The Underworld Podcast - The Rise and Incredible Fall of China’s Mob King

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

When his Green Gang goons killed thousands of leftists in 1927’s Shanghai Massacre, Du Yuesheng was welcomed into the political scene of China’s nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. ‘Big Ears Du��� would then take over the country’s biggest city wholesale — running transport, water, electrical grids and even a major bank. All the while Du’s profits from narcotics and vice soared, making him one of the richest organized criminals in world history. But events in Asia were spiraling beyond Du’s control. China’s communists regrouped after the Green Gang had almost wiped them off the map. And Japan, its imperial ambitions supercharged by hypernationalist yakuza gangsters, eyed an invasion of Manchuria to fuel its war machine. Caught between a rock and a hard place, there was only one way for Du: down. And his fall would be almost as spectacular as his rise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now streaming on Disney Plus, the Hulu original series Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black, played by Emmy Rossum, on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. New episodes week over week. Watch the Hulu original series Furious, now streaming only on Hulu on Disney Plus. 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. April 12, 1927, downtown Shanghai, dawn. China's biggest city boils with tension. Chiang Kai Shek and his nationalist army have for a year swept aside the region's ramshackle warlords. Their goal? A united China, run by Chang and backed, improbably, by the Soviet Union. But Shanghai still stands in his path.

On paper, Chang rules everything except the city's international settlement. But communists and trade unionists have run riot, striking and marching and sacking foreign businesses. Allow these shenanigans to continue for long, Chen reckons, and the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, will soon pose a far greater threat than any two-bit warlord. So Chang reaches out to Shanghai. other great power. It's underworld. More specifically, the Green Gang, a former secret society led by the unprecedentedly powerful mob boss, Du Yue Sheng. Big ears do. A man as ungainly looking

as he is ruthless, willing to do anything to maintain his own grip on the city's booming trade in vice. The communists of angered do too, tearing away his access to Shanghai's poor and desperate labor force. Men who once made perfect pimps, drug dealers and doorman are now rallying against imperialism. This, Doe decides, will not do. The two men hatch a plan. Doe will mobilize a gang army of his own, slipping amongst the leftists and cause havoc. When it's over and you're leading China, he tells Chang, you make sure you remember old big ears. Chang agrees. On April 11, Dues men slaughter one of Shanghai's top trade unionists. Then, early the next morning, 2,000 more of them change into denim overalls and filter into crowds thronging Shanghai's

city centre. The stage is set for mayhem. At dawn, a bugle and a gumboat siren, play simultaneously. The sign. The green gang goons whip out knives and other weapons and attack anybody they see. Protesters are rounded up and shot. Men beheaded in the the street, more thrown into the flatbeds of trucks and led off to prisoner camps. A rumor even spreads that railroad workers are being burned alive in their trains. By nightfall, the green gangsters have murdered as many as 5,000 leftists across Shanghai. Several of the CCP's top brass escape, but the massacre will kick off a period of bloodletting known as the White Terror and only 10,000 of China's 60,000 CCP members will survive 1927. The Chinese civil war has truly

begun. And Do has played its key role, butchering reds and coming out of the massacre Shanghai's one true king. Chang, true to his word, brings the Green Gang into his nationalist firmament, which do leverages into commanding businesses in banking, commerce. even education. Shanghai, Pearl of the Orient, now belongs to the mob. And Big Ears Do might just be the most powerful gangster on the planet. How long can he stay on top? Well, that won't depend on him for much longer.

This is the Underworld podcast. Hello and welcome to a podcast hosted by two investigative reporters that shows you how crime really works and how it drives pretty much everything about the world we live in. I'm Sean Williams, a writer-based in Buenos Aires, I'm Tina, and I am joined by a documentary and co-host Danny Gold in New York City. That's it, guys. That's the show. Yeah, I mean, we are running out of ideas for that. I don't know how The Simpsons kept it up for 30 years, but that's the intro. Yeah, remember COVID? That's when we started. Anyway, housekeeping.

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Anyway, merch outunderworldpot.com. And please do reach out the underworldpodcast at gmail.com. Yeah, that'll be it. Unless you want to say saying funny, but people don't like that, do they? So we better just do the story. No, they don't. No, no, they hate that. All right.

