Of course, the majority of Vietnamese immigrants who made it into the United States did not become criminals. In fact, the relative ease with which the earliest generation of refugees adapted to American society may have lulled some U.S. citizens into thinking the Vietnamese possessed an innate ability for adjusting to alien environments. Having escaped the clutches of a victorious Communist regime bent on exacting revenge and imposing its will, most postwar refugees accepted their reincarnation as Americans with diligence. Many achieved financial success as small-business owners, and their children often excelled in U.S. schools.
But these initial refugees had come overwhelmingly from Vietnam’s educated class, those with ties to the military power structure in Saigon. The boat people in the late 1970s and those who followed throughout the eighties were not so well scrubbed. They were poor and mostly from the countryside. Predominantly young males, they were set adrift by their families, a tradition known as “throwing out the anchor.” It was hoped that, as males, they would be better equipped to survive the refugee experience and find work in Australia, Canada, or the United States, then bring family members to live with them.
Arriving as “unaccompanied minors,” many young, shellshocked refugees simply cracked under the enormous pressures. Like Tinh Ngo, they bounced from foster family to foster family. From Florida to Washington State, they dropped out of school and hung out in pool halls with other young Southeast Asian refugees. Some banded together and committed crimes, establishing links with other Vietnamese criminals in far-flung towns and cities.
By the late 1980s, wayward Vietnamese hoodlums had become associated with a particularly brutal type of crime known as “home invasions.” Home invasions were like robberies, only the perpetrators planned the crime so as to deliberately find the home’s occupants within. During a home invasion a family might be tied up with electrical cord, rope, or duct tape while gang members ransacked the house looking for cash, jewelry, and electronics. Terror tactics and sometimes torture were used to coerce the victims into producing valuables like gold or expensive family heirlooms locked away in a safe.
The victims of these home invasions were always Asian—Cambodians, Koreans, Laotians, Malaysians, Chinese. Communities with large segments of Vietnamese were especially susceptible. In Southern California, where more Vietnamese immigrants reside than anywhere else in the United States, over two hundred home invasions were reported in 1989 and 1990, meaning maybe twice that many actually occurred. To the north in San Jose during that same period, home invasions were taking place at a reported rate of four a month.
By 1990, home invasions and other violent crimes committed against Asians by Vietnamese gangs were on the rise in a staggering variety of cities, including Houston, suburban Washington, D.C., Boston, Minneapolis, and Toronto.
Because of the nomadic nature of this unusual new breed of gangster, local lawmen around the country weren’t having much luck prosecuting cases. In New York and other major cities where Chinese gangs had been around for a while, at least local cops had a frame of reference. But Vietnamese gangsters often hit in communities off the beaten track. Even on those occasions when witnesses and victims did come forward, there weren’t many cops or agents with an understanding of the culture.
Like the Chinese, Vietnamese names were written with the family name first, though this was usually changed once a person settled in the United States. There were only around two hundred family names in the entire Vietnamese language, leading U.S. lawmen to think that because there were so many criminals named Nguyen or Tran, the two most common Vietnamese surnames, the criminals were either using an alias or were all related. To add to the confusion, Vietnamese gangsters had adopted a certain patented appearance carried over from city to city that made them look strikingly similar.
In 1987, a systematic attempt to deal with the problem was undertaken by two enterprising cops outside Washington. James Badey, a Vietnam War vet and detective from Arlington, Virginia, and Detective Phil Hannum from neighboring Falls Church, were both battling an increase in crimes committed against Asians in their respective communities. In response, they started the International Association of Asian Crime Investigators, an information network they hoped would become a nexus for investigators working on all types of Asian crimes. Much to their surprise, the IAACI’s quarterly newsletter soon became almost exclusively devoted to the exploits of the Vietnamese underworld, which they described as “the most rapidly expanding criminal phenomenon in the United States.”
