American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  If David Thai had beaten and pummeled a fellow Vietnamese the way he and his Canal Street dai low were presently punishing Nigel, Thai would have risked alienating some members of the gang. But Nigel was lanky, his East Indian skin the color of mocha; he spoke English with a curious accent, a mixture of his parents’ Indian roots and his own Trinidadian upbringing. Clearly, he was not one of them. This made him expendable in the eyes of Anh hai.

  “Tell me!” shouted LV Hong. “Tell me where is the gold!”

  By now, Nigel had been beaten so badly he was unable to respond.

  “Get this motherfuck outta here,” David Thai proclaimed disdainfully. “Let him go.”

  Nigel was helped to his feet by a couple of gang members and led to the front door of the apartment, which opened onto Forty-fifth Street. The door was opened and he was pushed out onto the sidewalk, his face badly mangled, his body bruised. He would spend the next three days and nights in a hospital with severe internal hemorrhaging, cracked ribs, and a fractured skull.

  Inside the apartment, the gang members remained silent. Eventually, David Thai stood. “Anyone steal from the gang, anyone lie to the gang, this is what happen to them.”

  Anh hai checked to make sure no blood had splattered on his clothes, then added, “This motherfucker, he lucky he still alive.”

  Nigel Jagmohan’s righteous ass-whupping frustrated Dan Kumor, Bill Oldham, and others involved in the BTK investigation. Tinh Ngo had paged Oldham not long after the incident and told him all about it, but there was nothing the investigators could do.

  Not that they would have squandered the entire investigation by bursting in and making arrests over one beating, however bloody it might have been. The investigators were committed to stockpiling enough information and evidence to put a slew of gang members away on multiple counts. The problem was, individual crimes like this hellacious beating would continue to go unpunished unless they found a way of securing more compelling evidence. As of now, all they had on the beating was Tinh’s partial eyewitness account, with no corroboration.

  From the beginning of the investigation, Kumor and the others had discussed the idea of having Tinh wear a secret recording device. For agents and prosecutors, incriminating conversations captured live on tape are the ultimate form of evidence in court. In this case, however, the investigators had first broached the subject more as a fantasy than an actual strategy.

  For one thing, it seemed unlikely that Tinh would ever be in a position to illicit incriminating dialogue directly from David Thai. Thai seemed to respect Tinh. Maybe he even trusted Tinh more than the average sai low now that Tinh had been with the gang for almost two full years. Nonetheless, Tinh had rarely been privy to the detailed planning of the gang’s criminal acts in the past. Like most everyone else, he was kept in the dark until the time came to actually do the crime.

  There were also obvious dangers involved in having Tinh wear a recorder. Under any circumstances, asking a C.I. to circulate among fellow criminals wearing a hidden recording device is no small request. With the BTK, nobody had any doubt that if Tinh was discovered with a recorder strapped to his body, he would be killed instantly. In short, the benefits to be gained by wiring Tinh had to be carefully weighed against the risks involved.

  By early May, a few weeks after the beating of Nigel, Kumor, Oldham, and the other investigators were inclined to take whatever risks were necessary. They had recently begun almost daily surveillance of some of the gang’s key members, tailing Lan Tran and others as they drove from BTK safe houses in Long Island and Brooklyn to Canal Street. So far, the best evidence of a criminal conspiracy was surveillance photos of gang members hanging out in front of restaurants and pool halls—photos they hoped would eventually substantiate the relationships that existed among the various subjects of the investigation.

  To bolster this newly accumulated evidence, they needed voices, intimate conversations between members of the gang discussing crimes past and present.

  On the morning of May 8, 1991, Kumor and Oldham arranged to meet with Tinh at the Municipal Building, where they had rendezvoused a couple of times before. A short walk from City Hall, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, the building was a downtown landmark.

  It was around 3:00 P.M. when Tinh crossed under the building’s historic Corinthian colonnade. He liked the hustle and bustle that engulfed the Municipal Building daily, with numerous subways spilling passengers into the station in the basement of the building. And there were always plenty of lovers, young and old, making their way to the marriage license bureau on the second floor.

