Oakland's first gang-unit member recalls a dangerous Chinatown

Along with the money from Hong Kong came some of the Asian gangs--and that’s the subject of our next story from the early 1980s. It’s about an immigrant from Hong Kong who would change community-police relations. Reporter Sena Woodson has the story.

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HARRY HU: See like this place has been here forever.

SENA WOODSON: I’m walking around Chinatown with Harry Hu. He’s the former gang-unit leader for the Oakland Police Department. He’s tall and burly, and although he recently retired from the force, he still wears his gun and badge proudly on his belt. He’s taking me on the foot patrol route he followed every day in the early 1980s. As he strolls down 8th Street, most people seem to recognize him--some wave and others stop to chat.

HU: I used to hang out at this place almost every day.

WOMAN: Now he don’t walk in Chinatown anymore.

People are friendly now, but when Hu was first assigned here, they didn’t speak to him so freely. 

HU: People in Chinatown were very skeptical because they never really had any, you know, personal interaction with the police.

Hu says recent immigrants in particular had misgivings.

HU: They come from war torn countries, they come from the third world, where the police was not there to protect the citizens and often they were corrupted. So they don’t trust the police.

That made it hard to solve crimes in Oakland’s Chinatown. So the OPD hired Harry Hu in 1981. He was the first bilingual Asian-American officer in the department. He spoke Cantonese, Mandarin and Toisanese. But Hu says, because of his size, lots of people assumed he wasn’t Chinese--and they didn’t realize he could understand them.

HU: And people were just talking as I was walking down the street and say ‘man now they put a Hawaiian here’ you know, not knowing I was Chinese.

But, eventually people in Chinatown figured it out and started talking to Hu. It took about six months, but pretty soon he says informants were coming to him. Some residents would even wait for Hu to come back from vacation to report urgent matters, such as robberies. In return for the information, he kept residents informed about law enforcement activities. Hu’s walking partner in the early 80s was Rodney Gee.

RODNEY GEE: Just them getting that information and feedback from Harry made them feel better. I could see that. And to feel better that we’re involved, really involved.

With the help of Chinatown merchants and residents, Hu and Gee learned everyone’s given names and nicknames and kept their pictures on file. Hu even knew many of the alleged criminals personally. In one major extortion incident, Hu says the entire case broke because of a nickname.

HU: Cause the uh, one of the suspects demanding the extortion money gave a nickname, and it was Rice Boy. And I remember who Rice Boy was because I had stopped him two weeks prior to that, and I said I know Rice Boy.

That kind of success led to Harry Hu’s transfer to the Intelligence Unit in 1989. At the time, Asian organized crime was on the rise. Newspapers were constantly reporting on the growing gang phenomenon, like in these articles from the Washington Post in 1984:

FROM NEWSREEL: Fear of the 1997 Chinese takeover of Hong Kong has sent a flood of Asian investment into Chinese-American communities, creating new opportunities for both legitimate businesses and a new breed of criminal gangs... A loose-knit Asian Mafia with criminal operations in Hong Kong, Taiwan and more than a dozen North American cities is responsible for a fifth of the heroin imported into the United States. Attorney General William French Smith said the Chinese Triad Societies are part of "new crime cartels emerging in the Far East and spreading to the West.”

Harry Hu was working to stop those Cartels. As an officer in the OPD’s intelligence unit, he started working on the gang problem. And in 1991, Hu became part of Oakland’s first gang unit.  

HU: And I was there by myself with my partner, a two people gang unit for the whole city of Oakland, and we were busy.

Hu says one gang in particular that had formed in Oakland, called Wo Hop To, began to pose a major threat to the Chinatown community. In 1991, the gang conducted door-to-door extortions all over the neighborhood, as well as in San Francisco. Soon, the operation extended to other parts of the United States and China. Harry Hu says that’s when the FBI got involved.

HU: And uh we were deputized as Federal Agents for the FBI. So we cross-designated and we could literally go anywhere, you know, within the U.S. and we would have authority as a Federal Agent.  

Hu says over time, the gang unit virtually eliminated organized crime in Chinatown. Officer Rodney Gee says the key was knowing the criminals and the neighborhood in which they operated.

GEE: They get away with stuff when they’re anonymous, you don’t know who they are. But when you know them before they even commit the crime, boy you’ve got a big jump on them.

Hu says he doesn’t see many young people hanging out in Chinatown anymore. He thinks residents and merchants feel safe to a certain extent, but admits crime is still an issue.

HU: But it’s not blatantly and right in front of you and causing a lot of problems for the community of Chinatown and threatening, you know, the wellbeing of Chinatown.

According to Hu, some of the men who used to threaten Chinatown have now turned their lives around.

HU: They’re now family men, they have businesses established. We still see each other, you know, out in the street and talk about the old days and they say how stupid they were before.  

Hu retired from the Oakland Police Department in 2005, but the Gang Unit he helped build is still in operation. These days, Hu works as an inspector in the Alameda County DA’s Office, and he stays in touch with the Chinatown community.  

HU: I still participate in a lot of their uh functions. Of course folks are a lot older now, you know.

Today’s Chinatown is a vibrant place, with markets and shoppers and crowded sidewalks. Harry Hu helped make it a safer place and broke the barrier between police and community. Now that’s a goal all over the country, but in Hu’s day, it was something extraordinary. 

In Oakland, I’m Sena Woodson for Crosscurrents.

This story originally aired on June 16, 2010 as part of a series on Oakland's Chinatown.