast. Full recommend. So if you hear tropical birds or whatever, it's that. But, you know, there's this one that sounds like a car alarm and it goes off

every morning at 645. I'm not going to lie to you, Sean. I just, I want to destroy that little bastard's habitat. I just, like, I like nature. I support the environment, but I will chop down every tree that dude nest in with no regards. Certainly makes for a vivid image. Like the George Washington a spring break with your little axe. It's going to look really cool. Hey, thanks for asking how I am. Yeah, I'm good. I'm good.

I'm stuffed to an exhumation in Manila after this. I've got a few more days of drug war madness and then I'm home. So, yeah, I think we're going to put together a show on all of this stuff for next week because it's pretty crazy. Some of the information I'm picking up over here, I mean, some people that might be following it could see that Rodrigo Duterte, the former president, is himself implicated in the drug industry and yeah i've met some people around the country the last week or so who have confirmed some of that so um yeah we'll put together some first-hand reporting uh which is exciting but

anyway back to your birds yeah how's that going yeah it's pretty good you're gonna get out of there by the time this episode airs huh i feel like deterte's not the kind of guy you want knowing that you're going to reveal that he is heavily involved in the drug train though i guess it's been in the news before but uh yeah no no i i i think i'll i'll be fine um but it is an interesting trip. It never is a boring woman on here. And yeah, this one, it's always like such a experience coming here. It's nuts.

But yeah, we'll do some stuff on that next week. Speaking of doing stuff, I was able to write this episode super easily because I've been drinking this drink, these magic mind little kind of tinctures every morning. And it's really helped zero in my ability to focus and concentrate and be productive. Have you heard about these? They call it like a mental performance shot. It's got time release caffeine and a whole bunch of,

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They worked on it for something like 10 years. I mean, this stuff legitimately works. I was able to sit still for like, I don't know, three times as long as I normally can. Didn't have the usual brain fog that I normally do in the morning. Anyway, definitely get some magic mind if you want to be more productive.

They ship to 65 countries and offer a 100% refund after 100 days. No questions asked if you don't feel a difference. You have a limited offer you can use now that gets you up to 48% off your first subscription or 20% on a one-time purchase with code underworld at checkout. You can claim it at magicmind.com slash underworld. That's magicmind.com slash underworld. Anyway, Peter Chin and the GoShadows and the New York. City, Chinatown gang wars of the 1970s and 1980s. If you guys are longtime listeners, you may recall we did an early episode on the battle

between the Ghost Shadows and the Flying Dragons, which really went into detail in the history of Chinatown and the Tongs and everything. We're going to go over that a bit here, but I want to keep to mainly telling the story of Peter Chin, who became the boss after the infamous Nikki Louie, who we talk about in the cold open. And the reason we're focusing on Chin is because he has a new book, out an autobiography, co-written, called in the... the ghost shadows, the untold story of China Town's most powerful crime boss.

Most of this episode is based on that book, though I am going to use a bit of the stuff we did in the previous episode based on Mark Jacobson's work in the village voice and some other really good work from newspapers in the 70s and 80s. It's also important to note this is chins telling, right? Keep that in mind. It's his story with his viewpoint for things he was at. So the truth, well, you know, it's his truth. It doesn't mean it's the truth.

It's his lived experience, actually, Danny. Please update your vocabulary for the list. Oh, yeah. Is that what they're calling it right now? Peter Chin's lived experience. In fact, after I went through this book, I went through the previous episode from a couple years ago. And the only thing I say about him is that he's a violent psycho whose only claim to fame was his pension for violence. So, you know, that's obviously how some other media have covered him.

Not so much in this book, but he doesn't shy away from talking about some of the gnarly stuff he did. Now, Chinatown gangs, let's get into Chinese immigration and how New York City's Chinatown built up. It really starts in the mid-19th century as immigrants came into work as laborers and minors, often working in seriously back conditions and facing horrible racism. The first Tongue was established in 1816, California. The tongs are like these civic organizations, like, you know, the Rotary Club or Merchant Organization. They're set up so that they could all look out for each other, but also serve as like protectors and as courts. because the Chinese didn't really trust the official American ones,

and the official American ones didn't really have anything to do with them. They were modeled after the triads, which are these ancient Chinese societies that became massive organized crime groups that are still around today. Some of the Tongs were triad affiliated, but they were at first like legitimate, you know, like kind of mutual aid societies. And they drew their memberships from the railway workers and the gold miners,

some of whom had been triads who had fled crackdowns and famines back in China. Yeah, I mean, just a random fact at this point, But the world's oldest Chinatown is actually right here in Manila. It's a place called Benondo. It's absolutely amazing. It's one of my favorite places in the world. And I'll put some stuff up in the IG because there's plenty of weird crime shit going down here as well. But yeah, just a little pub trivia for you.

Thanks. Thanks, Sean. Of course, as the amount of Chinese immigrants continues to grow in Chinatowns form in other cities, like any insular ethnic community, during that time, you know, from the Italians to the Jews to the Irish, someone needs to control the vice rackets and the tongs step up to do that. We're talking gambling houses, prostitution, opium, loan sharking. There was money to be made there, like a lot of money. Mark Jacobson, who I mentioned before, I actually got coffee with him, like after that episode came out.

