Born to Kill (7 page)

There was a hushed silence at the table. Andy's response could have been taken as a test of David Thai's authority, if David wanted to take it that way. Instead, with his usual smooth persuasiveness, Thai seized on the occasion to present a favored image of himself, that of the velvet glove pulled smooth and tight over an iron fist.

“Little brother,” he responded calmly, “go home and think about it. No one should have to make such an important decision right away. The door is always open. But remember: You must sign this paper if you call yourself a member of our organization.”

Tinh and the others at the table were impressed. Thai handled Andy's challenge with such a cool head, standing up for his own position without needlessly embarrassing his challenger. In fact, as Tinh watched David move so confidently from table to table, dazzling his guests with charming small talk and easy laughter, he wondered how Thai had developed such a fearsome reputation.

Tinh may have been young, but he had experienced enough in life to know that leadership was based on power, and power, especially in the underworld, was based largely on fear. How could anyone be afraid of David Thai, thought Tinh, when he appeared to be so benevolent, so understanding?

Three weeks later, after the cognac had been downed and the words of solidarity had receded into the atmosphere like so much cigarette smoke, Tinh would have his answer.

Stretched out on a bed in a small hotel room, Tinh was awakened from his nap by a knock at the door. Clad only in his underwear, he got up, went to the door, and inched it open. Through the crack, he could see Phu, a short
Viet-Ching
.

“
Anh hai
want to see you,” Phu told Tinh.

“
Anh hai?
He here? At this hotel?”

“Yes,” nodded Phu. “He want to talk to you. Room 308.”

“Okay. Give me one minute, I get my clothes on.” Tinh closed the door and pulled on his pants, wondering what on earth David Thai was doing at the Carter Hotel.

Located directly across from the offices of
The New York Times
on West Forty-third Street in midtown Manhattan, the Carter was a cheap hotel trying to look expensive. The lobby was spacious, with lots of mirrors and gold lamé, but the rooms were small and spare.

Lately, the hotel had become a favored hideout for BTK gang members who needed to lie low after assorted criminal activities. Surrounded by the continuous tumult of Times Square, the gangsters figured
a few tough-looking Asian kids would hardly be noticed at the Carter. It was not the kind of place a smooth operator like David Thai would usually be found, unless he had a reason. Tinh knew of one possibility, and it made his stomach muscles tighten with fear.

Just two days earlier, Tinh, the Vu brothers, and Phu had raided another Chinatown massage parlor, this one at 54 Sixth Avenue. It had been a daring 4:00
A.M
. heist in the middle of Ghost Shadows territory, and the net had been an impressive $15,000.

After the robbery, as they hightailed it to the Carter Hotel, Tinh had secretly taken $1,000 from the bag of stolen money and stuffed it in his underwear.

Tinh knew it was a dangerous thing to do, but he didn't care. Months earlier, after his first massage-parlor robbery, the Brooklyn
dai low
, Jimmy Wong, had taken nearly all of Tinh's cut, claiming he needed it to buy food and pay rent.

Tinh knew gang protocol specified that the
dai low
was authorized to control the distribution of proceeds from all robberies. And he knew that a percentage of the proceeds from all robberies was used to cover living expenses in the various “safe houses,” or apartments, that the gang members used. But Tinh had come away from the Chrystie Street robbery with a measly $100, and he was determined to make sure that this time he received his fair share.

Tinh took the elevator down to the third floor and knocked on the door of room 308. Phu opened the door and motioned Tinh inside.

“Hello,
Anh hai
,” Tinh said, as he entered. Looking around the room, Tinh saw worried looks on the faces of Tommy Vu, Jimmy Wong, Sonny, and others who were there.

David Thai stood up, walked over to Tinh, and brusquely slapped him across the face. Then he kneed him in the groin. When Tinh fell to the ground in pain, David began kicking him.

“Motherfucker!” screamed Thai, kicking and kicking. “You motherfucking motherfucker! How dare you steal from me! How dare you steal from BTK!”

“Sorry,
Anh hai
,” cried Tinh, between blows. “I know I make mistake. Please. Sorry.”