So today's episode is the third in a mammoth three part on the Green Gang and the rise of of do, UA Shreng. he's possibly, I mean I'm convinced after reading all these things on him, like one of the biggest gangsters in history, huge historical figure in China. As you just heard, not a nice guy, but in many ways do is the part of the story of modern China you barely ever hear about. And that is pretty strange given that he straddle so many key moments in the 20th century. And Shanghai, this heaving metropolis, home to about 2 million people in 1927,

I guess 1,995,000 by April 13, given the cold open you just heard. It is in the middle of a massive crazy boom period. Its population is going to surpass 3 million in the next few years. Most of them live in the vast, poor Chinese-administered area. But there's also the international settlement in the French concession, home to some of the richest foreign businesses anywhere on earth. Vice everywhere, crazy place. you might, for example, remember this scene from movie law.

Dale, do not post it. It's, you know, we're going to get, that's one of the, they protect their IP. We're going to get demonetized. Dale, I want you to just come in right now and narrate what's happening in the scene for the audience. They love you anyway. That would be cool. Okay, so first Harrison Ford, like, throws some water or something in his face, and then just, I guess he's a Chinese guy, comes in with, like, a Tommy gun, and he's shooting. they're like in a club oh it's called club obiwan uh which in china i guess and then there's this

giant gong and the chinese guy it's a party and the chinese guys shoots at the gong and the gong falls off it's like holder and then harrison for is like running behind the gong and then the gong oh he grabs this woman i guess uh harrison ford knows her and then they're running behind the gong like hiding from the Tommy gun and then the gong knocks out a window and they jump out the window and they like fall through and awning and then they fall onto the streets of Shanghai and there's like a lot of neon

and like old cars and the little kid short round and yeah then they're in Shanghai I guess and that's what Danny and Sean wanted me to tell you

anyway if you are not getting it from Dale's beautiful description. Yes, that is 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That scene was actually filmed in Macau, not Shanghai for, I guess, obvious reasons, given the weird legal status of Macau back then. But Shanghai really was that wilder place in the 1930s when the movie is set, and it was largely down to Doe U.S. Sheng. As early as 1927, when the Shanghai massacre takes place, Dooh has already. really dismantled any rival gangs or political enemies to become the underworld authority. He has his own version of Plata or Blomor, keeping corrupt officials on board by an honor system

called Guangji, something we've explored in those money laundering Chinese episodes. For anybody else, there is a slightly different approach. Right to the website, damn interesting, which I know you are all reading right now. quote, by 1927, nothing criminal, illegal, or even questionable, took place in Shanghai without do say so. And any crook who dared to knock over a safe, rob a well-heeled Westerner, or run a quiet numbers game without giving the Green Gang their cut, was liable to end up shot, kidnapped for ransom, with their tendons sliced apart with a fruit knives. Remember websites? I know you still go to some websites. I don't go to that many, but I know you like the ones with X at the beginning or hub at the end, right? like that you're still regular regular. Yeah, great.

Yeah, I have to verify my age these days, which is not cool when you're lying on your own in a hotel room in cube. I mean, what are you talking about anyway? No, I don't know what you're saying. I have no idea what Danny's talking about there. However, do, remember him, he does the Mafia's horse head thing in style as well.

He sends actual coffins to the home of anybody he wants to stop doing what they're doing, and few on the receiving end of that little stunt failed to get the message. His great power is to unite Shanghai's disparate criminal powers into one giant cartel. Before he had done this, Shanghai crime is divided amongst gangs from different regions.

One group, for example, are the feared kidnappers. Others are the armed robbers. The Shanghai merchants grow terrified of these twin specters, a cottage industry of gang-affiliated bodyguards and security pop-up too. They provide intel to the gangs while coining it from the rich industrialists. So he basically like Amazon's organized crime in Shanghai just takes over everything. They're doing everything.

They're selling everything. They're committing everything. And he's the one in control. He is, yeah. And as we're going to learn, his labor law practices are pretty if he too. So there are darker sides to the city's thriving, kidnapping black market, as if you can imagine that. And they don't just affect the rich and powerful. Some groups in Shanghai focus on trafficking boys to monasteries or businesses outside the city,

something called lifting rocks, or I mean, I know you know this, but I'll tell you anyway, Ban Shittu. Girls, meanwhile, are kidnapped into the sex trade, something gangsters call pretty grimly, plucking mulberry leaves, or Jay Jiangxie. Yeah, sorry about that. I don't even think I've got the letters right there. So prevalent is this kind of bleak act that Western philanthropist establish an anti-kidnapping society in China, which manages to save almost 4,000 children across a decade.

