The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

by Jeffrey Toobin

  But in America, we know nothing of such matters. Officially, Juárez has healthy wages and almost no unemployment. It is a beacon of the global economy that was poised to become a modern city in a Mexico that was to become a modern nation. But when Mexico instead lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was ignored by successive American administrations, since a quiet neighbor was and is the best kind of neighbor for a global economic empire. When Mexico persisted in being a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, it was the fault of American habit and addiction. Finally, when these habits could not be contained, the North American Free Trade Agreement was ballyhooed as the answer that would bring prosperity and end the violence.

  What America got from NAFTA was cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration from the barrios of places like Juárez into the United States. What Juárez got was more drugs and more violence.

  The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.

  I HAVE A VISION in which all the dead in Juárez since January will gather in the plaza before the cathedral downtown. They will sit in rows of chairs just as in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. There will be 500 separate tales of how they loved things and enjoyed life and how they were murdered and who murdered them. It is a play, of course, that will never end.

  I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts but she will be bored. Her perfect face will be blank, her beautiful eyes, cocooned in makeup, will wander to the hills outside town where she stayed in the asylum. By now her hair will have grown out and the handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her time at the Casablanca.

  But of course, nothing she knows will matter to most people—just as the dead of Juárez will vanish and this killing season will be forgotten. You can believe in the war on drugs, in battles between the cartels, in secure borders, in free trade, in official states and statesmen. You don’t have handprints on your ass and bite scars on your breasts and fragments of your mind that tell you of places that presidents never mention. I prefer the company of Miss Sinaloa, her skin so fair, her bruised thoughts more knowing than the governments that pretend to rule the chaos that now rules Juárez.

  And as I watch this new Our Town in the plaza before the cathedral, one image sticks in my head—a fragment whispering of a murder. There is a barrio near here where people scavenge old televisions and bits of metal from both Juárez and El Paso and sell them. A man peddles cocaine on the street and is warned to stop, but he is in his thirties and has no other livelihood. So he persists, and then armed men come with masks and blow his brains out. He falls dead on the street near his mother’s house.

  But his body is not what I imagine.

  What I see is his mother. It is night now. The body has been taken away and there is a light on, the screen door is pushed open and an old woman with a blank face stares down at the street. She is there alone, and her son is not coming home. Her face is a portrait of Juárez: silent, enduring, doomed.

  CHARLES BOWDEN is the author of twenty-two books, including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. Inferno, with photographer Michael Berman, was a finalist for the Orion Book of the Year for 2007. His most recent book is Exodus, with photographer Julian Cardona. Trinity and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing will both he published in 2009.

  Bowden is a correspondent for GQ magazine, and his work has appeared in Harper’s, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and Esquire. A Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, he lives in Tucson, Arizona, with a standard poodle, a desert tortoise, and a witch.

  Coda

  I have been going to Ciudad Juárez for fifteen years because I could sense the future was unfolding there—violence, poverty, American-owned factories with low wages, and a vast drug business. Starting around January 2008, Juárez probed further into its destiny. In 2007, there were 301 murders, in the following year 1,607, including dozens of police. The pace has continued into 2009. All this will be in a forthcoming book, Miss Sinaloa.

  R. Scott Moxley

  HATE AND DEATH

  FROM OC Weekly

  IF THIEN MINH LY HAD LOOKED UP as he Rollerbladed in slow circles on the Tustin High School tennis courts, he would have seen a few stars flickering in the partly cloudy night sky over the nearby Santa Ana Mountains. The 5-foot-6, 117-pound immigrant with a gentle demeanor and a curiosity for discovery had been back in Orange County for a year after returning from graduate school at Georgetown University, and he was still mulling his next career move. Doctor? Lawyer? He’d even voiced a hope to one day serve as the first Vietnamese American ambassador to his birthplace.

