American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  Utter pandemonium ensued, with people screaming and scurrying for cover. The leader of the grounds crew, a beefy African American, dove headfirst into Amigo’s open grave. Many of the mourners crawled behind tombstones for protection. The gunmen used an Uzi submachine gun and a .12-gauge pump-action shotgun, spraying the gathering with no specific target in mind.

  Tinh saw one of the mourners take a bullet in the hand; another was hit in the leg. A lone gang member pulled out a handgun and returned fire while fleeing through the cemetery, toppling tombstones. Later, the gang members would curse themselves for not having been properly armed, but who could have guessed rival gangsters would dare to seek retribution on such hallowed ground? Earlier, perhaps, on the already bloodstained streets of Chinatown, but not here, where even your worst enemies are supposed to have the right to peacefully bury their dead.

  The sound of gunfire echoed sporadically through the cemetery. Peering from behind a small tombstone, Tinh saw one of the gunmen getting closer and closer. He knew he had to make a run for it.

  Tinh fled past dozens of mourners lying on the ground, some who had been hit, some pretending they were dead, hoping the gunmen would pass them by. He snaked his way through rows of tombstones until he arrived at the chain-link fence, where more gang members were frantically trying to escape. Both male and female mourners clawed at the fence, tearing their clothes and lacerating their flesh on the sharp metal.

  A few made it over, running along the shoulder of the highway to safety. Dozens more collapsed in the excitement and exhaustion of the moment. It seemed as if a good half hour had passed, but it was more like sixty seconds when the gunfire finally subsided, to be replaced by the sound of approaching sirens. In all the confusion, the gunmen vanished as mysteriously as they had arrived.

  When Al Kroboth got there, the cops had already begun rounding up what was left of the mourners. A strapping six feet five inches tall, Kroboth was the cemetery’s head grounds keeper and director of security. He was also a veteran of the Vietnam War. For nearly three years Kroboth had traversed the jungles and rice fields of Indochina. He’d seen plenty of combat and eventually spent fifteen months in a cage as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese.

  Kroboth surveyed the damage: A medevac helicopter had landed in the middle of the cemetery, and the injured were being loaded on stretchers to be taken to a nearby hospital in Newark that specialized in gunshot wounds. Seven people had been hit, dozens more trampled while fleeing the barrage of gunfire or badly cut while attempting to scale the metal fence. Medical personnel and local police tended to the others—one hundred or so young Vietnamese still traumatized by the sudden fury of the attack. As the chopper drifted skyward and the remaining wounded moaned in pain, Kroboth couldn’t help but be reminded of battlefields he’d seen a long time ago, in a country most of these mourners called home.

  At the Linden police station, New Jersey cops struggled to understand what were, to them, nearly indecipherable accents and names, though most of the names were probably fictitious anyway. Of the nearly one hundred mourners brought in for questioning—including Tinh Ngo—only two carried identification. The cops scratched their heads and made phone calls, trying to find out whatever they could about a group of gangsters they hadn’t even known existed until today.

  In the days that followed, the cemetery shootout would become a popular news item, receiving fervid coverage locally and in the national media. Since the perpetrators were not yet known, accounts tended to focus on the targets of the shooting: the Vietnamese. Few journalists could resist the angle that these gangsters, born in a country brutalized by a shameful war, appeared to respect no one—not even the dead. Forevermore, the shooting at Rosedale Memorial Park Cemetery would be remembered as a defining event, the moment at which the idea of Vietnamese gangsters in America entered the national consciousness.

  Truth was, the problem had been brewing for some time. Across America, the face of organized crime was changing, and the old-world courtesies of the past no longer applied. The underworld was now an ethnic polyglot, with a new generation of gangsters taking over where the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians left off. Only now, a new ingredient had been added to the melting pot: a nihilistic, unconscionable type of violence that harked back to a dark, troubling era in American history. An era when U.S. soldiers stormed hamlets and bamboo huts in places like Danang, Khe San, and Nha Trang while terrified, wide-eyed children cowered in dark corners.

  To those throughout mainstream America who took the time to acknowledge what was happening, it was as if their worst fears were being realized. U.S. foreign policy had come home to roost, and the untidy residue of the Vietnam War had taken on yet another ugly, unexpected permutation.

  For Tinh Ngo and the others who had become identified with the gang known as Born to Kill, the consequences were even more immediate. For years, they had struggled to survive, to find their place within a society that did not seem to want them. For a time they drifted aimlessly, like small sampans on a large, turbulent ocean. Eventually, they banded together in cities and small towns throughout the United States, and they had begun to pursue their own unique version of the American dream.

  Theirs was a brotherhood born of trauma, sealed in bloodshed. A brotherhood that had first begun to coalesce many months earlier in the bustling restaurants, pool halls, and back alleys of New York City’s Chinatown.

  PART ONE

  The Gang

  When men lack a sense of awe,

  there will be disaster.

  —LAO-TZU

  The Tao-te Ching

  (sixth century B.C.)

  Chapter 1

  The group of five young males stood in the dingy second-floor hallway of an old industrial building, banging on a door.

  “Who’s there?” asked a middle-aged woman on the other side.

