Born to Kill (43 page)

It was a neat, impervious
American
trial.

A trial at which the war in Vietnam was never even mentioned.

On April Fool's Day, 1992, Tinh Ngo picked up the phone and dialed ATF headquarters.

“Is Dan Kumor there?” he asked.

Tinh was calling long distance; he could barely hear the voice on the other end of the line. “Kumor's not in right now,” it said faintly.

“Oh. This is Timmy calling. Tinh Ngo.”

“
Oh
,” the voice piped up excitedly, “Timmy. We got great news.”

“Yes.”

“They were nailed to the wall. Day before yesterday. All except Dat Nguyen, he got off. Everybody else was convicted on pretty much all of the charges. David Thai, Lan Tran, the whole lot of them.”

Tinh said thank you and hung up the phone. Thinking about his convicted gang brothers, his mind wandered. He thought back to when he had first heard about the arrests of David Thai, Lan Tran, and the others.

At the time, Tinh was holed up in a lower Manhattan hotel. The only time his handlers let him out was to drive him the few blocks to the ATF building on Church Street.

On the evening of the arrests, after all the gang members had been processed and carted off to jail, Tinh was at the ATF offices when a news report about the gang came on television. The various cops and agents who were watching slapped each other on the back and seemed overjoyed at the sight of the BTK gangsters being herded off to jail in handcuffs.

Tinh felt a different emotion. No matter how hard he tried, he could not completely shake the feeling that he had somehow engaged in an act of betrayal. Seeing
Anh hai
and the others being arrested made him feel depressed.

“You think maybe I can go somewhere, anywhere?” Tinh asked an ATF agent. “Get a sandwich, a soda or something?”

Two ATF agents took Tinh to a nearby cop bar, where they figured he would be safe. Inside the bar, Tinh sat quietly while the American lawmen drank, laughed, and told each other stories. At one point, Tinh looked up at a television mounted above the bar. There, again, was the same report he'd seen an hour earlier—
Anh hai
, Uncle Lan, and all the others with their heads hanging down, being led off to jail.

Man!
Tinh thought to himself.
When will it all end? When will I stop feeling so bad?

Now, after getting the news about the guilty verdicts, Tinh was not so much depressed as relieved. Maybe he could finally begin to put his years as a gang member and a federal informant behind him. Maybe now he could live a normal life.

Tinh knew it wasn't going be easy. The most recent turn of events in his relatively brief life had landed him many thousands of miles away from New York City. He had a job washing dishes in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant. He'd changed his name and was renting a room in a house with a large Vietnamese family, trying to make it on his own.

Dan Kumor had offered Tinh the cover of the Witness Security Program (WITSEC), the U.S. government's vaunted relocation program for people whose lives were endangered because of their cooperation with the authorities. In WITSEC, a person was given a new identity, some money, and relocated to a different part of the country, hopefully beyond the grasp of those he'd helped put away.

Tinh considered the offer. It sounded okay to him, under one condition. He wanted to be relocated to Seattle. In the months leading up to the trial, he had been stashed in Seattle by the government. Tinh had stayed in a small apartment in a part of the city known as the University District, where he'd found a job in a Chinese restaurant and even a girlfriend. Not an Asian girl, either. A Caucasian girl. For the first time in his life, Tinh could imagine a world beyond the limits heretofore defined by war, his refugee status, his ethnicity.

When Tinh told Kumor and the others he wanted to be relocated in Seattle, they told him it wasn't a good idea. He would have to live somewhere else. Furthermore, he would have no say in the matter. He would live wherever they felt was best.

“In that case,” Tinh said, “I think maybe I better off on my own, making my own decisions.”

Tinh's response startled his government handlers. They tried to talk him out of it. We know what's best for you, they said. We feel responsible. Besides, there were too many risks.

The way Tinh saw it, life was full of risks, no matter what you did. He would honor their wishes by not returning to Seattle. But he did not want the U.S. government telling him where he could or could not live.

