The tongs that once ruled NY's Chinatown

Before there were the Five Families of New York, there were the tongs.

The On Leong Tong and the Hip Sing Tong waged a bloody battle for control of Manhattan's Chinatown over a span of 25 years, starting around 1900. Many of the future gangsters began arriving in New York in the late 1800s, after public jobs were closed to them in San Francisco.

The story of the Tongs' heyday in New York is vividly recreated in Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's Chinatown by Scott D. Seligman. The author, fluent in Mandarin, is a historian and retired corporate executive with degrees from Princeton and Harvard.