Born to Kill

by T. J. English

  “Yeah,” agreed Kumor. “But what about Fifty-first and Eighth Avenue? How come they never met out here like they were supposed to?”

  Oldham squirmed in his seat. “Uh, I guess that was Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, not Brooklyn.”

  Despite the gravity of the situation, Kumor had to chuckle. Billy Oldham, he knew, was the kind of guy who did not like to admit his mistakes. Oldham had assumed Tinh meant Brooklyn when he meant Manhattan—and cops were supposed to know that you never assumed anything.

  In the five or six weeks Kumor had been working around the clock with Oldham, he’d actually grown to like him. Most of his initial impressions still held true. Oldham was arrogant, condescending, and had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way. He had especially angered Detective Alex Sabo, who was supposed to be his partner, and ATF Agent Don Tisdale. They felt Oldham was deliberately keeping them in the dark about important details of the investigation and denying them access to the C.I.

  Kumor knew all this, but he still had to admire Oldham’s chutzpah. Though only in his late thirties, which was still relatively young for a detective, Oldham had the self-confidence of a twenty-year veteran. Within the police department he was a renegade and a loner who did things his way. Kumor was the exact opposite, a conscientious federal employee trained to do everything by the book. He took a certain vicarious pleasure in the way Oldham circumvented red tape by taking matters into his own hands, though he could see now that Oldham was just as prone as the next guy to make a rookie mistake.

  “Okay,” said Kumor, doing Oldham a favor by ignoring his screwup. “I’m gonna go to headquarters and make some calls. Keep in touch. Lemme know if you hear anything new.”

  This was the predicament they’d known was bound to present itself sooner or later. The challenge was to prevent the crime from happening without tipping their hand to the gang members and blowing the larger investigation. If they moved in and arrested the robbers without giving it some thought, they risked exposing their informant, possibly getting him killed. If they didn’t move fast enough and the robbery did take place, the investigators might wind up with a dead Asian merchant on their hands.

  Kumor called the state highway patrol on the outside chance they might spot the two-car caravan heading north. It wasn’t likely, considering the trip to Rochester might take the BTK crew through three different states on a half dozen different highways, depending on which route they took. After two or three hours at the ATF office waiting to hear from someone, Kumor left, driving through the Holland Tunnel back to his apartment in New Jersey. He knew it was a good six-hour drive from Manhattan to Rochester. All he and Oldham could do was wait; hopefully they would hear from Tinh as soon as he arrived.

  By the time 2:00 A.M. rolled around, Kumor had begun to think about bed. Then the phone rang.

  “Okay,” said Oldham. “You got a pen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got beeped about five minutes ago. There was a phone number, followed by Timmy’s code—three-zero-zero. When I called the number, I got a receptionist at the EconoLodge motel on Jefferson Road, just outside Rochester. He said a group of Asian males checked in half an hour earlier.”

  Kumor wrote down the address and phone number. “Okay. I’ve already called the nearest ATF office up there, in Buffalo. They can set up a surveillance, pick up Tinh and the others as soon as they get outta bed. Also, I’m gonna go up there myself—catch a flight first thing in the morning.”

  “I hope those guys up there know what they’re doing and don’t expose Timmy somehow by mistake,” Oldham said.

  “That’s why I’m goin’ up there,” Kumor assured him. “’Cause we don’t wanna take that chance. Hopefully, I can get there before the agents have to make a move.”

  It was 3:00 A.M. by the time Kumor got off the phone. A few hours later, after a brief cat nap, he was on a commercial airliner high over New York State, headed north toward Rochester.

  Earlier that morning, around 1:00 A.M., Tinh Ngo and the others had arrived at the outskirts of Rochester, a gray, industrial city on the banks of Lake Ontario, forty miles from the Canadian border. Tinh was bleary-eyed from the long drive along dark back roads through densely forested stretches of the Empire State.

  First, they had gone to the Holiday Inn at 1111 Jefferson Road, where David Thai had told them to ask for “Alan Yee,” his alias. The gang members found Anh hai with his girlfriend, Sophia, in room 312.

