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  • » Name: Amanda Bassa
  • » Location: VA
  • » Member Since: 09/21/07
  • » Bio: student, future change maker, and everything you wouldn't expect me to be.
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The Undisputed Truth

Chinese Gangster


November 01, 2007 | Tags: Gangs, mafia, heroin, drugs, crime

For those who may not know, which is probably all of you, I used to have a large fascination with the organized crime scene. And yeah, it goes beyond seeing The Godfather more times than I can count on all my fingers and toes*. I used to write essays on the mafia whenever I could figure out a way to get away with it during high school. I’ve read books about the stuff on my spare time – which is saying a lot because up until a year or so ago you couldn’t pay me to spend time reading something that I absolutely didn’t have to. But the concept of organized crime held my interest despite my hate of all things that resembled an intellectual pastime.

So naturally, with all this American Gangster talk these days, I’ve had organized crime on the brain. Well, maybe that’s not so natural. I don’t know if anybody else feels that way. Perhaps it’s the emphasis on the “-er” that makes me think of the mafioso-type gangsters rather than the around the way hood thug “gangstas”**. Anyway, I hear a lot about one specific ethnic group when it comes to mafia talk – the Italians, of course. But there’s a lot of other ethnic groups that have their own organized crime units. Today’s focus is on the Chinese mafia. And let me tell you, they ain’t nuthin to fuck with. Also important to note – this isn’t just a history lesson. The Chinese gangs still exist today, and are still smuggling drugs and handling all that sort of business. For example, the Fuk Ching gang from Fukien is still active in New York with narcotics, auto theft, extortion, etc. Hell, there’s even strong Chinese organized crime activity happening in Australia. But they’re not the focus of my words today.

Johnny Kon, born Kon Yu-Leung, was a Dragonhead in the Chinese mafia world. Basically, if you cop the title of Dragonhead that means you’re runnin shit. It’s on the level of Don status or Godfather. He was no random soldier, that’s for sure. I mean of course he worked his way up, but by the peak of his “career” this guy was runnin shit. Not only was he runnin shit in China though, he was holdin it down here in the streets of America as well. Starting out associated with the Triad societies, he ultimately ended up within the Big Circle***. Somewhere between working in a fur shop in China as a youngster and becoming a prominent figure in the international drug trade, this guy got smart. He ended up being one of the most significant smugglers of Southeast Asian heroin into the United States. Other things went along with this, like murders and extortion, but drug smuggling is what ultimately caused his downfall. He devised ingenious ways of smuggling the drugs into the country as well. Well, people slip up. Kon was arrested in 1988 and sentenced to 27 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to smuggling 1,000 pounds of heroin in a four year time span. Let’s just say that number was probably an understatement. He served his time, got out, and claims to be in legit business now. Honestly, I can’t find the info to tell you how true that is, aside from the fact that he himself claims it. I’ll leave that assumption up to you.

My point with this isn’t to give you some full detailed bio of the guy’s life, even though I could because I just spend too much time reading about this stuff, but rather to just make you aware of worldly affairs. BET may talk about American gangsters, there may be movies about an American gangster, etc. But this is an age of rapid globalization, and so you know I gotta highlight other parts of the world sometimes in my own feeble attempt to counter some of the cultural homogenization that seems to be going down lately. Plus, it’s always just interesting to know where the drugs that hit our streets are really coming from and what the stuff goes through to get here.








*I love that movie, but oddly enough as of late, Goodfellas has been on my brain more significantly as what I may consider to be one of my favorite movies ever.


**Face it, “gangstas”. You ain’t on the mafia level.

***Seeing as how I’m not trying to write a full length research paper for a blog, and I think you can figure out the main concept of these groups with little knowledge of them…I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what the two groups are if you’ve never heard of them. Plus, they’re also broken into tinier branches and it gets a little complicated.


The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the writer and not necessarily those of HipHopDX.com or Cheri Media Group.

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