Dude doesn't mind get involved in his vice. It's just another market, his Green Gang Underlings managed to consolidate under his rule. But nothing propels him more than the Shanghai massacre. For one, he's just become a truly pivotal figure in Chinese history. By April 13, 1927, his denim-wearing assassins have left 5,000 dead and kicked off the white terror, A year's long pogrom that will kill up to a million Chinese leftists almost, I mean, yeah, history tells that story, almost wiping out the Chinese Communist Party altogether. Yeah, that's a crazy story. The comeback they made.

What, I mean, that's a pretty, that's like being down three, oh, that's the Red Sox comeback with the Yankees and what was the 2004? Anyway, you know, there's like that internet joke about how Chinese history are full of little known to us events call things like the sad year where just 15 million people die for like a massacre. occur or like a famine or something like that. Yeah, I think reading this stuff, that would be called the happy year. I think just after this happens, there's like a massive flood that basically wipes a billion people off the face of the earth. That's crazy. So, yeah, I guess 5,000 being stabbed and beheaded in a major city center is small change, perhaps.

Am I, is that, am I allowed to say that? Yeah, that's fine, isn't it? It's been long enough. Anyway, Chang Kai Sheck, remember him. He then welcomes Doe into the hierarchy of his nationalist Komitang, or the KMT, China's ruling party. Doe and fellow Green Gang leaders are handed honorary major general roles in Chang's army. Doe then pays a massive bung to the leaders of Shanghai's international settlement, which gives him the right to manufacture and sell drugs within its borders.

This convinces the French authorities in their own concession to buckle under Doe's increasing criminal demands. They extend dues opium selling licenses further, guaranteeing his drug-laden riverboats the protection of the French Navy. Writes Brian Martin, whose excellent book, The Shanghai Green Gang, I read, enjoyed, read again and read it a third time because it's so cool. Yeah, I'll use it a lot for this trilogy. The largest chunk of money due sent upriver to Chang, the first of many illicit paydays and the start of a beautiful friendship. Of course, if you've listened to our other shows about the KMT, whether they were in Taiwan or Myanmar, they quite liked getting involved in drug money. Anyway, Do then opens five massive gambling houses in the French concession, protected by an army of 500 gangsters. The biggest of these is a three-story foreign-style house known as No. 181 for its address, of course.

Continues Martin, quote, it catered to all types of Western and Chinese forms of gambling for her. Whose use do paid 4,000 silver tiles each month. Yeah, in case you like me don't have a clue what a silver tile is. Turns out it's this weird conch-shaped ingot uses currency in Imperial Japan. Yeah, I still don't know after you describe it, what that means. Imagine little tiny silver ears that you've got and then you pay for prostitutes with it. Imagine that. Now you're painting a very vivid picture.

Now I got it. There we go. Should have led with that. There's websites again. Anyway, on with the quote, quickly as possible. Besides such prestigious locations, do also control innumerable gambling dives catered to working class gamblers. In the words of Britain's consul general in Shanghai, very British words, I should add apologies for that. The Green Game boss is a quote, extremely useful intermediaries in dealing by Chinese methods with any Chinese troubles which are right.

with a political, industrial, or even peace and good order in the French concession. They can continue their opium dealings just so long as the concession benefits very materially and is spared much of the trouble to which foreign authorities in China so often airs. I am partners with a diplomat who writes a diplomatic cable, so I'll probably shut up at this point.