  Tinh took an elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the cavernous marble hallway to a small deserted office where Kumor and Oldham were waiting. After pleasantries were exchanged, Kumor got right to business.

  “Timmy,” he asked, “what do you hear about upcoming jobs—you know, robberies, home invasions, anything like that?”

  “Yes,” replied Tinh, “there’s a big job I hear about. More than one robbery. In Philadelphia.”

  “BTK in Philly are gonna do a robbery?” asked Oldham.

  “No. Some of us drive down there to do the robbery. David Thai plan all this himself. I don’t know much about it yet.”

  Tinh told the two investigators that he had heard through Uncle Lan that a handful of gang members, including Tinh, Lan, Anh hai, and others, would be driving in two cars to Philadelphia, much as they had on their Connecticut and Georgia excursions. They would be staying at a BTK safe house somewhere in the city, and were supposed to be leaving within the next few days.

  “Wow,” Kumor responded. “That soon?”

  “Yes,” said Tinh. “This is what they tell me.”

  Kumor glanced at Oldham, who shrugged and nodded his head as if to say, “Now’s as good a time as any.”

  “Listen, Timmy,” began Kumor, “we have something we want you to do. We want you to carry a tape recorder, a mini-cassette. We want you to try to tape some conversations. Conversations with David Thai, Lan Tran, anybody you can.” Kumor took a small Sony recorder out of his pocket. “Lemme show you how to strap this on.”

  Tinh looked at the recorder in Kumor’s hands as if it were a loaded gun being pointed in his direction. “You want me to carry this recorder?” he asked, trying not to sound too startled. “You want me to record people’s voices?”

  “That’s right,” Oldham answered. “We want to use these recordings as evidence in court. We need this to bring charges against David Thai.”

  The idea of secretly recording conversations was so imponderable to Tinh that he couldn’t even think of anything to say. Besides, Kumor and Oldham were not asking him if he wanted to wear the recorder. They were telling him that this was what they needed him to do.

  “The best way,” offered Kumor, “is to hold it in the waistband of your pants. Run the microphone wire up your side. We can tape it. Poke a hole on the inside of your breast pocket, the pocket of your shirt. Nobody will see the mike inside your pocket.”

  The recording method Kumor was suggesting might have seemed remarkably unsophisticated, but he and Oldham had actually given considerable thought to the subject. They could have used a Nagra recorder, the device normally employed by law enforcement personnel for secret recording operations. Or they could have outfitted Tinh with a Kel transmitter, another commonly used device that allows conversations to be transmitted to another location, where they are taped on a reel-to-reel recorder.

  In Tinh’s case, neither of these methods seemed suitable. The Nagra, which was about five inches long, four inches wide, and an inch deep, was too big. The Kels came in two varieties—one that fit on a person’s waist like a beeper but was somewhat unreliable, and another that fit into a shoulder holster, a method that was cumbersome and sometimes easily detectable.

  The Sony microcassette was not designed for undercover police work. Chances were, the quality of the recordings would not be as good with the Sony as they would be with the Nagra. But the
Sony microcassette was smaller and, the investigators felt, more suitable for what they had in mind for Tinh.

  “You want me to use this right now? Today?” asked Tinh, still trying to fathom exactly what it was he was being asked to do.

  “We’re gonna be nearby in a car,” reassured Kumor. “You got our beeper numbers. We’re never gonna be more than a block or two away. Okay?”

  “Yes,” answered Tinh, sounding none too convinced.

  Later that evening and throughout the next day, Tinh attempted a few trial runs with the recorder. As Kumor had suggested, he stuck it in his pants, ran the microphone wire up his abdomen, and concealed the mike in his breast pocket. While on the street, he moved the recorder to his jacket pocket. At another point he slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt, trying to find a location that seemed comfortable, a place where the recorder could be turned off and on without anyone noticing what he was up to.

  Two days later, Tinh was sitting in the front room of the safe-house apartment in Sunset Park. It was a Friday night, and a number of gang members had gathered, including Shadow Boy, Minh Do, and Tam Thanh Do, a gang member better known as “Son.”

