By the time Vinegrad became involved in the case, code-named White Mare, more than forty suspects had been arrested in New York, Thailand, and Hong Kong. For more than a year, a team of prosecutors from the Eastern District set their entire caseload aside to concentrate on various aspects of the investigation. There would be at least two trials, two sentencing hearings, four extradition cases, and dozens of plea bargainings before more than two dozen people were put behind bars on RICO charges.
With White Mare, Vinegrad had been dealing with the upper echelons of Asian organized crime; the defendants were mostly successful businessmen who smuggled dope as if it were a legitimate commodity and then buried the huge profits in real estate, restaurant chains, produce markets, and dummy bank accounts throughout Chinatown, Manhattan, and the rest of the United States. They ran the gamut from high-rolling nightclub types to reputable businessmen with solid family backgrounds, all of whom were seduced by what drug agents and economists were now calling the most profitable cash business in the world.
It didn’t take Vinegrad long to realize that his current case was something else entirely. David Thai might have had pretensions of one day sitting high in an office tower atop New York or Hong Kong, but most of his BTK brothers were content with a warm place to sleep and a healthy bowl of pho. Throw in a silk shirt, a tailored suit, and a year’s supply of stylish black sunglasses and they might even have thought they’d risen above their station. The large-scale trafficking of heroin was far removed from the sort of street-level robberies, extortions, and home invasions that had become the BTK’s stock-in-trade.
Or was it? Once Vinegrad began sifting through the evidence and other data the ATF investigators were accumulating, he was struck by the ways in which the Asian underworld reinforced its iron grip. In Chinatown, disparate groups within the community’s byzantine criminal structure seemed to benefit from one another’s activities, whether they were directly involved in those activities or not. Certainly the young ruffians who comprised the BTK were not involved in the underworld’s more lucrative rackets, which were controlled by Chinese criminal syndicates spread across the globe. But for major heroin trafficking to take place, the proper climate was required. Asian youth gangs, from the Ghost Shadows to the Flying Dragons to the BTK, were the ones who created and maintained this climate through day-to-day acts of terror and violence.
The way Vinegrad saw it, the BTK investigation presented a rare opportunity to strike at one of the most pernicious aspects of Asian organized crime: the street-level brutality that made it possible for gangsters and racketeers at every level to ply their trade.
When Vinegrad met Tinh Ngo for the first time at the investigators’ tenth-floor headquarters, it was not exactly love at first sight. Tinh was there to drop off a couple of mini-cassette tapes he had recorded the day before. Now that he was using the tape recorder on a regular basis and had become responsible for alerting the agents to major crimes the gang might be planning, the intense pressure he was under had begun to show. Tinh’s weight had dipped to around one hundred and five pounds, and he seemed increasingly withdrawn and anxious.
Though physically a wreck, Tinh impressed Vinegrad with his intelligence. His command of the English language was better than average. He had an excellent memory for names and dates. Most important of all, he seemed to have an even temperament; he never lost his cool while being questioned on subjects he had probably been grilled about dozens and dozens of times in the last few months.
After speaking with Tinh, Vinegrad was more convinced than ever that much of the case would revolve around his secret recordings. The problem was, nearly all of the tapes were in Vietnamese. Not only would they have to be carefully transcribed, they would need to be sent to a language institute where they could be translated into English—a laborious process that could take weeks, even months.
“Until I see some of these transcripts,” Vinegrad told Kumor and the other investigators, “I won’t really know what we have.”
“How long’s that gonna take?” asked Kumor.
“Maybe I’ll have something in a few weeks. We’ll meet again then.”
In the meantime, the investigators had their informant out on the street, keeping a close eye on his gang brothers. On May 21, 1991, nine days after the aborted robbery in Rochester, Tinh was supposed to take part in another heist. This time the gang’s target was a leather-goods store in Copiague, Long Island, forty miles outside of New York City.
David Thai had told Tinh to select two other gang members to commit the robbery with the help of Lan Tran. They were to steal cash, expensive leather jackets, and as much other merchandise as possible, which they could later sell at reduced prices to Chinatown merchants.
