Born to Kill (5 page)

On the subway heading back to Brooklyn, Tinh's curiosity got the better of him. He lifted up a corner of the bandage and peeked at the glistening tattoo, admiring not only the craftsmanship, but all that it represented. The refugee boat, the camps, and the years of humiliation in suburbia were finally behind him. As a member of the expanding brotherhood known as Born to Kill, his life had a sense of purpose.

Maybe now, thought Tinh, he would even get to meet the gang's esteemed leader, a man whose name he usually heard uttered in hushed tones. A man gang members referred to privately as
Anh hai
, a term of endearment and supreme respect. A man known to the people of Chinatown as Tho Hoang “David” Thai.

Chapter 2

I
n the heart of Chinatown, seated in a small luncheonette in the rear of a hectic shopping arcade, David Thai slurped from a bowl of
pho
, traditional Vietnamese noodle soup. Around him, a handful of young toughs chatted among themselves. A middle-aged Chinese merchant seated across from Thai shifted uncomfortably in his chair. David wiped his chin with a napkin and eyed the merchant with wry skepticism. “Mr. Chang,” intoned the thirty-three-year-old gang boss, “you ask me I deliver for you two hundred fifty watches, okay? But last time I deliver, you take maybe half. I forced to unload the rest at basement price. This no good for me, Mr. Chang.”

Mr. Chang acknowledged his past transgression with a nervous shrug. “Mr. Thai,” he explained, “I sell them all this time, no problem. Rolex sell the best. Best quality.”

“Yes, Mr. Chang, best quality. Best quality on all Canal Street.”

The Chinese merchant nodded, and David mustered
a sly, self-satisfied grin. “Okay,” said Thai, “you'll get your two hundred fifty watches. Just fill out the papers. But remember, Mr. Chang. You remember this small favor, yes?” The merchant was handed two forms by a teenager seated nearby. He stood and again nodded humbly, thanking the young gang boss for his indulgence. On his way out the door, the merchant awkwardly bumped into a customer and almost knocked over a stack of boxes. A few of the gang members chuckled; David Thai smiled.

Though Mr. Chang had been a less than sterling customer, Thai could afford to be magnanimous. Over the last two years, while young Tinh Ngo was bouncing from foster family to foster family on Long Island, the Vietnamese gang boss was methodically solidifying his control over the importation and sale of counterfeit watches along Canal Street—the preeminent commercial artery in the largest Chinatown in the Western Hemisphere.

From the hundreds of stalls and shops jammed together over a dense twelve-block stretch, Thai could count on a fantastic monthly volume. Dummy watches, shipped from Hong Kong and stenciled with fake brand names of famous manufacturers like Cartier, Gucci, Omega, and Rolex, sold on Canal Street for $10 to $20. David stood to clear at least $7 per watch. In 1988 alone, he would claim to have sold $13 million worth of merchandise.

It was not all profit, of course. Shipments had to be off-loaded, labeling equipment purchased and maintained, and weekly salaries paid to the young hoodlums whose job it was to protect and maintain a smooth-running operation. Thai often complained of the travails of over-seeing an “unregulated” business, but he wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Not only had the counterfeit watch trade made him rich, it had established his reputation as a man to be reckoned with, a key player in Chinatown's venerable and thriving underground economy.

The Asian Shopping Mall at 271 Canal Street certainly did not look like the headquarters of a multimillion-dollar counterfeit watch operation. Under an anonymous green and white awning, elevated slightly above street level, the mini-arcade consisted of a series of small stalls. Individual merchants sold watches from a few of the stalls, sunglasses, wallets, and sweatshirts out of others. Far in the back, partially
hidden behind empty boxes and haphazardly scattered merchandise, was the Pho Hanoi restaurant, the tiny luncheonette that often served as David Thai's private office.

On any given day, a dozen or more young Vietnamese could be found eating rice and
pho
at one of Pho Hanoi's six tightly packed tables or hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the shopping arcade. Most were in their late teens or early twenties. Some had already established reputations as gang members and criminals, but the majority were fresh-faced juveniles, newcomers to Chinatown's criminal underworld.

