hand hit the ground, and then picked up the briefcase and ran. Later, he counted $40,000, and handed it over to a very pleased Uncle Seven.
“Yeah, I’ve seen guys get their hands chopped off,” John says flatly. “This guy, first of all, he’s involved in something he shouldn’t have been involved in. I said, maybe my hand will be chopped next. Maybe I should learn a lesson from that.”
On another occasion, John unknowingly went after a check-cashing business owned and operated by the Italian mafia. John got the money, but he was nearly killed in the attempt. While running down the street, John turned a corner and heard a loud shotgun blast. He looked back and saw a large hole in the wall next to him. That was his last check-cashing heist.
The first shots John ever fired from a gun were moments after he and his crew robbed an illegal sweatshop. He raced down the street with bullets whistling over his head, and while ducking and still running away, he reached back and fired wildly in the general direction of the shooters. Innocent bystanders could have been killed, but John was in survival mode.
“That really opened my eyes,” John says. “This was for real. That was the first real sense I got that if I didn’t shoot, I’d be dead.”
Wanting desperately to impress Uncle Seven, John did as he was told and a little more. For instance, he learned to speak Chinese. John practiced constantly with his best friend in the group, a young Asian man who went by Sam.
“You have to speak Chinese,” Sam told him. “How else will you get the girls?”
Sam began by teaching John one word at a time. Glass is “boi.” Table is “toi.” Door is “munh.” John wrote them all down on flash cards, unconcerned with proper spelling. He just needed to pronounce the words correctly. Listening to a lot of Chinese music and singing songs at karaoke clubs helped. Watching dozens of Chinese movies with subtitles helped more. His favorite movie was Moment of Romance, starring Andy Lau as a gangster who falls in love with a good girl. John still relates to it well.
“I have the soundtrack, and I listen to it,” he says. “It takes me back to when I was younger.”
In the beginning, John often spoke in broken Chinese, and he routinely spoke it backward, but he was happy to be understood and proud to be respected.
“It wasn’t me that taught myself Chinese,” John says humbly. “God taught me. He gave me what I needed to survive.”
John’s fluency in the language didn’t happen until he began living with the Laus, a Chinese couple, in Queens. They taught him to speak fluent Chinese with an authentic Toi Son accent, and they instilled in John the importance of Buddhism as part of his new Chinese culture. John soaked it all in, and he had no trouble reconciling the life lessons he learned and the actual life he was leading.
“Before I did anything, I prayed,” John says.
While he was living with Jackie Lau, who, along with his brother Peter Lau, owned businesses in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Queens, John settled into place as an enforcer and a bodyguard. It was another opportunity for him to see firsthand how Chinese leaders ran their operations. The very fact that he was living with his boss told him that in this insular world people took care of their own. And John, in turn, would take care of them.
As their armed bodyguard, John traveled with Jackie and Peter all over the country as they tended to a variety of business interests. John enjoyed visiting new cities, but he especially loved the fast-paced energy of New York. Being with the Lau brothers gave John a special status and certain privileges. He was with them when they frequented an underground club at the Hollywood Bowl on Woodhaven Boulevard where high-priced escorts flirted in sexy outfits.
The first time John went to the club, he entered nervously. He was concerned that the off-duty police officers guarding the door would take his gun from him when the alarm went off on the metal detectors, but the cops just waved him through. Once inside, John still had a job to do, so he didn’t drink or pick up women, but he beamed with pride as he looked around and realized that he had made it. He fit in at a place filled with rich and powerful people. He was a little over two years removed from starving on his kitchen floor, and now he had more money than he knew what to do with. John’s primary job was to collect protection money from neighborhood stores, but he made most of his money robbing the gambling dens. He and his crew even robbed the cooks at restaurants on payday for what little money those men had. John also got involved with running drugs, and eventually, selling them himself.
He also learned the fine art of a specific form of extortion known as Wat Yan. It was a simple process of letting rich Asian college students or foreign businessmen get drunk enough to start shooting their mouths off. Once they realized they had insulted the wrong people, they paid whatever it took to escape the consequences.
One night when a few of the other men who lived at Jackie’s house in Queens got into a fight, a New York City SWAT team showed up and stormed the house with guns drawn. Shots were fired and one of Jackie’s men was killed. Jackie was arrested along with his brother Peter who had pulled a gun on the cops and threatened them. One of the very few Asian police officers on the force was able to calm everyone down and avoid further bloodshed. John was not arrested, so it was his responsibility to collect the funds necessary to bail out everyone else. It was part of the code.
“We follow a set of rules,” John explains. “If you’re my brother, that means something. You stick together. God forbid, you get arrested and your bail is twenty thousand dollars. Well, we’re all running around with big, thick, gold bracelets on that are worth eight to ten thousand bucks. You take them off. You trade them in to get the money, and you get your brother out. No thoughts. No nothing. You do it.”
But rules come with consequences, and in John’s Chinese family, the consequences were often severe. One of John’s gang brothers named Tony had escalated the fight at the house that resulted in the SWAT team raid. Tony wasn’t killed for his unintended mistake, but he did have his legs broken. John brought Tony to Chinatown where two other men enforced the order. Tony understood.
John also understood that gang violence and retaliation were simply the result of those gangs playing by the rules. So, when a disc jockey working at Jackie and Peter’s waterfront nightclub was shot in the head and killed in October of 1990, John understood it was a proper response to the BTK shooting at the funeral three months earlier. After all, the DJ was a member of Ghost Shadows. And John wasn’t surprised when one week after the DJ’s murder, three members of BTK were killed execution style right out in front of the Lau’s club.
After his nearly two years of residency-like training was completed in New York, John moved back to Boston’s Chinatown. He quickly learned that the FBI was watching him closely. It was the early fall of 1990, and John was walking down Beach Street in Chinatown when he noticed a dark car driving slowly by him. When the car went by for the third time, John jumped in front of the car, forcing it to stop. John slammed both his palms down onto the hood. The passenger in the front seat of the vehicle rolled down his window and called out to John.
“Uncle Seven’s dead!”
The man spoke unemotionally and John, despite learning someone he greatly respected had died, reacted the same way. He walked over to the passenger side of the car where the man identified himself as an FBI agent and showed John his badge.
“Why you telling me?” John asked. “I don’t know anybody named Uncle Seven.”
“No?” the agent asked, surprised. “Ever been to New York?”
“Nope.