It was not an easy decision, but Tinh felt good about it. All his life, he had been controlled by a higher authority—the dictates of fate,
Anh hai
, the cops and agents who eventually brought down the BTK. His life had been a tumultuous, disorienting affair, an adventure worthy of
The Tale of Kieu
.

Along the way, Tinh had learned some valuable lessons. He had learned there is sometimes a wide gulf between what a person says and the true motivations buried deep inside. He learned the difference between good and evil, yin and yang. And he had learned that for Tinh Ngo to truly become the controller of his own destiny, he must stand on his own two feet. He must learn, by himself, what it means to be an American.

He must learn what it means to be free.

Epilogue

T
o the people of Chinatown, the successful prosecution of David Thai and his BTK brothers was a startling, momentous event. Unlike similar prosecutions in the mid-1980s involving influential tong-associated gangs like the Ghost Shadows and the United Bamboo, the BTK trial received extensive coverage in all of the local Chinese-language newspapers. It was as if the community's traditional powers were gloating over the demise of the renegade Vietnamese gang, reasserting their cultural and territorial imperative over a group of gangsters who had shown so little respect for the area's deeply ingrained underworld rules.

The mainstream media, on the other hand, was not nearly as interested in the fall of the BTK as they had been in the gang's volatile, highly sensational rise to power. At the time of the arrests there had been some newspaper and television reports, culminating with
Newsday
's jailhouse interview with David Thai. But scant follow-up coverage was given to the courtroom testimony of Tinh Ngo, Odum Lim, Ying Jing
Gan, and others whose lives had been so inexorably affected by their encounters with the BTK. In part, the media's lack of concern was an extension of a long-standing negligence when it came to issues relating to the Asian community. Mostly, it was because of a more “newsworthy” event that was taking place elsewhere in the same courthouse, one that dominated media coverage not only in New York City but throughout most of the United States.

There was no denying that the prosecution of Mafia boss John Gotti was an important story. The demise of Gotti, the leader of the largest
Cosa Nostra
family in New York, symbolized the further erosion of a once-proud criminal tradition. Although the federal government had been successfully chipping away at the Mafia for at least the last decade, two previous attempts to prosecute Gotti ended in acquittal. Each trial brought a higher level of media attention, with this latest proceeding attracting hordes of reporters, not to mention Hollywood celebrities like Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rourke, and others whose careers revealed an enduring professional fascination with “the Mob.”

On journalistic grounds, the story of Gotti's fall was historic, but the real secret of its appeal with the media and the public at large was its familiarity. The Dapper Don was the latest in a long line of New York gangsters whose exploits had been lionized in countless movies and books. The mystique of the Mob—established during the years of Prohibition, embellished in the decades that followed—had long since become central to the American identity. By now, the public had come to feel a nostalgic, almost sentimental attachment to these Old World mobsters, who hark back to a time when the underworld was ruled mostly by Caucasian men of European extraction.

Asian gangsters in America have never been embraced in quite the same way. Aside from an occasional lurid melodrama like
Year of the Dragon
, Hollywood has largely avoided the subject, although Chinese organized crime has been around at least as long as the Mafia. When written about in newspapers and magazines—usually in connection with the latest gang shooting or robbery—the word most often used to describe Chinese or Vietnamese gangsters is “vicious,” as if the wholesale plundering of labor unions, violent intimidation, and brutal gangland rubouts of yesteryear represented a more honorable form of criminal behavior.

The fact that hordes of reporters trudged daily to the Gotti courtroom while, two floors away, the BTK trial unfolded in virtual anonymity was indicative of more than just a cultural bias. During the months of the BTK trial, four floors below Judge Amon's courtroom, the case against the Green Dragons was also unfolding, making the Eastern District courthouse perhaps the hottest crime beat in the United States. The argument could be made that, taken together, the Born to Kill and Green Dragons proceedings were more relevant to an understanding of crime in the 1990s than was the Gotti trial. The two trials were the end result of investigations that involved over forty gang members—a representative sampling of an entire generation of young Asian males. The charges against the nineteen defendants who chose to go to trial included eleven murders, numerous attempted murders, over a dozen robberies, numerous kidnappings, and countless extortionate acts, all of which took place during an intensely violent three-year period. Additionally, the victims of these crimes were not other gangsters, as they were in most traditional mob cases like Gotti's. The BTK and Green Dragons preyed mostly on innocent citizens whose only crime was that they were Asian and therefore susceptible to a group of gangsters who had always seemed to be beyond the reach of American law enforcement.

