American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  In the larger arena of American life, these young Vietnamese hoodlums didn’t even exist. At Brooklyn’s Coney Island, where Tinh Ngo, Tommy Vu, Kenny Vu, and others from their crew maintained a safe-house apartment, they walked around largely unnoticed by the local citizenry. Coney Island was the last stop on the subway, as far out as you could get without sinking into the Atlantic Ocean. Once home to earlier generations of Russian Jews and other Eastern Europeans, the neighborhood, like most of Brooklyn, had been through a cultural wringer. On Neptune Avenue, near where the BTK brothers rented their apartment, the restaurants and shops were now mostly Indian and Pakistani. The rest of the neighborhood was a mishmash of white ethnics, African Americans, and a smattering of Chinese who lived over the storefronts along Coney Island Avenue.

  Hanging out in the weathered video arcades near the once-proud Brighton Beach boardwalk, Tinh and the others sought to approximate the mores and mannerisms of the American kids around them. Like most urban youth, they patterned their behavior after young African Americans, who seemed to rule the streets. Their conversations, whether in English or in Vietnamese, were peppered with exclamations like “yo” and “man,” and they frequently called each other “homeboy,” as in, “Yo, man, this is Quang. He my homeboy.”

  It was here in Brooklyn that Tinh Ngo first partook of another custom common to American youth—the purchase and consumption of illegal narcotics.

  As a relative newcomer to the gang, Tinh was the one who often had to buy the drugs. Usually, Kenny Vu would send Tinh out to Coney Island Avenue to purchase dime bags of marijuana and crack cocaine. The first few times, Tinh was terrified. But he knew it was a rite of passage he had to go through.

  On the Avenue, black males lingered in shadowy doorways while white cops cruised by in squad cars. Using the lingo he’d been taught by Kenny, Tinh would ask a street peddler, “You got the good stuff?”

  “Yeah, my man,” he would answer. “How much you need?”

  After buying a couple of dime bags of crack and two or three bags of smoke, Tinh would head back to the Neptune Avenue safe house, located in a three-story, red-brick building. Tinh and the others lived on the first floor, next door to a Spanish bodega and directly above a street-level exterminator-supply shop.

  At first, Tinh stayed away from crack. He had seen how wild it made his assorted foster siblings. But almost everyone else in the apartment got high, especially Kenny Vu. Soon, Tinh also was taking hits of the powerful cocaine derivative, usually by inhaling from a compressed beer can, which, when properly dented and perforated, served nicely as a crude pipe.

  Early one morning in August 1989, Tinh, Kenny, and a few other gang members had been up all night drinking and smoking crack. Dawn had begun to lighten the sky outside, and the salty ocean air provided a respite from the inevitable mugginess just hours away. The small apartment, practically devoid of furniture, was a mess. Empty beer cans and cartons of Chinese take-out were strewn about the floor, and dirty dishes were piled high in the kitchen.

  In the front room Kenny Vu was standing in his underwear, whacked out of his mind and holding a gun. The others were greatly amused. It was not uncommon for Kenny to parade around with at least his shirt off, to better display his impressive array of tattoos. On his right arm, from his shoulder to his elbow, was a naked woman with wings. Below the elbow on his forearm was an elaborate, multicolored dragon. On the other arm was a large black panther; below that, a menacing cobra coiled and ready to strike. On his chest was a jagged red and blue rendering that looked more like a gaping wound than a lightning bolt, which was what it was supposed to be.

  Kenny staggered to an open window at the front of the apartment, aimed his gun, and fired. He liked to pop off rounds in the apartment, which sometimes annoyed the neighbors. Sure enough, within seconds there was a banging from the apartment above.

  Once before, the two elderly Russian ladies who lived above had complained when Kenny fired shots in the apartment. Kenny didn’t seem to care. He would aim and fire at kitchen appliances, mirrors on the wall, or out the window at the moon, the clouds, and the sky.

  Kenny fired another shot out the window. The banging persisted until, suddenly, there was a loud thump! as if someone had fallen to the ground.

  The boys didn’t think anything of it. Within ten minutes, however, they heard the sound of an approaching siren, which got louder and louder. Eventually, an Emergency Medical Service vehicle pulled up in front of their building.

