Institutionalization of the Chinese Tongs in Chicago's Chinatown

Appendix A

The national, Chicago, Houston, and New York On Leong Merchants Associations and 29 individuals and associates of the On Leong were indicted in Chicago in August 1990 in United States v. National On Leong Chinese Merchants Association, et al., a prosecution handled by the Chicago Strike Force Unit of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois. The defendants were charged in connection with their operation, since 1974, of an illegal gambling business. The four On Leong associations and thirteen individual defendants were also charged with RICO based on a pattern of racketeering that included illegal gambling, briber of a Cook County judge and a witness in the murder trail of a Ghost Shadow member, solicitation of an unrelated murder, interstate travel to acquire firearms, assaulting a unhappy bettor, and the collection of unlawful debts, among other crimes. Some of the defendants were also charged with income tax violations.

The On Leong case went to trail on April 1, 1991. Sixteen defendants plead guilty prior to trail, one pled guilty at trail, and five of the six defendants charged with tax violations were found guilty. The jury was unable to reach verdicts on the RICO and illegal gambling counts for all defendants, apparently due to its juror confusion over the RICO enterprise charge. The government will soon file a superseding indictment and retry the defendants on those counts. In a related civil forfeiture proceeding brought under 18 U.S.C. 1955, the illegal gambling business statute, the Chicago On Leong was ordered to forfeit to the government its Chicago building (worth $2.1 million), $300,000 in cash, and assorted gambling-related paraphernalia (Hearing before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs: Asian Organized Crime, 299-300).