“Alan,” he said, “are you with us?”
Tam was high, and confused, and conflict-shy by nature. He told them he was.
Dan Xin offered Four-Eyed Fish and five other associates $50,000 each to help him take revenge. They visited a gun dealer they knew, a young man with spiked hair and a black leather jacket who worked out of an apartment he shared with his mother, a garment factory worker. They bought five handguns and a Cobray Mac-11 assault pistol, which could shoot 1,200 rounds per minute. At times they seemed not like juvenile killers but like harmless truants, kids playing GI Joe. They all referred to the Mac-11, erroneously, as “the Uzi.” They bought serrated hunting knives and called them “Rambo knives.” The plan was to kill Ah Wong and then torch his safe house, burning it to the ground. They went to a gas station and filled two plastic water jugs with gasoline, then departed on a scouting mission. But they had neglected to seal the jugs securely, and before long they had to stop, because they had all gotten woozy from the fumes.
Tam could see what was going to happen. He told Dan Xin where Ah Wong was hiding out—a safe house in Teaneck, New Jersey, a quiet suburb on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. As the plotters made their preparations, a pile of weapons began to accumulate on a living room table at the whorehouse in Brooklyn. Tam said he didn’t want to take part in the killing. But Four-Eyed Fish threatened him. “Whoever doesn’t go, we gotta do him,” Four-Eye said. Tam reluctantly drew them a map of the safe house, diagramming the entrances and exits. He would later claim that he had deliberately misconstrued the layout of the house, but it was of little importance; Dan Xin had the address where Ah Wong was hiding. Tam had always had an insatiable appetite for drugs, and in the days leading up to the operation he took whatever he could, trying to incapacitate himself, or at least appear to.
On the evening of May 23, 1993, Dan Xin traveled to the parking lot of a motel near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. It was the last time he would meet with his handlers at the FBI. Ray Kerr and Peter Lee could sense that he had become impatient. But so far as they knew, Dan Xin still didn’t know how to locate Ah Wong. “Remember, if you find out where that safe house is, you don’t do anything. You call Peter,” Kerr told him. Dan Xin nodded.
The next afternoon Dan Xin and the others left Alan asleep at the brothel. There were seven of them altogether. They got into a light blue Dodge Caravan and an Audi that sputtered with a broken muffler. Then they drove north, in the direction of the George Washington Bridge.
Teaneck is a placid middle-class community of tranquil avenues and subdivisions lined with leafy trees, pruned hedges, swing sets, and small, carefully tended lawns. The house at 1326 Somerset Road was a modest two-story brick-and-shingle place set back from the street and surrounded by hedges and towering oak trees. Inside, a man named Chang Liang Lin was cooking rice in the kitchen. Chang had grown up in a village in Fujian and had left his wife and eight-year-old son and been smuggled from China to Los Angeles. He had arrived in New York only recently, and still owed $33,000 for the trip. Chang had been in the house for a week. He’d been beaten once, but on the whole it hadn’t been so bad. The house was very comfortable by Chinese standards; to Chang, it looked like a mansion.
The house was unusually empty that afternoon; it was just Chang and Guo Liang Qun, Ah Kay’s youngest brother, who was twenty-one and whom everyone called Ah Qun. The doorbell rang, and Ah Qun walked to the front of the house to see who it was. He opened the door, and several people pushed their way in. One of them was Dan Xin Lin, whom Chang knew slightly, because they had lived near each other back in China. Dan Xin looked angry, and he and Ah Qun began arguing and shouting at each other. Suddenly Dan Xin and the men with him pulled out guns, and one of them accidentally discharged, the bullet lodging itself in Ah Qun’s leg. The boy howled with pain. Two of Dan Xin’s men went into the kitchen and started beating Chang. They took him into the living room, where Ah Qun was screaming, and tied his hands and legs, and Ah Qun’s hands and legs, with duct tape. Dan Xin leaned over them and taped their mouths shut, and the others forced them down into the basement.
The basement floor was cold. One of Dan Xin’s underlings, a sallow twenty-two-year-old named Yun Lin, stayed with Chang and Ah Qun. Yun Lin had high cheekbones and delicate lips. He had just arrived from China himself, and he was kind to Chang. He found a blanket and wrapped it around Chang to keep him warm. He spoke to him and called him uncle, a gesture of affection and respect. Chang lay on the floor next to Ah Qun and wondered what would become of them.