  Tinh, Uncle Lan, Son, and Minh Do took seats in the cramped room. Sophia, who did not speak Vietnamese, sat in bed filing her nails and watching television while Anh hai explained what he had planned for the following morning. Tinh marveled at how Thai had fine-tuned his method of withholding specific details until the last minute. Even the exact city had been kept secret until earlier that day, which was why Tinh had been unable to notify his police contacts until it was almost too late.

  “This robbery should be very simple,” David assured his gang brothers. The Ming Jewelry Store, a retail outlet located in an outdoor shopping mall five minutes away, was just waiting to be taken. Thai had checked the place out. There were only two employees, a husband and wife. The husband was usually in the back doing repair work while his wife tended to the customers.

  David suggested that Uncle Lan and Son go in first; one minute later, Minh Do and Tinh should follow. Uncle Lan and Son would both have guns, Minh Do a knife. It would be Tinh’s responsibility to break the glass counter and steal the jewelry, just like he had in Doraville.

  “If the owner fight with you, just put the gun to his head and pull the trigger,” Anh hai counseled Son, his voice firm but calm.

  The gang members nodded solemnly.

  Lan Tran had a suggestion. “Listen,” he said, “if anybody need to shoot, let me. I have the three-eighty. It won’t make so much noise like Son’s forty-five.”

  It was agreed that if any killing needed to be done, Uncle Lan would take care of it, using the smaller, quieter .380.

  Tinh, Minh Do, Son, and Lan left David Thai’s room around 1:30 A.M.. They drove a quarter of a mile down Jefferson Road and checked into the EconoLodge motel, using Lan Tran’s Texas driver’s license for identification.

  Well into the predawn hours, Tinh lay in bed worrying whether the investigators would be able to do anything to prevent the robbery. He had been able to call Oldham’s beeper when the other gang members were in the bathroom, but there was no telling what the consequences of that might be. Would the local authorities be notified and attempt to stop the gang members? If so, would Lan and the others resist? And what if the cops weren’t notified in time?

  This last possibility scared Tinh the most. If the robbery went ahead as planned, how was this going to affect his standing with the government? And what if someone got killed, just like during the dark, disastrous heist in Doraville?

  Tinh thrashed around in bed until the morning sunlight began to peep through the cheap motel-room curtains. Around 8:00 A.M., he got up and stepped into the shower, just a few minutes before Lan Tran, Son, and Minh Do also arose.

  “Okay,” said Uncle Lan when they had all gathered in the front room, “Timmy and me go get Anh hai. Minh and Son, you take the Buick and follow us, okay?”

  While Minh Do and Son waited in the Buick near the EconoLodge, Uncle Lan and Tinh drove the short distance to the Holiday Inn and knocked on the door of room 312.

  “Good morning, little brothers,” said David Thai, opening the door and greeting them sleepily. Tinh and Lan waited as David and Sophia quickly showered and dressed.

  When all four of them left twenty minutes later, Tinh frantically scanned the parking lot for some sign of Oldham or any other cop. There was none. Now what? thought Tinh. Am I supposed to just go along on this robbery? Am I supposed to stand by idly while Uncle Lan shoots another innocent store owner!?

  The synapses in Tinh’s brain snapped like a string of holiday firecrackers. In fact, he was so skittish he hadn’t look
ed closely enough. Earlier that morning, an ATF surveillance team had spotted the gangsters’ Caddie and Buick at the EconoLodge and had been sitting on the motel ever since. Together with state and local authorities, a contingent of twenty-five lawmen were spread out in twelve different vehicles, parked behind buildings and around corners, linked by two-way radio and ready to pounce.

  It was a slightly overcast day, with the sun occasionally peeking out from behind the clouds, then disappearing instantly. David Thai and Sophia got into Thai’s gray Jaguar and pulled out onto Jefferson Road. Lan and Tinh followed in the Cadillac. Both cars came to a stop at a red light directly in front of the motel.

