Born to Kill (12 page)

About the only non–gang-related outlet Tinh had was a relationship he had struck up with a seventeen-year-old Chinese-American girl named Sandy. He first met Sandy earlier that summer, through Kenny Vu. She was slim and delicate, with porcelain features and beautiful, translucent skin. Her parents were immigrants, but Sandy was New
York-born, or ABC, as American-born Chinese were commonly known in Chinatown.

Tinh liked Sandy, but he couldn't really say he was crazy about her. In fact, he had never officially asked Sandy out on a date at all. They were simply paired up one day by a group of mutual friends while on their way to a party in Queens. Afterward, they took occasional trips together to the Coney Island amusement park. There they passed the hours in the penny arcades along the boardwalk and drove the bumper cars. Their favorite ride was the Wonder Wheel, Coney Island's age-old Ferris wheel, which took them high in the sky, overlooking the ocean, the beach, and the elevated subway trains that brought thousands of people to the far-flung reaches of Brooklyn.

Tinh had always been timid and awkward around girls. Many gang members had taken advantage of David Thai's stable of young prostitutes, the immigrant women who worked at his Chinatown massage parlor. Kenny and Tommy Vu were at the massage parlor all the time. A gang member named Hai had fallen madly in love with one of David's girls and even followed her back to Malaysia. But Tinh had never gone to the massage parlor as a customer. And he'd never really had a serious girlfriend before.

In the beginning, what Tinh liked most about hanging out with Sandy was the stature it brought him among his friends. Although women were never allowed to take part in the gang's activities in any substantial way, a gang member's standing seemed to increase if he had young girls trailing after him. Sandy also seemed to gain respect and even awe from friends of hers who were impressed that she went to parties and occasionally danced at nightclubs with notorious members of the underworld.

“What's it like?” Sandy once asked Tinh about his life as a gangster.

“It's really nothing special,” Tinh answered modestly.

Eventually, Sandy took matters into her own hands and introduced Tinh into the world of the flesh. One afternoon while no one was at home at the safe-house apartment, Sandy offered, “Here, Timmy, this is how it's done.”

On a mattress on the floor, with horns honking and sound of children playing outside, Sandy guided Tinh through his first sexual encounter.
Tinh was relieved, since many of the other gang members had been making fun of him for being so inexperienced. He also felt it was appropriate that he should lose his virginity in a BTK safe house.

As he got to know Sandy better, Tinh tried to express his budding feelings of disenchantment about his underworld life. Tinh had never experienced this level of physical intimacy with anyone before. Moreover, as an outsider, Sandy seemed like the only person who might understand why Tinh would feel trapped by a life-style that pushed him further and further from any prospect of a normal, well-adjusted existence. But Sandy wasn't interested. All she wanted to know was whether Tinh had ever killed anyone.

“I have no desire to kill any person,” Tinh told Sandy.

Later, Tinh asked Sandy why she had never taken him to meet her parents.

“Oh,” she answered, “I couldn't do that. My parents tell me to stay away from Vietnamese people. They would never approve of me having a boyfriend who was Vietnamese.”

Tinh had heard these sentiments expressed before, especially by other ABCs, who regarded the Vietnamese as crude and untrustworthy. Few self-respecting Chinese parents would hire a Vietnamese kid to work in their restaurant or market, much less allow one to go out with their American-born daughter.

After that, Tinh saw less and less of Sandy. In a way, the relationship succeeded only in driving him further back into the arms of the gang, convincing him that there was no life outside the closed criminal brotherhood that had become his family, his lifeline, his entire existence.

More than ever, Tinh became convinced that his lot had been decided long ago, when he first entered the world as a vulnerable, terrified newborn in his home country of Vietnam, the Land of the Ascending Dragon. Everything after that was
dao lam nguoi
—natural law, universal law, the law of karma.

Chapter 5

A
t the same time Tinh Ngo was having his emotional ties to the BTK reaffirmed, the relationship between Chinatown's various criminal factions was turning ugly once again.