After establishing that only Chang and Ah Qun were home, Dan Xin set out to search the rest of the house. He walked upstairs and began going through the bedrooms, looking for any weapons that might be hidden there. Then he heard the doorbell ring.
Ah Wong had spent the day in Chinatown, gambling with other members of the gang. As afternoon gave way to evening, he and three friends drove back over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey and through the quiet streets of Teaneck. They pulled up in front of the house, got out of the car, and walked up the front path. Ah Wong rang the doorbell, but no one answered. He told two of his companions, Yu Ping Zhang and Guang Sheng Li, to go around to the back of the house. They jimmied a window and climbed into the kitchen. The house was quiet; no one seemed to be home. They walked through the living room to the entry foyer in the front. Yu Ping Zhang was smoking a cigarette. He unlocked the front door, and his hand was on the knob and opening the door to let the others in when Dan Xin Lin came down the stairs, dressed in black and holding the Mac-11. Yu Ping Zhang was dead before he hit the floor, the cigarette still in his mouth. Before Guang Sheng Li could escape, the attackers were upon him, shooting him in the head and stabbing him repeatedly. Dan Xin may have taken a special satisfaction in this—Guang Sheng Li had been one of the men at the beeper store the day he had almost died.
On the front porch, Ah Wong and the man he was with, Ming Cheng, heard the shots. They turned and sprinted in opposite directions, but the killers burst out after them. They fired wildly at Ming Cheng but missed, and eventually lost track of him. Ah Wong dashed down Somerset Road and cut across a lawn at Wendell Place. But the lawn had recently been mowed, and he slid on the loose grass. The attackers caught up with him and stood above him, pumping bullets into his body as he squirmed on the ground.
Then the killers returned to the house to execute the two witnesses in the basement. Chang heard the shot that killed Ah Qun. But he hardly registered a thing when the men shot him in the head.
Akiva Fleischmann, who had just turned nine years old, was eating a dinner of takeout chicken with his family in the kitchen of their house on Mercedes Street when he heard what he thought must be fireworks. Akiva and his older brother, Shaya, ran into their backyard. When they reached the curb, Akiva saw several Chinese men galloping toward him. As they ran past, Akiva saw one of the men pause to throw something underneath a Cadillac parked in front of a neighbor’s house. Suddenly a blue minivan came tearing up Mercedes Street from the other direction and pulled to a stop right in front of him. As Akiva and his brother stood there, frozen, on the sidewalk, the van’s side door slid open, the Chinese men piled in, and in a screech of tires the van did a wild U-turn, then tore down the street and disappeared.
The Fleischmann boys were hardly the only ones to notice the shooting. It was a balmy May evening, and still light. A neighbor who lived nearby was mowing her lawn and saw the shooters sprint by. Another neighbor was watering his garden and heard the shots. Three local kids were riding their bicycles along the sidewalk when the shooters ran by. The police were receiving 911 calls before the shooting had even stopped. When officers arrived at Somerset Road, they found a terrifying scene: two men dead in the front foyer, two others bound, gagged, and shot in the head downstairs. In the basement they found a pool of blood that didn’t correspond to either of the victims on the floor, and they realized that one of the men in the foyer above had been stabbed so aggressively that the knife
had pierced the hardwood floor and blood was seeping through to the basement.
It was beginning to get dark as police officers cordoned off the area. The lights from their cruisers cast magic-lantern shadows across the foliage and facades. Akiva Fleischmann still didn’t know what to make of the events he had just witnessed, and from the safe distance of his front lawn, he watched the officers work. Then he remembered seeing the man throw something under his neighbor’s Cadillac. He approached the car and reached underneath it, still thinking it was some sort of firecracker. He pulled out a black Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter, sleek and cool and heavy, its grip pebbly in his palm. Holding it in front of him, Akiva approached a cop who stood nearby. “Do you guys want this?” he asked.
Ah Wong was still alive, sprawled on the freshly cut grass, when a member of the volunteer ambulance corps approached him and began scissoring the bloody clothes away from his body. As the medic worked, Ah Wong slowly reached into his pocket, withdrew a wad of crumpled money, and handed it to him. He died at the hospital three hours later. “Naked oriental male, black crew cut hair, five foot five, 120 pounds,” the medical examiner wrote when Ah Wong lay dead on a gurney, medical tubes still coiling out of his mouth. He surveyed Ah Wong’s small, hard body, a weathered butcher block of gouges and nicks, a contour map exposing the full topography of a gangland youth—the marks that his few brutal years had left upon him.
