Born to Kill (21 page)

Ta tried to reassure his wife, telling her time and time again that the police would make sure nothing bad happened to him. But Gan remained uneasy. She trembled each time the phone rang, fearing that maybe this would be the call informing her that her husband had been kidnapped in broad daylight, or gunned down on Canal Street.

Not surprisingly, their marriage suffered. Sen Van Ta rarely showed physical affection toward his wife anymore. At night, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Ying Jing Gan tried to transport herself. On
nights when she could sleep, she dreamed of her rural childhood in Chekiang Province, of the red sky at twilight in the hills west of her tiny village, and the familiar sounds of squabbling chickens, quacking ducks, and the soothing, early morning low of the water buffalo.

Anything to take her mind off the nagging sense of dread that had become an irrevocable part of their daily life in Chinatown.

To the federal agents and police officers who had begun to entertain the idea of bringing criminal charges against the BTK, Sen Van Ta's dispute with the gang was, at most, a distant echo. Detectives Oldham and Sabo were vaguely aware that a robbery had taken place at 302 Canal Street. They had asked Tinh Ngo during the interview at the Eighty-fourth Precinct if he knew anything about the robbery. Tinh told them, yes, he knew David Thai had planned the heist and supplied the weapons. But that incident was just one amid dozens of disconnected names, dates, and other information Tinh had passed along to the cops that day. It wasn't likely they were going to appreciate the severity of Sen Van Ta's predicament until their budding investigation came into focus.

Not long after Ta fingered LV Hong at the Pho Hanoi luncheonette, ATF agents Dan Kumor and Joe Greco drove across the Brooklyn Bridge to the King's County District Attorney's Office for their meeting with the cops—and Tinh Ngo.

Kumor, the youngest of the investigators, viewed the meeting with considerable apprehension. Not only would he likely be entering into a relationship with a confidential informant—an undertaking fraught with potential problems—but he would also be inaugurating a partnership with two of “New York's finest.”

In his brief tenure with ATF, it had been Kumor's experience that officers of the NYPD were sometimes more trouble than they were worth. Kumor himself was a middle-class kid from northeast Philadelphia who'd grown up with five brothers and one sister. His father was an attorney who had served two years as a municipal court judge. Coming from a large family, Kumor intuitively understood the value of cooperation, of making concessions for the good of the whole. But that philosophy seemed to be anathema to many detectives with the NYPD.

On the massive Jamaican posse investigation Kumor had recently
completed, he often found himself in the middle of ugly jurisdictional battles between the ATF agents and local cops assigned to the case. As the youngest and least jaded investigator involved, Kumor wound up playing the role of mediator. In the end, the case was successfully prosecuted, but most of the agents and cops had divided into hostile factions, with many of the lawmen refusing to even speak to one another.

Kumor found the experience aggravating and counterproductive, and he wasn't looking forward to the prospect of waging similar battles over the next six or seven months.

It was a blustery spring day when Kumor and Greco arrived at the D.A.'s office, located at Cadman Plaza, across from the Brooklyn Criminal Courts Building. The assistant district attorney who was handling Tinh Ngo's robbery charge introduced Kumor and Greco to Detective Oldham. The three investigators were led to a small conference room, where they were soon joined by Tinh, who had been brought from his temporary residence at Rikers Island.

Kumor and Greco took a backseat to Oldham, who by now had met with Tinh on a couple of occasions. This time Oldham was toting a book of mug shots, hoping that Tinh would be able to identify gang members and participants in various crimes he had already talked about. Occasionally, Greco interjected a question. Kumor sat quietly and took notes, observing both the informant and the detective with whom he would be spending most of his waking hours during the course of the investigation.

Watching Oldham, Kumor immediately heard alarm bells clamoring inside his head. For one thing, Oldham was dressed in a trendy, tailored suit that looked to have cost about $2,000 more than the discount attire favored by most detectives. With his neatly coiffed hair and GQ apparel, he looked like a Hollywood version of a New York City cop. His manner was cocky, to put it mildly, and he seemed to Kumor like the kind of guy who felt federal agents were a burden that he, a street-smart New York detective, was occasionally forced to endure.