On the morning of October 15, 1990, a parking-lot attendant arrived for work in lower Manhattan and made a grisly discovery. In the rear of the lot, amid debris and behind billowing plastic bags of garbage, the bodies of three young Asian males were found piled one on top of another. Each had been shot through the head at close range.

It didn't take the police long to piece together a thumbnail sketch of what had happened. The parking lot was on Reade Street, across from the Sinta Lounge in Ghost Shadows territory. Through various witnesses, the police established that the three murder victims had definitely been in the bar earlier that morning. A neighborhood resident reported hearing shots fired around 3:15
A.M
., just after the boys had been marched outside at gunpoint. Apparently, they had been made to put their jackets on backward, making
it virtually impossible for them to defend themselves. Then they were executed; two youths were shot twice in the back of the head, a third once.

All three of the victims were Vietnamese, with an assortment of tattoos identifying them as members of Born to Kill.

To the people of Chinatown and the city at large, the killings struck an unusually grim note. Chinatown had seen gang wars before. In 1976, a series of tit-for-tat gang hits resulted in more than a dozen deaths over a twelve-month period. In the mid-1980s, when Chinatown's ethnic makeup first began to diversify and there was a frantic scrambling for turf, gang members were gunned down in gambling dens, barber shops, and neighborhood video arcades. The shooting at the cemetery effectively established that the rules had changed—for the worse. Now it was as if Chinatown's gang wars had descended to the level of barbarism.

One member of the community who felt that the time had come for drastic action was Virgo Lee, the city's director of Asian affairs. Lee heard about the triple homicide on Reade Street on his car radio while driving home. Like most everyone else, he was sickened, especially when he heard the victims had been shot and left to die in a parking lot less than two blocks from his City Hall office.

The next morning, Lee picked up the phone.

“Let me ask you something,” he said to an acquaintance, a well-known restaurateur and member of the all-powerful Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. “If I were to call for a meeting between myself, business leaders, community leaders, and the police department to discuss what we can do about the gang problem in Chinatown, would you show up?”

“Well, yes,” the restaurateur answered. “If you asked me, I would.”

Lee hung up the phone, called another businessman he knew and asked the same question. “I suppose so,” the businessman answered.

Lee hung up, made a few more calls, and got generally the same answer. He was greatly encouraged.

In most communities, what Lee was proposing was hardly revolutionary. An exchange among representatives of city government, local
police, and community leaders might seem like a logical first step toward overcoming a crisis like the one currently bedeviling Chinatown. Few people knew better than Lee, however, just how different Chinatown was from most communities.

Though he had only recently been appointed to the job of Asian affairs director by the newly elected mayor, David Dinkins, Lee was, at the age of thirty-nine, a product of the community. Since arriving from his native Boston as a teenager, he'd spent much of his adult life butting heads with the community's traditional powers. As an activist and union advocate in the 1970s trying to organize working-class and poor immigrants, Lee had learned that social activism was rarely appreciated in Chinatown. Even his parents, rural peasants originally from Toishan province, thought he was “insane,” a rabble-rouser who had come under the sway of bad influences in America.

It was through his experiences as an activist that Lee first began to fully understand the ubiquitous power of the CCBA, the traditional nemesis of younger, more progressive Chinese-Americans.

Made up of representatives from most of the community's family, district, and business associations, the CCBA was Chinatown's official governing body. The association's president was sometimes referred to as “the Mayor of Chinatown.” CCBA members saw themselves as arbiters of Chinese tradition and culture. Mostly, they comprised a powerful business lobby that refused to deal with any Asian-American group or social-welfare organization not sanctioned by the CCBA.

Headquartered in several buildings on Mott Street, in the heart of old Chinatown, the association was fully legitimate, but it conducted business amid great secrecy, behind closed doors and only in Chinese. The ways in which the CCBA arrived at decisions that affected the lives of nearly all Asians living in the city had contributed greatly to Chinatown's reputation as a mysterious, closed society.

