Born to Kill (19 page)

As the afternoon wore on, Tinh edged closer and closer to the truth. The more he talked, the more he divulged. He gave the detectives an accurate account of his first armed robbery at the massage parlor on Chrystie Street, the one he committed with Blackeyes. He gave them names. At one point he even gave them David Thai's beeper number.

The detectives were taping the conversation on a small cassette recorder and writing down bits of information. Occasionally, they glanced at each other in disbelief. What's with this kid? they asked themselves. Not only was he unusually talkative, but not once had he posed the question all potential informants usually begin with: What's in it for me? This kid seemed more interested in talking than he did in striking a deal.

At one point, Tinh came perilously close to telling the detectives more than he wanted to about recent events in the state of Georgia. “David Thai, he get his guns in Georgia,” offered Tinh.

“He goes to Georgia?” asked Sabo.

“Georgia,” repeated Tinh.

“Where in Georgia?” asked Oldham.

“Grandview, Granville, something like this,” answered Tinh, unable to remember the exact name of the town where they had stayed.

“Did you ever go with them?” asked Oldham.

“Uh, yeah, I went there once.”

“When was this?”

“That's a long time ago.”

“One year, two years, three years?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you tell me.”

Hesitantly, Tinh claimed that about a year ago he had gone to Georgia with some gang members to buy guns. The detectives sensed that there was more, that he was leading them to Georgia for a reason. He seemed to have something he wanted to say. They prodded him with more questions about the trip. Who did the BTK buy the guns from? Did they bring the guns back to New York?

Tinh was sweating heavily now, his words barely discernible. Detective Oldham suggested they take a break. “Are you hungry?” he asked Tinh.

“What have you got?”

“We've got a McDonald's across the street,” suggested Sabo.

While Oldham ran out to get some food, Tinh wiped the perspiration from his brow.
What am I doing?
he asked himself again.
Why am I telling these men these things?

“You so quiet tonight, my husband. What's wrong?” inquired twenty-six-year-old Ying Jing Gan, the wife of Sen Van Ta.

Ta was seated on the edge of the bed in their small, cramped apartment on East Broadway, in Chinatown. He had been lost in thought, and his wife's question startled him.

“Is it something with the store?”

Ta sighed. He could no longer keep the troublesome events of the last few weeks from his wife. “Yes,” he answered. “There been some problems at the store.”

Usually, Ying Jing Gan knew better than to ask too many questions of her husband. She was Chinese, and Chinese tradition dictated that a wife not meddle in her husband's affairs, especially when it pertained to his job. But Gan sensed something was wrong. Ever since the robbery, her husband had seemed preoccupied and withdrawn.

“You remember the robbery?” Sen Van Ta asked his wife.

Gan was incredulous. “Of course I remember the robbery. What do you think?”

“Well …”

Sen Van Ta proceeded to tell his wife about the series of incidents that had occurred since then. She already knew that her husband had picked two of the robbers out of a police lineup. But she did not know about the threatening message he had received in the mail. And she certainly did not know that David Thai, the leader of Chinatown's most notorious criminal gang, had made a personal visit to her husband.

On the surface, Sen Van Ta remained steadfast in his determination to stand up to the BTK. He would not be intimidated, he told his fellow workers. Secretly, though, he was terrified. Ta knew what the BTK were capable of. “They come after me, they come after you. They come after anybody they think friendly with us,” he confessed to Ying Jing Gan.

Gan was barely five feet tall, fine-boned and petite even by Chinese standards. Her hair was black and luminous, with bangs that grazed the tips of her eyelashes. Her cheeks were full and rosy, even without makeup. The product of a traditional rural upbringing, she was a reticent person by nature, and had often been told by others that she was naive in the ways of the world. Her innocence and simple decency captivated Sen Van Ta the first day they met.

Now, standing in the doorway of their small bedroom, Ying Jing Gan was disturbed by what her husband was telling her. She had never seen Sen Van Ta express fear before. She turned and walked into the front room of their apartment, to an alcove where she knelt in front of a small shrine dedicated to her and Sen Van Ta's ancestors.

