Born to Kill (10 page)

A few weeks after the shootout at Winnie's Bar, Lee and his partner, Detective James Donovan, spotted David Thai as he pulled up in his Jaguar in front of the Asian Shopping Mall. They watched as he parked, entered the mini-mall, and soon reemerged with two other BTK members, including his right-hand man, Amigo.

Lately, Thai was rarely seen without Amigo, an increasingly popular figure on Canal Street. Despite the tensions between gangs, Amigo was known to have acquaintances that crossed gang boundaries. He was particularly cozy with the Fuk Ching, an up-and-coming gang that controlled
one of Chinatown's most lucrative new rackets: the smuggling of illegal Chinese aliens into the United States.

The cops watched as Thai, Amigo, and their companion climbed into David's Jaguar, pulled away from the curb, circled the block, and headed east on Canal Street.

“Let's follow these guys and see what they're up to,” suggested Lee. He knew it was unlikely they would catch someone like Thai in the act of committing a crime, but it was useful to know his daily routine.

The cops pulled out into traffic on Canal Street. It wasn't hard to follow David's Jaguar, with its distinctive grayish tint that seemed to change color slightly depending on the light of day. They followed the car to the Manhattan Bridge, across the East River and into Brooklyn. From there, David drove onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed north into Queens.

The Jaguar left the expressway, with the cops trailing at a safe distance. They watched as the car stopped in front of a combination gun shop and military supply store. David waited in the car while his two henchmen went into the store.

Lee and Donovan parked their car and idled the engine. Soon, Amigo and his companion came out of the store with two large boxes. David got out of the car, opened the trunk, and helped load the boxes into the back. Then they all got into the car and drove off.

“What was that all about?” Donovan asked the store's clerk a few minutes later, his detective's shield dangling prominently from his breast pocket.

“You mean those Chinese guys?” the female clerk asked.

“Vietnamese,” replied the detective.

“They were here to pick up an order. Twenty-seven bulletproof vests.”

Donovan had to hear that again. “Bulletproof vests?” he asked.

“That's right,” answered the clerk, “bulletproof vests, police issue. Just like you guys wear.”

On the drive back into Manhattan, the detectives shook their heads in dismay. They knew the BTK had stirred up tremendous bad blood between themselves and Chinatown's traditional criminal factions. They could smell it in the air. But twenty-seven bulletproof vests!?

It was impossible to know exactly what the gang up was to. But Lee was certain of one thing: David Thai loading up on bulletproof vests gave the distinct impression that the local underworld was about to erupt, perhaps raising the standard for gang violence to new heights. Which did not bode well for the Gilded Ghetto.

Chapter 4

I
n October 1989, a few months before detective Doug Lee spotted David Thai buying bulletproof vests in Queens, Tinh Ngo got himself arrested. Given the level of serious criminal activity under way in the Asian community at the time, Tinh's incarceration was petty. He, Kenny Vu, and three other gang members had been caught driving around Brooklyn with four unregistered handguns in the car. Tinh was ready to plead guilty as charged, but a court-appointed attorney told him to wait. Two of the guns weren't even in working order—lowering the infraction from a felony to a misdemeanor—and two other gang members had already pleaded guilty to possession of one gun each. Eventually, Tinh's case was dismissed, but not before he'd spent six long months in the notorious Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City's preeminent penal institution.

At Rikers, Tinh had occasional flashbacks to the refugee camps, where a similar institutional drudgery prevailed. Given the twenty-two months he spent within the confines of a fenced-in compound in Thailand,
Tinh seemed prepared for his time behind bars. But at least in the camps he had been surrounded by fellow countrymen, some even from Hau Giang, his home province. Rikers Island was an ethnic polyglot, with a seething criminal population fiercely divided along lines of race, color, and sexual predilection.

In his first week at Rikers, Tinh was taken under the wing of a renowned Vietnamese inmate known as LT, the unofficial
dai low
of the prison's Asian population. “In here,” LT told Tinh, “we speak only to other Asians. If Chinese or Vietnamese get in a fight with some people, we must back them up. Don't be afraid of black people, white people, Puerto Ricans. We defend you.”

