The next day, Sen Van Ta and two employees from the Golden Star jewelry store were brought to the First Precinct to view a lineup. From behind a two-way mirror, Sen Van Ta identified both Little Cobra and Jungle Man. Later, Teardrop and the fourth participant were also identified. They were booked on charges of robbery in the first degree, with Sen Van Ta listed as the main complainant.
Because of the high-speed car chase through Chinatown, the jewelry store robbery had quickly become the talk of the community. The heist was of particular interest to David Thai, who had selected the target for the robbery—a jewelry store located right next door to his Canal Street massage parlor. It was Anh hai who decided which gang members would commit the crime, and it was Anh hai who received the stolen jewelry after the robbery, delivered to him at a safe house in Long Island by the robbers in the second getaway car.
The arrest of four gang members had not been anticipated, though occasionally these things did happen. Usually, gang members in Chinatown—Vietnamese, Chinese, or whatever—could rest assured that witnesses would not come forward and their victims would not file charges. That was the way Chinatown operated, through a code of silence that had made it possible for generations of gangsters to continue plying their trade.
This time, the complainant had not only come forward—he seemed determined to see the case brought to justice.
Sen Van Ta, age twenty-nine, was not naive in the ways of Chinatown. Born in rural South Vietnam, he had come to New York as a penniless refugee after a two-year stint at a camp in Galang, Indonesia. In 1983, he began his business career as a street vendor. Along with hundreds of other Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants hoping to make their way in Chinatown’s highly competitive marketplace, Ta sold batteries, headphones, cassette tapes, and other inexpensive merchandise from a small, folding card table on Canal Street.
Driven by a desire to make something of his life, Sen Van Ta was proof that Chinatown, however crowded and perilous, still functioned as a vehicle of hope and opportunity for even the most destitute Asian immigrants. For two years, from 9:00 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. seven days a week, Ta stood behind his table on Canal Street selling trinkets. He saved nearly everything he earned. In late 1985, he and a friend—a fellow refugee he first met at the camp in Indonesia—pooled $15,000 each and opened a small store that sold jeans and T-shirts. At the time, commercial rents were still reasonable in Chinatown, and within the first twelve months of business Sen Van Ta and his partner were already turning a small profit.
By the late 1980s, Sen Van Ta had become well aware of the BTK. Most merchants he knew were inclined to pay the young gangsters who came into their stores demanding “protection money.” At the time, brazen thefts—mostly by African American teenagers—were common on Canal Street. If these Vietnamese toughs were able to prevent shoplifting and harassment by menacing outsiders, many store owners felt they had no choice but to pay.
In the beginning, Sen Van Ta also paid. But he had stopped. For one thing, at five feet nine and 175 pounds, Ta was reasonably sturdy for a Vietnamese male; he didn’t need to pay young hoodlums to look out for his physical welfare. Furthermore, Ta was infuriated by the rationale these gangsters used when they made their extortion demands. They would say, “We are Vietnamese, just like you. We are hungry and we need money to eat.”
Sen Van Ta felt he was just as much a humanitarian as the next person, but he too knew a few things about what it meant to be destitute. Just like these gangsters, he had been displaced by the Vietnam War at a young age. He too had been sent out to sea by his parents, spent years in a refugee camp, and arrived in America as a lonely, unwanted outsider. But Sen Van Ta had not chosen a life of crime. He worked for a living, sinking every penny he made back into his business ventures until he could stand proudly on his own two feet as a reputable, taxpaying citizen. As such, Ta could not see why he had to pay money to hoodlums who were unwilling to make the same sacrifices he had made.
Sen Van Ta knew his unwillingness to continue making extortion payments was probably one of the reasons his commercial space had been targeted for robbery. The blow to the head—a nasty gash that required ten stitches—was an added indignity that only strengthened his determination to stand up to the dreaded BTK.
