Born to Kill

by T. J. English

  Later, feeling slightly less magnanimous, Thai wrote:

  Life is still being dark and deceiving, I find./Companions, disciples, close friends, I had plenty./Who would think of that today…. /Looking at the past, I have but myself to blame./Giving everything away instead of looking after myself./Where are the close friends? Where are the disciples?

  Thai did not limit his public relations onslaught to a handful of turgid poems. In early October, for the first time ever, he granted an interview to a member of the mainstream, English-language press.

  The interview was conducted by Peg Tyre, the reporter who had covered the rise of the BTK for Newsday, the Long Island–based newspaper whose main offices are located in Melville, just a few miles from where Thai had been arrested. Tyre wrote two articles: a long piece on the joint ATF/NYPD investigation, and a slightly shorter piece devoted exclusively to David Thai, titled “Suspected Gang Leader Denies Link to BTK.”

  Seated in an interview room at the MCC, dressed in a bright-orange prison jumpsuit, Thai presented himself to his American interviewer as a man who had been horribly wronged. Federal agents, he claimed, had misinterpreted his humanitarian concern for Vietnamese refugees. “They say I’m the head of the BTK gang, but that is not so,” Thai was quoted as saying. “There is no such gang, it is just kids who have no family.”

  Thai claimed to have been out of the country when many of the crimes listed in the indictment were committed. For the last three years, he said, he had lived mostly in Philadelphia, where he supposedly worked restoring cars.

  At one point during the interview, Thai’s eyes welled with tears as he described how his love for his Vietnamese brothers ruined his first marriage. But it was worth it, he said, because there was nothing more important to him than the welfare of his troubled, wayward boys. “I tried to help them, and I tried to get the Vietnamese community to help them…. I see their misery and I know that. I know their misery because I too have lived the same life.”

  Despite the flagrant falsehoods about his involvement in specific BTK crimes, Thai’s emotional defense was one that he and most other gang members held near and dear to their hearts. Thai had always presented himself publicly as a kindly benefactor. He even deluded himself into believing that he was the only powerful person in Chinatown who truly cared about the welfare of his young Vietnamese brothers—and he had successfully instilled this perception into the minds of dozens of youths. Never mind that behind closed doors Thai was venal and brutal. Never mind that many gang members were now dead, in prison, or on the run for the rest of their lives. “A model example of a young Vietnamese man”—that was how Uncle Lan had described Anh hai in his journal. And that was the version most gang members and Thai himself would cling to as their world crumbled all around them.

  Of course, one gang member had seen the lie for what it was and chosen a different fate—Tinh Ngo. Although the identity of the government’s star witness had not yet been publicly revealed, one gang member was conspicuous by his absence.

  When asked by the Newsday reporter about the government’s confidential informant, Thai dabbed the moisture from his eyes with the back of his hand and shook his head sadly. “I fed him, gave him a place to stay, tried to send him to school, and he robbed me. I would say that he is troubled, extremely troubled.”

  Then Thai sighed wearily. Even in prison, he still thought of himself as the BTK’s overburdened, underappreciated Big Brother.

  The trial of United States of America v. David Thai et al. began in early January 1992 before Judge Carol Amon in a windowless courtroom at the federal courthouse on Cadman Plaza East, in downtown Brooklyn. Under harsh, antiseptic light, Alan Vinegrad delivered an opening statement framing the conspiracy he intended to prove in the nearly three months of testimony that would follow. The main motivation of Born to Kill, he explained to a jury of twelve citizens, was monetary. The members of the gang “shared at least two key characteristics: their Vietnamese heritage, and their willingness to join together to make money through crimes of violence.”

  The defendants sat in the courtroom next to their attorneys, listening quietly as the government prosecutor detailed a numbing litany of crimes. Considering that the BTK comprised as many as one hundred members at its zenith, the number on trial was a small sampling. Of the twenty-two gang members named in the government’s thirty-eight-page RICO indictment, many had already pleaded guilty, hoping for a lighter sentence. Others were testifying for the government. That left eight who had chosen to go to trial—David Thai, Lan Tran, LV Hong, David “Hawaii Dat” Nguyen, Hoang “Jungle Man” Ngo, Jimmy “Hong” Nguyen, Minh Do, and Quang Van Nguyen.