The day the robbery was supposed to take place, Tinh phoned the BTK safe house in Hicksville, Long Island, where he was scheduled to meet Lan Tran and David Thai.
“Where are you?” Lan Tran asked Tinh angrily.
Tinh played dumb, his mini-recorder pressed against the earpiece on the phone. “I don’t know where to meet Anh hai.”
Lan was exasperated. “Huh? Oh, God. I’m waiting for you. Anh hai just went out to the store, the store we rob, to wait for you guys.”
“Now, I can’t,” Tinh replied. “The car has no gas. I thought you were coming here to Brooklyn, to get us.”
“Wow, Timmy, you say one thing and you do another. You fucking kill me…. Yesterday, Anh hai said he’d wait here at twelve o’clock for you guys to call.”
“Oh” was all Tinh could think to say.
Uncle Lan let loose a long, weary sigh. “And now you don’t have gas to come here. And you don’t have any money?”
“No,” answered Tinh, “not even one dollar. Right now I’m calling collect to Anh hai, to you. I can only make collect calls.”
“Wow,” replied Lan, sighing again. “You guys really kill me.”
By making himself unavailable, Tinh had successfully scrambled the robbery plans that day. But he had also run out of excuses. The following afternoon, he could stall no longer. He and two other gang members took the gang’s green Buick and headed out to meet Lan Tran and David Thai in Copiague.
At least this time Tinh had been able to give the investigators some advance warning. On their way to meet Uncle Lan and Anh hai, Tinh and his companions were pulled over by Detective Oldham and ATF agent Don Tisdale. They told Tinh he had run a stop sign. When none of the occupants of the car was able to produce identification, they were handcuffed and taken to a nearby police station. There they were held for a few hours until the robbery plans were once again effectively derailed.
Back at ATF headquarters, the investigators slapped themselves on the back for having prevented another BTK crime. But it didn’t take long for the euphoria to wane. They may have stopped the robbery and netted more damaging evidence against the gang, but an obvious question was beginning to loom:
How much longer could they continue to make miraculous appearances just as BTK gangsters were about to go do a job before someone in the gang got wise, putting their C.I. in even more serious jeopardy than he already was?
Chapter 12
“Who want to betray the gang?” asked Lan Tran, glowering at his BTK brothers. “You! You want to betray the gang?” Uncle Lan pointed an accusing finger at Son.
“No, Uncle Lan. No way,” answered Son. “I don’t betray the gang.”
Lan was swaying from too much beer and ma tuy, marijuana. He had shown up unexpectedly at the safe house on Forty-fifth Street in Sunset Park, and he was in a foul mood.
Usually, Lan Tran was remarkably even-tempered. He may have been a killer, but he was a cool-headed killer who rarely showed his emotions. Only when he had too much to drink did his mood turn dark and surly.
“What about you? You betray the gang?” Lan demanded as he staggered around the front room of the apartment, indiscriminately pointing at gang members. There were seven or eight people in the room at the time. They’d been watching T
V when Lan burst in.
Minh Do, one of the gang members who’d gone on the trip to Rochester, was seated on the couch. Known as Fat Minh to most of the gang, Minh Do sank in his seat as Uncle Lan approached; he tried to avoid eye contact with anh ba, the Vietnamese honorific for the second highest brother after anh hai.
“You!?” barked Lan Tran. “Would you betray the gang?”
“No, Anh ba,” Minh Do replied meekly.
Lan reached out and smacked Fat Minh with an open hand. Minh tried to protect himself as Lan slapped him a few more times across the side of the head.
“You all weak now,” announced Lan, turning so that everyone in the room could hear him. “BTK used to be the toughest gang in Chinatown. Now, you new gang members, you all chicken!”
Lan Tran had been under a lot of pressure lately, and it was beginning to show. Ever since the murder of Sen Van Ta, he’d become more and more paranoid, especially as Ta’s death garnered increasing attention in the mainstream newspapers.
