Born to Kill (24 page)

Sen Van Ta and his Chinese wife, Ying Jing Gan, not long after they were reunited in New York City

Sen Van Ta lies sprawled on the floor of a Chinatown store after beign executed by the Born to Kill gang

The triggerman, Lan Ngoc Tran

A surveillance photo of confidential informant Tinh Ngo
(left)
meeting on Canal Street with Lan Tran to discuss an upcoming robbery

The team of lawmen that helped put away David Thai and other key BTK gang members.
Above (left to right and below)
: Detective Bill Oldham, Special Agent Don Tisdale, Special Agent Dan Kumor and Assistant U.S. Attorney Alan Vinegrad
ANTHONY LOEW

Sen Van Ta bent down to put some merchandise away. As he began to straighten up, he turned his head slightly.

Suddenly, the customer pulled out a gun. Young Vinh Tran's eyes opened wide with astonishment as he watched the man put the gun to his uncle's left temple and pull the trigger.

The gunshot reverberated throughout the small clothing store. Sen Van Ta's face contorted as the single bullet penetrated his skull, pierced through the left and right temporal lobes of his brain and exploded out the other side of his head, behind the right ear. Uncle Lan, the assassin, had turned and was out the door before the body even hit the ground.

Standing outside the store, Ying Jing Gan heard a loud
pop!
that sounded like a firecracker. When she looked up, a man was hurrying out of the store. He was about five feet two, reedy thin, and Gan would later remember that he had a yellow streak through his otherwise jet-black hair. He turned to his left and quickly headed north on Broadway.

Ying Jing Gan hurried into Golden Trading Discount just as her husband's body was falling to the floor. She saw blood—more blood than she had ever seen in one place in her whole life—gushing from Ta's head. Her young nephew, terrified, had ducked behind the cash register.

Gan felt her entire chest contract violently, as if she herself had been shot through the heart. A sickening wave of nausea engulfed her entire being; her head throbbed and her hands began to flutter uncontrollably. “
Noooooooooo!
” she cried out, her anguished wail bouncing from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, and out into the street.

Her legs ceased functioning; Gan fell to her knees and struggled to gather her husband in her arms. On the floor around Sen Van Ta's limp body was an expanding pool of blood—blood the color of
nuac mam
, the dark, amber fish sauce used like soy as a flavoring for traditional Vietnamese foods. Gan wrapped her arms around her husband's body and began to sob hysterically. The blood on her hands turned a deep, shiny black. She could feel the life seeping from her husband's body.

Two blocks away, on Walker Street, Kenny Vu was still sitting in the backseat of the taxi. He waited nervously. After nearly twenty minutes, Lan Tran had still not returned.

Kenny heard police sirens approaching. He saw an ambulance tearing down Canal Street toward Broadway.
Motherfuck!
he mumbled to himself.
Did Uncle Lan complete the job or had something bad happened to him?
With police closing in from all directions, Kenny didn't feel like waiting around to find out.

“I think we go back to Brooklyn now,” he told the driver.

An hour after Kenny got back, Lan Tran showed up at the safe house on Forty-fifth Street. “Man, where you go?” Kenny asked him.

Uncle Lan shrugged. “After I do the job, I don't want to cross Canal Street. So I go to Delancey Street and get rid of the gun.” From a pay phone, Lan Tran had then called David Thai to let him know that the problem with the store owner on Canal Street had been resolved—execution style.

At the same time Uncle Lan was calling
Anh hai
, a small crowd of Chinatown residents and passersby gathered on the sidewalk in front of Golden Trading Discount. The familiar yellow crime-scene tape had been stretched across the front of the store. Twirling police and ambulance lights cast an eerie, flickering glow on the street and surrounding buildings.

Inside, medics checked Sen Van Ta's vital signs as Ying Jing Gan was led to the rear of the store, where she stood with Ta's sister and nephew, and a few cops. Her face was streaked with tears, her clothing soaked with blood. She felt as if her baby were moving around inside her womb, and asked if someone could find her a chair.

Around 7:20
P.M
., fifteen minutes after the shooting occurred, one of the doctors approached to tell Gan what she already knew to be true.

Her husband, Sen Van Ta, no longer existed in this world.

A cold rain swept down on the streets of Chinatown, and it didn't let up for days. The gutters backed up and the street corners began to look like small reservoirs, with puddles of dirty rainwater spraying the street peddlers whenever buses or trucks chugged by. Business dropped off. Darkness fell early. The entire community succumbed to a cloudy, bone-chilling melancholy.

The weather was the least of it. The killing of Sen Van Ta had struck like a dagger rammed deep into the soul of Chinatown. Still, most
of the community's residents could not say they were surprised. This was the way the gangs operated. This was the way they had always operated.

