With the help of a passionate young Chinatown attorney named Shiauh-Wei Lin, Ying Jing Gan filed a lawsuit against the NYPD claiming that her husband’s death was a direct result of negligence. In response, members of the NYPD claimed in sworn affidavits that they had offered Ta protection, and he turned them down. If so, that revealed an even more saddening fact about life in Chinatown.
Sen Van Ta knew that if he had consented to police protection, he would have been further implicating himself as the person cooperating with the cops. He also knew that the police could not protect him all the time. The gang, on the other hand, was composed of people from the community who could monitor his whereabouts day and night, striking whenever the time was right. It could be a week from now, it could be a year from now.
That was the reality of life in Chinatown: If Sen Van Ta had consented to police protection, he was submitting himself and his wife to a greater degree of danger than if he simply went without.
To the handful of federal agents and cops who were in the process of inaugurating an investigation into the BTK, news of Sen Van Ta’s murder hit like a mean, well-placed kick in the groin. Immersed in the process of debriefing their C.I., they had been a few steps removed from Sen Van Ta and his predicament. Now, they were going to have to deal with the consequences of Ta’s murder. They were going to have to deal with the intractable fear it was sure to instill in the people of Chinatown—people whose cooperation these investigators were going to need if they hoped to build a case against the BTK.
The best course of action, the agents and cops agreed, was to get Tinh Ngo back on the street as quickly as possible.
On March 13, 1991, three days after Lan Tran silenced Sen Van Ta with a bullet through his brain, Tinh Ngo signed a four-page agreement with the King’s County District Attorney’s Office. He pleaded guilty to robbery charges, but it was unlikely he would serve time if all went well. His bail, which had been set at $5,000, was waived. In exchange, he agreed to solicit information on the criminal activities of the BTK, which he would then pass on to the authorities.
That afternoon, Tinh was released from custody at the Brooklyn courthouse. Detectives Bill Oldham and Alex Sabo drove Tinh to a motel near La Guardia Airport, in Queens. Oldham handed Tinh $75 in spending money. “Remember what I told you,” he cautioned Tinh.
Although the cops were impressed with their young informant so far, it was their natural instinct to think that maybe he was playing them for fools. Oldham had warned Tinh that if he tried to run away after they’d stuck their necks out for him, the NYPD would make his life miserable. Indulging in a bit of standard cop hyperbole, Oldham had told Tinh, “We could get you killed if we wanted to.”
Tinh was seated in the back of the unmarked police sedan. The two detectives were in the front, and they were both turned around facing him.
“You don’t have to worry,” Tinh assured them. “What I say I going to do, that’s what I do. I won’t run away.”
“Good,” answered Oldham. “Glad to hear it.”
Tinh got out of the car.
Just in case, the two detectives waited and watched as Tinh entered the front door of the motel and checked himself into his room.
All that night, Tinh did what he had been doing a lot of lately: He lay in bed with his eyes wide open, trying to make sense of what he’d gotten himself into.
It had crossed his mind to make a run for it after he’d achieved his immediate goal of getting himself out of Rikers Island. He felt sure that if he were to disappear, the authorities would never find him. In virtually any state in the union he could blend into existing Asian communities—communities most American cops could never hope to penetrate.
What good would that do? Tinh asked himself. Sure, he could hide out in Toronto, Bridgeport, Philadelphia, Texas, or any of the other places where Born to Kill had established a beachhead. That was his prerogative as a member of the Vietnamese underworld. In any of these regions, he could live with other gangsters and continue preying on innocent merchants, traumatizing people, and shattering their lives.
None of this appealed to Tinh anymore. He may have been scared and apprehensive about whether cooperating with the cops was the right thing to do, but he knew he did not want to be a gangster anymore. He’d known that ever since the trip to Doraville.
Even before he was arrested one month earlier, Tinh could have drifted away from the gang, maybe gotten a job delivering Chinese food or working in the kitchen of some restaurant. But Tinh never had much faith in himself. If he had submitted to the boredom of a commonplace, low-paying job—the only sort of legitimate employment available to a young, uneducated Vietnamese immigrant like himself—he would most likely have eased his way back into the gang, subconsciously or otherwise.
