By Rong Xiaoqing

“I am very nervous,” Peter Chin, squirming on a chair in front of a standing microphone, told a rapt audience at the Chatham Square Library in Chinatown. “You give me a mic, I don’t know what to do. You give me a gun, I know what to do.”

He was only half joking.

Chin was invited to the library’s “Asian American Authors in Conversation” event to discuss his memoir: “In the Ghost Shadows: The Untold Story of Chinatown’s Most Powerful Crime Boss,” published in January.

Dressed in a striped shirt and blue jeans with stand up gray hair, Chin, 65, looked more like a writer than a gang leader. But his experience in the Ghost Shadows cemented his status as the “dai lo” — the Big Boss — of  one of the fiercest gangs in Chinatown in the ‘70s and ‘80s. He joined the gang when he was 13-years-old, rising to the top, until eventually he was charged by a federal grand jury with 13 counts of murder on behalf of members of the Ghost Shadows, among other offences. When he was 26, he was sent to prison and would stay there for more than 20 years.

Sitting beside Chin and smiling was Mike Moy. His own memoir “Bad to Blue: The True Story of a Chinatown Gangster Turned NYPD Detective,” which followed his journey from being affiliated with the Fuk Ching gang to becoming a police officer, had just been published in July. Dressed in a black short-sleeved shirt, black pants and black flat cap, Moy appeared reserved and even a little mystic. But he was keen to head off one potential critique of his story. “Possibly people say  ‘Oh you are glamorizing it.’ ” Moy, 55, told the audience. “I cannot see how I am glamorizing ‘cause life is nothing glamorous.”

Chin and Moy are not the only former Chinese gang members who have taken up writing recently. It seems the Chinatown gang world is coming back, at least for now, on paper.

To read the entire article: https://documentedny.com/2025/09/12/ghosts-of-chinatown-gang-crime/