"For gambling against the house, whether it be with cards or dice or beans or dominoes, requires only a stout heart and a hunger for the impossible."
-- John Okada

Seattle's Chinatown is rooted in history. Simply walking along South King Street, as I have on many occasions, one cannot look east or west without seeing a building or a shop or a tenement rich in history. The husks of old speakeasies and popular Prohibition gambling clubs line South King Street and South Jackson Street. The New Chinatown has been turned into a Korean karaoke bar, but the outside of the building still features a neon bowl of steaming soup, with two "chopsticks" poking out from the bowl.

In addition to the old speakeasies and gambling clubs, there are the many tenements, trading companies, and laundromats dating back to the early nineteenth-century. Many of the area's buildings, once symbols of strength and perseverance, are now covered in grime, and sit vacant. In February 1997, the roof of the 85-year-old Kokusai Theater on Maynard Avenue collapsed. The Hong Kong Restaurant and Hotel, a Chinatown fixture from the 1940s through the mid-1980s, with its aged yet beautiful vertical neon marquee, sits empty. As Times writer Bock explained, "[South] King Street may be the soul of old Chinatown, but its buildings are mostly empty. Of [South] King Street's ten residential buildings, five have no residents." Many Chinatown residents credit the "emptiness" of Seattle's Chinatown to events spanning the last half-century: The internment of 7,000 Japanese Americans during World War II (few returned to the neighborhood); the construction of a stretch of Interstate-5 that cut through Chinatown during the 1960s; construction of the Kingdome in the 1970s (which resulted in traffic and parking nightmares); a downtown arson in the 1970s that sparked strict fire codes (closing down seventeen of forty-five Chinatown hotels); and the completion of Interstate-90 in 1993 ("sealing off" the south end of Chinatown).

According to a 1990 census, Seattle's Chinatown has a population of less than 2,000. The median age of a Chinatown resident is fifty-six years old. The median household income is less than $11,000, and more than half of Chinatown's residents are living below the poverty level. Ninety-three percent of Chinatown's residents rent apartments at an average monthly rate of $278. Yet, in an area encompassing less than one-quarter square mile, there are more than 350 businesses.

The Kong Yick buildings sit anchored to the southeast. They are the staples of South King Street. In 1910 the Kong Yick Investment Company, comprised of Chinese throughout the Pacific Northwest, collected shares to construct two brick buildings that housed several Chinese-owned importers/exporters and labor contractors -- including Wa Chong Company, Quong Tuck Company, Yuen Long Company, and Yick Fung Company. The buildings also housed the King Fur Cafe and the Gee How Oak Tin Family Association (the largest Chinese family Association in Washington state). The Kong Yick buildings represented the heart of Seattle's Chinatown. In the early-1900s, a construction "boom" followed; bulky brick buildings were constructed for use as hotels and family association headquarters. Cannery labor contractor and one-time consul general, Goon Dip, built the Milwaukee Hotel in 1911. The Eastern Hotel was also erected in 1911. And the Bing Kung tong constructed its building across the street from the Kong Yick buildings in 1916. The Tai Tung restaurant was founded in 1933 by P. J. Chin and Quan Lee, and remains the oldest Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. In the restaurant's early days, alcohol was not served because Quan felt drunks slowed down the nightly turnover (sometimes as many as 1,700 servings per day). The restaurant presently is filled with paneled booths and a crowded front counter with a smiling gold-plated Buddha at the far end. Tai Tung -- which means "all equal" in Chinese -- is a popular hangout for off-duty cops and tourists; the elderly Chinese men sit at the counter, sipping coffee with half-and-half and sugar. The Bush Hotel looms above South Jackson Street, boasting the words "Modern" and "Fireproof" in large black letters on the building's side. The Bush Hotel dates back to 1915, and was built to serve passengers arriving by rail. In the early-1970s the building was redeveloped into offices for social service agencies, and low-income housing. In 1998 renovations were completed on the Bush Hotel, which included a rooftop greenhouse and a mural by artist John Woo. The N.P. Hotel -- which stands for Northern Pacific Hotel -- was built in 1914 and served as an early residential and commercial cornerstone of the thriving pre-World War II Japantown. The Interim Community Development Association renovated the hotel into low-income housing in 1994, and Seattle's oldest Japanese restaurant -- Maneki -- is located on the street level. The Tsue Chong Noodle Company, which was founded in 1917 by Louie Gar Hip, has been operated by four generations of the Hip family, producing nearly two-dozen different types of Chinese noodles and fortune cookies, and serving many of Chinatown's popular restaurants.

