The point of view conveyed by Uncle Lan in his writings was an accurate reflection of how the others saw him: the alienated loner whose life in the underworld was guided by a strict code of honor. To Tinh Ngo and the other BTK gang members, Lan was a near mythical figure. His reputation was enhanced by the fact he was pure Vietnamese, not Viet-Ching, like many of the others. He had been born and raised in Hue, Vietnam’s ancient imperial capital. In the United States, he was a well-traveled criminal who had reputedly given the Born to Kill gang its catchy name. If David Thai was the BTK’s mandarin leader, Lan Tran was its dark prince, the highly disciplined, cold-blooded gangster that most of the gang’s lesser members could only pretend to be.
Like the others, Tinh started out worshiping Uncle Lan. But his feelings for the elder gangster had gone through an evolutionary process. Now that he had begun to come out from under the dark cloud of the gang, Tinh saw clearly what a trap Lan Tran’s life had become. Lan was the most irrefutable kind of killer. He believed he was killing for a cause, in this case the cause of brotherhood. And by setting himself up as the truest and most devoted gang member, he’d sealed his fate. Prison or death were the only avenues left.
Tinh felt sorry for Lan, but his sympathy was tempered by a harsh reality: He knew that Lan was crazy. And he knew that if his betrayal of the BTK ever came to light and somebody had to put a bullet in his head, the triggerman would most assuredly be Uncle Lan, who would no doubt carry out his assignment with the same ardor—and the same literary flair—he’d employed on all the other occasions.
Their confidential informant may not have been overly concerned by Lan’s drunken accusations of betrayal, but Dan Kumor and the other investigators were. As far as they knew, this was the first time the issue of betrayal had been brought into the open by one of the gang’s ranking members.
Their concerns intensified a few days later when they learned that Lan had barged into the Sunset Park safe house early on a Saturday morning and rustled Tinh out of bed.
“Timmy,” said Uncle Lan, “Timmy, wake up. Let’s go find some money.”
Tinh got up from his mattress on the floor and pulled on some clothes. He had no choice but to go with Uncle Lan as they drove to the gang’s safe house in Belmore, Long Island, a thirty-minute drive on the Long Island Expressway. During the drive, Lan told Tinh they were going to rob the same leather-goods store in Copiague they’d missed earlier.
When they arrived at the house in Belmore, Tinh sat at the kitchen table and tried to gather his thoughts. He was barely awake. There was no way he was going to be able to notify Kumor, Oldham, or anybody else. Once again, he was about to embark on a robbery with his fellow gang members. Only this time, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
Fifteen minutes later, David Thai showed up with Sophia. “Forget it,” Anh hai told Lan, Tinh, and the others. “I just check it out. That store isn’t even open today.”
Tinh breathed a sigh of relief.
Later, when he told Kumor and Oldham what had happened, they became more worried than ever that David Thai or Lan Tran was suspicious. The gang’s leaders had given Tinh very little advance notice of robberies in the past; this time, they’d given him none at all.
And there was more. Later that same day, David Thai had taken Tinh into the apartment’s main bedroom to show him a new cache of weapons he’d recently scored. From a suitcase under the bed, Anh hai had produced his pride and joy, a brand new Tech-9 semi-automatic machine gun.
“Haven’t had a chance to use it yet,” said David, “but I’m looking forward to it.”
All of which made the investigators very uneasy. Ever since Tinh had gone back out on the street, they’d had to scramble to keep up with the amount of criminal planning his life as a BTK member involved. So far, they’d been lucky. Tinh’s status as an informant had not been discovered, nor had he been forced into any crimes that might later compromise his standing as a government witness. But after only nine weeks of working undercover, Tinh had been through a number of close calls, and it seemed only a matter of time until his luck ran out.
For some time, Kumor had known that he and Oldham and probably Tinh were going to have to take a trip to Georgia. Tinh’s story of the shooting at the jewelry store in Doraville had given the investigators important leads that needed to be followed up on. They would have to check with the local authorities in Doraville, and also with cops in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where, Tinh informed them, a couple of BTK gangsters had committed an additional violent robbery.