Great guy. He wrote some incredible articles for the village voice in the 70s about the gangs of Chinatown that I use a lot here. He said this, quote, determined to survive. They built an extra legal society based on furtive alliances, police bribes, creative bookkeeping and immigration scams. The aim was to remain invisible and separate. To this day, few people in Chinatown are known by their real names. Most receive new identities, such as the Lees, Chins, and Wongs from the family associations who declared them cousins

to get them into the country. So actually, we should be telling overweight people that they've got more chins than an American phone box in that case? Oh, wait, wait, wait. It's awful. Terrible stuff here. Terrible stuff. The Tongs fight these vicious wars in the late 19th century in the first decades of the 20th century for control of those rackets, but eventually make peace in like the 1930s. And the U.S. had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was like this deeply racist immigration policy that severely restricted Chinese immigrants.

This was followed by the 1924 National Origins Act, which also restricted Asia immigration heavily. All of that changes in 1965 with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which let the Chinese come into the country again. All of a sudden, jump from like sometimes as low as 100 a year to 20,000. And many of the new Chinese immigrants are from Hong Kong and they're different.

They aren't the previous kind of rural types or farmers. These guys are, they're from the slums. They're tough kids, poor families. And there was almost this sort of culture class when they come in because you have the old guard of Chinese immigrants and their kids, you know, they were very kind of work hard, keep your head down, respect the elders. But these new Hong Kong kids, they took a look around and they don't like what they see. The American-born Chinese kids give them a hard time. The only jobs available to them when they get older are like working as waiters in Chinese restaurants or garment workers or laundry. Something like 30 to 40% of the men in Chinatown are waiters. And maybe if they bust their ass for 20, 25 years, six, seven days a week, long work days, they could eventually open up a business. But these kids don't want to wait. And they said, you know what? Screw this. And that's where the gangs come in. So these youth gangs develop in this time period. We're talking like,

late 1960s, but they really get going in the 1970s. And soon enough, you know, they're in New York City, right? They have, it's a very violent place in the 70s. They see other gangs. They've got guns. They're extorting. They're fighting. They're stealing.

They're robbing the gambling halls. And that's not good, yeah, because the tongs run that racket. These wild Hong Kong teenagers are shaking up the natural order of how things work in Chinatown that had been there for decades, just as the population is booming. 75,000 people now in Chinatown. So that means even more money on the table. It wasn't like there wasn't crime there, right? The tanks still ran those massive gambling halls and still did the protection racket extortion

plays. But there wasn't a Wild West atmosphere before the Hong Kong kids came in like there had been. The Tongs used to be the so-called hatchet men because, you know, they killed people with hatchets, right? But in that 1930s, you know, they started to put on suits. They weren't looking to get their hands dirty and they needed to rein in these kids that start rising up in the 70s. It's actually, it's really interesting to this dynamic that emerges in Chinatown, New York City. But also in others in the 60s and 70s because you had these community leader groups, the tongs that had been around for generations.

They had controlled all those rackets. But they're moving into an air of respectability at the time. I mean, they're meeting with the mayor, high-ranking politicians, city business leaders. They were business leaders themselves. They were respectable. But they decide to link up with these newly formed brutal street gangs. Ah, kids these days. Didn't you mention that generational Sicilian mob thing on the last stash house?

That was pretty incredible. Yeah, I mean, that's just the old story you see with all organized crime now, what they're talking about how young people just play on their phones and, you know, don't want to put the time in and refuse to go to prison for 15 years and give everyone up. But I feel like that's been a story since, like, you know, the 80s and 90s. Like, that was a major plot point on the Sopranos, right, with Christopher just being like a schmuck and Tony just being frustrated all the time because the younger generation were not good, not good at being mobsters. Um, did you, by the way, so, so just to get this straight, like the tongs are, so they're kind of like business associations, but they're, but they're kind of, I don't know, they're like sort of local business pressure groups kind of thing and they're just starting to get into crime. No, they've been in crime. They were the crime leaders for, for decades. And then in 1930s, they made peace. And when they made peace, they kind of realized, you know, we want to put on suits and be like respectable community leaders while controlling the gambling. rackets on the side. They kind of got smart enough and decided violence wasn't worth it. We make more money when we're not violent, you know? But they're still, they're one foot in, one foot out,

you know, they're, they're the community leaders, the businessman, all that in Chinatown, but they're also the ones who control the gambling halls, which is like where a lot of the money comes in there, you know, and extortioning. It's like similar to the Yucosa then in many ways, right? Like the way that they were sort of intermeshed with regular business as well. Yeah, I think they played things better than the Yakuza, you know. They were, weren't out there trying to intimidate everyone, I think, for the most part. Yeah. I think they were more, they were more slick, I would say, in terms of, like, presenting, like,

a facade of respectability. Now, Chin Chit Chui, who later goes by Peter Chin, is actually born in a rural part of Hong Kong in 1959. His parents are from mainland China, but they had recently fled to Hong Kong, which a lot of people did after 1945. His dad eventually runs off to Brazil when he's young. Chin's grandfather helps support the family and eventually gets them the money and means to immigrate to New York City's Chinat's about eight, nine years old when his family finally

gets to New York City. I mean, you know, it must be pretty crazy coming from like rural China to East Broadway. But his mom is tough. She's no nonsense. But it turns out his dad also happens to be in New York City. And the big family, you know, he had a bunch of sisters. They reunite and they live the New York City immigrant slum life in Chinatown. His dad, though, happens to be a dick, a violent one, who was quick with his fist to his family. And also, he's a member of a local Tong. His mom has the requisite factory job and his dad is a cook. He's in the New York City public schools as a preteen, even though he doesn't even speak English. The Chinatown gangs, they all hang out outside the entrance and they try to find the sort of wayward youth youth youth.