What he needed was a new life, an opportunity to extricate himself completely from his criminal past. He needed to start over again from the beginning. Tinh still wasn’t sure what cooperating with the United States government was going to entail, but he had a feeling it was the key to his future—a future free of the brutal entanglements of his past.
The following morning Tinh took the Number 7 subway train into Manhattan, emerging from the mausoleumlike dimness of Grand Central Station into the bright, bustling cacophony of pedestrian and automobile traffic on Forty-second Street. Indulging a renewed sense of physical freedom, Tinh strolled south through lower Manhattan. As he neared Chinatown, he could feel the energy level increase.
On Canal Street, BTK gang members were out in force. In the days following Sen Van Ta’s murder, David Thai had told LV Hong and others in the gang to make themselves more visible than ever at well-known gang meeting places like the Pho Hanoi luncheonette. “We show people we here to stay, they learn to respect BTK,” David told his dai lows.
One of the reasons the investigators had sprung Tinh Ngo from prison so quickly was to see what he could find out about the murder of Sen Van Ta. Seated at Pho Hanoi with LV Hong and a few other gang brothers, Tinh casually brought up the subject.
Nobody said a word. Clearly, the message had been delivered along the grapevine that everyone was to keep his mouth shut about the latest BTK atrocity—even among themselves.
Later that afternoon, Tinh took the subway out to Brooklyn. At a pool hall on Eighth Avenue, in Sunset Park, he ran into Kenny Vu and Lan Tran.
“Timmy, how you doing? Where you been, man?” asked Kenny.
Tinh slapped hands with Kenny and Lan. “I been in jail. Rikers Island.”
“What they put you in jail for?” asked Uncle Lan.
“Some stupid charge. Robbery, I think.”
“Hey,” said Lan. “Anh hai been asking about you. He wanna know if you still with us.”
“Yes,” answered Tinh. “Of course I still with you.”
Kenny Vu and Lan assured Tinh that David Thai would want to see him right away. “You move in with us, Timmy,” said Kenny. “Right down the block—eight-ten Forty-fifth Street. Tonight we go see Anh hai in Long Island. He give you some money and put you to work.”
That night, Tinh met Kenny Vu again at the pool hall. He climbed into the front seat of Kenny’s car, a faded green Buick Regal with Jersey plates.
“We drive to Hicksville,” said Kenny, “to David Thai’s old house. He got a new place now, but he don’t let anybody know where it is.”
Tinh nodded. “Who live in Hicksville now?”
“Uncle Lan live there with some other guys. I stay there too, sometimes.” David Thai had established a series of safe houses in suburbia to supplement the BTK apartments in the city. In Long Island, Thai would move into a house, live in it for six months or so, and then pass it on to his gang brothers. The lease was usually maintained under an alias, or in the name of Thai’s wife or some gang member other than David Thai.
It was a cool, moonless night as Kenny and Tinh drove along the Long Island Expressway toward Hicksville, thirty miles from the city limits. It had been a long time since Kenny first initiated
Tinh into the gang, plucking him out of Sheepshead Bay High School and having him move in with them on Neptune Avenue. Tinh still felt affection for Kenny. It was Kenny who taught him how to stand up for himself.
“So,” asked Tinh, “what about the little brothers who get arrested for that robbery on Canal Street?”
“Oh,” answered Kenny, “I think they gonna be okay. There was a witness, a store owner, but we take care of that. We kill this guy. I hear maybe there’s another witness. A lady. If we have to, we kill her too.”
Tinh nodded solemnly. He knew it would be inappropriate to just come right out and ask who killed Sen Van Ta.
“What David Thai up to these days?” he asked, changing the subject.
Kenny Vu smiled. “David Thai is very crazy. He getting, you know—paranoid. He making bombs in his house.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Kenny said. “Bombs. And he make his own silencers. He practicing with his new silencers all the time.”
“No,” said Tinh, shaking his head in amazement.
