Little Fuzhou

Little Fuzhou (Chinese: 小福州; pinyin: Xiǎo Fúzhōu; Foochow Romanized: Siēu-hók-ciŭ), or Fuzhou Town (Chinese: 福州埠; pinyin: Fúzhōu Bù; Foochow Romanized: Hók-ciŭ-pú), is a neighborhood in the Two Bridges and Lower East Side areas of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Starting in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, the neighborhood became a prime destination for immigrants from Fuzhou, Fujian, China. Manhattan's Little Fuzhou is centered on East Broadway. However, since the 2000s, Chinatown in the neighborhood of Sunset Park became New York City's new primary destination for the Fuzhou immigrants, surpassing the original enclave in Manhattan. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

Today, the most known recent gangs on East Broadway are now from Fuzhou, Fujian of China since this street is now the main gathering center for Fuzhou immigrants. The Fuzhou gangs that are known are the Fuk Ching, the Snakehead (gang), which are well known to smuggle illegal immigrants from Fuzhou to the United States and other countries and the Tung On Gang.

The Tung On gang was established between the 1980s–90s on East Broadway where they ran a gambling parlor. Parallel to the Cantonese Tong Gangs that had dominated the long-established Cantonese community in the western section of Chinatown, the Fuzhou gangs were the same for the Fuzhou community that was emerging in the 1990s, which made Manhattan's Chinatown expand past its original traditional borderlines further east onto the Lower East Side. A man named Alan Man Sin Lau, the leader of the Fukien American Association, gained a status like Benny Ong did with the Cantonese.

The Fuk Ching gang members are often the workers of the Snakehead gang where they would be the ones to collect money from the illegal Fuzhou immigrants who owed money to the Snakeheads, which they had borrowed to come over to the United States. Sometimes, the Fuk Ching gang members would hold the migrants hostage and even violently beat them until they paid up the loans they owed.

Although the Fuzhou Gangs are more recent than the Cantonese gangs in Chinatown, they have been around as early as the 1980s prior to the time when the Cantonese Freemasons gang were attempting to claim East Broadway as its own territories, which fell apart after three Freemason gang members were killed in gang violence.[78][79][80]

>>8087270

How a Betrayal Snagged a Chinese Gang Leader

Aug. 31, 1993

Guo Liang Chi thought he was talking to a friend when he described how he had ordered the murder of two of his trusted lieutenants in Chinatown last January. "Do it," he said, according to Federal transcripts of a secretly taped conversation. "Do a clean job."

Speaking by telephone in February from a hiding place in China, he recounted how he had given the command, and explained why they had to die – they had challenged him for a heftier cut of the huge profits their gang was earning from smuggling Chinese immigrants. But the friend, it turned out, was an informer, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation taped the call. Rare Look at Gang Life

The brutal simplicity of that execution order was just one of the elements about life within a violent Chinatown gang that emerged yesterday as Federal authorities, after more than two years of investigation, unveiled what they described as conclusive evidence that will finally put Mr. Guo, the leader of the Fuk Ching gang, away for life. The smoking gun, described in the Federal complaint against Mr. Guo, is a taped conversation in February between the gang leader and a confidential informer. Mr. Guo was already in Fujian Province in China, where he fled in January after the killing.

Mr. Guo was arrested in a restaurant in Hong Kong on Friday, and the charges, unsealed in Federal court yesterday, were for murder and conspiracy to murder. Although Mr. Guo had become the F.B.I.'s most wanted Asian gang leader for his role in smuggling human cargo, they wanted to nail him on a murder charge first. It is a charge that would be easier to prove and would carry a longer sentence.

• https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/31/nyregion/how-a-betrayal-snagged-a-chinese-gang-leader.html

>>8087270

THE SNAKEHEAD

April 17, 2006

Several hours before dawn on June 6, 1993, two Park Service police officers were patrolling the road next to Jacob Riis Park, a long stretch of beach on the Rockaway peninsula, in Queens, when they were startled by two Asian men flagging them down. As the officers got out of their car, they heard the sound of screams coming from the beach. The moon was full, and about a hundred yards offshore the officers saw a hundred-and-fifty-foot tramp steamer that had run aground. The ship’s deck was crowded with people, and, as the officers watched, men and women jumped over the side, falling twenty feet into the surging waves below. Dozens of figures bobbed in the water, some managing to clamber ashore, others flailing wildly, apparently unable to swim. The officers radioed for backup.