Kumor figured there would never be a better time for the trip to Georgia than right now. Removing Tinh from the scene would alleviate, if only temporarily, the danger of discovery and the pressure to participate in BTK crimes. Also, by retracing the gang’s steps in Georgia—something the investigators were going to have to do eventually anyway—they would be accumulating evidence crucial to securing a federal indictment against the BTK.
Already, Bill Oldham had made a phone call to the Doraville police department. That was when the investigators learned that Odum Lim, the Cambodian jewelry store owner shot in the head and left for dead, had not perished.
Despite three excruciating weeks spent in a Doraville hospital recovering from his wounds, Odum Lim counted himself among the luckiest people on earth. The .38-caliber bullet fired into his head at close range by Lan Tran had entered near his right temple at a slight downward angle, grazed his skull, wormed its way along his right cheek bone, and exited out the side of his face. Lim lay in a pool of blood spilling from twelve stab wounds and a gaping head wound. But he had stubbornly refused to die.
On the phone, Oldham asked a captain with the Doraville police if they’d had any luck with their investigation into the robbery and shooting.
“Well,” answered Detective Captain Cliff Edwards, a fourteen-year veteran, “as a matter of fact, yeah.”
Edwards had gotten to know Odum Lim well since the day he arrived at the Sun Wa Jewelry Store to find him lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk. Later, when the local newspaper reported that Lim had survived the shooting, Edwards insisted on putting his hospital room under twenty-four-hour guard. He didn’t want any gangsters coming back to finish the job.
The Doraville detective told Oldham that one month after the shooting, the mother of one of his fellow officers had clipped an article out of a Colorado newspaper about a robbery perpetrated by Vietnamese gangsters. According to the story, six armed criminals had stormed into a Catholic church in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, robbing some thirty parishioners during Sunday mass.
When Edwards called Colorado, he was informed that six suspects had been arrested in nearby Colby, Kansas, just across the border. Kansas state police sent Edwards fingerprints and photos of the six Vietnamese males they had in custody. Edwards took the photos over to the Lim’s jewelry store, which was located less than a mile from the Doraville police station.
Odum Lim had only recently been released from the hospital and was still angry. Determined to see the people who’d robbed his store, terrorized his family, and shot him in the head brought to justice, he picked out three of the photos.
Detective Edwards did not feel good about the identifications. He had a feeling that, given his zealous desire to see the perpetrators punished, Odum Lim’s judgment might have been skewed. Edwards seriously doubted the identifications would stand up in court. But he wasn’t about to admit that to some New York City detective who refused to even identify himself by name over the phone.
“We’ve got the robbers identified,” Edwards assured Oldham. “They’re in custody out in Colorado right now, and I’m gonna move for an indictment.”
“Don’t do it,” Oldham bluntly warned. “Those are not your people.”
Edwards was startled. “Well, who the hell are you? Where you comin’ from?”
“Look, that’s all I can tell you right now. I’m working a federal case here in New York. I’m NYPD. I’m not bullshitting you. Believe me, those
people you’re getting ready to indict are not your robbers. I know who your robbers are.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Myself and an ATF agent are gonna be down there soon. I’ll fill you in when we get there.” Then Oldham hung up.
A couple weeks later, on the morning of June 10, 1991, Oldham, Kumor, and Tinh Ngo arrived at Atlanta International Airport after a comfortable ninety-minute flight from New York City. It was a sultry summer day, with temperatures in the high eighties, and the sky was a cloudless, crystalline blue.
It had been nearly eight months since Tinh made the long drive along I-80 with the rest of the BTK road crew into the heart of the Deep South. In that time, Tinh had done his best to repress his recollections of the events surrounding the shooting at the Sun Wa Jewelry store. Since signing on with Kumor, Oldham, and company, he’d been forced to unearth many of them. But there was much that remained hazy. He remembered that he and the other gang members had stayed in a town called Gainesville, which he knew to be about fifty miles outside of Atlanta. He remembered the drive from Gainesville to the jewelry store where the robbery and shooting took place. But he did not remember the exact location of the store, nor was he certain he could find the precise house in Gainesville where he and the other gangsters had stayed.
