Born To Kill: The Vietnamese Refugee Gang that Terrorized the US
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July 28th, 1990. Somewhere out in the swamps of Jersey. Linden, actually, at the Rosedale Cemetery. The scene is like something out of a John Woo movie or a Hong Kong action flick. A bunch of tough-looking Vietnamese teenagers, all dressed in black linen pants, black linen jackets, and a white shirt with black shades, with wild spiky haircuts and visible tattoos, are there to watch a coffin get lowered into the ground.

The man being buried is Vinh Vu, a much-beloved lieutenant in the upstart Vietnamese street gang known as Born to Kill that's been running wild all over New York City's Chinatown and terrorizing Asian immigrant communities all over the country. Vu's the second in command, nicknamed Amigo because everyone got along with him. He was only 21 years old and got popped a few nights earlier leaving a massage parlor the gang ran in Chinatown.

His murder is a message from the more established organized crime in Manhattan's Chinatown, the age-old Tongs and their street-level enforcer gangs like the Ghost Shadows. BTK has been breaking all the rules, robbing gambling dens and extorting shops under the other gangs' protection, killing people in broad daylight, messing up the natural order of things. The others had had enough of BTK. This was how they delivered the message. But BTK has got a message of their own.

Hours before, they had paraded through New York City's Chinatown with a coffin, carrying big banners bearing Vu's name and the name of the gang and their logo. Three candles over a coffin, till death. They did it through Ghost Shadows territory, as if to tell them they wouldn't be cowed. Apparently this was normal back then, just these big gang funerals parading all over Chinatown. The day isn't over yet though, and there's one more message that's going to be sent.

Back at the funeral, the members of BTK start doing the Vietnamese custom, burning some of the deceased's belongings, his clothes actually, so he has something to wear in heaven. Just then, three other funeral growers dressed like the other gang members, young Asian men, walk towards everyone. They're holding flowers, but in a split second, they drop them, revealing guns, and start firing into the crowd.

The Born to Kill guys, some of them pull out their own guns and start firing back. It's a full-on shootout in the cemetery. Bullets are hitting gravestones, people are ducking for cover. When all is said and done, seven people end up shot, but somehow, crazily enough, no one gets killed. The story makes national news, though, and Born to Kill ends up being public enemy number one.

But it's just one more chaotic violence scene in the rise and fall of one of America's most notorious Asian street gangs. A bunch of Vietnamese refugee orphan kids who decided they weren't going to play by any underworld rules, but those set by David Tai. This is The Underworld Podcast. Welcome back, everyone. Happy New Year. I am Danny Gold. With me, as always, is Sean Williams. We are two journalists who have reported all over the world, and now we tell you stories about international organized crime in podcast form.

It is a new year. It's definitely not a new me. Everything's terrible. Support the patreon.com slash underworld podcast so I can buy myself nice things because our network isn't coming through with a check and we need funds to hire these Romanian guys I know from Gravesend to pay their office a visit. Sean, how are you? You know, Romanian guys in Kent now like I'm going to Greece. What's Kent? Gravesend. There's a Gravesend in New York.

In Brooklyn, dude. Oh man, that's where Pocahontas is buried in Kent. I don't even, I don't know what you're talking about, but anything else important? Anything, anything we got to talk about? No, I don't know what we got to talk about. I don't know. I'm firing out pitches like no one's business. Uh, there's the darts championship tonight. That's about all I've got for you. I got fat. That's, that's basically it. I got fat. I got Corona, but we're here now and we've got a new episode. We're going to get going.

Today's episode, Born to Kill, I mean, it's a really good one. I feel like a lot of people actually asked for us to do this one. And it's one I wanted to do as sort of this weird Chinatown series I feel like I've accidentally stepped into. But the episode itself, it's heavily based on the work of TJ English, whose books I think we've learned, we've used a lot before. This book is Born to Kill. And a few chapters from the new ethnic mobs by William Kleinschmidt, who's another great crime reporter from days gone by. Yeah, and the name Born to Kill, I mean, I feel like these guys...

they're not going to be running low key numbers out of a nice old boys pub or something, right? No, they were, they're, they're pretty out of control, but it's kind of crazy too, because they have this, and I'll talk about this. They have this insane, you know, um, reputation, but when it really comes down to it, they were only around in, in this, you know, really powerful form for a couple years, but they were just so chaotic that, uh, that,

that the legend kind of, kind of stood, you know, but anyway, quick background on Chinatown in New York city and organized crime there. If you want to go back to our white devil, John episode, which I think was like episode eight or the Chinatown gang wars episode. I think it was like 10 back. This is going to be, yeah, this is going to be majorly abbreviated. So I'm not repeating myself a lot, but those will give you a lot more background in case you want more of the history. So anyway,

We have major Chinese immigration to the U.S. in the 19th century. You know, obviously lots of racism directed towards them. Chinatowns form in cities like San Francisco, Boston, New York. And in the midst of these exclusionary immigration laws, the Chinatowns develop their own underworlds. Gambling, prostitution, drugs, opium, obviously. And these sort of civic organizations slash organized crime businessmen groups form in

what's known as the Tongs, which are connected to the centuries-old triad organized crime secret societies organizations in China and Hong Kong. Beginning at the end of the 19th century into the 1930s, these Tongs fight wars all over the country over control of the vice rackets.

New York's Tong wars were mainly fought between the two most powerful ones, the hip sing and the only on, and they were 30 years of just crazy Chinatown alleyway killings, especially when the infamous mock duck showed up and took control of the hip sing.

And that's how the Tongs essentially came up, right? Now, by the 1930s, things had really calmed down, and the Chinatown leaders do this massive about-face and try to give the neighborhood a new image in the eyes of the world. You know, more tourist-related, no more gang killings, drugs, and hookers, at least not in the open, right? Now it's businessmen, law-abiding, non-troublesome, upstanding people. And it was, mostly. I mean, even while the gangs were running around, it was mostly that. And the other stuff was sort of unprofessional.

under the radar. There weren't a lot of immigrants coming in, but that changes in 1965. The immigration laws targeting the Chinese are repealed and there's a whole new influx of Chinese immigrants. 1965. That's crazy. I mean, like, so suddenly now in 1965, we don't think the Chinese were opium peddlers and prostitutes. Cool. I mean, it wasn't just the Chinese leading up to then, right? I mean, we still had segregation in a lot of places, so it wasn't. Anyway, we don't have to get into that. Things weren't great.

