Born to Kill (11 page)

After the shooting, the angry Kam Lum leader first accused Ong of having masterminded the bloodbath, then had grave second thoughts. Eventually, he apologized to Uncle Seven and his tong all but disappeared from the scene.

Now, eight years after the Golden Star massacre, Benny Ong was faced with a new challenge in Chinatown—the sprawling aggregation of Vietnamese gangsters who had, among other things, disrupted the flow of commerce in Chinatown's underground economy. From his familiar perch at the Hong Shoon restaurant on Pell Street, where he appeared daily wearing a short-brimmed gray fedora, Uncle Benny heard stories of these young Vietnamese hooligans who were challenging the community's traditional power structure. Ong was not about to let a group of boys who had only recently arrived in Chinatown create such chaos, so he demanded a
kong su
, underworld slang for “negotiation.”

There were many in the community who felt that David Thai should have been flattered to share a plate of rice with Benny Ong. The very fact that Thai would be sitting at a table with the venerable God
father of Chinatown was, in a way, a significant acknowledgment of the niche David had carved for himself. Presumably, in exchange for David's reining in his gang brothers, the elderly tong leader would suggest some sort of power-sharing arrangement by which Thai could hold on to his lucrative Canal Street rackets.

Given the honor-bound nature of Chinatown's underworld, the worst thing David could have done was ignore Benny Ong's request for a meeting. Which is exactly what he did.

Of course, Thai knew that to ignore Benny Ong would be viewed as an unforgivable slight. The BTK had already offended everyone else in Chinatown by publicly trading gunfire with rival gangs. Although no blood had been shed, this was the worst insult of all. By not even responding, David was openly disparaging Uncle Seven, causing him to lose face. Uncle Benny would have to answer the insult.

Throughout history, Chinatown had experienced tong wars, gang wars, and retribution hits of every variety. In the lexicon of the triads, revenge was a god that required human sacrifice. Ominous forces had been put into play, and it would not take long for destiny to reveal itself to the members of the BTK, the people of Chinatown, and beyond.

On the morning of July 26, 1990, Tinh was asleep on a single mattress on the floor of his bedroom in the Bay Ridge safe-house apartment when one of his roommates shook him awake. “Timmy, Timmy, wake up,” urged Richie Huynh.

“What?” responded Tinh, still half asleep. “What is it?”

“You hear the news?” asked Richie.

“What news?”

“It's Amigo,” said Richie. “He got killed last night.” Richie explained how Amigo had been gunned down on Canal Street while waiting for a taxi outside David Thai's massage parlor.

Like everyone else, Tinh was deeply saddened by news of Amigo's death. He could imagine no greater outrage than rival gangsters brazenly murdering one of the BTK's most revered members in the middle of their home turf on Canal Street.

Two days later, Tinh would be forced to amend that evaluation when three Chinese hitmen sprayed the crowd at Amigo's burial with gunfire, sending hundreds of mourners fleeing in a mad rush to avoid a
sudden, unspeakable demise. From that point on, the BTK and their “journey” would never be the same.

BLOODY BURIAL, screamed the front page of the New York
Daily News
on Sunday, July 29, 1990. GANG WARFARE ERUPTS AT CEMETERY, trumpeted
Newsday
. Television and radio accounts added their own loud voices to the commotion. One national news program dusted off an old report suggesting that Vietnamese gangs like the BTK must be financed by powerful anti-Communist groups such as the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, or the Frogmen, a California-based gang comprised of former South Vietnamese soldiers trained in assassination and the sophisticated use of explosives.

It was hardly surprising that these reports lacked any direct evidence of a link between the organizations mentioned and the shooting at the cemetery. The mainstream media were like the cops, handicapped by a long tradition of neglect in regard to Asian issues. Now, a seething Chinatown gang war had burst into the open, and in the frenzy that followed, a bewildered media was flailing in search of an explanation.

Staged like a scene from a movie, with hitmen dressed in long black coats bearing flowers, the shooting was certainly dramatic. In fact, the hit may well have been styled after the Hong Kong gangster flicks that gang members—both Chinese and Vietnamese—viewed so assiduously at the Rosemary, the Sun Sing, and other Chinatown movie theaters.