On a map the two investigators and their informant picked up at the airport, Tinh was able to pick out the tiny suburb of Doraville, roughly fifteen miles outside the city. Kumor, Oldham, and Tinh piled into a rented Lincoln town car and drove north, through downtown Atlanta, until they arrived at Northwoods Plaza.
The cops were lucky. Tinh recognized the area immediately. The Sun Wa Jewelry Store, though inauspiciously located in the middle of the outdoor mall, was on Doraville’s main thoroughfare, at 5081 Buford Highway. Within minutes, Tinh spotted the store where Odum Lim had been stabbed, shot, and left for dead. It was located not far from a neatly painted sign mounted along the highway that must have held a special irony for Odum Lim. It read:
WELCOME TO THE CITY OF DORAVILLE
“A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE”
Once they’d found the store, Kumor and Oldham drove Tinh back to a hotel in Atlanta, where they checked into two adjoining rooms. They had decided not to take Tinh into the jewelry store. There was no telling how Odum Lim might react to having one of the robbers standing before him again. Besides, there was no reason for Tinh to be there anyway.
Tinh stretched out on the hotel bed, watched TV for a while, and then took a nap. Kumor and Oldham, meanwhile, got back in the car and returned to Doraville.
After arriving at the jewelry store and being buzzed inside, the two investigators introduced themselves to Odum Lim and his wife, Kim Lee.
“We were hoping maybe you might be able to help us,” Kumor explained to the Lims. “We’re police investigators from New York, and we’re working on an important investigation into the activities of a Vietnamese gang called Born to Kill. We think they may have been involved in the robbery that took place here last November twenty-sixth. Could you describe for us what happened that day?”
Kumor and Oldham were pleased to hear that the Lims’ version of the robbery and assault matched Tinh’s in virtually every detail.
Even eight months after the fact, Odum Lim was bitter about what he, his wife, and two children had been forced to endure that day. Lim had a deep scar and indentation on the side of his face, where the bullet from Lan Tran’s gun exited. Occasionally, he suffered from severe headaches and upsetting flashbacks. The shooting, he told the two investigators, was almost as traumatic as some of the things he’d experienced during the terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge.
Kumor and Oldham sat riveted as Lim recounted his years in Cambodia in the late 1970s, a slow descent into hell shared by tens of thousands of other Cambodian refugees.
“It all started in Phnom Penh,” said Lim, explaining how he had served in the country’s capital city as an interpreter for the U.S. military attaché. When the murderous Khmer Rouge, the Communist regime led by Pol Pot, overran Phnom Penh in April 1975, he and his family were forced into labor camps with other Cambodians. Untold numbers starved to death, or were brutally tortured and slaughtered in the notorious “killing fields” of rural Cambodia.
After three and a half years as prisoners and slaves in their own country, Odum Lim and his wife escaped the work camps and fled on foot toward Thailand. For five agonizing months they endured poisonous leeches and malaria in the rice paddies of western Cambodia, hiding from roaming Khmer Rouge execution squads in search of fleeing refugees. In early 1979, the Lims and a group of fellow refugees finally reached the border, where they were refused entry by Thai government authorities. Forced back into Cambodia, many of the Lims’ companions died when they stepped on land mines and were blown to smithereens. Those lucky enough to survive hid in the mountains for four months, then made another run at the Thai border.
This time, Odum and Kim Lee made it into Thailand, where they spent nearly two years in a refugee camp. For a time, Odum Lim served as a camp administrator. In August 1981, the Lims were sponsored by a Catholic church in Atlanta and brought to the United States as political refugees. Odum Lim worked for a while in a factory cleaning fish, then sold jewelry door to door until he’d raised enough money to open his own store in Doraville.
