When Tinh told Kumor and the others he wanted to be relocated in Seattle, they told him it wasn’t a good idea. He would have to live somewhere else. Furthermore, he would have no say in the matter. He would live wherever they felt was best.
“In that case,” Tinh said, “I think maybe I better off on my own, making my own decisions.”
Tinh’s response startled his government handlers. They tried to talk him out of it. We know what’s best for you, they said. We feel responsible. Besides, there were too many risks.
The way Tinh saw it, life was full of risks, no matter what you did. He would honor their wishes by not returning to Seattle. But he did not want the U.S. government telling him where he could or could not live.
It was not an easy decision, but Tinh felt good about it. All his life, he had been controlled by a higher authority—the dictates of fate, Anh hai, the cops and agents who eventually brought down the BTK. His life had been a tumultuous, disorienting affair, an adventure worthy of The Tale of Kieu.
Along the way, Tinh had learned some valuable lessons. He had learned there is sometimes a wide gulf between what a person says and the true motivations buried deep inside. He learned the difference between good and evil, yin and yang. And he had learned that for Tinh Ngo to truly become the controller of his own destiny, he must stand on his own two feet. He must learn, by himself, what it means to be an American.
He must learn what it means to be free.
Epilogue
To the people of Chinatown, the successful prosecution of David Thai and his BTK brothers was a startling, momentous event. Unlike similar prosecutions in the mid-1980s involving influential tong-associated gangs like the Ghost Shadows and the United Bamboo, the BTK trial received extensive coverage in all of the local Chinese-language newspapers. It was as if the community’s traditional powers were gloating over the demise of the renegade Vietnamese gang, reasserting their cultural and territorial imperative over a group of gangsters who had shown so little respect for the area’s deeply ingrained underworld rules.
The mainstream media, on the other hand, was not nearly as interested in the fall of the BTK as they had been in the gang’s volatile, highly sensational rise to power. At the time of the arrests there had been some newspaper and television reports, culminating with Newsday’s jailhouse interview with David Thai. But scant follow-up coverage was given to the courtroom testimony of Tinh Ngo, Odum Lim, Ying Jing Gan, and others whose lives had been so inexorably affected by their encounters with the BTK. In part, the media’s lack of concern was an extension of a long-standing negligence when it came to issues relating to the Asian community. Mostly, it was because of a more “newsworthy” event that was taking place elsewhere in the same courthouse, one that dominated media coverage not only in New York City but throughout most of the United States.
There was no denying that the prosecution of Mafia boss John Gotti was an important story. The demise of Gotti, the leader of the largest Cosa Nostra family in New York, symbolized the further erosion of a once-proud criminal tradition. Although the federal government had been successfully chipping away at the Mafia for at least the last decade, two previous attempts to prosecute Gotti ended in acquittal. Each trial brought a higher level of media attention, with this latest proceeding attracting hordes of reporters, not to mention Hollywood celebrities like Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rourke, and others whose careers revealed an enduring professional fascination with “the Mob.”
On journalistic grounds, the story of Gotti’s fall was historic, but the real secret of its appeal with the media and the public at large was its familiarity. The Dapper Don was the latest in a long line of New York gangsters whose exploits had been lionized in countless movies and books. The mystique of the Mob—established during the years of Prohibition, embellished in the decades that followed—had long since become central to the American identity. By now, the public had come to feel a nostalgic, almost sentimental attachment to these Old World mobsters, who hark back to a time when the underworld was ruled mostly by Caucasian men of European extraction.
Asian gangsters in America have never been embraced in quite the same way. Aside from an occasional lurid melodrama like Year of the Dragon, Hollywood has largely avoided the subject, although Chinese organized crime has been around at least as long as the Mafia. When written about in newspapers and magazines—usually in connection with the latest gang shooting or robbery—the word most often used to describe Chinese or Vietnamese gangsters is “vicious,” as if the wholesale plundering of labor unions, violent intimidation, and brutal gangland rubouts of yesteryear represented a more honorable form of criminal behavior.
The fact that hordes of reporters trudged daily to the Gotti courtroom while, two floors away, the BTK trial unfolded in virtual anonymity was indicative of more than just a cultural bias. During the months of the BTK trial, four floors below Judge Amon’s courtroom, the case against the Green Dragons was also unfolding, making the Eastern District courthouse perhaps the hottest crime beat in the United States. The argument could be made that, taken together, the Born to Kill and Green Dragons proceedings were more relevant to an understanding of crime in the 1990s than was the Gotti trial. The two trials were the end result of investigations that involved over forty gang members—a representative sampling of an entire generation of young Asian males. The charges against the nineteen defendants who chose to go to trial included eleven murders, numerous attempted murders, over a dozen robberies, numerous kidnappings, and countless extortionate acts, all of which took place during an intensely violent three-year period. Additionally, the victims of these crimes were not other gangsters, as they were in most traditional mob cases like Gotti’s. The BTK and Green Dragons preyed mostly on innocent citizens whose only crime was that they were Asian and therefore susceptible to a group of gangsters who had always seemed to be beyond the reach of American law enforcement.