  The 24-year-old’s boyish looks belied his tenaciousness. With his family, Ly—born in Tuy Hoa, a coastal village in Central Vietnam—fled brutal conditions in communist Vietnam via boat in 1983 after his father, an officer in the South Vietnamese military, was released from a concentration camp. After a stint living in an Indonesian refugee camp, the family arrived in California. Only 12 years old at the time, Ly led his non-English-speaking parents and two younger siblings through the early difficulties of life in an alien country. The family eventually opened a video rental shop in Santa Ana. A few months before he went Rollerblading on that cool January 1996 night, he had used a blue-ink pen and a yellow Post-It note to memorialize a thought he’d stick to a page in his diary.

  “I live in today and not very far into tomorrow,” he wrote. “I do my best every minute of the day, and when it’s over, I know there is more to come.”

  But hazel-eyed death—dressed all in black, with Jack in the Box on his breath and carrying a butcher’s knife—appeared suddenly from the darkness, taunted Ly on the tennis courts, mocked his fear, showed him no mercy and robbed him of his dreams.

  Time has a habit of letting us forget tragedies, even ones that spark outrage, like this one did in Little Saigon and in Asian communities across the nation. It’s been 12 years, but a key question about the murder is now the subject of a debate at the California Supreme Court. In coming weeks, the justices will finally announce if Ly really was the victim of a hate crime. For the killer, that decision is a matter of life or death.

  “I guess if your [sic] not white your [sic] not right.”

  —LY’S MURDERER IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND

  LESS THAN A QUARTER-MILE from Ly’s home, on an apartment wall over a futon, was taped a big-toothed caricature of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a gaping bullet hole between his eyebrows. The image came with a message: “If we could have killed four more, we would have had the rest of the week off.”

  But that wasn’t enough for Gunner Jay Lindberg. The 21-year-old Orange County native had used a yellow crayon to add the word “DEATH” to the upper-left corner of the poster on his bedroom wall. A second, mass-produced poster on the same wall showed two young white girls playing joyously.

  The room had a dirty white bedsheet for a curtain. On top of a small, cheap television and a cheaper VCR sat a plastic skull wearing a helmet with a swastika, two cross-country running trophies and miniature models of 1950s cars. A nightstand contained three bottles of Jack Daniels; books on violence; videos depicting gruesome real-life deaths; correspondence with the Aryan Nation, KKK groups, White Aryan Resistance, the New Order (a successor to the American Nazi Party) and National Association for the Advancement of White People; a folder with a list of people he wanted dead (mostly ex-friends and co-workers); a black notebook with thoughts on a coming intergalactic battle; an obnoxious spoof of an application to the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP); and a red-letter edition of the King James Bible, in which he had scrawled personal addresses for white supremacists in various states and this ominous note: “It’s not God’s will that everyone be healed in this life.”

  A quick-tempered box stocker at a Tustin Kmart with a penchant for picking fights with Asians, African-Americans and Latinos—anyone, really—Lindberg didn’t graduate from high school and possessed few social skills but was artistically gifted. He’d converted both a white 2.5-pound Gourmet’s Choice fruit container and a cardboard San Francisco 49ers checkers box into storage for his marijuana stash after redecorating them with swirling, hand-drawn psychedelic images of anger, death and Hitler. If pot soothed other people’s minds, it only fueled Lindberg’s fantasies of becoming, he wrote, “the king of all evil and distruction [sic].”

  Lindberg, who also took methamphetamines, never lived up to his narcissistic imagination. During an eight-year crime spree beginning at age 12, he proved himself to be little more than a thug who preyed on the defenseless. His victims included a cop’s 11-year-old son, whom he chased and shot in the throat with a BB gun; a day laborer, whom he attacked with a tree limb for the money in his pocket; a skateboarder, whom he repeatedly kicked in the stomach as he stole the board; the peers he angrily chased, firing a shotgun, over a perceived slight; an on-duty prison guard, whom he brutally ambushed; and an elderly woman, whom he pummeled during a home-invasion robbery for drug money.

