When I was growing up in NYC these two was very prominent Chinese street gangs based out of Downtown Chinatown. There were others, but The Ghost Shadows and The Flying Dragons were the largest and strongest.
They were constantly in then news back then. But I haven't heard a peek out of them of ever heard their names mentioned in many years. Are they still around?
I'm surprised nobody's heard of them. They each had hundreds of members and were also tied into the Chinatown Tong Assocations as enforcers and extortionists and shakedown artists all over Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and elsewhere. I think they were in other cities as well; San Fransisco, Philadelphia, etc.
Not from NYC, but yeah I've heard about them. They were mostly muscle for the Cantonese-speaking Tong organizations based in NYC. Most of their members were immigrants from Guangdong and Hong Kong.
Nowadays immigration from that part of Southern China seems to have cooled down. There's probably still organized crime in NYC connected to the Cantonese groups, but more under the radar.
Fujianese groups make more noise nowadays when it comes to Chinese OC in NYC (largely because most of the new Chinese immigrants coming into NYC seem to be from Fujian).
Re: Flying Dragons and Ghost Shadows
[Re: NYMafia]
#1015313 07/05/2107:30 AM07/05/2107:30 AM
They mostly kept to Chinese neighborhoods and dealt within their own communities. I never even heard of a non-Chinese having trouble with those people. Funny story; In later years of my old neighborhood a group of Chinese moved in around the corner.
One day I was out mowing the lawn while my mother was clipping some hedges when this Chinese kid comes running over yelling for us to help him. He said these gangsters were trying to kill him. He looked about 20. Hot on his heels are about 8 tough looking Chinese kids with weapons. One had a hatchet, another one had a chain, and a couple had sticks.
My mother had a big Italian mouth and she started yelling at these 'gangsters'. "What the hell do you think you are doing here?' and etc. They all stood there with their heads and eyes down at the floor while this 5 foot 1 woman dressed them down for a good 5 minutes. We brought the kid inside but not before I yelled out " you should all be ashamed of yourselves!"...and they sincerely looked it. The 'gang' was deflated and they all just sort of walked away.
We brought the kid inside and let him make a phone call. Somebody came to pick him up [ looked like his mother ]. Anyway that was our Chinese gangster story.
Yes Mamaluke, I used to see them walking around Downtown Chinatown and even Flushing years ago, but they mostly kept to themselves and dealt with their own kind.
Amercian born people generally had little to fear from them. They preyed on the Chinese restaurants, fruit and vegetable stores, and other retail type businesses Chinese people ran that they extorted.
Manny of these young gangs worked for and at the behest of the Chinese Tong organizations; The Hip Sing, and On Leong, etc. These Chinese gangs were almost like the bush leagues for the larger, better established, older Tongs, the elders.
I had cousins who lived in Chatham Towers during the Seventies and we'd go down to visit them and they'd take us across the street to Columbus Park between Baxter and Mulberry and you could cop anything you wanted. This was right after Bruce Lee died and Enter the Dragon came out, Bruce's face was everywhere in Chinatown, there was a huge mural of him on Canal St by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. Anyway, Columbus Park was where we would go to cop fireworks and street weapons like Nunchucks, throwing knives and stars and switchblades and butterfly knives. Not to mention nickel bags of weed and worse if you wanted, it wasn't until many years later that the irony of us engaging in this illicit business just steps from the intersection of the Five Points, where it all started decades before I was born, dawned on me.
How New York Chinatown gangs actually work, according to a former member INSIDER Video Mon, July 3, 2023 at 6:46 PM GMT+2 Mike Moy says he was a member of a gang in New York City's Chinatown. He was recruited at his school's gates and then got involved in a gang in the 1970s. Moy claims he was involved in gambling houses, counterfeit money, bootleg kung fu movies, gunrunning, and credit-card fraud. He then joined the New York City Police Department as an officer in 1995 and he worked there for 26 years. Moy discusses the Chinatown gang's links with the Italian Mafia and how extortion worked. He talks about the locations of safe houses in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, and the secret smuggling tunnels around the city. Moy founded the YouTube channel Chinatown Gang Stories, where he speaks with former gang members about their lives.