  Because the BTK was such a broad, sprawling conspiracy, the government had chosen to focus on an unusually busy one-year period, from August 1990 to August 1991. With twelve armed robberies, three murders and attempted murders, numerous extortions, and assorted other charges, it was enough to put most of the defendants away for life if convicted.

  As the government’s evidence unfolded over the weeks and months that followed, it became apparent that its case was not only strong, but overwhelming. Vinegrad and the small team of investigators had rounded up virtually everything they needed: phone logs, circumstantial evidence from crime scenes, Tinh Ngo’s taped conversations of robberies in the planning stages, videotapes of extortions on Canal Street. During the arrests at David Thai’s Long Island home, they had unearthed stolen jewelry, weapons, and incriminating personal correspondence between Anh hai and other gang members. Among the items confiscated were color photographs showing the gang marching through Chinatown holding aloft a BTK banner, and standing in the cemetery beside Amigo’s grave just minutes before a fusillade of gunfire exploded from out of nowhere.

  Even more impressive was the stunning array of government witnesses, more than sixty in all. Odum Lim and his wife and daughter were flown up from Doraville to testify. Crime victims from Tennessee and Bridgeport also made an appearance. And New York City’s Chinatown was ultimately represented by the most comprehensive collection of its citizens ever to testify at a criminal proceeding, a group that included everyone from Ying Jing Gan to numerous Canal Street merchants, people whose daily lives were most directly affected by the existence of the dreaded BTK.

  The most devastating single witness was Tinh Ngo. Over the course of two and a half weeks, Tinh described his budding involvement in the gang, his growing disenchantment, and his cooperation with Dan Kumor and Bill Oldham. Tinh had been well prepared by Vinegrad, who told him time and time again in the weeks leading up to the trial, “Use the truth as your anchor, Timmy. The lawyers will try to confuse you. They will call you a liar to your face. Just stick to the truth and everything will be okay.”

  For a nineteen-year-old refugee from South Vietnam—a high school dropout speaking in a difficult foreign language—Tinh showed a remarkable ability to hold his ground during the long hours of sometimes brutal cross-examination, revealing something deep inside that perhaps even he had not known existed.

  Over the months, Tinh’s cooperation with the United States government had been a slowly evolving affair. Had he known from the beginning that he would be forced to wear a recorder while circulating among his fellow gang members, then testify against them in court, he might never have agreed to cooperate. At each stage, he had undertaken these endeavors with a great deal of ambivalence, his willingness to go along with the program fueled by a combination of guilt and skillful coercion on the part of his law enforcement handlers. In the end, talking on the phone with Anh hai and Uncle Lan just before they were arrested, he’d even felt that maybe he had made a terrible mistake by betraying the only people who seemed to care about his welfare.

  But once he was seated on the witness stand, in stark, imposing, unfamiliar surroundings, Tinh arrived at an inner truth. The ambivalence washed away as lawyer after lawyer tried to portray him as a wanton crack addict and even a killer. When one of the defense attorneys asked him for the umptee
nth time to describe the shooting of Odum Lim—the event that had traumatized Tinh and turned him against the gang—his voice remained steady. “I heard a gunshot, so I take a look around and I heard Tung Lai say, ‘Uncle Lan, help me, help me, he have the gun! The owner have the gun!’ Then I see Lan from the owner’s side go over with the gun and put it against the owner’s head and pull the trigger.”

  “Isn’t it a fact,” asked the defense attorney, “that you, Tinh Ngo, had the gun and you shot the owner in the head?”

  “No,” Tinh answered firmly. “That is not true.”

  The more the lawyers badgered and cajoled Tinh, the stronger his resolve became. The more they tried to portray him as an unconscionable criminal bent only on saving his own skin, the more it became apparent that Tinh was being driven to testify by an unshakable moral imperative instilled a long time ago, before the gang, before the refugee camps, when, as a small child in Hau Giang Province, he first learned the difference between right and wrong.

