As the February 15 New Year approaches, ushering in the Year of the Ram, Chinatown continues to grow. Community and immigration officials point to 1997 and the repatriation of Hong Kong with mainland China as the cause of increasing immigration. In the year ahead, already scarce jobs and housing may become even more rare.
For Yin Lee, who traveled halfway across the world and through a war to get here, the future is uncertain. On the day of our interview, she had just come from a Manhattan abortion clinic. Living with the humiliation of having been raped, she neglected to reveal her secret to anyone until it was almost too late. Now four-and-a-half months pregnant, the doctor had warned her that it would be a potentially dangerous operation.
Despite everything, Yin was hopeful. Sitting in the bustling midtown coffee shop, she spoke idealistically of going to school to learn English. Today, her $10,000 smuggling debt was far from her mind; the fact that she might be working twelve hours a day for a wage of twenty or thirty dollars hadn’t registered. She talked with such animation and intensity that she barely touched her tuna salad sandwich. “I don’t really like it, anyway,” she explained, smiling politely. “When I was in the detention camp in Miami, that’s all they had—American food.”
Days later, Yin borrowed more money to finance her abortion. Following the operation, she was recuperating well. Although she had lost a few pounds and was feeling weak, her idealism remained intact. Soon, she would go looking for work.
3.
FORGET IT, JAKE, IT’S CHINATOWN
The Village Voice, February 28, 1995
For decades, cops have found the Asian community to be inscrutable—with lethal consequences. Can they change?
Chong Hui Chen did not have to die.
In September 1993, when the nineteen-year-old student at Seward Park High School in New York City was kidnapped by gangsters, Chen’s parents did what they thought was the right thing. They went to the police.
Chen’s father, Bi Lin Chen, was aware of the dangers involved. He was there the night his son was pistol-whipped and snatched from the family’s tiny takeout restaurant at 371 Grand Street, on the northeastern edge of Chinatown, in Lower Manhattan. The abduction had taken place during a terrifying kidnap-for-ransom spree that was sending shockwaves through the city’s Asian community. In the previous two weeks, there had been nearly a dozen kidnappings in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, most of them perpetrated by the Fuk Ching Gang. Targeted by the feds because of their involvement in the Golden Venture—the huge freighter that dramatically ran aground off Rockaway Beach, spilling nearly 300 illegal stowaways into the ocean, with ten drowning or dying from hyperthermia—the Fuk Ching were desperate. Previously, they only kidnapped undocumented immigrants who were smuggled into the country and had outstanding debts to pay to their “Snakehead,” or smuggler. But Chong Hui Chen was a legal resident with no known gang affiliation, and no outstanding debts.
Bi Lin Chen and his wife, Mei Yu Yang, were contacted by the kidnappers, who demanded $80,000 in ransom or their son would be killed. The kidnappers specified a drop site in Flushing.
On the night Bi Lin Chen agreed to meet the kidnappers, he was trailed by a unit from the NYPD’s Major Case Squad. According to Chen, the police bungled the case from the start. Though the gangsters had warned that if they saw police in the area they would kill Chen’s son, the cops showed up that night wearing easily identifiable bulletproof vests and parked only half a block away from the drop site. The stakeout team waited for a while, but eventually left their posts and returned to headquarters because their shift was over for the night.
The ransom was never picked up. Three days later, Chong Hui Chen’s body was found dumped near the Belt Parkway on the outskirts of Brooklyn. He’d been stabbed twenty times.
Bi Lin Chen and Mei Yu Yang were in a state of shock. Following the incident, the grieving father was quoted in the New York Daily News saying, “We put out faith in the police. Now our son is dead and our family is ruined.”
In the months that followed, the parents’ grief turned to anger. Late last year, Bi Lin Chen and Mei Yu Yang filed a civil lawsuit in State Supreme Court charging that the NYPD and the City of New York with gross negligence. The police department is contesting the suit. Citing the mental anguish and torture their son suffered between the time of his kidnapping and the time of his death, the plaintiffs are asking for damages totaling $21 million. None of which will bring back their son.