Since the mid-1980s, the Hong Kong film industry had been producing a seemingly endless stream of highly distinctive, hugely popular movies set in the Asian underworld. In
Bullet in the Head, A Better Tomorrow
, and
Love and Death in Saigon
—to name a few—moments of romanticized male bonding were interspersed with images of balletic, slow-motion violence. Some gang members viewed these movies as idealized versions of their own lives, and they reveled in the heavily stylized carnage and deliriously high body counts.

Most popular of all were the films of director John Woo, the Sam Peckinpah of the Hong Kong cinema. Woo's movies always contained at least one epic shootout in a dramatic setting. In
The Killer
, a few dozen gangsters wage war in a Gothic cathedral backlit with thousands
of candles. In
Hardboiled
, gangsters open fire on the movie's hero in a large, hectic urban hospital.

The gangsters who sprayed the BTK with gunfire at the cemetery in New Jersey had outdone even John Woo. The setting was not only picturesque, it also contained a cultural subtext that most Asians would immediately recognize.

While virtually all societies treat the burial of a loved one as a sacred ritual to be conducted with reverence and respect, Eastern religions have a uniquely holistic view of the afterlife. The overwhelming majority of Chinese and Vietnamese, steeped in the traditions of Buddhism, are raised to believe that after death comes rebirth and then life again, on and on in a cycle. Death is viewed not as a conclusion, but as a reunification of the deceased with his or her ancestors. The burial process is especially important, because it determines the degree of tranquillity a being will have as he or she passes from life on earth into the afterlife.

Apparently, Amigo's passage was going to be a bumpy one. The gods had every reason to be offended by what took place at Rosedale Memorial Park Cemetery. More than just an attempted gangland hit, it was a desecration, one that had been carefully orchestrated to exhibit the same level of disrespect toward the BTK that the BTK had shown toward Chinatown's underworld traditions.

After the shooting, the myriad forces that had brought about the murder of Amigo and the bloody aftermath remained murky. For such an important sequence of events to have taken place, however, knowledgeable observers both in Chinatown and in law enforcement felt certain that Uncle Seven must have played a role. They also knew it was unlikely that anyone would ever prove that in court. For his part, David Thai was convinced that whoever gave the actual go-ahead, the muscle was provided by the Ghost Shadows.

Even before Amigo's funeral, Thai had sworn vengeance. “We going to kidnap Ghost Shadows leader, chop his head off and throw it in the street,” he told Tinh Ngo and a handful of other BTK members at the Pho Hanoi luncheonette. Later, he claimed he was going to detonate a homemade bomb on Bayard Street, in the middle of Ghost Shadows territory, at the exact moment Amigo's body was being lowered into the ground out in Jersey.

The Great Cemetery Shootout quieted David down. He had been chastened, perhaps, by the magnitude of the event. Besides, all this media attention was not good for business. For the time being, the best course of action was to take no action at all.

An eerie calm descended on the streets of Chinatown. For the first time in a while, merchants on Canal Street opened their shops early and closed late. Tourists bought counterfeit merchandise at outrageously low prices and went home happy. Local restaurants were packed with smiling American customers.

It was inevitable, however, that the ranks of the BTK would be forced to reassert themselves. Not all of the gang's members were as free of financial concerns as David Thai. More than most of the many mobsters, punks, and white-collar charlatans operating within America's huge criminal underground, BTK gang members were motivated by a simple, irrefutable instinct for survival. They may have worshiped
Anh hai
and tried to endear themselves to him by following his every command. But they still had to eat.

By the end of the summer, after a few weeks of lying low, their collective stomach had definitely begun to growl.

Tinh Ngo stood at the front counter inside Maria's Bakery, a bustling cafeteria and catering shop located on Lafayette Street, one block north of Canal. He ordered a soda and a Chinese pastry. Behind him, the room was filled with afternoon idlers and high school kids just out of classes for the day. American pop music and the din of assorted Chinese dialects filled the air. On a plastic tray, Tinh carried his food and beverage to a Formica booth in a far corner, where four BTK brothers were sitting.