  Sitting in the courtroom each day, David Thai, Lan Tran, and the other defendants looked as if they didn’t know what hit them. Although they all spoke varying degrees of passable English, most of them chose to listen to the proceedings on headphones, translated into Vietnamese by an interpreter seated near the defense table. At first, they had taken Tinh’s testimony lightly, sneering and giggling every time he was forced to admit he smoked marijuana and crack. But even they recognized the cumulative effect of Tinh’s testimony and the other evidence that began to pile up. Soon they turned glum and then uncomprehending as they struggled to make sense of the government’s portrait of the gang as a sophisticated criminal organization.

  Their confusion was partly understandable. To establish the BTK as an enterprise worthy of conviction under the RICO statutes, Vinegrad often reminded the jury that the gang’s primary reason for existence was financial. The government predicated its case on showing that the ranks of the BTK had banded together for one reason: to make money. The fact that they had been successful in doing so was further proof of their motives.

  For most gang members, this was a grandiose concept. Yes, the end result of their actions was money. But “survival” was a better word to describe why most had joined the gang. Maybe David Thai lived the life of an underworld prince. Maybe he had an expendable income. But for most rank-and-file gang members the payoff was far less bankable.

  Near the end of the twelve-week trial, almost as an afterthought, Vinegrad read into the record a revealing piece of correspondence seized in the raid on David Thai’s house. The letter had been sent by Tommy Vu, Kenny Vu’s brother, who had once accompanied Tinh to the tattoo parlor on Delancey Street, where Tinh received his tattoo and was initiated into the BTK. Tommy Vu was writing to David Thai from prison, where he was serving a seven-year sentence on robbery charges. In a letter dated July 29, 1991, two weeks before the arrest of David Thai and the others, Tommy wrote:

  Dear Anh hai: Hi, how are you? I hope everything is fine with you. How is everything in New York? I sometimes worry about the problems that go on around you. Please be careful and take care of yourself, Anh hai. I will be coming home soon. Anh hai, when I come home I will be coming back to Born to Kill. I will try with all my power to take care of anything and everything that happens around Born to Kill. That’s my word, Anh hai. I really want to keep in touch with you, so please stay in touch with me and let me know what’s going on always, because, like I said, I will be coming home soon and want to look after you…. For now, Anh hai, I say good-bye…. Take care of yourself, and I love you with all my heart….

  Underneath his signature on the letter, Tommy wrote, “I love you, brother, forever.” Near the bottom of the page, with little space left, he wrote in smaller and smaller lettering, “Say hello to everyone. I love all brothers.” And finally, in a tiny, childlike scrawl along the bottom of the page: “BORN TO KILL FOREVER.”

  Tommy Vu’s letter was an accurate reflection of the feelings of most BTK gang members—even Tinh Ngo before he became disenchanted with his shallow, confining life as a gangster. The letter may have been a minor piece of evidence in the case against the BTK, but it had everything to do with the emotional undercurrents that created the gang in the first place.

  The level of affection suggested by Tommy Vu’s letter was part of a thread that, if carried to its furthest extension, would stretch back through failed foster-care situations, terrifying experiences on boats and in refugee camps, to a time when bombs and napalm and Agent Orange ruled the night and displaced an entire generation. Eleven and a half weeks of testimony had convincingly established the culpability of David Thai and his minions on a broad array of charges, but little light was shed on these most troubling issues.

  The question of who or what was responsible for creating the circumstances that gave birth to the BTK was a tricky one, shrouded in emotionalism and the whims of historical interpretation. Among themselves, BTK gang members rarely spoke of the war, a historical reality only a few of them experienced firsthand. Nonetheless, there was little doubt that the war’s legacy of violence, inhumanity, and abandonment had played a formative role in shaping the lives and actions of these young gangsters. It was written on their faces. It was all too evident in their actions. And it was tellingly reflected in the chillingly appropriate moniker they had chosen for themselves.