In itself, the murder of Chong Hui Chen was tragic enough, but there is evidence to suggest it is part of a pattern of ineptitude on the part of the NYPD when dealing with Asian gangs—a pattern that is itself the result of deep-rooted attitudes, which have always dictated the way law enforcement deals with underworld crime in Chinatown.
Late last year, the city settled out of court with Ying Jing Gan, the widow of a Vietnamese merchant who was murdered on a busy Sunday afternoon in March 1991. Gan’s husband had been cooperating with the police in an ongoing robbery investigation involving the notorious Vietnamese gang, Born to Kill (BTK). Inexplicably, he was left unprotected—to be shot in the head by a BTK assassin while working in a clothing store near Canal Street. The widow’s lawsuit contended that her husband was murdered because of a long-standing indifference on the part of law enforcement to the realities of gang violence in the Asian community.
Not surprisingly, these recent examples of alleged police ineptitude have proven embarrassing to the NYPD and potentially costly to the city. As a result, certain steps have been taken. Department press officers point proudly to the fact that nearly 1,100 applicants for the most recent police entry exam were of Asian descent, the product of a concerted recruitment campaign. And last May, the NYPD appointed Thomas M. Chan captain of Chinatown’s Fifth Precinct—the first Asian-American captain in the city’s history—a move designed to give the appearance of a department better equipped to confront a crime problem that has bedeviled law enforcement for at least the last three decades.
As many Chinatown merchants and residents know all too well, appearances can be deceiving. Even before the death of Chong Hui Chen, it might have seemed as if law enforcement was being unusually diligent in its pursuit and prosecution of organized crime figures in Chinatown. Beginning with the successful prosecution of the BTK in early 1992, there have been at least four major RICO trials involving Asian gangsters. This trend continued when thirty-three alleged members of the Flying Dragons, one of Chinatown’s oldest gangs, were arrested in November 1994 and charged on multiple counts of murder, heroin trafficking, arson, illegal gambling, extortion, and robberies that stretched from Manhattan into Brooklyn and Queens. More recently, a trial involving two powerful Chinatown tongs resulted in the January 1995 conviction of forty-year-old Clifford Wong, a well-known businessman and tong leader.
Taken together, these criminal indictments and prosecutions involve more than 200 assorted gang members and racketeers. Law enforcement spokespersons contend that the high volume of prosecutions is a clear sign that they are winning the battle against organized crime in the Asian community. Many in the community, however, see these sprawling RICO cases as a clear illustration of law enforcement’s inability to respond to criminal patterns until they have already become deeply entrenched, sometimes reaching epidemic proportions.
“All these federal racketeering cases come after that fact,” says Shiauh Wei Lin, a Chinatown attorney who has represented local residents in their grievances against the NYPD. Echoing the sentiments of others in the community, Lin asks, “Why can’t something be done before dozens of merchants are extorted by the gangs? Before so many innocent people are intimidated and kidnapped and killed? Before hundreds of young males are drawn into the gang life and wind up either dead or in jail for the rest of their lives?” It has long been the contention of Chinatown residents that when it comes to gang activity and organized crime, the police are the last to know. The most obvious and egregious example was the case of the Golden Venture. To law enfo
rcement and the mainstream media, it was as if the wholesale smuggling of aliens had only then reached its apex with the terrible tragedy in the waters off Rockaway Beach. Most people in Chinatown knew better. For at least the previous six or seven years, untold thousands of immigrants have been smuggled into Chinatown, Flushing, Sunset Park, and other Asian enclaves as they still are today. Once in the city, these undocumented migrants struggle to pay off their smuggling debts by working at paltry wages in restaurants, sweatshops, and brothels while living in tiny cubicles.