At first, the brazen killing of Sen Van Ta had been reported as just another gang shooting in Chinatown. The NYPD neglected to mention that Ta had been cooperating with the cops in an ongoing robbery and extortion case. Later, Peg Tyre, an enterprising reporter with Newsday, discovered that Sen Van Ta had been murdered because, in fact, he was a cooperating government witness who’d been left unprotected. This revelation proved embarrassing to the NYPD, forcing them to give the investigation of Ta’s murder high priority.
Though no one in the gang talked openly about it, everyone knew that Lan Tran had been the triggerman. And Lan Tran knew that everyone knew, which was why he had begun to exhibit more pronounced signs of paranoia.
Lan continued reeling around the room, practically stumbling over furniture, until he came face to face with Tinh Ngo, who was standing near the kitchen. Tinh met Lan’s gaze head-on. Normally, the subject of betrayal would have made Tinh jumpy. But he was reasonably certain that, this time at least, Lan Tran was just blowing smoke.
Tinh had spoken with both Lan and David Thai on the phone a few days earlier, trying to explain why he and the others were stopped on the way to the robbery in Copiague. “I only drove past the stop sign a little bit,” Tinh told David. “I don’t know, I’m having really bad luck, Anh hai.”
David Thai was philosophical. “Yes. This is an unlucky year. It’s my birth year.”
“How old are you this year, thirty-three?”
“Thirty-five. My birth year. So whatever I do, something always goes wrong. My head tries to think of big things, but …”
“I really want to help you, Anh hai,” Tinh butted in, “but I can’t seem to help you.”
David sighed. “Everything I’ve done failed, you know? I can’t understand it. Whatever I do fails, it just fails.”
Tinh actually felt sorry for Anh hai as he listened to him blame himself for the gang’s recent botched robbery attempts. The conversation was also reassuring. For the first time, Tinh was convinced that the gang’s leader had not even begun to entertain the possibility there might be a traitor in their midst.
Lan Tran had answered the phone that day and was sitting with Anh hai when Tinh spoke to him. If Lan had any serious accusations to make about betrayal, he would have done it then. Tinh figured that the big show Lan was putting on now, storming around the room smacking people and getting in their faces, was mostly a warning, a way of instilling fear in the younger gang members who’d not yet seen Lan Tran in action.
Standing before Tinh Ngo, Uncle Lan adopted a more sober posture. “What about you?” he asked, locking eyes with Tinh. “What do you think?”
“Hey, you know me long time,” answered Tinh coolly, knowing Lan would have to respect his status as a “veteran” gang member. Lan glared at Tinh a few seconds more, then moved on.
In fact, Tinh had known Uncle Lan for nearly two years, but there was much about the BTK’s premier hitman that had remained enigmatic, to Tinh and everyone else. Lan was eight or nine years older than most of the gang members, but he seemed even farther removed than that. Most gang members had a vague knowledge of Lan’s self-described history as an operative for the deposed South Vietnamese government. Still, even those who knew nothing of his past could tell that he had been through something dark and troubling. It seemed as if much of Vietnam’s recent history—the residue of the war, the refugee boats, the camps, the swath cut by Vietnamese gangs in the United States—had been captured in Lan’s haunted eyes and prematurely aged face.
Lan rarely socialized with the other gang members. Instead, he preferred to spend long hours alone in his room at David Thai’s sub-urban Long Island home, writing in his journal. Few gang members were aware of it, but Uncle Lan had been chronicling his and the gang’s exploits for a number of years. Lan always fancied himself something of a poet and scribe. When he entered the United States in 1982, on his immigration papers he listed his occupation as “writer.” Since then he’d filled numerous spiral notebooks with neat, compact Vietnamese script.
Mostly, Uncle Lan’s writings were an account of the BTK’s rise to power as the gang members themselves might have seen it. “In New York,” Lan wrote, “there came a gang bearing a terrifying, unbelievable code name … [whose] presence has facilitated and benefited the Vietnamese businesses in Chinatown.” David Thai was referred to with great veneration as “a model example of a young Vietnamese man. Thai is tall and his body is well proportioned. Girls from rich families, meeting him, could not stop themselves from falling in love with Thai.”
