Perhaps the most pervasive illicit activity in Chinatowns of the late-19th century was gambling. In 1868, one of the earliest Chinese residents in New York, Wah Kee, opened a fruit and vegetable store on Pell Street with rooms upstairs available for gambling and opium smoking. A few decades later, local tongs, which originated in the California goldfields around 1860, controlled most gambling (fan-tan, faro, lotteries) in New York's Chinatown. One of the most popular games of chance was fan-tan where players guessed the exact coins or cards left under a cup after a pile of cards had been counted off four at a time. Most popular, however, was the lottery. Players purchased randomly assigned sweepstakes numbers from gambling-houses, with drawings held at least once a day in lottery saloons. There were ten such saloons found in San Francisco in 1876, which received protection from corrupt policemen in exchange for weekly payoffs of around five dollars per week. Such gambling-houses were frequented by as many whites as Chinamen, though whites sat at separate tables.