Twice Burned

Around the same time, when Chow traveled to Atlantic City to sample a large supply of heroin, he saw cops everywhere, preventing him from completing the deal. He then traveled to New York, where he was arrested in La Guardia Airport for suspected drug dealing while holding $12,000 in cash.

Chow was released and the charges were eventually dropped, but from that point on, he knew something was amiss beyond the wiretaps on his phone. The police seemed to know the organization's every move. A "two-five," or informant, was in their midst, and he was determined to discover who it was. In reality, many of the underlings, caught for petty crimes, were talking to the police by that point, but Chow found his target in a girlfriend of one of the Wo Hop To's Oakland lieutenants.

Madeline Lee, or Mayflower, as she was called by her friends, had known Chow for years through her boyfriend, Tim Huang, who helped establish the Wo Hop To in the Bay Area. She was a pretty young woman, petite, but tough. She and a few associates had performed a series of robberies in Oakland for her boyfriend, turning over the proceeds to the Wo Hop To. Chow became suspicious that Lee was a police informant when she didn't serve any time after she was caught in a robbery attempt, even though she had the same criminal record as her partners. As Chow suspected, Mayflower was, indeed, acting as a confidential informant, and she would pay the price for her indiscretion.

When Mayflower stepped outside the Club Touche in lower Potrero Hill one night, four young men pounced on her. They broke her shoulder and knocked out a few of her teeth before the club's bouncers chased them away, the kids later testified. But while Lee lay bleeding on the pavement, she noted the license plate of the car carrying her attackers away from the scene.

Chow was on the phone the next day with a friend, describing the incident on a recorded call. "Last night they beat up Mayflower ... the bitch who caused all you guys to go insider. ... She was beaten up till she dropped, that Mayflower. I will play her bit by bit."

Meanwhile Lee, not realizing she was now a known snitch, called Chow to tell him she had been assaulted. "Find out who beat me up," she told him. "I saw them driving away with this license plate ...."

"I'll look into it," Chow told her.

This news, of course, worried Chow. If Lee reported the license plate to the police, the attack could be linked back to the gang. So he instructed his underling to report the car stolen. That way, if Lee reported the license plate, they could always claim that someone else had been driving the car.

Then he ordered the boys to attack her again.

This time they fell on her outside the Hong Kong Flower Lounge in Oakland. But before things got ugly, a passing cop intervened, and arrested an underling named Raymond Lei.

Lee still didn't realize who was behind the attacks, however, and she called Chow a second time. "It happened again," she said. "What's going on? I'm scared. I want to get out of here."

Chow didn't waste any more time eluding her questions. He told her in no uncertain terms to drop the charges. "I don't care what happened to you. Drop the charges against Raymond Lei," he told her, then repeated his command in a subsequent conversation. "I want you to show them that, hey, we are all of the same group, you know, not outsiders."

But Lee did not drop the charges, and the arrest of Raymond Lei, combined with Lee's identification of the car from her previous beating, spelled the beginning of the end for the Wo Hop To. With the cooperation of other informants like Chol Soo Lee, Wayne Kwong, and numerous underlings, police gathered enough evidence to arrest the top officials involved with the organization.

When they appeared at Chong's door in October 1992, warrants in hand, however, police found an empty apartment. Apparently tipped off, "Uncle" had fled town just days before.

Chow was also missing when police came to his Beale Street town house, but they found his wife leaving the building with a pistol in her purse. Police discovered a champagne-colored Jaguar in the garage and $50,000 in cash stashed in the apartment. Chow, unlike his boss, was still in the country, and was soon arrested. In 1995, he was convicted on six counts of gun trafficking and sentenced to 24 years in prison. The federal government's attempt a year later to convict Chow and other reputed leaders of the Wo Hop To on racketeering charges ended in a mistrial. U.S. Attorney William Schaefer decided to postpone retrying the case until Chong could be returned to the country.

Virtually all of the 19 individuals named in the original indictments either pleaded guilty or were convicted on at least some of the charges brought against them.

But not Peter Chong.

To its credit, the U.S. government has persisted against long odds in its pursuit of Chong. The fugitive was arrested shortly after he fled the United States, but two months later, Hong Kong officials released him, stating that the Justice Department had failed to provide adequate evidence that Chong was, as the U.S. government claimed, leader of the Wo Hop To crime syndicate. But in 1995, the United States returned with an amended indictment containing new and stronger evidence. This time Hong Kong complied with the request for extradition. Chong, however, remained missing until 1998, when he was arrested in a Hong Kong airport coming in from Taiwan.