Not only that, but the BTK and Green Dragons were part of a larger criminal conspiracy currently in its prime—a complex, multilayered underworld with pockets of influence throughout the United States and much of the world. Domestically, they represented an aspect of contemporary organized crime that the media and the public have yet to fully acknowledge.

As the ethnic makeup of the country has changed, so has the face of organized crime. A new generation of immigrants has been following patterns of criminal activity remarkably similar to those first established by Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. For an earlier generation of gangsters, bootleg liquor was the elixir that made it all possible. Today, it's illegal narcotics, though the country's vast, regionalized criminal marketplace has made it possible for organized crime groups to thrive in a number of ways, including the constant armed robberies, home invasions, violent extortions, and assorted other crimes from which most Vietnamese gangs derive their income.

The BTK trial and, to a lesser extent, the case against the Green Dragons, provided a rare opportunity for the media and the public to gain insights into the changing face of organized crime. Instead, the media clung exclusively and affectionately to a story that evoked a bygone era—a time when the world, presumably, was a much simpler place.

Twelve months after the conviction of David Thai and his BTK brothers, the lack of attention paid to the Asian underworld was dramatically underscored once again. Early on the morning of June 7,1993, a huge freighter ran aground off Rockaway Beach, in the outer reaches of New York City. Over the days and weeks that followed, the public was to find out about a massive, thriving criminal racket believed to be at least as profitable as wholesale cocaine and heroin smuggling.

More than three hundred illegal immigrants transported all the way from China were packed onto the freighter, known as the
Golden Venture
. After the ship accidentally buried its bow in a sandbar, many on board panicked. One hundred and twenty people jumped overboard into freezing, choppy waters. Ten met their death by drowning or later expired from hypothermia. Sixty more were plucked from the sea by helicopters and U.S. Coast Guard vessels. Throughout the day, a small army of city, state, and federal rescue personnel took the rest of the ship's massive human cargo into custody.

With dead bodies washing ashore and hundreds of starving, shivering travelers lining the beach, the story of the ill-fated
Golden Venture
was a tabloid editor's dream come true. Local and national media organizations assigned teams of reporters and photographers to cover the event. The media noted that the ship was actually one of dozens like it that had brought thousands of undocumented East Asians to the United States. The passengers aboard these ships paid on the average $30,000—sometimes as much as $50,000—to be smuggled into the country. Their passage halfway around the world was arranged and overseen by a vast criminal network, with the primary operatives being the Fuk Ching gang, based in New York City's Chinatown.

Esteemed media outlets like
The New York Times
and CNN presented their findings as if people-smuggling were a brand-new phenomenon, a criminal racket that had only now reached its apex with the
terrible tragedy in the waters off Rockaway Beach. In fact, the trafficking of human cargo by Chinese gangsters had been flourishing for the last five or six years. In New York, untold thousands of immigrants had been smuggled into the city, most by circuitous routes through South and Central America. Once in the New York area, many paid off their huge smuggling debts by working at paltry wages in restaurants, sweatshops, and massage parlors while living in tiny cubicles. The end result was a type of indentured servitude as pernicious as anything that existed in Chinatown a century ago.

Although aspects of this modern-day slave trade had been sporadically reported, it had never been deemed a major story. Nearly two years before the
Golden Venture
spilled its human cargo, Ying Chan, a journalist with the
Daily News
, wrote a two-part exposé on Asian people-smuggling. Few media outlets followed up on her disturbing revelations. An international criminal conspiracy continued to flourish largely unnoticed by the American press, until three hundred smuggled immigrants washed ashore in the country's largest city, making the story impossible to ignore.