American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  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!”

  On the other side of the store, Lan Tran looked up from trying to open a bulky, gray safe-deposit box, saw his fellow gang members wrestling with the store owner, and got up with an expression more of annoyance than concern.

  Tinh was still shoving jewelry into the pillowcase when he saw Lan come from the far side of the store, moving so quickly that Tinh could have sworn he saw a blaze of color trailing behind him. Gracefully, in one quick, fluid motion, Lan whipped out a gun from inside his waistband, placed it an inch away from Odum Lim’s left temple, and fired.

  To Tinh, the sequence seemed like a dream. He saw smoke and a burst of fire emanate from Lan’s gun. Then he saw blood spurt from the store owner’s temple and heard his muffled cry. Tung Lai and Little Cobra recoiled in shock. The store owner slumped to the floor.

  Slowly, Lan Tran turned toward Tinh. His eyes were cold. Empty. Looking at Uncle Lan, Tinh felt as if all his senses had been heightened. He could hear a clock ticking across the room; the wind blowing through the trees outside; a baby crying half a world away in a small bamboo hut somewhere in Hua Giang province.

  Then came an explosion of noise and confusion as they all ran. Tung Lai and Little Cobra practically tripped over one other trying to get to the door. Kenny Vu had already split. Lan Tran disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Tinh, jewelry dribbling from his pillowcase, stumbled for the door as quickly as he could.

  In the small storage room in back, Nicky had been attempting to handcuff Mrs. Lim to a metal bar on the wall. He heard a loud commotion and then silence.

  Looking more bemused than ever, Nicky peeked out from the back room, then gingerly crept to the front. His eyes opened wide. The gang members were gone, and the store was a shambles. There was blood on the carpet, starting where Odum Lim had been shot, then trailing across the floor and out the front door. Lim himself was nowhere in sight.

  Mrs. Lim and her two children also ventured to the front of the store. They stood in shock and surveyed the damage, their eyes slowly following the ominous blood smears.

  Outside, the gang members darted into two getaway cars. They drove two blocks east to a gas station parking lot, where David Thai and the local contact, Quang Nguyen, had been waiting patiently in a Jeep Cherokee.

  “Anh hai,” Lan Tran said to David, “the whole thing get fucked up. The owner—he get shot.”

  “You get the gold?” asked David.

  Tung Lai, his shirtfront covered with the store owner’s blood, proudly held up the bag of jewelry.

  “We better get out a here,” advised David. “Meet back at the house.”

  All three getaways cars sped down Buford Highway onto I-85, heading north to Gainesville.

  It was a good forty-five minutes before anyone realized that Nicky had been left behind in the store.

  Chapter 7

  “You motherfucking stupid motherfuck,” Anh hai yelled at Tung Lai. “Nobody say nothing about you fuck around with the owner. You supposed to get the jewelry, like Timmy.”

  The gangsters were standing in the front room of the house on Maverick Trail Road. Tung Lai had removed his bloody shirt and was trying to explain how he got involved in the tussle with the store owner. “I just try to make sure the owner don’t have some weapon.”

  “No,” snapped David Thai. “No, no, no. Your job was to break the glass and steal jewelry. That what you supposed to do.”

  “Hey,” interjected one of the gang members. “Where’s Nicky?”

  Everybody looked at one another in stunned silence, realizing that a colossal fuck-up had just gotten worse.

  “He’s not with you?” somebody asked.

  “No, I thought he with you,” someone else replied.

  “He not with us. Didn’t he come with you?”

  “Awww shit,” said David Thai, rolling his eyes.

  Anh hai and Quang Nguyen jumped back into the Jeep Cherokee and headed toward Doraville. They were only gone about thirty minutes when a Doraville taxi pu
lled up in front of the house and Nicky got out.

  “How you motherfuck leave me like that?” he screamed, storming in the front door. “You set me up.”

  “No, no,” replied Uncle Lan, trying to calm Nicky down. “It just a big mistake. We think you with them, they think you with us. David Thai just go to pick you up.”

  An hour later David Thai and Quang Nguyen came back to the house. Thai looked shaken. “We better get outta Georgia. Fast. I think that store owner dead. I see police everywhere.”

