Born to Kill (38 page)

“When I beep you, bring these guys over to do the job. But drop them off a few blocks from the restaurant, on Centre Street, where we'll be waiting. We'll stop them on the street before they get to Pho Bang.” That way, Kumor figured, he and Oldham could arrest the bombers without implicating Tinh.

“I don't know,” Tinh answered, a trace of uneasiness in his voice. “They ready to go now. I don't think I can delay much longer.”

“Just do what you can,” replied Kumor.

The investigators dropped Tinh off a few blocks from the apartment in Sunset Park and headed for Chinatown. On the way, they stopped at a pay phone. Kumor called Tisdale at ATF headquarters and told him to meet them in front of E-5 Communications, the beeper store on Centre Street where the BTK maintained an open tab.

By the time Kumor and Oldham arrived in the area, it was around 9:00
P.M
. Dusk had settled and automobile traffic was sparse. But the streets were still alive with pedestrians, many of whom had come to Chinatown to eat dinner, some probably at Pho Bang.

Oldham double-parked on Centre Street. Kumor got out of the car and ambled toward a pay phone. With Tinh not due to arrive in Chinatown until he was summoned, Kumor figured he had plenty of time.

The agent kicked an empty beer can out of the way and was about to drop in a quarter when he spotted a car parked down the block that
he immediately recognized as the BTK's green Buick. His heart sank.

Kumor dropped the phone receiver and walked toward the car. There were two people in the front seat. As he got closer, he recognized the passenger as gang member Lam Truong. Tinh was in the driver's seat. The two young bombers were nowhere in sight. For a brief second, Kumor's and Tinh's eyes met. Tinh looked slightly panicked and seemed to nod his head in the direction of Pho Bang.

Holy shit!
thought Kumor. He raced back to the ATF car and shouted through the open window on the driver's side, “Hey, Bill, Tinh's here already! He dropped the bombers off!”

Oldham snapped into action. “We better get over there,” he warned, starting the car and gunning the engine.

Kumor had already disappeared down the block, running as fast as he could in the direction of the Pho Bang restaurant.

Chapter 15

R
acing east along Hester Street, a typically narrow downtown lane lined with parked cars, Kumor dodged pedestrians and garbage bins overflowing with debris. His legs and arms churning, he sped past produce markets, an Italian-American social club, a Catholic church. He darted out into the middle of one intersection, narrowly missing oncoming traffic. Horns honked and motorists shouted obscenities.

Goddamnit
, Kumor mumbled to himself,
you went too far this time. You finally pushed it too damn far
.

Throughout the investigation, he, Oldham, and the others had been cognizant of the risks. Trying to halt BTK crimes was essentially a high-stakes game of chicken. Each time they successfully thwarted one of the gang's schemes, the dangers intensified. In a way, this was precisely what made the investigation so unusual and exciting to Kumor. In his seven-year career in law enforcement, he'd never been involved in a case even remotely like it, where his duties as a
lawman were so inexorably tied into the day-to-day operations of a violent criminal enterprise.

So far, the investigators had met each challenge with a good deal of ingenuity, stopping each crime as it was about to unfold. This time, Kumor was afraid they'd miscalculated. This time, maybe they were finally about to get burned.

The Pho Bang restaurant was three long city blocks from Centre Street, where Kumor had spotted Tinh Ngo
without
the two bombers. As he dashed across Mulberry Street, Kumor almost collided with a woman pushing a baby carriage. He could see pedestrians looking at him like he was a crazy person. So be it. He juked and jived and kept on moving, listening for a sound he did not want to hear, a loud, echoing
ka-booooooooom!
coming from the direction of the restaurant. At Mott Street, Kumor slowed and made a sharp right.

Pho Bang was nestled in the middle of the block, on the ground floor of a classic turn-of-the-century tenement. Underneath a cast-iron fire escape, a large, garish sign proclaimed the restaurant's name in Chinese, Vietnamese, and English. The block was thick with pedestrians. Old ladies waddled along with bags of groceries. Apartment dwellers walked their dogs. A number of old men were lounging in front of a bakery next door to Pho Bang.

