Hey, I'm Linnea Dominic, Curiosity Intern.

Well, the scavenger hunt is wrapping up this week.

We had about 400 teams and nearly 1,000 participants.

Hopefully, you had a chance to learn some details about a part of Chicago you didn't know that well before.

To cap off the past several weeks of unlocking clues, we're finishing with a story from 2018.

When a reporter Monica Aang took on a question about the historic role of gangs in Chinese

immigrant communities, it gave her a clue to an old family mystery. Stay tuned for some

updates at the end of the episode. Here's Monica. A hundred years ago in Chicago, two rival violent gangs were killing each other over territory, drugs, and gambling.

They weren't Italian. They weren't Irish. No, these were Chicago's Chinese gangs, also known as Tongs. Never heard of them? Well, that's kind of how they wanted it.

Warfare between the two Tong gangs was an insulated, secretive affair.

This is Richard Lindbergh. He wrote a big, fat book called Gangland Chicago. And it's got

extensive chapters on the history of Irish and Italian gangs. But on Chicago's Chinese gangs,

you only get a few pages. Asian crime in Chicago is not well documented simply because it was

conducted under the veil of secrecy for most of its history. But I decided to try and crack this veil of secrecy.

To answer a question, Curious City got from a listener who asked,

how did these gangs get started and what happened to him?

It turns out the answers actually reveal a lot about a mysterious 1936 murder in my own family, and how many Chinese businessmen

were forced to deal with the gangs or face the consequences. But more about that later.

So who exactly were the Chinese gangs or Tongs, and how'd they get to Chicago? Linberg says

there were two main factions, the Hib Singh and On Leong.

They arrived in the US in the 1860s with early Chinese railway workers,

and they offered protection for their members.

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