In 1937, Japan invaded China. On August 14, the Japanese launched a fierce assault on Shanghai. Chinese refugees fled to the foreign concessions hoping to be safe.
However, Du Yue-sheng had his Green Gang fight alongside Nationalist troops against the Japanese.
Three months later, Shanghai fell and Du fled to Hong Kong. The Triads would never be the same.
A month after the end of World War II, in 1945, Du returned to Shanghai.
Any respect and fear he had earned before the war had been lost. The Shanghainese saw him as a coward for running away from the Japanese and booed him when he was seen on the streets.
When the Communists won in 1949, broken and unhealthy, Du fled to Hong Kong and died there in 1951 at 66. The Communist Revolution ended the Green Gang in Shanghai.
However, the Communists did not destroy the Chinese underworld. With hundreds of gangs operating in other countries, power shifted out of mainland China.
In time, New York’s Chinatown would become the center of the Chinese Triads in the US.
In 1977, on Mott St. in the heart of New York’s Chinatown, a war raged between the Chinese gangs. One Chinatown gang boss, Nicky Louie, became the most feared gangster in New York’s Chinatown.
Nicky arrived in New York’s Chinatown in the 1960s along with tens of thousands of other Chinese soon after Congress changed the Chinese Exclusion Act allowing more Chinese into the US.
Work was hard to come by so young Chinese men organized street gangs modeled after the same gangs from China that the Communists had destroyed.
Nicky, ruthless and smart, quickly became the leader of a Triad gang called the Ghost Shadows.
Under Nicky’s leadership, the Ghost Shadows became more powerful and ruthless. However, Nicky wanted to control all of Chinatown. Success then made Nicky a target and he was shot many times but survived.
Return to The History of Organized Crime in China – Part 3
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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