  It was now around 7:00 A.M. Out of curiosity, a smattering of neighborhood onlookers gathered on the street. Tinh, Kenny, and a few others also went outside to see what was going on. When they did, they saw one of the old ladies from the second floor being carried outside on a stretcher.

  “What happen?” Tinh asked a bystander.

  “I guess she had a heart attack and died,” the guy answered.

  Tinh went upstairs and told Kenny, “Hey, you better get outta here. You fire the gun and one a those ladies fall down dead from a heart attack. Any minute cops come looking for you.”

  The gang members quickly rounded up what was left of their drugs and flushed them all down the toilet. Kenny gathered the half dozen or so guns around the apartment into a gym bag, climbed out a back window onto a fire escape and disappeared. When the cops finally knocked on the door, the boys played dumb, using the standard ruse of pretending they couldn’t speak English.

  The next day, Kenny called Tinh from the Chinatown safe house where he was hiding out. “Those cops still around?”

  “No,” answered Tinh, “but you better stay away. Maybe neighborhood people point the finger at you.”

  “Nah, Timmy. There’s no problem. We invisible to those people. They don’t even know we alive.”

  The following day Kenny returned to the apartment on Neptune Avenue. As he had predicted, nobody in the neighborhood seemed to notice.

  That night, after the sun disappeared over the horizon, Kenny sat by the front window of the safe-house apartment and resumed firing. Below him, a sign on the building’s facade read, simply and eloquently, EXTERMINATOR. RETAIL/WHOLESALE.

  “Everybody on the floor!” shouted Kenny Vu, standing inside the door of the Sinta Lounge, a Chinatown bar. For emphasis, he pulled the plug from a nearby juke box and fired a gunshot into the ceiling. The bar’s thirty or so patrons immediately hit the deck.

  Tinh Ngo and two other BTK gang members went to work. Tinh hopped over the bar counter and began loading money from the register into a plastic bag while Bao Hung Tran, a gang member known as Nicky, fleeced the patrons for cash, jewelry, and other valuables. Within minutes, they were out the door, where a getaway driver awaited. They raced to the home of Amigo, the Chinatown dai low, and counted the proceeds—$15,000 in cash, plus assorted watches, rings, and credit cards.

  Ever since the brazen double homicide of two young Flying Dragons on Canal Street six weeks earlier, the BTK had been committing crimes that seemed designed to provoke a reaction from Chinatown’s more established gangs. The robbery of the Sinta Lounge was a good example. Located on Reade Street just a few blocks from City Hall, the bar was a well-known hangout for members of the Ghost Shadows. Tinh and the others were familiar with the bar because Kenny Vu had a friend who was a member of the Ghost Shadows. Kenny and Tinh had been allowed to drink there before, and they used the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the bar’s layout and lax security.

  During the robbery, the BTK gangsters hadn’t bothered to wear masks or hide their identities in any way. The message they sought to deliver was blunt: Here’s my face. Take a good look. I dare you to do something about it.

  In numerous meetings with his dai lows, David Thai had made it clear that because Chinatown’s traditional power structure did not include the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese were therefore not bound by the rules and laws of the community. BTK members would play, rob, and even kill wherever they wanted.

  Their audacity was alarming. Around the same time a
s the Sinta Lounge heist, a BTK crew robbed a gambling den at 1 Catherine Street, the largest of Chinatown’s dozen or so illegal casinos. Charging into the basement of a building that housed two up-and-coming tongs—the Tung On and Tsung Tsin—a crew of six gang members not only stole the casino’s proceeds, but lined up the customers, who included some of Chinatown’s most reputable businessmen and tong leaders, and stripped them of cash, jewelry, and credit cards.

  Robbing a well-populated gambling den was serious business. It signified the BTK was intensifying its campaign, committing crimes that more directly affected the tongs, raising the level of its criminal activity higher and higher up the community power structure.