Most traditional Chinese and Vietnamese homes have a similar shrine. A small statue of Buddha was adorned with family photographs, flowers, an incense urn, and a few candles. Gan lit the candles and a stick of incense. She bowed her head and prayed not only for herself and her husband, but also for the baby she carried in her womb.

Bathed in flickering candlelight, Gan thought back to the first time she met Sen Van Ta, less than two years ago. It had been in Shanghai, around the time of the infamous Tiananmen Square uprising, an event that sent shock waves through all of China. Gan was from the rural town of Jinhua, in Chekiang Province, and she had traveled to Shanghai to meet Ta, a man she knew only through letters they had written back and forth. Their transcontinental courtship had been arranged by a
cousin, a matchmaking tradition still common in China even after decades of social change.

In Shanghai, Ying Jing Gan was not disappointed when she first laid eyes on Sen Van Ta, who had traveled all the way from New York City. Although he was dressed casually, he wore blue jeans, an extravagance by Chinese standards. Gan wore a white shirt buttoned to the neck, a long blue skirt, and red high heels.

There wasn't much they could do that first day in Shanghai, what with military vehicles patrolling the city and police checkpoints everywhere. They strolled across the street from Gan's aunt's house to a small park, where they walked and talked and rested in the shade. Given the chaotic events unfolding in China, they knew there wasn't much time.

The very next day, Ta, Gan, and Gan's cousin took a twelve-hour boat ride back to Chekiang Province, where Ta met Gan's parents.

Ta and Gan had briefly discussed marriage, but Gan was surprised when Ta came right out and boldly asked her parents, “I would like to have permission to marry your daughter.”

“We consent, if she consents,” replied Gan's father.

Everyone looked at Gan. “Of course,” she answered, her head spinning with a dizzying combination of joy and humility.

The following afternoon, Ta and Gan went to the township hall, registered, and were proclaimed husband and wife.

Sen Van Ta returned to New York. It would be another year before he was able to secure the necessary immigration papers and retrieve his wife.

Ying Jing Gan arrived in the States in the spring of 1990, a frightened, innocent bride living for the first time with a husband she hardly knew. She grew to love Sen Van Ta, but she was also lonely. She missed her family back in Chekiang Province. She would rather have been living in China. But she knew she could not go back. Chinese tradition declared that if you were married to a chicken, you must follow the chicken; if you married a dog, you must follow the dog's step.

When a Chinatown physician told her in December 1990 that she was pregnant, Ying Jing Gan was overjoyed. Now, while her husband worked, she would finally have a companion with whom she could pass the days. She would not be so lonely after all.

Gan could not believe how hard her husband and other Chinese
people worked in the States. Yes, there was prosperity to be had—but the price was high. Sen Van Ta worked seven days a week, from 9:30
A.M
. to 7:30
P.M
. Gan felt their life together lacked a certain spiritual quality that she associated with rural life in Chekiang. In Chinatown, she and Sen Van Ta saw each other only at night, and often her husband was exhausted.

Gan first heard about the Born to Kill gang not long after she arrived in New York City. There was plenty of neighborhood gossip about robberies. Sometimes, she even heard gunshots and the sound of wailing sirens as police cars raced through the neighborhood. Only later, after her husband's commercial space was robbed and he was beaten, did she become fully aware of the dangers involved in running a business in Chinatown.

Ying Jing Gan said one last prayer to Buddha, then extinguished the incense sticks and blew out the candles on the altar. When she climbed into bed, her husband was still awake.

“I don't know,” she said to Sen Van Ta. “Maybe you should just give these people what they want. Life is more important.”

“No,” her husband insisted. “They ask time and time again. We cannot afford to keep paying money. Besides, it's not right. They should work for a living just like everybody else. Now they rob the store. They beat me over the head. No way I cooperate with these people.”

Ta could see that his wife was troubled, and he regretted telling her about his problems. “Look,” he said. “I report all of this to the police. They know about the letter. They know about this man Thai. I trust they will not let anything bad happen. I trust they will protect us. Get these people in jail, where they belong.”

