Chapter 4
In October 1989, a few months before detective Doug Lee spotted David Thai buying bulletproof vests in Queens, Tinh Ngo got himself arrested. Given the level of serious criminal activity under way in the Asian community at the time, Tinh’s incarceration was petty. He, Kenny Vu, and three other gang members had been caught driving around Brooklyn with four unregistered handguns in the car. Tinh was ready to plead guilty as charged, but a court-appointed attorney told him to wait. Two of the guns weren’t even in working order—lowering the infraction from a felony to a misdemeanor—and two other gang members had already pleaded guilty to possession of one gun each. Eventually, Tinh’s case was dismissed, but not before he’d spent six long months in the notorious Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City’s preeminent penal institution.
At Rikers, Tinh had occasional flashbacks to the refugee camps, where a similar institutional drudgery prevailed. Given the twenty-two months he spent within the confines of a fenced-in compound in Thailand, Tinh seemed prepared for his time behind bars. But at least in the camps he had been surrounded by fellow countrymen, some even from Hau Giang, his home province. Rikers Island was an ethnic polyglot, with a seething criminal population fiercely divided along lines of race, color, and sexual predilection.
In his first week at Rikers, Tinh was taken under the wing of a renowned Vietnamese inmate known as LT, the unofficial dai low of the prison’s Asian population. “In here,” LT told Tinh, “we speak only to other Asians. If Chinese or Vietnamese get in a fight with some people, we must back them up. Don’t be afraid of black people, white people, Puerto Ricans. We defend you.”
LT explained that the other prisoners rarely messed with Asians, thanks to an incident that had occurred one year earlier. According to LT, some black inmates had been harassing him. So one night around Christmastime, LT and another Vietnamese inmate known as Shadow Boy went on a rampage, slicing the faces of black inmates with a straight razor. Said LT to Tinh, “We told them, ‘We have no gifts to open for Christmas, so we must open faces.’”
Despite LT’s paternalism and expressions of solidarity, Tinh found Rikers terrifying. Physically, few inmates were as diminutive as the Vietnamese. At five feet five and 125 pounds, Tinh was the norm for his group. He was afraid to go anywhere without at least three or four other Asian inmates.
On C Wing, where Tinh was housed, there were Vietnamese and Chinese representatives from all the Chinatown gangs. On the street, many of these people would have been rivals. Within the prison walls, they banded together as protection against a hostile, mostly non-Asian population.
Though small in stature, the Vietnamese inmates Tinh met at Rikers were among the toughest gangsters he had yet come into contact with. Many, like LT, were in for murder and assorted other harsh crimes. On those rare occasions when Tinh witnessed altercations between Asian and non-Asian inmates, the Vietnamese were always the first line of defense, their BTK tattoos serving as proud, garish badges of distinction. Tinh left Rikers Island with his convictions deeply reconfirmed that the only people he could count on in this mean, menacing world were his fellow gang brothers.
Upon his release in March 1990, Tinh used the BTK pipeline to facilitate his resettlement in the outside world. At Rikers, a gang member had given him Amigo’s pager number and told him to contact the Chinatown dai low as soon as he got out. Sure enough, Tinh beeped Amigo and was called back right away.
“Timmy,” said Amigo, “you out now? Good. Yes, we have a place for you.”
Since Tinh was identified with the Brooklyn faction of the BTK, Amigo set him up in a safe house in Bay Ridge, an old Italian and Irish working-class neighborhood in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge. There were five or six other gang members already living in the two-room apartment at the time. The day after moving in, Tinh took the subway to lower Manhattan, where he met Amigo at 267 Canal Street, a shopping arcade just a few buildings east of David Thai’s Pho Hanoi headquarters.
Tinh’s time in prison had altered his physical appearance in subtle but significant ways. No longer the wide-eyed innocent, he was leaner and harder, with the gaunt, feral look common to many Vietnamese gangsters.
“Timmy, you look like you get skinny in that place,” joked Amigo. “I better get you something to eat.” After stuffing himself with a huge bowl of pho, Tinh was told by Amigo, “Come on, I take you to see Anh hai.”
