American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  Uncle Lan cursed under his breath. The light turned green and Thai’s Jaguar continued up Sixth Avenue, then circled the block a couple of times. Each time it came past the store, Oldham was standing there like a lazy patrolman with nothing better to do. The BTK gangsters drove off angrily.

  Later, the investigators learned from Tinh what happened. “David and Lan see Billy there, they say they can’t do it. Mess everything up. Lan, he curse about it, say, ‘BTK have nothing but bad luck.’”

  In the days that followed, Tinh paid close attention to David Thai’s reaction to this latest failed BTK robbery. This was the third or fourth robbery that had fallen apart at the last minute, and by now Tinh was certain that somebody would be suspicious. But every time he brought up the subject around Anh hai or Uncle Lan, he got the same response. The gang was jinxed, they would say. They were having a bad year. The sun, the moon, and the stars were not properly aligned. Somebody’s karma was off.

  To Tinh, Anh hai’s inability to figure out why the gang’s robbery plans kept getting derailed was nothing short of astounding. From the day he’d first met David Thai at the Asian Shopping Mall on Canal Street, Tinh had believed the BTK leader to be infallible. To a man, Thai’s followers regarded him as all-seeing, all-knowing. His superior intelligence and sophistication was something Tinh and the other gang members not only took for granted—it was something they had built their lives around, a truism that served as a clarion call to young Vietnamese males throughout the United States.

  The possibility that David Thai might be just some run-of-the-mill gang leader with money in the bank and a nice conservative haircut was more than dismaying to Tinh; it was a realization that, once it began to sink in, turned his entire world upside down.

  “You sure this guy doesn’t suspect anything?” Kumor asked Tinh every time he came by ATF headquarters in the days following the thwarted robbery on Fourteenth Street.

  Tinh shook his head, more amazed than any of them. “No. David Thai, he don’t suspect nothing. He don’t know anything.”

  Then, uttering the unthinkable, Tinh added, “In fact, I think maybe David Thai—he not so smart. He not so smart after all.”

  Chapter 14

  Throughout the summer of 1991, as the BTK investigation continued to gain momentum, events far beyond Chinatown added an air of urgency to the efforts of Kumor’s team. Across the United States, the subject of gang violence was becoming a hot topic, with the inevitable panel discussions on national TV talk shows like Geraldo and Donahue.

  Street gangs in America had come a long way since the days when the Sharks and the Jets danced their way into the national imagination in West Side Story. Uzis, Tech-9s, and other automatic assault guns long ago replaced brass knuckles and switchblades as the weapons of choice in most gang altercations. Nearly ever major city and many mid-sized cities had experienced their share of drive-by shootings, with children and other innocent bystanders falling prey to a spasm of urban violence unlike anything ever seen in the United States before.

  Many people blamed drugs, though the reason for the country’s burgeoning gang problem was actually far more complex than that. In the West, the Crips and the Bloods had become the primary source of ego gratification for an entire generation of youths who might have been born within the boundaries of the continental United States but who were as far removed from any realistic hope of economic achievement as the lowliest immigrant. In Los Angeles and in smaller cities like Tacoma, Omaha, and St. Louis, gang colors had replaced school colors as a primary statement of identification for a staggering number of teenagers.

  In Southern California, Chicano gangs had existed in el barrio since at least the late-1950s and had by now become deeply entrenched in the state prison system. On the street, the traditional Latino gangs were now vying for turf with newer, younger gangs made up of recent immigrants from Central America. In the southwestern states and in Texas, gang violence had claimed the lives of American Latinos in dozens of cities, particularly those in close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border.

  As for Chinese and Vietnamese gangs, the phenomenon was not restricted by regional boundaries. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere, long-standing gangs had regenerated, and brand-new gangs were proliferating. As the country in general became more violent, so did the gangs’ criminal activities, with garden-variety robberies and extortions often ending in pointless homicides, brought about by the widespread availability of guns, guns, and more guns.