But, yeah, the writing needs an editor. Anyway, we do suddenly the toast of the KMT and protected by every fat cat in Shanghai, and there are quite a few of those there, he doesn't miss the chance to live the gangster high life. Gone are the fruit stalls and peasant clothes of his youth. Doe pours his cash into building a grand mansion on one of the city's main spalling avenues

and a wardrobe of incredibly lavish clothes, including a robe adorned, yeah, this is pretty nuts, with three preserved monkey heads, quote, for luck, something not even Rick Ross has come close to our blinging since. although Cameron does have that line about his zoo being a closet you ever dude I mean his closet being his oh I'm sorry

yeah that's a great line but uh what I don't I'm having trouble visualizing is it like three like their head first of all two makes sense but three they're like literally just heads attached to like the collar yeah I have a fur collar that's dope as hell but I feel like a head would smell A and B just not look good well I was imagining them perched on the back of like a kind of Star Trek style like collar. But maybe he has some like at the end of his sleeves, like little mittens and he can put his hands in the monkey heads.

Like foxes? Like when they have like the fox, the fox head thing? Yeah. Yeah. I like fur, but I think the foxes, it's too far, man. Don't.

Yeah, anytime you get the heads involved. Not good. You heard it here first, folks. Yeah. Leave the heads out of the fox. Minks, foxes,

yeah, all of that stuff. Yeah, don't do it. Leave the heads out of it. Yeah. Anyway, uh,

yes. You know what they say about guys with big, years, Danny? You don't do you? No, you never heard that before. Anyway, do likes the honeys. By that, I don't mean he's Winnie the Pooh. He's a serial polygamist with four wives and several more concubines in his mansion, bearing him a total of eight sons and three daughters. This happy household is protected by heavily armed Chinese bodyguards and an extra squad, because why not, have Russian bodyguards. When Doo heads to a nightclub or a casino, he usually gathers three or four, quote, Sing-song goals, deck

in mink, there it is again, and diamonds. I hope they didn't cross your head rule there. He's still chuffing on opium like its tobacco, of course, and that is going to catch up to him in due course. But right now, at the end of the 1920s, do is on top, if not of Shanghai, then the entire world. He's able to launder and reinvest his vast narco gambling and prostitution money, largely because he spends the majority of his post-Shanghai massacre time buying up legitimate businesses. In 1928, for example, he controls the French tramways union, which despite its name also works on Shanghai's water and electrical grid. He buys food and fish concerns, and he takes controlling stakes in the regional logistics and shipping industries. Do also pumps money into

local initiatives and charities that boost his image as a, wait for it, Robin, I don't know, maybe not quite, but he was looking to cement his image as something called. It's a same thing. There's something called Guaya. Yeah, Danny already knows what the hell of Jaya is. Yeah, it's the Honorable Outlaw Hero. Yeah, that is Robin Hood. It is exactly the same thing. Sound the Claxendale.

Anyway, do builds an orphanage, a retirement home, and two schools, which is something he's particularly interested in, given that his own pecuniary upbringing had robbed him of his own education. Quote, this is the place where I studied as a child, he says. after one opening. The monthly educational fee was 50 cents. My family being poor, however, on the fifth month, they were unable to raise the necessary money, and so my studies came to an end. In fact, Do remains illiterate all the way up to the mid-1930s when he hires a bunch of scholars to teach him the basics. Amazing. Just running hundreds of businesses, doesn't need an MBA,

doesn't even know how to read, and just making it happen, man. Yeah, maybe all those YouTube adverts, they're right. Maybe I should. Anyway, Do also gives 200 of the poorest homes in Shanghai a monthly stipend to help them survive. He is the president of two hospitals for which the government appoints him deputy chairman of the Chinese Red Cross, which is pretty hilarious given he's just butchered thousands of people in broad daylight. And he provides relief during humanitarian disasters, such as the 1931 Yangtze flood, to go back to your earlier point, Danny. Perhaps the deadliest natural disaster in human history, killing three point. So I am not well versed in Chinese history.

I can admit that. Never heard of that. I don't know. Is that like, it could be one of those things we learned in school when I just wasn't paying attention that day. Or I forgot it like I forgot everything else. But did you know about that before you read this right now?

Did like, were you? No. No, yeah. Yeah. And then when I looked it up, it was like only narrowly less people than the like 1932.

Chinese history is crazy, dude. Yeah, it is absolutely mad. Some people go from calling do big ears to big philanthropist, which crap. They do not do that. No one does that. No one does that. According to a local phrase,

he quote, scatters gold as if it were dirt, which, you know, there's Chinese phrases, I can imagine that, but yeah, you're right. No one's calling a big philanthropist. That is because he has got, well, I mean, you guessed it by now, a lot of gold to be scattering about. By the end of the 1920s, due is worth around a billion U.S. dollars in today's money. And the main catalyst for this isn't any of the stuff I just mentioned, but that in 1929, Doe opens his own bank called Zhang Hui.