And all of a sudden, immigrants jump up from somewhere as low as 100 a year sometimes to 20,000. And a lot of these new immigrants coming in are from Hong Kong. They're from the slums there. It's rougher. And they clash with the American-born Chinese who sort of have this society already set up.

These newcomers don't really have a ton of social networks or services looking out for them. And some of the younger ones get fed up with it. And they form these street gangs like the Ghost Shadows and the Flying Dragons that start getting a lot more violent, right? They bring crime back to Chinatown in the 1970s until the Tongs connect with them and things simmer down. It's really interesting to this dynamic that emerges then. You have these community leader groups, the Tongs, that had been around for generations. They had controlled the vice rackets for just as long.

But they're moving into this era of respectability, you know, meeting with mayors, high-ranking politicians, city business leaders. And they link up with these newly formed brutal street gangs made up of these roughneck immigrant teenagers from that new wave of immigration. And they both sort of feed off each other, thriving off Chinatown's insular underground economy. But it's a system. And despite these outbursts of violence, the system works and the natural order is restored, right?

But of course, something else happens in the 1960s that's going to have a crazy effect on how organized crime plays out in Chinatown. And that's the U.S. getting fully entrenched in the disastrous Vietnam War. And I'm not going to go full Dan Collin on this. And if you're looking for a podcast to get your explanation of the Vietnam War, I mean, just...

Like don't read, read a book, read many books or watch that Ken Burns doc. I think that was pretty solid. It's only like 10 hours, right? Yeah. I mean, I'll listen to our last show or listen to the one about console, the one about sister ping, and then just, just send us your money and quit moaning. I mean, what are we talking about again? I was actually saying, don't listen to podcasts for your historical explanations of the Vietnam Vietnamese war. Unless it's ours. But yeah, unless it's, unless it's ours and you want to get 30 seconds of background, but yeah,

Vietnam is plunged into a massive war, and one of the results is an exodus of refugees coming to the U.S. In fact, over 130,000 Vietnamese refugees came to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, in 1975. And now, the first wave of immigrant refugees that come over, right, they're the merchants, the professionals, the members of...

the South Vietnamese government and the military from South Vietnam. And these refugees were typically much better off. They were more educated, more connected. A lot of them ended up in Southern California and they tended to do well, right? They started businesses, they built up communities, they got their kids educated, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, there were also some corrupt members of the South Vietnamese Army, corrupt officials, and some of these guys got involved in extortion rackets and violence and things like that. The kids that would make up Born to Kill, though, they came out of what was called the lost generation. They were not the children of the professionals or the merchants or the officials or anyone well-connected like that. They came out of what was known as the boat people.

Basically, these were poor, desperate Vietnamese, you know, from rural areas, from the slums that fled the communist regime on like raggedy boats, generally headed towards Hong Kong. Think of obviously Syrians, Afghans and whatnot heading in from Turkey, Libya and like that right now. You know, these were desperate people making a desperate trip facing all sorts of pirates and crazy seas and all that just to get a chance. And a lot of them actually didn't survive the journey.

Those that made it to Hong Kong ended up in these resettlement-type refugee camps in squalid conditions where they languished and lived for years. They didn't come over, a lot of them, until the mid-'80s. All this really grim, grim shit. And that kind of thing tends to make you, I think, a harder person when you have all this trauma that builds up. And a lot of them, well, some of them actually, were ethnic Chinese who had lived in Vietnam and weren't looked at so kindly by the communist government, especially after China and Vietnam had clashes in 1979.

Some were also the children of Vietnamese women and American soldiers who were also kind of treated like outcasts. I mean, so China and Vietnam were fighting in the 1970s. I did not know that. I mean, was there anywhere that wasn't just completely on fire at any point in the 20th century? It's nuts.

Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing where we talk about not to go off on too much of a tangent when we talk about how bad things are now. You kind of look like at the 30s and 40s and everything. I don't know, man. I'm just saying, like, we'll make it through this time. There's no reason for for doomerism. We're all going to we'll be OK. All right. That's a New Year's message. Look at that. Some positivity coming from me right in the middle of the podcast. Who would have thought?

But yes, there is a sizable population of unaccompanied minors in these refugee camps as well. Kids that are under 16 years old who either, you know, their parents had died through the chaos of the war in the aftermath, or the parents had sent them off on their own for a chance at a better life to escape Vietnam. And these refugees often end up staying in these camps for years, right? And gangs were already forming in some of them by the early 80s. So the optimism lasted about 20 seconds there, but you know, we'll take it. Yeah.

Look, it's rough out there, man. I'm just saying, like, we're all going to be okay. Maybe. Not me, but I think a lot of other people. So now, some of these kids, they do end up in America, resettled. These children of the war who survived the boats, survived the awful and violent refugee camps. And obviously, they're traumatized from all of it. Family separation, no guidance, and all that. But again, there were some thriving Vietnamese communities in the U.S., but these kids, they weren't really a part of those communities.

Some end up living with extended relatives. Some end up in foster homes. A lot are placed into not so great situations when they get here. Like I said, they don't have a lot of support. There's not a lot of social services. It's not like when the Chinese were coming in, you know, they're already huge networks.

organizations and the tongs to get people jobs, education, loans, help with all that. And a lot of the Vietnamese, you know, they didn't even, it's not like they spoke the same language, right? They didn't speak Mandarin or Cantonese or any of those languages. So it wasn't like even if they wanted to, they couldn't get any of the help. In TJ Fisher's book, he tells the story of Ting Nguyen,

I'm going to have trouble with this, but it's like, no, right. There's the way to, it's like the, right. I've, I've looked these names up before and you're supposed to say them like they're the end of like doing. So it's like, right. Right. Like kind of thing. Yeah. It's tough, but, but you guys get it. We're making, we're making the effort, you know, we're making the effort, but yeah. So this guy, Ting, who would eventually join born to kill, I think she eventually turned state's evidence, which is why there was so much information out there on his life story.

He's kind of the perfect illustration of the kids that would eventually make up the gang. So I'm going to go off on a little tangent here and tell his story.

