American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  So how has Featherstone done it? How has he been able to achieve and maintain a new life for himself when Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, Henry Hill of Goodfellas fame and so many other high-profile criminals have reverted to their lives of crime? Much of it has to do with Featherstone’s original motivations as a criminal. Although Featherstone was clearly “a danger to society,” he was never a “gangster” in the way that Jimmy Coonan, Sammy the Bull or Henry Hill were gangsters. Featherstone’s more violent criminal impulses were usually acts of emotion driven by a perverted sense of loyalty, not by a profit motive. It is true that, later, after Featherstone returned to the neighborhood in the 1980s following a stint in federal prison, he became obsessed with making sure he got his fair share of the Westies criminal proceeds. But, he contends, that was due mostly to the resentment he felt that his wife and family had not been taken care of when he went away to prison, and also because people in the gang were using his name and reputation for their own personal gain.

  To this day, claims Mickey, he was never “money hungry or power hungry.” Consequently, he doesn’t find himself battling impulses to go on a robbery, make a big score, or use violence as a way to make money because “I never had those impulses in the first place.”

  As for Jimmy Coonan and other leading members of the Westies who were put behind bars by his testimony, Featherstone feels “they got what they deserved,” though he long ago let go of the hatred and rancor. Despite the remorse he feels at many of his violent acts, Featherstone is no longer a tortured soul haunted by nightmares. He is, he says, “free from the past.”

  Of course, the past is never gone for good. With criminal behavior, in particular, it has long been a contention of psychiatrists, sociologists and criminologists that ingrained antisocial behavior is like alcoholism or any other drug addiction: it may go into remission, but it never truly disappears.

  Even so, for nearly twenty years now, by all available accounts, Mickey Featherstone has lived an exemplary life. Against all odds, and contrary to the steadfast beliefs of his enemies and even some of his supporters, he appears to have attained something few ever thought he would: peace-of-mind.

  —T.J. English

  March 2006

  Born to Kill

  The Rise and Fall of America’s Bloodiest Asian Gang

  For Steven Wong,

  my dai low

  Acknowledgments

  One of the great myths about Chinatown is that it is a “closed society” where an attitude of insularity makes it impossible for the truth to be told. In fact, this book could not have been written were it not for the generous cooperation of numerous Asian and Asian American citizens, both within Chinatown and beyond. For opening doors and offering insights into their respective communities, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Shiauh-Wei Lin, Alex Peng, Cambao de Duong, Virgo Lee, Ying Jing Gan, Odum Lim, Kim Lee Lim, and many others who, unfortunately, cannot be identified by name due to the very real threat of gang retribution.

  To Tinh Ngo, I offer a heartfelt cam on for agreeing to share painful memories and observations at great length in various far-flung locations. This book, in many ways, is a testament to Tinh Ngo’s efforts to turn his unusually tumultuous life around.

  Many people at differing levels of law enforcement were unselfish with their time and expertise. Special thanks to Detective Sergeant Vincent Klebaur of the Linden Police Department, Linden, New Jersey; Lieutenant George Damanski of the Hudson County prosecutor’s office, Jersey City, New Jersey; Mark Peterkin, formerly with the Hudson County prosecutor’s office, now with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; Sergeant Aida Remele of the Bridgeport Police Department, Bridgeport, Connecticut; Captain Cliff Edwards of the Doraville Police Department, Doraville, Georgia; Lieutenant Joseph Pollini, Detective Sergeant Douglas Lee, and Detective Alex Sabo of the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad; special agents John O’Brien, Joe Greco, John DiAngelo, Don Tisdale, Dan Kumor, and Albert Trinh from the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Alan Vinegrad from the Eastern District of New York was a great help, as was Luke Rettler, head of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Asian Gang Unit, formerly known as the “Jade Squad.”