One of Chinatown's most beautiful buildings is the extravagantly decorated China Gate Restaurant. Originally built in 1924 as a Chinese opera house by restaurateur Charlie Louie, the building was converted to the Chinese Garden in 1929 -- a popular speakeasy featuring African American jazz musicians.

Seattle's Chinatown is much like other North American Chinatowns: Filled with history and often depicted as another world in popular movies and books. Writer Eric Liu, in his book The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, comments on North American Chinatowns, writing, "Chinatown...is above all an experience. Firecrackers sputtering like cheap ammunition. The buzz of an alien tongue on every corner. Red-and-gold lanterns, swinging wild neon lettering. Gangsters in black sedans. Roasted birds hanging by their necks behind grimy windows. The waft of vented grease and burnt incense and garbage. The sound of the cook hacking up phlegm as he stir-fries your order. The bent clanging of cymbals, the beating of drums. The undulations, wild and alive, of a great festival dragon....Chinatown is not so much a place as it is a metaphor -- an ideograph -- for all the exotic mystery of the Orient. We don't simply visit Chinatown; we believe in it, as surely we believe in the ghetto or the suburb. We imbue its every peculiarity with meaning and moral import."

A tug-of-war exists between what Chinatown is and isn't. As writer and activist, Peter Kwong, would describe, Chinatown is a nasty and brutish world where immigrants are exploited and forced to work long hours in hot kitchens, and sleep in stifling tenements. Writer Min Zhou describes Chinatown as a new model for Americanization -- an "enclave economy" fueled by Chinese entrepreneurs and workers who haven't fallen into the decadence of the dominant culture. "The difficulty," Liu argues, "is not that the truth lies somewhere in between. It is that the truth lies everywhere in between. There are more Chinatowns than we can identify. Gangster Chinatown, Dim Sum Chinatown, Bootstraps Chinatown, Welfare Chinatown, Hipster Chinatown, Oldster Chinatown, Chinese Chinatown, pan-Asian Chinatown, Chinatown the ghetto, Chinatown the gateway. There are now suburban Chinatowns...places built of free choice, not necessity. There is a Chinatown for every perspective."

Seattle's Chinatown is all of these -- nasty and brutish…a gateway and a ghetto…exotic and nearby…both historical and stoic while facing contemporary issues like crime and depopulation. And for one young man living in Chinatown during the late-1970s and early-1980s, Chinatown represented one thing in particular: an opportunity to exploit. That young man was Kwan Fai Mak, a well known youth in Seattle's Chinese community in the early-1980s. Mak worked off and on in several of the Chinatown restaurants. He held various jobs in Seattle and, further north, in Whatcom County. Sometimes he worked as a dealer at a couple of Chinatown's after-hours gambling clubs. He also took a job at a steelyard in Seattle, doing what he described as "hard labor." In 1982 he was working as a dealer and gambling on the side, making as much as one hundred dollars a night. Mak was a young man who had moved with his family from the Kwangtung Province in Mainland China in 1975, at the age of fifteen. In China, he and his family had lived in squalor, in a cramped apartment building with a staggering number of tenants.