He's born in 1972 in South Vietnam, you know, as the negotiations to end the war are just beginning. He's the 10th of 11 kids, and his parents are low-level merchants of Chinese descent. He's too young to really take in what's going on with the war, but the economy is stagnating, rice is being rationed, and as the 70s close out, there's additional wars being fought in Cambodia and against China in the north, and

And by the early 80s, his parents have just had enough and they want to get him out of the country. This is 1983. He's 11 years old. Yeah, I mean, you know, we always talk about the third kid of a third kid of a family wanting attention. But 10th of 11, I guess he's going to have some issues and wanting to make a name out there. And I mean, also, he's

11 years old in 83 is making me feel fucking old, to be honest. Yeah. But it's also, you know, having to feed that many kids or the country at war when you're, it's a tough situation. And again, this should sound familiar to anyone who like reads the news right now. But the way to get people out of the country is you pay smugglers who take these kids out on these raggedy ass boats on these dangerous ocean trips. And that's what happens.

ting's boat gets robbed by the vietnamese military it gets it gets stopped by thai pirates who the men get beaten the women get raped i mean it's just like horrific stuff they're at sea for 12 days with supplies running low you know actually reminds me of one of the very first episodes we did about the southeast asian human traffickers that prey on the rohingya which i had done a couple documentaries on but this year this is smuggling right not trafficking these kids aren't being forced to go they're they're

Anyway, the boat ends up stuck on an oil derrick for 20 days until a Panamanian shipping crew rescues them. But, you know, these seas, like these Asian seas are just, they're lawless. I mean, they really are. You've got, even now, pirates, all the people, like the seafood slavery. It's just nuts, you know? And if you want some good background on that, I think it's episode three, actually, three or four. It's 2020. About the Southeast Asian human trafficking. Yeah. Yeah.

The Southeast Asian human trafficking rings. And I did a doc on it called Left 4 Dead back in the Vice days that I think is actually one of the best docs I've done. How these groups operate. It's just really brutal stuff. But yeah, Ting ends up spending two years in resettlement camp in Thailand. And then 1985, he finally ends up getting everything approved and he's placed with a foster family in New York.

He ends up in Roosevelt, Long Island with an elderly black couple that has a bunch of other foster kids. No one speaks his language. He's in a rough neighborhood. It's just a bad situation. And he ends up bouncing around from foster home to foster home in the greater New York City area until he finally ends up in Flatbush, Brooklyn in a rundown apartment that people are selling crack out of. The number of these gangster origin stories we do that could be like grade A stories.

Hollywood material and producers are making like Black Widow six or whatever. Come on guys. Like give us a call. Just cut the check. Cut the check. Fucking check. Um, so by now he's in 11th grade, right? He's enrolled at a local high school, which, you know, New York city public school is in the mid eighties at a flatbush rough, real rough. Um,

Rough days. He's working at a supermarket after school. One day, though, he stumbles on a pool hall where there's a bunch of other Vietnamese and Southeast Asian kids hanging out. Roller skating rinks, pool halls. They were always big with the with the teen Asian gangs. You know, there used to be this one on Houston. I don't know if it's still there, but there are some stories about that place, man, even in like the 90s and 2000s. Anyway.

These kids are tough, right? They don't take shit. And Ting falls in with them. And it doesn't take long before he runs away from the apartment, drops out of school, quits his job, moves into a flop house with a dozen or so other Vietnamese teenagers. And they put him onto the game, which is basically just getting money any way they can. Usually by robbing people on the subway, sticking up restaurants and massage parlors and all that.

And he's never felt this before, right? This sense of brotherhood, people having his back, especially like fellow countrymen, not having any pushed around or anything like that. And these kids are wild, right? They fight back against the Hispanic gangs, the black gangs, the Irish kids, all that. After a few robberies, he meets the Dai Lo. I think, do you know if I'm saying that right? Dai Lo? Yeah, I think that's legit. Dai Lo. Yeah.

who they call Black Eyes, right? The Daylo is like the local boss and Black Eyes brings him in. And now he's a part of this crew that was actually under the Born to Kill franchise. I think at that time they were called the Canal Boys. But yeah, a little segue here. I just wanted to give you guys the sort of backstory to how this gang got formed and who these three kids were. Yeah. I mean, it does also sound like, you know, the way that this podcast is going full circle where we're going to end up getting into some kind of

I don't know. Are we going to get into some kind of an ex-podcaster gang and just rip people off on the street? I mean, I could get on the game. I don't know if I have the energy for that. But there's something else going on too at this time, right? With just some of these other Vietnamese kids that were a little older,

In maybe the late 70s, they came over. We're already in their 20s. They had started running their own hustles, and they were brutal as hell. They popularized these brutal home invasions in the early 80s. They would follow Asian businessmen home, always Asian, not just Vietnamese. But these were people who didn't use banks a lot, who operated in cash, and they wouldn't go to the police. They didn't trust the police.

And the Vietnamese gangsters, they were developing this reputation for being more violent, more brutal, more reckless. There's actually a New York Times article from around then, and it talks about how in six weeks, nine businessmen in Boston suffered home invasions from, quote, gangs of young Asians armed with automatic weapons and machetes. They were tied up. Their families are beaten in front of them. They're robbed of cash and jewelry. And nationwide,

These young gangs, who were usually of Chinese origin, Vietnamese, teenagers, early 20s, they're running wild because of a breakdown of gang structure.

But the thing is, for the Vietnamese, like there was no structure, right? They were outside the typical Chinese immigrant community situation. So they weren't like, they weren't really a part of the Tongs or the other street gangs. And then we're talking about both, whether it was licit or illicit businesses. Yeah, I feel like if you say you've got a licit business, that's a slight red flag. But yeah, yeah, point taken. Is licit a word or did I just make that up? I don't know.

I don't know. Licit. Sounds all right. We're going to leave it in. Right. You know, like if you were Chinese and you needed a loan or a job or something like that, they were the tongs and all the civic organizations set up to help you out. And same thing if you were a gangster. But the Vietnamese, they had none of that. No help. And they were kind of looked down on by the Chinese immigrant community.

But one thing the Chinese gangs did admire in the Vietnamese gangsters was like their toughness and their willingness to put in work. So they started putting them on, right, as the enforcers, the street gangs did. And it's sort of like we talked about this in the Albanian Bronx episode. The Italians did this with the Albanians as well when they came in. But just like the Albanians who eventually got sick of being enforcers and put together their own thing, the Vietnamese threatened to overtake the guys that they used to work for.