“Timmy,” said one of the gang members. “You hear what happen?”

“Oh, no,” moaned Tinh, taking a seat. “What now?”

The gang member filled Tinh in on the latest BTK escapade.

The previous day—around 10:00
A.M
neighborhood resident reported hearin. on the morning of August 27, 1990—a group of five gang members stormed a wholesale produce warehouse at 380 Broome Street, just a few blocks from where Tinh and the others were now sitting. During the robbery, the gang members shot
thirty-eight-year-old Sammy Eng, son of Kan Wah Eng, the owner of W. C. Produce. After ransacking the market's small front office, they began tying up Kan Wah Eng and the three or four store employees who were unlucky enough to be on the premises at the time.

While sixty-year-old Kan Wah Eng was on the floor, he made the mistake of looking up briefly.

“I told you not to look at me!” admonished Jimmy Nguyen, the lead robber. “Why you look at me?”

Another gang member, a slight
Viet-Ching
named Cuong Pham, was in the process of tying up Kan Wah Eng with a telephone cord. Just as he bent down to wrap the cord around Kan Wah Eng's ankles, an enraged Jimmy Nguyen fired a shot at the elderly store owner. He missed, hitting Cuong Pham instead in the back of the head, blowing his brains all over Kan Wah Eng, the floor, and a nearby wall. Frantically, the robbers fled W. C. Produce before the cops arrived.

“Oh, man,” said Tinh, when he heard the story. “What did David Thai say?”

“He mad,” replied the gang member. “He real mad.”

Among other things, the robbery attempt at W. C. Produce revealed a gap in leadership within the BTK. The produce market was in the middle of Amigo territory. With Amigo gone and nobody yet chosen to take his place, the BTK gangsters had embarked on the robbery without the knowledge or approval of any
dai low
. Coming just four weeks after the Great Cemetery Shootout, this wildly inept, accidental killing of one BTK gang member at the hands of another received significant local coverage in that morning's
Newsday
—an occurrence that did not sit well with David Thai.

Tinh Ngo sipped his soda and shook his head in astonishment. As the gang members gave him more details on the shocking death of Cuong Pham—a gang member Tinh knew well—he couldn't help but think: That could easily have been me.

Nearly all robberies were conducted amid a high level of chaos. The idea was for the robbers not only to get the goods, but to generate terror. This way, the victims wouldn't dare think of reporting the crime to the police. Furniture and other items were usually thrown around; victims were sometimes beaten and yelled at in an assortment of languages. Occasionally, shots were fired into the ceiling to scare people.

Tinh felt lucky. Of the half dozen or so robberies he had taken part in, none had yet erupted into serious violence. There was a time when he was turned on by the prospect of danger and the adrenaline rush that came from robbing people at gunpoint. But not anymore. After the cemetery shootout, where he hid behind a tombstone and watched as some of his fellow gang members were felled by gunfire or fled in horror, the harsh realities of violence suddenly became much more acute.

Now this—the stupid, careless death of a gang member during a sloppy attempted robbery that never should have taken place to begin with.

For the first time since he joined the gang, Tinh began to ponder what life might be like were he not a member of the BTK. The subject, quite frankly, made him feel bleak and depressed.

For Tinh and other BTK members, being a gangster was not the same as being a member of
Cosa Nostra
, or being a Colombian drug dealer, or even an African American gangbanger. A Mafia
soldato
lived a life separate from his criminal deeds. He had a wife and children at home and traveled in quasi-legitimate circles. A Colombian cocaine dealer reaped huge profits and presented himself to his community as a legitimate businessman. Members of the Crips and Bloods led halfway normal lives; many went to school and held jobs while fulfilling adolescent fantasies by being part-time gangsters.

But there was nothing part-time about being a member of the Vietnamese underworld. For Tinh and many of the others, the BTK was their entire life. They lived with gang members, ate with gang members, and socialized only with other gang members. In recent months Tinh had even cut off all communication with his family back in Vietnam. As far as he was concerned, he had no past. And like many teenagers his age, he never thought much about the future. His daily existence was entirely dependent on the various robberies and extortions he committed with other gang members.