  “It’s me, Tommy. Tommy Vu,” answered one of them. Behind him, the others waited anxiously, puffing on cigarettes, staring at the floor.

  The woman looked through a peephole, then slid back the latch on the door’s cast-iron, dead-bolt lock. When she opened the door, a pale golden light from the hallway streamed into the front room of her small, unadorned massage parlor.

  Tommy Vu entered, followed by the other youths. All were in their late teens or early twenties. Dressed mostly in black, with assorted punk hairstyles and glaring tattoos, they swaggered and blew streams of cigarette smoke in the air, exhibiting the general demeanor of bad boys on the prowl. Normally, the woman—an experienced madam—would have been worried at opening the door to a handful of such raffish youths. It was one o’clock in the morning, and it wouldn’t have been the first time her establishment—located at 59 Chrystie Street on the outskirts of Chinatown—was robbed by gangsters. But the woman recognized Tommy. Many times he had come to her massage parlor as a customer and enjoyed the ministrations of her stable of young females.

  Seated around the room on an upholstered sofa and matching chair, a half dozen smooth-skinned Korean and Malaysian ladies looked expectantly toward the young men. A few of the women straightened their tight-fitting dresses and sought to catch the boys’ attention with shy smiles and coquettish glances. Tommy and his companions seemed preoccupied, and they avoided eye contact.

  A security person stepped forward—a Chinese male in his thirties. “Hey, these guys look kind of young.” Turning to Tommy, he asked, “You got some ID?”

  Tommy sniffled. “Yeah. This my ID.” He pulled a 9mm from inside his jacket and stuck it in the guy’s face.

  With that, all hell broke loose.

  “Get down! Everybody! On the floor!” shouted Blackeyes, the tallest of the group, immediately assuming the role of leader.

  “Cooperate!” commanded Kenny Vu, Tommy Vu’s brother. “Cooperate or we will kill you.” All five of the young hoodlums waved handguns in the air.

  The girls immediately dropped to the floor. The security guy also lay flat on his belly. Blackeyes instructed Tommy Vu, Kenny
Vu, and a member of the crew named Andy to check the back rooms. Then he turned to Tinh Ngo, who seemed to be almost cowering in the background. “Timmy, you check basement. See who down there,” he ordered.

  Holding a .22-caliber pistol, his face moist with perspiration, Tinh didn’t even try to hide his nervousness. This was his first armed robbery, and as the others began rounding up the employees and customers, he froze in his tracks.

  “Go!” barked Blackeyes.

  Tinh headed out the front door and down the hallway to the rear of the building. He descended a set of steep, rickety stairs, not knowing what to expect, his gun pointed straight ahead.

  He had already convinced himself that if the occasion arose, he would try not to shoot anybody. Tinh hadn’t had much experience with guns. In recent months, he had carried a weapon during numerous muggings of people in subway stations, but mostly just for show. Often the gun wasn’t even loaded. In his apartment, he would stand in front of a mirror, whip out a gun, and pull the trigger, just like in the old movie Westerns. But he had never actually fired a loaded weapon, much less into the body of a living human being.

  He was told not to worry. Blackeyes and the others had robbed many massage parlors before. “We just go in, take the money, say bye-bye,” Blackeyes explained.

  Robbing a massage parlor wasn’t like robbing a legitimate establishment. Thinly veiled houses of prostitution, the parlors were big juicy chickens just waiting to be plucked. There was always plenty of loose cash on the premises. And since it was an illegal business, the owners weren’t likely to call the police and file a report. About the only thing you needed to worry about was the possibility that the parlor was under the protection of a rival gang, in which case there were likely to be armed security guys hidden somewhere on the premises.

  Tinh crept slowly down the dank basement hallway. From somewhere, he could hear the sound of a television playing a Chinese-language program. He came to an open doorway and peered inside. A man stood facing the TV. At roughly six feet tall, he looked like a giant to Tinh, who was short and small-boned and had a blank, wide-eyed face that made him look about fourteen, though he was actually three years older than that.

  Sensing trouble, the man’s head turned; his and Tinh’s eyes met.

  Without hesitation, Tinh ran, darting down the hallway, up the stairs, and back into the massage parlor. “Blackeyes,” he gasped, still winded from the run, “somebody down there. Big Chinese guy.”

  “Yeah?” said Blackeyes. “Okay, I take care of it. You help the others.”

  Tommy, Kenny, and Andy had already gathered the employees and patrons in the front room. With Tinh’s assistance, they began taking the girls one by one to the small massage rooms that lined a back hallway, forcing them to produce cash, jewelry, and other hidden valuables. Tinh noticed his companions were waving their guns around, cursing and treating the girls roughly.

  “Move, bitch!” Tinh shouted, imitating the others. “Give us the money!” He saw the fear in the girls’ faces and felt the pure adrenaline rush of doing something dangerous, something he knew was wrong. It reminded him of the terror that had been wrought by robbers and rapists on the refugee boats during his long, horrific voyage out of Vietnam. Tinh’s heart beat fast and the hair on the back of his neck tingled. For a change, he knew what it felt like to be the one instilling fear rather than recoiling in its wake.

  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.