And, you know, these gangs, when we talk about, they keep getting described as youth gangs. They were really like teenagers, you know, like 17, 18. You'll see Peter's doing stuff when he's like 15 and 16. Anyway, he doesn't speak English. He's incredibly poor. he's basically a prime recruit for them. His sister is also kind of flirting and seeing a gangster whose name is spare ribs, which is, you know, it's a dope name for a Chinese gangster.

Peter takes a beating or two from some of the other gangsters who rob him at one point, and you can kind of see his frustration growing. At 13, his dad, for the first time, beats one of Peter's sisters, hits her in the head with a frying pan, and Peter for the first time curses at the man who pulls a knife on him. And this causes Peter to run away from home. He's 13. He's on his own.

he's sleeping on the streets where he can, eating where he can, completely out of school. Jesus, man, this is, yeah, pretty bad. But also, this is during the Cultural Revolution back home in China, right? So I guess a dad putting a knife on his kids is way down the list of bad things Chinese families are going through at the time. There's like entire classrooms just rising up and lynching their teachers. It's insane. Did you also know, I found this out like just a couple days ago,

that when Mao's terrible policies were like starving millions of people, he told them it was the fault of sparrows eating all the food. So he had a campaign where people would go out and kill millions of sparrows. And then sparrows died out in China, which made the food ecosystem even worse. So then he had to go and beg the Russians to import sparrows back to China. Like the whole thing, I can't even get my head around how sort of clownish it was in many ways. You truly are the king of pub trivia, I got to say. Yeah.

I used to write them. It was one of my jobs as a teenager. The more you learn. At one point, the White Eagle is the most powerful gang at the time. They hear Peter's on the streets and corner one of his friends to find out info on him. If he joined a gang, where he is, how they can get to him, they beat the crap out of the friend. Peter hears about it. He's pissed and he goes to find spare rib, his sister's friend, who's a member of the ghost shadows.

The Ghost Shadows have a long-standing beef with the Eagles. And Mr. Rib gives Peter a gun so we can go bust one off at them. Peter rolls up to them and just starts letting off shots. He gets into a full-on shootout. He's 13. Terrible shot, though. No one's hit on either side. But, you know, you kind of see...

The kid was wild. Kid was wild off the bat. Spare Rib likes what he sees. He takes him in as a new recruit. He moves Peter into a Ghost Shadows apartment, which is, you know, a flop house on 2nd & B, where one bedroom right now will cost you 45. a month. These are basically crash pads for the teenage gang members.

Peter's not a full-fledged member. He's just one of the youngest guys there and he gets dubbed The Kid. I guess head across to Avenue D and you might still see some pretty crazy stuff or is that also now full of like fusion restaurants and cocktail bars? No, I mean, look, there's still projects there

and you know, there's still like Puerto Rican gangs on a low re-side and whatever else but for the most part like you're paying like $4,000 a month to live in that area. You know, it still maintains It's a little bit of grittiness, but it's definitely, definitely for the fancy boys these days. Fancy boys. I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels get you more of the experiences you value.

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Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it compliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to VANTA.com slash calm. So the backstory of the Go Shadows is that when they form up, they were the only serious Chinatown gang without a powerful Tong back. them. They start off as just a bunch of thieves who do burglaries back in the day, and they went by

the name Kwan Ying. A newspaper reporter when writing up the gang's crimes said they moved like shadows and dubbed them the ghost shadows. And kind of side note here, it's amazing how many gangs actually have their names coined by reporters, or if not reporters, police, all that. So from then on, they're the ghost shadows, which is a cool name. Like if someone dubbed me and my crew that, I would go with it. There's also the white eagles and the flying dragons and all the three are always beefing over territory and the rackets. I mean, it's, it's like, this is nagging me a little bit, but isn't that a tautology a bit, like a ghost shadow? If you're a ghost, you're invisible anyway and you don't have a shadow, or if you're, if you're a shadow, you can't, I don't

know, this is just bugging me. Does this make sense? You're overthinking it, man. You're overthinking it. It just sounds cool. Okay. The shadows get off to a rocky start when they try to expand and get in on the extortion business, but they're not just not good at it. So a bunch of them get arrested. Then a bunch of other members get guns and head to Boston to rob an On theong Tong gambling house to make bail money for the bros, and they get busted. And then

the On theong puts a bounty on their heads. One of the leaders of the Ghost Shadows then gets lowered back to Boston and killed confusingly by a former ghost shadows member who had moved to Boston to join the Tong, and now the former member moves back to New York and becomes the Dai Lowe or Boss man.

Okay, right. Did you get that? Yeah. Yeah, the Dialo is just like the local name for the capo, right? Yeah, yeah, but you got the whole thing, like former member, sets up current member, kills current member, moves back, becomes boss. Yeah, I got that although the way you just said it is like, it would be incredible if he went for a whole episode saying it like that. All right, so the big money in Chinatown back then isn't the extortion racket, it's gambling. And there are a ton of gambling houses, and they bring in a ton of cash. The Tongs run the gambling houses, and they're making me.

millions. NYPD mostly leaves them alone. They usually get paid off, but they still need protection. So the Tong's contract out to the youth gangs basically as security. In 1973, it's the White Eagles that run Mott Street for the Tong in charge. Mott Street's like this major street in Chinatown. That's where there are 11 gambling houses on that street alone. And they each pay $10,000 of protection fees a week to the White Eagles who are making,

I mean, that's serious money, especially back then. They're protecting them for the hip sing-tong, which is run. by the godfather of Chinatown at the time, Uncle Benny. Though I've actually seen reports now that, say, Eddie Chen, who ran the other major tongue, the On Leong, was more powerful. Yeah, I think that wasn't the On Leone also the gang that Sister Ping, Pod Legend, Sister Ping, the snakehead used when she was smuggling folks into Chinatown, like what, the 80s and 90s?