  Others to whom I am grateful for their assistance include Phil Hannum of the International Association of Asian Crime Investigators in Falls Church, Virginia; Virgo Lee, the former Director of Asian Affairs for the City of New York; attorney James Meyerson; Lisa Wager; Peg Tyre of Newsday; attorney Dave Secular; and, most especially, attorneys Michael Grossman and Thomas White.

  Michael McNickle, a friend and associate, helped with the investigative work and spent long hours mulling over the difficulties involved in telling the story. Frank Kuznik, a friend and mentor ever since he first taught me journalism in high school, read an early draft of the manuscript and, as always, offered invaluable suggestions.

  I am also indebted to Barbara Lowenstein, my agent, to my editor, Paul Bresnick, who guided the manuscript through troubled waters, and to Suzanne English, my mother, for reasons too numerous to mention.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  The Gang

  PART TWO

  The Investigation

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Index

  Prologue

  By the time young Tinh Ngo arrived for the funeral of his fallen gang brother, the mourners had already spilled out into the street. In front of the Wah Wing Sang Funeral Home, six pallbearers hoisted a sleek beige casket to their shoulders, while nearby a handful of elderly musicians played a lethargic funeral dirge. Tinh adjusted his wraparound sunglasses and surveyed the crowd. It looked as if the entire gang had assembled. Blackeyes was there. So was Shadow Boy, Little Cobra, Monkey Man, and Teardrop.

  On the morning of July 28, 1990, in the sweltering midday heat, Tinh and his fellow gang members were not hard to spot. To show their respect for the deceased, many wore white gloves, signifying purity and eternal life. Dressed in identical black linen suits, black shoes, black sunglasses, and sporting an assortment of spiked hairstyles typical of young Asian gangsters on the make, they were a sprawling mass of solemnity on an otherwise bright day.

  Known to the others as “Tim” or “Timmy”—the anglicized version of his name—Tinh waded into the crowd, nodding to friends and acquaintances. At eighteen, Tinh was one of the gang’s younger soldiers, and he always seemed to be lagging behind.

  Tinh’s appearance—barely five feet five inches tall, with soft features and jet-black hair sculpted into a stylish ducktail—made him nearly indistinguishable from the others. He had adopted the gang’s patented look as an expression of kinship. In the five years since his arrival in the United States, Tinh had lived a lonely, rootless existence until he fell in with this wayward collection of youths whose long journey to America was similar to his.

  As gangsters, theirs was a demanding life fraught with innumerable dangers. Even today, as they mourned the death of their fallen brother, Tinh and the others were engaged in a bloody turf war with rival criminals in New York City’s Chinatown. In recent months, the sound of gunfire and wailing sirens had become an all-too-familiar neighborhood refrain. Young gangsters were gunned down in gambling parlors, restaurants, and on crowded street corners. Although the gunplay undoubtedly hurt the local tourist trade, business was booming at Wah Wing Sang and the other funeral parlors clustered among the old tenements, tailor shops, and warehouses along lower Mulberry Street.

  Oblivious to traffic, Tinh and the others began their procession down the middle of the street toward the heart of Chinatown. With faces ranging from the innocent and angelic to those hardened well beyond their years, the mourners trailed behind the six pallbearers, who held the casket aloft with unwavering steadiness. The entourage walked past bustling seafood and produce stands, noodle factories, tea shops, video stores, and dozens of resta
urants with large, sometimes garish signs.

  The store owners and street merchants along Mulberry Street halted their morning duties and watched from stoops and shop windows. Normally, these citizens of Chinatown might have greeted the funeral procession with a well-rehearsed indifference. Over the decades they had seen the lives of far too many young males cut short because of their criminal affiliations. The gang funerals, with their showy air of importance and strutting displays of macho bravado, had become numbingly familiar.

  But today’s ceremony was different. For one thing, the deceased and most of the mourners were Vietnamese, relative newcomers to the community. These Vietnamese gangsters did not seem to respect the old ways. In recent months, they had violated Chinatown’s arcane, honor-bound codes of behavior time and time again, and they had done so with a level of brazenness that was especially offensive to the community’s more established residents.

