Born to Kill (16 page)

That afternoon, David Thai and his BTK brothers met Quang Nguyen and drove to Doraville, a placid Atlanta suburb fifty miles south of Gainesville. Doraville was small, with barely eight thousand residents, but the town had a sizable outdoor shopping center located alongside Buford Highway, a broad six-lane thoroughfare that connects Doraville with other Atlanta suburbs. Known as Northwoods Plaza, the shopping center was an ethnic mix of
taqueriás
and Chinese groceries, with a few Vietnamese establishments thrown in.

David Thai himself went into the Sun Wa Jewelry Store, a compact retail outlet sandwiched between a Spanish-language video shop and a Dollar-Mart. Ostensibly, Thai had a ring that needed fixing. Really, he was casing the place to see whether it was worth robbing.

“This one easy to take,” said
Anh hai
to the others after coming out of the store. “They got big inventory, no security.”

After checking out a few more Asian stores, the boys drove back to Gainesville.

The house where Thai and the others were staying was a squat, ranch-style dwelling at 2904 Maverick Trail Road, a rural, wooded culde-sac. The house was surrounded by leafy oak and sycamore trees; there were no streetlights, shops, or other urban amenities in the area. During his years in Georgia, Lan Tran had lived in another part of Gainesville with the couple now residing at the house, Lan's former roommate and his American girlfriend, Kathy Ivester—the woman with the Southern accent Kenny Vu had spoken with on the phone.

With nearly a dozen gang members now staying at the modest two-bedroom home, the place was a swirl of activity. The boys had barely settled in when, the next night, they were off to Atlanta again, this time
for a little entertainment. A nightclub in Atlanta was having a party, and the featured attraction was Diem “Linda” Trang, a sexy Vietnamese pop singer from California.

What the Vietnamese referred to as a “party,” most Americans would probably call a concert. For weeks leading up to the event, flyers are posted in Asian restaurants and pool halls throughout the area. Young men and women come from miles away, paying anywhere between $25 and $100 to see a familiar, top-name entertainer. The parties, held in big cities across the United States, are a rare opportunity for Vietnamese youths to get dressed up and meet other Vietnamese from outside their community.

On occasion, these parties also served as convenient meeting places for members of the underworld. It was not unusual for elaborate crimes to be hatched at tables and booths where young males sipped on expensive cognac while their girlfriends swirled around them on the dance floor.

At approximately 10:00
P.M
. that night, David Thai and his BTK brothers arrived at the Atlanta party in two carloads. Right away,
Anh hai
got angry. The doorman at the club had the audacity to actually make Thai and his BTK crew pay to get in. As leader of the largest and most infamous Vietnamese gang in the United States, Thai was accustomed to dropping his name and getting in free most places.

Inside, while nearly five hundred men and women danced underneath a disco ball and strobe light,
Anh hai
glowered. He declared to his gang brothers, “I tell you what we gonna do …”

Around one o'clock, when the club approached closing time, Kenny Vu, Black Phu, and a few others were to start a fight inside the club. That would draw the two security officers outside the club inside. Then Tinh Ngo and Nicky were to jump the doorman, who was standing just outside the front door. “He got big pockets on that jacket,” said David. “I bet he got something like a thousand dollars on him.”

By the time the club was starting to close, everyone had a few beers under his belt. Tinh and Nicky went outside. As planned, a commotion started inside the club, and the security guards were called in. At that moment, Nicky asked the doorman, “Hey, you know how we get to North Carolina?”

“Yeah,” answered the doorman. “Where your car?”

Like most gang members, Nicky was small, with a look of permanent bemusement on his face. He, the doorman, and Tinh ambled out into the parking lot.

Without warning, Nicky swiftly pulled out a gun and put it to the doorman's head. “Don't make me have to shoot, motherfuck,” he advised, using the BTK's favorite curse word—a word used variously as a noun, an adjective, and an exclamation point.

Tinh began rifling the doorman's pockets. Except for a few pieces of paper, they turned out to be completely empty.

Nicky had his arm around the guy's neck, trying to hold him still. But the doorman broke free and began to run through the parking lot. “
Ping! Pang! Pong!
” sounded the shots from Nicky's gun as he fired at the doorman, who danced through the parking lot like a monkey high on crack cocaine.

