Born to Kill (20 page)

The fact that Vietnamese gangs had become something of a national and even international phenomenon was both exciting and daunting to Oldham and Sabo. For starters, they knew they could probably use Tinh Ngo to make local arrests, maybe build a few robbery and even homicide cases. But they also knew this kid was potentially more valuable than that. If even half of what Tinh Ngo had thrown at them proved true, they had the makings of a solid racketeering case. They were also well aware that to build such a case would take more than the efforts of two detectives from the NYPD's Major Case Squad. They would need help from the Feds.

Just two weeks after their initial meeting with Tinh, the detectives made the connection they needed. As is often the case in law enforcement, it did not come about because of some directive from high up the federal chain of command. Instead, an industrious mid-level agent took it upon himself to establish contact with a rank-and-file detective, providing the impetus for an important investigation to begin taking shape.

Joe Greco, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been working a gun-trafficking case involving a network of Vietnamese gangsters based in Jersey City. The investigation had gotten under way the previous month, in January 1991. Greco and a handful of investigators with the Hudson County prosecutor's office had learned that their main player, an unassuming Vietnamese immigrant named Hoa Tran, had strong BTK ties. Tran had a booth on Canal Street where he sold counterfeit watches. Joe Greco believed that Hoa Tran was also a significant supplier of weapons to David Thai's BTK.

When Greco heard there were a couple of detectives with the NYPD's Major Case Squad looking to build a case against the BTK, he immediately called Bill Oldham, who agreed to meet with him. Greco was already up to his neck in the Jersey City gun case. So while he could serve as a liaison with the NYPD, he probably wouldn't be able
to serve as case agent in a major investigation. As a result, Dan Kumor, an agent based in the bureau's Manhattan office, was assigned to the case as well.

Kumor was young—just thirty years old—and he had been with ATF less than three years. Like many people in federal law enforcement, he had yet to familiarize himself with the workings of the Vietnamese underworld.

“BTK? What's that?” he had responded when first told he would be working the case.

“BTK,” his supervisor repeated. “Born to Kill. The Vietnamese gang. Based in Chinatown.”

That rang a bell. “Oh, yeah, right,” said Kumor. “The shootout at the cemetery in Jersey. I remember that.”

Kumor called Greco at his office in Newark to ask about his dealings so far with the NYPD.

“Well,” said Greco, “there's really not a lot for me to tell you just yet. I've only spoken with Oldham briefly. He thinks he's got the beginnings of a good case.”

“What's this about a possible confidential informant?” asked Kumor.

“Yeah. In fact,” Greco told Kumor, “I'm going out to Brooklyn later this week to meet the C.I. myself. Why don't you come along?”

“Definitely,” Kumor replied.

Starting an investigation with a confidential informant already in place was certainly a plus, but both Greco and Kumor knew better than to get overly excited. In the underworld, there are no shortage of low-level crooks looking to cut deals with the government by supplying information. Whether these crooks ever proved to have anything useful, and whether they had the stamina needed to sustain dangerous and complex criminal cases over the long haul, was a different matter altogether.

Before Kumor met face-to-face with Bill Oldham or anyone else, he knew he had some homework to do. The most recent case he'd worked was a Jamaican drug investigation involving a cocaine and crack posse based uptown, on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. It had taken months for Kumor to learn the nuances of heavy Jamaican accents laced
with an impenetrable patois rarely understood outside the shantytowns of Kingston. Now he had to learn about a whole new underworld, one peopled by criminals with names and habits that were, to him, equally strange and exotic.

The logical place to start was the case file on Joe Greco's gun-trafficking investigation in Jersey City. In that case, investigators had managed to penetrate a small ring of gun merchants by using an undercover agent posing as a Jamaican posse member. Kumor appreciated the investigators' ingenuity; no Vietnamese gangster would ever suspect that someone who looked and sounded like a Jamaican “rude boy” was a cop.

Already, the investigators had learned that the Vietnamese gangsters were getting most of their weapons from gun shops in Kentucky and Virginia, smuggling them into the New York-New Jersey area, and selling them through a network spread up and down the East Coast.

