Chinatown’s Gangster Prince: Shrimp Boy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves... I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world.
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2.40 in the morning, September 4th, 1977, the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown. The place is packed. This is a neighborhood that runs on its own clock, the oldest Chinatown in the Americas, a few crowded blocks of the densest real estate in the city, where the waiters and the cooks and the gamblers and the gangsters and the college kids all come off shift around the same time and go looking for noodles. The Golden Dragon stays open till dawn, and it's owned by the Hop Sing Tong, one of the old fraternal brotherhoods that have run this neighborhood since before anyone in the room was born. The Tongs, well, some are community organizations, some are organized crime groups connected to the triads, some are both, but more on that later.
Everyone here though is just eating noodles and soup. families finishing a wedding banquet, a couple of tourists, college kids on a road trip, and scattered around the tables, young men from the street gangs that have turned these alleys into a shooting gallery for the last five years. Because you have to understand what Chinatown is in 1977. When the immigration laws in America change in 1965, a whole new wave of Asian immigrants hits Chinatowns in the US. They're not farmer's kids or from the country. They're kids and teenagers from the slums of Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, Macau. And they arrive in the States and find few opportunities. And the neighborhoods, mostly peaceful since the vicious Tong wars half a century ago, don't have a great place for them.
So they form their own street gangs, assert their presence, Get involved in the burgeoning underworld of Chinatown, of gambling and drugs and prostitution and extortion led by the old guard, who have been there for decades, but see some value in the new wild youngsters who don't hesitate to get violent. So they put them on. And the gangs have now spent half a decade killing each other over gambling money and fireworks money and pride right out in the open in broad daylight on the most crowded streets in the city. Something like 50 people have been killed in those five years. And the cops can barely lay a finger on it because nobody in Chinatown talks to the cops. even if they could. And at one of the tables tonight, by his own telling, is a 17-year-old kid fresh off the boat from Hong Kong about a year ago.
Small, quiet-looking, runs with a young crew tied to the Hop Sing Tong. His grandmother gave him a nickname back home, a humble little name meant to fool the evil spirits into leaving him alone. She called him Shrimp Boy. Three young men walk in the door. They've got their faces half covered. One of them is carrying a .45, two of them have shotguns, and they've come for the leaders of a rival gang they've been told are eating here. Somebody shouts, and then the room comes apart. The gunmen open fire into a crowded restaurant, not at one table, into the room. Tables go over, glass goes everywhere. People are screaming and crawling and trying to get under anything they can as the bullets keep flying. It lasts seconds, and when it's done and the shooters are gone, five people are dead on the floor of the Golden Dragon, and 11 more are bleeding.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–7:16
2
What happened during the 1977 Golden Dragon massacre that introduced Shrimp Boy's story?
7:16–10:57
3
How did 1965 immigration changes fuel the rise of violent Chinatown street gangs?
10:57–51:57
4
How did Tong organizations and Triad history shape Chinatown organized crime?
51:57–1:08:32
Speakers
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