The enigma of Raymond Chow, self-proclaimed ex-gangster

Even as he sat in federal custody accused of overseeing a $2.3 million money-laundering operation, reputed Chinatown gangster Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow managed to have a photo of himself flashing a goofy grin and riding a children's mechanical horse posted to his Facebook page.

"Don't believe everything you read or hear," said the accompanying message, posted March 28. "Make your decision after you meet me and get to know me. I got to laugh today and I hope this photo does the same for you."

That lighthearted image stands in sharp contrast to Chow's dispassionate recounting of the intimidating tactics he used to consolidate San Francisco's Chinese criminal underground starting in the 1980s, or of his time in San Quentin after a 1978 armed robbery conviction, where he counted murderous cult leader Charles Manson as a "good friend of mine."

There are two deeply conflicting versions of Chow, the 5-foot, 5-inch package of calm intensity with a thin mustache above a hearty smile who in recent years frequented art galleries, drank at the swanky Hakkasan restaurant and sported eye-catching shirts, crisp jackets and a pocket square.

One is the gangster who once declared, "I run this city." The other is the reformed convict who spent hours warning teenagers against taking up the gang life, talked convincingly about "peace and love," and won the praise of top politicians such as Mayor Ed Lee, who provided Chow with a certificate of honor for his "tenacity and willingness to give back to the community."

Nuanced reality?

Whether the two can be reconciled should eventually play out in a San Francisco federal courtroom. There may also be a more nuanced reality: that Chow, at 54 years old, was striving to better himself and genuinely cared about youth, but couldn't fully leave the world of crime he had known since he was 9 years old - or ignore the practical need for money.

The man known to some in Chinatown as Dai Lo, which translates as "big brother" in Cantonese but can also connote "mob boss," says he has been in an immigration limbo for the last 10 years that precludes him from working legally. But Chow said in a Dec. 12, 2012, Facebook post that he relies on friends and family to survive and has not returned to his old ways. Chow, who is still in custody after his March 26 arrest, is commenting only through his attorneys.

The FBI contends Chow merely cultivated an image of legitimacy, removing himself from hands-on crime while still getting a cut of the proceeds brought in by the criminal network he oversaw and operated out of Ghee Kung Tong, also known as the Chinese freemasons. Chow was the leader, or "dragon head," of that tong, one of the oldest fraternal organizations in San Francisco's Chinatown.

A 137-page FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court last month alleges that a faction of tong members overseen by Chow laundered what they thought were drug and illegal gambling proceeds; sold cognac, scotch and cigarettes they thought were stolen; dealt guns; conspired to sell drugs; and provided introductions that led to bribery and an international arms scheme involving now-suspended state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco.

After being introduced to an undercover FBI agent posing as a member of the Mafia from New Jersey, Chow allegedly whispered to the agent during a meeting in a karaoke bar that he was no longer involved in crime, but that he "knew of and approved all criminal activities within his organization," according to the affidavit by FBI Special Agent Emmanuel Pascua.

Chow has been charged with seven counts of money laundering, two counts of conspiracy to transport and receive stolen liquor, and one count of conspiracy to traffic untaxed cigarettes - with the contraband provided by the FBI. He faces up to 20 years in prison for each money-laundering count, the ones that carry the harshest penalties. Twenty-eight other people, including Yee, face charges in the wide-ranging case.

Chow's attorneys have blasted the allegations against him as "government-created criminality" manufactured by the FBI, which spent five years on an undercover investigation, providing money to be laundered and pushing for more serious crimes. His legal team says those efforts turned up no real evidence against their main target, Chow.

In prosecution documents alone, there are 25 instances where Chow says he wants nothing to do with crime and four times that he discourages the undercover agent from illegal activity, including dealing heroin, his attorneys said at a news conference last week. Chow also demurred when credited with introductions that led to alleged money laundering or drug deals with others, his attorneys said.

"That's terrible dude, I don't want to know, that's illegal stuff," Chow told the agent posing as a mafioso on Feb. 14, 2013, when asked what he thought the agent and George Nieh, a member of the Ghee Kung Tong and a Chow associate who now faces criminal charges, were up to.

"That's what an innocent man says to an undercover agent," said Curtis Briggs, an attorney who met Chow a few years ago doing community work and volunteered to defend him in court.