Along with giving an “official” version of the gang’s history, Lan wrote long, vivid descriptions of his own exploits leading up to his involvement with the BTK. In many of these descriptions Lan portrayed himself as a professional, remorseless assassin.
Known as “Killing Hand,” I always observed the rules of the underworld. This time was my first opportunity in America. Me and my gun played the role. Five terrible bullets found the targets. Things were chaotic, patrons ran helter-skelter from the restaurant. Taking advantage of the situation, I ran. The damn car wouldn’t go. I was bewildered…. It’s truly destiny. Holding up the .38, I said thank-you and threw it in the snow-covered bush.
Lan Tran himself would later admit that much of his writing was a melding of fact and fiction, an imaginative rendering of his life filtered through too many Hong Kong gangster movies and further heightened by his own feverish vision of reality. True or not, his writings eloquently expressed the unique combination of romanticism, alienation, and violence that had become a hallmark of young Vietnamese gangsters, from New York to California.
Tonight, snow has fallen thicker than usual. I wandered the street. Each lonely step, I carried with me my feelings. The wind was blowing one gust after another, burning my face. Life here is always related to the present issues. I have never experienced coldness like this before…. Looking down, I see this huge city buried in snow. New York, the infamous city in the underworld which has scared people, has opened itself to me….
As the night progressed, the bar was almost deserted. I was still passionately involved with my newly served beer. All of a sudden, an old white American came to my table. I did not think that patrons here could cause trouble. In reality, this American was standing before me, talking baloney. It turned out that he served in Vietnam, all that baloney. I did not pay attention. Suddenly he pounded his two hands on the table, toppling the beer, sending liquid in all directions. I was mad but didn’t answer, bent down to pick up the glass and put it back on the table. He quickly threw the glass to the ground again and insulted me with dirty words. I could not control my temper, felt humiliated when I heard the two words “Viet Nam,” and it was too late for people around to stop me. “Crack,” my chair landed on the head of the white American….
The point of view conveyed by Uncle Lan in his writings was an accurate reflection of how the others saw him: the alienated loner whose life in the underworld was guided by a strict code of honor. T
o Tinh Ngo and the other BTK gang members, Lan was a near mythical figure. His reputation was enhanced by the fact he was pure Vietnamese, not Viet-Ching, like many of the others. He had been born and raised in Hue, Vietnam’s ancient imperial capital. In the United States, he was a well-traveled criminal who had reputedly given the Born to Kill gang its catchy name. If David Thai was the BTK’s mandarin leader, Lan Tran was its dark prince, the highly disciplined, cold-blooded gangster that most of the gang’s lesser members could only pretend to be.
Like the others, Tinh started out worshiping Uncle Lan. But his feelings for the elder gangster had gone through an evolutionary process. Now that he had begun to come out from under the dark cloud of the gang, Tinh saw clearly what a trap Lan Tran’s life had become. Lan was the most irrefutable kind of killer. He believed he was killing for a cause, in this case the cause of brotherhood. And by setting himself up as the truest and most devoted gang member, he’d sealed his fate. Prison or death were the only avenues left.
Tinh felt sorry for Lan, but his sympathy was tempered by a harsh reality: He knew that Lan was crazy. And he knew that if his betrayal of the BTK ever came to light and somebody had to put a bullet in his head, the triggerman would most assuredly be Uncle Lan, who would no doubt carry out his assignment with the same ardor—and the same literary flair—he’d employed on all the other occasions.
Their confidential informant may not have been overly concerned by Lan’s drunken accusations of betrayal, but Dan Kumor and the other investigators were. As far as they knew, this was the first time the issue of betrayal had been brought into the open by one of the gang’s ranking members.
Their concerns intensified a few days later when they learned that Lan had barged into the Sunset Park safe house early on a Saturday morning and rustled Tinh out of bed.
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