Born to Kill (36 page)

Dan Kumor, Bill Oldham, and the other investigators working the BTK case knew that if the FBI's Green Dragon case broke around the same time as their BTK indictments, they could expect little coverage in the local press. Kumor and Oldham, in particular, had no intention of spending a year of their lives investigating the BTK, delivering the case gift-wrapped to a prosecutor, then having it overshadowed by an FBI case. As a result, Kumor and Oldham began pestering their own assistant United States attorney, Alan Vinegrad, to at least begin the process of moving toward an indictment.

Vinegrad was adamant. “We're just not there yet,” he told the investigators. “We need more incriminating conversations on tape. We need more circumstantial evidence. We need more potential witnesses.”

Kumor and Oldham mumbled something under their breath about Vinegrad being unnecessarily cautious, but secretly they knew he was right. If they moved the case to trial prematurely, they would only wind up looking bad in the long run. Of course, if they waited too long, the next innocent civilian fatality might be from a BTK bullet, and how was that going to make them look?

Kumor, Oldham, and the other investigators continued pressing
forward, trying as best they could to ignore the considerable pressures mounting around them.

Inside the investigation's tenth-floor headquarters at the ATF building on Church Street, agent Albert Trinh hunched over a small tape recorder, a set of headphones clamped to his ears. He listened carefully for a moment, then clicked off the recorder. “Okay, Timmy,” said Trinh, taking off the headphones, “this part here where Son says to the merchant, ‘I want to get paid.' And the merchant says, ‘I paid before.' And Son replies, ‘I want more. I want twenty dollars, that's it.'”

“Yes,” remarked Tinh.

“You're sure he said ‘want' and not ‘need'? Because legally, there's a big difference between ‘want' and ‘need.' One implies coercion.”

“
Coercion?
” Tinh repeated the word quizzically, trying to enunciate the many syllables without tripping over his tongue.

Albert Trinh smiled. “Coercion,” he repeated. “It means pressuring somebody into doing something they don't want to do.”

In the three weeks since Albert Trinh and Tinh first met, they'd spent a couple of hours almost every day going over Tinh's secret recordings and the transcripts of those recordings. In many cases, the recordings were extremely difficult to understand. Some had been made in clamorous restaurants or on busy street corners, and the incidental background noises sometimes overwhelmed the conversations. Working with Tinh, Albert Trinh was attempting to fine-tune the transcripts, as well as transcribe and translate more recently recorded tapes.

The tape Albert and Tinh were currently working on was one Tinh had made two days earlier, on Saturday, July 27, 1991. During a surveillance on Canal Street in the middle of a busy afternoon, Tinh had circulated with a handful of gang members collecting extortion money. The gang members themselves referred to the process as collecting “tax money.”

Though the money collected from individual store managers and street peddlers was sometimes as little as twenty dollars, the gang's weekly extortion rounds were the backbone of their entire operation. By the end of a typical day, the gang members could have collected as much as $2,000, which was usually distributed to various
dai lows
to
buy food for the gang's rank and file. More important than the money, however, was the fact that by continuously reasserting its presence, the gang was making it clear to area merchants who was boss on Canal Street.

The July 27 surveillance was the second time investigators had wired Tinh while he and the others collected tax money. One month earlier, on June 29, they'd set up a team of ATF agents across the street from the Asian Shopping Mall, at 271 Canal Street. From the first floor of a bank that was closed for the day, the investigators monitored the gang with video and still cameras. They did the same thing again on July 27, recording a group of BTK members led by Minh Do, who made his rounds wearing a T-shirt that spelled out the BTK philosophy. Across the front of Fat Minh's T-shirt, in English, was printed, “Money talks, bullshit walks.”

Albert Trinh resumed following the group on tape. “Hey, Mr. Owner, help us out,” he heard Fat Minh demanding of a merchant.

“Help what?” the merchant asked.

“Money, what else you think?” answered Fat Minh. “Think you'll help us some other way? Only money.”