Tinh hadn’t had direct contact with David Thai in many months, not since the afternoon at the Carter Hotel when Anh hai smacked him around for stealing robbery proceeds. He was worried David might still be angry, but he needn’t have been. Thai knew how to play his role as both gang boss and benefactor. He knew that, unlike Chinese gang members, few Vietnamese coming out of prison had any family connections to depend on. David’s willingness to take care of his brothers, to provide food, rent, and companionship at such a vulnerable point in their lives, was one way of ensuring that the gang remained the center of all that was reliable and important to the boys of the BTK.
“Timmy,” offered David, “here’s two hundred dollars. Come by tomorrow, we have more for you.”
Anh hai also hooked Tinh up with a new beeper, second only to a tattoo as an important status symbol for Asian gangsters. Tinh simply walked over to E-5 Communications, an electronics store on Centre Street, one block north of Canal. In the past, the BTK had extorted money from and then robbed E-5 Communications until a special arrangement was worked out. Now, all a gang member had to do was show up with Amigo and say, “My name’s so-and-so. Born to Kill.” A special BTK notation was made by the customer’s name, and he was given unlimited free service on the finest beeper in the shop.
Armed with a new beeper and a fresh sense of freedom, Tinh was soon back into his usual routine, hanging out on Canal Street, at Chinatown amusement arcades, and at Maria’s Bakery, a large coffee and Chinese pastry shop where young gang members often gathered to plan crimes and engage in small talk.
While in prison, Tinh had heard about the shooting at Winnie’s Bar and other outrageous acts perpetrated by the BTK against the Ghost Shadows. The fact that bad feelings between the two gangs had escalated to the point where everyone seemed to think a war was imminent concerned him greatly. After all, Tinh had taken part in the robbery of two Ghost Shadows establishments—the massage parlor on Sixth Avenue and the Sinta Lounge. Neither time had he or his fellow bandits bothered to wear a mask or disguise. Before, their brashness had kept victims and rivals off-balance. But with a full-fledged gang war under way, there was no telling who might come looking for revenge.
Along with the obvious tension between gangs, Tinh was equally concerned about a story making the rounds in Chinatown that, if true, suggested the BTK was headed toward a day of reckoning that would make its current problems pale in comparison.
Apparently, the so-called Godfather of Chinatown, Kai Sui “Benny” Ong, had called for a meeting with David Thai. The eighty-one-year-old Ong, known in the community as Chut Suk, or Uncle Seven, was an “adviser-for-life” of the powerful Hip Sing tong. There was no figure more legendary and no leader more revered than Uncle Seven, an owlish, iron-willed octogenarian whose personal history seemed to encompass the entire dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Chinatown.
Born the seventh of nine sons to a poor bricklayer in the Toishan village of Harbin, Benny Ong had emigrated to the United States in 1921, at the age of twelve. Soon after his arrival in New York City, he took a two-dollar-a-week job in a laundry, developed a taste for gambling, and, on his eighteenth birthday, followed his older brother Sam into the Hip Sing. Like many young men of his generation, Benny Ong had played a role in the great tong wars of the 1920s and ’30s, during which territories and criminal rackets were established by the Hip Sing and On Leong tongs that remain deeply imbedded in the structure of modern-day Chinatown.
In 1935, Ong was arrested in connection with the death of a man during the robbery of a gambling game run by a rival tong. Legend h
as it that Ong was innocent and went to jail rather than implicate another Hip Sing member. Later newspaper reports revealed, however, that he admitted his guilt and provided the identities and whereabouts of three alleged accomplices. Either way, Ong was found guilty of murder and served the next seventeen years in an upstate New York prison. When he was paroled in 1952, he returned to Chinatown and picked up where he’d left off, eventually assuming leadership of the Hip Sing tong from his brother, who died of cancer in 1974.
Uncle Benny may have had a checkered past, but he was still a tong leader, which afforded him a position of considerable power. And his stature increased even more when, in the mid-1970s, he became a ranking member of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), Chinatown’s official governing body, comprised of leaders from the abundant family associations, district associations, and tongs.
