is who they wanted. I don’t know exactly why he was killed. It was probably some kind of power struggle. People might have felt like he was going to cause problems. It was said through the Chinese community that Hun Suk’s people did it.”
John’s account is corroborated by the two men who survived the massacre: Pak Wing Lee and Billy Yu Man Young. Lee miraculously survived a gunshot to the head. Young, unfavorably nicknamed “Wrinkled Skin Man,” was the owner of the club and was spared by the killers. Years after the shooting, both men would testify to what happened.
“Robbery!” three men shouted as they burst into the club. “Don’t move!”
But this was clearly not a robbery. When police arrived, there were several hundred dollars strewn on top of the card table. The money was splattered with blood and brains from the gunshot wounds to the victims’ heads.
Lee claimed that Hun Suk shouted the orders and told each man in the club to lie facedown on the floor. Hun Suk then strode purposefully over to Dai Keung and put a gun to the back of his head.
“Please, don’t shoot! I’m begging you!”
Those were Dai Keung’s last words before Hun Suk put two bullets in the back of his head.
Lee heard more pleading followed by more gunshots.
“I’ll be a horse. I’ll be a dog,” one man cried. “I’ll be anything. Don’t shoot.”
Lee didn’t move except when the gunshots startled him. He thought about fate’s role in all of this and regretted his decision to brave the snowstorm and come to the club that night. He was a cook at an Ipswich restaurant and had been to this gambling den many times before. Most recently, he had lost a bit of money and had returned to square his debt with the “Wrinkled Skin Man.” He remembers feeling the barrel of Hun Suk’s gun on the back of his head.
“Don’t fire the gun! Don’t!” Lee begged. He would later testify: “He did not listen to me. He fired. Then I did not know anything.”
Lee lay unconscious for thirty minutes, but he survived the shooting when the bullet broke into fragments and merely fractured his skull, but did not penetrate his brain. When he eventually regained consciousness, the shooters were gone. He crawled to the back door of the club and called out for help. Someone from a nearby apartment called the police. Lee was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he remained for several weeks before being released into the Witness Protection Program.
Moments after Lee was wounded, Hun Suk ordered one of the other shooters, Siny Van Tran, to “kill, kill, kill that Wrinkled Skin Man!”
Young began pleading for his life.
“If you want money, if you want gold, I’ll give you all. Please don’t shoot!”
Tran froze. He looked first at Hun Suk hoping he would change his mind, or redirect the order to the third shooter, Nam The Tham. But while those two men were busy shooting the other victims, Tran whispered urgently and gestured to Young to run away.
Tran maintains that he was only at the club to buy cocaine, and that he didn’t shoot anyone. He claims he didn’t even have a gun. Two guns were found at the scene. Neither had his fingerprints on them. He also denied Young’s accusation that he spent most of the night going in and out of the club and was probably the one who notified the other shooters that he had found their target. Tham’s account differs. He claims Tran and Hun Suk were the shooters.
“It was very cruel,” Tham said in a police interview. “I saw them shoot. I couldn’t even stand steady.”
Tham also told investigators that not only was Dai Keung the intended target, but so too was Wrinkled Skin Man. That, of course, seems unlikely, considering Wrinkled Skin Man wasn’t even shot. Within a week of the shooting, murder warrants were issued for the arrest of the three gunmen identified by Lee. The mayor of Boston, Raymond Flynn, who had gone to the scene in time to see the body bags being taken out of the club, said, “We have to chase the guys responsible for this, even if we have to go to the ends of the earth.”
He may have been somewhat prescient, because they found the gunmen seven years later on the other side of the world. When Tham, Tran, and Hun Suk fled the scene, perhaps in the blue Toyota spotted by the Irishman, they drove straight to Atlantic City, where they gambled for days. Upon hearing that Lee had survived the shooting, Tham, Tran, and Hun Suk went to the Philadelphia International Airport and escaped to Hong Kong. There they stayed in the Chinese underworld until 1998, when Tran and Tham were arrested by the Chinese government for unrelated crimes, including drug possession. It took three more years to convince China to extradite them back to the United States.
The delicate negotiations looked to be falling apart until investigators caught a break in April of 2001. The FBI arrested one of China’s most wanted fugitives, Qin Hong, in New York. Hong was wanted in China for millions of dollars’ worth of fraud, a crime punishable by death. The United States deported him to Peru, which sent him back to China. Six months later, Tran and Tham were extradited back to Boston. They were arraigned on murder charges the day after Christmas 2001 in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston. In 2005, they were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Judge Stephen Neel emphasized the “particularly heinous” nature of the killings and ordered the five life sentences run consecutively without the possibility of parole. Tran laughed out loud as the sentence was read.
Among the credible theories to explain the motive behind the Tyler Street Massacre is that Sky Dragon reached out from Hong Kong and finally exacted his vengeance upon Dai Keung for the disrespect shown to him years earlier, and the others killed were collateral damage. The FBI certainly finds that plausible. Their intelligence indicates Sky Dragon fled to Hong Kong in January of 1989, but that he returned at least twice, once in May of that year, and again in October of 1990. Perhaps not coincidentally, his traveling companion for that second trip back to the United States was Hun Suk. Three months later, Hun Suk shot and killed Dai Keung.
Of further interest to investigators is that Hun Suk, Tran, and Tham all worked for Sky Dragon at one time or another. Now, Hun Suk may have been a loyal soldier under Sky Dragon, or he may have acted alone as he sought to exert power and control of Chinatown’s gambling dens. It wasn’t long after Sky Dragon had left Boston that Hun Suk put together a gang of nearly two hundred men who helped him control Chinatown’s westernmost edge along lower Washington Street. Police believe he paid Sky Dragon tribute money for the right to sell drugs, run gambling dens, and control a small prostitution ring.
Hun Suk and another crime boss, named Wayne Kwong, were vying for sole power of Chinatown, and their fiercest rival was Bai Ming. These were the heads of the three most active and powerful gangs in Boston in the early 1990s. Hun Suk appears to have been Sky Dragon’s choice to take over, but Hun Suk fled from authorities after the Tyler Street Massacre. So, with him out of the picture, only Wayne Kwong stood in Bai Ming’s way of achieving exclusive power in Chinatown.
I’VE BEEN TO a lot more funerals than birthday parties,” John Willis often repeats with a smile.
Surrounded by death, yet so full of life, John suddenly found himself feeling weak and lethargic, and he was urinating a lot. Instead of going to a doctor, he decided it was time for the first vacation of his life. He went to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to visit his uncle.
“I was riding my uncle’s horse, and people going by kept waving,” John recalls fondly. “I went back and told