  But he committed his most heinous act on Ly. At 8 p.m. on Jan. 28, 1996, Lindberg took Domenic Michael Christopher, a Kmart co-worker, to his apartment after they finished a shift that consisted largely of watching the Super Bowl on television in the store’s break room. According to his own writings, Lindberg hoped to mold the impressionable 17-year-old, who liked karate and hadn’t been in trouble before, into his protégé. They smoked pot, talked about “robbery and shit like that” and left on foot—Lindberg carrying a butcher knife he’d stolen from his grandmother’s kitchen, according to police files. They stopped for dinner at Jack in the Box, and then walked the streets searching for a victim. At one point, they encountered a group of teenagers standing in a front yard, attempted to start a fight, failed and moved on.

  Minutes later, they found and trapped the unsuspecting Ly, whose last seven minutes of life were the stuff of horror flicks. Lindberg called him a “Jap,” demanded his car keys, cursed him, punched him, stomped on his head, kicked his face, slashed his throat and stabbed him 22 times—in part, to celebrate a victory earlier that evening by what Lindberg hailed as “America’s team,” the Dallas Cowboys.

  Among Ly’s final words were “What the fuck?”

  “I thought [Lindberg] was a cool guy, you know, cool. He’s funny. He is…He’s cool, you know what I mean?…If I’d known he was psycho, I wouldn’t have hung with him.”

  CHRISTOPHER TO POLICE

  A MONTH AFTER THE MURDER

  LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS SAY Lindberg was the first person Orange County sent to San Quentin State Prison’s death row under California’s hate-crime statute. Christopher, his now-remorseful accomplice, is serving a sentence of 25 years to life and is eligible to request parole in 2023.

  Lindberg’s days are filled with exercising, writing pen pals, creating art, playing chess, day-dreaming about Nordic lore and writing satanic poems that mock Ly’s death. Thanks to an automatic appeal of every death-penalty case, he’s also waiting for word from California’s highest court on the pending hate-crime question. The answer could remove him from death row.

  During supreme court oral arguments in June, deputy state public defender Ronald F. Turner pleaded Lindberg’s case. He told Chief Justice Ronald George and six associate justices that his client’s death-penalty punishment must be overturned. Turner argued that two special circumstances the jury found to be true—that the murder was committed during the commission of an attempted robbery and that Ly’s race was a key factor in the crime—were, in fact, false.

  “We’re not dealing with a rational individual here,” said Turner. “This was just a thrill kill, a bravado murder…motivated by male testosterone and nothing else.”

  In a February 2005 letter to the Weekly, Lindberg echoed Turner’s assertion. “[The Orange County district attorney’s office] blew up the white-supremacist issue,” he wrote. “I’m not like that. I did have some things [reading materials] but it was something I had in prison in Missouri and I only viewed it with passing interest long ago.”

  Oh, I killed a Jap a while ago. I stabbed him to death at Tustin High School. I walked up to him. Domenic was with me and I seen this guy Rollerblading and I had a knife. We walked in the tennis court where he was. I walked up to him. Domenic was right there. I walked right up to him and he was scared. I looked at him and said, “Oh, I thought I knew you,” and he got all happy that he wasn’t gonna get jumped. Then I hit him with one of my motherfuckers and he fell to the ground and he said in a very low voice, “What the fuck?” and “You can have whatever I got. I have nothing—only a key. You can have it.” Then I said, “You got a car.” Oh, I pulled the knife out—a butcher’s knife and he said, “No!” Then I put the knife to his throat and asked him, “Do you have a car?” And he grabbed my hand that I had the knife and looked at me, trying to get a description of me, so I stomped on his head three times and each times said, “Stop looking at me.” Then he was kinda knocked out. Dazzed. Then I stabbed him in the side about 7 or 8 times. He rolled over a little, so I stabbed his back about 18 or 19 times. Then he layed flat and I slit one side of his throat on his jugular vein. Oh, the sounds the guy was making were like “uhh-hhh.” Then Domenic said, “Do it again,” and I said, “I already did, dude,” so I cut his other jugular vein and Domenic said, “Kill him…Do it again.” I said, “He’s already dead.” Domenic said. “Stab him in the heart.” So I stabbed him about 20 to 21 times in the heart…He was dying just then, taking in some bloody gasps of air so I nudged his face with my shoe a few times. Then I told Domenic to kick him, so he kicked the fuck out of his face and he still has blood on his shoes all over [smiley face]. Then I ditched the knife after whipping it clean on to the side of the 5 freeway [smiley face]. Here’s the clippings from the newspaper and we were on all the news channels. [I’m] having a ball in Tustin. Wish you were here.

