Flying Dragons (gang)

The Flying Dragons (), also known as FDS, was a Chinese American street gang that was prominent in New York City's Chinatown from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Formed in 1967, by immigrants primarily from Hong Kong, they were affiliated with the Hip Sing Tong. Throughout the 1980s, the gang often engaged in bloody turf wars with the newer Ghost Shadows gang. Their activities included extortion, kidnapping, murder, racketeering, and illegal gambling. The gang moved heavily into heroin trafficking after the Italian-American Mafia lost the trade as a result of the Pizza Connection prosecutions in the mid-1980s.

Characteristics

Similar to the triads of China and the yakuza of Japan, the Flying Dragons were composed primarily of members of a single ethnicity. For a time, in comparison to Western gangs, this allowed organizations such as the Flying Dragons to remain relatively impenetrable by police outside of their own homelands.

Activities

The Flying Dragons allegedly maintained significant operations across Chinatowns in the United States and in Hong Kong. Much like other gangs, the Flying Dragons were heavily involved in the illegal drug trade, including heroin.

Flying Dragons leader Johnny Eng, also known as "Onionhead", was charged and convicted in 1992 of masterminding an international heroin importing scheme. Federal prosecutors alleged evidence against Eng including 300 pounds of heroin shipped to New York in stuffed animals, strapped to couriers, and sealed in steel machines used to wash bean sprouts.

In 1994, in what law-enforcement officials called a major blow to the largest and last of the traditional criminal gangs in Chinatown, 33 suspected members of the Flying Dragons were indicted on federal racketeering charges. Sources described these charges as three murders, 12 attempted murders, heroin trafficking, illegal gambling, arson, extortion, and robberies that stretched from Manhattan into Brooklyn and Queens.

Gang leadership

While the Flying Dragons' current leadership is unknown, the most well-known boss of the gang was Johnny "Onionhead" Eng (also known as Machinegun Johnny). His notable tenure as leader is estimated to have lasted from a rise to power in the early 1980s, to his incarceration in the 1990s.

Eng is widely believed to have first emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States in the early 1970s, aged around 13. Several sources agree that Eng took over the Flying Dragons in 1983, after the murder of his predecessor, Michael Chen, in the spring of that year. Nicknamed "The Scientist" for his cool and calm demeanor, Chen had been killed in the doorway of the Hip Sing credit union, suffering a total of 14 gunshots, including four rounds that were fired directly into his eyes.

Vietnamese Flying Dragons

The Vietnamese Flying Dragons were a former branch of the Flying Dragons gang that consisted of primarily Vietnamese members. One of its former members, David Thai, a Vietnamese refugee who had joined the gang in 1983, decided to leave the gang in 1987 after being disaffected by the lower status of the members that were consigned to this particular branch of the gang, who were mostly viewed as "coffee boys" and were ordered to carry out crimes that carried the stiffest penalties such as robbery and murder, and were cut off from the main gang's more lucrative activities such as drug dealing. David Thai would later go on to build his own gang that would rival the Flying Dragons, called Born to Kill, which began to compete with the Flying Dragons and the Ghost Shadows for control and territory over Chinatown.

Overseas activities

The Flying Dragons have their roots in Hong Kong and historically maintained operations there. They have also been allegedly linked to criminal activities in parts of Canada and Australia.

References

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{{Organized crime groups in New York City

Organizations established in 1967
1967 establishments in New York City
Organizations disestablished in 1994
1994 disestablishments in New York (state)
Chinese-American organized crime groups
Former gangs in New York City
Street gangs
Chinese-American culture in New York City
Overseas Chinese organisations
Chinatown, Manhattan
Triad groups