  Suddenly, from all sides, cars and vans appeared bearing the insignia of the New York State Police, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. By the time the traffic light turned green, the dozen or so police vehicles had screeched to a halt, surrounding the Caddie. Apparently, no one had told the lawmen anything about a Jaguar. As they forced the Caddie down the road and into the parking lot near the EconoLodge, David and Sophia sped away.

  At the EconoLodge, another cortege of vehicles had surrounded Son and Minh Do in the Buick. When the Caddie was brought to a halt alongside, a swarm of agents and cops, many with guns drawn, jumped out of the cars and surrounded the BTK gangsters.

  “Out of the car!” an ATF agent commanded. “Out of the car with your hands on your head!”

  Meanwhile, Dan Kumor had landed in Buffalo around 7:30 A.M., where he was met by an ATF agent from the local office. They piled into a car and raced toward Rochester.

  Kumor was almost as anxious as Tinh had been. The possibility that his informant might be exposed had been gnawing at him ever since he left Jersey. It wasn’t hard to imagine the agents on the scene searching Tinh in front of the other gang members, finding his tape recorder, and blowing his cover.

  Forty-five minutes later, when Kumor and the agent arrived at the scene, Tinh and the others had just been loaded into the back of the police cars. Kumor flung open his car door and bounded toward the agent in charge.

  “Don’t worry,” the agent informed Kumor after introducing himself, “everything’s in control here.” Then the agent asked, “By the way, is one of these guys a C.I.?”

  Kumor’s gnawing suddenly grew worse. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “Look, I think you better let me handle this.”

  Son and Minh were in the backseat of one police vehicle, Lan Tran and Tinh in another. Kumor took them out one at a time to ask questions, so none of the others would be suspicious when he finally approached Tinh.

  “Is everything okay?” Kumor asked his informant quietly.

  “Yes,” answered Tinh, who had never before been so happy to see a friendly, familiar face in a sea of gun-toting lawmen.

  “What happened?”

  Tinh explained how the gang members were driving off to do the robbery when the cops descended. Kumor was disappointed to hear that David Thai and Sophia had not been stopped.

  “Where’s your recorder?”

  “Oh, I left that back in Brooklyn,” answered Tinh, much to Kumor’s relief.

  Tinh told Kumor where the gang members had hidden their weapons. Sure enough, a few minutes later the agents found two handguns—a Taurus .380 and a Llama .45—under the hood of the Buick, stashed in a bag behind a headlight. Ammunition clips for both guns were later found under the driver’s seat.

  The guns posed a problem that Kumor had not anticipated. If the gang members were placed under arrest, sooner or later they were going to wonder who had tipped off the police. But if Kumor didn’t arrest them, they might wonder why, since they had just been caught with two unregistered handguns.

  A little creative fiction was called for.

  “You understand why you were stopped, right?” Kumor asked the four gang members once they had been brought out of the police cars and huddled together in the parking lot.

  They shook their heads.

  “Well,” said Kumor, “we thought you guys were drug dealers. We had information you guys were smuggling cocaine and heroin up here. You know what I’m talkin’ about?”

  Again, all four shook their heads, trying to look like innocent altar boys.

  “We know now you guys aren’t the ones we were looking for,” Kumor continued. “But we found these guns in the car. You know anything about these guns?”

  “We don’t know,” answered Lan Tran. “This car belong to a friend in New York, in Brooklyn.”

  Kumor nodded. “Okay, well, your friend shouldn’t have these guns in the car. You’re gonna have to explain this to a judge, all right? I’m gonna have to give you a summons.”

  The gang members sniffled, coughed, and avoided eye contact with Kumor.

  “See, normally we’d arrest you and take you before a judge today. But it’s Mother’s Day. Judges up here don’t sit on Mother’s Day. So we’re gonna let you go. But you’ll be getting a summons in the mail. Don’t ignore it or you’re gonna be in a lot of trouble. Understand?”

  Son, Minh, Lan, and Tinh all nodded their heads, then watched as the nearly two dozen agents and cops piled into their various vehicles and drove off. There was only one thing left for them to do: begin the long trek back toward New York City, where they would commiserate with one another, curse their bad luck, and begin preparations for the next BTK robbery.