Not only is this the most perfect money laundering system in the world, but it will also allow Doe literally to manipulate Chinese markets in his favor. This, of course, just makes him more outrageously rich. But it also leads to one particular moment that's pretty funny, when Chiang Kai Shek nationalizes most of Chinese commercial banking sector and Doe gets wind of the yuan's future foreign exchange rate, which isn't going to be good. But Doe misreads the tip and buys a huge amount of yuan. And when Doe realize he's messed up, he goes to the guy who gave him the tip, who's another top banking official, and tells him to reverse the deal. When the banker says, no, do reverse the

type and, yeah, sends a coffin alongside six funeral attendants to the banker's home. The banker then calls a special meeting of the border directors of the Central Bank of China, do, by the way, for context, has just been appointed one himself, where everybody agrees the state should take responsibility for do's stash of worthless Chinese money. So, you may have realized by this point, if your best buddies with the president of China, you run the biggest gang in China, possibly in the world, you run the world's biggest opium trafficking operation, you own Shanghai shipping, water, electrical grid and other businesses, you're worth over a billion dollars and you're literally on the border

the Central Bank and I'll add one in for luck. You've got three monkeys on your coat somewhere. You're quite a big deal. A Polish journalist who interviews do calls him a quote, combination of Al Capone and John D. Rockefeller. Yeah, I'm surprised no one's borrowed that. That's pretty good. That is good. It is very good as he stared into one of those dead monkeys' eyes doing his weirdest interview. It is a city whose richest inhabitants are usually foreign. Chinese adore their compatriot do's rise to such giddy stratosphere. In fact, so admired is he by this point that even his rough peasant Poudong dialect becomes fashionable in central Shanghai. Writes a fellow gang gang gang member, quote, loafers and their friends could all say a few

sentences of Pudong dialect in order to show off, implying that they had connections to do's group and that they were not alone in the world. I've showed off a lot of my own poo Du-dong dialect over the years, but it's never got me this far. According to a couple of sources I read, there are as many as 100,000 gangsters in Shanghai by the turn of the 1930s. That is higher than the ratio of podcasters in New York. Just barely. Just barely. Yeah, yeah, it is true. But of course, this being China, change, and violent change at that, is never not just around the corner. And this time, it's not the British, the Americans, or the French. It's Japan, a smaller but vastly more technologically advanced nation, hypernationalists,

with its eyes firmly set on building an empire across East Asia. In mid-1931, Do, his old buddy Huang Jim Rong and their Green Gang comrades, help launch an anti-Japanese boycott among Shanghai's business leaders. Can you just briefly real quick explain why they launched that boycott, like what Japan was doing, what was going on with Manchuria, stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, Manchuria is the sort of northeastern part of China, and Japan is sort of desperately trying to set up its own puppet state there so that it could spread its empire and mostly get a bunch of metals and minerals out of the ground, which Manchuria is very wealthy

in, so they can kind of fuel a future war effort. On September 18 that year, so that's 1930, Japan detonates some dynamite beside a railroad track near the Manchurian city of Mukden, now known as Shenyang, probably like 50 million people or something. The explosion is weak, but Tokyo accuses Chinese of carrying it out and fighting breaks out between Japanese imperial troops and soldiers belonging to Chiang Kai Shack's KMT. This event, the so-called Mukden incident, is a massive false flag, of course. Japanese officers have planted the explosives to blame China and spark an invasion of Manchuria rich in the minerals it needs to fuel its imperial war machine.

This, by the way, is what many historians consider to be the true beginning of World War II. It might even be the origin of the phrase false flag. I can't verify that. Please email and send loads of comments, especially to Facebook. Anyway, a few days later, Do is appointed to the book. board of a group called the Shanghai Municipal Resist Japan National Salvation Association. Man, those guys, they just love their incredibly long group names with like just nine-letter acronyms for anything, huh?