  Among the crimes Tinh had been instructed to try to elicit information about was the accidental shooting of gang member Cuong Pham during the produce warehouse robbery the previous summer. Tinh had already been told a version of this killing by another gang member at Maria’s Bakery, just a few days after the shooting occurred. It was one of the stories he had passed on to the investigators, but they told him they needed “corroboration”—a strange word with many syllables that Tinh would be hearing often in the months ahead.

  Tinh knew that Son had participated in the robbery at W. C. Produce. Son had watched as Jimmy Nguyen, a gang member sometimes known as “Hong,” attempted to shoot the elderly Chinese store owner, instead hitting Cuong Pham in the back of the head and killing him instantly.

  As Son began to explain what happened, Tinh felt inside his waistband to make sure the recorder was on.

  “That motherfucker,” Son said of Hong. “He was sweating, his hands were shaking. [The gun] fired and made a ‘bang’ noise in the basement.”

  “Motherfuck,” interjected Tinh, using the standard BTK modifier.

  “At that time,” continued Son, “Hong thought Cuong shot the Chinese guy. But Cuong held his gun at the Chinese guy’s head and the Chinese guy, he push the hand away and the gun went off. Hong started shaking then.”

  Tinh was confused. “Oh. Cuong pointed the gun at the owner’s head?”

  “Yeah, at the owner. So the owner pushed it away and it went off.”

  “Then who died? Hong died?”

  “No, Cuong died. Hong pointed the gun at the head.”

  “Whose head was he pointing at?”

  Son was starting to get exasperated with all the explaining. “He was pointing it at the Chinese’s guy’s head. At that time, Cuong was tying up the Chinese guy.”

  “Oh, oh, okay. And what were you doing?”

  “Motherfucker,” answered Son, with a wicked chuckle. “We were robbing the place. There was a lot of gold and money. Then the gun made a big noise in the basement. We ran away.”

  “At that time,” Tinh added encouragingly, trying to get Son to verbally identify the participants, “who was there? Hong, Be, you …”

  “One hour later,” Son went on, ignoring Tinh’s question, “[I] go to the bus station and drive to California. Stay for three days and three nights.”

  “Motherfuck,” exclaimed Tinh. “Who told you to do that?”

  “Anh hai.”

  By now, a few more gang members had entered the room and were seated on the floor and couch in front of the TV. Chopsticks in hand, some were eating Chinese take-out from white cartons while watching a Hong Kong gangster movie on the VCR.

  “Hey,” Minh Do cautioned Tinh and Son, “tomorrow we going to rob. Talking about these things is bad.”

  “Yes,” remembered Son. “Tomorrow we are going to cock the gun.”

  “Cock the gun” had become a favored BTK saying. It meant undertaking a major crime with loaded guns, with a good possibility that somebody—gang member or merchant—might wind up getting shot.

  Son and Minh Do turned their attention to the TV. Shadow Boy, seated on the floor in front of the couch, looked at Tinh. “Hey, Timmy, what’s that by your shirt? Your shirt is burning.”

  Tinh immediately flinched. He didn’t have to look down to see that Shadow Boy was pointing to where the tape recorder was concealed.

  “What?” Tinh asked innocently.

  Shadow Boy pointed again. “There. Right there. Your shirt on fire or something.”

  Tinh looked down. The red indicator light from the recorder was showing through his cotton T-shirt. “Motherfuck,” Tinh murmured, “what the fuck is this?” He stood up quickly, walked to the bathroom and closed the door.

  Tinh could feel a bead of sweat running down the side of his face. “Motherfuck,” he mumbled, grabbing the recorder from inside his waistband. He pulled out the microphone wire, wrapped it around the recorder, then stuck it in his pants pocket.

  Tinh’s head was swimming; he sat down on the edge of the bathtub to steady himself. Damn! The first night he tries to use the recorder to gather information, and already he’s been discovered!? Or has he?

  A worst-case scenario flickered inside Tinh’s head like a bad horror movie: Shadow Boy sees the red light. “What’s that?” he asks Tinh. Shadow Boy walks over and lifts up Tinh’s shirt, exposing the recorder and the wire microphone. Somebody pulls out a gun and the gang members swarm around him like zombies from Night of the Living Dead.