Trinh remembered this conversation; in fact, he witnessed it. Because he was Vietnamese, it was possible for Albert to circulate in the area without being noticed. Dressed casually in shorts and a T-shirt, he could supplement the electronic surveillance by following the gang on their rounds, staying within a few feet of Tinh, Fat Minh, and others, eavesdropping while they moved from store to store.

Albert was mildly surprised that Fat Minh and the others rarely had to resort to intimidation or even raise their voices as they made their collections. In the past, when the gang first began to make its presence felt on Canal Street back in 1989, “muscle” had been needed. Merchants were sometimes slapped around, street peddlers were chased off the block, store windows broken. In stubborn cases like Sen Van Ta, more drastic measures were taken.

By now, everyone pretty much got the picture.

Seated at ATF headquarters, Albert pulled off the headphones, picked up a pen, and continued transcribing bits of conversations. First, he wrote down the conversation in Vietnamese; later, it would be translated into English.

Even for someone who knew the language, it was painstaking work. Vietnamese is a tonal language, spoken with differing regional accents and pronunciations. In Vietnamese, the words spoken are important, but just as important is the way in which those words are spoken—whether a person's voice goes up or down, whether the intonation comes from the throat or is given a flat nasal twang. Simple variations of pronunciation can drastically alter the meaning of a word or phrase. A common word like
ma
could have two dozen different meanings. With a slight tonal variation, a phrase like “May Vietnam live for ten thousand years” might easily come out as “The sunburned duck is lying down.”

That, plus the fact that the tapes had been recorded under such noisy, difficult conditions, made transcribing them a numbing, meticulous task. Even a normally focused worker like Tinh got bored easily. Albert, a hard taskmaster, had to stay on him.

In the weeks since Tinh and Albert first met, they'd gotten to know and like each other, though it seemed an unlikely match at first. Albert was so clean-cut and his English so fluent that at first, Tinh could hardly believe he was a fellow countryman. Immediately after they met, Tinh asked Dan Kumor, “What is this guy, Japanese or something?”—an observation that was not meant as a compliment.

But once they began working on the tapes together, they developed an easy, respectful rapport. Tinh had never met anyone like Albert—an educated, well-adjusted Vietnamese American around the same age as himself. To break the monotony of working on the tapes, Tinh would ask Albert endless questions about growing up in the United States, where he got his education, how he'd become an ATF agent.

Albert, meanwhile, couldn't help but be taken by Tinh's sincerity and his quietly endearing personality. Even the other agents seemed to feel that way. “He's not a bad kid,” Kumor told Albert in the beginning. “In fact, he's a good person. I guess he was just easy to manipulate. I guess he got caught up in something that was bigger than he was.”

Albert may have been a relative newcomer to the ranks of American law enforcement, but even he knew this was not the way cops and agents usually talked about confidential informants. Maybe to their faces they were friendly and conciliatory, but behind their backs the agents usually referred to the informants they had to deal with as scum, the lowest of the low. The disdain they felt toward their C.I.s often resulted
in a kind of pathetic inverse reciprocity, as the informants tried in vain to endear themselves to their new masters.

Tinh Ngo seemed to have won the agents over simply by being himself.

As a refugee fortunate enough to be airlifted out of Vietnam soon after the fall of Saigon, Albert was as curious about Tinh as Tinh was about him. Growing up on the fringe of Southern California's refugee community, Albert had heard many stories about life in Vietnam in the years immediately following the war. He knew all about the refugee boats and the camps. But he'd never had the chance to speak directly with someone who'd taken that route to the underworld.

“Why?” Albert asked Tinh. “Why would someone as bright as you become involved with criminals? How could someone like David Thai manipulate you so easily?”

Even in his native language, these were not easy questions for Tinh to answer. “Ever since I come to the United States,” he told Albert, “these are the people I know. These are the people I eat with, sleep with, hang out with. David Thai, he the only person that ever really care for me. At least, I think this person a good person. I think,
Anh hai
, he look out for Vietnamese people.”

Albert recognized much of what Tinh was saying. In East Asian cultures in general, but even more so with the Vietnamese, if a person takes care of you financially, you become almost spiritually indebted to that person. To Tinh and the others, David Thai's willingness to pay their bills and give them pocket money was a matter not only of benevolence but of some greatness in his personality. In return, the ranks of the BTK felt they owed David Thai respect, loyalty, obedience.