It's probably just like five dashes on a piece of paper as well. Anyway, Green Gang leaders following Do's previous philanthropic lead, provide aid to Chinese refugees fleeing Manchuria, which is getting quickly overrun by the Japanese. And if you thought that organization name was good, try three more do founds. Number one, the secret investigation group for National Salvation and Resistance Against Japan, the Blood and Soul Group for the Extermination of Traitors, and the National Salvation Assassination Society. Okay, those are kind of tight, those last two.

Yeah, the last two are fantastic, actually. Yeah. Just get rid of the first one, mate. Now, some of these great organizations, some of what they do, is genuine resistance against the Japanese invasion. The last one, for example, the Salvation Assassination Society. Yeah, that does actually employ gangland snipers to shoot Japanese troops landing near Shanghai. But in reality, Green Gang members have had a back channel to the Japanese consulate in Shanghai for months, discussing the possibility of creating a Japanese concession in the city ruled over,

their mobsters, cheeky guys. And to police and the French concession, the Green Gang's stronghold, these apparently patriotic groups serve merely to extort cash out of Shanghai's business community. By the end of February 1932, Japan has taken over Manchuria and installed its puppet state of Manchakuo. It's at this point that its own nationalist gangsters, the Yakuza, get to work on Tokyo's behalf. Right back in one of our first ever episodes, we discussed, for example, how you can't Yakuza Bosch Yosho Kadama, himself having come out of a hyper right-wing secret group called the Dark Ocean Society, makes a fortune selling opium to Chinese in Manchakuo.

Kadama also mints a band of gangster spice for Japan and trades Chinese minerals on behalf of the emperor, writes the Yakuza historian David Kaplan, quote, Kadama operated as a sort of imperial Japanese version of Catch-22's Milo Minderbinder. buying Tunstan here, guns there, reselling them, and peddling vast stores of radium, coal, nickel and copper. He obtained the materials in China and Manchuria, forcing the Chinese at gunpoint to sell at pitifully low prices. It was an incredibly lucrative effort,

one that might easily be termed looting. And if you just type your coozer into the search for this show, you're going to find like half a dozen historical episodes about that exact thing, which is really fascinating. one of the reasons that the Yakuza became so rich after the war. Doom, meanwhile, focuses on spreading the Green Gang's opium business outside the French concession and Shanghai. In 1932, he secures an opium poppy farm way outside the city,

and with the embattled KMT, increasingly desperate for his cash and manpower, do grows even more powerful than he'd been before the Japanese invasion. As he'd done previously uniting fellow and rival Green Gang leaders, now do go several steps further, uniting the Green Gang with corporate fat cats and even rival triad groups under something he calls the Endurance Club, another good name.

This move Currie's do even more favour with his buddy Chang Kai Shek, who is trying to head off the Japanese and Chinese communists. Remember, he is still slaughtering reds as part of that white terror by integrating corporations into the state, something Mussolini, one of Chang's heroes, is doing at that moment in Italy.

Writes Brian Martin, quote, By the end of the year, therefore, Doe has succeeded in reaching an agreement with the Komintang authorities that not only allowed the transfer of his narcotics operation from the French concession to Chinese territory, but that also gave them a semi-official status. He was the only Green Gang boss to respond successfully

to the new political realities in Shanghai, and he was able, as a result, to achieve a position of dominance over the various Green Gang boss, gang groups, as well as to play an important role in the politics of the city. I mean, I don't think another gangster has run a city as sort of wholesale as this guy has. At this point, the only powerful enemy do has are the French. They have only now realized the Green Gang's power in their Shanghai enclave, despite him being a famous gangster or owns banks, coesies up to the Chinese president and wears roves with monkey heads on them. Maybe they're on a wine break or something.

Either way, in 1932, they moved to shut down opium and gambling dens across the French concession. Doe responds by organizing a strike at the French tramways union he controls. Remember, those are the ones who also control the water and the concession's electrical grid, but he follows it up with something even more sinister. One night, three French officials are holding a banquet, one of whose dishes contains mushrooms. Within a few days, all three men are dead. Poisoned, it's assumed, by Do's mobsters. Shortly afterwards, a French journalist had been boasting about imminently publishing a scandalous story,

most likely the mushroom poisoning, hops a balder boat bound for Europe. But it catches fire shortly after setting sail and sinks in the Indian Ocean. Bad public that he dealt with, Doe carries on expanding the Green Gang. And despite the French police setting up an anti-gambling squad in 1934, They are too late. And big ears do is too big to fail. Wait, so hold on. He kills them by slipping them poisonous mushrooms,