  Thai had seen Odum Lim on a stretcher in front of the Sun Wa Jewelry Store. Lim’s face was a bloody mess, and his left arm was perforated with a dozen stab wounds. After the robbers fled, Lim had managed to drag himself to the front of the store, pull open the door, and crawl out onto the pavement. When the police and medical personnel arrived, he was lying in a pool of blood with his distraught wife and two children sitting on the sidewalk next to him, sobbing quietly.

  “Gather your things,” Thai told the others. “We get outta here soon as we can.”

  “Anh hai,” said Kenny Vu firmly. “We don’t want Tung Lai in our car. Let him go somewhere else. This guy fuck up so bad, he bad luck for us.”

  “Hey,” interjected Nicky. “You think we want this motherfuck with us?”

  Tung Lai hung his head sheepishly.

  David Thai was exasperated. “Well, somebody gotta take him back to New York.”

  “We take him, Anh hai,” offered young Tinh Ngo. “We take him back with us.”

  Within a few hours, the BTK gang members were back on the road, driving through the dead of night along the interstate. Seated behind the wheel of the Monte Carlo, Tinh passed a blur of exit signs: Kannopolis, North Carolina; Savage, Maryland; Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. The names seemed otherworldly to Tinh and his Vietnamese brothers.

  With the car radio droning in the background, Tinh tried to make sense of all he had seen that day. The sound of Lan Tran’s gun was still ringing in his ears; the sight of blood spurting from the store owner’s head was still vivid.

  It was an event Tinh had been dreading for some time. Violence had been exploding all around him for months. Now, he was himself an accomplice in a stark, cold-blooded killing.

  One thing seemed clear to Tinh: This shooting was not right. To kill a man with his family nearby—a man who had done nothing but try to defend himself and his livelihood—was wrong, wrong, wrong. Tinh scoured his conscience, trying to find some excuse, any excuse, that might justify what had taken place.

  There was no excuse.

  Visions of the shooting at the Sun Wa Jewelry Store swirled inside Tinh’s head throughout the twenty-hour drive to New York City. They would continue to do so, taunting and tormenting him in the days and weeks that followed.

  Back in Chinatown, merchants and residents alike had enjoyed a brief respite from the persistent violence that had become synonymous with the BTK. Altogether, David Thai and the handful of key gang members who accompanied him on his out-of-state crime spree had been gone for the better part of a month. During that period, the tit-for-tat gang warfare of the last year and a half, which resulted in a string of dead gang members from most of Chinatown’s major gangs, had subsided. The city’s newspapers turned their attentions elsewhere. In December 1990, John Gotti, the Mafia’s capo di tutti capi, was arrested on federal racketeering charges, an event that would keep many of the city’s best crime reporters occupied over the weeks and months that followed.

  In part, the relative peacefulness that had now descended on Chinatown’s underworld could be attributed to the meeting held two months earlier by Virgo Lee, the mayor’s Asian affairs director. Typically, no official decrees had been announced or official truce declared. The CCBA had resumed its closed-door meetings; no one outside a handful of Chinatown’s most powerful tong and business leaders would know what sort of an arrangement was reached. Nonetheless, the Flying Dragons and the Ghost Shadows had backed off, and the shootings all but ceased.

  Not only that, but a fundamental change in the attitude of many in the community toward the BTK had taken place. As long as the gang stopped overstepping its boundaries by hitting commercial establishments in other gangs’ territories, it was as if Chinatown’s power structure had all but ceded Canal Street to David Thai’s Vietnamese gang.

  Of course, the BTK themselves had played a role. Even while Anh hai and his road crew were off haphazardly expanding the gang’s profile in Connecticut, Tennessee, and Georgia, the gang’s other members had not been idle. Although the exact number of gang members tended to ebb and flow depending on who was in prison or who had been killed lately, there were still believed to be somewhere around seventy-five BTK members in the New York vicinity alone. Thai had left strict instructions with numerous dai lows to maintain a strong presence on Canal Street.

  Every Saturday a handful of gang members made extortion rounds, demanding anywhere from $20 to $200 from the approximately seventy shops packed tightly along a four-block stretch of Canal Street, between the streets of Centre and Lafayette. Up to now, some merchants had resented making extortion payments to the BTK, not so much because they didn’t want to pay but because the Vietnamese gangsters had lacked the proper authority. In the wake of the big meeting between the NYPD and the CCBA, most merchants were glad to cough up the money, believing—perhaps wishfully—that it was a small price to pay for order and tranquillity on Canal Street.