In early June of 1989, after getting his tattoo and officially joining the ranks of the BTK, Tinh Ngo began making regular trips to the Asian Shopping Mall from his apartment on Neptune Avenue in Brooklyn. It was at the Pho Hanoi restaurant that he and David Thai were first introduced, by Tommy Vu.

“This Timmy,
Anh hai
. He with us now,” Tommy explained.

David glanced at Tinh, nodded, and asked, “
Con am con chua?
Have you eaten?” It was David's standard question of all new members, a common Vietnamese courtesy that indicated friendship and concern. Tinh bashfully replied, “Yes. We just finish.” He was so nervous he could hardly look
Anh hai
in the eye. Thai smiled politely and went on about his business, thinking nothing of this brief, innocuous encounter.

At the time, Mr. Thai was a highly visible presence. When he wasn't conducting business at Pho Hanoi, he could usually be found down the block at 300 Canal, where he maintained another office, this one up a flight of stairs and in the back of a massage parlor. There David presided over yet another lucrative criminal business. It was Thai who imported the young Southeast Asian immigrant women who worked in the parlor, where they sold their bodies for money, of which David Thai retained a sizable percentage.

Usually dressed in the Hong Kong style, with a tailored sport coat, silk shirt, and soft leather loafers, David presented a sleek, intelligent veneer. When he donned his tasteful black-rimmed spectacles, he had the look of a kindly physician. His jet-black hair was neatly groomed, his features smooth and pleasant. When he needed to, David spoke English with confidence. To an outsider, David may have seemed more like a doctor or a businessman than a gangster. Many of Chinatown's residents knew better.

At first, the merchants along Canal Street believed Thai when he told them he could control the unruly Vietnamese youngsters who seemed to appear out of nowhere in the late 1980s, stealing merchandise and extorting weekly protection payments. Over the years, the merchants had grown accustomed to a certain level of harassment from young Chinese gangsters. The fact that much of their trade involved the sale of counterfeit handbags, jewelry, cologne, watches, and other technically illegal items made them susceptible to extortion. Dealing with gangsters and gangster wannabes was an unavoidable part of the business.

Even so, these Vietnamese boys were not like the Chinese. They were disorganized and rude. The merchants were relieved when Thai presented himself as a conciliator, a man who understood these young toughs because he too had once been a lonely refugee lost in the big city.

It was soon clear, however, that David's “concern” for the welfare of Chinatown's merchant class was based more on self-interest than anything else. “If you do not conduct business with me only,” Thai warned retailers along Canal Street, “there is no guarantee I can control these boys.”

When the New York City Police Department first became aware that Thai was a major supplier of counterfeit watches on Canal Street, officers began making surprise visits to his headquarters. In response, David used his young gang brothers to harass the cops. Once, when a group of uniformed officers gathered on the sidewalk in front of 271 Canal Street, gang members showered them from a building rooftop with “mini-bombs,” twenty or thirty firecrackers bound together with string.

Merchants along Canal Street were not amused. Although they harbored no great affinity for the men in blue, it was not in their best interest to encourage their enmity.

David Thai didn't seem to care. A few weeks after the firecracker incident, he stated his case even more boldly. Over the previous week police had been steadily raiding his watch business, confiscating equipment and watches from his Pho Hanoi headquarters. To merchants and his fellow gang brothers, Thai complained they had cost him more than $100,000.

In an attempt to even the score, Thai handed a homemade incendiary device to one of his subordinates, sixteen-year-old Thanh “Eddie”
Tran. At five feet four, Tran was small and spindly, with the face of a ferret. Like Tinh Ngo and the other aspiring hoodlums who had begun to gather on Canal Street, Eddie was a wayward foster kid who'd done time in a refugee camp, in his case the notorious Pulau Bidong camp in Malaysia. With the gang as his only family, Eddie Tran was anxious to endear himself to
Anh hai
, no matter how outrageous the request.

It was a pleasant summer evening, just a few weeks after gang members had showered the police with firecrackers. Eddie Tran walked the six blocks from the Asian Shopping Mall to Elizabeth Street, a typically narrow Chinatown lane teeming with pedestrians. He turned right and soon came to the Fifth Precinct, a weathered, white-brick station house in the middle of the block. Eddie lit the fuse on the small bomb David Thai had given him, tossed it in the open window of an unattended police van, and ran.