When Mak arrived in Seattle, he entered the eighth grade at Sharples Junior High School. He spoke very little English, but was eager to learn the language. He lived with his parents and siblings in their South Seattle home and, later, attended nearby Cleveland High School. Though he had trouble in high school, eventually dropping out, he earned his General Equivalency Degree at a nearby college.

Mak was also street-smart. He went by the name "Willie" and spent a lot of time with friends with extensive criminal records. Mak was a member of the Hop Sing tong, one of the most revered and influential tongs on the West Coast. He had joined the tong because he believed they were involved in illegal activities, something that appealed to him. In 1981 he and a friend robbed a Seattle grocery store of a couple thousand dollars. Yet, despite the robbery, he was deep in debt. In the early part of January 1983, Mak had racked up a several thousand-dollar debt with one of the gambling clubs where he had worked. He was good for it, though. He was known in the tight-knit Chinese community. Mak was a regular fixture at the Imperial Lanes bowling alley/video arcade in South Seattle, where he could be seen hanging out with his friends. He was also a regular at many of the restaurants in Chinatown, where he frequently ate dinner with both peers and seniors in the Chinatown community. He was easy to find and not the type to skip out on his debts.

But in a matter of weeks, his debt of a few thousand dollars quickly grew into a debt of more than ten thousand dollars. By early-February Mak had incurred a debt estimated at nearly thirty thousand dollars. Mak was clearly unaware of a simple gambling fact: the house never really gambles; instead, it takes advantage of some well-known and clear mathematical principles of chance. The house cannot go broke and gamblers can never beat the house.

With each new gambling loss and each new debt incurred, Mak's situation worsened. He grew irritated and bitter. He often complained to his friends about his losses and, when his temper flared, he entertained the idea of robbing one of the gambling clubs.

The idea of robbing a gambling club quickly turned into a plan. In mid-January 1983 Mak began recruiting friends to join him in his plan. All of his prospective accomplices shared the same characteristics. They were young, Chinese, acquaintances of Mak's, and members of tongs. Mak held most of his meetings at a Denny's restaurant in South Seattle. It was there that he shared with his prospective accomplices his plan for a heist so large that he would evenly split the loot with the others and still have enough money for himself to erase his debts. The heist would be foolproof. They would rob the most lucrative gambling club in Chinatown to insure the maximum possible loot. The heist would be quick and detailed, with explicit instructions that Mak would be the leader and his accomplices would follow his orders. And there would be no witnesses. Whoever agreed to join Mak would follow his instructions to the tee. "If [the victims] resist me, I, Willie, will kill them," Mak told his prospective accomplices. "If the people with me, robbing these people, won't shoot them, I'll shoot them all."

In order to see his plan to fruition, Mak would have to be selective about which gambling club he robbed. He would have to rob one that carried the promise of patrons with large amounts of cash in hand and a house bank that rivaled no other. He would have to pick a club that was known for high-stakes gambling; a club that had tens of thousands of dollars on the table on any given night, at any given time.

Mak singled out the Wah Mee Club. Of the two games played at the Wah Mee -- Pai Kau and Mah Jongg -- Pai Kau was by far the Club's big game. The house bank was around $100,000 and, when the house was banker, the betting limit at the Club was $1,000. But when an individual was banker, no limit prevailed. As much as $50,000 was on the table at any given time.

Mak also singled out the Club because of its clientele. The Wah Mee was an exclusive, members-only venue attracting some of the Chinese community's wealthiest and most prominent members. Affluent restaurant owners would sometimes, after closing on a profitable Friday or Saturday evening, retire to the Wah Mee with tens of thousands of dollars cash in hand.

Mak also singled out the Club because of its history. The Wah Mee was one of the oldest clubs in Chinatown, lasting for more than a half-century. "The Wah Mee Club was famous in Seattle," writer Chin commented. "You don't speak with any real authority about Seattle of the 30's, 40's, or 50's, if you can't say when you first stepped into the electric, smoky…Wah Mee."