As a seasoned Chinatown merchant, Ta knew there would be repercussions. The first was a piece of mail delivered to the shop on February 7, two weeks after the robbery. Inside a plain white envelope Ta found an article on the robbery and subsequent arrests clipped from the Downtown Express, a free weekly newspaper distributed in Chinatown restaurants. Accompanying the article were a few shards of broken glass.
“What does this mean?” an employee asked him.
“This mean maybe they blow up the store,” answered Ta.
A few days later, Sen Van Ta was enjoying the early morning sunshine on Canal Street, standing on the sidewalk in front of his store. He had just unlocked the security gate to open for the day when he was approached by a well-dressed Asian male he immediately recognized as David Thai.
“Don’t open this store,” David Thai told Sen Van Ta. “Instead, go to court and say those four boys did not rob you. Then maybe you get your jewelry back and we can forget this unfortunate incident.”
In the past, Thai might have made this threat by proxy. After all, it was unseemly for a boss to directly involve himself in the gang’s street-level intimidations. But now that the BTK had confined its New York operations almost exclusively to Canal Street, it needed to enforce its territorial imperative more emphatically than ever before. By visiting Sen Van Ta in person, David Thai was drawing the line. He was making it clear to all merchants on Canal Street that defiance of the gang was an offense that would simply not be tolerated.
Sen Van Ta was not intimidated. He ignored the BTK leader and opened his store. With ten fresh stitches in his head, he couldn’t have forgotten the incident even if he wanted to. And he wasn’t about to let David Thai or anyone else scare him into dropping the charges.
Around the same time that Sen Van Ta was entering into a war of wills with the BTK, Tinh Ngo was slipping deeper and deeper into an emotional morass. Ever since the robbery and brutal assault in Georgia, he had been walking around in a daze.
The Doraville jeweler, in fact, had not died. Despite a gunshot wound to the head and multiple stab wounds, he recovered. But Tinh didn’t know that. He saw the guy take a bullet in the cranium and assumed he had been abruptly reunited with his ancestors. Guilt-ridden by his own complicity in what he believed was a cold-blooded murder, he had started smoking crack again, something he hadn’t done with any regularity in many months. Living with four or five other gang members in yet another BTK safe house in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, he was sleeping no more than three or four hours a night. His dreams were haunted by images of Lan Tran pressing his gun to the store owner’s head, the trigger being pulled, blood spurting upward.
The lack of sleep and occasional use of crack heightened Tinh’s sense of paranoia, which brought about an altercation with the law that, under the circumstances, seemed inevitable.
A few weeks before the robbery at Sen Van Ta’s store on Canal Street—two and a half months after returning from Georgia—Tinh was about to enter his Brooklyn apartment at 1033 Sixty-seventh Street when he saw a patrol car slowly pull up. A uniformed officer got out. Instinctively, Tinh ran. The cop chased him along Sixty-seventh Street, and with two other officers eventually wrestled him to the ground.
The cops had merely wanted to ask Tinh a few questions about who was living with him in the apartment. Now they wrote Tinh up a summons for “resisting,” a charge that required a court appearance.
One month later, when Tinh arrived at the Criminal Courts Building on Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn, he was approached by three detectives from the Sixtieth Precinct out in Coney Island.
“Are you Tinh Ngo?” asked one of the detectives.
“Yes,” answered Tinh.
“We’re placing y
ou under arrest,” he said, “for robbery. You’ll have to come with us.”
The robbery had taken place months earlier, before the trip to Georgia. At 5:00 A.M. on the morning of September 19, 1990, Tinh and a handful of other gang members had staged a home invasion at 223 Neptune Avenue, the same apartment building where Tinh lived when he first joined the gang. It turned violent when Richie Huyhn, one of the robbers, began pistol-whipping the lady of the house, a Cambodian woman in her forties.
Now, six months later, Tinh was in trouble. The detectives drove him through Brooklyn to the Coney Island precinct, where he was placed in a lineup with five other Asian males his age. He was quickly identified as one of the robbers, then taken back to the Criminal Courts Building, where he was made to wait overnight in a holding pen.