Yeah, I mean, the two big ones in New York were the On Leong and the Hip Sing, and they kind of traded power struggles, so it had to have been. But that's also one of our first 20 episodes, I think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right, quick intro to Uncle Benny. They call him Uncle Seven, and in 1991, a Senate subcommittee would describe him as the godfather of Chinatown. He ran hip-sing.

He took a cut of nearly all the gambling rackings in Chinatown. He had done time for murder. He's the type of guy who was honored at community banquets and would get a new immigrant a job, get another one alone. But, you know, he was also not to be messed with. Once, one of his Tong members tried to start his own thing in the early 80s called the Chinese Freemasons. The guy even hired some members of the Flying Dragons and starts up his own parallel street gang. Mass Gummins show up to his gang hideout, shoot it up and kill three and wound aid others. They couldn't pin anything on Benny.

But when a reporter asked him, he told the press, quote, 60 years I build up respect. And he think he knocked me down in one day, which, you know, power quote right there, especially if you can get away. Now, remember, the ghost shadows don't have a tongue backing them in 73. They're on their own. They're operating sort of on the fringe of Chinatown. robbing gambling houses, and because of that, getting money put on their heads, Peter Chin is barely a teenager at this point, but he spends his days with them learning how they do things,

going to restaurants they extort and eating for free. You know, he's participating in robberies. He's helping them rough people up. He's getting the scraps with the other gangs. Wait, wait, wait, so fly, all dragons are flying. They've all got wings. They can all fly. All dragons are flying dragons.

All dragons. Calm it down. Comment down. We're going to move on. Okay. The boss of the ghost shadows. Yeah. The boss of the Go Shadows isn't Nicky Louis at this point.

It's a guy named Ney Wong. Peter comes across Wong trying to collect cash from a guy, refuses to pay, and he helps another Go Shadow beat the crap out of the guy as Wong just kind of stands there watching. The guy, though, happens to be a former Hong Kong policeman, and these types, they're a rough bunch. They were corrupt, and they usually fled to the U.S. after a crackdown. Soon after this, April 1974, Peter and his boys are hanging out at a bar called the Mayfower Club.

It's their usual spot. The whole crew decides they're going to go to. a gambling house, except Peter can't go because he's only 15, which is funny because he was robbing them, but they're like, no, we're actually going to go gamble, you can't come with us. Wong stays behind two. He's with a woman he's seeing. The other gang members

take off, but Peter decides to hang around for a bit. The Hong Kong cop that got beat up shows up, calmly walks over to Wong and the woman, and shoots them both dead in front of Peter. He looks at Peter and he tells him, he's not there for him, and then he calmly waits for the police to show up. Now, this gets reported as being a loved

triangle gone wrong. And that's actually how I talked about it in the initial go shadows episode based on the research I'd done. But according to Chin, I think revealing the truth here for the first time, it was about the beating and losing phase. So again, you know, we talk a lot about how Laura's created and how these stories get told. It's important to remember that like, you know, a lot of times we don't actually know what the truth is. So the ghost shadows are in sort of shambles, right? They're still living hand-to-mouth, no serious backing. They've just lost their die low. Peter catches a gun charge. He has to do a few months in Juvie. When he gets out, he's finally made to a full member of the Ghost Shadows, and he has to take an oath under a statue of

General Kwan, who was a general during the Eastern Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period. His life and exploits are famously written about in a classic Chinese novel called Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and he's known to be like an incredibly loyal badass soldier. Swearing in front of his picture, it comes from triad rituals. And you know, the oath is the usual, like I will not rat on my brother, I will not leave the gang under penalty of death, all the normal stuff that all gangs and mafia

and rituals make you swear to. Then in December of 1974, the ghost shadows get into a shootout with two drunken, off-duty cops at a Chinatown bar. Once again, everyone gets arrested and Peter sent the juvie. One person's killed. The state eventually drops the case

after internal affairs gets involved. The same thing happens again shortly after when another shootout occurs with cops in our restaurant afterwards our exchange. Once again, the state drops the case. And this is just, like, this is how insane New York City was in the 1970s. Yeah, man, every show we do

about this era in New York has just blows my mind. I mean, I also don't want to stereotype Chinese people in any way. We've got what, a gangster called spare rib, a corrupt cop who does a double murder to save face and guys swearing oaths under what statues of ancient Chinese generals

this is very, this is very good stuff. it's a time period, man. Speaking of spare rib, he's effectively leading the gang then. He gets locked up on an extortion charge, and then that's right around the time Nikki Louis gets released from prison from a different sentence and takes over as the die low.

And he's got ideas. At this point, there's literally only 12 go shadows and they're struggling hard. Nikki's idea, though, is to take some little side street territory from the bigger gangs in a show of force. He's betting they won't risk a war for side streets they don't care about. They decide to take him over from the, the flying dragons, whose leader is in jail at the time.

The ghost shadows just grab the territory. They show up earlier and they stake out positions and the flying dragons don't realize what's happening until it's too late. By the time they spot them, post it up, it's already done and they don't bother with a fight, which this whole thing is weird, right? They're probably going to go home tomorrow or like at night at some time. Just do the same thing. Maybe show up earlier tomorrow, you know?