Not only that, but the BTK and Green Dragons were part of a larger criminal conspiracy currently in its prime—a complex, multilayered underworld with pockets of influence throughout the United States and much of the world. Domestically, they represented an aspect of contemporary organized crime that the media and the public have yet to fully acknowledge.
As the ethnic makeup of the country has changed, so has the face of organized crime. A new generation of immigrants has been following patterns of criminal activity remarkably similar to those first established by Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. For an earlier generation of gangsters, bootleg liquor was the elixir that made it all possible. Today, it’s illegal narcotics, though the country’s vast, regionalized criminal marketplace has made it possible for organized crime groups to thrive in a number of ways, including the constant armed robberies, home invasions, violent extortions, and assorted other crimes from which most Vietnamese gangs derive their income.
The BTK trial and, to a lesser extent, the case against the Green Dragons, provided a rare opportunity for the media and the public to gain insights into the changing face of organized crime. Instead, the media clung exclusively and affectionately to a story that evoked a bygone era—a time when the world, presumably, was a much simpler place.
Twelve months after the conviction of David Thai and his BTK brothers, the lack of attention paid to the Asian underworld was dramatically underscored once again. Early on the morning of June 7,1993, a huge freighter ran aground off Rockaway Beach, in the outer reaches of New York City. Over the days and weeks that followed, the public was to find out about a massive, thriving criminal racket believed to be at least as profitable as wholesale cocaine and heroin smuggling.
More than three hundred illegal immigrants transported all the way from China were packed onto the freighter, known as the Golden Venture. After the ship accidentally buried its bow in a sandbar, many on board panicked. One hundred and twenty people jumped overboard into freezing, choppy waters. Ten met their death by drowning or later expired from hypothermia. Sixty more were plucked fro
m the sea by helicopters and U.S. Coast Guard vessels. Throughout the day, a small army of city, state, and federal rescue personnel took the rest of the ship’s massive human cargo into custody.
With dead bodies washing ashore and hundreds of starving, shivering travelers lining the beach, the story of the ill-fated Golden Venture was a tabloid editor’s dream come true. Local and national media organizations assigned teams of reporters and photographers to cover the event. The media noted that the ship was actually one of dozens like it that had brought thousands of undocumented East Asians to the United States. The passengers aboard these ships paid on the average $30,000—sometimes as much as $50,000—to be smuggled into the country. Their passage halfway around the world was arranged and overseen by a vast criminal network, with the primary operatives being the Fuk Ching gang, based in New York City’s Chinatown.
Esteemed media outlets like The New York Times and CNN presented their findings as if people-smuggling were a brand-new phenomenon, a criminal racket that had only now reached its apex with the terrible tragedy in the waters off Rockaway Beach. In fact, the trafficking of human cargo by Chinese gangsters had been flourishing for the last five or six years. In New York, untold thousands of immigrants had been smuggled into the city, most by circuitous routes through South and Central America. Once in the New York area, many paid off their huge smuggling debts by working at paltry wages in restaurants, sweatshops, and massage parlors while living in tiny cubicles. The end result was a type of indentured servitude as pernicious as anything that existed in Chinatown a century ago.
Although aspects of this modern-day slave trade had been sporadically reported, it had never been deemed a major story. Nearly two years before the Golden Venture spilled its human cargo, Ying Chan, a journalist with the Daily News, wrote a two-part exposé on Asian people-smuggling. Few media outlets followed up on her disturbing revelations. An international criminal conspiracy continued to flourish largely unnoticed by the American press, until three hundred smuggled immigrants washed ashore in the country’s largest city, making the story impossible to ignore.
The same mentality that treated an international smuggling conspiracy based on the exploitation of Asians as if it were less newsworthy than, say, a mob war between rival Mafia families in Brooklyn, has helped make it possible for Chinese and Vietnamese gangs to continually regenerate. When speaking frankly, most federal agents and cops admit that their mandate as lawmen is all too often determined by what the media and, by extension, the public designate as a priority. Only recently, with the discovery of massive shipments of heroin being transported into the United States by Chinese syndicates, has the issue of Asian organized crime been labeled a significant national problem.
One federal agent determined to keep the subject on the front burner is Dan Kumor, who made a number of valuable community contacts through his six-month-long immersion into the world of the BTK. In December 1993, Kumor made the most of his newfound expertise. After a long investigation, he and other members of a joint ATF-NYPD task force arrested fifteen members of a gang known as the Tung On. The most notable of those charged on a multitude of federal RICO violations was none other than Paul Lai, adviser-for-life of the Tsung Tsin Association, one of Chinatown’s most influential tongs.
Three years earlier, Paul Lai was among those who gathered at police headquarters during the unprecedented meeting among City Hall, the police, and community leaders to discuss the gang problem in Chinatown. At the meeting, Lai had been the first business leader to speak up; he condemned the rash of gang crimes then being perpetrated by the BTK. Lai claimed he was motivated by a desire to protect the image of the community. If the indictment filed by the U.S. government was accurate, Lai’s real motivation was to apply political and police pressure to eliminate a vexing rival: the BTK.
