CRIMINAL LINKS BETWEEN OLD SHANGHAI & AMERICA!

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CRIMINAL LINKS BETWEEN OLD SHANGHAI & AMERICA!

Old Shanghai was a crazy period between the wars when the International Settlement of Shanghai was the most wide-open place on earth. No passport required; no visas necessary. Simply arrive, walk down the gangplank, tell an uninterested customs man any name you like, slip him a few dollars, and start your new life. No questions asked.

Picture source: The World of Chinese Magazine

Shanghai was a truly cosmopolitancity , a mix of a hundred thousand “Shanghailander” foreigners from two dozen nations who called the city home and four million Chinese who came to the city seeking escape from poverty and natural disaster for some, and escape political instability for others. Shanghai was the world’s fifth most populous city and by far the most modern metropolis in Asia—jazz, fast cars, machine guns, neon lights, taxi dancers, plush cinemas, massive casinos. It was also one of the most lawless cities in the world. By the late 1930s, the local law enforcement agencies were almost totally overwhelmed by a combination of Chinese gangs  (gangster  hēibāng 黑帮), foreign criminals, and the encroaching Japanese army.
Unsurprisingly, any number of criminals and fraudsters decided Shanghai was the place for them when things got tough back in America. Some of the most notorious names included:

#1 C.C. Julian, the great oil fraudster of the “Julian Pete” scandal, who jumped US$25,000 bail in Oklahoma and fled to Shanghai in 1933 where he tried to restart his oil stock frauds.

He got a false passport and posed as an Irishman called TR King, dressed shabbily and appeared to be down-on-his-luck. He managed to board a ship in Seattle and got off in Shanghai on March 23rd, 1933. Julian shed his shabby clothes, his fake Irish accent and checked into a suite at the Astor Hotel (today’s Pujiang Hotel). American justice went after him in Shanghai but Julian was a Canadian and the laws of extraterritoriality made it virtually impossible to get him in a court room.
Yet, Shanghai didn’t work for him. For a year, he tried to peddle every scheme he could think of, borrowed a lot of money from Chinese businessmen who weren’t quite aware of his past, and never paid it back. C.C Julian sank slowly into drunkenness and alcoholism.
After a fruitless year, Julian took the last of his borrowed money and checked back into the Astor Hotel. After a lavish dinner, he went back to his Shanghai hotel room at 1am one evening, left his girlfriend, a stenographer he had been running around town with, and a lot of empty champagne glasses behind, and swallowed poison. He died five hours later…

He got a false passport and posed as an Irishman called TR King, dressed shabbily and appeared to be down-on-his-luck. He managed to board a ship in Seattle and got off in Shanghai on March 23rd, 1933. Julian shed his shabby clothes, his fake Irish accent and checked into a suite at the Astor Hotel (today’s Pujiang Hotel). American justice went after him in Shanghai but Julian was a Canadian and the laws of extraterritoriality made it virtually impossible to get him in a court room.
Yet, Shanghai didn’t work for him. For a year, he tried to peddle every scheme he could think of, borrowed a lot of money from Chinese businessmen who weren’t quite aware of his past, and never paid it back. C.C Julian sank slowly into drunkenness and alcoholism.
After a fruitless year, Julian took the last of his borrowed money and checked back into the Astor Hotel. After a lavish dinner, he went back to his Shanghai hotel room at 1am one evening, left his girlfriend, a stenographer he had been running around town with, and a lot of empty champagne glasses behind, and swallowed poison. He died five hours later…

#2 Nathan Rabin, a hitman with the Chicago mob originally from Bay City, Michigan, skipped town and came to Shanghai after the Capone wars, selling his assassin services to the city’s foreign criminal gangs. He was a part of the Hovans Gang Crew, lead by the Latvian Captain Eugene Pick, AKA Hovens or Dr. Clige.
When the Japanese took over Shanghai, he turned traitor and started assassinating members of the Chinese resistance.

#3 Jacob “Yasha” Katzenberg, a narcotics trafficker from New York and an associate of Arnold Rothstein, came to China in 1935 and started to work for the city’s notorious Chinese Green Gang that controlled the enormous Shanghai opium trade.

He taught the Green Gang how to refine opium into heroin on a massive scale. When the Shanghai police and Chinese government tried to crack down on the trade, Yasha fled into the hills of eastern China and was never seen again..

Picture source: tony-henderson.com; the Green Gang

#4 Louis “Lepke” Buchalter of Murder Inc.

Louis "Lepke" Buchalter was a Jewish-American mobster and head of the Mafia hit squad Murder, Inc. during the 1930s. Buchalter was one of the premier labor racketeers in New York City during that era.
He needed as much opium as he could get his hands on. He had established a large refinery at his Seymour Avenue warehouse in Brooklyn to turn raw opium into heroin. He sent emissaries to Shanghai to talk to the Green Gang; the Green Gang supplied. Lepke's emissaries then met with local foreign gangsters from Europe and America who knew how Shanghai worked to arrange things. They set up a smuggling operation out of Shanghai to the West Coast. Six major shipments (that we know about—there were undoubtedly more) left Shanghai between December 1935 and February 1937, heading to America via various shipping routes. The Shanghai criminals were paid US$10,000,000 (in 1937 money!) in commissions by Lepke Buchalter and his associate Meyer Lansky via money launderers in Mexico City.

#5 Mexican crime bosses
Mexican crime bosses living in Shanghai shipped tequila from their distilleries back home to Customs-lite (make that nonexistent!) Shanghai. They then put the booze in barrels marked "pig bristles" (a major export from China to the US for use in toothbrushes And shipped it duty-free to Los Angeles and the speakeasies of the West Coast. Even with a 15,000-mile round trip, the profits were enormous. Plenty for the Mexican crime bosses to build an enormous dog racing, boxing, and jai- Alai stadium with attendant swanky nightclub for the city's Chinese and foreign elite in Shanghai's Frenchtown. They brought in Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentleman as the house band, got a friendly Tulsa criminal to stack the place with rigged slot machines, bought off the local Sûreté, and made another fortune.

Eventually, the US Treasury Department sent one of their best agents to Shanghai: Martin “Little Nicky” Nicholson. He tried to crack down on the foreign dope smugglers, but every time he got close, someone died. One Romanian trafficker thought to be talking to Little Nicky was bludgeoned to death and then set alight; a Maltese smuggler and pimp ready to squeal was stabbed in the back and left for dead in a Frenchtown park at midnight; a nightclub owner thought to be skimming the dope profits was shot in the back of the head at his desk. Old Shanghai was that kind of town!
And a little more old Shanghai made its way to America. Little Nicky was authorized by the Treasury Department, and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, to raid several Shanghai opium dens thought to have links with American citizens. Two Chinese opium pipes seized by Little Nicky in those Shanghai raids were proudly displayed on Hoover’s office wall for the rest of his tenure at the FBI.

If you want to dig deeper into criminal underbelly of the Old Shanghai’s, we recommend the book by Paul French
‘The City of Devils’

Information sources
http://www.criminalelement.com/
http://www.chinarhyming.com/
Wikipedia