The ship’s name, stencilled in white block letters on the bow, was the Golden Venture. Its cargo was nearly three hundred illegal Chinese emigrants. Before reaching the Rockaways, the ship had sailed some seventeen thousand miles, from Thailand to Kenya, around the Cape of Good Hope, then across the Atlantic to New York.

The passengers—mostly adults, but a few children—were emaciated. They had been confined in the ship’s hold for months, subsisting on rice, peanuts, and purified salt water. It had been uncomfortably hot, and many passengers wore only underwear; when they hit the water, which was fifty-three degrees, some went into cardiac arrest. One Coast Guard officer who performed CPR on two men onshore recalled, “I could feel the gristle of their bodies, the cartilage. They walked up out of the water, collapsed on the beach, and died.”

Six bodies were recovered from the surf; four others were found later. By dawn, news helicopters were capturing live footage of the disaster. The Golden Venture accident was not an isolated incident: in the preceding year, more than a dozen ships had dropped human cargo from China on American shores. In April, a ship called the Mermaid 1, carrying two hundred and thirty-seven illegal Chinese, had been intercepted by the Coast Guard near the Bahamas. In May, the Pai Sheng had slipped beneath the Golden Gate Bridge at night, depositing two hundred and fifty passengers on a San Francisco pier. An internal Department of Justice report declared an “immigration emergency”; the San Francisco Chronicle heralded a “ smuggler ship invasion .”

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/the-snakehead

>>8087270

Ringleader Of Human Smuggling Ring Dies, Leaving A Complex Legacy

April 29, 2014

For decades, Cheng Chui Ping smuggled thousands of people from China to the United States. She created a lucrative business and a robust network that brought immigrants through treacherous routes. Cheng died of cancer last Thursday in a Texas prison.

The 65-year-old, whom some affectionately called "Sister Ping," leaves behind a complicated legacy. Authorities referred to her as the mother of all snakeheads, a term used to describe those involved with human smuggling. Cheng arranged for as many as 3,000 people — most of whom were from China's Fujian province — to make their way illegally to the States. Her smuggling business collected a fortune of $40 million over two decades, and she charged as much as $35,000 per person. She also helped finance the now-infamous Golden Venture, a vessel carrying nearly 300 starving immigrants that ran aground in Queens, N.Y. leaving 10 of the passengers dead.

Cheng was ultimately arrested in the FBI's efforts to bust the notorious Fuk Ching gang, with which she had worked. In 2006, she was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison. (Her sentence was the maximum she could have received; her lawyer had tried to argue that her sentence shouldn't be harsher than the sentences of the gang members who'd testified against her, one of whom had confessed to eight murders.)

• https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/29/307770316/ringleader-of-human-smuggling-ring-dies-leaving-a-complex-legacy

Seems the Chinese have a penchant for human trafficking.

>>8087375

Yup, tongs.

>>8087408

Gee, I wonder who's an aficionado of cigars, oh, and scotch was it?

>>8087594

LOL. Joe Namath, you wearing Hai Karate too? Sorry, couldn't resist.

>>8087408

Interesting choice of cigar. A quorum.

Definition of quorum

1: a select group

2: the number (such as a majority) of officers or members of a body that when duly assembled is legally competent to transact business

3: a Mormon body comprising those in the same grade of priesthood

Quorum Has a Legal History

In Latin, quorum means "of whom" and is itself the genitive plural of qui, meaning "who." At one time, Latin quorum was used in the wording of the commissions issued to justices of the peace in England. In English, quorum initially referred to the number of justices of the peace who had to be present to constitute a legally sufficient bench. That sense is now rare, but it's not surprising that quorum has come to mean both "a select group" and "the minimum people required in order to conduct business."

• https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quorum

>>8087764

Something like this maybe?