White Devil. Bob Halloran
As they parked along Canal Street and observed the mingling of merchants, customers, and tourists, the three teenage boys had no way of knowing they were in the middle of a war zone.
The opposing gang factions typically operated peacefully within their own zones of power and influence. The borders were well defined. Certain streets belonged to certain gangs. But well-established gangs like the Flying Dragons and Ghost Shadows were being threatened by extremely violent upstart gangs like the Green Dragons, and especially the Canal Boys, who preferred to be called Born To Kill, or BTK.
John was seventeen when he arrived in New York in 1988. By then, the Green Dragons were well on their way to taking over Queens, and a Vietnamese emigrant known as David Thai had broken away from the Flying Dragons and organized BTK. He gathered nearly one hundred Vietnamese refugees, spiked their hair, and dressed them in black suits with dark sunglasses. Together they terrorized merchants and shopkeepers throughout Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens with a rash of robberies, extortion, and extreme violence.
BTK solidified its reputation for using extreme measures in 1988 when its members threw a bomb into a police cruiser, injuring two officers. It was Thai’s way of letting police know that he didn’t appreciate several merchants under his control being arrested for selling fake Rolex watches. The brazen attack also served notice to police that BTK was at the forefront of Chinatown’s growing phenomenon and incipient problem. There was an influx of unpredictable and uncontrollable Vietnamese gangs. And John moved right into the middle of it. Canal Street was the central place of operation for BTK, and John’s first New York apartment was above a gambling den at 74 Canal Street.
This was the BTK’s territory, but Thai was wise enough to work with instead of against the Hip Sing Association, one of the most powerful tongs in Chinatown. The tongs were secret brotherhoods and, like gangs, were powerful and often involved in criminal activity. Hip Sing was run by Benny Ong, known to law enforcement as the godfather of Chinatown, but known to everyone else as Uncle Seven, a nickname he received because he was the seventh child in his family. Uncle Seven had served seventeen years in prison for murder. He was convicted in 1937, when he was thirty years old, but whispers throughout Chinatown perpetuated a belief that Uncle Seven never committed the murder, but instead had taken the rap for someone more important within the organization. That kind of loyalty made him a hero in Chinatown, and a hero to John. David Thai decided it was wiser to make friends with an eighty-one-year-old legend than to go to war with him.
“Those Canal Boys, BTK, were friends with my boss,” John says, referring to Uncle Seven. “Those guys ran around the country just killing and doing whatever they wanted to.”
That, of course, created a number of enemies for BTK, and that led to the murder of Vinh Vu, an underboss in the gang and one of its most popular members. Vu’s high profile made him an attractive target. So, on July 25, 1990, when Vu exited a massage parlor on Canal Street he was gunned down by several gunmen firing from the front- and backseat of a car. Three days later, Vu’s funeral was disrupted at the cemetery when three gunmen opened fire on the mourners. Seven people were wounded.
“I was around when all this stuff happened,” John says. “These guys were like my people, but these guys were renegades. They were crazy. They didn’t follow the rules of the Chinese, because the majority of them were Vietnamese. When I grew up, there was a sense of loyalty to everybody. Like, we didn’t just go out and cause problems. If you had an issue you had to talk to your boss to see what you could do. You didn’t want to overstep your boundaries. There was honor. There was a sense of family.”
Surrounded by the violence but not an active participant in the war, John went about the business of learning his trade. He watched how Uncle Seven conducted his business with a comforting presence and a firm hand. Although he walked with a cane, Uncle Seven seemed to glide through Chinatown with a dignified grace that accurately reflected his stature, but also belied his potential for cruelty. John thought about the time Uncle Seven served in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and he was inspired by the amount of respect Uncle Seven must have had for the real murderer. It saddened John to see that kind of respect disregarded by the next generation.
“I sit here in prison today,” John says. “I could’ve told on people for murders and different things. But I’d rather take it and have my face, you know what I mean? People who put me in this position, the ones who ratted me out, there’s always a time where people will have to pay the piper, one way or the other.”
For gamblers who failed to pay, extorted merchants who complained, and robbery victims who dared to resist, the penalties were dramatic displays of force. John, who only needed a menacing glare or his fists to get people to hand over their money, was shocked the first time he and a few other gang members cased a check-cashing store. The men who delivered the cash to these stores were easy to spot. They were the ones with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. When one man refused to give up his suitcase, someone in John’s crew chopped off the man’s hand with a machete. John watched the hand hit the ground, and then picked up the briefcase and ran. Later, he counted $40,000, and handed it over to a very pleased Uncle Seven.
“Yeah, I’ve seen guys get their hands chopped off,” John says flatly. “This guy, first of all, he’s involved in something he shouldn’t have been involved in. I said, maybe my hand will be chopped next. Maybe I should learn a lesson from that.”
On another occasion, John unknowingly went after a check-cashing business owned and operated by the Italian mafia. John got the money, but he was nearly killed in the attempt. While running down the street, John turned a corner and heard a loud shotgun blast. He looked back and saw a large hole in the wall next to him. That was his last check-cashing heist.
The first shots John ever fired from a gun were moments after he and his crew robbed an illegal sweatshop. He raced down the street with bullets whistling over his head, and while ducking and still running away, he reached back and fired wildly in the general direction of the shooters. Innocent bystanders could have been killed, but John was in survival mode.
“That really opened my eyes,” John says. “This was for real. That was the first real sense I got that if I didn’t shoot, I’d be dead.”
Wanting desperately to impress Uncle Seven, John did as he was told and a little more. For instance, he learned to speak Chinese. John practiced constantly with his best friend in the group, a young Asian man who went by Sam.
“You have to speak Chinese,” Sam told him. “How else will you get the girls?”
Sam began by teaching John one word at a time. Glass is “boi.” Table is “toi.” Door is “munh.” John wrote them all down on flash cards, unconcerned with proper spelling. He just needed to pronounce the words correctly. Listening to a lot of Chinese music and singing songs at karaoke clubs helped. Watching dozens of Chinese movies with subtitles helped more. His favorite movie was Moment of Romance, starring Andy Lau as a gangster who falls in love with a good girl. John still relates to it well.
“I have the soundtrack, and I listen to it,” he says. “It takes me back to when I was younger.”
In the beginning, John often spoke in broken Chinese, and he routinely spoke it backward, but he was happy to be understood and proud to be respected.
“It wasn’t me that taught myself Chinese,” John says humbly. “God taught me. He gave me what I needed to survive.”
John’s fluency in the language didn’t happen until he began living with the Laus, a Chinese couple, in Queens. They taught him to speak fluent Chinese with an authentic Toi Son accent, and they instilled in John the importance of Buddhism as part of his new Chinese culture. John soaked it all in, and he had no trouble reconciling the life lessons he learned and the actual life he was leading.
“Before I did anything, I prayed,” John says.
While he was living with Jackie Lau, who, along with his brother Peter Lau, owned businesses in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Queens, John settled into place as an enforcer and a bodyguard. It was another opportunity for him to see firsthand how Chinese leaders ran their operations. The very fact that