  When it came to the country’s growing, multiethnic gang problem, New York City, ironically, had always been something of an exception. In New York, youth gangs were something a wayward kid might join in his early teens before moving on to a more serious, market-driven brand of criminal activity. Groups of people who gathered together to commit crimes in New York usually had some connection to a larger social framework, either within their own community or, in the case of the Mafia, the city at large. Because of the city’s population density, criminal activity for profit was stringently organized. Thus, New York City didn’t have a “gang” problem. It had an organized-crime problem.

  The one part of the city where street gangs had been a significant factor was Chinatown. But even, in Chinatown the gangs had always been part of a larger criminal structure. Gang activity, as violent as it may have been, was usually predicated on a move for turf or power based on a clear-cut profit motive. In that sense, gang activity seemed to be engineered by forces that were readily understood—at least to the people of Chinatown.

  What had terrified everyone so much about the emergence of the BTK was that it appeared to represent a more anarchistic style of gang behavior, one that had the potential to overtake the area’s traditional patterns, establishing a senseless, 1990s style, where innocent bystanders would fall prey to random, disorganized bloodletting.

  In July 1991—three weeks before the BTK’s foiled robbery attempt on Fourteenth Street—an incident occurred that stoked these fears. At one of Chinatown’s busiest intersections, a tourist was accidentally shot and killed during a gang dispute.

  Rhona Lantin, a twenty-six-year-old bride-to-be from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been out for dinner with a group of friends. Around 11:30 P.M., she was sitting in the passenger seat of a Ford Explorer driving north on Mulberry Street. As the vehicle crossed Bayard Street, there was a sudden pop, pop that sounded so much like exploding firecrackers few pedestrians seemed to notice. The Explorer rolled to a halt as Rhona Lantin slumped over in her seat, shot through the head with a .38-caliber bullet.

  It was the night before the Fourth of July holiday and the streets had been swamped with revelers, but no witnesses came forward. Bayard Street ran through the heart of Ghost Shadows territory, and the word on the street was that the shooting stemmed from a power struggle between rival members within the gang. Rhona Lantin, a popular graduate student at the University of Maryland, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Among other things, innocent bystanders getting shot while dining or shopping in the neighborhood was not conducive to a brisk, profitable commercial trade. Once again, gang activity was threatening Chinatown’s “life’s blood,” a state of affairs that brought about the inevitable loud demands from politicians and business leaders for swift police action against the gangs.

  As if the unpredictable antics of Chinatown’s many gang members weren’t trouble enough, Dan Kumor and the BTK investigators were feeling the heat from other quarters as well. Though few people were aware of it at the time, a major FBI investigation was under way against the Green Dragons, a gang centered in Flushing, Queens, New York City’s second Chinatown. A team of investigators more than twice the size of Kumor’s ATF squad had been gathering evidence for months and was rumored to be on the brink of announcing a RICO indictment against the gang.

  Like the BTK, the Green Dragons were relatively new on the scene. Comprised mostly of recent immigrants from Fukien Province on China’s southeastern coast, the gang ha
d been founded in 1987 by Paul Wong, better known as Foochow Paul. In June of 1989, rival gangsters ambushed Foochow Paul outside a private house in Flushing, filling him with four bullets. While he was recuperating, Green Dragon gang members, on the pretext of being relatives, guarded Paul Wong around the clock, using handguns that had been smuggled into Wong’s hospital room in the hollowed-out core of a Yellow Pages.

  Foochow Paul survived the assassination attempt, then fled the United States to China. Although he remained the gang’s overseer, the Green Dragons’ daily operations were subsequently controlled by Chen I. Chung, a skinny twenty-year-old Taiwanese American.

  Chen I. Chung presided over a gang of some forty members that robbed and extorted money from restaurants, nightclubs, and pool halls throughout Flushing and the nearby neighborhood of Elmhurst, Queens.

