Most popular of all were the films of director John Woo, the Sam Peckinpah of the Hong Kong cinema. Woo’s movies always contained at least one epic shootout in a dramatic setting. In The Killer, a few dozen gangsters wage war in a Gothic cathedral backlit with thousands of candles. In Hardboiled, gangsters open fire on the movie’s hero in a large, hectic urban hospital.
The gangsters who sprayed the BTK with gunfire at the cemetery in New Jersey had outdone even John Woo. The setting was not only picturesque, it also contained a cultural subtext that most Asians would immediately recognize.
While virtually all societies treat the burial of a loved one as a sacred ritual to be conducted with reverence and respect, Eastern religions have a uniquely holistic view of the afterlife. The overwhelming majority of Chinese and Vietnamese, steeped in the traditions of Buddhism, are raised to believe that after death comes rebirth and then life again, on and on in a cycle. Death is viewed not as a conclusion, but as a reunification of the deceased with his or her ancestors. The burial process is especially important, because it determines the degree of tranquillity a being will have as he or she passes from life on earth into the afterlife.
Apparently, Amigo’s passage was going to be a bumpy one. The gods had every reason to be offended by what took place at Rosedale Memorial Park Cemetery. More than just an attempted gangland hit, it was a desecration, one that had been carefully orchestrated to exhibit the same level of disrespect toward the BTK that the BTK had shown toward Chinatown’s underworld traditions.
After the shooting, the myriad forces that had brought about the murder of Amigo and the bloody aftermath remained murky. For such an important sequence of events to have taken place, however, knowledgeable observers both in Chinatown and in law enforcement felt certain that Uncle Seven must have played a role. They also knew it was unlikely that anyone would ever prove that in court. For his part, David Thai was convinced that whoever gave the actual go-ahead, the muscle was provided by the Ghost Shadows.
Even before Amigo’s funeral, Thai had sworn vengeance. “We going to kidnap Ghost Shadows leader, chop his head off and throw it in the street,” he told Tinh Ngo and a handful of other BTK members at the Pho Hanoi luncheonette. Later, he claimed he was going to detonate a homemade bomb on Bayard Street, in the middle of Ghost Shadows territory, at the exact moment Amigo’s body was being lowered into the ground out in Jersey.
The Great Cemetery Shootout quieted David down. He had been chastened, perhaps, by the magnitude of the event. Besides, all this media attention was not good for business. For the time being, the best course of action was to take no action at all.
An eerie calm descended on the streets of Chinatown. For the first time in a while, merchants on Canal Street opened their shops early and closed late. Tourists bought counterfeit merchandise at outrageously low prices and went home happy. Local restaurants were packed with smiling American customers.
It was inevitable, however, that the ranks of the BTK would be forced to reassert themselves. Not all of the gang’s members were as free of financial concerns as David Thai. More than most of the many mobsters, punks, and white-collar charlatans operating within America’s huge criminal underground, BTK gang members were motivated by a simple, irrefutable instinct for survival. They may have worshiped Anh hai and tried to endear themselves to him by following his every command. But they still had to eat.
By the end of the summer, after a few weeks of lying low, their collective stomach had definitely begun to growl.
Tinh Ngo stood at the front counter inside Maria’s Bakery, a bustling cafeteria and catering shop located on Lafayette Street, one block north of Canal. He ordered a soda and a Chinese pastry. Behind him, the room was filled with afternoon idlers and high school kids just out of classes for the day. American pop music and the din of assorted Chinese dialects filled the air. On a plastic tray, Tinh carried his food and beverage to a Formica booth in a far corner, where four BTK brothers were sitting.
“Timmy,” said one of the gang members. “You hear what happen?”
“Oh, no,” moaned Tinh, taking a seat. “What now?”
The gang member filled Tinh in on the latest BTK escapade.