which seems complicated. Like, same thing with burning an ocean island. Why not just kill the guys in a dark alley and dump the bodies? There's no CCTV during this time. I mean, have you seen or met French people? I mean, just sort of putting poison in butter is probably enough to kill half the country. and another day I'll tell you all about my thoughts on French cuisine

anyway in the course of the 1930s writes Brian Martin old friend do you A Sheeng had successfully remade himself look I'm just saying you can't just say that you're the best people of cooking in the world if you just drown everything in butter

that's not that's not cooking that's just butter that's just shut up man oh god no no no you don't like a steak fruits That's a top tier. That's a top five meal.

Yeah, it is great. But did the French invent that? I thought it was a fresh thing, no. Steak free. It's just French for fried steak. Never see poise? Pueve a lot and you kind of, no, steak free is delicious. What does the poix?

What does the poix mean? Is that the steak? Pepper. Pepper. Oh, my God. Well done to the French. Well done. You're a lot of class.

You put pepper and cream together. Anyway, yeah. Moving back to Chinese organized crime probably on sort of a more sound ground there. Du Wei Sheng, I'm quoting Brian Martin here, had successfully remade himself. Although he remained the head of the most powerful organized criminal syndicate in Shanghai, this was no longer the only or increasingly the most important element that defined his power in the city. It was the creation of his own political networks and his involvement with the politics of the city

and indeed the Chinese nation that enhanced and consolidated his influence in Shanghai. He had become, in other words, a leading political figure in his own right and a powerful ally of the Ko-Mintang state. But Shanghai's party is coming to an end. In August 1937, Japanese and Chinese nationalist troops showdown in Shanghai, fighting a three-month battle that ends with the Japanese capture of the city. Add for I mightn quote, as Japanese forces poured into the city in early November, Dune knew that it was only a matter of time before stiff-necked officers would come call. to either persuade him to join them or to snatch away his properties.

Doe quietly took inventory, calculate in which opium dens, gambling venues and brothels were likely to be seized by the occupiers, assigning trusted lieutenants to the remains to keep his cash flowing. Then, with one of his wives in tow, he left town. God, that must have been an awkward afternoon, choosing which wife to go with. Doe swaps Shanghai for the British colony of Hong Kong. There, he supports the Chinese war effort, providing relief. for refugees through the Chinese Red Cross and quarterbacking spy and resistance networks through the Green Gang. By 1943, with war raging across the world, Germany occupies France and

installs its puppet regime centered on the town of Vichy. These Quislings then hand over the French concession to the Japanese puppet state, ending almost a century of French rule in Shanghai. Japan loses the war, in case you didn't know already, but China quickly descends into civil war, between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party. Doe decamps again, this time to the Chinese mainland city of Chongqing, which I think is now the biggest city in the world, where in 1948 he meets personally with Chang,

whose nationalists are getting battered by Mao Zedong's CCP. Whatever happens during that meeting between Do and Chang, do's downfall begins later that year, when his son, Wei Ping, a stock broker on the Shanghai Stock Exchange is arrested on Shang's orders, accused of stock manipulation and paraded about in handcuffs. Over 20 years earlier, a moment exactly like this has sealed Huang Jing Rong's position at the top of the Green Gang, handing the baton to do Yue Sheng. Now, Do is going through the exact same thing, bearing the shame of seeing his son branded

a criminal in newspapers up and down China. Did he do something to piss off Shankarashak? Like why? What he just wanted power? Was it a power struggle? Like, what are we talking about here? Well, I mean, I guess like Chan could have just found out that he was chatting to the Chinese behind his back for like 10 years. Maybe that sort of swayed it.

That would have definitely done it. Or maybe they just like, you know, just fell out. Just like old friends do. Just like we never have, but, you know, people do over the years. They do every day pretty much. But we always come back. We always somehow. somehow come back.

Make it word. The CCP declared victory over the KMT the following year. So that is in 1949, establishing what we all now know and love as the People's Republic of China. Writes of New York Times report a quote, The few remaining foreigners left the country. Closed off from the outside world with which it had become so comfortable, Shanghai fell into a deep sleep.

