Unless you had a taste for punishment, you didn’t fuck around with David Thai.
Chapter 3
It 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.
The community’s insular structure may have been counterproductive, but the reasons for its existence were not hard to f
athom. Few ethnic groups in the history of the United States had been as systematically discriminated against as the early Chinese settlers who came to California during the years of the Gold Rush. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further Chinese laborers and their wives from legally entering the country. It excluded Chinese from most occupations, including manufacturing and mining. It also forbade them to become citizens. Many states even denied Chinese the right to testify against Caucasians in court.
Unlike American immigrants of Irish, Jewish, and African descent who fought against the pernicious stain of racism, the Chinese tried to make the best of a bad situation by drawing inward. Rather than face the risk of death at the hands of government-financed mobs, they formed their own internally governed societies, first in major metropolitan areas on the West Coast, then later in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities.
The youth gangs that would eventually become a major problem in nearly every Chinatown throughout the United States were a product of this process. Before the gangs, there were the tongs. Initially, the tongs had been established as self-help organizations designed to assist new immigrants in adjusting to life in Kam San, or Gold Mountain, as the United States became known. Since there were few women in Chinatown as a result of the Exclusion Act, tongs were exclusively fraternal organizations. For a small fee, any adult male could join. Regular meetings were held at the tong headquarters, which was housed in a building owned by the tong and presided over by a duly elected leader.
Eventually, the tongs became the primary overseers of Chinatown’s various criminal rackets, which included gambling, prostitution, and the sale of opium. Since local police either stayed out of Chinatown or were bought off, there was plenty of room for territorial disputes and other violent altercations. From 1910 to the early 1930s, bloody tong wars were a rite of passage for many young Chinese males.
The tongs were themselves patterned after ancient secret societies known as triads, revered organizations once lionized in epic poetry and song. First formed in China in the seventeenth century, triads began as part of an underground political movement that sought to overthrow the corrupt Ming dynasty. Later, triads evolved into a sprawling criminal fraternity with membership in virtually every Chinese community throughout the world.
The triads were less an organization than a loose brotherhood, similar to the Freemasons or the Knights of Columbus. The fact that they were secret only enhanced their mystique. If the Asian underworld was a rich, bubbling kettle of hot and sour soup, then the triads were the secret ingredient that gave it its unique tang.
Most tongs maintained elaborate initiation rituals based on triad legend. In a secret ceremony, an aspiring tong member would have his finger pricked with a needle, then mix a drop of his blood with water and drink it down. With the leader of the tong presiding, the inductee then knelt before a Buddhist shrine and recited the Thirty-six Oaths, pledging loyalty and fidelity to the tong. The triad mystique made being a member of the Asian underworld seem like a noble, even sacred endeavor, and it has continued to serve as a persuasive means of recruitment for tong and gang leaders to this day.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the tongs—once composed of assorted hooligans and “hatchet men”—sought to change their image. The tongs had never been legally defined as criminal organizations, but their primary function within the community was well known. Now, however, they tried to pass themselves off as fully legitimate business associations. From here on out, the daily details of overseeing the community’s still burgeoning criminal rackets would be handled by youth gangs, who were just beginning to emerge as a persistent force.
Over the decades that followed, reporters, some cops, and even representatives of the U.S. government would often try to define the relationship between the tongs and the gangs. Even though gang members worked as guards in gambling dens located in the basements of buildings owned by the tongs, even though gang members were sometimes known to live inside the tong headquarters, the leaders of these business associations denied there was a relationship. Most tong members had themselves never been implicated in any crime and steadfastly refused to accept characterizations of their organization as a criminal enterprise.
Nonetheless, throughout most of Chinatown, the relationship was understood. The On Leong and Hip Sing tongs, the community’s two most powerful business associations, had been around since the dawn of Chinatown. Beginning in the mid-1970s, periodic gang wars raged, establishing certain alliances. The Ghost Shadows became closely identified with the On Leong tong, the Flying Dragons with Hip Sing. The police referred to the gangs as the tongs’ “youth wing” or “standing army.”
Through it all, gambling and prostitution remained two of Chinatown’s healthiest rackets, though the early twentieth-century brothels had long since been replaced by slightly more respectable massage parlors. Extortion of local merchants by gangsters became such a common practice that most merchants didn’t even think of it as such; they willingly paid a weekly fee for the promise of protection. This caldron of illicit activity sustained Chinatown’s underground economy well into the 1980s, until heroin entered the picture.
