The Dragonhead: The Godfather of Chinese Crime--His Rise and Fall [Hardcover]

John Sack (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2001

Distinguished journalist John Sack spent twelve years fearlessly shadowing and befriending the most powerful crime lord in the Chinese Mafia. Now he tells the true, unfictionalized story of mob legend Johnny Kon–“the Dragonhead.”

The Chinese Mafia has always been a mystery to both law enforcement and the media–part of an unapproachable and unfathomable conglomeration of secret societies operating worldwide. To this day, though, police and prosecutors insist that Johnny Kon’s own secret organization–the Big Circle–is public enemy number one. Now, in a triumph of literary journalism, John Sack introduces us to this secret world and its top criminal mastermind, reporting from the homes, hotel rooms, crime scenes, and jail cells of Johnny and his gang, all reported with their full cooperation. It is a journalistic coup.

From Kon’s escape from poverty in China and his golden years as a smuggler during the Vietnam War, The Dragonhead traces Johnny’s rapid rise to power and chronicles the growth of his heroin cartel, as it smuggles a billion dollars worth of drugs into the United States. With astonishing savvy, Sack reveals the humanity behind the previously impenetrable wall of the Chinese and American underworlds, rife with shocking crimes, bound by unforgiving codes of honor. At once a loyal husband and father and a ruthless crime boss, Johnny Kon is by turns fascinating and repellent, but ultimately unforgettable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is a swiftly paced, artful account of one man's life in the Chinese Triads, one of the world's most secretive and dangerous criminal societies. Drawing from "one dozen years hang[ing] out with" Chinese gangsters, veteran journalist Sack (From Here to Shimbashi, etc.) offers a surprisingly sympathetic, muscular portrait of this reprehensible figure, one of a few Asian gangsters who distributed heroin worldwide after the Vietnam War. Johnny Kon was a Chinese everyman who (despite familial warnings to stay away from the long-entrenched Green Gang) became an enthusiastic criminal apprentice, under cover of the fur trade (he first prospered selling Chinese weasels to foreigners as minks). After his children were killed in the Cambodian War, Kon's intelligence and facility for navigating the American power structure allowed him to realize "his scheme to avenge his massacred children and to destroy the United States" via Triad encroachment upon the U.S. drug trade the revered "Golden Mountain" for Asian gangs. Kon recruited the Big Circle, a violent clique of former Red Guards, and established a byzantine smuggling system that poured heroin (and eventually Bolivian cocaine) into the U.S. throughout the 1980s. But betrayals and disrespect within the gang led to many murders, and the DEA made Kon its top priority, ultimately wrangling a plea from him by indicting his entire family. Although the intrigue surrounding the gang's decline follows a familiar melodramatic path, and it's hard to keep straight the many eccentric gangsters (with nicknames like Michael Jackson, Fat Ass, ABC and Dopey), Sack's essential thesis that Kon unwittingly provided the template for today's ultra-violent, ritualized Asian gangs resonates throughout this slick, meticulously crafted narrative. (Oct.)Forecast: With a four-city author tour, and national radio and print campaign, this lively tale should spark strong initial sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

For this book, veteran journalist Sack spent a dozen years talking with Chinese criminals and his subject himself Johnny Kon, mastermind of the 1980s Chinese Mafia. What he relates, in a quirky style nearer that of a storyteller than a journalist, is something of an Asian Horatio Alger tale that takes a few deviant turns, skids off the tracks, and crashes. Born in poverty in China, Kon uses his wits to pull himself up by the bootstraps and become, first, a successful though less than ethical furrier and then a kingpin in the international drug trade responsible for importing more than $1 billion worth of heroin into the United States. Betrayed by one of his soldiers (who later, perhaps not too ironically, was murdered), Kon is now spending his 13th year in prison, awaiting release in 2011. Despite his deviant turns, he appears here as a man of a paradoxical, almost childlike basic humanity, a man of infinite complexity, a man worth reading about. Recommended for all public libraries. Jim Burns, Ottumwa P.L., IA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (October 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609603531
• ISBN-13: 978-0609603536
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #828,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars FlawedBut Not Fataly, July 3, 2002