Just 5 a.m. I don't know. I'm not a Chinatown youth gang boss and probably never will be. Like, what do I know? I'm just saying it's kind of weird the way they describe it. Yeah, I mean, although being a Chinatown gang boss might be a way more achievable goal than anything you've done in crypto. What if my goal was to lose a bunch of money stupidly? Then I, you know, what if that's my goal?

This move, though, it gets them some respect and catches Uncle Benny's eye, the boss, the King of Chinatown, connected the triads all over. Uncle Benny sees these wild go shadows and doesn't want them falling under the sway of his rivals at the On the Yongtong. So he brings in Nikki and inducts him as an affiliate. They're his gang now, backed and affiliated with the powerful hip sing. Although there's some reporting, not this book, that says they were backed by the only which is very confusing. The Tongs, I guess, don't have these rigid relationships with the gangs, but still, I mean, the whole thing is like, it's a lot of whack.

Now, the ghost shadows are playing at a whole new level, right? They've got money, they've got backing, they can get guns, businesses to extort. Then they take over Mott Street from the White Eagles, tooling up, chasing them out, firing at some, catching others, beating them badly. I mean, this makes more sense, right? Shooting at them and beating them up is a lot better than just showing up early. Uncle Benny and the hip-synks sit back and they kind of let this one play out. I mean, I think both gangs are affiliated, but if one is more powerful, then the other, I guess,

is thinking is that they deserve to be in charge. Now, they're pulling all the protection money from the gambling houses. Peter's pulling in $55 a week. He's one of the five generals under Nicky, and the go-shadows soon have over 70 members. They're a force to be reckoned with. But the Eagles are pissed. They can't just take the street back. There's just too many ghost shadows.

So they go hunting, trying to find them when they're by themselves and outnumbered. They try to kill as many as they can. And Chinatown is a mess of shootouts. Peter actually heads to San Francisco's Chinatown at this point, which I know, I know we need to do a shrimp boy episode. Peter gets involved in a war there, but fails to help his homies retake territory from a different gang and then heads back to New York, kind of defeated. Things heat up, though, with the Flying Dragons back in New York, who are no joke. There's a shootout, a 39-year-old civilian ends up dead. One of the Flying Dragons, some guy Peter had roughed up before, gets shot in the lag, and here's where it gets interesting.

He tells the cops that Peter's the one who did it, even though Peter wasn't there. Peter ends up in Rikers, I think he's 16 at this point, gets into some fights, but he eventually makes bail. And then boom, another shootout with the Flying Dragons, and that same guy, he snitches again. And this time, Peter's hit with an attempt to murder a witness charge because that guy, you know, in the shootout, he was the witness. He gets arrested and sent back to Rikers. Keep in mind he's still only 16. It's wild, right? But then it turns out the witness is found to be unreliable.

Peter walks free. I mean, back then, dude, you can just get away with almost anything. Like, no cameras, no DNA. It doesn't even seem to the cops care that much. It was just the whole different world. Yeah, I know. Was he getting charged as an adult, too? Like, it's crazy than not pinning anything on him.

I think at 16 if you're being sent to Rikers, you are being charged as an adult. because before it said Jubi, you know? Yeah, yeah. Wow, I can't believe they're not doing him. But while Peter's locked up, Nikki Louie makes a major mistake. There's an unofficial mayor of Chinatown, dude, the kind of guy who helps New immigrants get jobs and language lessons,

secures loans for businesses, counseling for the youth, and he's a big-time anti-crime in Chinatown guy. He's really against the gangs. Louis wants him gone because he's been going after them. And this, by the way, you know, the targeting the activist type, it's a constant thing in the organized crime world. It rarely works out with the attention.

had that effect, it usually just has the opposite effect, like a big backfire. And that's exactly what happens. A hitman stabs the guy five times, but he survives, and the pressure on the ghost shadows ramps way up. The cops do the unthinkable. They shut down the gambling houses. The go shadows are losing out on millions of dollars. Remember how they, you know, had gone from something like 12 guys to 70 guys by 1977 way up from their previous number? Well, that's all well and good when there's plenty of money to go around. But when there's not, it's going to drive a lot of tension. So under Nikki, there had been five generals. He was the die low and there were five generals underneath him. Peter was one of those generals. And the ghost shadow split into two factions and the guns come out.

Peter's on the other side of Nikki and there's a shootout, an internal one in their own territory. Nikki calls Peter during a moment at peace. He tries to loan to his side. Peter says no. And eventually he meets up with the four other generals and they decide there's a new ghost shadows. No more die low, no more boss, there's a council, it's the five of them. But before that, they need to take Nikki out and Peter is going to be the one to do it. I mean, I've got to say, like, if this is his own recounting of everything and he's trying to set the record straight, still comes off pretty psychopathic and mercenary. He's like a total survivor, this kid. He would just do anything to get by. Yeah, yeah, I think that's generally what he was going for in the story. It's, uh, it's true. It's nuts.

The five generals with their 50 or so soldiers on one side of Mott Street, you know, Peter's one of them, Nikki's 20 or so guys on the other side. The whole neighborhood is holding their breath. No one thinks the peace is going to last, and these guys are literally on opposite sides of the street doing their thing. One tiny mistake has the potential to set off a bloodbath. Nicky's in the shadows.

He's trying not to be out there too much. He knows what's coming. That's when we have the opening scene from the Cold Open and the soldier named Potato, which, you know, potato's great, goes after Nicky, fails to do him in, Nicky makes it the police station dimes out potato who eventually gets a 5 to 15 year sentence and then Nikki

flees New York City Yeah I mean potato is Yeah it's potato but maybe in China A potato is a really respected food Because it's so heavy or something I'm guessing I don't know There's not many freedom fries going around back then in Beijing Or maybe it's just a fat guy with a big round head

You're having a real hard time with the nicknames And the gang names I am Sorry guys Hello, compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals?