At that same meeting, the affidavit said, after the undercover agent gave Chow an envelope containing $2,000 and thanked him for the "opportunity to work with his people," Chow laughed and said, "No, no, I didn't give you the opportunity; you make your own opportunity. Damn, that is bribery money dude, that's not good."

But he took the cash.

According to the affidavit, it was part of at least $58,000 the agent paid Chow over almost three years, ending in December, as his cut from money laundering, purportedly stolen liquor sales and contraband cigarettes.

Testified against boss

Chow maintains that he has been clean since he was released early from federal prison in 2003 after he agreed to testify against his former boss, Peter Chong, a reputed leader of the Wo Hop To triad, an organized crime syndicate based in Hong Kong. Chong had worked with Chow to consolidate Asian gangs in San Francisco and beyond. Chong was released from prison in 2008.

Chow, a Chinese citizen, was allowed to remain in the United States wearing an ankle monitor as he applied for a special visa reserved for witnesses in criminal cases. That application is still pending, according to the FBI.

He also can't legally work in the United States because of his immigration status, according to his attorneys, who say federal authorities reneged on a promise to put Chow in a witness protection program and left him to return to the only life he's known - the criminal underworld.

Chow has previously said he joined an organized crime group at age 9 in his native Hong Kong, where he was born Kwok Cheung Chow. His grandmother gave him the nickname Shrimp Boy out of the belief that evil spirits could not find little children if they didn't know their name. He was the smallest of five brothers, so the name stuck, he said in a 2007 interview.

When his family moved to the United States in 1976 when he was 16, Chow found familiarity in the Hop Sing Boys, a street gang that was the enforcement arm of the Hop Sing Tong, one of the numerous tongs, or fraternal groups, with their roots in the Hung Mun, a secret society that began in mid-17th century China to overthrow the Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty.

The offshoot groups that sprang up during waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere sometimes served as mini-governments and a bulwark against rampant discrimination. The tongs settled disputes, provided aid to immigrants and approved business locations. Some also engaged in extortion, prostitution and the opium trade.

Violent tong

By the 1970s, most San Francisco tongs had become social clubs for aging immigrants. But Hop Sing was torn by violence as younger members struggled for power with older leaders.

In 1977, a year after Chow arrived in San Francisco, he was one of a group of young gangsters inside Chinatown's Golden Dragon restaurant, in a Hop Sing-owned building, when rival gang members burst in and opened fire. Five patrons were killed and 11 people wounded - none of them gang members.

Chow quickly distinguished himself within the Hop Sing Boys with his blend of charisma and ruthlessness, and would later boast of controlling all of the region's Asian gangs.

"If you are asking me which gang did I join, I did not join any gang," Chow told a federal prosecutor in 2002. "I owned the gang. ... All those people who were walking the streets of the Bay Area, all of them were controlled by me."

Chow was convicted in 1978 for a Chinatown robbery and served a little over seven years of an 11-year prison sentence.

He was released in 1985, but found himself back behind bars a year later, charged with assault with a deadly weapon and other crimes. Chow served three years and was released in 1989, but was arrested again in 1992, when he was charged, along with Chong, with leading a widespread criminal network attempting to unify Chinese gangs on both U.S. coasts under the Wo Hop To triad.

Chow pleaded guilty in federal court to racketeering involving murder for hire, conspiracy to distribute heroin, arson and other crimes. He got his sentence cut in half after he agreed to testify against Chong and was released in 2003.

He emerged from prison a changed man, said Eli Crawford III, a former inmate who said he served as the orderly in the secure unit, or solitary confinement prison block, where Chow had been housed.

"Raymond made a promise not only to me, but he made the promise to God," said Crawford, who said that since their release from the prison, both men had worked together to tamp down violence in San Francisco's Bayview and Western Addition neighborhoods. He said they also conducted a three-day workshop at San Francisco City College in 2012 on education and re-entry into society after incarceration.

But less than two years after Chow's release from prison in 2003, his name was connected to an alleged attempt to extort $100,000 from the Hop Sing Tong.

Allen Leung, an elder at that point in both the Hop Sing Tong and the Ghee Kung Tong - also known as Chee Kung Tong, or CKT - went to the FBI in 2005 with concerns and later said he feared for his life.