Fashion, music and romance gave way to uniformity and the stark reality of communism. That's the kind of lion that you just do not get away with these days. Chankai Shik retreats to Taiwan in December 149. Doe declines an offer to join him there, heading instead back to Hong Kong, where he lives in relative obscurity with his fifth wife, a Beijing opera star.

On August 16, 1951, at age 62, Doe dies, reportedly of chronic asthma, a result of his decades of opium abuse. Do we know what he was doing, like where he was? Do we know what Do was doing at the do? No, not really. Again, like, his last few years are pretty murky. I think he's, like, living in pretty awful health.

By all accounts, he's been smoking opium since he was, like, four years old or something. So I think that is quite bad for your health. Two years after he dies, so in 1953, Doos remains are brought to Taiwan and interred in a private cemetery just outside Taipei, the capital of Chang Kai Shek's new Republic of China. An inscription above his tomb speaks to the man's honour and loyalty, but Mao's CCP clearly don't agree. Still angered by his allyship with Chang and the death he'd ruled in the Shanghai massacre,

they make it a criminal offence to publish books or newspaper articles about Do at all. When the country opens up economically in the late 1970s, however, this edict is relaxed, and that is when a mountain of literature about the so-called Emperor of Shanghai rebuilds the legend of Du Yue Sheng. His Green Gang, meanwhile, sputters gamely on. But leaderless, rudderless, in array amid the communist takeover of China, They're swallowed up by a variety of smaller local gangs in Shanghai. Their command of the opium trade, however, means that many Green Gang members are coveted

by organos criminals as drug manufacturing experts. And there are rumors that Green Gang Narco Labs may have been used by Chinese mobsters all the way up to the 1990s. 90s is crazy, dude. It is crazy. And I'm wondering if there's a link between these guys and the Taiwanese, like, chemists that are commonly used by all of the sort of... meth cartels in the Burmese jungles because that was what I was told when I was there,

that they are all Taiwanese, which would make sense with the KMT? I don't know. And that, more or less, is where our mammoth tale of Duwethe and the Green Gang comes to an end. Despite wishing him harm for the best part of the last few months, I'll give the final words to Brian Martin, because despite writing 10 sentences where one will do, his book really does go deep on all of this, and its incredible bit of historical digging, this is him comparing Do and the Green Gang to other major organised criminal groups of the time. Quote, the mafia, far from being a single,

centralized, organized and unified system, was in fact a loose network of small groups of no more than a dozen or so individuals, known as Kosca, Antichote Leaves, organized around one leading mafioso. In this, it was reminiscent of the Green Gang, which itself was not a centralized, but rather a loosely structured network of groups

organized around powerful individuals. In the case of the Green Gang, however, this structure was reinforced by a formal generational hierarchy and a system of branch or bang organizations, which provided it with a relatively greater degree of organizational coherence than that enjoyed by the Mafia of Southern Italy. And Martin goes on, The origins of the American criminal gangs or syndicates

are to be found in the ethnic youth gangs that proliferate among the immigrant communities in cities such as New York. Although these syndicates were later commonly described as the Mafia, they were not exclusively Italian but included a mix of ethnic groups, including Jews, Irish, and Poles, as well as Italians, the gangs themselves with loose networks of alliances rather than a highly structured organisation. This eclecticism of the American gang or syndicate was also shared by the Green Gang system, As the careers of Duwet Sheng and other Green Gang bosses indicate, the Green Gang organisation was able to draw on a vast pool of young street hoodlums for its recruits. It also successfully absorbed into its system other well-established petty gangster groups.

I mean, I actually think that the closest equivalent to the Green Gang is Japan's Yakuza, which came out of ultra-nationalist secret to size to become a worldwide mafia alongside the Japanese state rather than against it. If you're interested, again, head back into our archives. We've done a lot of episodes on them over the years, including a recent two-parter on my trip to Japan in, what, October last year. But yeah, slightly short episode today, but one I hope you enjoy. Don't Instagrammy crimes, and we are going to see you next week.

Triple parter on Chinese history. Well done, bud. Hopefully you guys all made it here. Yeah, I'm going to forget every word of it. Oh, yeah. Give it to it, maybe. All right, guys. Cool.

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