LT explained that the other prisoners rarely messed with Asians, thanks to an incident that had occurred one year earlier. According to LT, some black inmates had been harassing him. So one night around Christmastime, LT and another Vietnamese inmate known as Shadow Boy went on a rampage, slicing the faces of black inmates with a straight razor. Said LT to Tinh, “We told them, ‘We have no gifts to open for Christmas, so we must open faces.'”

Despite LT's paternalism and expressions of solidarity, Tinh found Rikers terrifying. Physically, few inmates were as diminutive as the Vietnamese. At five feet five and 125 pounds, Tinh was the norm for his group. He was afraid to go anywhere without at least three or four other Asian inmates.

On C Wing, where Tinh was housed, there were Vietnamese and Chinese representatives from all the Chinatown gangs. On the street, many of these people would have been rivals. Within the prison walls, they banded together as protection against a hostile, mostly non-Asian population.

Though small in stature, the Vietnamese inmates Tinh met at Rikers were among the toughest gangsters he had yet come into contact with. Many, like LT, were in for murder and assorted other harsh crimes. On those rare occasions when Tinh witnessed altercations between Asian and non-Asian inmates, the Vietnamese were always the first line of defense, their BTK tattoos serving as proud, garish badges of distinction. Tinh left Rikers Island with his convictions deeply reconfirmed that the only people he could count on in this mean, menacing world were his fellow gang brothers.

Upon his release in March 1990, Tinh used the BTK pipeline to facilitate his resettlement in the outside world. At Rikers, a gang member had given him Amigo's pager number and told him to contact the Chinatown
dai low
as soon as he got out. Sure enough, Tinh beeped Amigo and was called back right away.

“Timmy,” said Amigo, “you out now? Good. Yes, we have a place for you.”

Since Tinh was identified with the Brooklyn faction of the BTK, Amigo set him up in a safe house in Bay Ridge, an old Italian and Irish working-class neighborhood in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge. There were five or six other gang members already living in the two-room apartment at the time. The day after moving in, Tinh took the subway to lower Manhattan, where he met Amigo at 267 Canal Street, a shopping arcade just a few buildings east of David Thai's Pho Hanoi headquarters.

Tinh's time in prison had altered his physical appearance in subtle but significant ways. No longer the wide-eyed innocent, he was leaner and harder, with the gaunt, feral look common to many Vietnamese gangsters.

“Timmy, you look like you get skinny in that place,” joked Amigo. “I better get you something to eat.” After stuffing himself with a huge bowl of
pho
, Tinh was told by Amigo, “Come on, I take you to see
Anh hai
.”

Tinh hadn't had direct contact with David Thai in many months, not since the afternoon at the Carter Hotel when
Anh hai
smacked him around for stealing robbery proceeds. He was worried David might still be angry, but he needn't have been. Thai knew how to play his role as both gang boss and benefactor. He knew that, unlike Chinese gang members, few Vietnamese coming out of prison had any family connections to depend on. David's willingness to take care of his brothers, to provide food, rent, and companionship at such a vulnerable point in their lives, was one way of ensuring that the gang remained the center of all that was reliable and important to the boys of the BTK.

“Timmy,” offered David, “here's two hundred dollars. Come by tomorrow, we have more for you.”

Anh hai
also hooked Tinh up with a new beeper, second only to a tattoo as an important status symbol for Asian gangsters. Tinh simply
walked over to E-5 Communications, an electronics store on Centre Street, one block north of Canal. In the past, the BTK had extorted money from and then robbed E-5 Communications until a special arrangement was worked out. Now, all a gang member had to do was show up with Amigo and say, “My name's so-and-so. Born to Kill.” A special BTK notation was made by the customer's name, and he was given unlimited free service on the finest beeper in the shop.

Armed with a new beeper and a fresh sense of freedom, Tinh was soon back into his usual routine, hanging out on Canal Street, at Chinatown amusement arcades, and at Maria's Bakery, a large coffee and Chinese pastry shop where young gang members often gathered to plan crimes and engage in small talk.