Unlike the ranks of the BTK, who were operating mostly within New York City’s highly structured criminal underworld in Chinatown, most Vietnamese brotherhoods were made up of “parasitic groups,” a term used by Badey and Hannum to describe small, roving bands of gangsters who struck wherever and whenever they wanted. As yet, there didn’t seem to be any clearly defined structure that linked these groups in any hierarchical way. There was no capo di tutti capi, or boss of bosses. But the possibilities were disquieting. With such a vast reservoir of criminal talent, how long would it be before some strong-willed, charismatic leader had the vision to seize the reins?
Despite the efforts of the IAACI, few lawmen were paying attention to the country’s growing Vietnamese underworld, especially at the federal level. At the time, the FBI and DEA were busy chasing mafiosi and megabuck dope dealers; they weren’t likely to focus on a group of “fringe” criminals who targeted only East Asians, seemingly one of the country’s quietest minorities. Even in New York’s Chinatown, where David Thai was well known to cops with Asian crime expertise, there was little knowledge of the gang’s out-of-state connections—which was hardly surprising. In New York, a police officer’s performance is judged on his or her local arrest rate. There was simply no impetus for NYPD detectives to concern themselves with what might be happening beyond the boundaries of the city or the state.
If they had, they might have foreseen that David Thai had big plans when it came to the Vietnamese underworld. Up to now, those plans involved occasional BTK crime sprees in disparate locales like Connecticut and Georgia, the gang’s current destination. Beyond that, the stakes only got bigger. Although Anh hai didn’t talk about it much, Tinh Ngo and the other BTK sai lows began to see that their leader was driven by a deep, powerful ambition. Thai knew that, even if the BTK were never to be Top Dog in Chinatown, Chinatown would serve nicely as a stepping-stone, a foundation from which he could tap into a larger criminal network of Vietnamese gangsters and racketeers scattered throughout the United States.
As far as Tinh Ngo and the others was concerned, it was a given: If anyone was going to emerge as supreme commander of America’s sprawling, expanding Vietnamese underworld, it was very likely going to be their esteemed boss, Mr. Tho Hoang “David” Thai.
When Tinh and the other BTK gangsters arrived in two carloads at a Dunkin’ Donuts just off Highway 129 near Gainesville, it was well past midnight. There was a whiff of juniper in the air and a stillness unlike anything the boys had ever experienced back in Chinatown. From a pay phone, Kenny Vu dialed the number they had been given by Anh hai. An American woman answered with a lyrical Southern accent that sounded funny to Kenny.
“David Thai there?” he asked.
“You better call back tomorrow,” answered the lady. “Everybody here’s had so much to drink they fell right asleep.”
Kenny told the lady to let David Thai know they would be staying at Days Inn, located across the street from Dunkin’ Donuts.
At nine o’clock the following morning, Anh hai knocked on the door of the motel room, fresh and wide awake. He greeted his young brothers like an eager conventioneer, instructing them to follow him to Cafe Huong, a Vietnamese coffee shop on the outskirts of Gainesville, where he bought everyone breakfast. After they’d eaten, David handed each gang member $100. “Put this in your pocket in case you need it,” he said, playing his usual role as big brother and benefactor.
The gang members were still exhausted from the twe
nty-hour drive from New York City. But David already had business on the brain. “Today, we gonna check out a couple jewelry stores near Atlanta,” he told the gang.
In Georgia, the BTK contact was a lanky, rugged auto mechanic named Quang Van Nguyen. Quang served the same function as Phat Lam in Bridgeport, making up a list of local Asian establishments that looked like good robbery targets.
That afternoon, David Thai and his BTK brothers met Quang Nguyen and drove to Doraville, a placid Atlanta suburb fifty miles south of Gainesville. Doraville was small, with barely eight thousand residents, but the town had a sizable outdoor shopping center located alongside Buford Highway, a broad six-lane thoroughfare that connects Doraville with other Atlanta suburbs. Known as Northwoods Plaza, the shopping center was an ethnic mix of taqueriás and Chinese groceries, with a few Vietnamese establishments thrown in.
David Thai himself went into the Sun Wa Jewelry Store, a compact retail outlet sandwiched between a Spanish-language video shop and a Dollar-Mart. Ostensibly, Thai had a ring that needed fixing. Really, he was casing the place to see whether it was worth robbing.