By the time Kumor got to the restaurant, he was sucking wind. He stopped and scanned the area.

Tinh had given him a description of the two young bombers; one was fifteen, the other sixteen. There were a number of teenagers walking by, but none who seemed to fit Tinh's description. Had they already come and gone? Scenes flashed through Kumor's mind of a bomb going off inside the restaurant, sending glass and debris flying out into the street, injuring him and dozens of innocent bystanders.

Night had fallen on Mott Street. Kumor squinted, his eyes adjusting to the streetlights and neon signs, as he looked frantically for the two young bombers. He started slowly down the block past Pho Bang toward Canal Street, thinking perhaps he would catch them coming from that direction. His gaze was fixed so firmly in the distance that he almost missed the two young Vietnamese males as they briskly walked right past him.

Kumor spun around and pulled his ATF shield out from under his
shirt, letting it dangle on the chain around his neck. Less than twenty feet from the entrance to Pho Bang, he accosted the two young bombers from behind, shouting, “Hey, up against the wall! Now!”

Whipping out his government-issue 9mm from a hip holster underneath his shirt, Kumor pushed them up against the facade of a Chinese restaurant. One of the bombers was holding a plastic shopping bag, which Kumor quickly grabbed. He peeked inside and spotted the homemade bomb; it was in a glass jar about ten inches long and five inches thick, crudely wrapped in duct tape, with a five-inch fuse.

One of the kids had a lit cigarette in his mouth, presumably to light the fuse. He had a baby face, with thick black hair parted in the middle, and was wearing a T-shirt with
Terminator 2
, the title of the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger opus, emblazoned across the front.

“You know why I'm stopping you guys?” Kumor asked the pair, who were facing the wall with their legs spread wide.

“No,” they both mumbled.

Kumor grabbed the cigarette from the mouth of Terminator 2, threw it on the pavement, and stamped it out. “Yeah, you know,” Kumor growled at him. “You're wanted, aren't you? There's a fucking warrant out on you.”

The kid responded indignantly, “Nah, I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Well, I'm gonna find out who you are because I think there's a warrant out.” Then Kumor addressed the other bomber. “And you, I don't know who you are. But you're with him, so I'm gonna have to take you in too.”

By now, Detective Oldham had pulled up to the curb, hopped out, and was standing alongside Kumor. A small crowd of onlookers gathered, curious about what was going down on this mild summer evening. Oldham and Kumor handcuffed both teenagers, loaded them into the backseat of Oldham's car, and drove them three short blocks to the Fifth Precinct.

In an interrogation room, the two pubescent gangsters stonewalled, claiming they didn't know it was a bomb they'd been carrying in their shopping bag. They were charged with possession of explosives.

By the following afternoon, the investigators had learned most of
what they needed to know about the attempted bombing. The NYPD's Bomb Squad examined the bomb—a powerful M-1,000 explosive packed inside a glass jar—and determined it was the same sort of device that had blasted the restaurant next door to Pho Bang one week earlier. That bomb, Kumor learned later through Tinh Ngo, had actually been intended for Pho Bang. The assignment was given to two young gang members who mistakenly threw the bomb into the wrong restaurant!

Furthermore, the investigators were able to piece together a motive. David Thai told Tinh Ngo that he was being paid $10,000 by another person to bomb Pho Bang—a claim neither Tinh nor the investigators believed. A more likely motivating factor was an avowed reluctance on the part of the restaurant's owner to continue making extortion payments. Not only that, but a recent article on gang violence in
The New York Times
had quoted Tang Hai—described as “the operator of the Pho Bang restaurant on Mott Street”—criticizing the BTK. “It is very easy to tell them apart [from members of other gangs],” noted Tang Hai.

Hai's comment, in and of itself, wasn't much of an insult. But coming in the middle of an article that singled out the BTK as the area's most universally disliked gang, it was noteworthy.

According to the unwritten rules known and adhered to by most merchants in Chinatown, those associated with Pho Bang had committed at least two major mistakes.

One, they were quoted in print criticizing a Chinatown gang.

Two—an inexplicable and even more perilous faux pas—they had allowed themselves to be quoted
by name
.

