Born to Kill (8 page)

The community's insular structure may have been counterproductive, but the reasons for its existence were not hard to fathom. Few ethnic groups in the history of the United States had been as systematically discriminated against as the early Chinese settlers who came to California during the years of the Gold Rush. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further Chinese laborers and their wives from legally entering the country. It excluded Chinese from most occupations, including manufacturing and mining. It also forbade them to become citizens. Many states even denied Chinese the right to testify against Caucasians in court.

Unlike American immigrants of Irish, Jewish, and African descent who fought against the pernicious stain of racism, the Chinese tried to make the best of a bad situation by drawing inward. Rather than face the risk of death at the hands of government-financed mobs, they formed their own internally governed societies, first in major metropolitan areas on the West Coast, then later in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities.

The youth gangs that would eventually become a major problem in nearly every Chinatown throughout the United States were a product of this process. Before the gangs, there were the tongs. Initially, the tongs had been established as self-help organizations designed to assist new immigrants in adjusting to life in
Kam San
, or Gold Mountain, as the United States became known. Since there were few women in Chinatown as a result of the Exclusion Act, tongs were exclusively fraternal organizations. For a small fee, any adult male could join. Regular meetings were held at the tong headquarters, which was housed in a building owned by the tong and presided over by a duly elected leader.

Eventually, the tongs became the primary overseers of Chinatown's various criminal rackets, which included gambling, prostitution, and the sale of opium. Since local police either stayed out of Chinatown or were bought off, there was plenty of room for territorial disputes and other violent altercations. From 1910 to the early 1930s, bloody tong wars were a rite of passage for many young Chinese males.

The tongs were themselves patterned after ancient secret societies known as triads, revered organizations once lionized in epic poetry and song. First formed in China in the seventeenth century, triads began as part of an underground political movement that sought to overthrow the corrupt Ming dynasty. Later, triads evolved into a sprawling criminal fraternity with membership in virtually every Chinese community throughout the world.

The triads were less an organization than a loose brotherhood, similar to the Freemasons or the Knights of Columbus. The fact that they were secret only enhanced their mystique. If the Asian underworld was a rich, bubbling kettle of hot and sour soup, then the triads were the secret ingredient that gave it its unique tang.

Most tongs maintained elaborate initiation rituals based on triad legend. In a secret ceremony, an aspiring tong member would have his finger pricked with a needle, then mix a drop of his blood with water and drink it down. With the leader of the tong presiding, the inductee then knelt before a Buddhist shrine and recited the Thirty-six Oaths, pledging loyalty and fidelity to the tong. The triad mystique made being a member of the Asian underworld seem like a noble, even sacred endeavor, and it has continued to serve as a persuasive means of recruitment for tong and gang leaders to this day.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the tongs—once composed of assorted hooligans and “hatchet men”—sought to change their image. The tongs had never been
legally
defined as criminal organizations, but their primary function within the community was well known. Now, however, they tried to pass themselves off as fully legitimate business associations. From here on out, the daily details of overseeing the community's still burgeoning criminal rackets would be handled by youth gangs, who were just beginning to emerge as a persistent force.

Over the decades that followed, reporters, some cops, and even representatives of the U.S. government would often try to define the relationship between the tongs and the gangs. Even though gang members worked as guards in gambling dens located in the basements of buildings owned by the tongs, even though gang members were sometimes known to
live
inside the tong headquarters, the leaders of these business associations denied there was a relationship. Most tong members had themselves never been implicated in any crime and steadfastly
refused to accept characterizations of their organization as a criminal enterprise.

Nonetheless, throughout most of Chinatown, the relationship was understood. The On Leong and Hip Sing tongs, the community's two most powerful business associations, had been around since the dawn of Chinatown. Beginning in the mid-1970s, periodic gang wars raged, establishing certain alliances. The Ghost Shadows became closely identified with the On Leong tong, the Flying Dragons with Hip Sing. The police referred to the gangs as the tongs' “youth wing” or “standing army.”