While in prison, Tinh had heard about the shooting at Winnie's Bar and other outrageous acts perpetrated by the BTK against the Ghost Shadows. The fact that bad feelings between the two gangs had escalated to the point where everyone seemed to think a war was imminent concerned him greatly. After all, Tinh had taken part in the robbery of two Ghost Shadows establishments—the massage parlor on Sixth Avenue and the Sinta Lounge. Neither time had he or his fellow bandits bothered to wear a mask or disguise. Before, their brashness had kept victims and rivals off-balance. But with a full-fledged gang war under way, there was no telling who might come looking for revenge.

Along with the obvious tension between gangs, Tinh was equally concerned about a story making the rounds in Chinatown that, if true, suggested the BTK was headed toward a day of reckoning that would make its current problems pale in comparison.

Apparently, the so-called Godfather of Chinatown, Kai Sui “Benny” Ong, had called for a meeting with David Thai. The eighty-one-year-old Ong, known in the community as
Chut Suk
, or Uncle Seven, was an “adviser-for-life” of the powerful Hip Sing tong. There was no figure more legendary and no leader more revered than Uncle Seven, an owlish, iron-willed octogenarian whose personal history seemed to encompass the entire dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Chinatown.

Born the seventh of nine sons to a poor bricklayer in the Toishan village of Harbin, Benny Ong had emigrated to the United States in
1921, at the age of twelve. Soon after his arrival in New York City, he took a two-dollar-a-week job in a laundry, developed a taste for gambling, and, on his eighteenth birthday, followed his older brother Sam into the Hip Sing. Like many young men of his generation, Benny Ong had played a role in the great tong wars of the 1920s and '30s, during which territories and criminal rackets were established by the Hip Sing and On Leong tongs that remain deeply imbedded in the structure of modern-day Chinatown.

In 1935, Ong was arrested in connection with the death of a man during the robbery of a gambling game run by a rival tong. Legend has it that Ong was innocent and went to jail rather than implicate another Hip Sing member. Later newspaper reports revealed, however, that he admitted his guilt and provided the identities and whereabouts of three alleged accomplices. Either way, Ong was found guilty of murder and served the next seventeen years in an upstate New York prison. When he was paroled in 1952, he returned to Chinatown and picked up where he'd left off, eventually assuming leadership of the Hip Sing tong from his brother, who died of cancer in 1974.

Uncle Benny may have had a checkered past, but he was still a tong leader, which afforded him a position of considerable power. And his stature increased even more when, in the mid-1970s, he became a ranking member of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), Chinatown's official governing body, comprised of leaders from the abundant family associations, district associations, and tongs.

As leader of the Hip Sing, Uncle Benny was believed to have been the first to establish strong ties between the tongs and the gangs. At the time Uncle Benny took over, the gangs were getting uppity, shaking down merchants, robbing tong-sponsored gambling parlors, and showing a general lack of respect toward community elders. Ong saw the value in incorporating gang members into the tong structure, where their activities would become more organized and perhaps less wantonly destructive to the community at large.

Of course, paying gang members to protect Hip Sing gambling halls and to apply pressure during territorial disputes was also a great personal benefit to Benny Ong. Benny's power in Chinatown continued
to grow, even though he was jailed again briefly in 1977 on charges of having bribed an immigration official.

The lengths that Uncle Seven was willing to go in utilizing the leverage of the gangs became a matter of great controversy in December 1982, following one of Chinatown's most well-known gangland slaughters. Two days before Christmas, four gunmen from the Flying Dragons walked into the Golden Star tea room, a Chinatown saloon on East Broadway. Using an assortment of automatic weapons, they let loose a barrage of gunfire. Patrons dove for cover behind tables and booths. Shattered glass littered the room like confetti. By the time the gunmen fled, three people lay dead and eight more had been seriously injured.

The Golden Star was a popular gathering place for members of the Kam Lum, an upstart tong recently begun by a disaffected Hip Sing member. In Chinatown, trying to start a new tong in another tong's territory was like trying to eat a bowl of chicken broth with chopsticks—it simply wasn't going to work. Benny Ong viewed the very existence of the Kam Lum as a challenge to his authority. In a rare instance of public frankness, he was quoted in
New York
magazine as saying of the Kam Lum leader, “Sixty year I build up respect and he think he knock me down in one day?”