Each arm was sheathed in a multicolored 8-inch tattoo of a ferocious dragon. Another dragon, this one a foot tall and 7 or 8 inches wide, sprawled across his back. “On the victim’s upper right arm, approximately one inch below the armpit, the victim has what appear to be two old bullet wounds. On the deceased’s lower chest and abdomen are six old scars which appear to be old stab wounds.” Ah Wong had been shot nine times that night. Seven of the bullets were plucked from his body; two more had passed clear through. A tenth bullet—a .380-caliber hollow point—was extracted from his leg, but it didn’t match any of the ballistics at the scene. The medical examiner determined that it was from an old gunshot wound he had never had treated. Even Fujianese who weren’t involved in criminal activity tended to avoid the hospital; they rarely had insurance, and they didn’t want to occasion any unnecessary checks into their immigration status. But the gunfighters of the Fuk Ching were especially inclined to stoicism in the face of injury if it meant they could avoid questioning by police. Ah Wong had been walking around with a bullet in his leg.
Four-Eyed Fish and another assailant, Shing Chung, had fled in the blue Audi. They headed north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and escaped. Four-Eye was eventually apprehended two years later, in Florida, where he was working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. Shing Chung has never been caught.
Dan Xin Lin was not so lucky. “Get out of here!” he shouted when the Dodge Caravan picked him up. “Get onto the highway and cross the bridge.” It may simply have been the terror and exhilaration of the slaughter the boys had just participated in, and a kind of homing instinct that suddenly asserted itself, drawing them out of the unfamiliar suburban universe of subdivisions and safe houses and back to the cramped safety of Chinatown. But heading back to Chinatown was a mistake. The George Washington Bridge was the most obvious route back into Manhattan, and within minutes of the shootings an all-points bulletin had gone out to police in the area to look out for the blue Dodge van that had fled the scene. In nearby Fort Lee, a police officer was stationed by the entrance to the bridge and spotted the van approaching the tollbooths. He drew his gun, walked toward the van, and ordered the passengers to get out. Five Chinese men stepped onto the pavement. The clothes they wore were covered in blood.
Ray Kerr was asleep that night when he got a call from a colleague at the FBI telling him that Dan Xin Lin had killed four people in New Jersey. When Dan Xin was put in jail and permitted to make one telephone call, he contacted Peter Lee. The authorities were furious, and embarrassed, that their witness in the beeper-store case had taken matters into his own hands. The Daily News ran an article on the incident under the headline “FBI Informer Held in Massacre.” Kerr cut it out and put it on his wall, as a reminder to himself and others of the risks they ran when dealing with people like Dan Xin Lin.
The killers were held as maximum-security prisoners at the Bergen County Jail. When a judge set Dan Xin’s bail at $1 million, he had a distinctly Fujianese response. “If I come up with one million from relatives,” he wondered, “can I go?” Ultimately, Dan Xin and his accomplices were convicted and given multiple life sentences. Chang, the Fujianese hostage who was being held in the house in Teaneck, ended up surviving, albeit with a bullet permanently lodged in his head, and testifying against his assailants. The prosecutor who put him on the stand referred to him, affectionately and out of earshot of the jury as Bullet Head.
In New York, the small band of officers of the state and federal government who knew that the bloodshed in Teaneck was in fact an installment in the larger struggle between Ah Kay and Dan Xin Lin all had the same thought: the gravest acts of terror could only be yet to come, because somewhere in the world Ah Kay had no doubt learned of the deaths of his two younger brothers, and his wrath, and his particular brand of sociopathic indifference to the mores and laws of American society, would soon be felt. Only then would the true significance of Teaneck be understood. Luke Rettler was sure of it. So were Ray Kerr and his colleagues at the FBI. The Fifth Precinct of the NYPD began augmenting security on the streets of Chinatown. Everyone braced for an all-out war.
