The Tough Guy Cometh –With George Raft’s Bullet For Joey In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Pound for pound China Turk was the toughest hood , gangster, crook, whatever you called the hard guys in your neighborhood, your growing up neighborhood if you, like me, came from some tough, mean working poor streets where no quarter was given, and none was expected or if you live on those means streets . China ruled the roost in old time bustling car-making Detroit, before the war, World War II that is, when ruling the city roost meant something, when being a hard guy and making no apologies for it, of even the idea of making apologies for it, was under the radar, a non-starter. He had his hand in everything, everything working guys with a little dough after the plants were unionized wanted from alcohol to drugs to women and everything in between, had every angle covered, had some very powerful angels protecting him, protecting him or else. They say in the old days when he was rising to the top that he never turned down any proposition that had dollar signs attached to it, if the making of it was easy, or had a perverse twist to it. They say, as well, he didn’t care who made the offer, friend or foe, as long as it was to his advantage and as, he grew in power, to the advantage of his burgeoning organization.

So, yah, China started from hunger like a lot of us, started without a stick to call his own, but he made up for it with his reign of terror. China had one rule, one rule with two parts that tied together, rules that he picked up the hard way- don’t step off on some caper for chump change and don’t forget to clean up after yourself, leave no traces. See China when he was just starting out, a kid of maybe sixteen, no more, not in school since nobody at home, and that meant nobody, was watching to see whether he attended or not got picked up, picked up easy, after he committed an armed robbery of some two bit- gas station. He got about eight bucks and change after waylaying the gas jockey. China wound up doing a deuce in the Wayne County jail since the county didn’t see him as a candidate for some reform school workout, and they turned out to be right.

Here is the kicker though jail is where China got his education, where he got wise to what was going on, got wise to the fact that if he didn’t, like most of the losers in that institution, want to be in and out of stir for the rest of his life he had better change his style. What China figured out fast was that there was no percentage in cheapjack crime and if you were going to do time then you had better go big or don’t bother. That’s the first part. The second part, the dicey part, the cleanup part, is don’t leave loose ends, don’t leave witnesses. The main reason he got caught on that first caper was because that waylaid gas jockey fingered him in court. And so for the rest of his career China cleaned up, cleaned up good, very good, after every caper. Proof: China Turk after that first youthful error never spent another day in jail, any place.

Of course even tough guys get old, lose their edge and so by the late 1950s China Turk was old news, was old school and so he didn’t see it coming when the Feds started taking putting bad guys off the streets as a priorityand he started losing guys around the edges of his operations as they started picking them off. Didn’t see that he needed to flow with the times, ease up on the rackets, ease up on squeezing every last ounce out of every caper. And to stop creating a corpse logjam in the rivers and harbors of this great country after cleaning up those capers. What China did see was that the citizenry of Detroit were up in arms, for a while. China, old school or not, had enough sense to see that he had to split, split the country until the heat died down so he moved his operation over to Windsor, over across from Detroit on the Canadian side. Smart move for him personally, but a bad move for his organization. Crime syndicates like anything else, politics, whatever, abhor a vacuum, a presence vacuum and so China lost his place in the food chain. Lost it until his last great caper came along, the one certain people in places like Detroit, Chi town, ditto Frisco town, Vegas, the Hollywood Hills still talk about with veiled reverence.

One day in the mid-1960s, sometime after the big missile crisis blew over, China was sitting in a café in Montreal, a place he went to often when he got bored with provincial Windsor, or got a little homesick for the states. Somebody must have known his whereabouts, must have taken note of his movements, because no sooner had he ordered his cup of coffee than a guy, a guy who looked like he sold insurance, or was some kind of ten- percent guy, approached him with an offer, an offer that the guy said China couldn’t refuse. And that guy threw one hundred thou in cash at China just for talking rights. China’s eyes lit up at that sight and so the ten-percent guy talked his talk. The caper involved an old fashion kidnapping of a guy, a scientist, a nuclear scientist teaching over at McGill, that this guy’s principals wanted to talk to, wanted to get information about nuclear power from. China rubbed his hands together and told the agent that it would be, like in the old days, a piece of cake as long as a million for him, plus extra dough for his boys and expenses came with it. China, like in the old days as well, never asked who he was working for although he suspected the Cubans or Chinese, never said the whole thing was hooey, or that it was against some moral principle of his to work against his old country. Once the financial arrangements were negotiated successfully all he said was “done.”

And the caper was a beauty. Funny things started to happen once China mads his moves. First China he planted an old flame as a secretary/bait in the professor’s office, Professor Clark Schwein. You might remember the name, a big guy from Germany in the hydrogen bomb days, but after that project finished up he was then just teaching at McGill. That part was easy since the professor's previous secretary had very recently had an accident, had wound up very dead in a mysterious car crash when the brakes failed. Then he planted another guy in the school security office. That guy, a good inside man in the old days, seemed to have lost his touch a little though because one night when he was rummaging through the professor’s office looking for materials that might be useful to China’s clients about testing sites and such when another guard came in. That guard wound up falling out a third story window that night. Finally one of China’s boys, one of his smarter boys, Jimmy Jenkins, applied for a position in the professor’s department. One day another professor, an American and a former hydrogen bigwig as well, saw Jimmy talking with China in an unguarded moment and went over and asked China if he was China, the famous Detroit gangster that he had idolized as a kid. Mistake, big mistake. The good professor was found early the next morning floating face down in the Saint Lawrence River.

Naturally each of these people having their troubles, their deadly troubles all of a sudden and connected with the good professor got the RCMP and through them the FBI up in arms. Up in arms enough to throw a full-scale investigation into the matter. And here is where China really did shine, really did show why he was king of the hill in the old days. Eventually the RCMP and the FBI connected the dots and figured out that a party, or parties, unknown, was seeking information from the professor to aid in their nuclear weapons programs. Unfortunately for those agencies by the time that they connected the dots, connected the dots to China Turk and his associates acting for Red Chinese interests, he already had kidnapped and hidden the professor away in a safe place.

The FBI agent in charge, Jim Swain, once he found China’s whereabouts, went to his suite in the Imperial Hotel and begged him practically on his hands and knees to give the professor up in the interest of American national security, the fate of civilized world, and what not. They later found Jim Swain’s body in the bottom of the hotel’s elevator shaft. They found the professor’s body a couple of weeks later in the coal bin of an abandoned freighter docked in Prince Edward Island. Red China tested a hydrogen bomb not many years thereafter. And China Turk ? Well, the last anybody heard China was either living, living very well, in Hong Kong, Havana, Albania, or some other port of call.