White Devil. Bob Halloran
he recognized the greeting as the Chinese word for “hello.”
“Ni hao,” he replied with an inherent South Boston accent that revealed his identity.
“Hey,” Woping Joe said, “you’re the white boy from the bar. What do you want?”
John explained the predicament he was in, and to his astonishment, Woping Joe told him someone would be by in ten minutes to pick him up. John waited inside the phone booth where it was still freezing, but at least it was dry and the wind wasn’t cutting through the hole in his jacket. Tragedy had hardened him so much that John had forgotten how to feel scared. So, ten minutes later, when two cars, a brand-new Acura and a BMW, rolled up on him, and a Chinese stranger said, “Get in,” John got in without hesitation.
He was taken to a large three-family house in Braintree where he was immediately surrounded by more than a dozen Asian gangsters. Most of them only glanced up at the white boy in their midst. Others stared him down. John stood nervously in the middle of the room. He noticed each of the gangsters had a gun tucked into his waistband. He saw the latest electronics. He heard music blaring from an expensive stereo, and he smelled a delicious aroma he’d later learn was Chinese noodles. It was a sensory overload that should have made John turn and run, but it didn’t.
“It was so badass!” John remembers. “I loved it!”
Several Asian women came out of the kitchen and were told by the men to serve dinner and set another place. John struggled to use chopsticks, which brought about plenty of laughter at the table, and that laughter only grew when John surrendered, picked up his bowl, and shoveled the food into his mouth with his thick fingers. The gangsters followed suit and good-naturedly copied John, who couldn’t help but laugh himself. It was a fun-filled family dinner like John had never experienced. He looked around the room and saw faces quite unlike his own, and yet he felt at home. He couldn’t know at the time that the seeds had just been planted for something that would grow strong inside him. Those were the seeds of loyalty and respect, and they would be nurtured over time. They were the seeds of an easier way. Never again would John face difficult decisions about right or wrong. If someone gave him respect, he returned it. If someone failed to show him respect, he showed that person what a mistake that was. There was a surprising simplicity in honor. And John would find weeding out the complexities of conscience or societal norms made it easy to accept otherwise unacceptable behavior.
“I can never say enough about these people,” John says sincerely. “As far as being family oriented, your brother is your brother, you know? Things are just the way they are. You don’t ask questions. It is what it is. To be taught a different culture, to live that culture, and to experience things that I have experienced, I have no regrets for anything that happened to me.”
John sat at the Asian gangsters’ dinner table that first night unaware that the direction of his life had been permanently and irreversibly altered. Unwittingly, Woping Joe had just become the catalyst for everything that would happen in John’s life from that day forward, and that included all things inspiring and reprehensible. Woping Joe thought he was simply repaying a debt. John had helped him in the bar that night, so Woping Joe was obliged to return the favor. That is the Chinese way, and John would come to believe that it was the best part of a Chinese culture that has its roots going back thousands of years. Strength and loyalty to his brothers meant so much to John that he had the phrase tattooed on his arm. It was an indelible reminder of how to live.
“I’m never going to walk away from the people. They took care of me in my life. That’s kind of a vow that you make; you never, ever walk away from the people that took care of you and care about you, ’cause that makes you no different from anybody else. Always honor your people. Honor your friends, your family. You know, respect and loyalty to your brothers that haven’t ratted on you, you know what I mean? I’m not gonna change, not in that aspect.”
John slept on the floor that night, but this time there was a carpet beneath him and the house, like his heart, was warm. John had found peace, and he found a family. The next day he would find another family, one even more long-lasting, one with dozens of fiercely loyal brothers willing to fight and die—or kill—for each other.
WOPING JOE brought John to a Vietnamese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown. This time, there were about twenty Asian gangsters demanding to know who John was and why he was there. Woping Joe vouched for John. They shared a meal of pork chops and rice with fish sauce, and John was in the gang. It was that easy. The rest of the initiation process included a shopping spree.
“I tried to say ‘no,’ but Woping Joe wasn’t hearing that,” John says. “So we went shopping and that was the beginning of my new life. It was the first time I ever went shopping without worrying about the price. If I didn’t have enough to cover something, my new friends paid. I soon learned we all stood together as a family, and that was a feeling I’d been searching for my whole life.”
As a white kid, John’s assimilation into the Chinese gang culture was unprecedented, but surprisingly easy. He walked comfortably among a group of hard-core criminals, undaunted by the language barrier and the cultural differences, and free of any moral ambiguities that might have shown weakness or caused him to hesitate. He didn’t judge them except to respect them, and that’s what they were looking for in a recruit.
Each morning, there was a meeting at a restaurant called Dong Kahn, where several leaders of a local Asian gang comprised of Chinese and Vietnamese men discussed their gambling and drug business. The gambling was done inside Chinatown. The drugs were sold outside Chinatown. John was quickly passed off to another young Chinese man they called Eric. John lived with Eric and adopted the role of enforcer when it came time to collect gambling debts or drug money. John went from being a poor white kid to being a Chinese gangster literally overnight. It was an odd transformation, but one John adapted to very quickly. He loved learning about the Chinese culture, but he was actually being exposed to a mutated philosophy that exists only in the Asian underworld. While his gang leaders talked about and demanded respect, they routinely intimidated, extorted, and stole under a flag of self-righteousness that inexplicably satisfied a warped rationale for their violence and criminality.
“You might say, ‘Normal people don’t kill people,’” John begins. “Well, we were not normal people. Normal people don’t deal with the things we deal with. We dealt with the street, but we dealt with it in a way that was, in our eyes, correct, you know? And that’s just the way it goes.”
It was all starting to make sense to John. A series of events and self-realizations answered the questions he had asked when he was cold and alone. When he faced danger or imposed pain on another human being without fear of consequences or reciprocity, and without so much as his pulse rising, he knew he was born for this. The extreme violence he was exposed to never shocked him or triggered a flight response. Rather, he found it suited his personality.
“I remember walking into a strip club in Chinatown, and I got jumped by some Italian gangsters,” John recalls. “It was over a stripper who didn’t make a difference to me. I didn’t even know her real name. Well, some guy sucker punched me in the face. Broke my nose. And then another guy pulled out a big knife and went to stab me. As he pulls the knife out, the other guys grabbed me. So the kid I was with pulls out a Mac-10 machine gun. Thank God!”
John was seventeen years old when that happened. No shots were fired, but the appearance of the machine gun served as a warning. John casually walked to the bar with his friend, got some ice for his nose, ordered a drink, and stayed to watch the stripper who was at the heart of the altercation. Overall, it was a pretty good night.
After joining the gang, John spent about a year and a half in Boston’s Chinatown working as muscle. His job was to be the imposing figure that stood by quietly while the Chinese and Vietnamese gang kids collected money from the gambling dens for their bosses. John’s impact was significant, and it was rewarded with an opportunity to rise through the ranks. As if he were a legitimate businessman, he was transferred to New York, where he would receive additional training.
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