The previous day—around 10:00 A.M neighborhood resident reported hearin. on the morning of August 27, 1990—a group of five gang members stormed a wholesale produce warehouse at 380 Broome Street, just a few blocks from where Tinh and the others were now sitting. During the robbery, the gang members shot thirty-eight-year-old Sammy Eng, son of Kan Wah Eng, the owner of W. C. Produce. After ransacking the market’s small front office, they began tying up Kan Wah Eng and the three or four store employees who were unlucky enough to be on the premises at the time.
While sixty-year-old Kan Wah Eng was on the floor, he made the mistake of looking up briefly.
“I told you not to look at me!” admonished Jimmy Nguyen, the lead robber. “Why you look at me?”
Another gang member, a slight Viet-Ching named Cuong Pham, was in the process of tying up Kan Wah Eng with a telephone cord. Just as he bent down to wrap the cord around Kan Wah Eng’s ankles, an enraged Jimmy Nguyen fired a shot at the elderly store owner. He missed, hitting Cuong Pham instead in the back of the head, blowing his brains all over Kan Wah Eng, the floor, and a nearby wall. Frantically, the robbers fled W. C. Produce before the cops arrived.
“Oh, man,” said Tinh, when he heard the story. “What did David Thai say?”
“He mad,” replied the gang member. “He real mad.”
Among other things, the robbery attempt at W. C. Produce revealed a gap in leadership within the BTK. The produce market was in the middle of Amigo territory. With Amigo gone and nobody yet chosen to take his place, the BTK gangsters had embarked on the robbery without the knowledge or approval of any dai low. Coming just four weeks after the Great Cemetery Shootout, this wildly inept, accidental killing of one BTK gang member at the hands of another received significant local coverage in that morning’s Newsday—an occurrence that did not sit well with David Thai.
Tinh Ngo sipped his soda and shook his head in astonishment. As the gang members gave him more details on the shocking death of Cuong Pham—a gang member Tinh knew well—he couldn’t help but think: That could easily have been me.
Nearly all robberies were conducted amid a high level of chaos. The idea was for the robbers not only to get the goods, but to generate terror. This way, the victims wouldn’t dare think of reporting the crime to the police. Furniture and other items were usually thrown around; victims were sometimes beaten and yelled at in an assortment of languages. Occasionally, shots were fired into the ceiling to scare people.
Tinh felt lucky. Of the half dozen or so robberies he had taken part in, none had yet erupted into serious violence. There was a time when he was turned on by the prospect of danger and the adrenaline rush that came from robbing people at gunpoint. But not anymore. After the cemetery shootout, where he hid behind a tombstone and watched as some of his fellow gang members were felled by gunfire or fled in horror, the harsh realities of violence suddenly became much more acute.
Now this—the stupid, careless death of a gang member during a sloppy attempted robbery that never should have taken place to begin with.
For the first time since he joined the gang, Tinh began to ponder what life might be like were he not a member of the BTK. The subject, quite frankly, made him feel bleak and depressed.
For Tinh and other BTK members, being a gangster was not the same as being a member of Cosa Nostra, or being a Colombian drug dealer, or even an African American gangbanger. A Mafia soldato lived a life separate from his criminal deeds. He had a wife and children at home and traveled in quasi-legitimate circles. A Colombian cocaine dealer reaped huge profits and presented himself to his community as a legitimate businessman. Members of the Crips and Bloods led halfway normal lives; many went to school and held jobs while fulfilling adolescent fantasies by being part-time gangsters.
But there was no
thing part-time about being a member of the Vietnamese underworld. For Tinh and many of the others, the BTK was their entire life. They lived with gang members, ate with gang members, and socialized only with other gang members. In recent months Tinh had even cut off all communication with his family back in Vietnam. As far as he was concerned, he had no past. And like many teenagers his age, he never thought much about the future. His daily existence was entirely dependent on the various robberies and extortions he committed with other gang members.
About the only non–gang-related outlet Tinh had was a relationship he had struck up with a seventeen-year-old Chinese-American girl named Sandy. He first met Sandy earlier that summer, through Kenny Vu. She was slim and delicate, with porcelain features and beautiful, translucent skin. Her parents were immigrants, but Sandy was New York-born, or ABC, as American-born Chinese were commonly known in Chinatown.
