The following afternoon, Ta and Gan went to the township hall, registered, and were proclaimed husband and wife.
Sen Van Ta returned to New York. It would be another year before he was able to secure the necessary immigration papers and retrieve his wife.
Ying Jing Gan arrived in the States in the spring of 1990, a frightened, innocent bride living for the first time with a husband she hardly knew. She grew to love Sen Van Ta, but she was also lonely. She missed her family back in Chekiang Province. She would rather have been living in China. But she knew she could not go back. Chinese tradition declared that if you were married to a chicken, you must follow the chicken; if you married a dog, you must follow the dog’s step.
When a Chinatown physician told her in December 1990 that she was pregnant, Ying Jing Gan was overjoyed. Now, while her husband worked, she would finally have a companion with whom she could pass the days. She would not be so lonely after all.
Gan could not believe how hard her husband and other Chinese people worked in the States. Yes, there was prosperity to be had—but the price was high. Sen Van Ta worked seven days a week, from 9:30 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. Gan felt their life together lacked a certain spiritual quality that she associated with rural life in Chekiang. In Chinatown, she and Sen Van Ta saw each other only at night, and often her husband was exhausted.
Gan first heard about the Born to Kill gang not long after she arrived in New York City. There was plenty of neighborhood gossip about robberies. Sometimes, she even heard gunshots and the sound of wailing sirens as police cars raced through the neighborhood. Only later, after her husband’s commercial space was robbed and he was beaten, did she become fully aware of the dangers involved in running a business in Chinatown.
Ying Jing Gan said one last prayer to Buddha, then extinguished the incense sticks and blew out the candles on the altar. When she climbed into bed, her husband was still awake.
“I don’t know,” she said to Sen Van Ta. “Maybe you should just give these people what they want. Life is more important.”
“No,” her husband insisted. “They ask time and time again. We cannot afford to keep paying money. Besides, it’s not right. They should work for a living just like everybody else. Now they rob the store. They beat me over the head. No way I cooperate with these people.”
Ta could see that his wife was troubled, and he regretted telling her about his problems. “Look,” he said. “I report all of this to the police. They know about the letter. They know about this man Thai. I trust they will not let anything bad happen. I trust they will protect us. Get these people in jail, where they belong.”
Sen Van Ta was trying to put a good face on things, but Ying Jing Gan was not so sure. Where she came from, the police were not somebody you turned to in times of trouble. In the People’s Republic of China, the police were instruments of the state; it paid to be suspicious of their authority.
Though doubtful, Ying Jing Gan decided to keep her concerns to herself. “Okay,” she conceded reluctantly. “Please, let’s go to sleep.”
Everything Gan had been taught led her to conclude that the course her husband had chosen would only make matters worse, but she was the wife, and he was the husband. If Sen Van Ta believed the police had their best interests in mind, she had no choice but to accept his wishes.
After all, the United States was an unfamiliar place. Ying Jing Gan was still a stranger in Chinatown.
Presumably, her husband knew best.
Chapter 8
With Tinh Ngo, detectives Bill Oldham and Alex Sabo knew they had a ringer. Unless the kid was bullshitting them across the board, which seemed unlikely given his situation, he definitely had inside knowledge about the workings of the BTK. In fact, during the interview at the Eighty-fourth Precinct, Tinh had thrown so many names and events at the detectives they really didn’t know where to begin.
Oldham and Sabo were both from the Major Case Squad, a unit with citywide jurisdiction that dealt mainly with robberies and kidnappings—types of crime commonly practiced by Asian street gangs. But neither detective was an expert on organized crime in Chinatown. Oldham had spent most of his time on the force in Narcotics; Sabo was considered one of the department’s best-informed detectives on the subject of art theft. When it came to Asian crime, their knowledge was mostly a mishmash of rumors and other information culled from individual robbery investigations.