Along with familiarizing himself with Greco's case, Kumor began delving into ATF intelligence files. Though little had been done with them over the years, the files on Asian organized crime were voluminous, made up mostly of government reports and assorted documents stamped CONFIDENTIAL. Reading the reports, Kumor learned for the first time about triads and tongs and how they interacted with traditional Chinatown gangs like the Flying Dragons and the Ghost Shadows. He read old files on Eddie Chan, Uncle Benny Ong, and other renowned figures in Chinatown.

Despite the abundant background data, there was little current, specific information on the Vietnamese underworld. For this, Kumor thumbed through back issues of the International Association of Asian Crime Investigators quarterly newsletter. He was amazed not only by the geographic breadth of criminal activity associated with Vietnamese gangsters, but by the level of violence. As far as Kumor could tell, what distinguished Vietnamese gangsters from the Italians, Jamaicans, Dominicans, and other organized hoodlums currently thriving in America's vast criminal marketplace was the high levels of recklessness and desperation their actions seemed to reveal.

The other thing Kumor noticed was how tight-lipped they were. In all the IAACI newsletters and government reports, he could not find a
single example of a case against Vietnamese underworld figures where a gang member had been “flipped”—the law enforcement term for getting a criminal to join the other side.

All of which made Agent Kumor doubly curious about this socalled confidential informant the NYPD would be introducing him to in Brooklyn.

At 302 Canal Street, in front of Sen Van Ta's store, the sidewalk was packed with the usual human slipstream: a nonstop procession of shoppers, street merchants, and Chinatown residents. Small curbside tables had been set up for peddlers to hawk children's toys, road atlases, and other miscellaneous items, leaving only a narrow walkway for pedestrians.

Inside the entrance to Ta's store, only slightly removed from the hubbub of the street, Ying Jing Gan stared at her husband in disbelief. “You did what!?” she asked incredulously, her voice rising with each syllable.

“I had no choice,” her husband defensively responded. “The police came to me. They said, ‘Mr. Ta, we know you can make the identification. You must come with us.'
I
had no choice!
”

Gan was so stunned by what her husband was telling her that she asked him to repeat the entire story again.

A few days earlier, on the afternoon of February 13, 1991, Sen Van Ta had been working in his store when three BTK gang members came in demanding money. It was just a few days before the culmination of the New Year's season, a time when gang members traditionally increase their extortionate demands for “lucky money.”

Sen Van Ta was fed up. First, the gangsters rob him and smack him in the head. Then they harass and threaten him. Now they come looking for money.

“How you expect us to pay money?” Ta admonished the lead gangster. “You already rob this store. Now we have nothing.”

Ta continued shouting at the gangsters, telling them he and his fellow workers had nothing left to give. The three BTK hoodlums scowled and left the store.

One hour later, they returned along with two other gang members,
holding their hands inside their jackets as if they were packing concealed guns. Sen Van Ta recognized the one who seemed to be their leader; he was named LV Hong.

Like most BTK gang members, Hong was
Viet-Ching
. Nearly six feet tall and slightly older than the others, he had a mole on his cheek with a few hairs growing out of it, a distinguishing feature that made his face easy to remember. It was rumored among local merchants that LV Hong had been personally selected by David Thai and flown in from Texas to replace Amigo as the new Canal Street
dai low
.

“Don't ever raise your voice with these boys,” LV Hong warned Sen Van Ta, asking, “Don't you know about respect?” Once again the gangsters demanded money, and once again Ta said he had no money to give. Angrily, LV Hong and the others left the store.

Now Sen Van Ta was really irate. He pictured the gangsters coming back every day, demanding money and threatening his employees. So Ta did the unthinkable: He picked up the phone and called the cops.

One hour later, around five o'clock, two uniformed officers from the local precinct arrived at the store. Ta was still steaming. He told the policemen about the gangsters coming into the store not once, but twice. They seemed to be carrying weapons and they demanded money.

“Could you identify these guys?” one of the cops asked Ta.