As a representative of city government, Virgo Lee had to deal with the CCBA, whether he liked it or not. Its members' power as decision-makers reached far beyond the organization itself to encompass a stratum of Chinatown society known simply as “the elders.” Mostly conservative Cantonese-speaking residents who had fled China in the thirties and forties, the elders were the official voice of Chinatown. No
meeting that Lee might hold would have any credibility unless they were included.

Getting their cooperation was problematic, to say the least. Although most elders had never been directly linked to the criminal rackets or the gangs, they supported a system of commerce in which the tongs and the gangs played an important role. If a well-known restaurateur and CCBA member was having a labor problem, gang members might be used to harass picketing employees. In fact, nobody liked to talk about it much, but it was common knowledge that a sizable portion of Chinatown's labor pool was composed of illegal immigrants smuggled into the United States by gangsters. A number of prominent tong bosses who were also CCBA members were believed to be key players in the smuggling process.

Given the symbiotic relationship between Chinatown's business community and the criminal element, the elders had never been out front on the issue of gang violence. For years, most elders refused to admit publicly that gangs existed at all, much less that they were a problem. This attitude had prevailed for so long that even most of Chinatown's social activists had come to believe the gang situation could never be seriously addressed.

As a community veteran, Virgo Lee knew what he was up against. Which made him doubly surprised as he continued flipping through his Rolodex, calling virtually every community and business leader he was on speaking terms with. His idea for a joint community/city government/ law enforcement meeting was being met not with terseness, as he expected, but with general acceptance. Even when Lee emphasized that this would be a public gathering attended by members of the Chinese-language press, and not a secret closed-door meeting, no one hung up on him.

By late afternoon nearly two dozen community leaders, including some of the most powerful businessmen in Chinatown, had pledged their willingness to take part in the meeting.

The director of Asian affairs was astounded. The prospect of the community's most powerful forces coming together to officially acknowledge the gang situation was unprecedented. To Lee, it was as startling an indication as any underworld shootout could have been that the current wave of gang activity represented something new, something even
the most revered and powerful leaders in Chinatown felt had moved beyond their control.

The most reluctant participant in Virgo Lee's plan for a high-powered summit meeting on gang violence was none other than the New York City Police Department.

“Why should we be negotiating with gangsters?” one high-ranking lieutenant bluntly asked Lee when the subject of the meeting was broached.

“Hey,” answered Lee. “If you have evidence any of these people are engaged in criminal activity, then arrest them. Otherwise, you're going to have to deal with these people because of who they are and who they represent.”

One reason for police reticence when dealing with community elders was the still-smoldering memory of Chan Tse-Chiu, a legendary tong leader better known as Eddie Chan. In the late 1970s, after an especially violent period of gang warfare, Chan emerged as a key force in the Asian community. With impressive financial power and friends in high places, Chan was a classic example of the type of Chinatown power broker who frustrated lawmen most—outwardly respectable, close to powerful politicians, and thoroughly corrupt.

Theoretically, the cops should have liked Eddie Chan. He was, after all, one of them. Chan first come to New York from Hong Kong, where he had served for many years as a detective sergeant with the Royal Hong Kong Police. In the early 1970s, a corruption scandal forced five notorious police sergeants to flee the colony, though not before they amassed a small fortune from gambling, extortion, prostitution, loan-sharking, and other criminal rackets. As rich exiles in Taiwan and later Canada, the former police officers became known as the Five Dragons. Though his name had not yet surfaced in the ongoing corruption probe, Eddie Chan also fled Hong Kong at the time of the scandal. In New York's Chinatown, he became known as the Sixth Dragon.

A stout, balding, moon-faced man with a Fu Manchu mustache, Eddie started slowly in New York, first by opening a small jewelry and antiques store. Then he bought a funeral parlor, two or three restaurants, a vegetable market, and several buildings in Chinatown and Little Italy.
When young gangsters from the Ghost Shadows inevitably tried to shake Eddie down, he invited them to lunch. Seated around a restaurant table, the lead gangster asked Chan, “You used to be a police officer in Hong Kong, right?”