While U.S. law enforcement focused virtually all of its energies on the worldwide cocaine scourge that reached its zenith during the years of the Reagan/Bush presidency, Chinese criminals had been systematically consolidating the production and wholesale distribution of heroin. Contrary to popular opinion, heroin use in the United States remained steady throughout the 1980s. Through a loose international network based in Hong Kong, Chinese gangsters met this demand by offering a product that was cheaper and more potent than anything that had ever been seen before. Southeast Asian heroin, known as China White, flooded the market. Chinatown became the place where massive heroin deals were initiated and where the criminal proceeds—unprecedented amounts of dirty money—were laundered through local banks and used to open businesses and finance major real-estate purchases.
Ironically, at the same time tumultuous social changes in Chinatown were making it possible for newer gangs like the BTK to gain a toehold, Chinese crime lords were consolidating their control of the heroin trade, the largest cash business in the world. Attitudes about crime in Chinatown were being redefined; no longer was it the quaint, localized undertaking portrayed in the mainstream media. Now when cops and federal agents talked about triads, tongs, and gangs, they usually used the term “Asian organized crime.” In early 1989, congressional hearings were held to discuss a troubling new problem—the Chinese Mafia—believed to be centered in New York City’s Chinatown.
With stakes so high, renegade factions like the BTK, though they may have been relatively low in the pecking order, were a potentially serious problem. For the Asian underworld to operate properly, certain rules had to be adhered to. Hong Kong drug lords funneled money into Chinatown banks and real estate, which enhanced local business interests represented by the tongs. Youth gangs, at the behest of the tongs, protected everyone’s interests at the street level. Supposedly, the triad mystique made everybody feel like they were in it together. If the various criminal divisions fulfilled their duties as they were supposed to, it was a thing of beauty. The Asian underworld prospered and Caucasian law enforcement stayed away.
The more the BTK challenged the status quo by brazenly carving out turf for itself, pissing off the police, and engaging other gangs in violent conflict for the flimsiest of reasons, the more it disrupted the flow of commerce. The gang’s intemperate murder of two Flying Dragons on Canal Street was a prime example. The BTK’s antics were attracting unwanted attention. The gang did whatever it wanted, with little or no regard for Chinatown’s larger criminal framework. Given the number of factions who were affected, from rival gang members to tong leaders to international brokers of China White, it created a situation that was simply intolerable and would have to be dealt with soon, lest the activities of a lumpen street gang began to do irreparable damage to a vast, hugely profitable u
nderworld conglomerate.
As a veteran member of Chinatown’s criminal establishment, David Thai knew full well the threat his budding gang posed to the powers-that-be. Thai’s minions, on the other hand, were mostly oblivious. The ranks of the BTK were satisfied with the eminence the gang gave them within the community, and they felt honored by the sense of brotherhood they were able to derive from it. As for the larger galaxy of tong bosses and heroin traffickers who presided over the underworld, they were as far removed from the daily lives of Tinh Ngo and the others as the moon, the stars, and other far-off constellations.
If the Chinese gangsters who now controlled the upper echelons of Asian organized crime were indeed comparable to modern-day capo regimes, their young BTK counterparts resembled some earlier incarnation of Cosa Nostra. Tough and unvarnished, they were the contemporary Asian equivalent of the Sicilian Black Hand, Cosa Nostra in its incubation stage, when padrinos and their henchmen were content to prey exclusively on recent immigrants within their own community.
Like the Black Hand, the BTK understood that most immigrants were cut off from the protections of mainstream American society. It was Jimmy Wong, the gang’s Brooklyn dai low, who told young Tinh Ngo when he first joined the BTK, “We rob and steal only from other Asians. They don’t know anything about U.S. law and don’t go to police. They afraid. They afraid to even report the crime.”
The BTK’s practice of preying entirely on Asians only reinforced the gang’s inherent isolation. The Vietnamese, in general, had not been warmly embraced in Chinatown to begin with. Now that the BTK was muscling its way onto the local scene in such a seemingly disrespectful fashion, Chinese stereotypes about the Vietnamese were conveniently substantiated.
It wasn’t fair, of course. Most Vietnamese in Chinatown were hard-working and law-abiding, as were most Chinese. But the antics of the BTK reinforced negative perceptions, pushing the gangs’ members further and further from any hope of ever integrating into Chinatown’s legitimate social framework. They became outsiders in a community already far outside the mainstream.
American Gangsters Page 70