ambiguities that might have shown weakness or caused him to hesitate. He didn’t judge them except to respect them, and that’s what they were looking for in a recruit.
Each morning, there was a meeting at a restaurant called Dong Kahn, where several leaders of a local Asian gang comprised of Chinese and Vietnamese men discussed their gambling and drug business. The gambling was done inside Chinatown. The drugs were sold outside Chinatown. John was quickly passed off to another young Chinese man they called Eric. John lived with Eric and adopted the role of enforcer when it came time to collect gambling debts or drug money. John went from being a poor white kid to being a Chinese gangster literally overnight. It was an odd transformation, but one John adapted to very quickly. He loved learning about the Chinese culture, but he was actually being exposed to a mutated philosophy that exists only in the Asian underworld. While his gang leaders talked about and demanded respect, they routinely intimidated, extorted, and stole under a flag of self-righteousness that inexplicably satisfied a warped rationale for their violence and criminality.
“You might say, ‘Normal people don’t kill people,’” John begins. “Well, we were not normal people. Normal people don’t deal with the things we deal with. We dealt with the street, but we dealt with it in a way that was, in our eyes, correct, you know? And that’s just the way it goes.”
It was all starting to make sense to John. A series of events and self-realizations answered the questions he had asked when he was cold and alone. When he faced danger or imposed pain on another human being without fear of consequences or reciprocity, and without so much as his pulse rising, he knew he was born for this. The extreme violence he was exposed to never shocked him or triggered a flight response. Rather, he found it suited his personality.
“I remember walking into a strip club in Chinatown, and I got jumped by some Italian gangsters,” John recalls. “It was over a stripper who didn’t make a difference to me. I didn’t even know her real name. Well, some guy sucker punched me in the face. Broke my nose. And then another guy pulled out a big knife and went to stab me. As he pulls the knife out, the other guys grabbed me. So the kid I was with pulls out a Mac-10 machine gun. Thank God!”
John was seventeen years old when that happened. No shots were fired, but the appearance of the machine gun served as a warning. John casually walked to the bar with his friend, got some ice for his nose, ordered a drink, and stayed to watch the stripper who was at the heart of the altercation. Overall, it was a pretty good night.
After joining the gang, John spent about a year and a half in Boston’s Chinatown working as muscle. His job was to be the imposing figure that stood by quietly while the Chinese and Vietnamese gang kids collected money from the gambling dens for their bosses. John’s impact was significant, and it was rewarded with an opportunity to rise through the ranks. As if he were a legitimate businessman, he was transferred to New York, where he would receive additional training.
In order to reach his new home, John and a couple of Vietnamese gang kids stole two cars and drove to New York’s Chinatown. As they parked along Canal Street and observed the mingling of merchants, customers, and tourists, the three teenage boys had no way of knowing they were in the middle of a war zone.
The opposing gang factions typically operated peacefully within their own zones of power and influence. The borders were well defined. Certain streets belonged to certain gangs. But well-established gangs like the Flying Dragons and Ghost Shadows were being threatened by extremely violent upstart gangs like the Green Dragons, and especially the Canal Boys, who preferred to be called Born To Kill, or BTK.
John was seventeen when he arrived in New York in 1988. By then, the Green Dragons were well on their way to taking over Queens, and a Vietnamese emigrant known as David Thai had broken away from the Flying Dragons and organized BTK. He gathered nearly one hundred Vietnamese refugees, spiked their hair, and dressed them in black suits with dark sunglasses. Together they terrorized merchants and shopkeepers throughout Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens with a rash of robberies, extortion, and extreme violence.
BTK solidified its reputation for using extreme measures in 1988 when its members threw a bomb into a police cruiser, injuring two officers. It was Thai’s way of letting police know that he didn’t appreciate several merchants under his control being arrested for selling fake Rolex watches. The brazen attack also served notice to police that BTK was at the forefront of Chinatown’s growing phenomenon and incipient problem. There was an influx of unpredictable and uncontrollable Vietnamese gangs. And John moved right into the middle of it. Canal Street was the central place of operation for BTK, and John’s first New York apartment was above a gambling den at 74 Canal Street.
This was the BTK’s territory, but Thai was wise enough to work with instead of against the Hip Sing Association, one of the most powerful tongs in Chinatown. The tongs were secret brotherhoods and, like gangs, were powerful and often involved in criminal activity. Hip Sing was run by Benny Ong, known to law enforcement as the godfather of Chinatown, but known to everyone else as Uncle Seven, a nickname he received because he was the seventh child in his family. Uncle Seven had served seventeen years in prison for murder. He was convicted in 1937, when he was thirty years old, but whispers throughout Chinatown perpetuated a belief that Uncle Seven never committed the murder, but instead had taken the rap for someone more important within the organization. That kind of loyalty made him a hero in Chinatown, and a hero to John. David Thai decided it was wiser to make friends with an eighty-one-year-old legend than to go to war with him.
“Those Canal Boys, BTK, were friends with my boss,” John says, referring to Uncle Seven. “Those guys ran around the country just killing and doing whatever they wanted to.”
That, of course, created a number of enemies for BTK, and that led to the murder of Vinh Vu, an underboss in the gang and one of its most popular members. Vu’s high profile made him an attractive target. So, on July 25, 1990, when Vu exited a massage parlor on Canal Street he was gunned down by several gunmen firing from the front- and backseat of a car. Three days later, Vu’s funeral was disrupted at the cemetery when three gunmen opened fire on the mourners. Seven people were wounded.
“I was around when all this stuff happened,” John says. “These guys were like my people, but these guys were renegades. They were crazy. They didn’t follow the rules of the Chinese, because the majority of them were Vietnamese. When I grew up, there was a sense of loyalty to everybody. Like, we didn’t just go out and cause problems. If you had an issue you had to talk to your boss to see what you could do. You didn’t want to overstep your boundaries. There was honor. There was a sense of family.”
Surrounded by the violence but not an active participant in the war, John went about the business of learning his trade. He watched how Uncle Seven conducted his business with a comforting presence and a firm hand. Although he walked with a cane, Uncle Seven seemed to glide through Chinatown with a dignified grace that accurately reflected his stature, but also belied his potential for cruelty. John thought about the time Uncle Seven served in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and he was inspired by the amount of respect Uncle Seven must have had for the real murderer. It saddened John to see that kind of respect disregarded by the next generation.
“I sit here in prison today,” John says. “I could’ve told on people for murders and different things. But I’d rather take it and have my face, you know what I mean? People who put me in this position, the ones who ratted me out, there’s always a time where people will have to pay the piper, one way or the other.”
For gamblers who failed to pay, extorted merchants who complained, and robbery victims who dared to resist, the penalties were dramatic displays of force. John, who only needed a menacing glare or his fists to get people to hand over their money, was shocked the first time he and a few other gang members cased a check-cashing store. The men who delivered the cash to these stores were easy to spot. They were the ones with briefcases handcuffed to their