Through it all, gambling and prostitution remained two of Chinatown's healthiest rackets, though the early twentieth-century brothels had long since been replaced by slightly more respectable massage parlors. Extortion of local merchants by gangsters became such a common practice that most merchants didn't even think of it as such; they willingly paid a weekly fee for the promise of protection. This caldron of illicit activity sustained Chinatown's underground economy well into the 1980s, until heroin entered the picture.

While U.S. law enforcement focused virtually all of its energies on the worldwide cocaine scourge that reached its zenith during the years of the Reagan/Bush presidency, Chinese criminals had been systematically consolidating the production and wholesale distribution of heroin. Contrary to popular opinion, heroin use in the United States remained steady throughout the 1980s. Through a loose international network based in Hong Kong, Chinese gangsters met this demand by offering a product that was cheaper and more potent than anything that had ever been seen before. Southeast Asian heroin, known as China White, flooded the market. Chinatown became the place where massive heroin deals were initiated and where the criminal proceeds—unprecedented amounts of dirty money—were laundered through local banks and used to open businesses and finance major real-estate purchases.

Ironically, at the same time tumultuous social changes in Chinatown were making it possible for newer gangs like the BTK to gain a toehold, Chinese crime lords were consolidating their control of the heroin trade, the largest cash business in the world. Attitudes about crime in Chinatown were being redefined; no longer was it the quaint,
localized undertaking portrayed in the mainstream media. Now when cops and federal agents talked about triads, tongs, and gangs, they usually used the term “Asian organized crime.” In early 1989, congressional hearings were held to discuss a troubling new problem—the Chinese Mafia—believed to be centered in New York City's Chinatown.

With stakes so high, renegade factions like the BTK, though they may have been relatively low in the pecking order, were a potentially serious problem. For the Asian underworld to operate properly, certain rules had to be adhered to. Hong Kong drug lords funneled money into Chinatown banks and real estate, which enhanced local business interests represented by the tongs. Youth gangs, at the behest of the tongs, protected everyone's interests at the street level. Supposedly, the triad mystique made everybody feel like they were in it together. If the various criminal divisions fulfilled their duties as they were supposed to, it was a thing of beauty. The Asian underworld prospered and Caucasian law enforcement stayed away.

The more the BTK challenged the status quo by brazenly carving out turf for itself, pissing off the police, and engaging other gangs in violent conflict for the flimsiest of reasons, the more it disrupted the flow of commerce. The gang's intemperate murder of two Flying Dragons on Canal Street was a prime example. The BTK's antics were attracting unwanted attention. The gang did whatever it wanted, with little or no regard for Chinatown's larger criminal framework. Given the number of factions who were affected, from rival gang members to tong leaders to international brokers of China White, it created a situation that was simply intolerable and would have to be dealt with soon, lest the activities of a lumpen street gang began to do irreparable damage to a vast, hugely profitable underworld conglomerate.

As a veteran member of Chinatown's criminal establishment, David Thai knew full well the threat his budding gang posed to the powers-that-be. Thai's minions, on the other hand, were mostly oblivious. The ranks of the BTK were satisfied with the eminence the gang gave them within the community, and they felt honored by the sense of brotherhood they were able to derive from it. As for the larger galaxy of tong bosses and
heroin traffickers who presided over the underworld, they were as far removed from the daily lives of Tinh Ngo and the others as the moon, the stars, and other far-off constellations.

If the Chinese gangsters who now controlled the upper echelons of Asian organized crime were indeed comparable to modern-day
capo regimes
, their young BTK counterparts resembled some earlier incarnation of
Cosa Nostra
. Tough and unvarnished, they were the contemporary Asian equivalent of the Sicilian Black Hand,
Cosa Nostra
in its incubation stage, when
padrinos
and their henchmen were content to prey exclusively on recent immigrants within their own community.

Like the Black Hand, the BTK understood that most immigrants were cut off from the protections of mainstream American society. It was Jimmy Wong, the gang's Brooklyn
dai low
, who told young Tinh Ngo when he first joined the BTK, “We rob and steal only from other Asians. They don't know anything about U.S. law and don't go to police. They afraid. They afraid to even report the crime.”