That was clear on the tapes, in the language the gang members used to underscore their subservience to
Anh hai
. When referring to themselves, individual gang members always used
em
, a Vietnamese word used like the pronoun
I
when speaking with someone older and wiser. It connotes a deference based partly on age, but is also used to show respect for a person's power, financial wealth, or superior intelligence.

David Thai certainly had been successful in getting his BTK minions to view him as
cao so
, a man who was “highly destined.” But Albert knew that Thai's appeal went even deeper than that.

Long before the U.S. military created a generation of refugees by first ravaging and then abandoning Vietnam in 1975, the Vietnamese people had come to see themselves as the inevitable victims of a cruel fate. Over the ages, the history of Vietnam had been marked by turbulence and torment, by terrible natural and human forces unleashed against helpless individuals. Many times, typhoons had devastated the densely populated delta and coastal regions of north and central Vietnam. Just as often, the people were victimized by military regimes who inflicted misfortune on the populace in the name of ideology.

After conquest and despite numerous rebellions, the Chinese, the French, and the Americans lorded over the country for one thousand years. With few exceptions, native rulers were also tyrants, adopting and maintaining a Chinese-style system designed more for repression and suppression than to deliver justice to the people.

In the face of such a tortured history, the Vietnamese have come to see themselves as the victims of an evil karma, an identity most eloquently encapsulated in an epic poem written two hundred years ago, known to Vietnamese throughout the world as
The Tale of Kieu
.

Written by Nguyen Du, a poet and Confucian scholar,
The Tale of Kieu
is the story of a young woman cast adrift by her family who is compelled to endure many hardships, including being forced into prostitution. Central to Kieu's tumultuous journey through life is the concept of
oan
, a word for which the nearest equivalent in English is “wronged.” Throughout the poem, Kieu is forced into submission by circumstances beyond her control. Ultimately, she prevails because she is able to endure.

For many Vietnamese,
The Tale of Kieu
has served as a cultural Bible and window to their soul from the time it was published in the late eighteenth century. The poem is still taught in Vietnamese schools and many of its 3,254 verses have been memorized by young and old, peasant and scholar. For refugees living in exile in various parts of the globe, the poem holds a special significance. The very term
Viet-Kieu
, used to describe itinerant Vietnamese scattered throughout the world, was derived from Nguyen Du's masterpiece.

For those who have felt the sting of abandonment,
The Tale of Kieu
contains a powerful unifying message. Whether they see themselves as victims or survivors, all Vietnamese refugees have been severed
from the land of their ancestors. Like Kieu, they have been compelled to serve false masters, to do things they otherwise might not have done were it not for the cruel demands of fate. To face horrible odds, to suffer, to toil in misery—these are all essential aspects of the Vietnamese refugee experience.

From what he had heard from Tinh and seen for himself, Albert Trinh knew that David Thai was a man who understood the power of mythology. When he first gathered his BTK brothers at the Japanese restaurant more than two years ago, he'd used the phrase
Con kien cong con vua
—“By sticking together, the tiny ants can carry the elephant.” The ant was a powerful metaphor to most Vietnamese, many of whom viewed themselves as tiny, insignificant entities in a large, uncaring cosmos.

Certainly, Thai was promising his BTK brothers strength in numbers, an opportunity to forge an identity for themselves in the midst of a hostile environment. But he was also promising something more—much more.

At the gang's first big sit-down,
Anh hai
referred to their mission as being part of a larger “journey.” By doing so, he was knowingly evoking the mythology of
The Tale of Kieu
. A generation older than his followers, Thai recognized that Tinh Ngo and
his
generation had no roots. Severed from all sense of country, culture, or family, they yearned for something—
anything
—to reconnect them with the culture that had shaped their lives, but one they had hardly any tangible relationship with beyond the sweet, hazy memories of childhood. By calling on his young BTK brothers to join him on a journey through perilous waters, David Thai was offering them a chance to reconnect. He was giving them something that seemingly no one else could: an opportunity to fulfill their destiny as Vietnamese.