  Now that Chinatown’s criminal element had, for the time being, ceased shooting at each other, the citizens of the community could turn their attention to more worthy matters. As the chill of December gave way to the deep freeze of January, all of Chinatown rallied to celebrate the New Year’s season, an annual, ongoing festival that ran from late January until February 15. Neighborhood restaurants and markets bustled with shoppers, and the sound of firecrackers and the smell of brimstone filled the air day and night. Drifts of debris from shredded firecrackers littered the streets like new-fallen snow.

  The celebration culminated with the Dance of the Dragons, a grand Chinatown tradition. In different parts of the community, five different dragons operated by a dozen young males gyrated back and forth through the streets. Trailing behind the dragons was a parade of Chinatown’s citizens, who clanged cymbals and banged on drums. Revelers lined the streets and watched from windows and fire escapes, clamorously ushering in the Lunar New Year, in this case the Year of the Ram.

  To the Vietnamese, the New Year’s season is known as Tet, the Festival of the First Morning of the Year. Their celebration is designed to unite all Vietnamese—Buddhist and Catholic, Marxist and capitalist. Firecrackers are exploded to ward off evil demons and spirits. The first distinct sound heard in the new year is most important. Traditionally, a cock’s crow signals hard work and a bad harvest. The lowing of a buffalo heralds a year of sweat and toil. A dog barking signifies confidence and trust.

  In 1991, one of the first sounds heard by a Chinatown store owner named Sen Van Ta was the thwaaack from the butt of a gun being smashed against his skull. This is not a sound explained in Vietnamese mythology, but its implications were clear enough.

  It was early in the evening of January 21, 1991, the beginning of Tet. Sen Van Ta was shutting his clothing outlet at 302 Canal Street after a busy day. Ta was the landlord of a sizable commercial space that included his store and a subtenant, the Golden Star jewelry store. Ta stood outside the store on the sidewalk, pulling down a metal security gate. Inside, three employees were putting jewelry and cash into a large safe.

  Out of nowhere, three BTK gangsters appeared on the sidewalk. “Open this gate and let us in,” demanded one of them, pressing the barrel of his gun against Sen Van Ta’s ribs. They forced the landlord back inside his store, where the startled employees looked up just as one of the gangsters smacked Sen Van Ta in the head with a handgun.

  After that, the robbers followed the usual routine. They made all the employees lie facedown on the floor. Then they ransacked the store
and robbed each employee, kicking one of them in the ribs when he removed a ring from his finger too slowly. They fled the store with an impressive $350,000 worth of jewelry and close to $1,000 in cash.

  Outside on Canal Street, two getaway cars awaited. Three of the gangsters piled into a powder-blue Cadillac with New Jersey plates. Behind the wheel was Jungle Man, the Georgia-based BTK member who’d served as a getaway driver during the bloody Doraville heist and was now living in New York. Little Cobra, another of the Doraville robbers, jumped into the backseat of the Caddie along with Nguieu Tun, a sixteen-year-old gang member known as Teardrop because of a small, teardrop-shaped tattoo under his left eye. (During the robbery, Teardrop covered the easily identifiable tattoo with a flesh-colored Band-Aid.)

  Darkness had descended on the streets of Chinatown. The Cadillac, its headlights not yet turned on, zoomed west on Canal Street. Three cops in an unmarked police vehicle saw it go speeding by. They turned on their siren, put a flashing red light on top of the car, and took off after it.

  When Jungle Man saw the cops in pursuit, he stomped on the accelerator and led them on a wild chase through the streets of Chinatown and Little Italy. The Cadillac raced through a number of red lights, sideswiped a car, and narrowly missed plowing head-on into an NYPD squad car. An all-points-bulletin went out, and approaching sirens resounded throughout Chinatown.

  After a fifteen-minute chase through heavy traffic, the Cadillac was finally cut off at the intersection of Chrystie and Broome by police cars converging from all sides. The BTK gangsters were dragged from the car by nearly a dozen cops, all of whom had their guns drawn.

  “Down on the pavement! All of you!” commanded one of the cops, his gun aimed at their heads.

  The gang members dropped to the ground.

  The police searched the Caddie and found some jewelry. When they retraced the route of the chase, they found a .380 handgun and an Uzi submachine gun used in the robbery that had been tossed from the speeding getaway car. Jungle Man, Little Cobra, Teardrop, and one other gang member were taken into custody.