But the officials were all tragically mistaken. To American law enforcement, Ah Kay may have seemed uncatchable and undeportable, an almost superhuman wanderer who could flit from one country to the next, completely unimpeded by the niceties of national boundaries. But as it happened, they badly overestimated him. For even as he mourned the deaths of his brothers, Ah Kay was confronted by a plan gone devastatingly awry During the trial of the murderers at Teaneck, it emerged that while Dan Xin’s desire for revenge had driven the killings, there was another motivation as well. “He said he was going to do Ah Wong because Ah Kay was in China,” Alan Tam testified. “When they do Ah Wong, they going to take over the smuggling business.” Dan Xin knew that Ah Wong was expecting a boat to arrive in the United States, with a $9 million bounty of Fujianese passengers. Because the Teaneck trial unfolded later, after the ship arrived in so spectacular a fashion, and there was a fear that any association between the defendants and that event might prejudice the jury the judge instructed Tam and the other witnesses to refer to the vessel in question simply as “the boat” or “the ship” and not by its name, the Golden Venture. “From what I hear from Dan Xin,” one of the killers said, “after we kill those people … we could get Wong’s boat of people that’s coming to the United States, and we could collect those money.”
With Ah Kay stuck in China and Ah Wong and the others dead, the gang was in disarray. Even the resourceful Ah Kay would not be able to arrange a fleet of fishing boats to offload the ship in the Atlantic. And with Dan Xin and his accomplices locked up in a Bergen County jail, they would not be able to meet the ship either. It was not the arrival of Ah Kay from the East that the authorities should have been worrying about in the days following the massacre at Teaneck, but the arrival of the Golden Venture.
Chapter Ten
Mutiny in the Atlantic
ONE WEEK before the killings at Teaneck, as Ah Wong and his allies were hiding out in the safe house and Dan Xin and his allies were preparing to kill them, the Golden Venture rumbled toward a prearranged set of nautical coordinates in the North Atlantic, five days’ journey from the East Coast, where according to the plan it would rendezvous with fishing boats sent by the Fuk Ching. The ship’s imminent arrival was well known in Chinatown. Sister Ping was expecting her two customers any day, and both Weng Yu Hui and Mr. Charlie had flown back to New York to supervise the offloading. They had supplied their onboard enforcer, Kin Sin Lee, with a radio frequency to contact the smaller boats. But whe
n Kin Sin Lee tried to reach them, the smaller boats did not reply. When Lee was able to reach Weng and Mr. Charlie, they told him that there was a problem with the smaller boats, because with Ah Kay in China and his brothers in hiding, they had been unable to arrange a way to transport the passengers from ship to shore.
Kin Sin Lee was growing anxious. The passengers were restless: it had been over a month since they left Mombasa, and three months since the ship took on the original passengers at Pattaya. Supplies were dwindling, he told the snakeheads; the ship was running low on fuel. But this lament did not have the intended effect; rather than saying that they would send out the smaller boats immediately, Charlie and Weng suggested that if supplies were so low, Kin Sin Lee should turn the ship around and head back east across the Atlantic to the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira, some 400 miles off the coast of Morocco, where he could resupply before endeavoring another mid-Atlantic meeting.
Captain Tobing liked this new plan. The journey had taken much longer than he anticipated. He was also fearful of being arrested in the coastal waters of the United States. It may simply be that he felt more secure heading away from America’s shoreline and into the unpoliced wilderness of the Atlantic; it may also be that he planned on abandoning the ship once it docked in Madeira, as the Najd II’s original captain had done in Mauritius. If the snakeheads sent an employee to Madeira to resupply the ship, the captain figured, perhaps he and his crew could take the employee hostage and demand that Weng and Mr. Charlie send smaller boats. But Kin Sin Lee didn’t like this plan. The passengers were getting manic and edgy. If the captain turned the ship around, Lee was certain they would revolt.
Tobing was two decades older than Lee, physically sturdier, and far more experienced at sea, and he stubbornly insisted that the best course of action was to head to Madeira. But Lee was in no mood to defer to some ship’s captain. He ordered Tobing to sail the Golden Venture to America. Tobing steadfastly refused, saying he would only take the ship east, toward Madeira. With the matter unresolved, Lee assembled his various allies from among the passengers and arrived at a whispered plan. He quietly distributed six knives, three wooden clubs, and a gun and explained that if the captain was going to be so unreasonable, they would simply have to depose him. He didn’t call it a mutiny. He called it “kidnapping the boat.”
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