Born to Kill (3 page)

Blackeyes brought the Chinese guy up from the basement and made him lie down with the others. The money and jewelry had been dumped on a coffee table in the front room. Kenny Vu stashed the loot into a pillow case and shouted, “Let's go!”

Abruptly, Tommy Vu ripped the telephone off the wall; chips of paint and plaster rained down on the terrified employees spread out on the floor.

The boys scurried down the stairs and out into the night, where a car and driver were waiting—not a getaway car or even a driver they knew. These young gangsters had merely called a car service. The driver, an oblivious Hispanic male, had driven them to the massage parlor and waited, just like they requested.

Blackeyes directed the driver to a hotel far in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, where the boys checked into a room and immediately dumped the loot out on a bed. There wasn't much jewelry, but they counted more cash than they expected, approximately $30,000, mostly in small bills. “Just think,” Blackeyes remarked, “I work five years and couldn't even save five hundred dollars. Here only fifteen minutes we make thirty thousand.”

The others smiled knowingly.

To Tinh, the robbery seemed so incredibly easy. If he hadn't known better, he might have thought everyone was in on it—the madam, the girls, everyone. It was almost as if it were a preset scheme with rules that had been agreed on beforehand. Later, the others explained it to Tinh. “That's just Chinatown,” said Kenny. Robberies happened all the time; store owners and businesspeople knew the routine.

As a newcomer to the underworld, there was a lot Tinh didn't know. He often relied on Kenny, Blackeyes, and the others to fill him in, not just about life as a gangster, but about life in general in New York City.

It was late May 1989, and the others had been committing crimes for months. Most of the time, Blackeyes would choose the target. Sometimes Kenny, Tommy, or a handful of others would venture out on their own, but only after clearing things with their bosses.

Tinh was only vaguely aware of the hierarchy. He knew there was a collection of slightly older gangsters who called the shots for a vast coterie of young Vietnamese males spread throughout much of the city. He was told this gang of criminals called themselves Born to Kill, or BTK for short, and they were fast becoming one of the most feared gangs in the city's Asian community. Some of the gang's members had criminal experience, but many did not. Like Tinh, they were expected to watch and learn as they went along.

In the days following the massage-parlor robbery on Chrystie Street, Tinh's companions often poked fun at him. “Timmy, we thought maybe you piss your pants,” joked Blackeyes, referring to the fear in Tinh's eyes when he encountered the Chinese security guy in the basement. Really, though, they were pleased. Tinh had not panicked or done anything stupid, and the robbery had netted a better than average take. As a result, Tinh's stature within the group grew; he could now consider himself one of a legion of young gangsters who committed crimes under the BTK banner. Most likely, he would be invited along on future undertakings.

They would not all be so easy, he was warned. Ripping off massage parlors was one thing, but robbing jewelry stores, restaurants, and people's homes often brought unexpected results. “Sometimes things go bad,” said Kenny Vu. “Sometimes, people—they get shot.”

The prospect of danger was both frightening and exciting to Tinh. With his small, delicate frame, no one had ever mistaken Tinh for a tough guy. Like most refugees, he had learned to communicate mostly through his eyes, doelike brown orbs that opened wide with fear, wonder, and amazement. Even to the other gang members, most of whom were barely out of adolescence, Tinh seemed innocent and naive. But underneath this facade of unformed virginal acquiescence, Tinh Ngo possessed the soul of a survivor. Already, as a child of war and an exile, he had weathered more than his fill of terror and trauma—an inheritance he shared in common with Blackeyes, Tommy Vu, and all the rest.

In fact, given all that he and his companions had endured, Tinh couldn't help but feel that his arrival as a budding member of the Born to Kill gang was a product of fate. What else could it be but the natural consequence of a grand, cataclysmic journey. A journey that began long ago, before the camps, before the refugee boats, in the bombed-out rice paddies and bamboo groves of his home country of Vietnam.