When Thai finally stopped kicking, Tinh pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and thrust it toward David. “Here,
Anh hai
, this all the
money I have. I know the mistake,
Anh hai
, so I won't make mistake again.”

David was breathing heavily from the exertion. He took the money from Tinh and turned to the others. “Who take care a this guy?” he asked. “Who does he follow?”

“Uh, I take care a him,” answered Jimmy Wong, Tinh's official
dai low
.

“Jimmy, take this guy home. Take this motherfucker outta my sight.”

Jimmy Wong walked over and helped Tinh to his feet.

Wincing in pain, Tinh glanced around the room at the others, who looked chastened. For good reason. Whether David Thai knew it or not, it was a common practice for gang members to skim money from robbery proceeds if they thought they could get away with it. Tinh had seen others do it, including many of those standing by as he took his beating.

“Sorry,
Anh hai
,” mumbled Tinh one last time as he was led to the door.

In the days that followed, Tinh nursed his cuts and bruises. He figured it was Phu who had squealed on him. He knew he should be mad about it, but he wasn't going to worry for now. After all, the incident had taught him an important lesson. He had seen the iron fist in the velvet glove. To Tinh, the moral was as plain as the hair on Ho Chi Minh's chin.

Unless you had a taste for punishment, you didn't fuck around with David Thai.

Chapter 3

I
t was just after five o'clock on the afternoon of August 5, 1989, and traffic on Canal Street was backed up as far as the eye could see. Huge trucks and commuter vehicles idled their engines, some waiting to head west toward the Holland Tunnel, others due east toward the Manhattan Bridge. Many motorists, their vehicles belching noxious fumes, angrily honked their horns and screamed obscenities. Others sat comatose, resigned to their fate as victims of a predictable New York City horror: rush hour congestion in Chinatown.

At 271 Canal Street, in front of the Asian Shopping Mall, two teenage males approached David Thai, who was chatting idly with a few associates. The two boys were both members of the Flying Dragons. It had finally become clear to the larger, more established gang that the BTK was a force to be reckoned with, especially here on Canal Street. Accordingly, the Dragons had been harassing Born to Kill gang members throughout the city.

“You think you big man,” said one of the boys,
fifteen-year-old Duc Ly. “You think you important guy. But nobody respect you, David Thai. Nobody respect BTK.” With Duc Ly was an equally young companion named Thanh Lai. Together, they stood on the sidewalk taunting David in broken English, as throngs of rush-hour shoppers obliviously passed by.

The BTK leader was clearly annoyed. “Hey, little boys,” he replied, “go home. Your mothers call for you.”

Then Duc Ly did something everyone knew spelled trouble. He spit on the sidewalk, a gesture of disregard for BTK territory, the BTK, and David Thai himself.

For a moment, Thai froze, so startled he was unable to think of an appropriate response. Then he turned and abruptly stormed toward the rear of the shopping mall. Duc Ly and Thanh Lai continued laughing and making comments about Thai and the BTK. Although the passersby may have been oblivious, the Chinese and Vietnamese merchants and street peddlers were not. They looked down and avoided eye contact with the young troublemakers, hoping the tenseness of the moment would pass.

In the rear of the mall, Thai brushed past a handful of BTK gang members and disappeared through a door that led to a small cellar below the Pho Hanoi luncheonette. When he reappeared seconds later, he was holding two handguns. “Here,” he said, handing one gun to gang member Eddie Tran and the other to nineteen-year-old Lam Trang, another BTK
sai low
. “Go shoot those motherfuckers.”

Ferret-faced Eddie Tran had not hesitated when David asked him to blow up the police van in front of the Fifth Precinct, but murder in broad daylight was another matter. He stammered and tried to disappear into the crowd. Lam Trang, on the other hand, seemed enthusiastic. With his unruly mop of black hair greased into a bad version of a 1950s ducktail, he was anxious to distinguish himself from all the others making daily pilgrimages to Canal Street.

Lam Trang ran to the front of the mall. As dozens of onlookers watched in horror, he raised a .38-caliber revolver and fired two shots. One bullet struck Duc Ly squarely in the face, another in the side of the head, sending him crashing to the pavement.