They're going to do the same thing the Albanians did, all under the leadership of the infamous David Tai, the man the New York Times once called the scourge of Chinatown. Tai is born in 1956 in Saigon. He's a little older than the core group of Born to Kill members. He actually really lives through the chaos and poverty and violence of the Vietnam War, enough to remember it and kind of be scarred by it, right? He's already a hustler as a young kid.

He serves as a go-between for American GIs and the pimps and pushers of the underground Saigon markets. And he lives through the collapse of the city. You know, his father is imprisoned by the communists. He actually gets airlifted out onto an aircraft carrier right when Saigon falls. He ends up in Hong Kong for a few months before he finds himself in Lafayette, Indiana at a church-run foster home for boys. But, you know, that doesn't last long.

And he books it out of there with $150 in his pocket for New York. And he actually ends up sleeping in the Port Authority for like the first couple nights. He's 19 years old at this point, and he's totally on his own.

He starts getting work the way a lot of Asian immigrants did who didn't have many options during that time, which is he ends up bouncing from like being a waiter to kitchen work and back and forth at Chinese restaurants. He actually gets married in 1978. He goes to NYU, I think, for a semester, has a kid, moves with his wife to a cramped apartment in Hell's Kitchen. But I guess I find the NYU thing like a little weird, right? Because the whole thing is like,

He never had a shot, but if you end up at NYU, you kind of have a shot, you know? Yeah. I mean, was the student loan still crippling back then? What was he studying? I don't know. That information I do not have, but I'd sure love to learn. So Ty, he's barely getting by, and he's realizing he needs to figure something out.

He's been hanging around in Chinatown for a while now. You know, he was familiar with the owner world. He's in the pool halls, sort of on the periphery of what's going on there. And he's this like pretty striking dude. He's tall, he's handsome, he's charismatic. He kind of, he had it, you know, that those star qualities that you can't put your finger on. And what he figures out is he's going to join one of the new gangs that have formed up in the last decade. And he gets involved with the Flying Dragons doing the enforcer work that I talked about earlier.

But he's not like super active. And he kind of realizes almost right away, he's not going to get far in a Chinese gang, right? They don't respect him or his people. And also at this time, the cops start cracking down a bit on the Flying Dragons, on the Ghost Shadows, and they kind of get weakened a bit. There's a little bit of a vacuum. And Tai starts formulating this plan. He's going to break away and he's going to form his own thing with all the other tough Vietnamese kids. Because the Ghost Dragons, the Flying Dragons, they all kind of had a couple of Vietnamese enforcers that were there.

And by 1987, he decides it's safe for him to do that, right? This is a big risk, though, because it wasn't easy. And oftentimes, when someone tried to form these breakaway factions, they got put down really quick. Like, people just got executed. But...

Thai goes for it, right? He doesn't even get permission from the big tongs. And he focuses on territory out of the way of the other gangs on Canal Street. And he calls his crew, of course, the Canal Boys. And he recruits the other Vietnamese enforcer kids in the Ghost Shadows and Flying Dragons to start off. Canal Street. Canal Boys. That sounds suggestive? No, maybe not. I don't know.

I feel like a lot of these gangs call themselves the something boys or whatever. I feel like that was a popular thing, whether Vietnamese, Italian, whatever it was, but

Makes sense.

brass knuckles, knives, things like that. There's always a kid who buys throwing stars for some reason. And it's also still where tourists go to buy like fake sunglasses and fake Louis Vuitton bags. I think, I think we should just like do stories about your youth, to be honest. I think we should just go there. Yeah.

yeah i mean i don't think it's that exciting so david ty he sets up a shop there with actually i think firecrackers too i mean i was gonna say like if you're the were you the guy buying the bright light the throwing stars was it you i was not i i i've never brought bought throwing stars i just want to put that on the rack of rock i don't know anything else there definitely bought a bunch of fake my man learns the sword but i

I never bought, I never bought a sword. I never bought throwing stars. Definitely, definitely some knives. There definitely were knives purchased, but you know, that's just called being a teenager, but there were no, no throwing stars. I never trained with a sword. There was none of that. So David Thai sets up shop there with the canal boys and he basically starts collecting all these other Vietnamese kids. So we're talking like teenagers, right? 13, 14, 15, 15,

These kids are runaways. They're orphans. They're roughneck kids in the pool hall who are already hustling and stealing. He's recruiting and putting them all together. You know, I told that story about how Vin ran away, how he ran away. There were a bunch of other kids that did that, and they sort of gravitated towards Chinatown, towards the couple of Vietnamese areas and shops there.

These kids, they didn't have anywhere else to go, right? Anywhere to turn to. And a lot of them actually started seeking Ty out. They heard about him and they became his soldiers and he would fix them up with a place to stay. One of these flop houses, some of them were in like Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Some of them were in Coney Island. Get them a little bit of pocket money, get them food, start putting them to work. They started extorting the shops on Canal Street, robbing restaurants, protecting the brothels and massage parlors they ran, robbing the ones they didn't.

And everything gets kicked back up to him. Apparently at one point they were getting up to two grand a day in extortion from 70 or so of those market stalls, which were each paying like

you know, $20 or $200 a week or something like that. And the gang members started as young as 13. Most of them were in their teens and they would hang out on Canal Street, scaring the hell out of everyone, shaking down the shopkeepers, right? They were louder. They were more aggressive. They were tougher than the other gangs that were operating there. And they're just recklessly robbing, shooting shit up in broad daylight, fighting like really lawless.

They would go out, commit crimes, robberies, extortion. Then they would just hide out in these safe houses or like Times Square hotel rooms. And they had their own dressing style. They had gang tattoos. These sort of pompadour haircuts or spiky haircuts.

And Ty is like this almost godlike father figure to the gang. He's a bit older than the rest of them. He takes them off the streets. He sets them up with like women and housing and drugs, some of them. And he gives them a sense of pride too. You know, it's really, he's really one hell of a recruiter. The way he's described, it does make him seem almost like a cult leader.

And a lot of these kids, they were just living these lives. Like, they didn't expect to survive into their 20s. A lot of them didn't. And, you know, some of them were off smoking crack. Others were doing heroin. It was just like this raggedy crew of lost boys that he was in charge of. Yeah, I mean, I'm into this guy. He's like an Asian rockabilly gangster fagin'. I mean, he probably would have had loads of followers on social media these days. And that's really cool. I kind of...

