Hindsight: 114 Years Ago

by Thomas L. Libby

On January 23, 1897, Fong Ching, the leader of San Francisco's Sam Yup Tong gang, was shot and killed at a barbershop by two assassins from the rival See Yup Tong. This was quite an achievement as Ching, who was more widely known by his nickname, "Little Pete," almost always donned a chain-mail armor vest and a medieval-style helmet when he went out, and usually was accompanied by attack dogs.

Ching had good reason to fear retribution. Though only in his early thirties when he died, he had allegedly killed more than 50 men during the infamous Tong Wars that established his empire of gambling, prostitution, opium dealing, and protection rackets reaching into the highest branches of San Francisco's notoriously corrupt Barbary Coast-era government.

Unsurprisingly, Ching also had his share of legal problems. A decade earlier, he was charged with attempting to bribe police officers. Ching's attorney, Hall McAllister—later memorialized by McAllister Street, where the current San Francisco Superior Court is located—employed a novel defense in which he admitted Ching's bribery attempt but argued that Ching was arrested only after he didn't give in to the officers' demand for even more money.

After two hung juries, Ching was finally convicted and sentenced to five years in Folsom Prison. But his conviction was reversed and remanded for a new trial by the California Supreme Court in People v. Fong Ching (78 Cal. 169 (1889)) because the judge had given a prejudicial jury instruction. Though the outcome or even the existence of that fourth trial remains unclear, Ching's supreme court case remains vital today, because it established that what constitutes bribery is a question of law for the court, but that whether the crime has actually been committed is a question of fact for the jury.

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