Meanwhile, inside the club, Black Phu had taken his role in the charade far too seriously. A dark-skinned Amerasian—the child of an African American soldier stationed in Vietnam during the war—Phu was notoriously high-strung. On top of that, he'd had too much to drink, turning what was supposed to be a fake altercation into a real one by pulling out
his
gun and firing a few shots into the ceiling of the nightclub.

The BTK members inside fled at the same time the doorman outside was scampering through the parking lot. Police sirens could be heard getting closer. Nicky stopped shooting and ditched his gun underneath the fender of a huge truck. The gang members piled into their two cars, then raced through the streets of Atlanta until they found the expressway.

As they drove through the pitch darkness on I-85 back toward Gainesville, Tinh told David Thai what had happened with the doorman. He was certain
Anh hai
would be mad. Instead, David laughed, his usually reserved chuckle building into a full-blown guffaw. This pleased Tinh, who rarely saw Thai express pleasure of any kind. Tinh also laughed, and so did the other gang members, until the entire car was filled with the sound of howling, knee-slapping BTK gangsters.

Over the next forty-eight hours, everyone in the crowded house on
Maverick Trail Road began to get antsy. On Thanksgiving, a holiday that meant little to the boys of the BTK, a handful of gang members headed north across the state line into Chattanooga, Tennessee. Led by Jimmy Nguyen—the gang member who had accidentally shot and killed a fellow BTK gangster during the robbery of the produce warehouse in Chinatown three months earlier—the crew robbed a small jewelry outlet just as the store's owner was closing for the day. They blindfolded and tied up the middle-aged Vietnamese woman with duct tape and set her on a large bag of rice in the back of the store. Little Cobra stabbed the bag threateningly, then Jimmy Nguyen pistol-whipped the woman until she mercifully passed out. The boys arrived back at the house in Gainesville with a bag of jewelry.

The next morning, David Thai, Lan Tran, Tinh, and a few others walked across Maverick Trail Road to a wooded area not far from the house. Another local gang member, Hoang Ngo—better known as Jungle Man—had just dropped off a small cache of handguns purchased at a pawnshop in nearby Braselton. Located sixty miles from Atlanta, Braselton was a sleepy Georgia town that became famous when it was purchased a year earlier by its most renowned native daughter, the sultry actress Kim Basinger. Like most Georgia towns, Braselton was a convenient place to purchase guns. The only requirement was a Georgia state driver's license and one other piece of ID.

Near a pond in the woods, the gang members took target practice, firing at empty beer bottles and the trunk of a large sycamore tree. The report from the weapons echoed across the pond and through the trees, and soon Kathy Ivester, the gang's hostess, came out to complain.

“Are you trying to get us evicted?” she yelled at David Thai.

For days, Ivester had been aiming caustic barbs at
Anh hai
, mostly because he tied up her telephone for hours at a time, making long-distance calls to New York, California, and God knows where else. “You think you can just come out here and fire your guns and nobody's gonna notice? Well, you better think again, mister. We got neighbors here. They might just call the police.”

Then she stormed back into the house.

David winced, as if maybe he was developing an ulcer. “Man, this
lady getting on my nerves,” he said to no one in particular. “I think maybe we go do this robbery and get the fuck outta here.”

Late on the morning of November 26, 1990, forty-six-year-old Odum Lim was seated in the back of the Sun Wa Jewelry Store, fixing the clasp on a diamond necklace. Lim's work space was cramped, which was just the way he liked it. Tools hung from nails on the wall around him, his bench was messy, and a glaring fluorescent desk light was pulled in tight on the job before him.

A buzzer on the store's front door sounded. Lim looked out from behind his workbench to see four well-dressed Vietnamese males enter the store. To Lim, they seemed a little
too
well dressed for an uneventful Monday afternoon in Doraville. He got up from his bench and came out to the front of the shop, where his wife and two young daughters were standing behind a glass showcase.

The interior of the Sun Wa Jewelry Store was not spacious, but Lim and his wife had a sizable inventory displayed in a series of eight glass cases arranged in a U-shape. Customers could peruse the expensive gold and diamond jewelry arranged on velvet trays inside each four-foot-high case, but could not get behind the counter without being buzzed in through a security door—or jumping over the top of the counter.