In 1972, the year Tinh Ngo left his mother's womb, the war in Indochina had reached its most crucial phase. After eight years of unremitting horror, North Vietnamese and U.S. negotiators had finally been forced to the bargaining table. President Richard M. Nixon had reduced the number of soldiers in Vietnam, but he had also increased the frequency of bombing raids, especially in the North. Around Hanoi and Haiphong, napalm rained down from the heavens, tracers lit up the night sky, and the rumble of approaching B-52s was more common than the rooster's call at dawn.

Tinh was born in the South, in the province of Hau Giang, on April 7. The tenth of eleven children, he was fortunate to have been born too late to have any firsthand experience of the war that raged around him. Others in his village were not so lucky. At the time of Tinh's birth, Communist forces from the North had made great inroads into the Mekong Delta, the bountiful agricultural region that encompassed much of Hau Giang. On the outskirts of Can Tho, where Tinh's family lived, soldiers from the North patrolled dusty streets with the arrogance of a conquering army, which they were soon to become.

Tinh's parents were Chinese-born merchants who owned a small pharmacy, which put them in a better financial position than many in Hau Giang. Mostly, the province was inhabited by rural peasants whose dependence on the land for their livelihood meant they would pay the highest price of all. From 1962 to 1970, U.S. forces periodically strafed the delta with Agent Orange, a highly toxic defoliant known to be injurious to humans. By the time of the American evacuation of Saigon and the official end to the war in April 1975, much of the Mekong Delta had been blasted and burned beyond recognition.

As a young boy growing up in South Vietnam in the late 1970s, Tinh was cheerfully oblivious to the war's legacy of violence and devastation.
At the time, it seemed perfectly normal to swim in huge bomb craters filled with rainwater. There was nothing odd to Tinh about seeing the carcasses of charred U.S. helicopters and trucks dotting the landscape, or sandbags piled high along the roads. These were the everyday sights of postwar Vietnam, the only world young Tinh knew.

For his parents, however, the turmoil and uncertainty of life under the country's new regime made it seem as if the war had never ended. Drunk with victory, the government had proclaimed Vietnam “the outpost of socialism in Southeast Asia” and rigidly aligned itself with the Soviet Union. American aid, which had artificially bolstered the South Vietnamese economy since the early 1950s, ceased overnight. Inflation skyrocketed, and stores were bereft of basic consumer items. Rice, once the most plentiful commodity in all of Vietnam, was now rationed monthly at state-run rice shops.

Along with the collapse of the country's economy, Vietnam could not escape the continuing ravages of war. In 1978, in reaction to the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam invaded neighboring Cambodia. In response, China invaded Vietnam from the North. For a time, the country had two wars raging at once, with thousands of young males being conscripted into the military, where they were slaughtered at a terrifying rate.

By 1983, Tinh Ngo's parents surveyed the situation in their homeland and reached an indisputable conclusion: Vietnam was no place to raise a child. They had a family friend who had made his way to California and sent back photographs, glorious full-color snapshots of enormous homes and golden landscapes. If they could get Tinh to a refugee camp in a border country, there was a reasonable chance he would be sponsored by a resettlement agency and sent to the States, where he too might experience the magnificence of American prosperity.

Even with the country's seemingly intractable problems, the decision to cast off their child was a torturous one for Tinh's parents. The Confucian ethic and Vietnamese tradition say that offspring must look after parents when they grow old, and the only real social security that anyone had in Vietnam was the family. But Tinh's parents were both in their sixties. Realistically, they knew there was no future for them in Vietnam—nor would there be for their son if he remained.

On the drive to the refugee boats in Cau Mau, eleven-year-old
Tinh cried and cried. As a young schoolboy living through the prime of his childhood, Tinh could not understand the concerns that led his parents to conclude he would be better off someplace else. There had always been rice on the table, a bamboo bed to sleep on, and clothing passed down from one sibling to the next. What could be the problem? he asked. His parent's response that there was no future in Vietnam had not satisfied young Tinh, and he felt cruelly abandoned.

At Cau Mau, on the southern peninsula of the delta, the banks of the Ganh Hao River were packed with refugees. In recent years, Cau Mau had become the favored embarkation point for ethnic Chinese, a minority whom the Vietnamese government had never trusted, fearing they might become a fifth column for Beijing. Many
Viet-Ching
had been expelled in the late 1970s as “boat people” and perished at sea. Now they paid gold to underworld figures to help them flee by arranging illegal shipments of human cargo.

