Little Pete (1864 – January 23, 1897) was a prominent leader of the Som Yop Tong during the

Tong war The Tong Wars were a series of violent disputes beginning in the late 19th century among rival Chinese Tong factions centered in the Chinatowns of various American cities, in particular San Francisco. Tong wars could be triggered by a variety o ...

s of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

's Chinatown in the 1890s. Born ''Fung Jing Toy'' () in Kow Kong, Canton, China, around 1864, Little Pete emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of five in 1870. As a child he was said to have witnessed a battle between the Suey Sings and the Kwong Docks Tongs in 1875 and studied how the outcome of the battle could have been saved. Becoming involved in San Francisco's underworld by 1885, Little Pete had become a well known Tong hatchetman involved in prostitution,

illegal gambling Gaming law is the set of rules and regulations that apply to the gaming or gambling industry. Gaming law is not a branch of law in the traditional sense but rather is a collection of several areas of law that include criminal law, regulatory law, ...

, and opium peddling. On one occasion, he was attacked by members of the rival Suey On Tong. Little Pete, wearing a steel-reinforced hat and

chain mail Chain mail (properly called mail or maille but usually called chain mail or chainmail) is a type of armour consisting of small metal rings linked together in a pattern to form a mesh. It was in common military use between the 3rd century BC and ...

, managed to fight the men armed with hatchets and clubs, driving them off and soon throughout Chinatown he was considered invincible. By 1890, at the age of twenty-five, Little Pete was the leader of the Som Yop Tong and quickly became involved in a gang war with rival Sue Yop Tong during which Little Pete was said to have killed over fifty Tong members. During this time the local press first began to take notice of him and dubbing him "Little Pete". Little Pete regularly began to walk around Chinatown in his chain mail armor, accompanied by three bodyguards, as his regular payoffs to city officials, particularly

Christopher Augustine Buckley Christopher Augustine Buckley Sr. (December 25, 1845 – April 20, 1922), commonly referred to as Blind Boss Buckley, was a saloonkeeper and Democratic Party political boss in San Francisco, California. Though he never held public office, Buck ...

, convinced rivals of Little Pete's influence in San Francisco. This fear of Little Pete using his influence to eliminate his rivals may have been the cause of hired Tong assassins Lem Jung and Chew Tin Gop who attacked Little Pete in a

barber A barber is a person whose occupation is mainly to cut, dress, groom, style and shave men's and boys' hair or beards. A barber's place of work is known as a "barbershop" or a "barber's". Barbershops are also places of social interaction and publi ...

shop with one of the assassins grabbing him by the hair and shooting him five times in the spine under his chainmail on January 23, 1897. Lem Jung and Chew Tin Gop later returned to China as wealthy men as a result of Little Pete's murder.

References

* Asbury, Herbert. ''The Gangs of New York''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927. *Sifakis, Carl. ''The Encyclopedia of American Crime''. New York: Facts on File Inc., 2001.

External links

WebRoots Library U.S. History: Chapter 8 Barbary Coast - Slaves of Chinatown
{{Authority control 1864 births 1897 deaths Murdered American gangsters American gangsters People from Nanhai District American people of Chinese descent Triad members People murdered in California Deaths by firearm in California