Willie Mak approached at least a half-dozen of his peers, trying to get accomplices for his planned heist-and-killing. He met separately with Wai Chung Tam and Sze Ming Ng at a Denny's restaurant in South Seattle. In his meetings, Mak continued to voice his frustration about his gambling losses and dwelled on the subject of robbery and murder in an effort to get out of the red. Another young man, Steve Chin, was also a witness to Mak's many discussions. Yin Yen Lau, a twenty-year-old cook, was approached by Mak, but the young man replied, "I have my own business. I don't need that kind of money."

Mak eventually found an ally in a young man with an extensive criminal record; a high school dropout with a parole history and several criminal incidents involving guns. His name was Benjamin Ng and he was a thin, young, twenty-year-old. He was barely five-feet-two, and weighed just over 100 pounds, with boyish features and large eyes. But he was also a thug. Ng frequented several gambling clubs in the area and was known to carry a gun while cruising the streets of Chinatown in his Corvette. He was a troublemaker in high school, causing one teacher to comment that he "had some serious growing up to do."

Benjamin Ng and Willie Mak had many similarities. Their parents were from the Kwangtung Province of Mainland China. They later moved to Hong Kong and, in 1975, both families relocated to the United States. Ng and Mak also attended Cleveland High School in Seattle. Both worked for short periods of time as cooks at Chin's Palace restaurant and lived in the restaurant owner's home. People who knew the young men said they gambled and worked as dealers at a different club. They were regular fixtures in Seattle's Chinatown, both interested in playing video games at the Imperial Lanes in South Seattle and watching movies at the Kokusai Theater. And, like Mak, Ng had a reputation for being short-tempered and violent. His temper was so uncontrollable and erratic at times that, once, he shot dead a neighborhood dog because it was barking too loud.

Benjamin Ng was an ideal accomplice for Willie Mak's plan. He had an extensive criminal record dating back to 1980. As a juvenile, Ng was arrested on at least two occasions for incidents involving handguns. In December 1978 Ng was picked up along with two youths who had robbed an eleven-year-old boy of twenty-five dollars. Ng was not arrested for the incident because he was considered a "follower" in that situation.

On March 15, 1980, Benjamin Ng and two companions were arrested for stealing merchandise from the Southcenter Mall. A security guard at the Mall searched Ng's car and found a pellet pistol. Ng was sentenced to two days behind bars and six months' probation.

But Benjamin Ng was a model probationer. In addition to his punishment for the 1980 incident, Ng was ordered to complete fifty hours of community service and did so by volunteering at the Chinese Community Center. His probation officer, pleased with Ng's initiative, debated letting him off probation early.

In 1981 Benjamin Ng shot at four young men in retaliation after being attacked in the Rainier Valley. Ng injured all four men and fled the scene. Two days later, Ng turned himself in and, two months later, records show that charges were dropped on grounds that he acted in self-defense.

By all accounts, Benjamin Ng's family was hard-working and law-abiding. Benjamin, the youngest of five children, was an exception. His early arrests as a juvenile disturbed his parents. After the December 1978 incident in which Ng was arrested for shoplifting, his parents refused to take him home from juvenile detention. They were trying to teach him a lesson.

Mak approached Bon Chin, another young man in the Chinatown community, shortly after Ng was recruited. Mak asked Chin to join him and Ng, and help rob the Wah Mee Club. Mak believed the three men could walk away from the heist with $60,000. But Chin refused to join because he didn't need the money and he feared that he was too well known in Chinatown.

As Mak's debts plagued him, he continued to search for a third accomplice. And as his search continued, he was losing time and opening himself to exposure. The more people Mak tried to enlist, the more he was exposing his plan, and increased rumors around Chinatown of what he had in mind.