Lan Tran, Nicky, Little Cobra, and Kenny Vu pretended they were looking at the merchandise. Nicky eventually approached Lim's wife, Kim Lee, with a broken neck chain that needed fixing. At that moment, Tinh Ngo and Tung Lai entered the store.

From the door, Tinh watched as Nicky leaned over the counter to speak with Mrs. Lim. On the other side of the store, Lan Tran was pointing out a ring inside one of the glass cases that he wanted Mr. Lim to show him. Otherwise, the store was quiet, and Tinh wondered what the hell was going on. The plan had been for him and Tung Lai to enter after the others, when the robbery would already be under way. For a second, he thought maybe the job had been called off.

Just then, Tung Lai, standing on the right side of the store next to Nicky, called out, “Mr. Owner, will you please help me with this one, this ring right here?” He pointed to a piece of jewelry in the case.

Odum Lim looked suspicious, but he came over anyway.

“This one,” insisted Lai, “this one right here.”

As Lim bent over to see which ring Lai was pointing at, Lai abruptly reached across the counter and grabbed him by the tie. It was a bold maneuver to start the robbery, except for one thing: The tie was a clip-on, and it immediately came off in his hand.

Before the store owner had a chance to react, Little Cobra, standing next to Tung Lai, pulled out a .38 special and stuck it in his face. “This a robbery! Everybody down on the floor! Now!” he barked.

Tung Lai, Little Cobra, and Nicky all vaulted over the glass counter in unison. Nicky grabbed Mrs. Lim by the throat and began pushing her toward the rear of the store. “Follow me or I hurt your mother!” he commanded the two young girls, ages nine and six.

“
Please don't hurt mommy! Please!
” begged the younger of the two daughters while following Nicky and Mrs. Lim toward a room in the back of the store.

The robbery had been carefully planned, with specific duties assigned to each of the robbers. Lan Tran hopped over the counter on the far side of the store and began trying to break the lock on a safe-deposit box. Kenny Vu whipped out his gun and stood guard at the door. Little Cobra, Tung Lai, and Tinh were supposed to clean out the glass showcases, dumping the contents into pillow cases they had brought with them.

Tinh hopped over the counter in the far right corner, directly across the store from Lan Tran. The glass jewelry cases were locked, and Tinh began frantically searching for a key. There was none that he could see. He spotted a plastic Nintendo play gun on the counter, picked it up, and banged it against the case, trying to break the glass. Instead, the flimsy plastic gun cracked and shattered in his hands. Tinh looked around for something harder, spotted a large stapler, and again began
thump, thump, thumping
on the glass.

To his left, Tinh could see that Tung Lai and Little Cobra were having problems with Mr. Lim. A Cambodian refugee who had spent years in a work camp at a time when the murderous Khmer Rouge ruled his country, Odum Lim might have been twenty-five years older than most of the robbers, but he was tough. Lim was not about to let these
young Vietnamese punks endanger his livelihood and threaten his family without a fight.

“
Motherfuck!
” exclaimed one of the gangsters.

“I get you!” grunted Odum Lim. He reached out, attempting to grab Little Cobra's gun, then smashed Tung Lai in the face with a forearm.

Lim, Lai, and Little Cobra began wrestling. They banged against the glass case in front of them, toppling it over with an ear-splitting
crash
! That's when Tung Lai pulled out a six-inch bowie knife and began sticking and stabbing Odum Lim, the knife piercing Lim over and over in the arm and neck.

Meanwhile, Tinh had shattered his glass case and was hurriedly dumping trays of jewelry into the pillowcase. He could see Tung Lai stabbing and wrestling with Mr. Lim, but continued to do what he had been told. “No matter what happens, Timmy,” David Thai had said, “you just keep taking jewelry. You got most important job of all.”

BAM!
A piercing gunshot rang out, the bullet ricocheting off a far wall and into the ceiling. A startled Tinh Ngo looked over to see that despite multiple stab wounds and being covered with blood, Odum Lim had gotten his hands on Little Cobra's gun, which had discharged. Tung Lai cried out, “Look out! The owner have the gun, the owner have the gun!”