Tinh liked Sandy, but he couldn’t really say he was crazy about her. In fact, he had never officially asked Sandy out on a date at all. They were simply paired up one day by a group of mutual friends while on their way to a party in Queens. Afterward, they took occasional trips together to the Coney Island amusement park. There they passed the hours in the penny arcades along the boardwalk and drove the bumper cars. Their favorite ride was the Wonder Wheel, Coney Island’s age-old Ferris wheel, which took them high in the sky, overlooking the ocean, the beach, and the elevated subway trains that brought thousands of people to the far-flung reaches of Brooklyn.
Tinh had always been timid and awkward around girls. Many gang members had taken advantage of David Thai’s stable of young prostitutes, the immigrant women who worked at his Chinatown massage parlor. Kenny and Tommy Vu were at the massage parlor all the time. A gang member named Hai had fallen madly in love with one of David’s girls and even followed her back to Malaysia. But Tinh had never gone to the massage parlor as a customer. And he’d never really had a serious girlfriend before.
In the beginning, what Tinh liked most about hanging out with Sandy was the stature it brought him among his friends. Although women were never allowed to take part in the gang’s activities in any substantial way, a gang member’s standing seemed to increase if he had young girls trailing after him. Sandy also seemed to gain respect and even awe from friends of hers who were impressed that she went to parties and occasionally danced at nightclubs with notorious members of the underworld.
“What’s it like?” Sandy once asked Tinh about his life as a gangster.
“It’s really nothing special,” Tinh answered modestly.
Eventually, Sandy took matters into her own hands and introduced Tinh into the world of the flesh. One afternoon while no one was at home at the safe-house apartment, Sandy offered, “Here, Timmy, this is how it’s done.”
On a mattress on the floor, with horns honking and sound of children playing outside, Sandy guided Tinh through his first sexual encounter. Tinh was relieved, since many of the other gang members had been making fun of him for being so inexperienced. He also felt it was appropriate that he should lose his virginity in a BTK safe house.
As he got to know Sandy better, Tinh tried to express his budding feelings of disenchantment about his underworld life. Tinh had never experienced this level of physical intimacy with anyone before. Moreover, as an outsider, Sandy seemed like the only person who might understand why Tinh would feel trapped by a life-style that pushed him further and further from any prospect of a normal, well-adjusted existence. But Sandy wasn’t interested. All she wanted to know was whether Tinh had ever killed anyone.
“I have no desire to kill any person,” Tinh told Sandy.
Later, Tinh asked Sandy why she had never taken him to meet her parents.
“Oh,” she answered, “I couldn’t do that. My parents tell me to stay away from Vietnamese people. They would never approve of me having a boyfriend who was Vietnamese.”
Tinh had heard these sentiments expressed before, especially by other ABCs, who regarded the Vietnamese as crude and untrustworthy. Few self-respecting Chinese parents would hire a Vietnamese kid to work in their restaurant or market, much less allow one to go out with their American-born daughter.
After that, Tinh saw less and less of Sandy. In a way, the relationship succeeded only in driving him further back into the arms of the gang, convincing him that there was no life outside the closed criminal brotherhood that had become his family, his lifeline, his entire existence.
More than ever, Tinh became convinced that his lot had been decided long ago, when he first entered the world as a vulnerable, terrified newborn in his home country of Vietnam, the Land of the Ascending Dragon. Everything after that was dao lam nguoi—natural law, universal law, the law of karma.
Chapter 5
At the same time Tinh Ngo was having his emotional ties to the BTK reaffirmed, the relationship between Chinatown’s various criminal factions was turning ugly once again.
On the morning of October 15, 1990, a parking-lot attendant arrived for work in lower Manhattan and made a grisly discovery. In the rear of the lot, amid debris and behind billowing plastic bags of garbage, the bodies of three young Asian males were found piled one on top of another. Each had been shot through the head at close range.