  In a little over a year, from the time David Thai first established the Pho Hanoi luncheonette as an informal headquarters, the BTK had mushroomed to nearly one hundred members in the New York area alone, a rapid expansion that may well have given the gang delusions of grandeur. Chinatown’s other criminal groups were taken aback. The Flying Dragons, after all, had insulted David Thai’s BTK and received a rude awakening, i.e., two dead Dragons sprawled on Canal Street at rush hour. Now, many in Chinatown figured the Ghost Shadows would have to step up and meet the BTK’s challenge or risk losing stature within the community.

  By late 1989, the level of gang activity in Chinatown had gotten so outrageous that even the cops were finding it hard to ignore. The fact that the BTK was willing to blow up a police van in front of the precinct house should have tipped the NYPD off that they weren’t dealing with the usual Chinatown crowd. In the past, when gang activity got out of hand, the police would usually go directly to the tong leaders, who were expected to control the gangs and keep the situation from spinning out of control. But since the BTK had no tong affiliation, the police had so far been unable—or unwilling—to take any other meaningful action.

  Like everything else in Chinatown, the relationship between the cops and the community’s organized criminal element was complex. Since the earliest days of Chinatown, police had developed a habit of staying out of the way when it came to underworld crime—especially if it involved crimes committed by one gang against another. Partly, this stemmed from certain cultural realities. To initiate a criminal investigation, you needed an official complaint from the victim. Since people in Chinatown were discouraged from taking their problems outside the community, crimes very often went unreported.

  An even greater problem was that, in the past, cops had been encouraged—sometimes even paid—by tong officials to look the other way. Ignoring crime in Chinatown was not hard, since the community traditionally was one of New York City’s safest, with little of the random street violence that bedeviled much of Manhattan and the other boroughs.

  To rationalize taking payoffs and disregarding gang activity, an attitude developed among the ranks of the NYPD that Chinatown was a hopelessly enigmatic netherworld that could never be understood by anyone who wasn’t Chinese. This “truism,” adhered to by non-Asians throughout New York, became a convenient excuse for a tradition of apathy and outright negligence toward Chinatown that never would have been tolerated in most other ethnic communities.

  One NYPD officer with more knowledge than most of the unusual dynamic that existed among the cops, the criminals, and the people of Chinatown was Detective Douglas Lee. Born in Hong Kong and raised in New York City, Lee was a rare item on the force—a Chinese-American cop who spoke Cantonese, Mandarin, and also Toishanes, a village-style Chinese spoken by many neighborhood elders.

  In 1987, Lee became a member of the Jade Squad, a unit of five detectives assigned to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office whose sole bailiwick was Asian crime gangs. The Jade Squad had been started specifically as a way to circumvent the neglect that existed in other areas of law enforcement when it came to gang crimes in Chinatown. The unit was given a citywide mandate to gather intelligence that might help the police spot developments in Chinatown’s vast underworld before they exploded into embarrassing newspaper headlines.

  In numerous trips around Chinatown, Lee had been getting an earful from local merchants about the BTK. “These Vietnamese boys crazy,” the people told him. “They have no control. We give them money they ask for, they still push us around, throw chairs, break things up.”

  Many Chinese merchants were willing to talk with Lee, not only because he spoke their native tongue but because his manner was exceedingly respectful. At an even six feet, Lee was tall for a Chinese male, but he spoke in a soft, deferential tone that matched his gentle smile and kindly features.

  As a child of Chinatown, Lee understood the importance of “face,” the universal Asian term for acknowledging an individual’s dignity and prestige. He knew that if you showed another Chinese person face, they would feel compelled to return the courtesy. Face was like respect, only more subtle and multifaceted. Face could be expressed in a gesture, a manner of speech, or through a person’s general attitude. You could achieve face through proper behavior and high social standing. If you bestowed the proper degree of face on others, you were blessed. If you caused someone to lose face, you stood to suffer the consequences.

  Since arriving in Chinatown with his family at the age of thirteen, Lee had become well acquainted with the corrupting influence of the gangs. In the days of his youth in the late 1960s it had been the Black Eagles and the White Eagles who recruited fresh blood by hanging around local high school playgrounds. Sometimes kids were physically intimidated into joining the gang; other times they were lured through the promise of girls, money, and excitement.