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In an all-new season, now streaming only on Disney Plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with that. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again, of streaming only on Disney Plus. The gambling houses eventually reopened after a year or two in 78, 79,

so the ghost shadows are back making money. Peter gets married in 1979 and also two of his generals get lengthy prison sentences for an extortion case in Baltimore. And another one goes on the run. Now it's only Peter and another general by the name of Stinky Bug as the bosses. Yes, you heard me, Sean, deal with it, Stinky Bug. No notes, no notes at all. by the way there is like some banging now there's some guys doing construction in the hotel so i'm sorry

if anyone picks that up but actually it comes to one of my big uh my big recies for going away on trips in asia which is find a brand new chinese made hotel because they will give you a five-star hotel for about 30 bucks a night so uh but they will be working on it when you're in there which is making a podcast the go shadows decide to take a vote to elect a leader peter wins and Stinky Bug, he's feeling stinky. Oh, thank you. He says he's going to leave the group. He's disappointed. Real loser energy, to be honest.

Peter tries to talk him out of it, but Stinky Bug won't be persuaded. Peter makes him promise not to start another gang, which he holds off on for about six months, when he starts one called the White Tigers and Queens. There's actually a big New Yorker article on the White Tigers that comes out in 1992, where there's a massive sting against them, and a mediocre movie based on the article called

Revenge of the Green Dragons. Okay. I mean, are all dragons green? Questionable. That's, yeah, I don't know. You got to let it go, bro. Yeah, I will. It's been a long week. For now, all you have to know is Stinky Bug sets them up, and Peter Chin ain't happy. But for now, they're in Queens. Peter lets it go until the white tigers shoot at some ghost shadows.

Then it's on. There's a war. The white tigers are also beefing with the flying dragons, and the white tigers are trying to expand into Manhattan. An incident happens when Peter's on monsters. in his territory, and he sees the flying dragons chasing some kids. The dragons tell Peter that the kids that they're chasing members of the white tigers. Peter tells them to get the hell out of his territory and that he'll handle it. Some ghost shadows eventually catch the kids, beat them, take them somewhere, and then shoot them in the head. It turns out, though, it's bad info.

The kids aren't gangsters at all. They're civilians. Or weren't gangsters. They're civilians. And it's just, it's too many murders. And the NYPD are really starting to focus on the ghost shadows and the other gangs and starting to build massive RICO cases. Around this time, Peter buys a nightclub in Midtown called the Golden Taipei.

The owner has been trying to unload it for cheap because there's a bunch of low-level Chinese hooligans who've made it home and have been causing problems. But at this point, Peter is a known quantity. People are scared of him and they do what he says. So these guys, they're getting drunk and scaring away customers. Peter shows up, has a talk with them real quick, makes it clear he's in charge now, and they back off real quick. one day later, an older white guy starts hanging out at the club and some of the drunk and Chinese guys are, they've been harassing him.

But Peter notices something about his composure and he strikes up a friendship with a guy who turns out is a lone shark connected to the Genovacy family. They hit it off. They start bonding. They work together. Peter helps him get his money on the streets of Chinatown where they can charge triple the usual interest. They're making millions. And now Peter is connected with the actual mafia who, you know, back then, late 70s, early 80s, were still a major, major. are forced to be reckoned with.

But in the world of Chinese gangs, things are getting weird and convoluted. At some point, the general from the ghost shadows who went on the run after the Baltimore extortion, remember, you know, there are five, including Peter, two get sentenced, one stinky bug, one goes on the run. Peter gets him a good lawyer and arranges for him to get bailed out. The guy's name is Taiwan, and he comes back to town, but he doesn't like how things have changed. He's not thrilled with Peter. The ghost shadows, they're much bigger now, and Peter's running things.

he's got like all these like really loyal soldiers and Taiwan's jealous of Peter's power the loyalty the soldiers have to him and how much respect that he's built. I mean, why would he expect anything else? He's been away. I don't get it. Dude, these guys are all 19 and 20, man. They're like, uh, you know, I don't think they, they, they don't have adult emotions. They're also just like probably, you know, getting messed up all the time and and carousing and

staying up all night. I can't, you can't expect them to be like emotionally rational. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Fair enough. I'm sure like, when were you at university, dude? Like, yeah, lunatic, I'm sure. Ouch.

Meanwhile, it wasn't good. Yeah, me neither. Meanwhile, Nikki Louis slightly comes back to town and starts working with the white tigers and stinky bugs. So now you've got the former Dailo and Stinky Bug, who's the former general who started the white tigers. You got Peter leading the ghost shadows with Taiwan, another general who's with him, but also not happy with him. Unbeknownst the Peter, though, Taiwan also decides to take out the white, Tiger's leader Stinky Buck. He sends a hitman after him, but the hitman

fails. And because they don't know Taiwan's back in town, the white tigers assume Peter's behind it. So, they send a hit man after Peter. I mean, you know, so he's the ones, you know, that you came up with and all that. But is this, do we got it so far? There's like Chihuahua's barking in the distance.

I got bird screeching, but is this making sense, Sean? Is this confusing? No, no, no. I'm following it. There's just like a lot of names, but it's good. It's good because the names are brilliant. But yeah, I'm I'm following it and I have not slept for a literal week. So, yeah, that is high praise. On that yaba.