It didn’t take the police long to piece together a thumbnail sketch of what had happened. The parking lot was on Reade Street, across from the Sinta Lounge in Ghost Shadows territory. Through various witnesses, the police established that the three murder victims had definitely been in the bar earlier that morning. A neighborhood resident reported hearing shots fired around 3:15 A.M., just after the boys had been marched outside at gunpoint. Apparently, they had been made to put their jackets on backward, making it virtually impossible for them to defend themselves. Then they were executed; two youths were shot twice in the back of the head, a third once.
All three of the victims were Vietnamese, with an assortment of tattoos identifying them as members of Born to Kill.
To the people of Chinatown and the city at large, the killings struck an unusually grim note. Chinatown had seen gang wars before. In 1976, a series of tit-for-tat gang hits resulted in more than a dozen deaths over a twelve-month period. In the mid-1980s, when Chinatown’s ethnic makeup first began to diversify and there was a frantic scrambling for turf, gang members were gunned down in gambling dens, barber shops, and neighborhood video arcades. The shooting at the cemetery effectively established that the rules had changed—for the worse. Now it was as if Chinatown’s gang wars had descended to the level of barbarism.
One member of the community who felt that the time had come for drastic action was Virgo Lee, the city’s director of Asian affairs. Lee heard about the triple homicide on Reade Street on his car radio while driving home. Like most everyone else, he was sickened, especially when he heard the victims had been shot and left to die in a parking lot less than two blocks from his City Hall office.
The next morning, Lee picked up the phone.
“Let me ask you something,” he said to an acquaintance, a well-known restaurateur and member of the all-powerful Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. “If I were to call for a meeting between myself, business leaders, community leaders, and the police department to discuss what we can do about the gang problem in Chinatown, would you show up?”
“Well, yes,” the restaurateur answered. “If you asked me, I would.”
Lee hung up the phone, called another businessman he knew and asked the same question. “I suppose so,” the businessman answered.
Lee hung up, made a few more calls, and got generally the same answer. He was greatly encouraged.
In most communities, what Lee was proposing was hardly revolutionary. An exchange among representatives of city government, local police, and community leaders might seem like a logical first step toward overcoming a crisis like the one currently bedeviling Chinatown. Few people knew better than Lee, however, just how different Chinatown was from most communities.
&nb
sp; Though he had only recently been appointed to the job of Asian affairs director by the newly elected mayor, David Dinkins, Lee was, at the age of thirty-nine, a product of the community. Since arriving from his native Boston as a teenager, he’d spent much of his adult life butting heads with the community’s traditional powers. As an activist and union advocate in the 1970s trying to organize working-class and poor immigrants, Lee had learned that social activism was rarely appreciated in Chinatown. Even his parents, rural peasants originally from Toishan province, thought he was “insane,” a rabble-rouser who had come under the sway of bad influences in America.
It was through his experiences as an activist that Lee first began to fully understand the ubiquitous power of the CCBA, the traditional nemesis of younger, more progressive Chinese-Americans.
Made up of representatives from most of the community’s family, district, and business associations, the CCBA was Chinatown’s official governing body. The association’s president was sometimes referred to as “the Mayor of Chinatown.” CCBA members saw themselves as arbiters of Chinese tradition and culture. Mostly, they comprised a powerful business lobby that refused to deal with any Asian-American group or social-welfare organization not sanctioned by the CCBA.
Headquartered in several buildings on Mott Street, in the heart of old Chinatown, the association was fully legitimate, but it conducted business amid great secrecy, behind closed doors and only in Chinese. The ways in which the CCBA arrived at decisions that affected the lives of nearly all Asians living in the city had contributed greatly to Chinatown’s reputation as a mysterious, closed society.
As a representative of city government, Virgo Lee had to deal with the CCBA, whether he liked it or not. Its members’ power as decision-makers reached far beyond the organization itself to encompass a stratum of Chinatown society known simply as “the elders.” Mostly conservative Cantonese-speaking residents who had fled China in the thirties and forties, the elders were the official voice of Chinatown. No meeting that Lee might hold would have any credibility unless they were included.
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