Awaiting arraignment the next day, Tinh was approached by a United States marshal who announced, “Tinh Ngo, you have a visitor.”
Now what? thought Tinh. Who could possibly be coming to see me at the Criminal Courts Building in Brooklyn?
Tinh was taken outside the courtroom, into a hallway, where two white guys he immediately recognized as detectives were waiting. The younger of the two was dressed in a flashy suit and tie. The older detective looked like a professional football player; he was maybe six feet four inches tall, and solid.
“Tinh Ngo, we understand you wanted to talk to the police about crimes, right?” said the younger detective.
Earlier, when Tinh realized he was being arrested for robbery, he had asked one of the detectives at the Coney Island precinct if there was anything he could do to help himself.
“Yeah, sure,” said the detective. “You can clear your conscience, tell us everything you know about other crimes you or anyone else might have perpetrated.”
Tinh had no response. But apparently the overture had been passed along to these two cops now standing in a hallway outside the arraignment room.
Tinh answered the detective cautiously. “Uh, okay. Maybe I talk with you.”
The two detectives signed some papers and took Tinh into custody, driving him to yet another Brooklyn police precinct, the Eighty-fourth, located downtown on Gold Street. Tinh was sat down in a small interview room with bad lighting and bars on the windows. The younger detective introduced himself as William Oldham. The older one was named Alex Sabo.
“Okay,” said Oldham. “We think maybe you’re in a position to help us out. Then maybe we can help you out. We already know more than you probably think we know. But I want to hear it from you.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Tinh.
“So,” asked Oldham, “how long you been with the Ghost Shadows?”
Apparently, the cops didn’t know much.
“BTK. I used to be with BTK,” answered Tinh, pretending he had dropped out of the gang.
“Okay. Why did you leave BTK?”
“Because I think I want to leave. Like, you know, drugs and stuff like that. I want to go back to school and try to get a job.”
It was unnerving talking face-to-face with cops. Tinh wanted to strike a deal that would keep him out of jail but was afraid to tell the cops anything that might get him deeper into trouble with the law. He wasn’t sure these men could be trusted.
“I assume the gang has a leader,” said Oldham.
“Yes, sir,” answered Tinh.
“I know his name. Do you know his name?”
“Yes. It’s Thai.”
“David Thai?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what do you call David Thai?”
“I call him Big Brother.”
Tinh’s voice quivered with emotion. What am I doing here? he asked himself. It was like an audition, with Tinh playing the role of the pliant ex-gang member. He knew he had to show the cops he had information that was valuable. But the ambivalence he felt sitting in this room with them was causing Tinh to sweat; his stomach was churning, his head pounding.
“Listen,” said the detective. “You have to tell us the truth now. Because later we’re going to use your words to help you. But if your words are lies, they can’t help you. They hurt you, and they hurt us. When they hurt us, they will hurt you. Understand?”
“You got a big brother, we have bosses,” chimed in Sabo, the older detective. “If we tell the bosses that you told us this, then two months from now you tell them something else, then they say to us, ‘Well, wait a minute.’”
“See,” interrupted Oldham. “I want you to tell me the truth. Are you able to do that?”
“The truth?” asked Tinh, a quizzical expression on his face. For a person who had lived the last twenty months of his life in the underworld, it was a strange concept.
Deep in his gut, Tinh desperately wanted to come clean. He needed to unburden himself of the guilt that had been building up inside; he wanted to set himself free from the trap his life had become. But his instincts for survival told him to be careful.
The confusion Tinh was feeling manifested itself in this way: For the next two hours, he talked virtually nonstop. Much of what he said was in a breathless, excitable English that the detectives had trouble understanding. What came through was a blizzard of names and events, a byzantine melding of fact and fiction. He told the detectives about real crimes that had taken place, then gave false names. He passed along street gossip about gang-related crimes in Boston, Pennsylvania, Montreal, and Texas. Mostly, he tried to present himself as a small-time outsider, a guy who ran errands for the big boys. “I used to buy crack for them. They smoke crack. The other stuff, I’m the youngest one, so they usually don’t need me that much.”