They knew enough, however, to know that the BTK was probably the hottest thing going in Chinatown right now. Not only had the gang arrived on the local scene in a big way over the last year and a half, but the NYPD was constantly getting desperate calls from cops in other cities asking for help, explaining, “We just arrested half a dozen Vietnamese males on a local home invasion. We don’t know a thing about ’em, except they got BTK tattoos on their arms and New York City addresses.”
The most recent example of the gang’s far-flung influence involved an arrest that had taken place on Canal Street, just six days before Oldham and Sabo spoke with Tinh Ngo. In the middle of the afternoon, detectives from Toronto, with the help of local cops from the Fifth Precinct, surrounded Sonny Long, a twenty-eight-year-old BTK member wanted for murder. Two months earlier, Long and two other hitmen had sauntered into the Kim Bo Restaurant, a bustling establishment in Toronto’s Chinatown. “Don’t fuck with my dai low,” Long exclaimed to a table full of Vietnamese males, just before he and the others opened fire in the crowded restaurant. Two people were killed. One of the victims was shot six times.
At first, Canadian police believed the double homicide was a revenge hit for the shooting at the cemetery in Linden, New Jersey. The motive was never firmly established. Nonetheless, with this shocking midday hit Canadian police were becoming aware they had a sizable Vietnamese gang problem in their two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal. More than a few of the young gangsters they were arresting—including Sonny Long—had tattoos with the letters BTK underlining the gang’s insignia: a coffin accompanied by three lit candles.
Canada wasn’t the only place with an emerging BTK problem. In Stockton, California, police arrested Lam Trang, the gang member who had gunned down two young Flying Dragons on Canal Street at David Thai’s behest sixteen months earlier. After that well-known double homicide, Trang fled to Stockton, where he founded his own group of BTK gangsters. Before arriving, however, he had stopped in Port Arthur, Texas, where he was suspected of having played a part in at least one and possibly three murders.
The mobility of Lam Trang and other BTK members like him made it seem as if the gang was everywhere. Vietnamese gang members with BTK tattoos were now being arrested routinely in dozens of jurisdictions.
Of course, just because a young Vietnamese gangster had a coffin or a dragon or some other BTK tattoo on his arm didn’t mean he was directly affiliated with David Thai. Some of these gangs were made up of renegade New York members on the run. Some were merely local gangs that had appropriated the name. Either way, the BTK’s reputation had become so exalted throughout the Asian underworld that gangsters everywhere were attempting to capitalize on the mystique.
The fact that Vietnamese gangs had become something of a national and even international phenomenon was both exciting and daunting to Oldham and Sabo. For starters, they knew they could probably use Tinh Ngo to make local arrests, maybe build a few robbery and even homicide cases. But they also knew this kid was potentially more valuable than that. If even half of what Tinh Ngo had thrown at them proved true, they had the makings of a solid racketeering case. They were also well aware that to build such a case would take more than the efforts of two detectives from the NYPD’s Major Case Squad. They would need help from the Feds.
Just two weeks after their initial meeting with Tinh, the detectives made the connection they needed. As is often the case in law enforcement, it did not come about because of some directive from high up the federal chain of command. Instead, an industrious mid-level agent took it upon himself to establish contact with a rank-an
d-file detective, providing the impetus for an important investigation to begin taking shape.
Joe Greco, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been working a gun-trafficking case involving a network of Vietnamese gangsters based in Jersey City. The investigation had gotten under way the previous month, in January 1991. Greco and a handful of investigators with the Hudson County prosecutor’s office had learned that their main player, an unassuming Vietnamese immigrant named Hoa Tran, had strong BTK ties. Tran had a booth on Canal Street where he sold counterfeit watches. Joe Greco believed that Hoa Tran was also a significant supplier of weapons to David Thai’s BTK.
When Greco heard there were a couple of detectives with the NYPD’s Major Case Squad looking to build a case against the BTK, he immediately called Bill Oldham, who agreed to meet with him. Greco was already up to his neck in the Jersey City gun case. So while he could serve as a liaison with the NYPD, he probably wouldn’t be able to serve as case agent in a major investigation. As a result, Dan Kumor, an agent based in the bureau’s Manhattan office, was assigned to the case as well.