On top of everything else, Ta's death reaffirmed an age-old truism in Chinatown: Never, under any circumstances, should an Oriental put his or her faith in the police.

Most merchants and shop owners on Canal Street had been well aware of Ta's dispute with the BTK, but not all were sympathetic. For years, they had studiously avoided confrontations with the gangs by paying whatever was demanded of them. Ta, they felt, was a hothead who had put all their lives in danger by incurring the gang's wrath.

Others secretly admired Ta for standing up to the dreaded BTK. But even these people had been skeptical that anything good could come of cooperating with
low faan
.

The police simply did not understand the true nature of crime in Chinatown, they felt. Take extortion. If a local merchant reported an extortionate act to the police, the cops rarely took it seriously. To them, the amount of money involved—sometimes as little as ten or twenty dollars—was laughable. But merchants in Chinatown knew that the act of extortion was not just about money. Extortion was also about establishing territory, instilling fear, and negotiating the often tricky issue of face.

Studies conducted by community groups showed that the overwhelming majority of merchants doing business in Chinatown—somewhere around ninety percent—paid some form of extortion. Cops in the local precinct sometimes pointed to this fact as an example of how merchants supported and even encouraged gang activity in their areas.

The idea that the police or anyone else might draw a conclusion like this was, to the people of Chinatown, a good example of how non-Asians had come to be called
low faan
in the first place. Fact was, most merchants were not anxious to pay extortion. They paid because they felt they had no choice. They paid because they did not want to wind up like Sen Van Ta.

Ying Jing Gan certainly felt that the extortion demands and other threats made against her husband were not taken seriously enough by the NYPD. The horror of holding a dying Sen Van Ta in her arms would never go away, though her feelings of shock eventually turned to anger.
As far as she knew, the police had never offered to protect her husband, even though they were the ones who had coerced him into making the public identification of LV Hong, the new Canal Street
dai low
. In effect, with that identification Ta had signed his death warrant.

With the help of a passionate young Chinatown attorney named Shiauh-Wei Lin, Ying Jing Gan filed a lawsuit against the NYPD claiming that her husband's death was a direct result of negligence. In response, members of the NYPD claimed in sworn affidavits that they had offered Ta protection, and he turned them down. If so, that revealed an even more saddening fact about life in Chinatown.

Sen Van Ta knew that if he had consented to police protection, he would have been further implicating himself as the person cooperating with the cops. He also knew that the police could not protect him all the time. The gang, on the other hand, was composed of people from the community who could monitor his whereabouts day and night, striking whenever the time was right. It could be a week from now, it could be a year from now.

That was the reality of life in Chinatown: If Sen Van Ta had consented to police protection, he was submitting himself and his wife to a greater degree of danger than if he simply went without.

To the handful of federal agents and cops who were in the process of inaugurating an investigation into the BTK, news of Sen Van Ta's murder hit like a mean, well-placed kick in the groin. Immersed in the process of debriefing their C.I., they had been a few steps removed from Sen Van Ta and his predicament. Now, they were going to have to deal with the consequences of Ta's murder. They were going to have to deal with the intractable fear it was sure to instill in the people of Chinatown—people whose cooperation these investigators were going to need if they hoped to build a case against the BTK.

The best course of action, the agents and cops agreed, was to get Tinh Ngo back on the street as quickly as possible.

On March 13, 1991, three days after Lan Tran silenced Sen Van Ta with a bullet through his brain, Tinh Ngo signed a four-page agreement with the King's County District Attorney's Office. He pleaded guilty to robbery charges, but it was unlikely he would serve time if all went well. His bail, which had been set at $5,000, was waived. In
exchange, he agreed to solicit information on the criminal activities of the BTK, which he would then pass on to the authorities.

That afternoon, Tinh was released from custody at the Brooklyn courthouse. Detectives Bill Oldham and Alex Sabo drove Tinh to a motel near La Guardia Airport, in Queens. Oldham handed Tinh $75 in spending money. “Remember what I told you,” he cautioned Tinh.

Although the cops were impressed with their young informant so far, it was their natural instinct to think that maybe he was playing them for fools. Oldham had warned Tinh that if he tried to run away after they'd stuck their necks out for him, the NYPD would make his life miserable. Indulging in a bit of standard cop hyperbole, Oldham had told Tinh, “We could get you killed if we wanted to.”

Tinh was seated in the back of the unmarked police sedan. The two detectives were in the front, and they were both turned around facing him.

“You don't have to worry,” Tinh assured them. “What I say I going to do, that's what I do. I won't run away.”

“Good,” answered Oldham. “Glad to hear it.”

Tinh got out of the car.

Just in case, the two detectives waited and watched as Tinh entered the front door of the motel and checked himself into his room.

All that night, Tinh did what he had been doing a lot of lately: He lay in bed with his eyes wide open, trying to make sense of what he'd gotten himself into.