To the criminals who oversee this modern form of indentured servitude, the high profitability of alien smuggling has helped lay the foundation for an array of intertwined criminal rackets. Even with all the recent prosecutions, mainstay businesses like gambling, extortion, prostitution, and heroin smuggling continue to flourish, while living, health, and work conditions for many of the community’s newest immigrants are as bad as anything that existed a century ago.
The reason Chinatown’s criminal underworld has remained so durable over the decades certainly cannot be blamed entirely on law enforcement. But just as the area’s various rackets have persisted through years of social evolution, so have police attitudes toward Chinatown.
Like many of the city’s non-Asian residents, cops have long subscribed to the theory that Chinatown is a hopelessly enigmatic netherworld that can never be understood by anyone who isn’t Chinese. In the past, this resulted in allowing designated tong leaders to resolve sometimes-violent gang disputes without the interference of “outside forces.” It might even have meant certain officers would be paid to stay away, through cash payoffs and gratuities. While many agree that the grafts have diminished if not disappeared entirely, what lingers on is the attitudes those practices engendered.
“Despite what you read in the mainstream press, the police have never really taken Asian gangs seriously,” says forty-year-old Steven Wong, a Chinatown activist who has had numerous dealings with both local and federal law enforcement. “They either don’t know or don’t care about the damage the gangs do to the community. All they care about is the impact they create in the media.”
Ten years ago, Wong played a key role in one of the best-known gang prosecutions in Chinatown history. Posing as a local gangster with Mafia connections, Wong infiltrated the United Bamboo, an international gang with strong ties to the Taiwanese government. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Chinatown, Wong was able to give the impression he was a tough, steely-eyed gang veteran. In truth, he was nothing more than a former taxi driver fed up with seeing the community’s relatively small criminal element run roughshod over the neighborhood’s mostly hardworking, law-abiding citizenry.
Wong’s high-risk infiltration of the gang was conducted in conjunction with a special FBI-NYPD task force. But the fact that he was a legitimate citizen and not a criminal facing charges like most confidential informants was anathema to the police investigators. “Because I wasn’t a cop or a criminal, they never trusted me,” says Wong. “The cops called me a cowboy. The FBI tried to say I had political motivations.”
Eventually, the investigation culminated in a long federal trial in which Steven Wong, the main witness for the prosecution, faced two weeks of sometimes-merciless cross-examination at the hands of eleven criminal defense attorneys. In 1986, eleven members of the United Bamboo were convicted on RICO charges. Afterward, many of the investigators received commendations and promotions within their various agencies and bureaus. Wong disappeared, his life in serious peril. After laying low for a few years, he returned to Chinatown, where he now works as a community advocate and part-time journalist for Sing Tao, a Chinese-language daily newspaper.
“They say the Chinese don’t cooperate with the police because of Chinese history,” explains Wong, referring to a commonly held belief that Chinese attitudes toward the police are formed in the People’s Republic of China, where the police have always been a corrupt and sometimes brutal instrument of the state. “I don’t agree. Chinese people distrust the police because of how they are treated, and have always been treated, by the police here in the United States.”
To illustrate his point, Wong relates a story from his childhood. As a youngster in Chinatown, he once brought home an essay from school in which he proclaimed his desire to be a police officer when he grew up. Like many Chinese parents, his mother and father were dead set against the idea. “I’d rather you join the triad,” said Wong’s father, referring to the secret criminal societies first formed in sixteenth-century China. “This way, if you are a crook, you are an honest crook. You’re telling people you are a bad guy, instead of doing it the devious way by being a police officer.”
Wong’s father took him downstairs to a Chinese coffee shop, where they waited until two cops came in. “Watch this,” Steven was told. The two Caucasian officers ordered coffee, then rice and noodles, then bottles of beer. They ate voraciously, made lots of noise, then stood up and arrogantly walked out without paying.
The point Steven Wong’s father was trying to make to his son was one most people in Chinatown knew. Decades of low level payola and more serious forms of graft made Chinatown an attractive beat for cops on the take.