I kind of like the rockabilly description because I do feel like there was an element of that there.

You know, you don't see that a lot these days. I definitely, I worked with a rockabilly guy once. He had, it's a style, it works. It works for some people. Oh man, one of my favorite bars in New York is a rockabilly bar. And I don't know if they exist anymore. It's on 14th Street. I don't know. Scenes kind of died out here. Yeah. But Born to Kill, I mean, they were full on, right? It wasn't like you're in the mafia and you have a separate family life. Everything is the gang. The gang is your life. It is the family for wayward youth from broken homes. And I talked about this a lot

in the El Salvador episode because it's a thing MS-13 and T-Street gang members will tell you too. Like, yes, it's vicious, but they become a part of something and it feels like family for the first time. You know, it's finding your family who sometimes it seems would die for you and there's this sense of belonging. That's a very powerful thing.

And these Asian youth gangs, especially the Vietnamese one, with the sense of history and the national identity that I think have been broken for a lot of them and all the trauma. And they, you know, they play on the ancient rights. Like, that's a hugely powerful thing. La Costa Nostra is the same way, right? You know, they have their ceremonies and whatnot. But remember, a lot of them come from actual big Italian families.

imagine what it's like how powerful the pull is when you have no family you know you got to understand kind of where these kids are coming from yeah that's i mean that's what we're doing with our podcast right with our podcast platform just two way with boys no family seeking immediate fortune and along comes some sugar daddy telling us he's gonna pay us a mediocre amount of cash every now and then it's too good to refuse man couldn't refuse that he

You're on a weird one this morning, huh? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I had just as weird a new year. I'm easing into it this episode. I just looked up that bar. It still exists, by the way. It's Otto's Shrunken Head. Do you know this place? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do know that place. Yeah, it's great. Is that Rockabilly? I thought it was like a tiki situation. Yeah, Polynesian-esque setting and cocktails enliven this offbeat tiki bar, rock bar. Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of Rockabilly. Anyway.

I'm okay. I'm totally fine. Yeah. How's your serotonin level these days? You max it out over the weekends? Yeah, the Ritalin's doing great. Getting it back.

Anyway, one gang member told investigators that David Tai was the only one who ever cared for them and looked out for them. You know, he's offering this counter narrative too, because there was also a lot of like the Vietnamese identity at that time in the 80s. They were kind of looked down on, right? You had the Vietnamese war that had ended. Obviously, there was racism towards Asians. You had the Chinese who kind of looked down on them as well. And they had this sort of like broken identity at the time.

So this was like this counter-narrative to their lives kind of in the gutter, right? It was a tie to their roots and to their heritage that they could be proud of. There was a sense of belonging there. And it's powerful stuff, especially to teenagers. I mean, a lot of it's powerful right now. TJ English called it, quote, a brotherhood born of trauma sealed in bloodshed, which is kind of dramatic, but I fuck with it. Tie at this point,

He's driving a Jaguar. He has a big house in the suburbs in Long Island. And he's also running the fake Rolex racket on Canal Street. He would flip these fakes he got in from Hong Kong, basically had a distribution come warehouse factory in the basement of this big house he had out on the island. And he allegedly cleared $13 million off that racket in 1988 alone, which...

I think that's revenue. I don't know. It sounds, it sounds a little exaggerated to me, but, uh, but people do, I mean, people buying those, those watches all day, every day and tons of markets, still tons of market stalls that, uh, that sell them. That's true. Yeah.

By the end of 1988, he calls a meeting with some of his top guys, and they really start planning and getting organized. And later in June 89, he buys out a Japanese restaurant in Midtown, and he holds an even bigger meeting, not just with gang members from Chinatown, but Vietnamese gang members from all over New York City, you know, different states. And this was the real start of Born to Kill.

They were all the, all the Dilo's or street bosses from Connecticut, from the Bronx, from Jersey city. So born to kill, it's almost like a federation, right? If you think about it. So, so, so the, the Dilo that that's just a catch all name for like a kind of gang boss in the Asian sort of gang community. Right. Just to, just to kind of catch up. Yeah. Right. The guy who kind of like ran, ran his crews. Right. Not like, um, think of it as like, you know, the capos in a way, but they were kind of unfederated at this time. That's a word too. Yeah.

So they all come together under this name, you know, this banner, the coffin with the three candles. And Ty has them sign an agreement, an oath of sorts, right? Which is, you don't betray your brothers, you don't talk to police, you don't

If you leave, your tattoo needs to be scraped from their skin. If you leave the New York City gang, you have to leave New York City. And any crime you're going to commit, it needs to be cleared with your dialogue. Are these like sort of Yakuza tats, like special kind of ones or just chicks on bikes and skulls? I think it was like the initials and then the coffin with the three candles. So it wasn't like giant, you know, full body, full leg. But these guys were generally covered in tattoos, but it wasn't.

It wasn't Yakuza style where they were like really ceremonious and like full body and there was like a supreme significance to them. Although I guess there was because you had to have it to be in the gang and you have to get it off if you left, but.

Yeah.

Now, though, the other Chinatown gangs, they're really starting to take notice and they're not happy with this Vietnamese gang that's wilding out all over. So they start applying some pressure. And in one instance, two flying dragons are talking shit to Ty in his territory in a little mall on Canal Street and they spit at him. So Ty walks away. He gets two guns from a back room. He gives them to two teenage members of BTK and he orders them to go shoot the ghost dragons in broad daylight in the mall.

Sorry, I said ghost dragons, but I mean, what did I mean? Flying dragons? Flying dragons, yeah. So they go and they shoot these guys in broad daylight. And the two flying dragons are killed. And none of the shopkeepers or witnesses are willing to talk because everyone was just so scared of Born to Kill at this time. Yeah, I was beginning to wonder if the gang name was a bit OTT, but I guess that settles it.

No, they did. Yeah, they killed. So they start essentially behaving like this, like no one can tell them anything. And they're upsetting the balance here, right? They're bringing unwanted attention. And that's bad for the big bosses, real bad. And it's kind of crazy, right? You have this street gang of

of teenagers taking on this other street gang, but this faction, I mean, Flying Dragons and Ghost Shadows, they were part of a large international organized crime framework, which included Hong Kong drug lords, big time money laundering, and large scale China white heroin traffickers, triads, all that. And it's like, you have all these international connections,

But the guys doing your dirty work on the ground here, the Flying Dragons, what if there's a group out there that's crazier and more dangerous than them? Like, does that large-scale framework matter?