Kumor was young—just thirty years old—and he had been with ATF less than three years. Like many people in federal law enforcement, he had yet to familiarize himself with the workings of the Vietnamese underworld.
“BTK? What’s that?” he had responded when first told he would be working the case.
“BTK,” his supervisor repeated. “Born to Kill. The Vietnamese gang. Based in Chinatown.”
That rang a bell. “Oh, yeah, right,” said Kumor. “The shootout at the cemetery in Jersey. I remember that.”
Kumor called Greco at his office in Newark to ask about his dealings so far with the NYPD.
“Well,” said Greco, “there’s really not a lot for me to tell you just yet. I’ve only spoken with Oldham briefly. He thinks he’s got the beginnings of a good case.”
“What’s this about a possible confidential informant?” asked Kumor.
“Yeah. In fact,” Greco told Kumor, “I’m going out to Brooklyn later this week to meet the C.I. myself. Why don’t you come along?”
“Definitely,” Kumor replied.
Starting an investigation with a confidential informant already in place was certainly a plus, but both Greco and Kumor knew better than to get overly excited. In the underworld, there are no shortage of low-level crooks looking to cut deals with the government by supplying information. Whether these crooks ever proved to have anything useful, and whether they had the stamina needed to sustain dangerous and complex criminal cases over the long haul, was a different matter altogether.
Before Kumor met face-to-face with Bill Oldham or anyone else, he knew he had some homework to do. The most recent case he’d worked was a Jamaican drug investigation involving a cocaine and crack posse based uptown, on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. It had taken months for Kumor to learn the nuances of heavy Jamaican accents laced with an impenetrable patois rarely understood outside the shantytowns of Kingston. Now he had to learn about a whole new underworld, one peopled by criminals with names and habits that were, to him, equally strange and exotic.
The logical place to start was the case file on Joe Greco’s gun-trafficking investigation in Jersey City. In that case, investigators had managed to penetrate a small ring of gun merchants by using an undercover agent posing as a Jamaican posse member. Kumor appreciated the investigators’ ingenuity; no Vietnamese gangster would ever suspect that someone who looked and sounded like a Jamaican “rude boy” was a cop.
Already, the investigators had learned that the Vietnamese gangsters were getting most of their weapons from gun shops in Kentucky and Virginia, smuggling them into the New York-New Jersey area, and selling them through a network spread up and down the East Coast.
Along with familiarizing himself with Greco’s case, Kumor began delving into ATF intelligence files. Though little had been done with them over the years, the files on Asian organized crime were voluminous, made up mostly of government reports and assorted documents stamped CONFIDENTIAL. Reading the reports, Kumor learned for the first time about triads and tongs and how they interacted with traditional Chinatown gangs like the Flying Dragons and the Ghost Shadows. He read old files on Eddie Chan, Uncle Benny Ong, and other renowned figures in Chinatown.
Despite the abundant background data, there was little current, specific information on the Vietnamese underworld. For this, Kumor thumbed through back issues of the International Association of Asian Crime Investigators quarterly newsletter. He was amazed not only by the geographic breadth of criminal activity associated with Vietnamese gangsters, but by the level of violence. As far as Kumor could tell, what distinguished Vietnamese gangsters from the Italians, Jamaicans, Dominicans, and other organized hoodlums currently thriving in America’s vast criminal marketplace was the high levels of recklessness and desperation their actions seemed to reveal.
The other thing Kumor noticed was how tight-lipped they were. In all the IAACI newsletters and government reports, he could not find a single example of a case against Vietnamese underworld figures where a gang member had been “flipped”—the law enforcement term for getting a criminal to join the other side.
All of which made Agent Kumor doubly curious about this socalled confidential informant the NYPD would be introducing him to in Brooklyn.