  U.S. District Court may have been the place where the guilt or innocence of the individual was determined beyond the shadow of a doubt, but in terms of condemning or even identifying the forces that created those individuals, it might as well have been an empty chamber. Common law courtrooms, of course, were never meant to serve as forums for a broader discussion of the human condition, and the case against the BTK would be no exception. After nearly three years of murder and mayhem on the part of the gang, months of dangerous and diligent work by Tinh Ngo and the team of investigators, and an airtight prosecution by Vinegrad, the circumstances that transported a legacy of violence from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the streets of America twenty years later would remain unexamined.

  It was a neat, impervious American trial.

  A trial at which the war in Vietnam was never even mentioned.

  On April Fool’s Day, 1992, Tinh Ngo picked up the phone and dialed ATF headquarters.

  “Is Dan Kumor there?” he asked.

  Tinh was calling long distance; he could barely hear the voice on the other end of the line. “Kumor’s not in right now,” it said faintly.

  “Oh. This is Timmy calling. Tinh Ngo.”

  “Oh,” the voice piped up excitedly, “Timmy. We got great news.”

  “Yes.”

  “They were nailed to the wall. Day before yesterday. All except Dat Nguyen, he got off. Everybody else was convicted on pretty much all of the charges. David Thai, Lan Tran, the whole lot of them.”

  Tinh said thank you and hung up the phone. Thinking about his convicted gang brothers, his mind wandered. He thought back to when he had first heard about the arrests of David Thai, Lan Tran, and the others.

  At the time, Tinh was holed up in a lower Manhattan hotel. The only time his handlers let him out was to drive him the few blocks to the ATF building on Church Street.

  On the evening of the arrests, after all the gang members had been processed and carted off to jail, Tinh was at the ATF offices when a news report about the gang came on television. The various cops and agents who were watching slapped each other on the back and seemed overjoyed at the sight of the BTK gangsters being herded off to jail in handcuffs.

  Tinh felt a different emotion. No matter how hard he tried, he could not completely shake the feeling that he had somehow engaged in an act of betrayal. Seeing Anh hai and the others being arrested made him feel depressed.

  “You think maybe I can go somewhere, anywhere?” Tinh asked an ATF agent. “Get a sandwich, a soda or something?”

  Two ATF agents took Tinh to a nearby cop bar, where they figured he would be safe. Inside the bar, Tinh s
at quietly while the American lawmen drank, laughed, and told each other stories. At one point, Tinh looked up at a television mounted above the bar. There, again, was the same report he’d seen an hour earlier—Anh hai, Uncle Lan, and all the others with their heads hanging down, being led off to jail.

  Man! Tinh thought to himself. When will it all end? When will I stop feeling so bad?

  Now, after getting the news about the guilty verdicts, Tinh was not so much depressed as relieved. Maybe he could finally begin to put his years as a gang member and a federal informant behind him. Maybe now he could live a normal life.

  Tinh knew it wasn’t going be easy. The most recent turn of events in his relatively brief life had landed him many thousands of miles away from New York City. He had a job washing dishes in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant. He’d changed his name and was renting a room in a house with a large Vietnamese family, trying to make it on his own.

  Dan Kumor had offered Tinh the cover of the Witness Security Program (WITSEC), the U.S. government’s vaunted relocation program for people whose lives were endangered because of their cooperation with the authorities. In WITSEC, a person was given a new identity, some money, and relocated to a different part of the country, hopefully beyond the grasp of those he’d helped put away.

  Tinh considered the offer. It sounded okay to him, under one condition. He wanted to be relocated to Seattle. In the months leading up to the trial, he had been stashed in Seattle by the government. Tinh had stayed in a small apartment in a part of the city known as the University District, where he’d found a job in a Chinese restaurant and even a girlfriend. Not an Asian girl, either. A Caucasian girl. For the first time in his life, Tinh could imagine a world beyond the limits heretofore defined by war, his refugee status, his ethnicity.