Mak finally found his needed accomplice in a young Chinese man named Wai Chiu Ng. Ng preferred to be called "Tony" and, though he shared a last name with Benjamin, he was unrelated to him. Mak's luring Tony Ng was near miraculous. Ng was twenty-five years old -- the eldest of the three -- and had no prior criminal record. He was rather small for his age, standing 5' 7" and weighing no more than 120 pounds. He was born in Hong Kong, where he lived with his mother, father, two brothers, sister, and grandmother, in a cramped apartment. In 1960, when Ng was six years old, his father left Hong Kong and moved to America, to find work as a cook in Baltimore. Ten years later, the senior Ng was joined in Baltimore by the rest of his family.

When Tony Ng arrived in Baltimore, he knew very little English. He was the only Chinese-speaking student at his school. But he was a bright kid, eager to learn, and quickly began studying English. After spending two years in Baltimore, the Ng family moved to Seattle. Ng lived with his parents in South Seattle and earned $150 per week working occasionally for his father, who owned the China Kitchen restaurant in Lynnwood, Washington. Ng was a quiet young man who had a girlfriend and stayed out of trouble. Like the other young men in Seattle's Chinese community, he frequented the Imperial Lanes and occasionally gambled. Like Mak and Benjamin Ng, Tony Ng had also attended Cleveland High School, where he was a member of that school's soccer team. Ng graduated from Cleveland High School in 1975. After high school, Ng attended South Seattle Community College. He had an interest in cars, and spent two years enrolled in a vocational auto mechanics school. He later worked for seven months at Riach Oldsmobile, on Seventh & Pine, near downtown.

Ng frequently made trips to Hong Kong to visit friends. While Willie Mak had a temper and Benjamin Ng had a criminal record, Tony Ng was a shy, soft-spoken young man with few (if any) enemies. He was a loner, not belonging to any tong. "Not too many people knew Tony in the community," commented a Chinatown restaurant owner. "He didn't come to Chinatown as often as Ben and Willie did."

Tony Ng agreed to rob the Wah Mee Club with Benjamin and Willie for money. Tony owed Mak $1,000 and joining the robbery would clear his debt. Ng was not interested in killing the members of the Wah Mee Club. In fact, he didn't even know murder was part of the plan. Mak told him that the three men would simply rob the Club. Ng wasn't enthused about robbing the victims for profit. Unlike Mak and Benjamin Ng had been, Tony shunned violence and crime. Ng owed Mak money; working part-time for his father's restaurant wasn't going to allow him to pay off his debts anytime soon.

As Mak's plan approached fulfillment, Tony Ng became wary. The Wah Mee was huge, a landmark among Chinatown gambling clubs. It had dozens of members, all of whom had serious pull in the Chinese community. They were going to rob the Club on a weekend night, around midnight, during the Chinese New Year, when after-hours gambling would surely be in full throttle; the Wah Mee would be packed with people. Also, Ng's father had a history of gambling at the Wah Mee and the thought of robbing his own father made the young man uncomfortable. Furthermore, vice cops spent a lot of time at the Wah Mee, not to make arrests but to receive monetary kickbacks in exchange for allowing the Club to operate. What if Ng entered the Club with his accomplices and the place was crawling with cops?

As the logistics were straightened out and the plan came closer to being realized, Tony Ng changed his mind. He didn't want to join Mak and Benjamin Ng. Less than twenty-four hours before the killings, Ng borrowed $1,000 from his girlfriend and took the money to Mak. He wanted out and hinted that he was going to let the police know what Mak had in mind for the Wah Mee Club. The two men went to the Mak residence and met in an adjacent storage shed. Ng offered the money to Mak, but it was refused. Mak pulled a gun from the back of his belt and fired a bullet at the floor, barely missing Ng's feet. "You know too much already," Mak said, "You got to go. If you tell the police, I'll kill you. If you back out now, I'll shoot you, your family, your girlfriend, and burn down your parents' restaurant. Now go home. I'll pick you up later. If you're not home, I'm going to kill you."

Chapter Three | Gambling tolerance policies and police corruption kept the Wah Mee Club open for years

This story originally appeared as a serialized feature in Asian Focus newspaper