  As if to illustrate their youthful audacity, the gang members halted in the middle of Mulberry Street and unfurled a neatly lettered cloth banner. Emblazoned across the banner, in white lettering set against a black background, were the words: STAND BY BTK/CANAL BOYS. BTK stood for Born to Kill, the name of the gang. Canal Street was their main base of operation.

  As the procession continued on, the mourners soon came under the watchful eye of a smattering of police detectives and uniformed cops. In recent months, the gangsters known as Born to Kill had achieved a special level of enmity among local lawmen. In the past, a tacit understanding had always existed between the cops and the community. Local leaders were allowed to handle local problems free of interference from the police, as long as the criminal activity was kept behind doors and out of the newspapers. Lately, the BTK had obliterated this understanding. The gang’s criminal activities were getting out of hand, and their exploits had begun to get clamorous attention in the city’s tabloid press.

  At the corner of Mulberry and Bayard streets, an officer shook his head contemptuously and stepped forward, trying to pull the banner from one of the mourner’s hands. There was a brief tussle; the cops and gangsters squared off in the middle of the intersection. Only after one of the gangsters folded up the banner did the policemen retreat.

  “Fuck you!” a few of the gang members shouted at the cops in heavily accented English. Some used a gesture easily understood in any language: the extended middle finger. The older residents watched in dismay, shook their heads, and cursed this new breed of gangster who knew nothing of civility or respect.

  Having wound their way through seven or eight of the most densely populated blocks in Chinatown, the pallbearers stopped at Canal Street, the neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare. The casket was loaded into a waiting hearse, and the mourners piled into nearly two dozen nearby limousines. Once again, onlookers took notice as the gangsters made a grand display, driving slowly along Canal Street in a long caravan. The entourage continued west through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, where they eventually arrived at the Rosedale Memorial Park Cemetery in the town of Linden.

  A mere thirty minutes by car from lower Manhattan, the Rosedale cemetery was a sprawling, immaculately landscaped burial ground. The roughly ninety acres that comprised the grounds were separated from a nearby highway by a chain-link fence. Inside, gently pitched green hills were layered with oak and sycamore trees, giving the cemetery an air of suburban grandeur. In recent years, Rosedale had become a popular resting place for prematurely deceased gang members, mostly of Chinese extraction.

  Once inside the cemetery’s cast-iron gates, the mourners were each given a single white carnation and a good-luck penny, which they were to toss into the open grave of their fallen gang brother. A metal garbage can next to the grave had been loaded with some of the deceased’s personal belongings—including clothing—and set afire. When Tinh Ngo arrived and saw the flaming garbage can with gray smoke billowing toward the sky, he asked a fellow gang member, “Why the fire?”

  “Timmy,” answered the gang member, “don’t you know anything? They burn our brother’s clothes. This way, when he go to heaven or hell—wherever—he got something to wear.”

  Tinh nodded gravely. “Ahhhhh, yes. Of course,” he replied.

  Surveying the crowd from near the back, Tinh estimated the entourage had doubled in size since this morning. Now, roughly two hundred people had gathered, and they were assembled around a grave festooned with dozens of bouquets and wreaths. Nearby, incense burned in an urn in front of the casket, which was adorned with the same black-and-white BTK/CANAL BOYS banner that had earlier been paraded through Chinatown.

  Tinh took in the scene with a sense of wonder. He knew one reason so many mourners had gathered was the popularity of the deceased, Vinh Vu, known to the gang as Amigo. At twenty-one, Amigo had been the gang’s dai low, or “big brother,” on Canal Street. Everyone knew and liked Amigo, who controlled his minions through guile and kindness rather than brute force. When Born to Kill angered rival gang factions in Chinatown, as they had often in recent months, Amigo’s high esteem within the gang made him an attractive target.

