Clad in black and speaking Chinese, the three men entered a mah-jongg parlor hidden in a building on Hester Street in Chinatown. They pulled out a pistol and a knife and stripped gamblers of more than $5,600, the police said.
Over the next seven weeks, from late February to early April, three more parlors were robbed: one in Chinatown and two in Flushing, Queens. Each was hit by a small group of Chinese-speaking men with firearms — in one case, an assault rifle.
The robbers may have counted on the silence that has long kept these places in the shadows: The gambling is illegal, so owners and bettors are unlikely to report crimes. But in these cases, victims did, opening a peephole into the busy world of underground Chinese gambling and rattling many of those who work and play in it.
Several gamblers in Flushing said two more parlors were robbed this month, though the attacks were not reported to the police. “We’re really scared now,” one player said as he emerged from a secret den. “Now we have to be especially careful.”
The parlors are tucked in basements or upstairs in warrenlike office buildings, places where a steady stream of players can go unnoticed in the commotion of everyday traffic, say gamblers and others in the Chinese community. Some games take place in private apartments, with paper covering the windows or shades pulled tight, or in the backrooms of community associations.
Because operators frequently shift locations to avoid police detection, it is unclear — to the authorities as well as to those who work there — how many parlors there are.
But the police, familiar with the business for generations, said they were surprised by the sudden rash of armed invasions.
“Historically, there’s been gambling in Chinatown locations, but we haven’t had a significant amount of violence associated with it,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Last year, he said, there were no reported robberies at the parlors.
The police have not made any arrests in the recent crimes, which they believe were all the work of the same crew, Mr. Browne said.
Gambling parlors involving cards, unauthorized lotteries, mah-jongg and other games have been a fixture in Chinese immigrant communities in the United States since the 19th century.
The parlors became a key source of income for some district and family organizations in Chinatown and eventually for street gangs, said Ko-lin Chin, a Rutgers University criminologist. But even after law enforcement broke the gangs’ stranglehold on the neighborhood in the 1990s, gambling rooms continued to flourish.
Today, some are exclusively devoted to mah-jongg, a tile game that is one of the most popular forms of recreation among the Chinese. Other operations include high-stakes card games like poker, and sometimes even the sorts of electronic gambling machines found in legal casinos.
“You see these here?” said one parlor boss, pointing at some three-story walk-up apartment buildings just off Main Street in Flushing. “They all have at least one mah-jongg parlor.”
Some stay open around the clock, while others do business for only a few hours a day.
One popular mah-jongg parlor in Flushing thrived, until recently, in a two-bedroom apartment where as many as 20 people played at a time. Some regulars would stay for as long as two days, taking catnaps on a sofa. They would eat takeout food, and in the evening the boss would oversee the preparation of more elaborate meals.
At parlors devoted to mah-jongg, the stakes do not get very high, with maximum wins and losses usually amounting to no more than several hundred dollars per person in a session. In other parlors, however, players may experience swings involving tens of thousands of dollars.
Not all mah-jongg games involve gambling; acquaintances often gather to play for fun, with no wagering. Gambling becomes illegal, according to state law, when the house takes a percentage, Mr. Browne explained.
In a faint echo of places like Las Vegas, parlor bosses sometimes treat their favored customers to dinners, spa visits and sessions in karaoke bars. They might even lend them money.
Officials in the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that this year they had prosecuted 25 people in gambling-related cases in the Fifth Precinct, which includes Chinatown, and a total of 82 during the past three years. Most were charged with promoting gambling or possession of gambling records, low-level felonies, then pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and received penalties of community service, officials said.
It is unclear why victims in the four recent robberies took the risk of contacting the police. But Mr. Browne said the authorities were not pressing gambling charges in those cases because the victims had cooperated with investigators.
Mr. Browne said the four parlors were relatively large operations, each serving 20 or more players. “These were not informal mah-jongg games between acquaintances,” he said.
The robberies have chilled the mah-jongg network. Bosses have been more careful about whom they let in; most parlors have outer doors with peepholes, and some have closed-circuit security cameras, gamblers say. The operators have also been warning clients to be careful.
“We just tell them not to bring too much cash,” said the parlor boss in Flushing.
A Flushing parlor that was robbed shut down after the incident, but reopened last week.
Signs newly posted on the door in English and Chinese warned that the premises were under police video?surveillance. When a reporter rang the parlor’s bell one recent evening, he was buzzed into the building. But as he climbed to the second-floor apartment, he could hear people scrambling around, speaking in the Shanghai dialect and scraping chairs and tables across the floor.
When he knocked, someone inside shouted, “We’re eating!” Five minutes later, the door opened and about two dozen people flooded out, down the stairs and into the night, saying nothing.
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