As the afternoon wore on, Tinh edged closer and closer to the truth. The more he talked, the more he divulged. He gave the detectives an accurate account of his first armed robbery at the massage parlor on Chrystie Street, the one he committed with Blackeyes. He gave them names. At one point he even gave them David Thai’s beeper number.
The detectives were taping the conversation on a small cassette recorder and writing down bits of information. Occasionally, they glanced at each other in disbelief. What’s with this kid? they asked themselves. Not only was he unusually talkative, but not once had he posed the question all potential informants usually begin with: What’s in it for me? This kid seemed more interested in talking than he did in striking a deal.
At one point, Tinh came perilously close to telling the detectives more than he wanted to about recent events in the state of Georgia. “David Thai, he get his guns in Georgia,” offered Tinh.
“He goes to Georgia?” asked Sabo.
“Georgia,” repeated Tinh.
“Where in Georgia?” asked Oldham.
“Grandview, Granville, something like this,” answered Tinh, unable to remember the exact name of the town where they had stayed.
“Did you ever go with them?” asked Oldham.
“Uh, yeah, I went there once.”
“When was this?”
“That’s a long time ago.”
“One year, two years, three years?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you tell me.”
Hesitantly, Tinh claimed that about a year ago he had gone to Georgia with some gang members to buy guns. The detectives sensed that there was more, that he was leading them to Georgia for a reason. He seemed to have something he wanted to say. They prodded him with more questions about the trip. Who did the BTK buy the guns from? Did they bring the guns back to New York?
Tinh was sweating heavily now, his words barely discernible. Detective Oldham suggested they take a break. “Are you hungry?” he asked Tinh.
“What have you got?”
“We’ve got a McDonald’s across the street,” suggested Sabo.
While Oldham ran out to get some food, Tinh wiped the perspiration from his brow. What am I doing? he asked himself again. Why am I telling these men these things?
“You so quiet tonight, my husband. What’s wrong?” inquired twenty-six-year-old Ying Jing Gan, the wife of Sen Va
n Ta.
Ta was seated on the edge of the bed in their small, cramped apartment on East Broadway, in Chinatown. He had been lost in thought, and his wife’s question startled him.
“Is it something with the store?”
Ta sighed. He could no longer keep the troublesome events of the last few weeks from his wife. “Yes,” he answered. “There been some problems at the store.”
Usually, Ying Jing Gan knew better than to ask too many questions of her husband. She was Chinese, and Chinese tradition dictated that a wife not meddle in her husband’s affairs, especially when it pertained to his job. But Gan sensed something was wrong. Ever since the robbery, her husband had seemed preoccupied and withdrawn.
“You remember the robbery?” Sen Van Ta asked his wife.
Gan was incredulous. “Of course I remember the robbery. What do you think?”
“Well …”
Sen Van Ta proceeded to tell his wife about the series of incidents that had occurred since then. She already knew that her husband had picked two of the robbers out of a police lineup. But she did not know about the threatening message he had received in the mail. And she certainly did not know that David Thai, the leader of Chinatown’s most notorious criminal gang, had made a personal visit to her husband.
On the surface, Sen Van Ta remained steadfast in his determination to stand up to the BTK. He would not be intimidated, he told his fellow workers. Secretly, though, he was terrified. Ta knew what the BTK were capable of. “They come after me, they come after you. They come after anybody they think friendly with us,” he confessed to Ying Jing Gan.
Gan was barely five feet tall, fine-boned and petite even by Chinese standards. Her hair was black and luminous, with bangs that grazed the tips of her eyelashes. Her cheeks were full and rosy, even without makeup. The product of a traditional rural upbringing, she was a reticent person by nature, and had often been told by others that she was naive in the ways of the world. Her innocence and simple decency captivated Sen Van Ta the first day they met.
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