And it kind of does in a way, right? Cause there's more money that you can put into it, but it's kind of crazy to see them being challenged and like, what, what can you do? I mean, I mean, I don't know what came first, the rockabilly or the gangs, but ghost shadows and flying dragons are two of the most rockabilly names I've heard for gangs in a while. Yeah. They really, they really, and the haircuts too, the haircuts fit. I feel like there were a lot of sleeveless shirt, like denim shirts that, that led themselves to rockabilly style, but.

Here's how a 1990 New York Times article described what was going on with Born to Kill. Quote,

Bars and nightclubs, traditionally not targets of violence, have been the scenes of shootings recently. And the violence threatens the old order, in which established, more predictable Chinese gangs provided protection for businesses. When they felt they had to make an impression, gang members broke windows or committed other minor assaults on property, not people, Mr. Li said.

I mean, when did mad, lawless, poor as shit NYC become high finance, crazy rents, hipster bars NYC? I mean, I thought it was like an 80s thing, but we've covered a bunch of 90s stuff in the 90s and early 2000s there now.

Well, there was always the high finance 80s Wall Street stuff, you know, but I mean, the 90s in New York were pretty, that's when it had the highest murder rate ever, I think was 93 or 92, you know, because that was the crack wars as well. So it was just like an overwhelming amount of violence. And of course that filters out into everywhere else. But yeah, 90s, 90s were insane in New York. And Giuliani, like the broken windows kind of stuff. Is that that time? I mean, I might be dumb. That starts, I believe, in the mid 90s. Oh, okay. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, the crack wars were late 80s, early 90s. And that's the early 90s were when New York had like five, six murders a day. Like early 90s in New York was insane. Yeah. That whole like 70s through mid to late 90s period was just completely nuts. After this, PTK just gives like less and less of a fuck. They're robbing karaoke joints that these gangs are drinking in. They're extorting the businesses under their protection. They're sticking up the illegal casinos. Here's a quote from Fisher's book.

In numerous meetings with his dailos, David Tai had made it clear that because Chinatown's traditional power structure did not include the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese were therefore not bound by the rules and laws of the community. BTK members would play, rob, and even kill wherever they wanted. Their audacity was alarming. So it's like they were the sovereign citizen movement of Chinatown, basically. Nice.

There's actually an interesting segue in the book here, too, about one of the born-to-kill guys who gets locked up in Rikers. And apparently there, all the gang rivalries between the Asian gangs actually go out the window, and they all have to band together for protection against Bloods, Crips, the Dominican gangs, Latin Kings, and all that. And they just have to stick with each other. And they held their own. They were vicious in Rikers, too, and they were able to protect themselves, which is not an easy thing to do.

At this point, there's said to be up to 100 BTK members in New York. And even the cops are starting to pick up on it and get worried. There's another incident soon after the mall shooting. After a bunch of BTK members try to go to a Go Shadows bar, they get kicked out. And they send a 15-year-old gang member into the bar. He shoots at the place. Two dead, two injured. A whole shootout occurs. And that's when Benny Ong...

otherwise known as Uncle Seven, he's one of the major Tong bosses, advisor for life for the hip sing, and the godfather of Chinatown. He calls in Tai for a meeting. And Ong is like,

I mean, this is a guy who was connected to, you know, Burmese warlords, Hong Kong triads, major, major heroin trafficking. Like not, not a street guy. You know what I'm saying? Like, like a real deal international mover and shaker. And Ty's supposed to be honored that Benny would even want to meet with him in the first place. You know, to even be paid attention to by Uncle Seven is a huge deal. But Ty says, fuck it, right? He ignores the meeting. He doesn't even show up.

And this is not a good move, right? This does not bode well for his future. And sure enough, shortly after the snub, that's when Amigo, the popular second-in-command guy I talked about in the opening, he gets popped outside one of Ty's massage parlors at 1 a.m. He's leaving with four women. He puts them in a cab, and another car just rolls up and sprays him with automatic gunfire. And then a couple of days later, you have these Chinese hitmen who spray up the funeral, and that's when things get kicked into overdrive.

That's when it stopped being just this insular Chinatown news and starts being on the front page of the Post and the national papers. And the NYPD, who had already been monitoring Tai in the newly forming gang war, know they have to switch into overdrive and try to shut things down.

It's never proven that Ong was behind the shooting, and Tai actually thinks it's the ghost shadows who did it at his request. Either way, it brings a lot of attention and things get eerily calm in Chinatown as all the gangsters start staying off the streets, and they kind of decide to head out of state for some other action. And things just keep kind of going south for BTK. In August, there's a bad friendly fire incident, a robbery gone wrong, and one BTK member accidentally kills another by shooting him in the head.

Then in October, the bodies of three Born to Kill members, two 17-year-olds and a 16-year-old, are found executed in a Ghost Shadows territory. Apparently, they had been marched out of a karaoke parlor, lined up, and just shot in the back of the head. Whoa. I mean, that's slipping into Narcos foul state kind of stuff.

Which we'll also be getting into a lot next week, by the way. So a little tee up for that. I mean, I was reading this script and thinking, I really hope we get like loads of confused teenagers signing up to our podcast thinking this is about a K-pop band. But is it BTS? BTK? I don't know. What are you talking about?

I don't think that's going to happen. At this point, Chinatown leaders, like legitimate leaders, businessmen, Asian politicians, they're starting to get really worried, fearing that there's going to be a really, I mean, I guess there already is a bloody war, but they're feeling things are going to, fearing things are going to get really out of control. And Tai Tu, he figures Chinatown is getting a little too hot, like all of New York. So he starts looking to expand more out of state.

He settles on Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is about 90 miles from New York City. He opens up a brothel there with a madam he had been dating. He had gotten divorced earlier. And him and his crew, they literally start making a list of all the Asian businesses in town that they're going to rob there. They always go after their own, like these ethnic groups. Like why, why Asian businesses? You mentioned like some kind of cash stuff earlier, right? Is it a language barrier? Did they not go to the cops? Is it, is it they can be easily kind of harassed through tight migrant communities?