  Along with the BTK, the Green Dragons had initiated a criminal reign of terror that obliterated Chinatown’s traditional borders and balance of power. The more deeply entrenched gangs of the 1970s and 1980s—the Ghost Shadows and the Flying Dragons—had given way to a new generation, of which the Green Dragons were a prime example. They preyed on merchants in a community more prosperous and slightly more middle-class than the city’s older Chinatown. They were not connected to any of the traditional tongs or business associations. And they were extremely violent.

  It was the Green Dragons who murdered Tina Sham, the young woman who testified against a member of the gang in court. The horrific killing of Tina Sham and her boyfriend had haunted Ying Jing Gan in the weeks leading up to the death of her husband, Sen Van Ta.

  Along with being brutal, the Green Dragons were reckless. Another of their many killings involved a young Korean student gunned down in a drive-by shooting the previous winter. The hitmen had mistaken the student for a member of the BTK, who’d been infringing on Green Dragon territory in Queens at the time.

  Cathy Palmer, an assistant United States attorney based in the Eastern District of New York, was handling the federal prosecution of the murderous Green Dragons. A small, bespectacled woman in her thirties, Palmer had played a key role in most of the major Asian-crime cases in recent years. She’d indicted Golden Triangle drug lords, and once received a package at her office with a loaded gun inside, rigged to fire when the packaged was opened. Fortunately for Palmer, the gun was discovered and the assassination attempt foiled. “The Dragon Lady,” as she was affectionately known to fellow members of the bar, cops, and newspaper reporters, had gone on to become the foremost Asian-crime prosecutor in New York City, if not the entire United States.

  Dan Kumor, Bill Oldham, and the other investigators working the BTK case knew that if the FBI’s Green Dragon case broke around the same time as their BTK indictments, they could expect little coverage in the local press. Kumor and Oldham, in particular, had no intention of spending a year of their lives investigating the BTK, delivering the case gift-wrapped to a prosecutor, then having it overshadowed by an FBI case. As a result, Kumor and Oldham began pestering their own assistant United States attorney, Alan Vinegrad, to at least begin the process of moving toward an indictment.

  Vinegrad was adamant. “We’re just not there yet,” he told the investigators. “We need more incriminating conversations on tape. We need more circumstantial evidence. We need more potential witnesses.”

  Kumor and Oldham mumbled something under their breath about Vinegrad being unnecessarily cautious, but secretly they knew he was right. If they moved the case to trial prematurely, they would only wind up looking bad in the long run. Of course, if they waited too long, the next innocent civilian fatality might be from a BTK bullet, and how was that going to make them look?

  Kumor, Oldham, and the other investigators continued pressing forward, trying as best they could to ignore the considerable pressures mounting around them.

  Inside the investigation’s tenth-floor headquarters at the ATF building on Church Street, agent Albert Trinh hunched over a small tape recorder, a set of headphones clamped to his ears. He listened carefully for a moment, then clicked off the recorder. “Okay, Timmy,” said Trinh, taking off the headphones, “this part here where Son says to the merchant, ‘I want to get paid.’ And the merchant says, ‘I paid before.’ And Son replies, ‘I want more. I want twenty dollars, that’s it.’”

  “Yes,” remarked Tinh.

  “You’re sure he said ‘want’ and not ‘need’? Because legally, there’s a big difference between ‘want’ and ‘need.’ One implies coercion.”

  “Coercion?” Tinh repeated the word quizzically, trying to enunciate the many syllables without tripping over his tongue.

  Albert Trinh smiled. “Coercion,” he repeated. “It means pressuring somebody into doing something they don’t want to do.”

  In the three weeks since Albert Trinh and Tinh first met, they’d spent a couple of hours almost every day going over Tinh’s secret recordings and the transcripts of those recordings. In many cases, the recordings were extremely difficult to understand. Some had been made in clamorous restaurants or on busy street corners, and the incidental background noises sometimes overwhelmed the conversations. Working with Tinh, Albert Trinh was attempting to fine-tune the transcripts, as well as transcribe and translate more recently recorded tapes.