Anyway, mid-April, mid-April 1980, Peter goes out to dinner with his crew and he gets a beep. Do I need to explain what beepers are for our younger listeners? Oh, they're in the news. Yeah, they know they are. Oh, that's true. Yeah, they are. Peter steps out to take a call and as he's walking back, a hitman comes for him. He shoots Peter in the face, just grazes him, and then he shoots him in the back.

Peter stumbles into the police precinct just like Nicky did. Apparently it's the closest government building to Mod Street. So he goes in to have the cops call an ambulance, but the cops, they try to make him ID the shooter from a book of mug shots before they call the ambulance. He's just kind of like sitting there bleeding out and they're refusing to do it

until he points to a photo of the guy who shot him. They finally relents when one cop is like, hey, he's going to die here. And he gets to the hospital where he's in a coma for three days, but pulls through. When he wakes up, he gets a phone call in his hospital room, threat, to finish the job. Okay, that is utterly mad policing.

But also he's got a landline in his hospital room. Is that normal? I think they had them back then. I'm pretty sure, you know? Ah, okay. Peter spends a couple of months recuperating. The doctors tell him that if the bullet had been just an inch in either direction, he would have died.

And he uses that as motivation. He launches a big-time entertainment company called Oriental Arts with a triad boss from Toronto and a gang boss in Boston. And their plan is to bring over singers and international. from Hong Kong to tour those cities. Peter also really wants to visit Hong Kong. It's, you know, the 80s, the city is flush with cash. It's corrupt.

There's lots of money going around, and he sees big opportunities. He's thinking bigger than Chinatown. So in 1981, he takes a months-long trip to Taiwan and Hong Kong, meeting with triads, establishing connections. Meanwhile, with that touring company happening, a big star from Hong Kong is performing an Atlantic city, when the Flying Dragons show up and just hold them for ransom. handsome with his family, I think like in the green room or something. Peter gets the call from his new

triad friends to handle it and he rolls up to the Tropicana casino with his guys, goes into the VIP suite where they're being held, you know, to the singer, his family and 10 Flying Dragons. Peter just handles the situation and it's resolved. He doesn't need to need to raise his voice. That's how much weight he carries at the moment. And all of this, by the way, when he's only 21. Yeah, I mean, I also had the ability to clear a bar at the age of 21, but for very, very different reasons. So Peter is diversifying. He's expanding. You know, there's some bootleg Chinese videotapes becoming a huge thing. Peter's got a little bit of that going on. He's getting approached to move hundreds of pounds of heroin from a connect in Hong Kong, but he actually turns that

down, even though he would have gotten $25 million per shipment. Peter wants to stay out of the drug game. He knows the money's huge, but he also knows it brings a lot of heat. He even gets an offer to get involved in counterfeiting U.S. currency. There's like, you know, the actual plates, like the plot of rush hour. But he's smart enough to turn that down to. just recognizes how much heat and federal engagement both drugs and counterfeit bills would bring on him. But just when things are going well and he's making smart choices, he gets some new info. He got into horse racing and he befriends a guy who was a business partner working in Chinatown. And the business partner is dating a cop.

And the cop let slip to his girlfriend, the business partner, that they have an informant inside the ghost shadows. Someone flipped and the guy's code name is Casper. Then there's an insanely brutal incident that turns into front page tablet. fodder makes national news and it really signals the downfall and the brutality of the ghost shadows. Peter and his wife go to a restaurant in Chinatown. There's a group of younger ghost shadows drinking there and there's just like a strangely, you know, it's one of these all Chinese bars, a young white woman at the bar. Peter and his wife leave. But later that night, the younger goshadows rape and murder the woman, strangling her with an electrical cord. Her body

is found in an alley. Peter's on tape saying he won't help them. You know, he won't get them lawyers or support that they can rot in prison. It's according to the book. So I don't really know Peter's involvement. But in the book, he says he wasn't really involved, which could be true, because I think those tapes were, you know, from the informants. But this is front page news, front page New York Post, New York Times stuff, national news headlines, a gang kidnapping, raping and murdering a woman, leaving her in an alley.

That means the hammer is about to come down. And it turns out that Casper, the informant that had been wearing a wire is Peter's driver. Peter actually had found out the informant's last name was Wong. He had a number of Wongs in the ghost shadows, I think four. So he brings them all together in a room, tells them what he heard, and watches their reactions. And then right there, he realizes it's his driver, but the guy never comes back after that.

The book doesn't really go into that part, which honestly sounds insane, and I kind of wish it did. Yeah. I mean, it's also pretty amazing that he knew the guy's actual name, and that didn't narrow it down a huge amount. I guess so. Meanwhile, good old spare ribs, he gets out of prison. Remember him? Sort of like Peter's gang mentor. He hangs out with Taiwan, who's still envious and distrustful of Peter, and they start collaborating with Nikki Louie, and the three of them plan to take Peter out. You know, it's your own people, Sean. Be your own people. In 1981, though, spare ribs is killed by the Flying Dragons in a kung fu movie theater, which is like, you know, John Yu kind of sick, sick scene, I bet. Definitely a Hong Kong action film scene. And then Peter has a running with Nikki Louis, shoots at him, and all this while the white tigers are still putting money on Peter's head, which he finds out about actually from the police who warn him. The cops also have an informant in the white tigers too.