Leung told the FBI the problems had begun in late 2004, when two young members of Hop Sing sought about $100,000 from the organization. Leung told FBI Special Agent William Wu that Chow had also shown up at Hop Sing's headquarters in late 2004 making the same demand.

In February 2005, a restaurant and four Chinatown buildings that housed tongs - but not Hop Sing - were vandalized with red paint. About two weeks later, Leung and other Hop Sing leaders met and voted to turn down the request for $100,000, Leung told authorities.

The next day, several shots were fired into the door of the Hop Sing Tong, police said. Later in March, Hop Sing leaders received a taunting letter that read: "Someone opened fire to front door but you're just chickens -. No response to it. Just keeping your mouth quiet. Having this kind of leader makes all the tongs lose face. I have a poem to dedicate to you. 'You should be embarrassed for a thousand years and your reputation stink for 10,000 years.' "

When asked by the FBI, Chow denied the extortion threat and said that Hop Sing board members had approached him and "wanted him to loan-shark the money," according to court documents.

Unsolved slaying

Less than a year later, on Feb. 26, 2006, Leung was shot dead in his import-export business on Jackson Street as his wife looked on. His killing has not been solved. Chow, who wore a white suit to Leung's funeral, has denied any involvement in his killing, suggesting that others could have tried to extort money using his name.

Six months after the killing, Chow took Leung's place as leader of Ghee Kung Tong, and the FBI and San Francisco police both conducted surveillance at his swearing in.

But acquaintances said Chow resisted the pull of the underworld - instead talking to troubled youth through violence-prevention groups like United Playaz, and working on an autobiography with the help of a ghostwriter and his girlfriend of the past six years.

He has plans to turn his story into a movie and told the undercover FBI agent he had $50,000 set aside to get his book published, and had a potential book and movie deal worth $3 million that he was reluctant to sign because he wanted to control the production.

"From what I could see, I thought he was very sincere," said Bill Lee, a former San Francisco planning commissioner and former city administrator who has attended some Ghee Kung Tong banquets. "I told him, 'I don't mind helping you.' "

Until recently, Chow lived on Potrero Hill at the home of his girlfriend, Alicia Lo, who, according to her Facebook page, models and works in sales and marketing for a custom cabinetry and handmade furniture company. Lo declined to comment when reached at her home or after the press conference last week at the law offices of Chow's attorneys, where she sat in the audience wearing sunglasses.

Lo cried at one point when one of the speakers, Rudy Corpuz Jr., a felon turned community activist who invited Chow on numerous occasions to talk to teenagers about making smart choices in life, said, "I got love for the brother. And I say that from my heart."

Positive influence

By all accounts, Lo helped Chow turn his life around, shepherding him on the book deal, taking care of him, even buying him clothes.

"She has been an extremely positive, consistent force in Raymond's life," Briggs said. "She believes in him 200 percent. She helped him. She had resources."

Despite Chow's dapper dress, in October 2011 he told an undercover FBI agent that he was broke.

The agent responded that Chow had a lot of nice clothes and jewelry, and "Chow explained that he did not understand why people gave him things all the time."

Many of the clothes, though, Lo bought for him secondhand at shops like Goodwill, said Briggs, who described Chow as "this almost monastic figure who is trying to put the pieces together."

"He had a lot of friends who saw him doing community work," Briggs said. "There is nobody who met Ray who didn't want to help him."

Perhaps one of the most telling exchanges - and one that may reveal much about Chow - was recorded by the FBI on May 6, 2012, when he was talking to Nieh in Nieh's car, neither man realizing the FBI was bugging the conversation.

During that seemingly unguarded moment, Chow voiced concerns about having Ghee Kung Tong members working with a person they thought was a member of the Mafia, and said he didn't want the organization involved.

"Chow said he was afraid of the (tong) being tagged as an 'underworld society' and 'participating in organized crime,' " according to the FBI affidavit. "Chow said that was all he was worried about, but, of course, he wanted to make money."

In almost the next breath, he had his defense planned out.

"Chow said if he got ratted out, he would claim that he had only introduced the relationship," according to the affidavit, "and that he didn't know what they were doing."

John Coté is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jcote@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnwcote