Born to Kill

by T. J. English

  “Master the language,” Albert’s father told him time and time again. “Become an American. You will probably never be returning to Vietnam.”

  Albert took his father’s advice to heart. He was an exceptional student in grade school, high school, and at the University of California at Irvine, where he graduated with a degree in social ecology. He took some postgraduate law courses, served for a time as an orderly at a hospital in San Antonio, then spent three months working for the Orange County Public Defender’s office. When Albert decided to pursue a career in law enforcement, his parents were supportive, though it was an unusual choice for a young Vietnamese-American male.

  As a Los Angeles resident, Albert knew all about Vietnamese gangs. As a student in college he had conducted a research study on gangs in the Los Angeles area. He was surprised to learn that, although local police estimated there were as many as fifty different Vietnamese gangs in Orange County alone, the gang members were not all starving refugees from failed foster families. In fact, many of Southern California’s Vietnamese gang kids were from middle- or lower-middle-class families. They joined gangs for the same reason most Chicano, Chinese, and African American youths had—protection, power, and self-respect.

  In the faces of the young gangsters who comprised New York City’s Born to Kill gang, Albert Trinh saw something else. These were the kids he had wondered about years ago when video footage of Vietnam’s “boat people” was first beamed around the world. Like everyone else, Albert had been riveted by the images of destitute refugees hanging from flimsy boats, risking everything for freedom and a new life in the United States. It had made him feel fortunate to be among the first wave of refugees who’d escaped by air with their families relatively intact. The mug shots that Albert perused now were those who had not been so lucky, the lost souls he’d heard more established Vietnamese refugees sometimes refer to as bui doi, “the dust of life.”

  Trinh was not given much time to ponder the hapless fate of his fellow refugees. Before he’d even finished flipping through the entire BTK photo book, Kumor tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, we need you to come with us,” he said. “We’ve got an arrest going down in Brooklyn. It’ll give you a chance to get your feet wet.”

  Thirty minutes later, Albert found himself sitting with Kumor in an ATF sedan, parked on a side street in Sunset Park, lying in wait to arrest Tuan Tran, otherwise known as Blackeyes. Nobody had bothered to tell Albert who Blackeyes was, but he could tell from the placement of more than a dozen arresting agents around Blackeyes’ apartment building that he was something more than a petty parole violator.

  In the more than two years since Blackeyes first initiated young Tinh Ngo into the ranks of the BTK, he’d led something of a charmed life in the Vietnamese underworld. When Tinh first met him, Blackeyes was considered the gang’s Brooklyn dai low. He led Tinh, Kenny, and Tommy Vu on numerous robberies, including Tinh’s first, the massage parlor at 59 Chrystie Street in Chinatown. Tinh and the others had always looked up to the charismatic gangster with “Buddhist ears,” who was the epitome of what they hoped to become. Blackeyes dressed sharp, ate American food, and he was popular with Chinese and even some of the American girls who hung out at the pool halls and skating rinks frequented by Chinatown gangsters.

  In fact, Blackeyes was so popular with the little brothers of the BTK that David Thai soon began to see him as something of a rival. In the summer of 1990, when Blackeyes branched off from the gang and declared he was no longer a member of the BTK, rumors began to circulate that Anh hai had put out a contract on his life. For a short time, Blackeyes operated freely as an independent operator, a posture virtually unheard of in Asian crime circles. But rumors about young BTK hitmen looking to make a name for themselves by taking him out soon got Blackeyes packing. He fled New York City and was rumored to have formed his own small gang, a group that roamed the eastern seaboard committing home invasions and other crimes.

  On the afternoon of the Fourth of July—just one week before Albert Trinh arrived in New York—Blackeyes committed his most audacious crime. Far from the streets of New York, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Blackeyes and six other gangsters burst into the Jabil Circuit Company, located on Roosevelt Avenue. Ten employees were tied up with duct tape and held at gunpoint while the gangsters fleeced the company’s warehouse, stealing approximately one million dollars’ worth of computer chips.

  It must have seemed like the heist of a lifetime, but it didn’t take long to turn sour. A few days after the robbery, two suspects surrendered to authorities in Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, and implicated Blackeyes.

  When Kumor and the other investigators heard from Tinh that Blackeyes was back in the New York City area looking to sell a shipment of Intel-series computer chips, they immediately volunteered to make the arrest. They knew all about Blackeyes’ adversarial relationship with David Thai and were hoping that maybe, before Blackeyes was shipped off to authorities in Florida, he could be talked into cutting a deal.

  Now, waiting in the car less than a block from Blackeyes’ apartment on Forty-sixth Street, Albert Trinh could feel the excitement. He had never been to New York City before and was amazed at how much it looked like countless photographs and movies and TV shows. The old Brooklyn tenements were musty and run-down; across the street a handful of children were playing in the torrent of an open fire hydrant, trying to take the edge off the sweltering July heat. The avenue was alive with people of all ages talking and hanging out, teeming with a neighborhood atmosphere unlike anything Albert knew in Los Angeles.

  Blackeyes finally ambled out the front door of his apartment building, dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt. Within seconds, the team of agents swooped down.

  “Let’s make this easy, Blackeyes,” advised the arresting agent.

  Blackeyes appeared only mildly startled, and he surrendered with no resistance.

  At a local police precinct, Kumor and Tisdale sat Blackeyes down in a small, windowless room and tried to talk him into giving them some useful information. They got nowhere.

  “Let me try,” Albert suggested to Kumor. “I can speak to him in Vietnamese.”

  Alone with Blackeyes inside the stuffy interrogation room, Albert tried the nice-guy approach. “You and me,” he reassured Blackeyes, “we’re both Vietnamese. I understand where you’re coming from. If you can help me out, maybe there’s something I can do for you.”

  Blackeyes eyed Albert curiously. He asked where exactly Albert was from, and how he wound up being a federal agent. But it was soon apparent that Blackeyes had no intention of divulging information of any value about anyone, especially David Thai.

  The other agents took one last shot. Trinh watched through a glass partition as Kumor, Tisdale, Oldham, and Sabo all hovered over the young Vietnamese gangster, who had begun to slink down in his chair. They stuck their faces in his, gesticulating angrily. One of the agents waved around a photograph of Blackeyes’ girlfriend that they’d found in his wallet.

  Albert was fascinated. Here he was, a spanking new agent from six thousand miles away. He was still finishing ATF training, where they spent hours teaching the proper arrest and interview techniques according to the strictest interpretations of the law—most of which were being flagrantly ignored by the group of investigators haranguing Black-eyes in a gamy interrogation room in the middle of a humid afternoon in the heart of Brooklyn.

  Albert had to smile. If he needed a reminder that he’d arrived in the Big City, this was definitely it.

  Dan Kumor hadn’t really expected to get anything out of Blackeyes, but he figured it was worth a try. After all, David Thai had been attempting to claim a portion of the proceeds from the Florida computer-chip robbery, for no reason other than the fact that he was the leader of the BTK. Lan Tran had even suggested to Tinh in a taped phone conversation that, on behalf of David Thai, they kidnap Blackeyes. In the interrogation room, Kumor tried to persuade Blackeyes that there was no reason to protect a person who would probably
have him killed if he could. But Blackeyes remained stone-faced.

  Nothing gained, nothing lost. The BTK investigation was such that minor disappointments were quickly subsumed by newer events. By the time Blackeyes was shipped off to Florida to face the music there, Kumor and the other investigators were already deeply engrossed in yet another BTK robbery plot involving Tinh and their two primary targets, David Thai and Lan Tran.

  It began on the afternoon of Saturday, July 20, 1991, when Tinh was eating lunch at Pho Bang, a popular Vietnamese restaurant on Mott Street in Chinatown. Around 2:00 P.M., his beeper sounded. Anh hai was trying to reach him. Tinh got up from the large circular table where he was seated with three or four other gang members, went to a pay phone, and called Thai’s beeper, leaving the number on the pay phone at Pho Bang.

  Thai called back immediately. “Timmy, where are you guys? I’ve been looking for you.”

  Tinh explained that he and the others living in the Forty-fifth Street apartment in Sunset Park had been kicked out by the landlord. They hadn’t paid their rent in months, and what with the gunfire and occasional beatings of gang members like Nigel Jagmohan, they’d been making a lot of noise. Now that Blackeyes was no longer using his apartment just around the corner at Forty-sixth Street and Eighth Avenue, Tinh and a handful of others had moved in over there. But they still needed money for rent.

  “Don’t worry about rent money,” Anh hai assured him. “I take care of that.”

  David Thai then told Tinh he had a “job” coming up, and would need Tinh’s assistance. He instructed Tinh to pick out two more gang members to help out.

  “Of course, Anh hai,” Tinh answered dutifully.

  The fact that David Thai was delegating Tinh to line up accomplices for BTK robberies was something new, though not unexpected. Tinh had been a sai low for more than two years now, an old-timer by BTK standards. Thai had come to trust Tinh and was giving him more responsibilities, a sign of respect.

  For a person who was once afraid to even look Anh hai in the eyes, Tinh had come a long way. He was dealing directly with David Thai now, without going through a dai low or any other intermediary. In fact, Thai was treating Tinh as if he were the Brooklyn dai low, giving him duties that David had entrusted to a string of others before Tinh—most of whom were now either dead or in prison.

  That night Tinh returned to the apartment in Brooklyn and tried to talk two gang members into going along on the robbery, which Thai told him was scheduled for early Monday morning. But the responsibility of being a dai low was not so easy. Dat Nguyen, a light-skinned Amerasian known as “Hawaii Dat” because he had only recently arrived in New York from Honolulu, was decidedly unenthusiastic. Tinh also asked Eddie Tran, the veteran gang member who, almost two years earlier, had signaled the arrival of the BTK in Chinatown by throwing a homemade bomb into a police van on Elizabeth Street.

  “Timmy,” Eddie told Tinh, “I just get out from prison after one year. I’m still on parole. Please, no robberies.”

  Exasperated, Tinh later spoke on the phone with Lan Tran about the difficult time he was having finding willing gang members.

  “Forget them,” Uncle Lan told Tinh. “We don’t need them. Me and you, we do the robbery with Anh hai.”

  The next day, on Sunday afternoon, Tinh sneaked over to Detective Oldham’s office at One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan and told him about the robbery scheduled to take place the following morning. As yet, Tinh had no idea what store they were going to hit.

  Oldham had a suggestion. “Timmy, we gotta find out where this store is so we can stop this robbery from happening. Call David Thai. Try to get as many details as you can.”

  Tinh balked; he was afraid that if he kept calling Thai to press him for information, Anh hai would grow suspicious. “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” he told Oldham.

  “Hey, Timmy,” the detective countered. “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”

  Tinh beeped David Thai, who called him back on a private line at the offices of the Major Case Squad.

  “Anh hai,” said Tinh, “I’m on Canal Street right now, at a pay phone. What you want me to do about tomorrow?”

  David explained that Tinh still needed to line up another gang member to serve as a getaway driver. “Me and Lan gonna drive there together from my place,” he told Tinh, “but you need someone to drive you from Brooklyn.” Thai also instructed Tinh to buy some “nice clothes.” Tinh was probably going to be the first person to enter the store, and David Thai wanted him to look as much like a normal, respectable customer as possible.

  Tinh was not able to get any details from David Thai about the location of the robbery. But later that afternoon, when he met Lan Tran in front of the Asian Shopping Mall in Chinatown, he was finally told they would be robbing a jewelry store on Fourteenth Street, a bustling commercial thoroughfare on the northern edge of Greenwich Village.

  Tinh was somewhat surprised that the target was a store outside the city’s traditional Asian enclaves. Apparently, David Thai had developed a new philosophy. The BTK was no longer indiscriminately robbing stores, tea rooms, and gambling dens in rival gang territory. On Canal Street, they were running out of stores to rob. The time had come to look elsewhere.

  Their geographic range within the city may have been expanding, but the homogeneous ethnicity of their victims remained steadfast. The jewelry store on Fourteenth Street, Uncle Lan told Tinh, was owned and run by Asians; in this case, Koreans. David Thai had been tipped off about the place by a Vietnamese peddler whom the Koreans allowed to sell counterfeit watches from a table in front of the store.

  That evening, after Tinh told him what he had learned, Bill Oldham drove the entire length of Fourteenth Street, from one side of Manhattan to the other. Currently under major construction, the street was more chaotic than usual, with gaping holes in the pavement and barriers restricting the flow of traffic, all underscored by the constant clamor of jackhammers. Despite the noise, the cut-rate clothing stores, toy shops, and electronics outlets packed side by side were still doing a brisk business. For two hours, Oldham kept looking until he located two jewelry stores run by Asians—one at Second Avenue on the east side of town, another at Sixth Avenue, four wide crosstown blocks to the west.

  The following morning, a couple of hours before the robbery’s scheduled 9:00 A.M. start, Oldham and the rest of the investigative team moved into action. Virtually every ATF agent Kumor had at his disposal was ready. Two agents sat in a car outside David Thai’s home in Long Island, waiting to trail Thai and Lan Tran into the city. Another surveillance team was set up outside the safe-house apartment on Forty-sixth Street in Brooklyn, where Tinh emerged with Hawaii Dat, who had finally agreed to come along as his getaway driver.

  Even though the investigators were reasonably certain that the gang’s target was the jewelry store on Sixth Avenue, just in case, ATF agents Kumor and Tisdale set up surveillance on the other jewelry store, the one on Second Avenue. The Sixth Avenue store was covered by Oldham himself.

  Early that morning Oldham had arisen and pulled his old police uniform out of the closet. He hadn’t worn it since making detective four years earlier. The pants were a little tight around the waist, but all in all it was not a bad fit. It would serve nicely for what Oldham had in mind, a scheme that perhaps only he would have had the audacity to attempt.

  After donning his uniform, Oldham drove to Fourteenth Street and stood in front of the Eldorado Jewelry Store at Sixth Avenue, waiting patiently for the BTK crew to arrive.

  Around 9:00 A.M., David Thai’s gray Jaguar crept by. When it stopped at a red light, Oldham could see Lan Tran lean back in the passenger seat and look him directly in the eyes. Oldham tried to look oblivious, like a neighborhood cop patroling his beat.

  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.”