“Yeah.” Kenny turned to face Tinh. “I think maybe tonight he gonna practice on you.”
Tinh grinned nervously and looked at Kenny, who was not smiling. He looked dead serious.
Oh, man, Tinh thought to himself. Could they know already? How could they know? Did somebody see me talking with the detectives at the courthouse? Did somebody at Rikers Island find out I was meeting with the DA.?
Kenny turned his attention back to the expressway. Tinh sat in silence and looked out the window.
“Kenny,” said Tinh, finally. “You like to gamble, right?”
“Yes.”
“I know a gambling place right near here. We could stop and take a look. Maybe we even want to rob this place sometime later.”
“Okay,” said Kenny. He veered to the right and got off the expressway at the nearest exit.
Tinh had no intention of gambling, nor did he know of any gambling house in the area. He wanted out of the car—immediately.
Tinh directed Kenny to a house near a gas station. “Let me first check something,” he told Kenny. He got out of the car, ducked around a corner for a few minutes, then returned.
“Nah,” he said to Kenny. “There’s no gambling here tonight. But I’m going to stay with a friend. I see you tomorrow.”
“Wait,” implored Kenny. “What about Anh hai?”
“Tell him I see him tomorrow.” Tinh slammed the car door and disappeared around the corner.
For a few minutes, Tinh walked through the strange, placid neighborhood in an attempt to calm himself. His hands were still trembling. Maybe Kenny was just joking. David Thai wanted to use him for target practice. Ha, ha, ha. Tinh made his way back to Brooklyn and cooled out at the safe house.
The next morning, David Thai appeared at the apartment. “Timmy, how you been doing?” he asked Tinh in a friendly tone. He handed Tinh $200. “We got lot of jobs to do, Timmy. I hope you ready to come back with us.”
“Okay,” answered Tinh. He observed his leader warily, remembering the time Anh hai had slapped him around for stealing robbery proceeds. This time Thai seemed calm and relaxed.
Of course, that was Anh hai’s way. He was a smart guy. Most of the time, you had no way of knowing what was really going on inside his head. If David knew Tinh was cooperating with the government and wanted to shoot him for it, he was doing an excellent job of keeping it hidden. Tinh could not be sure whether Anh hai was once again fulfilling his duties as the gang’s kindly overseer, or merely attempting to lull Tinh into a false sense of security, fattening him up to be used as an example of what a horrible fate awaited anyone who even entertained the idea of betraying the ranks of the BTK.
“You wanna take a break, Timmy?”
Agent Dan Kumor leaned back in his chair, eyeing Tinh carefully. For the last two hours, he and his young informant had been sitting at his desk, attempting to meticulously re-create many of the crimes in which Tinh had played a role.
“No, Dan. I okay. We can keep going.” Tinh took a sip from a can of Pepsi.
Kumor had to marvel at Tinh. Although the agent was hardly a veteran, he’d dealt with more than a few informants in his career and had never come across one like this kid. He kept waiting for Tinh to reveal some dark, manipulative side of his character. But there didn’t seem to be one.
In the weeks since Tinh was put back on the street, he had been making semiregular visits to the ATF offices at 90 Church Street, a few blocks north of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. The agents and cops assigned to the BTK investigation had established an informal headquarters there on the tenth floor. Within days, the drab, windowless room had become crowded with overflowing file cabinets, maps of Chinatown, and mug-shot displays. The investigators had begun to categorize the numerous robberies, extortions, and homicides Tinh was telling them about on a series of hand-drawn charts that dominated one wall.
So far, there were only four full-time investigators assigned to the case. Joe Greco, who had been instrumental in getting the investigation started, was busy with his gun-smuggling case in Jersey City and no longer available. Kumor had taken over as the investigation’s lead agent; he was backed by Don Tisdale, a veteran ATF agent from the bureau’s Manhattan office. Detectives Bill Oldham and Alex Sabo were assigned as representatives of the NYPD’s Major Case Squad.