The explosion sounded with a rousing
ka-booooooooom
, echoing down the street and sending shattered glass flying twenty feet. When the smoke cleared, the van's windows had been blown out, the upholstery shredded, and the dashboard destroyed. Eleven bystanders suffered minor injuries.

The incident was met with alarm by both the NYPD and the people of Chinatown. Gangsters running rampant in the community had been a problem for years, but previous gang leaders had always tried to steer their people away from direct confrontations with the police. To brazenly declare war on the cops by blowing up one of their vehicles was an act no traditional gang leader would have sanctioned. But as the cops and the people of Chinatown were finding out, David Thai was no ordinary gang boss.

Born in Saigon on January 30, 1956, Tho Hoang Thai's experiences as a youth in Vietnam were quite different from those of Tinh Ngo and most of the others who would eventually comprise his gang. Coming of age in the late 1960s, Thai experienced the Vietnam War as it unfolded. He watched his home city transformed from a proud, provincial capital—“the Paris of the Far East”—into a chaotic, slum-ridden warren. Thousands of rural peasants fleeing outlying areas devastated by
U.S. bombing campaigns crowded the city, hoping to find work servicing the military. In downtown Saigon, widows, orphans, and amputees begging for money jammed the sidewalks. Late at night, after curfew, the rats took over, rummaging through huge mounds of garbage left uncollected because municipal workers had deserted to higher salaries at U.S. base sites.

As a youngster on the streets of Saigon, David made the most of the city's wide-open atmosphere. When he wasn't in school, there were GIs to be hustled and money to be made, especially on Truong Minh Gian Street, which lit up at night like a tawdry facsimile of Las Vegas. Prostitutes and their pimps roamed freely; massage parlor “bordellos” and tacky American-style nightclubs abounded. Like many enterprising young Vietnamese, David offered himself as a go-between for the GIs in search of drugs and the
Binh Xuyen
, traditional racketeers who presided over the city's thriving black market.

In Saigon, there was little overt devastation from bombings or the spraying of poisonous defoliants, but David was not immune to the daily terrors. In 1968, on the day after his twelfth birthday, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, an audacious attack on major cities in the South. The Thai family cowered in their home on Ton Dan Street as Viet Cong rockets strafed the city and snipers shot their way to the steps of the Presidential Palace.

The following morning, after the seven-hour siege had ended, thousands of civilians lay dead or wounded in the streets. A Viet Cong captive with his hands bound behind him was paraded through Saigon. A South Vietnamese general stepped forward, placed the snout of his revolver against the man's temple, and pulled the trigger. The man grimaced, his legs slowly buckled, and a steady stream of blood spurted from his head. The execution was captured on film and shown over and over for weeks afterward on the government-run television stations. To the citizens of Saigon and people throughout the world, it would become a symbol of the malignant brutality that had engulfed all of Vietnam.

By the early 1970s, it was clear to David Thai's parents that the South Vietnamese government was finished. The American presence in Saigon was diminishing at a rapid rate, and the city's bastardized wartime economy was on the brink of collapse. The war's legacy of inhumanity
had turned the people of Saigon inward; corruption and venal self-interest ruled the day. By April 1975, the entire city was caught in a frenzied, desperate rush to evacuate.

As Saigon fell, sixty-one-year-old Dieu Thai was jailed by his Communist enemies. He still had enough pull, though, to secure his son's passage out of Vietnam. In May 1975, David was airlifted by chopper to a U.S. aircraft carrier destined for Hong Kong.

Barely three months passed before David Thai, now nineteen, found himself in the small, alien town of Lafayette, Indiana, living in a home for boys run by a local Lutheran church. Tormented by visions of his father languishing in a reeducation camp, Thai swore not to let his status as a refugee keep him from achieving for himself all the things his father believed possible under the capitalist system. But David had a problem. There was little that was familiar to him in Indiana, a land of big, beefy Caucasians, more than a few of whom held
all
Vietnamese personally responsible for the death of their loved ones during the war. In May of 1976, with $150 in his pocket, Thai ran away from the group home and hopped on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City.