Weirdly, and again, not a lot of detail. All this beef kind of gets resolved. One of the old school gang members negotiates a piece between Peter and Taiwan, and as a co-author of the book writes, Peter is strangely good at not holding grudges except against his father. The bullets are still flying, though. and when we say youth gangs, we mean youth. Here's the Washington Post in 1982. Quote, two weeks ago in what's characterized as

your typical incident between young gangsters, members of the rival Ghost Shadows and Flying Dragons crashed a party at New York University, given by the school's Oriental Culture Club. When the fighting stopped, 14-year-old Kim Fu Man, a member of the Ghost Shadows, lay dead, and 16-year-old James Lee,

a member of the Dragons, suffered bullet wounds in his chest. That a 14-year-old having been carrying a pistol was no surprise to a Chinatown detective. Quote, in our experience, it's the 14 and 13-year-olds who carry the guns when they leave Chinatown, he said.

They do that for two reasons. No one is going to think that sweet little 85-pound 4'8 Sunshine is carrying a weapon. And if he's caught, he's treated like a juvenile. Very, very typical incident between youngsters, that?

Pretty wild, right? Around that same time, a corrupt Hong Kong police officer arrives in Chinatown, hoping to transform himself from a businessman into a mafia boss. He aligns himself with the Hipsing Association, but Uncle Benny refuses to make a deal with him.

This is when the guy strikes out, and he starts his own tong called the Freemasons and establishes his ties with the white tigers. Eventually, Uncle Benny decides this rogue operator needs to be dealt with. He hands a murder contract to the Flying Dragons, and on December 23, 1982, the hitman tracked down the businessman at a Chinese restaurant and just let off.

That's when they kill three people, including a 13-year-old, and injurate others, and the massacre draws even more national and federal attention to Chinatown. Meanwhile, Stinky Bug and the White Tigers, our line with the Freemasons, Stinky Bug reaches out to Peter to borrow his street, asking if he has permission to cross Matsui

in pursuit of the Flying Dragons, but when they reached their target, they failed to make a move. And in an unexpected turn, the boss of the Flying Dragons, the very gang Uncle Benny had hired, has a falling out with Uncle Benny. The Dailo, who's known as the scientists,

feared his own gang was plotting to kill him because of this, and in response, he hires a new bodyguard. However, both he and the bodyguard are murdered within six hours. There's like a running theme in this episode of people really not doing their jobs very well at all. I mean, I know these guys, at least half of them are like 10 years old, but still. Yeah.

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They weren't guessing. They were asking the victim who killed them. Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. Minas Durfer, and every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling, true crime story connected to that exact day in history.

From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, morning cup of murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled,

then sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Shockingly, it turns out that Uncle Benny orchestrated their deaths, despite the scientist being his own godson and the fact that he was merely carrying out Uncle Benny's original orders. And one major consequence of the scientist's murder while I'm getting into it is the NYPD's Chinatown Task Force, known as the Jade Squad,

decides they're going to shift their focus entirely onto Peter and the Goh Shadows instead of the Flying Dragons and the Scientist. Shortly after the scientist's death, Peter meets with the new boss of the Flying Dragons. They negotiate a peace, which is the first in 20 years, bringing an end to Chinatown's longstanding war, including the feud with the White Tigers. But, you know, you can't negotiate a peace with them Federallis.

On Sunday, February 17, 1985, Peter gets rated. 25 members of the ghost shadows are indicted on RICO charges. Peter thinks he's going to take a plea. He ends up in a cell with Nikki Louis and they both share a laugh, you know, because they're both facing their own RICO charges. 13 murders are tied to the case. A guy named Robin Chee takes over the ghost shadows. Everyone takes pleas.

Nikki Louie gets 15 years. Peter gets 35. He ends up in prison in Indiana. He's working in the kosher kitchen of all places. Another inmate teaches him to read, which he never could before. He's eventually transferred to Petersburg, Virginia, where he hangs out and plays handball with none other than sunny Franzisi, the father of famous podcaster Michael Franzisi. Handball, that is random. It might be worth telling people what Rico actually means, because it's like it's a huge thing once you get cocked with one of those, right?

Yeah, Rico is the racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations act that was passed, I believe, in the 70s, right? and it became the way to take down organized crime because basically any crime committed by your organization, they can throw at you. So it's very easy. It makes it very easy to throw, tie everything together with an enterprise gang, organized crime, whatever, and you get a lot of years for it.

It was primarily, I think, the primary intent was the deal with the mafia, and then they started applying it to street gangs as well and things of that nature. But yeah, RICO, serious. It's like, you know, once you get hit with the RICO, it's over. From the book, it seems like Peter still maintains a level of respect and power. Even among other gangsters in prison, he gets treated pretty decently inside. He's able to connect with other known gangsters.

He eventually gets released in June of 2005 after serving only 20 years, which seems like a short sentence for 35 with federal charges. But this is the crazy thing. He gets out. 2005, he's only 46 years old after serving 20 years and being this game. gang boss, which is crazy. He gets a job at a relative's construction company, takes over a karaoke club in Queens because of course, and also, of course, what does he get into? None other than real estate development. He's probably making bank right now. And that is the story of Peter Chin, said to be one of the most powerful bosses of street gangs in Chinatown, the last real boss of the

Go Shadows, though they do exist somewhat up until the early 2000s. I really love these Chinatown episodes. They're fascinating. And also there's a Chinese noodle joint just down the street from here. And this convinced me to go get that for my breakfast. Good move. Yeah, I kind of want some too. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed. Yeah, until next week, member Spotify, Patreon.com, system, their own podcast.

Support our sponsors, please, so they keep buying ads from us because, you know, when those budgets change over from December to January and you get that earnings back from January, it ain't pretty, folks. It makes you want to quit. Anyway, until next week. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities,

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