Thanh Lai tried to flee but didn't get far. Lam knelt on the sidewalk to steady his aim and fired two more shots. Ten feet away, Thanh
Lai was struck twice in the back, with one bullet piercing his left lung and another his aorta.

The BTK gang members scattered; David Thai went one way, Lam Trang another. By the time police arrived, both victims were lying in glistening pools of blood. They were also both dead.

Along Canal Street, most shop owners quickly pulled their gates down and closed for the day. Despite the many merchants and shoppers on the street at the time of the shooting, no local residents would admit having witnessed this outrageous double homicide on one of the city's most crowded streets in broad daylight.

Stark terror had a lot to do with their reluctance. For some time, tensions had been building along Canal Street and throughout Chinatown. The manner in which Born to Kill had taken over such a lucrative commercial strip called for some sort of response from the powers-that-be. In the past, disputes of this nature were sometimes settled through gang warfare. Turf-related shootings were not uncommon.

Even so, this was something new. Gang shootings in Chinatown were usually carefully orchestrated affairs. A group of hitmen would go into a rival disco, video arcade, or restaurant and open fire on a specific target. It may have been brutal, and sometimes innocent bystanders did get killed. But at least it was planned.

Rarely were gangland shootings as wild and spontaneous as this stupefying double murder on Canal Street. To old-timers—even those merchants and residents who had lived through previous periods of gang violence—this shooting represented something altogether different, a tear in the fabric of the community that suggested Chinatown, as they knew it, was beginning to come apart at the seams.

To an outsider, Chinatown in the late 1980s probably looked much the same as it always had. Business was booming as usual. The neighborhood's narrow, craggy streets were alive with the customary swarm of Asian immigrants. Dining in one of the area's many dozens of restaurants was still the pleasant, affordable experience it had always been for tourists and Wall Street types, people who enjoyed the more obvious aspects of Chinatown's commercial prosperity without ever looking beyond the garish signs, the quaint shops, the cheap prices.

Maybe the rest of the city didn't see it, but the locals were abundantly aware that Chinatown was in the midst of a startling transformation. Among other things, in the last decade the city's Asian population had nearly doubled, further crowding an already tight-knit, densely populated stretch of real estate covering just forty square blocks on Manhattan's Lower East Side. To accommodate the influx, the community's traditional boundaries had expanded north, well past Canal Street into Little Italy. Newer Asian communities in Brooklyn and Queens were also growing at an astonishing rate.

The geographic changes were only the most conspicuous aspect of the community's metamorphosis. Even the average Caucasian could see that Chinatown was growing and reinventing itself, in slightly smaller versions, throughout the five boroughs of New York. What most New Yorkers did not know was that, as a result of the diverse nature of recent immigration, the community was being transformed at its core.

In the past, Chinatown had been comprised overwhelmingly of immigrants from Mandarin-speaking regions of China. The 1965 Immigration Act had opened the door to a new generation of immigrants, and they had gone about the business of establishing a vibrant, largely self-sustaining society. In America, they spoke mostly Cantonese and saw themselves as Chinese subjects living in a country that held little interest beyond the clearly defined boundaries of their own community.

Now, the community moved to the rhythms of an array of nationalities from all over Southeast Asia. Not only were the Vietnamese arriving in sizable numbers, but immigrants had also been flooding in from Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Fukien, a rural province in south-east China with its own unique dialect. Like the Vietnamese, these newer immigrants were mostly from Third World countries in the throes of political turmoil. They spoke their own language. They came to Chinatown with little education or material wealth, straining the community's already overburdened social-service organizations.

From the beginning, Chinatown had always preferred to take care of its own problems, free of meddling by
low faan
, which is short for
guey low faan
, or “barbarian”—a term used to describe know-nothing outsiders. For decades the community's unique isolation from mainstream American society was both its great strength and its most crippling weakness. The image of Chinatown presented to the general public
by its inhabitants was of a “Gilded Ghetto,” a thriving business community where any impoverished immigrant could make a living. In truth, Chinatown's housing, health, and labor conditions were among the worst in the city, and they were getting worse.