  —LINDBERG IN A LETTER TO HIS COUSIN

  IF LINDBERG HADN’T WRITTEN that letter describing the killing to a cousin in New Mexico and the cousin’s wife hadn’t contacted authorities, there’s a good chance the case would remain unsolved to this day.

  Of course, Lindberg’s “Jap” was Thien Minh Ly.

  At Tustin High, Ly wowed teachers by enrolling in advanced-placement classes in calculus, physics, Spanish, English, civics and economics—quite an achievement for an immigrant who’d known English fewer than six years. He earned an eighth-place ranking in a class of about 400. At UCLA, he served as president of the Vietnamese Student Association. In August 1995, he emerged from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with a master’s degree in physiology.

  The devout Buddhist returned to his parents’ OC home to decide his next move. Friends saw that he carried a study guide to the law school admissions exam, but he also spoke about his interest in medicine. While he debated his decision, he volunteered at a legal clinic established to help poor Asian immigrants in Southern California.

  “My brother was such a loving, kind person,” Ly’s sister Thu says. “I can’t describe to you the pain his death caused my family. There were so many tears. How could this happen to him? It tore our hearts apart…. He inspired me to be the best person I can be.”

  Though it’s been more than a decade since the crime, Thai—Thien’s younger brother—still can’t talk about it, according to Thu, who is married with several young children and living in San Diego. She dedicated her life to her slain brother, entered the military and served four years as a naval officer in places such as Kuwait and Iraq.

  “He wanted
me to be a strong and intelligent woman with the courage to find my own adventure,” she told the Weekly. “I often wonder what he would think of how I turned out if he were here. Such a thought often brings both smiles and tears.”

  “All I want to do is hurt and kill…. I’m a pure fucking evil dog and that’s no shit.”

  —LINDBERG IN A LETTER TO A RELATIVE

  TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MURDER

  IN ANTICIPATION OF THIS STORY, I initiated contact with the condemned Lindberg at San Quentin several years ago. In return, I received handwritten letters loaded with smiley faces. Lindberg also likes to tell people that he’s insane, a word that’s tattooed on his upper left arm.

  When I told him that I was going to write about him and requested a face-to-face interview, he first told me that a key witness who’d pissed him off during the Ly trial had died. He wrote, “Sounds like foul play!” Then he explained the conditions of our meeting.

  “You’ll be locked into a small cage with me, and won’t be allowed a recorder or anything,” he wrote. “At first I was going to say NO. But if your [sic] wanting to do it then OK. Here’s your visiting form. You just fill it out and send it with a letter to me. Always, Gunner.”

  The Department of Justice’s death-row-visitation form is lengthy, containing detailed questions about addresses, phone numbers, financial information, work history, schooling and relatives. It’s a treasure trove of personal data. And Lindberg wanted me to provide him with mine.

  Suspicious, I called a high-ranking prison official, who laughed when I told him what Lindberg suggested.

  “He knows damn well that he’s not supposed to receive that,” the official told me. “You have to be exceptionally careful with these people. Are you sure you want to be locked in the same room with him?”