Finally, he set the paperwork down.
“Sueno, do you have any idea how embarrassing this is going to be if you’re wrong? A couple of Eighth Army CID agents knocking down walls, looking for old bones?”
I nodded.
“We could end up on the DMZ, trudging through snow in the middle of the night, searching for North Korean infiltrators.”
I nodded again.
Ernie rolled his eyes, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “How would we pull it off?”
I told him.
The members of about a dozen families-men, women, and even children-stood in front of the building that had once been Mori Di’s headquarters but now belonged to the gang of criminals known as the Seven Dragons. Wind laced with stray flakes of snow blew down the narrow Itaewon roadway, a roadway that would later become known by G.I. s as “Hooker Hill.” It was the middle of the morning, about nine or ten, and what had started with a small group of men loudly complaining to one another had grown into a crowd that the nuns estimated at a hundred people.
The ragamuffin Korean civilians wielded clubs and hoes and sickles and broom handles and any sort of weapon they could get their hands on. All of them were screaming, blood in their eyes. In most cases, every bit of wealth that their family retained, whether in the form of gold or jewelry or ancient artwork, had been entrusted to Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti. And with him gone, along with their wealth, and with no economic prospects in sight, all these Korean families could forget about any chance of a future, of education for their children or of being able to afford to set up a business. Instead, they faced poverty, misery, and-possibly-slow and agonizing starvation.
Every person in the mob was prepared to fight to the death.
When faced with this band of desperate people, the Seven Dragons were, at first, caught off guard. Within minutes, they regrouped. By now, the Seven Dragons had attracted dozens of shiftless young men to their ranks. Once these men realized what was going on, they armed themselves with knives and cudgels and prepared to attack.
While this fight was brewing in the middle of Itaewon the American MPs were back on the compound. Since most G.I. s work during the day outside of Itaewon, the MPs didn’t bother to patrol the ville until after regular duty hours. The KNPs were in Itaewon but not where the crowd was gathering. They were at their comfortable heated police station, staying put. The Seven Dragons must have warned them off. They’d known this fight with the families who’d entrusted their wealth to Mori Di was inevitable and wanted it to end quickly and decisively.
The nuns told Cort that the Seven Dragons envisioned a shining era of postwar corruption opening before them. They had money; they had power; they had influence and they didn’t want a lot of whining men, women, and children yapping at their heels, threatening their corrupt empire. They wanted to settle the issue now-in blood.
The families threw themselves at the front door of the Grand Ole Opry Club. Using improvised battering rams, they knocked it down. But the Seven Dragons were ready for them. As the mob poured in, from the wooden rafters above, men rained bricks down upon their heads. Still the crowd surged forward. At the far end of the open room, the Seven Dragons had locked the big double doors and barred them with metal rods. The crowd surged up against the doors, pushed against them, but could go no further. In confusion, the crowd turned back on itself but by now more people had pushed into the huge room and were milling around like cattle. Bricks kept falling.
Then a phalanx of Seven Dragon punks rushed down the stairs. Another group attacked through the side door that led into the kitchen. The crowd fought back on both fronts but that’s exactly what the Seven Dragons wanted. Upon a shouted order, the two groups of Seven Dragon fighters pulled back. Small groups of enraged men fighting for their families last possessions followed in small groups, pushed forward by the mob. They found themselves outnumbered by the Seven Dragon minions. One by one, the rioters were ground into mush.
The main body of rioters realized things were not going their way. More and more people had crumpled to their knees, victims of the vicious rain of bricks that had never relented. The bravest men, the ones who had taken the lead, had been knocked back down the stairs or had entered the double door of the kitchen never to return. Panicked, the crowd started surging back toward the front door.
A third squad of Seven Dragon lackeys, all holding sharpened broom handles, were waiting for them. The first rioters out the door tried to stop but they were pushed forward by the rushing mob and fell down the steep cement stairs. Many were impaled on the sharply pointed tips of the waiting broom handles. More screams. More blood. More panic. And then the Seven Dragons ordered their men on the stairs and in the kitchen to charge into the main room. They did and now the rioters were set upon from all sides.
Once the mob had been totally routed, the Seven Dragons and their vicious auxiliaries waded through the blood and the bodies. Some of the women, especially those with children, had not charged into the building but had waited outside. Now, the Seven Dragons’ lackeys turned on them. The women screamed and attempted to run away, children clinging to their skirts. The women were attacked from behind, clubbed, stabbed, and knocked down. Some of them were murdered immediately. Others were dragged into side alleys and gang-raped. Children wandered through the gore and the screaming crowd, crying and calling for their mothers.
The Seven Dragons laid out the unconscious and bloodied attackers in a huge pile in the street. Then the Seven Dragons ordered gasoline poured atop the bodies. Amidst the screams of the few relatives cowering in the distance, one of the men struck a wooden match, watched it sizzle, and then tossed it onto the pile. As the bodies began to smolder and then burn, some of the rioters actually roused themselves and stumbled away from the growing conflagration. Children dragged their fathers out of the pile. The bravest bystanders pulled bodies away from the flames but they were quickly beaten back. In the end, the children and the few still-conscious women managed to save only a handful of men from the fire.
Not a single Korean National Policeman appeared.
7
Cort was appalled. He’d been monitoring blotter reports every day since he’d been in country and he’d never heard of any such incident. He asked a question to make sure he understood correctly what the nuns told him.
“The Korean police did nothing?”
The nuns nodded their bald heads. Yes. Nothing.
How many people died?
More than a dozen. Many others were wounded and scarred for life.
Did anyone retrieve their valuables?
No one.
Does anyone know what the Seven Dragons did with those valuables?
Shrugs all around. But the nuns did know that soon after, Itaewon began to explode in a riot of bright lights and fancy nightclubs.
Cort spent the night with the nuns because there was too much snow outside to drive home safely. In the morning he fastened chains to the back tires of his jeep, ate a warming breakfast of hot rice gruel and dried turnip, thanked the nuns, and left.
Upon his return to 8th Army, he checked with the MPs who’d been on duty during the day of the bonfire. There were only two of them. One of the MPs, a guy name Smith, told Cort that he and his partner had been aware of the fire.
“The KNPs told us they were taking care of it,” he said. “Only Korean nationals were involved and they didn’t want us there.”
“You weren’t curious?” Cort asked.
“I’ve seen fires before.”
“Did the KNPs tell you that there’d been a fight before the fire and that during the fire people were injured?”
“They said something about it. Told us it was Reds agitating.”
That would explain 8th Army’s indifference. Any action taken against Communists would have been