The BTK's practice of preying entirely on Asians only reinforced the gang's inherent isolation. The Vietnamese, in general, had not been warmly embraced in Chinatown to begin with. Now that the BTK was muscling its way onto the local scene in such a seemingly disrespectful fashion, Chinese stereotypes about the Vietnamese were conveniently substantiated.

It wasn't fair, of course. Most Vietnamese in Chinatown were hard-working and law-abiding, as were most Chinese. But the antics of the BTK reinforced negative perceptions, pushing the gangs' members further and further from any hope of ever integrating into Chinatown's legitimate social framework. They became outsiders in a community already far outside the mainstream.

In the larger arena of American life, these young Vietnamese hoodlums didn't even exist. At Brooklyn's Coney Island, where Tinh Ngo, Tommy Vu, Kenny Vu, and others from their crew maintained a safe-house apartment, they walked around largely unnoticed by the local citizenry. Coney Island was the last stop on the subway, as far out as you could get without sinking into the Atlantic Ocean. Once home to earlier generations of Russian Jews and other Eastern Europeans, the neighborhood, like most of Brooklyn, had been through a cultural wringer. On Neptune Avenue, near where the BTK brothers rented their
apartment, the restaurants and shops were now mostly Indian and Pakistani. The rest of the neighborhood was a mishmash of white ethnics, African Americans, and a smattering of Chinese who lived over the storefronts along Coney Island Avenue.

Hanging out in the weathered video arcades near the once-proud Brighton Beach boardwalk, Tinh and the others sought to approximate the mores and mannerisms of the American kids around them. Like most urban youth, they patterned their behavior after young African Americans, who seemed to rule the streets. Their conversations, whether in English or in Vietnamese, were peppered with exclamations like “yo” and “man,” and they frequently called each other “homeboy,” as in, “Yo, man, this is Quang. He my homeboy.”

It was here in Brooklyn that Tinh Ngo first partook of another custom common to American youth—the purchase and consumption of illegal narcotics.

As a relative newcomer to the gang, Tinh was the one who often had to buy the drugs. Usually, Kenny Vu would send Tinh out to Coney Island Avenue to purchase dime bags of marijuana and crack cocaine. The first few times, Tinh was terrified. But he knew it was a rite of passage he had to go through.

On the Avenue, black males lingered in shadowy doorways while white cops cruised by in squad cars. Using the lingo he'd been taught by Kenny, Tinh would ask a street peddler, “You got the good stuff?”

“Yeah, my man,” he would answer. “How much you need?”

After buying a couple of dime bags of crack and two or three bags of smoke, Tinh would head back to the Neptune Avenue safe house, located in a three-story, red-brick building. Tinh and the others lived on the first floor, next door to a Spanish bodega and directly above a street-level exterminator-supply shop.

At first, Tinh stayed away from crack. He had seen how wild it made his assorted foster siblings. But almost everyone else in the apartment got high, especially Kenny Vu. Soon, Tinh also was taking hits of the powerful cocaine derivative, usually by inhaling from a compressed beer can, which, when properly dented and perforated, served nicely as a crude pipe.

Early one morning in August 1989, Tinh, Kenny, and a few other gang members had been up all night drinking and smoking crack. Dawn
had begun to lighten the sky outside, and the salty ocean air provided a respite from the inevitable mugginess just hours away. The small apartment, practically devoid of furniture, was a mess. Empty beer cans and cartons of Chinese take-out were strewn about the floor, and dirty dishes were piled high in the kitchen.

In the front room Kenny Vu was standing in his underwear, whacked out of his mind and holding a gun. The others were greatly amused. It was not uncommon for Kenny to parade around with at least his shirt off, to better display his impressive array of tattoos. On his right arm, from his shoulder to his elbow, was a naked woman with wings. Below the elbow on his forearm was an elaborate, multicolored dragon. On the other arm was a large black panther; below that, a menacing cobra coiled and ready to strike. On his chest was a jagged red and blue rendering that looked more like a gaping wound than a lightning bolt, which was what it was supposed to be.