Sen Van Ta was trying to put a good face on things, but Ying Jing Gan was not so sure. Where she came from, the police were not somebody you turned to in times of trouble. In the People's Republic of China, the police were instruments of the state; it paid to be suspicious of their authority.

Though doubtful, Ying Jing Gan decided to keep her concerns to herself. “Okay,” she conceded reluctantly. “Please, let's go to sleep.”

Everything Gan had been taught led her to conclude that the course her husband had chosen would only make matters worse, but she was the wife, and he was the husband. If Sen Van Ta believed the
police had their best interests in mind, she had no choice but to accept his wishes.

After all, the United States was an unfamiliar place. Ying Jing Gan was still a stranger in Chinatown.

Presumably, her husband knew best.

Chapter 8

W
ith Tinh Ngo, detectives Bill Oldham and Alex Sabo knew they had a ringer. Unless the kid was bullshitting them across the board, which seemed unlikely given his situation, he definitely had inside knowledge about the workings of the BTK. In fact, during the interview at the Eighty-fourth Precinct, Tinh had thrown so many names and events at the detectives they really didn't know where to begin.

Oldham and Sabo were both from the Major Case Squad, a unit with citywide jurisdiction that dealt mainly with robberies and kidnappings—types of crime commonly practiced by Asian street gangs. But neither detective was an expert on organized crime in Chinatown. Oldham had spent most of his time on the force in Narcotics; Sabo was considered one of the department's best-informed detectives on the subject of art theft. When it came to Asian crime, their knowledge was mostly a mishmash of rumors and other information culled from individual robbery investigations.

They knew enough, however, to know that the
BTK was probably the hottest thing going in Chinatown right now. Not only had the gang arrived on the local scene in a big way over the last year and a half, but the NYPD was constantly getting desperate calls from cops in other cities asking for help, explaining, “We just arrested half a dozen Vietnamese males on a local home invasion. We don't know a thing about 'em, except they got BTK tattoos on their arms and New York City addresses.”

The most recent example of the gang's far-flung influence involved an arrest that had taken place on Canal Street, just six days before Oldham and Sabo spoke with Tinh Ngo. In the middle of the afternoon, detectives from Toronto, with the help of local cops from the Fifth Precinct, surrounded Sonny Long, a twenty-eight-year-old BTK member wanted for murder. Two months earlier, Long and two other hitmen had sauntered into the Kim Bo Restaurant, a bustling establishment in Toronto's Chinatown. “Don't fuck with my
dai low
,” Long exclaimed to a table full of Vietnamese males, just before he and the others opened fire in the crowded restaurant. Two people were killed. One of the victims was shot six times.

At first, Canadian police believed the double homicide was a revenge hit for the shooting at the cemetery in Linden, New Jersey. The motive was never firmly established. Nonetheless, with this shocking midday hit Canadian police were becoming aware they had a sizable Vietnamese gang problem in their two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal. More than a few of the young gangsters they were arresting—including Sonny Long—had tattoos with the letters BTK underlining the gang's insignia: a coffin accompanied by three lit candles.

Canada wasn't the only place with an emerging BTK problem. In Stockton, California, police arrested Lam Trang, the gang member who had gunned down two young Flying Dragons on Canal Street at David Thai's behest sixteen months earlier. After that well-known double homicide, Trang fled to Stockton, where he founded his own group of BTK gangsters. Before arriving, however, he had stopped in Port Arthur, Texas, where he was suspected of having played a part in at least one and possibly three murders.

The mobility of Lam Trang and other BTK members like him made it seem as if the gang was everywhere. Vietnamese gang members with BTK tattoos were now being arrested routinely in dozens of jurisdictions.

Of course, just because a young Vietnamese gangster had a coffin or a dragon or some other BTK tattoo on his arm didn't mean he was directly affiliated with David Thai. Some of these gangs were made up of renegade New York members on the run. Some were merely local gangs that had appropriated the name. Either way, the BTK's reputation had become so exalted throughout the Asian underworld that gangsters everywhere were attempting to capitalize on the mystique.