As leader of the Hip Sing, Uncle Benny was believed to have been the first to establish strong ties between the tongs and the gangs. At the time Uncle Benny took over, the gangs were getting uppity, shaking down merchants, robbing tong-sponsored gambling parlors, and showing a general lack of respect toward community elders. Ong saw the value in incorporating gang members into the tong structure, where their activities would become more organized and perhaps less wantonly destructive to the community at large.
Of course, paying gang members to protect Hip Sing gambling halls and to apply pressure during territorial disputes was also a great personal benefit to Benny Ong. Benny’s power in Chinatown continued to grow, even though he was jailed again briefly in 1977 on charges of having bribed an immigration official.
The lengths that Uncle Seven was willing to go in utilizing the leverage of the gangs became a matter of great controversy in December 1982, following one of Chinatown’s most well-known gangland slaughters. Two days before Christmas, four gunmen from the Flying Dragons walked into the Golden Star tea room, a Chinatown saloon on East Broadway. Using an assortment of automatic weapons, they let loose a barrage of gunfire. Patrons dove for cover behind tables and booths. Shattered glass littered the room like confetti. By the time the gunmen fled, three people lay dead and eight more had been seriously injured.
The Golden Star was a popular gathering place for members of the Kam Lum, an upstart tong recently begun by a disaffected Hip Sing member. In Chinatown, trying to start a new tong in another tong’s territory was like trying to eat a bowl of chicken broth with chopsticks—it simply wasn’t going to work. Benny Ong viewed the very existence of the Kam Lum as a challenge to his authority. In a rare instance of public frankness, he was quoted in New York magazine as saying of the Kam Lum leader, “Sixty year I build up respect and he think he knock me down in one day?”
After the shooting, the angry Kam Lum leader first accused Ong of having masterminded the bloodbath, then had grave second thoughts. Eventually, he apologized to Uncle Seven and his tong all but disappeared from the scene.
Now, eight years after the Golden Star massacre, Benny Ong was faced with a new challenge in Chinatown—the sprawling aggregation of Vietnamese gangsters who had, among other things, disrupted the flow of commerce in Chinatown’s underground economy. From his familiar perch at the Hong Shoon restaurant on Pell Street, where he appeared daily wearing a short-brimmed gray fedora, Uncle Benny heard stories of these young Vietnamese hooligans who were challenging the community’s traditional power structure. Ong was not about to let a group of boys who had only recently arrived in Chinatown create such chaos, so he demanded a kong su, underworld slang for “negotiation.”
There were many in the community who felt that David Thai should have been flattered to share a plate of rice with Benny Ong. The very fact that Thai would be sitting at a table with the venerable Godfather of Chinatown was, in a way, a significant acknowledgment of the niche David had carved for himself. Presumably, in exchange for David’s reining in his gang brothers, the elderly tong leader would suggest some sort of power-sharing arrangement by which Thai could hold on to his lucrative Canal Street rackets.
Given the honor-bound nature of Chinatown’s underworld, the worst thing David could have done was ignore Benny Ong’s request for a meeting. Which is exactly what he did.
Of course, Thai knew that to ignore Benny Ong would be viewed as an unforgivable slight. The BTK had already offended everyone else in Chinatown by publicly trading gunfire with rival gangs. Although no blood had been shed, this was the worst insult of all. By not even responding, David was openly disparaging Uncle Seven, causing him to lose face. Uncle Benny would have to answer the insult.
Throughout history, Chinatown had experienced tong wars, gang wars, and retribution hits of every variety. In the lexicon of the triads, revenge was a god that required human sacrifice. Ominous forces had been put into play, and it would not take long for destiny to reveal itself to the members of the BTK, the people of Chinatown, and beyond.
On the morning of July 26, 1990, Tinh was asleep on a single mattress on the floor of his bedroom in the Bay Ridge safe-house apartment when one of his roommates shook him awake. “Timmy, Timmy, wake up,” urged Richie Huynh.
“What?” responded Tinh, still half asleep. “What is it?”
“You hear the news?” asked Richie.
“What news?”