The BTK investigation was certainly more focused than it had been just a few weeks earlier, but there were still many important decisions to be made. Not only was the Vietnamese underworld a vast network with criminal connections that crossed state boundaries, but there was an ominous political dimension that had to be examined.
Since the early 1980s, five Vietnamese journalists had been murdered in the United States, the most recent being Triet Le, a former columnist for Tien Phong, a nationally distributed biweekly Vietnamese-language magazine. Although Le’s writings were far from supportive of Vietnam’s Communist government, the journalist was known as a “caustic voice,” whose diatribes never failed to incite emotions on all sides of the political spectrum. In September 1990, Le and his wife were assassinated, shot multiple times while sitting in a car in front of their home in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Triet Le was believed to be the latest victim of a rabidly anti-Communist faction of the Vietnamese exile community, a group not unlike the anti-Castro Cubans displaced by the revolution in that country. There had been some speculation on the part of American journalists and people in law enforcement that Vietnamese street gangs were somehow intertwined with these dissident political forces. Based on what Kumor and his investigators were hearing, Born to Kill had no direct connection with these or any other political killings. Nonetheless, it was an intriguing possibility that bore investigation.
Even among the many crimes that had a definite BTK link, the investigators were going to have to make some hard choices. Tinh was giving them so many names and bits of information, they were never going to get anywhere unless they focused only on those gang members who could be cleanly roped into one neat conspiracy package.
The obvious starting point was David Thai. They knew Thai had plotted many of the gang’s crimes, even if he rarely took part in their execution. Thai, it seemed, was much too shrewd for that.
When Tinh Ngo was first released, the investigators told him that one of his primary assignments was to get close to David Thai. Tinh was taken aback. “You want me to meet directly with Anh hai?” he asked, astounded by the thought.
Tinh explained that very few rank-and-file gang members ever initiated contact with David Thai. Usually, Anh hai preferred to establish communication through his dai lows, which was just fine with most gang members.
Especially since the murder of Sen Van Ta, David Thai had been lying low, trying to bolster his mystique by rarely showing his face in public. On those rare occasions when Anh hai did speak directly with his young gang members, many were too intimidated to even look him in the fa
ce.
“Make him trust you,” the investigators encouraged Tinh. “You’re a likable guy. You can do it.”
Since the ATF offices had been established as the investigation’s headquarters, Dan Kumor had been trying to get to know his young C.I. better. He knew he had some catching up to do. Detective Oldham already had a relationship with Tinh. But Kumor was now the lead agent on the case, and he needed to gain Tinh’s trust. He didn’t want his informant withholding information, or telling things to the detectives that he wasn’t willing to tell him first.
Luckily for Kumor, Tinh Ngo was an accommodating person by nature. Above all else, Tinh liked to be liked. His overriding eagerness to please was part of the reason he had joined the BTK in the first place.
Seated in the ATF headquarters, Tinh approached the task at hand with diligence, poring over mug shots of Vietnamese and Chinese criminals. It had been a long day, with Kumor grilling Tinh over and over about specific details of crimes, a methodical, drawn-out process that would continue off and on over the next eight weeks.
“Hey, Timmy,” Kumor finally interjected, “maybe you don’t need a break, but I sure as hell do.”
Tinh laughed, then sat back and polished off his Pepsi. Kumor left the office to take care of a few errands. When he returned Tinh was still sitting in the same spot, looking distracted.
“Dan,” Tinh said, speaking up unexpectedly, “I have a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“What would happen if somebody was shot in a robbery I was at?”
“Well,” Kumor answered cautiously, “that depends. What do you mean?”
Tinh paused for a moment, struggling to find the words to communicate in a foreign language something that had weighed heavily on his conscience for months. He looked at Kumor, then down at the floor.
In his three or four meetings with Kumor so far, Tinh had come to feel that the young ATF agent was a person he could trust. Perhaps it was because Kumor, at thirty, was closer in age to Tinh than any of the other investigators. But Kumor also seemed to Tinh like someone with a good heart. His sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, and steady, upright posture reminded Tinh of those straight-shooting American cowboys he saw in the old Westerns on late-night television.
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