  Just three days earlier, Amigo had come out of a Canal Street massage parlor around 1:00 A.M. He was with another gang member and four female employees of the parlor at the time. A cab was flagged down. Seeing as there were too many people for one cab, Amigo let the girls go on ahead. While he and the fellow gang member waited for a second taxi, a car drove up. From the backseat, rival Chinese hitmen opened fire, their gun barrels spitting blue flames. Amigo’s companion was shot twice but survived. Amigo tried to run; he was struck twice in the leg and twice in the chest, with one bullet piercing his heart, killing him instantly.

  Amigo’s death had stunned his gang brothers. Certainly, today’s huge cemetery gathering was a manifestation of the grief they felt at his passing, but Tinh knew it was also more than that.

  Since joining the gang thirteen months ago, Tinh had been impressed to hear more established members brag of criminal affiliations in the underworld that reached far beyond New York City. Many Born to Kill gangsters were outlaws on the run, and their far-flung exploits had led them to establish a national network of sorts.

  For today’s burial, gang members had traveled south from Canada and Massachusetts, north from Virginia and Georgia. Dozens came from the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area. Tinh heard that the gang had received letters of condolence from as far west as Colorado and California.

  Nearly everyone who made the pilgrimage to Rosedale Memorial Park Cemetery did so with at least one thing in common: their Vietnamese heritage. Born and reared in villages and hamlets in a country ravaged by war, they had survived refugee boats and border camps. Some were Amerasian, the half-American, half-Vietnamese children of American GIs who abandoned them during and after the war. Violently uprooted from their battered homeland, they now found themselves adrift in America, unwelcome reminders of an infamous conflict that had scarred the national soul. Those assembled today were representatives of this lost generation of Vietnamese youth. And the size of the gathering was a show of fellowship unlike anything most of them had ever experienced in America.

  Tinh Ngo, for one, could not help but feel a near overwhelming sense of pride. And he knew they owed it all to one man: David Thai, known to the gathering as Anh hai. Literally, anh hai meant “number two brother.” In Vietnamese families, anh hai was second only to the father; he was the wisest and most esteemed brother of all.

  Standing at the head of the crowd, directly in front of Amigo’s grave, David Thai exuded authority. At thirty-four, he was ten to fifteen years older than most of the gang’s rank-and-file sai lows, or “little brothers.” Where many young Vietnamese were awkward and unpolished in public, David was regal. His handsomeness and smooth demeanor were exceeded only by his seemingly genuine concern for the welfare of his gang brothers.

  To Tinh, Anh hai was a prince. He and the others willingly entrusted their futures to David Thai. And they would continue to do so, no matt
er how many home invasions, bombings, cold-blooded killings, and other outrageous acts of mayhem he asked them to commit.

  A soothing summer breeze rustled the treetops, sending the aroma of incense wafting through the cemetery. A crew of grounds keepers siphoned water from the open grave with a gas-powered pump, then readied the casket to be lowered into the earth.

  “Who those people?” whispered Tinh, to no one in particular.

  A number of nearby gang members looked to see what Tinh was talking about. In the distance, three young males approached, bearing flowers. They wore black sunglasses, just like everyone else, and long black overcoats that fluttered gracefully in the wind. Although they were not readily familiar to Tinh or the others, they were definitely Asian, perhaps Chinese-Vietnamese. Many of the mourners were themselves Viet-Ching—ethnic Chinese born in Vietnam—so this was no great cause for alarm.

  These strangers, however, were unusually purposeful as they neared the crowd, walking in unison. When they got to within twenty feet of the mourners, they abruptly came to a halt.

  Tinh was one of the first to dive for cover. He saw the lead stranger toss his bouquet of flowers aside. The other two seemed to throw theirs in the air. All three produced guns that glistened in the midday sun.

  The harsh, staccato rhythms of automatic gunfire rang out, decimating the afternoon calm. At first, many in the crowd seemed to think it was fireworks, a common sound at Vietnamese and Chinese ceremonies. Then a couple of the mourners went down, struck by bullets. “Where’s the gun!?” a gang member shouted. “Who fire!?” shouted another.