“I know who they are,” answered Ta. “Everybody know who they are. They gather right across the street from here at two-seven-one Canal Street mall.”

“Well,” explained the cop, “we can arrest these people on a charge of aggravated harassment. But you have to make an identification. It's called probable cause. If you don't ID them, there's nothing we can do.”

Standing inside his store three days later, Ta was still uncomfortable about what happened next. He told Ying Jing Gan that he was none too excited by the prospect of identifying these gangsters right in the middle of a crowded Canal Street mall. He told the police he would be willing to file a complaint, and maybe even pick the gangsters out of a lineup at a later date.

“Nah,” the cop replied. “The only way anything is gonna get done is if you finger this bad guy right now.”

Reluctantly, Sen Van Ta got into a police car with the two officers.
They drove around the block and pulled up directly in front of the mini-mall at 271 Canal Street. Ta and the cops entered the mall and walked to the Pho Hanoi restaurant in the back. All around them, merchants and customers froze in their tracks.

LV Hong was seated at a table against the restaurant's rear wall talking with three or four other gang members. With the two cops standing behind him, Sen Van Ta walked into the small luncheonette and pointed at LV Hong. “That's the guy right there,” he declared.

“Okay,” said one of the cops to LV Hong. “Let's go, pal. You're coming with us.” They slapped a set of handcuffs on LV and led him through the mall and out onto the street. “Watch your head,” one of the cops cautioned LV, as he was lowered into the backseat of the police car.

Standing on Canal Street, the other gangsters looked mostly shocked. From the backseat, LV Hong glared at Ta with an expression of pure, unmitigated disgust.

Hearing the details of LV Hong's arrest, a wave of fear shuddered through Ying Jing Gan's small, bird-boned frame. She may have been naive, but she knew full well the possible consequences of openly crossing a Chinatown gang.

When Gan first arrived in Chinatown, one of the most-talked-about recent events was a retribution murder that had taken place in February 1990. A pretty twenty-two-year-old named Tina Sham had testified at a murder trial against two members of the Green Dragons, a gang based in the growing Asian community of Flushing, Queens. One year later, Sham and her boyfriend had been abducted coming out of the Crown Palace, a restaurant in Queens. They were driven to a secluded area on Long Island and shot multiple times in the head and body. Their partially decayed corpses were found one month later.

The killing of Tina Sham and her boyfriend had been a cruel reminder to people in Chinatown what could happen if they openly cooperated with the law. Ying Jing Gan had been riveted by the story of the vile double homicide; she needed no other reminder of how vengeful the gangs could be.

“You don't respect your own life,” Ying Jing Gan scolded her husband.

Ta pleaded with his wife, trying to make her understand that he
had not willingly identified LV Hong in public. “Don't you think I would rather go into the police station, where I make identification from behind glass? Do you think I want so these people know who I am?”

Gan could see that her husband was just as distressed by what had happened as she was. She had guessed from his behavior the last few days that something was amiss; he seemed skittish, always looking over his shoulder.

“Well,” said Gan, trying not to sound too alarmed, “all we can do now is be careful.” She shook her head. “But please, listen to me. Do not talk with these policemen anymore. Do not get us into more trouble than we already are. Please.”

Throughout February and into March, Sen Van Ta and his wife lived their lives like frightened mice, scurrying around in the shadows of Chinatown. Each evening, Ying Jing Gan met her husband at his store on Canal Street just before closing time. Each evening, they would take a different route to their home on East Broadway, far on the other side of the neighborhood. They stayed off the main thoroughfares, especially Canal Street.

At home, they locked their windows and kept the door bolted at all times. Idlers standing outside their apartment building—especially those loitering across the street in shabby Seward Park—were viewed with suspicion.

Ying Jing Gan loved her husband, but she was starting to feel resentful. She admired the fact that Sen Van Ta was a righteous man who had the courage to do what he believed was right by standing up to the BTK. But they had to think of more than themselves now. “Feel my stomach,” she would say. “Soon you have a child. Maybe seven months, you have a family. What are we supposed to do if something bad happen to you?”