It's a number of reasons, right, that you touched on. One is that these groups, whether it's them or it doesn't matter like what ethnicity, what race you are, these gangs always start off preying on their own people, you know, because they're the easiest ones for them to intimidate. The cash businesses, a lot of these businesses operated in cash. They didn't use traditional banking a lot, so they were going to have a lot of cash in them. They also were more intimidated by these gangs. You know, they wouldn't.

They wouldn't go to, they wouldn't go to the police. They knew these guys wouldn't go to the police. They knew they could intimidate them. It was just kind of, you know, they were, they were easy prey. They were easy to target. And, and, and, you know, they knew that they could get away with it too. Cause another thing was that the police weren't paying a lot more. You know, if you rob a white business guy versus a Asian immigrant business guy, the police are going to pay a different level of attention. So yeah,

That was kind of what it was. Around this time, Ty starts relying more on this guy, Lan Nguoc Tran. I hope I did that best. Decently. Who, like him, is older. And he's from Hue, which is this beautiful town in Vietnam. I actually once had a white linen suit custom made there for $65, which is a true story. Yeah, and I can't believe you're wearing it now on this call. God, if I had it still, man, I'd lost it years ago.

He was older, like David, so he'd actually lived through the war as well, unlike a lot of the younger guys. He actually stayed in Vietnam post-False Saigon. He was, you know, one of these underground rebels. He carried out attacks on the communists guerrilla style, even allegedly following home officials and killing them. He got caught. He got tortured in jail. He escaped, and he came to the U.S., and they called him Uncle Lan or the Poet of Death, and he actually wrote all these poetry journals that were found and read during the trial, which is like...

It's got to be embarrassing if you're like a gangster killer, right? And they just start reading your poetry at the trial. Depends how good it is. Like, how do you think? I mean, that's true. Actually, I read some of the, I should have written them down. Like some of his poems were pretty, pretty, I mean, dark, you know, pretty powerful stuff, but, but dark. So Patreon members can listen to Danny performing some of Lan Niu Tran's poetry, right? I would do that if we get enough.

patreon.com says animal podcast i will i'll make it happen so he's only he's only like five foot two but he's just a bad dude like a real killer ty put him to work he he like had this really kind of mysterious thing he'd always moved around from place to place never staying in one place too long very mysterious one of these really damaged by war and torture types just like seen too much thousand yard stares and all that yeah i like this intro to this guy you've done a real sort of hunter thompson job on him i like it

Yeah, I mean, the way they describe him, it just sounds terrifying. Anyway, these guys, they go on the road. They start robbing the shit out of Bridgeport. And then they take off and they head to Gainesville, Georgia. You know, same thing, stick and move, case some joints, find out where the money is, take it and leave. By 1990, there was already...

500,000 Vietnamese refugees in the US. And you know, many obviously are successful in law abiding and all that. But these stick up crews, these home invasion crews, they basically go around the US targeting various successful Asian businessmen and businesses bouncing from small city to small city. And they're in and out before the local police who aren't clued into these communities at all.

have like any clue whatsoever. And these gang members, they're hard to track. You know, they have a dozen fake aliases. They probably look alike to some small town cop in Georgia. You know, it got so bad that two cops outside DC, they started this international association of Asian crime investigators to like talk shop and compare notes. Huh.

In Georgia, they rob a few jewelry stores. They shoot up an owner of one of them, something awful, but he somehow survives, and that's going to come back into play. But yeah, after a few months on the road, they decide to head back to New York City, hoping the heat is off. They go after a big jewelry store, and they get away with $350,000. But one of the getaway cars actually gets caught. There were two of them, and the shop owner, who's a refugee from South Vietnam who came to the U.S. with nothing and built up his business,

He decides he's going to ID them. And that never happened with Born to Kill. Like, people were too terrified. And this guy, he's not going to back down, though. And BTK, they start trying to intimidate him. They make threats. They're mailing him, like, glass shards, approaching him on the street. David Tai even personally offers to give him back the jewelry if he takes back his testimony. But he holds firm. One of the main BTK gang members, too, he flips. I think it was the guy I mentioned in the beginning. Not Vin Vu, the other one. Right around this time, he gets picked up on a robbery. The

The detectives work him good, and he just kind of confesses everything and agrees to go out undercover as an informant. Meanwhile, other BTK members, they're getting picked up all over the states for murders, other crime, places like Stockton, California, Toronto. The walls are just closing in, and then the BTK guys make a really fatal mistake.

They try to extort the jewelry shop owner they had just hit again, that South Vietnamese guy, for protection money. And he just gets fed up. He calls the cops. He fingers all of them that afternoon. Adelo gets arrested. And at this point, Thai orders him killed. So the Poe to death, you know, the guy who used to kill the communist officials in South Vietnam, he kills the guy in his store in broad daylight, just puts two in his head in front of witnesses. And that, I mean, once you start killing witnesses...

Like it's over, you know, like that's going to that's going to earn you a lot of attention that you don't want. Ty's also getting paranoid. He's making bombs. He's like practicing out on Long Island with silencers. So it just kind of the whole thing is just, you know, it's getting to that point. Yeah, that'll do it. I mean, the store only had absolute nerves of steel, to be honest, to absolute hero. Oh, yeah. Like no one would no one would testify against them.

So this big RICO case is being built. You know, they're even using the shooting at the Georgia jewelry store because that guy's going to talk as well. The informant is out there. He's wearing a wire. He's getting more evidence, including, you know, a bunch of things are happening now too where I kind of, this part of the story makes almost not that much sense to me because what happens is the informant starts cluing them into incidents that are going to take place and they arrest them on the way to do it and they let them go to keep building the case. Right.

So there's one incident where they're up in Rochester and the informant's like a guy who's with them at the time. They're up in Rochester, upstate New York, and they're about to rob a jewelry store. And the informant had phoned it in and the cops stopped them on the way to the robbery. They'd found some guns in the car too. But for some reason, they just don't want to prosecute them on this, which you would think would get them sent away for a while.

But they don't want to ruin the informant thing, so they make up an excuse about the judges being in like it's Mother's Day. So they let them go with the summons on the gun, and they say they stopped them because they thought they were drug dealers. So I guess – I mean I guess they're going for a big racketeering case, and Ty wasn't there either, so maybe that's what they wanted to do. But they let them go.