“This one easy to take,” said Anh hai to the others after coming out of the store. “They got big inventory, no security.”
After checking out a few more Asian stores, the boys drove back to Gainesville.
The house where Thai and the others were staying was a squat, ranch-style dwelling at 2904 Maverick Trail Road, a rural, wooded culde-sac. The house was surrounded by leafy oak and sycamore trees; there were no streetlights, shops, or other urban amenities in the area. During his years in Georgia, Lan Tran had lived in another part of Gainesville with the couple now residing at the house, Lan’s former roommate and his American girlfriend, Kathy Ivester—the woman with the Southern accent Kenny Vu had spoken with on the phone.
With nearly a dozen gang members now staying at the modest two-bedroom home, the place was a swirl of activity. The boys had barely settled in when, the next night, they were off to Atlanta again, this time for a little entertainment. A nightclub in Atlanta was having a party, and the featured attraction was Diem “Linda” Trang, a sexy Vietnamese pop singer from California.
What the Vietnamese referred to as a “party,” most Americans would probably call a concert. For weeks leading up to the event, flyers are posted in Asian restaurants and pool halls throughout the area. Young men and women come from miles away, paying anywhere between $25 and $100 to see a familiar, top-name entertainer. The parties, held in big cities across the United States, are a rare opportunity for Vietnamese youths to get dressed up and meet other Vietnamese from outside their community.
On occasion, these parties also served as convenient meeting places for members of the underworld. It was not unusual for elaborate crimes to be hatched at tables and booths where young males sipped on expensive cognac while their girlfriends swirled around them on the dance floor.
At approximately 10:00 P.M. that night, David Thai and his BTK brothers arrived at the Atlanta party in two carloads. Right away, Anh hai got angry. The doorman at the club had the audacity to actually make Thai and his BTK crew pay to get in. As leader of the largest and most infamous Vietnamese gang in the United States, Thai was accustomed to dropping his name and getting in free most places.
Inside, while nearly five hundred men and women danced underneath a disco ball and strobe light, Anh hai glowered. He declared to his gang brothers, “I tell you what we gonna do …”
Around one o’clock, when the club approached closing time, Kenny Vu, Black Phu, and a few others were to start a fight inside the club. That would draw the two security officers outside the club inside. Then Tinh Ngo and Nicky were to jump the doorman, who was standing just outside the front door. “He got big pockets on that jacket,” said David. “I bet he got something like a thousand dollars on him.”
By the time the club was starting to close, everyone had a few beers under his belt. Tinh and Nicky went outside. As planned, a commotion started inside the club, and the security guards were called in. At that moment, Nicky asked the doorman, “Hey, you know how we get to North Carolina?”
“Yeah,” answered the doorman. “Where your car?”
Like most gang members, Nicky was small, with a look of permanent bemusement on his face. He, the doorman, and Tinh ambled out into the parking lot.
Without warning, Nicky swiftly pulled out a gun and put it to the doorman’s head. “Don’t make me have to shoot, motherfuck,” he advised, using the BTK’s favorite curse word—a word used variously as a noun, an adjective, and an exclamation point.
Tinh began rifling the doorman’s pockets. Except for a few pieces of paper, they turned out to be completely empty.
Nicky had his arm around the guy’s neck, trying to hold him still. But the doorman broke free and began to run through the parking lot. “Ping! Pang! Pong!” sounded the shots from Nicky’s gun as he fired at the doorman, who danced through the parking lot like a monkey high on crack cocaine.
Meanwhile, inside the club, Black Phu had taken his role in the charade far too seriously. A dark-skinned Amerasian—the child of an African American soldier stationed in Vietnam during the war—Phu was notoriously high-strung. On top of that, he’d had too much to drink, turning what was supposed to be a fake altercation into a real one by pulling out his gun and firing a few shots into the ceiling of the nightclub.