The fact that local merchants and tong leaders routinely paid off police officers was something most cops grew accustomed to, but one thing the police have never been able to understand is why those same merchants also pay money to the gangs.
Protection money is still paid by most Chinatown merchants, for reasons that are as clear as a broken store window, a threatening late-night phone call, or a blow to the back of the head. “They pay because they don’t want to be harassed,” says Steven Wong. “Or to have their store robbed on a regular basis. Or be killed. They know the police cannot protect them.”
Cops have always maintained that merchants paying extortion money to hoodlums only perpetuates the gang problem. In the minds of some officers, this, in fact, makes the merchants part of the crime problem.
One cop in a better position than most to understand the complicated relationship that exists between the police and the community is Thomas Chan, the Fifth Precinct commander whose promotion has been widely heralded. Chan was born in Chinatown and grew up in the Alfred E. Smith Houses on Catherine Street. From his youth, he remembers the police as a forbidding presence. “Overall,” says Chan, “people in Chinatown didn’t want to have anything to do with the police unless they had to.”
Seated in his office inside the hectic Fifth Precinct station house on Elizabeth Street, Captain Chan cuts an attractive figure. He is articulate, friendly, and projects an air of earnestness and sincerity. Although he has been with the department a mere twelve years, his rise has been meteoric.
As the first Asian-American precinct commander in the history of the NYPD, Chan is understandably glowing in his assessment of the department’s commitment to establishing a more user-friendly profile in the community; his promotion, he feels, is a product of that commitment. But Chan also has been around long enough to know that in order to satisfy his department overseers, he, like any other precinct commander, must show himself to be adequately tough-minded in his dealings with local troublemakers.
One activity that has always created bad blood between local residents and the police is the sale of counterfeit merchandise. In October and November of 1994—apparently unbeknownst to Captain Chan—the NYPD conducted a series of counterfeit raids in a commercially dense section of Canal Street. The raids were brought about by a legal action on behalf of Ralph Lauren, Guess, Timberland, and other popular manufacturers. Although the raids were not carried out by officers from the Fifth Precinct, the residue from these rids is something local cops will have to deal with for months to come.
It’s certainly no secret that counterfeit watches, leather jackets, perfume, and other goods are routinely sold on Canal Street. Most merchants would not dispute the claim. The merchants’ complaint—aired in a series of interviews at the law offices of Shiauh Wei Lin—was not that
the raids took place, but the manner in which they were conducted.
The raids culminated one morning when some twenty officers from a special midtown counterfeit squad descended on a number of stores near the intersection of Canal and Broadway. Most of the stores had been raided before, so the merchants were familiar with the routine. This time, the police followed a different procedure. “They came in like it was a war,” says one store owner.
Gates were pulled down so that onlookers on the sidewalk could not see what was happening inside. The merchants claim the cops were laughing with one another, trying on jackets, and loading merchandise into plastic garbage bags without looking to see what was counterfeit and what wasn’t. One officer removed a videotape from a VCR on which their actions would have been recorded through a security camera mounted on the wall. No receipts were given, nor was any attempt made to itemize what was being seized. One merchant claims police confiscated $20,000 worth of legitimate merchandise from his store. These counterfeit raids are a classic example of the kind of clumsy community relations that have contributed greatly to the NYPD’s negative image in Chinatown.
The intersection where these raids took place has long been a nexus of gang activity. For years, these merchants have been extorted by members of both the BTK and a faction of the Ghost Shadows. Most work twelve-hour days, seven days a week. What money they make usually goes into overhead, city and state taxes, and fines of one kind or another for allegedly selling counterfeit.
“These people struggle to survive,” says Shiauh Wei Lin, who is considering a class action suit against the NYPD to find out where the merchandise goes after it is seized. “They cannot afford to take a hit like this.”
American Gangsters Page 11