Although he was snooty and dismissive toward Greco and himself, Kumor could see that Oldham knew his job. He may have thought he was the cat's ass, but he also seemed to be intelligent. He handled Tinh well, applying just the right degrees of forcefulness and patience in his inquiries.

As far as Kumor could tell, Oldham's relationship with the informant was still in the developmental stage. The kid was forthcoming, but there was no way of knowing yet just how truthful his answers were. Many of the names he was throwing out seemed to mean more to Oldham than they did to Kumor or Greco, but the detective was definitely still probing. Using information Tinh had given him during previous interviews, Oldham was cross-checking names, dates, and other data, trying to catch the informant contradicting himself.

Kumor was impressed with Tinh Ngo. He had been told the kid had a good memory, but he had not been prepared for how focused Tinh would be. He also seemed to have an excellent attitude. Kumor was used to informants being cagey and manipulative; they usually wanted to know what the government was going to do for them before they offered anything of value. But Tinh seemed amazingly guileless.

He didn't look anything like a gang kid, either. There wasn't the spiky hair or that hungry, haunted look that characterized most of the Asian gangsters Kumor had seen. He knew from Tinh's rap sheet that the kid was about to turn nineteen, but he looked maybe three or four years younger than that. Moreover, he seemed to have the kind of innocence that couldn't be faked. He was also exceedingly polite. Kumor couldn't tell if this was because Tinh was terrified, or if he was just being respectful.

The ATF agent looked around the cramped government conference room, with overflowing file cabinets and maps of the city on the wall. It wouldn't surprise him if Tinh was intimidated. There wasn't much precedent for an Asian gang kid entering into a pact with the law. Surrounded by the prosecutorial trappings of the district attorney's office and three sizable Caucasian lawmen, Tinh must be wondering what he'd gotten himself into.

After forty-five minutes or so, the informant was allowed to go. “The kid sounds good,” offered Joe Greco after he was gone.

“He's got a lot of information, that's for sure,” replied Oldham. “We're still checking a lot of this stuff out. But even if only half of what he's telling us is true, that's a lot to go on.”

The ATF agents concurred.

“So, you think your people are gonna want to come on board?” asked Oldham.

Oldham hadn't tried to hide his distaste for federal agents, but he could certainly use their pocketbooks. If the investigation blossomed to the point where travel was involved, or a lot of surveillance, or expensive drug and gun buys, the NYPD would not be able to keep up. Perennially constrained by financial woes, the cops were not equipped to take on a gang the size of the BTK by themselves.

“Well,” answered Kumor. “The way I heard it, we already are on board. It's just a question of making it official on paper.”

Oldham nodded his approval, and the investigators said their goodbyes for now.

Driving back toward the ATF office in lower Manhattan, Kumor twisted slightly in his seat. As he and Greco crossed the stately Brooklyn Bridge, Kumor peered through the enveloping web of iron cable toward the twinkling lights of New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty glistening in the distance. Once again he was about to embark on a complicated joint-task-force operation involving his agency and the NYPD—a state of affairs that had his stomach churning with the usual mixture of excitement, anticipation, and trepidation.

At Rikers Island, lying on the well-worn mattress in his cell, Tinh Ngo considered his options for what seemed like the millionth time. Already, he was in much deeper than he ever imagined he would be. He had started by thinking he would tell the investigators only about crimes committed by others, implicating only gang members who were already in prison. But Detective Oldham told him that wasn't good enough.

“I have to know if you are being honest with me,” the detective had said during a brief meeting in a secluded room at Rikers. “I hear you talking about other people. What I'm interested in is what you've done.”