At 302 Canal Street, in front of Sen Van Ta’s store, the sidewalk was packed with the usual human slipstream: a nonstop procession of shoppers, street merchants, and Chinatown residents. Small curbside tables had been set up for peddlers to hawk children’s toys, road atlases, and other miscellaneous items, leaving only a narrow walkway for pedestrians.
Inside the entrance to Ta’s store, only slightly removed from the hubbub of the street, Ying Jing Gan stared at her husband in disbelief. “You did what!?” she asked incredulously, her voice rising with each syllable.
“I had no choice,” her husband defensively responded. “The police came to me. They said, ‘Mr. Ta, we know you can make the identification. You must come with us.’ I had no choice!”
Gan was so stunned by what her husband was telling her that she asked him to repeat the entire story again.
A few days earlier, on the afternoon of February 13, 1991, Sen Van Ta had been working in his store when three BTK gang members came in demanding money. It was just a few days before the culmination of the New Year’s season, a time when gang members traditionally increase their extortionate demands for “lucky money.”
Sen Van Ta was fed up. First, the gangsters rob him and smack him in the head. Then they harass and threaten him. Now they come looking for money.
“How you expect us to pay money?” Ta admonished the lead gangster. “You already rob this store. Now we have nothing.”
Ta continued shouting at the gangsters, telling them he and his fellow workers had nothing left to give. The three BTK hoodlums scowled and left the store.
One hour later, they returned along with two other gang members, holding their hands inside their jackets as if they were packing concealed guns. Sen Van Ta recognized the one who seemed to be their leader; he was named LV Hong.
Like most BTK gang members, Hong was Viet-Ching. Nearly six feet tall and slightly older than the others, he had a mole on his cheek with a few hairs growing out of it, a distinguishing feature that made his face easy to remember. It was rumored among local merchants that LV Hong had been personally selected by David Thai and flown in from Texas to replace Amigo as the new Canal Street dai low.
“Don’t ever raise your voice with these boys,” LV Hong warned Sen Van Ta, asking, “Don’t you know about respect?” Once again the gangsters demanded money, and once again Ta said he had no money to give. Angrily, LV Hong and the others left the store.
Now Sen Van Ta was really irate. He pictured the gangsters coming back every day, demanding money and threatening his employees. So Ta did the unthinkable: He picked up the phone and called the cops.
One hou
r later, around five o’clock, two uniformed officers from the local precinct arrived at the store. Ta was still steaming. He told the policemen about the gangsters coming into the store not once, but twice. They seemed to be carrying weapons and they demanded money.
“Could you identify these guys?” one of the cops asked Ta.
“I know who they are,” answered Ta. “Everybody know who they are. They gather right across the street from here at two-seven-one Canal Street mall.”
“Well,” explained the cop, “we can arrest these people on a charge of aggravated harassment. But you have to make an identification. It’s called probable cause. If you don’t ID them, there’s nothing we can do.”
Standing inside his store three days later, Ta was still uncomfortable about what happened next. He told Ying Jing Gan that he was none too excited by the prospect of identifying these gangsters right in the middle of a crowded Canal Street mall. He told the police he would be willing to file a complaint, and maybe even pick the gangsters out of a lineup at a later date.
“Nah,” the cop replied. “The only way anything is gonna get done is if you finger this bad guy right now.”
Reluctantly, Sen Van Ta got into a police car with the two officers. They drove around the block and pulled up directly in front of the mini-mall at 271 Canal Street. Ta and the cops entered the mall and walked to the Pho Hanoi restaurant in the back. All around them, merchants and customers froze in their tracks.
LV Hong was seated at a table against the restaurant’s rear wall talking with three or four other gang members. With the two cops standing behind him, Sen Van Ta walked into the small luncheonette and pointed at LV Hong. “That’s the guy right there,” he declared.
“Okay,” said one of the cops to LV Hong. “Let’s go, pal. You’re coming with us.” They slapped a set of handcuffs on LV and led him through the mall and out onto the street. “Watch your head,” one of the cops cautioned LV, as he was lowered into the backseat of the police car.
Born to Kill Page 15