The case against Paul Lai and other members of the Tung On gang was unique. In the past, many Chinatown gang members had been prosecuted at the state and federal levels. Since the mid-1980s, dozens of young gangsters had paid the price for their involvement in the underworld. Never, however, had an attempt been made to clearly establish a criminal link between a powerful tong boss—a “reputable” community elder—and the day-to-day operations of a Chinatown street gang.
The indictment alleged that Lai “relied on the gang’s use of violence to maintain the prestige of the Tung On and Tsung Tsin Associations vis-à-vis other Chinatown business and criminal groups…. Among other things, gang members slept and held their secret initiation ceremonies in the Tung On Association, regularly met in both Associations to plan murders, assaults, firebombings and extortions, and provided security for an illegal gambling operation housed in the basement of the Tsung Tsin Association.”
Of course, neighborhood merchants, the cops, and citizens in the know were well aware that Paul Lai’s relationship with the Tung On gang was not atypical. Traditionally, the primary function of youth gangs in Chinatown has always been to do the dirty work for an older, socalled legitimate stratum of the business community. But no one had ever tried to prove it in court. The prosecution of Paul Lai had the potential to rock Chinatown to its foundations, to significantly alter the area’s criminal hierarchy for the first time ever, perhaps changing irrevocably the way the local underworld conducts business.
As for Vietnamese gangsters in Chinatown and beyond, there was little doubt that the prosecution of David Thai and his minions had dealt a devastating blow to the single most notorious gang in their midst. Seven months after their conviction, the BTK gang members received the ultimate adjudication. Thai and his right-hand man, Lan Ngoc Tran, were given multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. The others received slightly less harsh sentences ranging from twelve to sixty years.
In the end, perhaps the most significant result of the government’s successful prosecution of the BTK was that David Thai had been stopped before he was able to fulfill his most ambitious schemes. Anh hai would never be able to further cultivate his relationship with “the Italians,” as he had planned. And he would never again forge ties with the country’s larger Vietnamese underworld, with the hope of one day establishing himself as the leader of a vast multistate network of young, wayward criminals.
That network, however—the less savory representatives of a lost generation of Vietnamese youth—remained relatively unaffected by the conviction of eighteen BTK gang members, who either copped a plea or were found guilty in court. The circumstances surrounding the creation of this underworld still exist as a gaping wound on the body politic, both in the United States and half a world away in the Republic of Vietnam. Despite improving diplomatic relations between the United States and its former arch-enemy, shell-shocked refugees continue to flee the Land of the Ascending Dragon. Once in America, they drift aimlessly, with few points of entry into a society that, historically, has rarely been receptive to “their kind.”
Into the early months of 1994, merchants and citizens were still being victimized by young Vietnamese-born gangsters at an alarming rate. The International Association of Asian Crime Investigators bimonthly newsletter still contained information about criminal activity and violent fugitives from California, Texas, Virginia, Massachusetts, and other states. There is no way of knowing exactly how many gang members there are spread throughout the United States, but the IAACI estimates thousands—maybe tens of thousands.
For Dan Kumor and other lawmen who received a crash course in Asian organized crime through the first successful investigation of a major Vietnamese gang, the results were a wake-up call. In New York City and beyond, the parameters of a substantial new criminal phenomenon had been defined more clearly than ever before, and the results were sobering.
For those in law enforcement and elsewhere who cared to notice, the successful prosecution of the Born to Kill gang was not the end.
It was only the beginning.
Sources
The following is a partial list of books that contained information and insi
ghts that were helpful, if not instrumental, in the writing of Born to Kill.
Of the dozens of books published on the subject of the Vietnam War, Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983) is still the most comprehensive. Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie (New York: Random House, 1988) provides unparalleled insights into the American military mind-set that created and sustained the war. Also helpful was The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) by Marilyn B. Young.
On the subject of life in Southeast Asia during the tumultuous years of the war, there are few testaments more moving than Haing Ngor’s A Cambodian Odyssey (New York: Macmillan, 1987), which details the author’s experiences in Cambodia during the horrendous reign of the Khmer Rouge. Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Place (New York: Doubleday, 1989) is the autobiographical account of a woman’s coming-of-age in Vietnam during some of the worst years of the war. John Balaban’s Remembering Heaven’s Face (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991) is a different kind of memoir, written by a poet and conscientious objector who lived in Saigon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
On the subject of Vietnam in the years after the U.S. evacuation, two very different books were helpful: Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind (New York: William Morrow, 1993), a novel that beautifully evokes the colors, sounds, and textures of Vietnamese culture, and Neil Sheehan’s After the War Was Over (New York: Random House, 1992), a telling examination of, among other things, the political failures of Vietnam’s postwar government.
Not much has been published in the United States on the subject of the refugee camps, although Ban Vinai: The Refugee Camp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), by Lynellyn D. Long, is an excellent source of information, particularly on the camps in Thailand.
The Asian experience in America has been the subject of numerous books, including a poignant memoir by Nguyen Qui Duc titled Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994). Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Little, Brown, 1989) provides an informative overview of Asian immigration. Le Ly Hayslip’s Child of War, Woman of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1993) continues where her first book left off by recounting the author’s years as a Vietnamese refugee trying to adjust to life in America.
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