“It’s Amigo,” said Richie. “He got killed last night.” Richie explained how Amigo had been gunned down on Canal Street while waiting for a taxi outside David Thai’s massage parlor.
Like everyone else, Tinh was deeply saddened by news of Amigo’s death. He could imagine no greater outrage than rival gangsters brazenly murdering one of the BTK’s most revered members in the middle of their home turf on Canal Street.
Two days later, Tinh would be forced to amend that evaluation when three Chinese hitmen sprayed the crowd at Amigo’s burial with gunfire, sending hundreds of mourners fleeing in a mad rush to avoid a sudden, unspeakable demise. From that point on, the BTK and their “journey” would never be the same.
BLOODY BURIAL, screamed the front page of the New York Daily News on Sunday, July 29, 1990. GANG WARFARE ERUPTS AT CEMETERY, trumpeted Newsday. Television and radio accounts added their own loud voices to the commotion. One national news program dusted off an old report suggesting that Vietnamese gangs like the BTK must be financed by powerful anti-Communist groups such as the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, or the Frogmen, a California-based gang comprised of former South Vietnamese soldiers trained in assassination and the sophisticated use of explosives.
It was hardly surprising that these reports lacked any direct evidence of a link between the organizations mentioned and the shooting at the cemetery. The mainstream media were like the cops, handicapped by a long tradition of neglect in regard to Asian issues. Now, a seething Chinatown gang war had burst into the open, and in the frenzy that followed, a bewildered media was flailing in search of an explanation.
Staged like a scene from a movie, with hitmen dressed in long black coats bearing flowers, the shooting was certainly dramatic. In fact, the hit may well have been styled after the Hong Kong gangster flicks that gang members—both Chinese and Vietnamese—viewed so assiduously at the Rosemary, the Sun Sing, and other Chinatown movie theaters.
Since the mid-1980s, the Hong Kong film industry had been producing a seemingly endless stream of highly distinctive, hugely popular movies set in the Asian underworld. In Bullet in the Head, A Better Tomorrow, and Love and Death in Saigon—to name a few—moments of romanticized male bonding were interspersed with images of balletic, slow-motion violence. Some gang members viewed these movies as idealized versions of their own lives, and they reveled in the heavily stylized carnage and deliriously high body counts.
Most popular of all were the films of director John Woo, the Sam Peckinpah of the Hong Kong cinema. Woo’s movies always contained at least one epic shootout in a dramatic setting. In The Killer, a few dozen gangsters wage war in a Gothic cathedral backlit with thousands of candles. In Hardboiled,
gangsters open fire on the movie’s hero in a large, hectic urban hospital.
The gangsters who sprayed the BTK with gunfire at the cemetery in New Jersey had outdone even John Woo. The setting was not only picturesque, it also contained a cultural subtext that most Asians would immediately recognize.
While virtually all societies treat the burial of a loved one as a sacred ritual to be conducted with reverence and respect, Eastern religions have a uniquely holistic view of the afterlife. The overwhelming majority of Chinese and Vietnamese, steeped in the traditions of Buddhism, are raised to believe that after death comes rebirth and then life again, on and on in a cycle. Death is viewed not as a conclusion, but as a reunification of the deceased with his or her ancestors. The burial process is especially important, because it determines the degree of tranquillity a being will have as he or she passes from life on earth into the afterlife.
Apparently, Amigo’s passage was going to be a bumpy one. The gods had every reason to be offended by what took place at Rosedale Memorial Park Cemetery. More than just an attempted gangland hit, it was a desecration, one that had been carefully orchestrated to exhibit the same level of disrespect toward the BTK that the BTK had shown toward Chinatown’s underworld traditions.
After the shooting, the myriad forces that had brought about the murder of Amigo and the bloody aftermath remained murky. For such an important sequence of events to have taken place, however, knowledgeable observers both in Chinatown and in law enforcement felt certain that Uncle Seven must have played a role. They also knew it was unlikely that anyone would ever prove that in court. For his part, David Thai was convinced that whoever gave the actual go-ahead, the muscle was provided by the Ghost Shadows.
Born to Kill Page 8