And it happens again with another robbery that they're about to pull off. The informant drops the dime. They get pulled over on the way for running a stop sign. It's the same thing. And I just don't understand how leaders don't get tipped off at this point. But Ty and the other guys, they're blaming fate. They're saying they had bad luck. It's a very superstitious thing that's going on. And they just kind of don't get clued into the fact that they have an informant in their midst. And this guy is just sitting in the car with some like Game Boy era audio equipment, just sweating his tits off, blaming the stop sign. I mean...

I get stressed this on gives me a bollocking on Twitter. So this guy is he's struggling at the moment. I'll be pretty pissed with my handlers if this was happening. Yeah, I guess there was at some point Ty and them were starting to get clued in and kind of asking around. You know, they still yeah, they still blended on on fate. And at one point, Ty sends a 15 year old and a 16 year old with a bomb to blow up a restaurant where the owner had insulted BTK. I actually think they had insulted them in that New York Times article. And that's what it was.

And the NYPD, who are informed again of this by the informant, they only narrowly avoid having it off. Like they stop the guys right at the restaurant entrance. And at that point, there's just too much out there. So finally, they raid David Tai's house on Long Island and a bunch of safe houses in Brooklyn and Manhattan. You know, they find a bomb making factory. They find all sorts of guns.

And these guys get brought in. And this is August 1991. So for all the reputation and legend, you know, BTK only existed in their prime for like three years, maybe four years. But something about the way they operated, the kind of fear they inspired, and the stories really built up this legend. This is from a 1990 New York Times article on the reign of BTK. Quote,

I used to tell people who asked me that those stories about gang violence are just sensationalism, said Peter Lee, a journalist who has covered Chinatown for Chinese language newspapers. But now I tell them to be careful. I feel leery of myself sometimes walking down the street, and that was never true before.

You know, you also kind of see how quick these groups rise and fall in the US. Like you really do come to an appreciation for how the Italian mob has kind of kept things going for generations and generations. Yeah, big up the Italian mob guys. They really don't get enough credit on this show.

i'm just i'm just saying like it is like a lot of these gangs we covered like get brought down in like five ten years max you know and it's kind of yeah you're a fan of the italian mob yeah yeah i'm not saying i'm a fan i'm just saying like let's just move on at one point you have to like appreciate keeping something going for generations and generations even if it's a shade of its former self so sure yeah that sounded the trial of

The trial for BTK is in January 1992. 22 of them get hit in the Rico case. Tai finally gives an interview to an English-language press during the trial. He claims to be a community leader helping Vietnamese refugees with no family. And the new Ethnic Mobs book quotes the news reporter who met him and interviewed him when he was locked up. And she said, quote, he's a very, very handsome guy.

settle down he looks like a person who ate well and worked out regularly he looks right into your eyes when he talks to you he put his hand on my knees when we were talking and even broke out crying once jesus christ um first yeah but have you ever have you ever done a jail interview

I have not actually, despite my career. Oh man. I got sent to Rikers by the post. And, uh, when I was like a real young cop reporter, it's funny. They sent this guy, I don't want to say his name, but he was like a legendary reporter who was so good at getting interviews in Rikers that they, um, they banned him from going. And he was also just like, you know, old school, real New Yorker kept the bottle. I remember showing up late to an assignment once at like a courthouse and he made me drink a shot of like rum that he had in his desk. Oh my God. And, uh,

They like, I was terrified. Like, I don't know what the fuck is going on. So they put me on the phone with him before I'm going in. He gives me this advice. And the first 15 minutes of advice are basically just like, you know, cause you got to take a bus to get into Rikers, like a jail bus. The first 50 minutes are him just being like, whatever you do, do not get involved with the women on the bus.

Like, just don't get involved. And he's going on and on. He's like, I don't care. They got a big ass on the bus. Like, just do not get involved with these women on the Rikers bus. Like, do not. That was literally 15 minutes of the conversation. And I'm like, buddy, I don't think you got to worry about that. And then it's just like,

all these things about how to get a rise out of the guy if he's not, if he's not like answering your questions and all that. And they got to, you know, you got to go in there and they won't let press in. So you basically have to say that you're like a business associate or a friend and then you can get turned down. I mean, the guy I went to see was, um,

This dude from Staten Island that had just killed his parents. So that was going to be interesting. And it's not like you don't go into a, like a thing where there's like a barrier between you. It's basically like a, like a high school lunchroom with tables and you just sit right across from the guy.

I got a good, I got a good story about doing a court report from East London back in the day, but I'll save that for another, another show. And it does also involve a woman who was pretty keen to make a good impression on me for some reason as a court report. But yeah, well maybe we'll go for that one in the next episode. Yeah. But anyway, I ended up sitting in Rutgers like in that room for four hours. The guy never came out. He just looked at me through the window and then said he didn't want to talk. But anyway, so Ty's defense doesn't work.

Him and Uncle Lam, they end up getting multiple life sentences. I think they're both still locked up. Born to Kill mostly fades away. There's still some iterations of it left, I think, or at least Vietnamese gangsters using the name like a franchise. In fact, just last April, a 49-year-old guy in Philly

Said to have been a BTK member in the early 90s. He gets arrested for the torture and murder of two Vietnamese brothers. It was over a drug debt. He stabbed him, weighed him down with cement and threw him into the river. It was a $300,000 marijuana debt owed to a supplier in Cali. And this guy was actually hired to do the hit by another former BTK associate. One guy, actually, I guess there was a third one. He survived after being thrown in the water. He crawled out and testified.

And the New York Post actually had an article on Ty last year. He was pleading for his release, you know, the coronavirus protection thing. And he would have been in his late 60s at the time, I think. But he did not get the release. Oh, shame for him. I mean, these are nice guys. Yeah. Crazy gang. This is another one of those episodes that like desperately needs to be turned into a high budget Hollywood movie with us both at the helm, of course. And then maybe I can come to that tiki bar again and we can have a drink.

Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, thank you guys again for everyone who supported us last year and is going to support us this year. We genuinely appreciate it. We'd love to keep this going as much as possible and not get frustrated and quit. So please give us more money so that that doesn't happen. I want to thank Patrick Rowland, Tanner McCleave, Sam Ramsey, Juan Ponce, Michael Rich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, Doug Prindival. Thank you guys so much for all your support. Yeah, we love you.

Yeah, we really do. Until next week. Yeah. Peace out.