Watch World History of Organized Crime online: Episode 4 China

"The gangsters didn't buy off the police. They were the police." -- Frederick Wakeman, historian Thousands of years of Chinese history must be full of tales of organized criminality, but this episode is almost more about immigration than it is about crime. Desperate, poor Chinese are stowed away in shipping crates by illegal alien smugglers, known as snakeheads. One low-wage job in the U.S. can support an entire Chinese village: "Even the worst conditions here are better than the best conditions there." These stories are heartbreaking, but given the mission of this documentary series, the fact that there aren't organized crime bosses on hand is a little disappointing. The episode gallops through the millennia, stopping off to discuss the Heaven and Earth Association, which became known in the West as the Triads, the group to which the contemporary Chinese mafia can trace its roots. Much of the history is vague: organized crime may or may not have started in Fujian province, and the founders may or may not have been a group of Shaolin monks, who may or may not have invented kung fu. There's also a good amount of attention paid to the city of Shanghai, which in its day was the den of iniquity: "Every vice was catered to, and that is no exaggeration." As with the Russian installment, the latter portion of the action takes place in the U.S. -- specifically, in New York's Chinatown, featuring Nicky Louie, an especially hardened Chinese mobster who became a role model for a generation, sort of an Asian John Gotti.

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