  On his return flight that afternoon, Kumor looked out the window at a bed of soft, silvery clouds. “Mother’s Day!” a couple of agents had exclaimed, laughing on the way to the airport. The only reason Kumor had thought of it was because he had planned to visit his mother that day, until the BTK derailed his plans by suddenly embarking on their upstate foray.

  Okay, thought Kumor, so what if it was a lame excuse? It worked. They’d faced their biggest challenge yet and come through with flying colors. They’d gotten away with it.

  This time.

  Kumor clamped on a set of headphones and reclined in his seat, allowing himself to relax for the first time in the last twenty-four hours.

  Back in Manhattan the next day, after questioning Tinh in detail about the events leading up to and including the trip to Rochester, Kumor and the other investigators felt chastened. Yes, they had successfully prevented the robbery without blowing Tinh’s cover. But if Kumor had not arrived on Jefferson Road when he did, the entire investigation could have been pissed away. Obviously, they needed to improve communications, not only with Tinh but with the vast coterie of law enforcement people they would need to call on if the gang continued to hatch robbery schemes that took them beyond New York City.

  On the positive side, the investigators had accumulated a wealth of evidence pertaining to a serious felony: attempted robbery. They had taped conversations of the crime being discussed by gang members in the Brooklyn safe house. They had confiscated guns, which Kumor brought back on the plane with him. And they had numerous eyewitness accounts of gang members having been in Rochester the day the crime was scheduled to take place. Kumor, for one, felt that if they continued to thwart BTK robberies in this manner, reaping an impressive harvest of evidence each time, they were well on their way to establishing a comprehensive racketeering case.

  The foiled robbery also proved to be an important catalyst. One week later, Alan Vinegrad, an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, paid a visit to the ATF headquarters, where he met the various investigators assigned to the case and their star C.I., Tinh Ngo.

  A federal prosecutor was key to the investigators’ hopes of being able to nail the BTK by using federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statutes, a sweeping collection of laws that had grown out of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. RICO turned out to be the ultimate tool in the United States government’s fight against organized crime. Throughout the 1980s, the RICO statutes were used successfully against the Mafia in a number of highly publicized trials. More recently, RICO had also been use
d against Jamaican posses, Latin drug cartels, and even in some notorious cases of white-collar and corporate malfeasance.

  To successfully prosecute a RICO case, you needed mounds of evidence to establish an “ongoing criminal conspiracy” or “racketeering enterprise.” You also needed a federal prosecutor to champion your investigation, to shepherd it through the bureaucracy and commit the time, money, and manpower necessary to bring the case to trial.

  Alan Vinegrad, just thirty-one years old, had been with the United States Attorney’s office less than two years when he was handed the BTK case as a result of another, more experienced prosecutor’s taking a leave of absence. Like Kumor, Vinegrad was only vaguely aware of the BTK when the case first came his way. In fact, he drew a blank until his immediate supervisor reminded him, “You know, the shootout in the cemetery. The cemetery in New Jersey.”

  “Oh, yeah,” answered Vinegrad, “of course.”

  Vinegrad may have been a neophyte when it came to the BTK, but in his relatively brief tenure with the U.S. Attorney’s office he had acquired more than his share of expertise on the broader subject of Asian organized crime. Since joining the office in September 1989, he’d spent most of his time with the Eastern District’s narcotics bureau working on a massive Chinese heroin case involving what was, at the time, the single biggest seizure of heroin in U.S. history.

  That case had begun in October 1989 when an FBI-NYPD task force seized 820 pounds of China White, high-grade heroin from South-east Asia’s Golden Triangle, the infamous poppy-growing region that encompasses parts of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. The heroin had been discovered inside the rubber tires of garden carts, part of a huge shipment delivered to two residences in Queens. Once in New York, the heroin could be “cut,” or diluted, and sold primarily to African-American and Dominican distributors. With an estimated street value of roughly $1 billion, the shipment represented staggering profits for the Chinese businessmen and triad members who arranged the cargo’s safe passage halfway around the world.