  The tape Albert and Tinh were currently working on was one Tinh had made two days earlier, on Saturday, July 27, 1991. During a surveillance on Canal Street in the middle of a busy afternoon, Tinh had circulated with a handful of gang members collecting extortion money. The gang members themselves referred to the process as collecting “tax money.”

  Though the money collected from individual store managers and street peddlers was sometimes as little as twenty dollars, the gang’s weekly extortion rounds were the backbone of their entire operation. By the end of a typical day, the gang members could have collected as much as $2,000, which was usually distributed to various dai lows to buy food for the gang’s rank and file. More important than the money, however, was the fact that by continuously reasserting its presence, the gang was making it clear to area merchants who was boss on Canal Street.

  The July 27 surveillance was the second time investigators had wired Tinh while he and the others collected tax money. One month earlier, on June 29, they’d set up a team of ATF agents across the street from the Asian Shopping Mall, at 271 Canal Street. From the first floor of a bank that was closed for the day, the investigators monitored the gang with video and still cameras. They did the same thing again on July 27, recording a group of BTK members led by Minh Do, who made his rounds wearing a T-shirt that spelled out the BTK philosophy. Across the front of Fat Minh’s T-shirt, in English, was printed, “Money talks, bullshit walks.”

  Albert Trinh resumed following the group on tape. “Hey, Mr. Owner, help us out,” he heard Fat Minh demanding of a merchant.

  “Help what?” the merchant asked.

  “Money, what else you think?” answered Fat Minh. “Think you’ll help us some other way? Only money.”

  Trinh remembered this conversation; in fact, he witnessed it. Because he was Vietnamese, it was possible for Albert to circulate in the area without being noticed. Dressed casually in shorts and a T-shirt, he could supplement the electronic surveillance by following the gang on their rounds, staying within a few feet of Tinh, Fat Minh, and others, eavesdropping while they moved from store to store.

  Albert was mildly surprised that Fat Minh and the others rarely had to resort to intimidation or even raise their voices as they made their collections. In the past, when the gang first began to make its presence felt on Canal Street back in 1989, “muscle” had been needed. Merchants were sometimes slapped around, street peddlers were chased off the block, store windows broken. In stubborn cases like Sen Van Ta, more drastic measures were taken.

  By now, everyone pretty much got the picture.

  Seated at ATF headquarters, Albert pulled off the headphones, picked up a pen, and continued transcribing bits of conversations. First, he
wrote down the conversation in Vietnamese; later, it would be translated into English.

  Even for someone who knew the language, it was painstaking work. Vietnamese is a tonal language, spoken with differing regional accents and pronunciations. In Vietnamese, the words spoken are important, but just as important is the way in which those words are spoken—whether a person’s voice goes up or down, whether the intonation comes from the throat or is given a flat nasal twang. Simple variations of pronunciation can drastically alter the meaning of a word or phrase. A common word like ma could have two dozen different meanings. With a slight tonal variation, a phrase like “May Vietnam live for ten thousand years” might easily come out as “The sunburned duck is lying down.”

  That, plus the fact that the tapes had been recorded under such noisy, difficult conditions, made transcribing them a numbing, meticulous task. Even a normally focused worker like Tinh got bored easily. Albert, a hard taskmaster, had to stay on him.

  In the weeks since Tinh and Albert first met, they’d gotten to know and like each other, though it seemed an unlikely match at first. Albert was so clean-cut and his English so fluent that at first, Tinh could hardly believe he was a fellow countryman. Immediately after they met, Tinh asked Dan Kumor, “What is this guy, Japanese or something?”—an observation that was not meant as a compliment.

  But once they began working on the tapes together, they developed an easy, respectful rapport. Tinh had never met anyone like Albert—an educated, well-adjusted Vietnamese American around the same age as himself. To break the monotony of working on the tapes, Tinh would ask Albert endless questions about growing up in the United States, where he got his education, how he’d become an ATF agent.