  Through the bathroom door, Tinh could hear the TV droning away. Maybe he should crawl out the bathroom window. Then what? He started free-associating, remembering every damn trap he’d ever gotten himself into: the refugee camps, prison, the gang.

  “Motherfuck,” he mumbled one more time, wiping the perspiration from his brow. Afraid that the gang members would get even more suspicious if he stayed in the bathroom too long, he splashed some cold water on his face and returned to the front room.

  Everyone seemed to be engrossed in the movie. Shadow Boy glanced at Tinh. “It was just my beeper,” Tinh offered, trying to sound casual. “The light come on when the battery get low.”

  Shadow Boy nodded and turned his attention back to the TV. Tinh sat down on the couch and stared straight ahead.

  The room’s overhead lights had been turned off; the only illumination in the room was from the television. On screen, elegantly dressed Chinese gangsters were shooting it out. Gunfire raged and bodies writhed in slow motion, with blood spurting from bullet wounds like lava exploding from a volcano.

  It seemed to Tinh like ten minutes passed before he took his first breath. Man, he asked himself, as he had been more and more often since signing on with Kumor, Oldham, and the other government investigators. How on earth did I get myself into this?

  Chapter 11

  Kumor, Oldham, and the others were not indifferent to the risks Tinh faced by carrying the hidden tape recorder. They had vowed to have at least one member of the investigative team within the city limits, available to Tinh at all times should he need to beep someone immediately. They tried to talk Tinh through potentially dangerous encounters, and they told him they would be there when he needed to come down from the emotional anxiety of secretly taping conversations.

  The thing was, the investigators were distracted most of the time. They had their own problems to worry about.

  The beating of Nigel Jagmohan had raised a question that Dan Kumor had been asking himself ever since the day it occurred. What if Tinh had actually been able to inform them about the beating before it took place? Would he and the other investigators have been able to stop it?

  The question had become even more pertinent in the last few days, since Tinh first informed them about an upcoming BTK robbery that was supposed to take place in Philadel
phia. The very next day, Tinh informed them that the robbery was off. But for a while there, they’d had the gang under constant surveillance, waiting for the robbery plans to develop. It had been tense and even exciting, but Kumor had told himself afterward, I hope next time we have more information. I hope next time we aren’t driving around blind, wondering exactly where and when the gang is going to strike.

  Kumor was pondering these and other issues when he arrived at his apartment in suburban New Jersey around four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, the day after Tinh had almost been discovered with the tape recorder by his fellow gang members. Kumor was still carrying his gym bag after a badly needed workout. Ever since the BTK investigation began, he’d barely had time to sleep, much less stay in shape—a fact his girlfriend had reminded him of on more than one occasion. This was the first Saturday in a month he hadn’t gone into the office; he was thinking about a movie or maybe a nice dinner at home. Maybe pizza.

  Then the phone rang.

  “It’s going down,” said Oldham, on the other end of the line.

  Kumor was standing in the kitchen. “What do you mean it’s going down?”

  “The robbery. It’s on. Lan Tran, Timmy, the rest of ’em—they’re getting ready to go do the job right now.”

  “The robbery in Philly?”

  “Well, yeah, but it’s not in Philly. It’s in Rochester.”

  Now Kumor was thoroughly confused. Two days ago, late on Thursday, May 9, Tinh definitely told them the robbery in Philadelphia was canceled. ATF had reassigned most of the agents who’d been helping out with the surveillance, and everyone had gone home thinking it was going to be a relatively peaceful weekend. Now the robbery was back on—not in Philadelphia, as originally planned, but three hundred and twenty miles to the north, in Rochester, New York.

  “Timmy just called,” Oldham explained. “He says he and two other gang members are on their way to pick up Lan Tran at Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue. Two cars, a light green Buick Regal and a maroon Cadillac with Jersey plates. Seems David Thai and his girlfriend are already in Rochester. Timmy and the others are supposed to arrive up there tonight.”