Gambino family capo exclaimed, a little defensively, on a wiretap. “You gotta push their skinny asses into a chair and stick your fingers in their face. ‘Keep your fucking chopsticks outta my place, you little slant cocksucker. You savvy?’”
The new gangs were much more violent than their predecessors. Without adult supervision by the tongs, they fell into bloody feuds based not just on real estate but on the most petty of pretexts. An insufficiently deferential facial expression on a Friday night at a bowling alley could result in shots fired. The police often came to the aid of teenagers who had been beaten and stabbed on a busy sidewalk, only to learn that the victim had no gang connection and the whole incident was a case of mistaken identity: the assailants had thought he was somebody else. A gang of Vietnamese teenagers who, in a chilling appropriation of the stock phrase of American GIs, called themselves Born To Kill, or BTK, became known for upping the ante on indiscriminate brutality. They worked for various tongs, or even for other gangs, in a freelance capacity, when there was truly dirty work to be done. A BTK funeral at a cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, was interrupted once when several mourners dropped the flowers they had brought, produced automaticweapons, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, prompting some of the mourners to take cover by jumping into the open grave and others, who had come to the funeral armed, to fire back.
Because much of the gang violence was Chinese-on-Chinese, and many of the victims were undocumented immigrants who could disappear from the streets without anyone so much as filing a police report, it took some time before the authorities came to appreciate the extent of the brutal anarchy that had taken hold. On the Fourth of July, 1991, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Rhona Lantin came to New York City for a girls’ night out with old friends from high school. Lantin lived in Maryland and worked as an economist at the Department of Agriculture in Washington. As a graduate student at the University of Maryland, she had met and fallen in love with a fellow student named Patrick, and the two were engaged to be married the following spring. It was a warm, beautiful night in the city, and Lantin and her friends watched the fireworks over New York Harbor, then all six of them piled into a Ford Explorer and drove to Chinatown for a late-night snack. The narrow streets and sidewalks were crowded with merrymakers, and the Explorer slowed to the halting pace of Chinatown traffic. Inching north along Mulberry, none of the passengers would have realized it, but they had entered the heart of Ghost Shadows territory. At around 11:30, as they reached the intersection with Bayard, several shots rang out and a single bullet pierced the windshield and struck Rhona Lantin in the head. It was a stray bullet in a gang shootout; the killer, a teenaged Ghost Shadow, would eventually be convicted of “depraved indifference” murder. The morning after the shooting, Lantin died in the hospital. For police and prosecutors in New York, the randomness of the killing—and the fact that the victim was not Chinese or Vietnamese, that she was a tourist—brought home the urgent realization that the violence of the Chinatown gangs was no longer purely indigenous or contained. It had become an epidemic.
Part of the unruliness of the gangs was simple immaturity. Many of the members had barely reached puberty—they were twelve, fourteen,sixteen. The snakehead trade and America’s accommodating asylum policies meant that thousands of new children arrived in Chinatown every year. Many of them had been uprooted from a claustrophobic, sheltered childhood of agrarian poverty only to be thrust into the riotous urban scrum of Chinatown. They lived in cramped quarters with older relatives who were largely absent, working day and night to pay off snakehead debts or raise money to send for more relatives. They
The new gangs were much more violent than their predecessors. Without adult supervision by the tongs, they fell into bloody feuds based not just on real estate but on the most petty of pretexts. An insufficiently deferential facial expression on a Friday night at a bowling alley could result in shots fired. The police often came to the aid of teenagers who had been beaten and stabbed on a busy sidewalk, only to learn that the victim had no gang connection and the whole incident was a case of mistaken identity: the assailants had thought he was somebody else. A gang of Vietnamese teenagers who, in a chilling appropriation of the stock phrase of American GIs, called themselves Born To Kill, or BTK, became known for upping the ante on indiscriminate brutality. They worked for various tongs, or even for other gangs, in a freelance capacity, when there was truly dirty work to be done. A BTK funeral at a cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, was interrupted once when several mourners dropped the flowers they had brought, produced automaticweapons, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, prompting some of the mourners to take cover by jumping into the open grave and others, who had come to the funeral armed, to fire back.
Because much of the gang violence was Chinese-on-Chinese, and many of the victims were undocumented immigrants who could disappear from the streets without anyone so much as filing a police report, it took some time before the authorities came to appreciate the extent of the brutal anarchy that had taken hold. On the Fourth of July, 1991, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Rhona Lantin came to New York City for a girls’ night out with old friends from high school. Lantin lived in Maryland and worked as an economist at the Department of Agriculture in Washington. As a graduate student at the University of Maryland, she had met and fallen in love with a fellow student named Patrick, and the two were engaged to be married the following spring. It was a warm, beautiful night in the city, and Lantin and her friends watched the fireworks over New York Harbor, then all six of them piled into a Ford Explorer and drove to Chinatown for a late-night snack. The narrow streets and sidewalks were crowded with merrymakers, and the Explorer slowed to the halting pace of Chinatown traffic. Inching north along Mulberry, none of the passengers would have realized it, but they had entered the heart of Ghost Shadows territory. At around 11:30, as they reached the intersection with Bayard, several shots rang out and a single bullet pierced the windshield and struck Rhona Lantin in the head. It was a stray bullet in a gang shootout; the killer, a teenaged Ghost Shadow, would eventually be convicted of “depraved indifference” murder. The morning after the shooting, Lantin died in the hospital. For police and prosecutors in New York, the randomness of the killing—and the fact that the victim was not Chinese or Vietnamese, that she was a tourist—brought home the urgent realization that the violence of the Chinatown gangs was no longer purely indigenous or contained. It had become an epidemic.
Part of the unruliness of the gangs was simple immaturity. Many of the members had barely reached puberty—they were twelve, fourteen,sixteen. The snakehead trade and America’s accommodating asylum policies meant that thousands of new children arrived in Chinatown every year. Many of them had been uprooted from a claustrophobic, sheltered childhood of agrarian poverty only to be thrust into the riotous urban scrum of Chinatown. They lived in cramped quarters with older relatives who were largely absent, working day and night to pay off snakehead debts or raise money to send for more relatives. They
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