Late on the night of the foiled bombing attempt, Dan Kumor drove home to his apartment in suburban New Jersey, popped open a beer, and put his feet up. After the first satisfying sip, he let loose a steady, sustained sigh of relief.

All the way home, through the Holland Tunnel and on the Jersey Turnpike, Kumor had replayed the incident in his head. Along with the potent M-1,000, David Thai's homemade bomb had been tightly packed with tacks, screws, and nails—shrapnel that would have sprayed the
entire restaurant had the device exploded. Pho Bang was a popular spot. Employees from the nearby government buildings ate there. Innocent tourists. Women and children.

Visions of mayhem and carnage haunted Kumor's dreams that night. By the next morning he'd reached a conclusion.

“We've accumulated mounds of evidence,” he told Oldham and the other investigators in a meeting at ATF headquarters. “We've got Timmy. I'm sure we can flip a few more of these guys. Give me one good reason we shouldn't dump the whole thing in Vinegrad's lap right now, get warrants, and make the arrests.”

The investigators looked at one another. When he thought about it, even Kumor knew the response to that challenge. It could be summed up in two words:

The Italians.

The possibility that David Thai and his BTK brothers were about to attempt a major robbery with some Mafia wiseguys was just too good to pass up. Ever since Kumor and his fellow ATF agents had begun working the “emerging crime groups” beat in the late 1980s, it had been apparent that most of the new gangs preferred to work in isolation. If they did branch out, it was usually to groups of similar ethnicity. A Dominican gang might do business with a Puerto Rican, Panamanian, or Colombian organization. A Jamaican posse might do business with an African American gang. But never had anyone imagined, much less seen, a group of young Vietnamese gangsters join hands with Italian-American
mafiosi
.

For decades, Canal Street had existed as an unofficial borderline between Chinatown and Little Italy. Even though these two communities, among the oldest in New York City, were located side by side, their inhabitants rarely intermingled. It wasn't due to any overt hostility. The gulf between the two neighborhoods was simply a reflection of the broad cultural differences between Southern European Catholics and East Asians, most of whom were Chinese and Buddhist.

In the 1980s, as Chinatown's population grew and the neighborhood's boundaries expanded well north of Canal Street, Little Italy became diluted. As this transformation occurred, local cops sometimes speculated about a possible alliance between the two oldest and largest criminal organizations in the history of New York: the Mafia and the
Asian underworld. It was unlikely that David Thai had anything quite so grandiose in mind. Still, the possibilities were too intriguing to ignore.

The day after the failed bombing attempt, Kumor had Tinh Ngo put in a call to David Thai from ATF headquarters. With the microphone from his tape recorder affixed to the mouthpiece, Tinh explained to
Anh hai
that last night's bombing had been “unsuccessful.”

Once again, Thai cursed his bad luck, blaming the two young bombers. “They were told to go individually,” he complained. “They go together, they get arrested.”

“What do you want to do,
Anh hai?
” Tinh asked.

“Huh?”

“What action are you going to take?”

David Thai sighed—the sound of a beleaguered gang boss stoically shouldering the burdens of his less talented brethren. “Now, we must wait to see what will happen. That's all.”

Tinh changed the subject. “
Anh
hai
, what about the situation tomorrow?”

“About tomorrow?” Thai repeated the question absently, his mind still mulling over the enormity of his responsibilities as the “oldest and wisest brother.”

“Yeah. Tomorrow,” repeated Tinh.

Anh hai
finally snapped into focus. “Yes, yes. Tomorrow is on. Ten o'clock. I'm coming over to pick you up.”

“You'll be over here at ten?” Tinh asked, as if he were calling from the Sunset Park safe-house apartment.

“Yes. If anything comes up, I'll get in contact with you later. If I beep you, answer me right away. Understand?”

Tinh could tell from the tone of David Thai's voice that these were serious plans for a major robbery. “Yes,
Anh hai
. I understand.”

After Tinh hung up, Kumor and the other investigators went over their options. They were in a familiar predicament. Once again, they knew of a major BTK crime that was about to go down. But once again, David Thai was revealing little, leading his gang brothers into the robbery while divulging only what they needed to know to move them from one stage to the next.