HONG Shoon House was the place to be seen if you were part of New York's Chinese underworld. Located in the middle of Manhattan's Chinatown, the restaurant's ground-floor tables provided front-row seats for the gangland flashpoints of Mott and Pell streets.
But its main attraction was one man, known to everyone as Uncle Seven. It was here, his unofficial throne room only a few blocks from the 5th Precinct police station, that people came to pay him homage.
Also called the Godfather of Chinatown, Benny Ong Kai-sui, 87, the adviser-for-life of the Hip Sing tong, went to the restaurant every day like clockwork.
He was respected by everyone: by the Hip Sing and the associated Flying Dragons, the rival On Leong tong and its Ghost Shadows gang, and the Tung On tong and its followers. Even the new order of immigrants from Fujian province - the uncouth and rebellious Fuk Ching, or 'Youth of Fujian' - gave him face.
So when the 'Godfather', whose Chinese name means Good Prophecy, died of prostrate cancer and pneumonia on August 3 last year, it sounded the death knell for much more than the restaurant: barely two months after his funeral, the shutters came down on Hong Shoon House - and on the old order of New York's Chinese underworld.
Ong's passing paralleled the decline of the empire he ruled for three decades, an empire that in recent years had come under fire from within and without. Pressures have included vicious infighting between the newly arrived Fukianese and the established Cantonese tongs, conflict with Hong Kong triads trying to muscle in on New York ahead of 1997, and rivalry between Kuomintang and communist factions.
But the main damage has come from a crackdown by federal authorities. Capitalising on the unrest, the prosecutions have put several Chinatown bosses behind bars and sent the rest underground. Now speculation is rife about who will fill the vacuum.
