Soon, rumor of Yuen's unexpected wealth was circulating through the city's imbibing establishments, of which there was no shortage. Of 285 businesses in town, 110 dispensed liquor.
The Chinese were already the objects of both fear and revulsion in L.A.: fear because they were seen as almost superhuman in their ability to work long hours for a pittance, revulsion because their religion and culture were alien.
Corpses of the Chinese victims
Los Angeles at the time of the Chinese massacre
Related Content
More About
Popular books at the time suggested that the Chinese streaming into California by the thousands to search for gold eventually would take over California and elect a silk-clad Mandarin as governor.
Hatred was so strong that during the Civil War California's Legislature passed a law that forbade any Chinese from testifying against a white man. The law gave whites immunity — an invitation to violence that historian Paul De Falla says the people of Los Angeles took up with "a glint and a glee" the night of the massacre.
Against that backdrop, it's easy to imagine the reaction to the revelation that a Chinese company possessed a small fortune, protected only by a locked trunk.
Indeed, several pieces of evidence strongly suggest that Bilderrain went to Negro Alley that evening not to investigate gunshots but to rob Sam Yuen.
For one thing, Bilderrain had a reputation for dishonesty and larceny. Several court cases were filed against him in the years before and after the massacre, accusing him of stealing valuable roosters for use in his cockfighting operation.
Along with his brother Ygnacio, Bilderrain was an inveterate gambler. For years, he and his brother controlled and manipulated the Latino voting bloc in Los Angeles on behalf of Democratic candidates who, ironically, opposed racial equality. On Election Day, it was a common sight to see Jesus Bilderrain in a white duster stuffing bills into voters' pockets in downtown Los Angeles.
Then there is Bilderrain's changing story. According to his own account, after he saw Choy wounded in the street, he chased Yuen's band into the Coronel Building. This made little sense, since Choy was working for Yuen's gang.
Instead, the officer should have sought out Hing's gang.
Why didn't he? Because he likely was working for Hing.
It was well known in town that the Chinese companies paid off the local police for favors. As Hing said about L.A. law enforcement, according to newspaper accounts of a later court hearing, "Police likee money."
The chief "favor" rendered by the police was the retrieval of escaped Chinese prostitutes. The women were little more than slaves to the companies, yet whenever a prostitute tried to escape her awful confinement, all her owner had to do was go to court and swear out a warrant accusing her of theft. Then, knowing they would earn a fat reward, the police would spring into action, tracking the woman to Santa Barbara, San Diego or elsewhere, and restore her to her tormentors. While police were off on these errands, they left the city unguarded.
This system of payoffs inevitably led to police officers being openly allied with one Chinese company or another.
The likelihood that Bilderrain was doing Hing's bidding is apparent in his comments after the riot. The officer insisted that he had seen Yuen shoot bar owner Robert Thompson, a remarkable feat given that Bilderrain was lying wounded in the street when Thompson was shot by someone in the dark interior of the building.
Horace Bell, a lawyer and early chronicler of Los Angeles, wrote years later that he believed Bilderrain and Thompson went to Yuen's store that afternoon for no other purpose than to steal his gold.
Bell's account was dismissed by historians because he was known to stir a good deal of drink into his tales of early Los Angeles. But in this case there is plenty of independent evidence of Bilderrain's duplicity.
In the days after the massacre, Hing and Yuen, both of whom survived, gave their versions of events to the Los Angeles Daily Star, blaming each other for the outbreak. But Yuen provided a key piece of evidence in his account, saying his men opened fire on Bilderrain because he came for them in the company of Hing, his enemy.
There was no way, in the highly charged aftermath of the riot, that Yuen could openly accuse a police officer of robbery or of starting the massacre. He could, however, hint at it while blaming Hing for being the instigator of both the kidnapping and the riot.
Further evidence of the Chinese view was offered later, when Dr. Gene Tong's widow sued Hing, accusing him of starting the violence.
Finally, there was a monumental reversal by Bilderrain that casts doubt on his original explanation for the start of the massacre. He and his friends gave several accounts of what he saw that night, sometimes naming Yuen and sometimes not.
But by the time Yuen filed suit against the city of Los Angeles to recover his lost gold, Bilderrain had come around 180 degrees. He testified for Yuen, claiming he had never seen the gang leader on the night of the massacre.
However the riot started, one of the greatest unanswered questions is how it was allowed to continue. A review of news accounts in the days following the massacre showed that the authorities were strangely, and criminally, uninvolved.