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dragonhead: The Godfather of Chinese Crime--His Rise and Fall (Hardcover)

First of all, I strongly encourage anyone to read an excerpt of this book before purchasing it. Sack (for better or worse) is one of the pioneers of "literary journalism", which means his writing style is more akin to storytelling, with recreated conversations and whatnot, than many people will be used to. This is especially disconcerting because he explains his methodology in assembling this biography of Chinese gang lord Johnny Kon at the end of the book, instead of the beginning. If this doesn't put you off, it's still hard to ignore some of his other stylistic flaws. Foremost of these is an excess of detail-throughout the book the reader is kept up to date on every dish consumed during gang meetings, the cost, style, and provenance of every item of footwear Johnny Kon is wearing, and the precise decor of every hotel lobby and room he passes through. These details, marginally interesting the first or second appearance, rapidly grow annoying and intrusive, ballooning what might have been a 250 page book to it's final 400 pages. Another stylistic flaw is the lack of dates throughout. Once the early part of Johnny's life is past, and the Vietnam War is over, it's very hard to get a sense of what time frame is under discussion.

The life and times of Johnny Kon is certainly an interesting tale, and not one many people could have even attempted, much less completed. From a life of poverty in Maoist China, Kon escaped to Shanghai and then Hong Kong, building a semi-legitimate fur empire. Much of his fur fortune was linked to the huge US Army presence in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, and the sections which detail his interactions with the US Army are very compelling. However, in this period also lies Kon's alleged motive for becoming the leading importer of heroin to the US. I say alleged because the basis for the book is Sack's relationship with Kon and interviews with him conducted in jail, and so it's hard not to view Kon's "motive" as an after-the-fact self-justification. In any event, whether one believes it or not, the event that pushed Kon into drug dealing was the death of two of his children in the chaos of the Khmer Rouge coup in Cambodia. He lays the ultimate blame for this at the feet of the US and its meddling in other countries and spread of indiscriminate death and destruction. The book posits the dubious notion that heroin was "popularized" by all the US soldiers who became addicted during their tour of duty, and thus created the demand for Kon's operations ten years later.

So, Kon builds himself a gang comprised of a tough circle of ex-Red Guard soldiers and embarks on an effective smuggling operation that massive quantities of heroin into the US in the '80s. While the logistics of his operation make for interesting reader, the dynamics of the gang do not. There are so many members of his gang, it gets hard to keep them, their nicknames, and their allegiances straight (here, a diagram or simple list at the beginning of the book would have been a useful editorial addiction). Similarly, the Byzantine feuds of the various gangs and how they all relate to each other gets a bit tedious and hard to follow. Ultimately, Kon's downfall was predictably the result of some rather amazing bungling, silly escalations of petty rivalries over "respect" between gang members, and that ultimate foe of the gangster-betrayal.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the book are the descriptions of how the US government strong-armed a number of countries into extraditing members of Kon's family who had nothing to do with his heroin operations. They were used as leverage against Kon, forcing him to plead guilty-and while there's no denying he was a very bad drug lord, those kinds of tactics are bad precedent setters. Ultimately, the book is moderately interesting, but far too long. It suffers greatly from its more or less detached recounting of Kon's life story-especially odious are Kon's attempts to be a good Bhuddist amidst it all. The same kind of hypocrisy that infested the Irish-Catholic gangs and Italian mafia. Ultimately, unless one is really really interested in the heroin trade, or in Chinese gangs, I'd probably advise skipping this overladen book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What a disappointment!, January 12, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dragonhead: The Godfather of Chinese Crime--His Rise and Fall (Hardcover)

Before buying this book, read the first few pages. If you like the style, then you'll like the book. If not, you'll find that this is a great story that was ruined by an annoying style.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Irritating narrative style., December 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dragonhead: The Godfather of Chinese Crime--His Rise and Fall (Hardcover)

This was a subject I was interested in reading about but the authors smug,semi-humorous style made it too annoying to finish. He seemed to be treating the whole serious subject with a self satisfied smirk.