October 2023 issue contents - Features
Sai Wing Mock and the New York 'Tong Wars'
By Thomas Hunt
Sai Wing Mock, a sixty-two-year-old resident of Brooklyn’s Flatbush section, died at Kings County Hospital in the early afternoon of July 23, 1941. An autopsy revealed that he had suffered with tuberculosis of the larynx, acute miliary tuberculosis and tuberculous pneumonia.
According to his death certificate, Mock was born in the U.S. to Chinese parents and had worked as a food merchant. He was buried July 27 at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.
His death went virtually unnoticed. Sai Wing Mock, better known by his alias of “Mock Duck,” was widely believed to have died about a decade earlier in 1932. And, even at that time, many on New York’s Lower East Side may have been surprised he managed to live so long...
Magazine page count: thirteen.
Images: eleven.
Endnotes.