“For so many years,” Lim said angrily to Kumor and Oldham, “me and my wife survive the worst the Khmer Rouge have to offer. Then we come to United States and almost die in one day. Shot in the head by Vietnamese gangsters.” Lim shook his head in disgust. “The United States have no death sentence, that’s the problem. It too easy to commit crimes here.”
As sympathetic as Kumor and Oldham may have been to Lim’s political sentiments, they had work to do. They’d brought a photo album containing many mug shots, including everyone they believed had taken part in the Doraville robbery. They needed IDs. They were particularly hopeful of getting positive IDs from the Lims’ two daughters, since young children make especially appealing and effective witnesses in court.
Both girls were in school. Kumor decided to wait on the photos, and told Odum Lim that he and Oldham would come back later that afternoon. In the meantime, it was time for the two investigators from New York to pay a visit to Detective Captain Cliff Edwards of the Doraville PD.
After the call from Oldham, Captain Edwards had held off on his own investigation, waiting and wondering what cards the boys from New York were holding in their deck. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?” Edwards asked cordially after Kumor and Oldham had taken seats in his modest, wood-paneled office at the Doraville police station.
Oldham did the talking. As always, he seemed intent on getting as much information out of the local authorities as possible without offering anything in return.
“What we thought you might be able to help us with,” he told Edwards, “is in locating a local Vietnamese criminal. All we have is a first name—Quang. We believe this guy selected the robbery target here in Doraville and another one in Chattanooga.”
“And you want us to help you find Quang?” asked Edwards.
“That’s right.”
Cliff Edwards was in his early forties, lean, with thinning blond hair and a friendly, unassuming manner. A Georgia native, he was, by nature, an accommodating sort. But there was clearly a lot these two tight-lipped Yankees from north of the Mason-Dixon line weren’t saying.
“Look,” he offered, “nobody wants to see this crime solved more than I do, if you catch my drift. But y’all gonna have to tell me what the hell this is all about.”
It was Kumor who finally filled Edwards in.
“Okay. We’ve got an informant,” explained Kumor. “A kid who took part in the robbery at Odum Lim’s store. Not only has this kid been providing us with information about a powerful Vietnamese gang called Born to Kill, he’s been working undercover. The investigation is highly sensitive. We were hoping you could help us tie this robbery at the jewelry store into a federal RI
CO case, put these guys away for a long time. And we were hoping you could do it as quietly as possible.”
Captain Edwards smiled. “Well, shit,” he replied, “of course we’ll help. Why didn’t you just tell me all that in the first place?”
“We just wanna make sure,” interjected Oldham, “that you understand when the time comes to arrest this guy Quang, if we find him, we’re the ones who get credit for the collar.”
“Collar?” Edwards asked quizzically. “I got a collar on my shirt. You mean arrest?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Oldham retorted.
“Hell, we don’t care about that. This is Doraville. There isn’t enough crime around here for us to be fighting over who gets credit for arrests.”
With Edwards on board, everything seemed to fall into place. Over the next few days, Kumor and Oldham gathered more evidence than they could have hoped for. Quang Van Nguyen, the BTK’s Southern contact, was located and quietly taken into custody. Two sets of fingerprints retrieved from a glass counter at the Sun Wa Jewelry store were positively linked to two of the robbers, Tung Lai and Little Cobra. And the Lims’ two children, along with Mrs. Lim, were able to pick out photographs of four members of the robbery crew, including the shooter, Lan Tran.
On the fourth day of their stay in Atlanta, Kumor, Oldham, and Tinh drove to Gainesville. It took the entire afternoon to find the house on Maverick Trail Road where most of the gang had stayed. They spoke with Kathy Ivester, the Southern belle who lived at the house with her Vietnamese boyfriend. They showed Ivester their book of photos, and she was able to identify mug shots of all of the gang members who’d stayed with her the week of the robbery. She especially remembered David Thai. “That boy tied up my phone for hours,” noted Ivester.
American Gangsters Page 87