The BTK members inside fled at the same time the doorman outside was scampering through the parking lot. Police sirens could be heard getting closer. Nicky stopped shooting and ditched his gun underneath the fender of a huge truck. The gang members piled into their two cars, then raced through the streets of Atlanta until they found the expressway.
As they drove through the pitch darkness on I-85 back toward Gainesville, Tinh told David Thai what had happened with the doorman. He was certain Anh hai would be mad. Instead, David laughed, his usually reserved chuckle building into a full-blown guffaw. This pleased Tinh, who rarely saw Thai express pleasure of any kind. Tinh also laughed, and so did the other gang members, until the entire car was filled with the sound of howling, knee-slapping BTK gangsters.
Over the next forty-eight hours, everyone in the crowded house on Maverick Trail Road began to get antsy. On Thanksgiving, a holiday that meant little to the boys of the BTK, a handful of gang members headed north across the state line into Chattanooga, Tennessee. Led by Jimmy Nguyen—the gang member who had accidentally shot and killed a fellow BTK gangster during the robbery of the produce warehouse in Chinatown three months earlier—the crew robbed a small jewelry outlet just as the store’s owner was closing for the day. They blindfolded and tied up the middle-aged Vietnamese woman with duct tape and set her on a large bag of rice in the back of the store. Little Cobra stabbed the bag threateningly, then Jimmy Nguyen pistol-whipped the woman until she mercifully passed out. The boys arrived back at the house in Gainesville with a bag of jewelry.
The next morning, David Thai, Lan Tran, Tinh, and a few others walked across Maverick Trail Road to a wooded area not far from the house. Another local gang member, Hoang Ngo—better known as Jungle Man—had just dropped off a small cache of handguns purchased at a pawnshop in nearby Braselton. Located sixty miles from Atlanta, Braselton was a sleepy Georgia town that became famous when it was purchased a year earlier by its most renowned native daughter, the sultry actress Kim Basinger. Like most Georgia towns, Braselton was a convenient place to purchase guns. The only requirement was a Georgia state driver’s license and one other piece of ID.
Near a pond in the woods, the gang members took target practice, firing at empty beer bottles and the trunk of a large sycamore tree. The report from the weapons echoed across the pond and through the trees, and soon Kathy Ivester, the gang’s hostess, came out to complain.
“Are you trying to get us evicted?” she yelled at David Thai.
For days, Ivester had been aiming caustic barbs at Anh hai, mostly because he tied up her telephone for hours at a time, making
long-distance calls to New York, California, and God knows where else. “You think you can just come out here and fire your guns and nobody’s gonna notice? Well, you better think again, mister. We got neighbors here. They might just call the police.”
Then she stormed back into the house.
David winced, as if maybe he was developing an ulcer. “Man, this lady getting on my nerves,” he said to no one in particular. “I think maybe we go do this robbery and get the fuck outta here.”
Late on the morning of November 26, 1990, forty-six-year-old Odum Lim was seated in the back of the Sun Wa Jewelry Store, fixing the clasp on a diamond necklace. Lim’s work space was cramped, which was just the way he liked it. Tools hung from nails on the wall around him, his bench was messy, and a glaring fluorescent desk light was pulled in tight on the job before him.
A buzzer on the store’s front door sounded. Lim looked out from behind his workbench to see four well-dressed Vietnamese males enter the store. To Lim, they seemed a little too well dressed for an uneventful Monday afternoon in Doraville. He got up from his bench and came out to the front of the shop, where his wife and two young daughters were standing behind a glass showcase.
The interior of the Sun Wa Jewelry Store was not spacious, but Lim and his wife had a sizable inventory displayed in a series of eight glass cases arranged in a U-shape. Customers could peruse the expensive gold and diamond jewelry arranged on velvet trays inside each four-foot-high case, but could not get behind the counter without being buzzed in through a security door—or jumping over the top of the counter.
Lan Tran, Nicky, Little Cobra, and Kenny Vu pretended they were looking at the merchandise. Nicky eventually approached Lim’s wife, Kim Lee, with a broken neck chain that needed fixing. At that moment, Tinh Ngo and Tung Lai entered the store.
American Gangsters Page 76