  Lee himself had friends and knew of fellow students from Chinatown’s Seward Park High School who had forsaken their education to become gangsters. Some were from respectable middle-class families. Unlike their immigrant parents, they had been raised in an aggressive, consumer-oriented society and had no intention of working long hours at a dry cleaner’s or a fish and produce market. Being a gang member meant fast cash and, in some quarters, “big face.”

  Of course, most of what Lee knew about the gangs, both as a former resident of Chinatown and as a member of the police department’s preeminent Asian gang unit, did not apply to the Vietnamese. They had not grown up in Chinatown, and few of the gang members lived there. They had no family or community restraints that might cause them to feel shame or embarrassment at provoking so much trouble in the community.

  In early February 1990, in response to complaints about the BTK throughout the city, Lee and his Jade Squad partners increased their surveillance in and around Chinatown. They checked in often with restaurant owners and merchants in the area, and sometimes spoke with the gangsters themselves, who usually snickered disdainfully at the police and went on their merry way.

  Lee even approached David Thai, whom the Jade Squad had long since identified as the leader of the BTK. Thai often double-parked in front of the Asian Shopping Mall in a sleek 1985 Jaguar he had recently leased. “David, how are you?” Lee would ask, approaching Thai either on the sidewalk or inside the mall. “Where are your boys today? Out causing trouble?”

  David usually frowned. “Detective Lee, I tell you so many times. I don’t control those boys. I only a businessman.”

  In recent weeks, the incident that Lee and his fellow officers had become most concerned about was yet another shocking double homicide. During the early morning hours of February 8, four young BTK members had strolled into Winnie’s Bar on Bayard Street, a revered Ghost Shadows “tea room,” as Chinatown saloons were still sometimes known. A few Ghost Shadows gang members approached the BTK gangsters and told them they were not welcome in Winnie’s Bar and would have to leave.

  The BTK members went outside and huddled across the street in Columbus Park, where they smoked cigarettes and cursed the Ghost Shadows for the insult they had been forced to endure. The oldest of the group handed a 9mm semi-automatic pistol to fifteen-year-old Qui Tran, a relative newcomer to the gang. “You call yourself BTK, you must prove you belong,” he said. “Go in there. Wave
the gun around. Scare them.”

  Qui Tran went into Winnie’s Bar and pulled out the handgun. Almost immediately, the Ghost Shadows pulled out theirs. A wild shootout ensued, with automatic gunfire shattering glass and ricocheting off the ceiling and walls. Within seconds, two Ghost Shadows lay dead and two more were seriously injured, including a girlfriend of one of the gang members.

  Qui Tran fled the bar onto Bayard Street. His companions were nowhere in sight. Before he had time to react, Tran spotted an NYPD paddy wagon barreling down the street in his direction. Without hesitation, he ran.

  The paddy wagon, with two cops inside, pursued Tran through the deserted streets of Chinatown. Near Canal Street, Tran ducked behind a parked car and aimed his 9mm at the cops. Officer James Meyers hit the brakes, drew his weapon, and fired off three rounds at Tran, one of which nailed him in the shoulder. The young gangster fell to the pavement. Meyers and his partner jumped from the wagon, handcuffed the assailant, and immediately took him into custody.

  Within days, news of the shootout at Winnie’s Bar wafted through Chinatown like the smell of rancid fish, malodorous but not altogether unfamiliar. Lee knew it spelled trouble. First, the BTK had murdered two Flying Dragons in broad daylight on Canal Street. Now they had perpetrated an incredible double killing in one of the Ghost Shadows’ favored tea rooms.

  A few weeks after the shootout at Winnie’s Bar, Lee and his partner, Detective James Donovan, spotted David Thai as he pulled up in his Jaguar in front of the Asian Shopping Mall. They watched as he parked, entered the mini-mall, and soon reemerged with two other BTK members, including his right-hand man, Amigo.

  Lately, Thai was rarely seen without Amigo, an increasingly popular figure on Canal Street. Despite the tensions between gangs, Amigo was known to have acquaintances that crossed gang boundaries. He was particularly cozy with the Fuk Ching, an up-and-coming gang that controlled one of Chinatown’s most lucrative new rackets: the smuggling of illegal Chinese aliens into the United States.