Following on from New York Times bestseller Midnight in Peking, Paul French released City of Devils, a delve into the murky underworld of Old Shanghai. There were plenty of wrong'uns about, and a whole lot of bad blood between them. In this 'Gangs of Old Shanghai' series, French presents us with a who's who of old time organized crime, and quite the rogues gallery it is too.
The Kan Gang/Unione Corse
Boss: Mr. Kan
Base: Route Courbet (Fumin Lu)
The Kan Gang was a loose affiliation between a number of independent gangsters in Frenchtown, with links back to France and/or French Indochina, and the members of the infamous Unione Corse in Shanghai. They socialized and worked out of a house on Route Courbet, and ran a casino and bordello on Rue Stanislas Chevalier (Jianguo Zhong Lu).
That location was no accident – many of the Corsicans affiliated to the criminal organization associated with the French-controlled island were also members of the French Concession police force, whose headquarter was just up the road. With the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, the Unione Corse split into pro-resistance and pro-Vichy wings – most of the former faction returned to France to resist.
With the French Concession and its flics under Vichy collaborationist control, the rest remained and, so it seems, were virtually immune to prosecution by the hopelessly corrupt Vichy regime. However, the war and the disruption at sea had ruined the Unione Corse’s main Shanghai business – shipping drugs to Marseille (the original ‘French Connection’). So, with the shady Mr Kan (about who we know next to nothing), they went into the nightclub and bordello business. Their long links to Frenchtown police meant they never saw the inside of a jail cell.
To read about more Gangs of Old Shanghai, click here. For more history stories, click here.
[Images courtesy of Paul French]
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