Tinh's parents had made arrangements for him to travel with his oldest sister's husband, whom Tinh knew as Kha Manh. Kha Manh had just spent eight years in a Vietnamese prison camp for the sole offense of having served as an interpreter for the American military during the war. He was thirty-eight years old, spoke good English, and it was believed he would be a wise, able-bodied protector for his young nephew.

As Tinh and Kha Manh prepared to embark, the Ngo family was startled to hear that young Tinh, in fact, would be traveling separately from his brother-in-law. Apparently, the plans had been altered at the last minute. Now, two small vessels, each packed with some thirty people, were to follow a large mother ship through the delta and out to sea. Tinh would be on one vessel, Kha Manh on the other. Both ships were destined for Malaysia, where the castaways planned to throw themselves on the mercy of the refugee camps.

As a surly navigator hollered instructions and rounded up the refugees, Tinh's mother wept and embraced her son. “My child,” she explained, “I know you do not understand. But someday you will. And you will realize that what we have done is for the best.”

Tinh cried uncontrollably and his nose dripped like a leaky faucet. Standing in the mud on the banks of the river, he waved good-bye to his parents, then disappeared into the crowd of refugees fighting their
way onto the boats they hoped would carry them to some faraway world of peace and opportunity.

It didn't take long for Tinh's boat to run into trouble. At the mouth of the Ganh Hao River, after a one-hour voyage through the eerie U Minh forest, both Tinh's and his brother-in-law's boats were stopped by a Vietnamese military patrol vessel. Soldiers stormed onto the boats with guns and began demanding gold and other valuables. When one of the refugees resisted, he was abruptly smacked across the face with the butt of a rifle.

Refugees from both boats were loaded onto the military vessel, stripped naked, and searched. Soldiers turned the contents of the refugee boats upside down looking for precious commodities. By the time the soldiers allowed the refugees to dress and reboard their boats, the mother ship was nowhere in sight.

“You will return to your point of origin,” a soldier ordered the navigators of both boats, “or you will perish at sea.” The soldiers then drained gasoline from the refugee boats, leaving just enough for the return to Cau Mau.

After the military patrol vessel had safely disappeared, the refugees elected to push on. The two seventy-foot wooden cargo boats powered by truck engines chugged slowly toward the South China Sea, the passengers packed so tightly they were unable to lie down.

Dressed only in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt, Tinh couldn't help but feel his young life might be nearing a premature end. What few belongings he had were on the other boat with Kha Manh. Feeling destitute and frightened, he cursed his parents once again for throwing him to the sharks.

That night, the sun set on the western horizon and an ominous darkness engulfed both vessels. Navigation had been reduced to a simple maxim: At night, follow the North star; during the day, follow the sun. Unfortunately, this method did not make allowances for the swirling currents at sea, and by dawn the two refugee boats had been separated. Tinh would not see his brother-in-law's face again for many years.

After two days and nights, Tinh's boat was stopped again, this time by a Thai pirate ship. The robbers were dressed like fishermen,
and they carried an assortment of weapons, including knives, guns, and a hammer.

“Give us your gold!” shouted one of the pirates in English. A passenger on the boat who spoke English translated to the others what the robbers were demanding. When no one moved, the robbers began angrily ransacking the boat, looking for secret compartments where valuables might be stashed. One of the robbers grabbed a young female passenger and ripped her clothing. She screamed out for help. A Vietnamese male tried to intervene, but he was struck with a hammer and fell to the deck.

Then, in front of everyone, the female passenger was raped. Tinh squeezed his eyes shut, but he could still hear the woman crying, “No, please, I beg you!”

The pirates tied the refugee boat to their own. Another woman was taken at gunpoint onto the pirate boat, where she too was raped and finally released. After two hours, Tinh's boat was cut loose and the pirates sailed away.

The refugees had been told their entire trip to Malaysia was supposed to take three days. They were now in their fifth day at sea, with no land in sight. Without food or water, some passengers became sick and began vomiting blood. Others drank sea water and urine for sustenance.