In just a few meetings, Tinh had told the cops almost everything. He told them about how he got started with the gang, robbing waiters of their tip money in the D train subway station on Grand Street. He told them about his early robberies with Blackeyes and the Vu brothers,
Kenny and Tommy. He told them about the meeting at the Japanese restaurant in midtown Manhattan where everyone signed the paper pledging allegiance to the BTK. He told them about the hierarchy of the gang, how David Thai was the boss and the various neighborhoods were controlled by
dai lows
, underbosses who supposedly controlled all the gang crimes that took place in their areas.

Tinh buried the investigators with information. But in all his revelations, he said nothing about the robbery in Doraville, Georgia, where the Cambodian jeweler was shot and left for dead.

Tinh wanted to come clean about the Doraville shooting. But he could not. Partly, he was paralyzed with shame by what had happened. But he was also afraid that if he told the investigators about his role in what he believed was a murder, they would lock him up and throw away the key.

The prospect of spending any more time in prison made Tinh nearly sick with depression. Already, his return to Rikers Island reminded him of what a suffocating trap his life had become. He had asked to be placed in general population, but the investigators insisted he stay in P.C.—protective custody. They told Tinh it was for his own safety, which may have been true. But the cops had other motives as well.

P.C. was not unlike solitary confinement. Each day, the prisoner in P.C. surveyed his bleak, numbingly dull surroundings and became more acutely aware of just how limited his options had become. Each day, the prospect of cooperating with the law seemed more and more like a last glimmer of hope.

Of course, Tinh Ngo was already supplying the investigators with information, and probably did not need further encouragement. But the cops had plans for their young informant—plans that required he be thoroughly and completely predisposed to accommodate the wishes of his overseers.

“What we propose is this,” Oldham told Tinh one afternoon at the King's County D.A.'s office. “We think it would be a good idea to put you back out on the street and have you reestablish ties with the gang, just like before you got arrested. You supply us with fresh information. Nobody on the street would know anything about it, of course. It would be a secret undercover operation.”

Tinh was confused.

“You know,” continued Oldham, “like
Twenty-one Jump Street
. You ever see
Twenty-one Jump Street?
”

“Oh yeah,” mumbled Tinh, who was beginning to doubt this detective had any idea what it was like being a member of the Vietnamese underworld.

Oldham had his own reasons for wanting to put Tinh back out on the street. “We could go on interviewing Timmy for months,” he argued to the other investigators. “The only thing that will come of it is intelligence—intelligence that will go into department files to be used by other detectives to make arrests.”

Like most young, aggressive detectives, Oldham was not interested in stockpiling intelligence data for the use and possible glory of others. He wanted to catch criminals on wiretaps and videotape discussing crimes. He wanted the thrill of nailing criminals in the act. He wanted to spearhead an investigation that was unlike anything ever attempted before in Chinatown, an investigation that would make headlines and enhance everyone's careers.

Later, locked inside his lifeless, ten- by twelve-foot cell, Tinh thought about Oldham's offer. The detective had told him he would have to sign some kind of agreement with the D.A.'s office. In exchange for his cooperation, the D.A. would recommend that Tinh be given a “downward departure,” which meant he would walk on the robbery charge.

To Tinh, the most appealing part of the government's offer was that it would get him out of Rikers Island immediately. In fact, his desire to get out of prison was so overwhelming that he could hardly think of anything else. The likelihood that he would have to wear a recording device and eventually testify against his gang brothers in court never entered Tinh's mind.

A few days after being asked, Tinh Ngo responded to Oldham's offer by saying, “Yes. I think maybe I could do what you ask.”

On the surface, the investigators remained composed. They sent Tinh back to Rikers, telling him that it would be days before the agreement papers would be ready for him to sign. In reality, they were ecstatic. For the first time in living memory, the cops would have a gang member operating as an informant from inside an Asian gang. And not just any Asian gang. This informant would take them inside the most
violent and notorious gang in Chinatown—maybe in all of New York City.

There was no way of knowing exactly which direction the investigation would go. But the cops and agents were sure of one thing. With an undercover informant supplying info from inside the BTK, it promised to be one hell of a ride.