White Devil. Bob Halloran
No retaliatory measures were planned, and John couldn’t stand for it.
“We’ve got to do something about this,” John shouted at Woping Joe and his crew. “Let’s go!”
John grabbed a Mac-10 machine gun and led the gang down to the building where the presumed assailants lived. John spotted the guys they were after and shot at them several times. It was a bold move of leadership and Bai Ming took notice. From that moment on, John spent nearly every day at Ming’s side. Ming became his mentor, and John became Ming’s enforcer and protector.
“There were loyal things he did, like you know, I always had the best clothes, the best sneakers. He’d take me shopping. Different guys, he’d pay for their medical bills and different things. He was definitely the brother that you needed to have when you were young.”
Now, as Dai Keung schemed with Peter Chong to take over the Boston gangs, it’s reasonable to think Dai Keung was making friends with John and earning his trust in order to get close to Ming. It’s a theory Ming himself may have considered.
After breakfast, John and Dai Keung made plans to get together later that night. First, however, John was charged with driving Woping Joe’s older brother, Wah Ming, to the airport.
“Me and another kid named Manny dropped him off at the airport,” John recalls. “Manny (which isn’t his real name) used to sell a lot of drugs, cocaine mostly. It was probably about ten thirty at night when he got a call to bring some coke to Chinatown for Dai Keung. We were at Boston Billiards at the time, and when we went outside it was snowing. We still had Wah Ming’s new Mercedes, which we weren’t supposed to be driving. We were supposed to take it back to his house. The streets of Chinatown are very thin and congested. So, I said, ‘I’m not going over there with this car. We’re gonna get in trouble,’ but we ended up going anyway.”
Cautiously, John drove the Mercedes through the snow out of the Fenway neighborhood and down Brookline Avenue. Still a few miles from Chinatown, John hit a massive snow-covered pothole. That thud was followed by the distinctive thumping sound a flat tire makes. The car swerved toward a line of parked cars, but John was able to get it under control without hitting anything.
“Fuck it! Let’s leave,” John said to Manny as they changed the right front tire. “Let’s go back!”
John was rather convincing standing there with a lug wrench in his hands, and Manny agreed to turn back around. John got back to his apartment in Forest Hills about one in the morning, and he received a call less than four hours later.
“Don’t come to Chinatown,” the voice on the other end commanded. John recognized the voice, and was prepared to obey the directive.
“Okay,” he said, “but why not?”
“Just don’t come. You’ll find out soon enough. Tell everybody to stay home!”
John awoke the next morning to the news that five men had been killed, his friend Dai Keung among them. Word spread quickly through the streets, but even street rumors, often the most reliable source, were merely conjecture.
“They came to get Dai Keung,” John says with conviction. “They shot them all, but Dai Keung is who they wanted. I don’t know exactly why he was killed. It was probably some kind of power struggle. People might have felt like he was going to cause problems. It was said through the Chinese community that Hun Suk’s people did it.”
John’s account is corroborated by the two men who survived the massacre: Pak Wing Lee and Billy Yu Man Young. Lee miraculously survived a gunshot to the head. Young, unfavorably nicknamed “Wrinkled Skin Man,” was the owner of the club and was spared by the killers. Years after the shooting, both men would testify to what happened.
“Robbery!” three men shouted as they burst into the club. “Don’t move!”
But this was clearly not a robbery. When police arrived, there were several hundred dollars strewn on top of the card table. The money was splattered with blood and brains from the gunshot wounds to the victims’ heads.
Lee claimed that Hun Suk shouted the orders and told each man in the club to lie facedown on the floor. Hun Suk then strode purposefully over to Dai Keung and put a gun to the back of his head.
“Please, don’t shoot! I’m begging you!”
Those were Dai Keung’s last words before Hun Suk put two bullets in the back of his head.
Lee heard more pleading followed by more gunshots.
“I’ll be a horse. I’ll be a dog,” one man cried. “I’ll be anything. Don’t shoot.”
Lee didn’t move except when the gunshots startled him. He thought about fate’s role in all of this and regretted his decision to brave the snowstorm and come to the club that night. He was a cook at an Ipswich restaurant and had been to this gambling den many times before. Most recently, he had lost a bit of money and had returned to square his debt with the “Wrinkled Skin Man.” He remembers feeling the barrel of Hun Suk’s gun on the back of his head.
“Don’t fire the gun! Don’t!” Lee begged. He would later testify: “He did not listen to me. He fired. Then I did not know anything.”
Lee lay unconscious for thirty minutes, but he survived the shooting when the bullet broke into fragments and merely fractured his skull, but did not penetrate his brain. When he eventually regained consciousness, the shooters were gone. He crawled to the back door of the club and called out for help. Someone from a nearby apartment called the police. Lee was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he remained for several weeks before being released into the Witness Protection Program.
Moments after Lee was wounded, Hun Suk ordered one of the other shooters, Siny Van Tran, to “kill, kill, kill that Wrinkled Skin Man!”
Young began pleading for his life.
“If you want money, if you want gold, I’ll give you all. Please don’t shoot!”
Tran froze. He looked first at Hun Suk hoping he would change his mind, or redirect the order to the third shooter, Nam The Tham. But while those two men were busy shooting the other victims, Tran whispered urgently and gestured to Young to run away.
Tran maintains that he was only at the club to buy cocaine, and that he didn’t shoot anyone. He claims he didn’t even have a gun. Two guns were found at the scene. Neither had his fingerprints on them. He also denied Young’s accusation that he spent most of the night going in and out of the club and was probably the one who notified the other shooters that he had found their target. Tham’s account differs. He claims Tran and Hun Suk were the shooters.
“It was very cruel,” Tham said in a police interview. “I saw them shoot. I couldn’t even stand steady.”
Tham also told investigators that not only was Dai Keung the intended target, but so too was Wrinkled Skin Man. That, of course, seems unlikely, considering Wrinkled Skin Man wasn’t even shot. Within a week of the shooting, murder warrants were issued for the arrest of the three gunmen identified by Lee. The mayor of Boston, Raymond Flynn, who had gone to the scene in time to see the body bags being taken out of the club, said, “We have to chase the guys responsible for this, even if we have to go to the ends of the earth.”
He may have been somewhat prescient, because they found the gunmen seven years later on the other side of the world. When Tham, Tran, and Hun Suk fled the scene, perhaps in the blue Toyota spotted by the Irishman, they drove straight to Atlantic City, where they gambled for days. Upon hearing that Lee had survived the shooting, Tham, Tran, and Hun Suk went to the Philadelphia International Airport and escaped to Hong Kong. There they stayed in the Chinese underworld until 1998, when Tran and Tham were arrested by the Chinese government for unrelated crimes, including drug possession. It took three more years to convince China to extradite them back to the United States.
The delicate negotiations looked to be falling apart until investigators caught a break in April of 2001. The FBI arrested one of China’s most wanted fugitives, Qin Hong, in New York.