Viet Gangs Plague Cities Across the U.S.

Huyen Thi Hoang, a mother of 14 who fled the violence of war-torn Vietnam, lost her dream of a better life to a bullet as she prayed at her bedside.

Five armed, masked robbers--ages 12, 13, 14, 17 and 20--broke in to loot her Santa Ana home last May. The two youngest invaders told police that the woman was shot and killed when she screamed, startling 14-year-old gang member Sau Van Le. The accused “triggerboy” has not been captured.

Huyen Thi Hoang’s case is perhaps the most horrifying of a growing number of such crimes faced by police and resettlement experts coast to coast.

In at least two dozen cities--from Orange County’s populous “Little Saigon” to Houston, from Boston to Dodge City, Kan., from Toronto to the Pacific Northwest--roving gangs of young Vietnamese are preying primarily on other Asian refugees.

The crimes include robbery, extortion, car theft, loan-sharking, drug-selling, prostitution and murder. The criminals, police say, are young, jobless and vicious. Many have no family ties. Often, they move from one city to another before their identities land on rap sheets or in mug books.

Most Vietnamese refugees came to America seeking an end to violence, but many of these youngsters came with the only life style they knew. As orphans or part of war-separated families, they started running in child gangs in Vietnam for sheer survival.

“They are children who heard guns being fired and bombs exploding from the day they were conceived,” said Detective Jim Badey of Arlington, Va., perhaps the country’s foremost expert on the problem.

These youngsters are often shunned by other refugees who fear these relatively few “bad apples” are making the entire 600,000-member Vietnamese refugee community in America look bad. Cultural differences have also aggravated the problem.

An Tonthat, resettlement director at the International Institute in Boston, said a more structured society and tougher legal system deterred youth crime in Vietnam.

“The perception of most of them is that the legal system here is very loose, very inconsistent, and very slow, and they are sure they can get away with crime,” Tonthat said. “When they come into contact with American society, the notion of class disappears, and they feel they can do anything they want very quickly to become rich.”

Orange County has the nation’s largest Indochinese community, with 100,000 refugees, 87% of whom are Vietnamese. Many young thugs picked up elsewhere have been traced back to the Orange County cities of Santa Ana, Westminster and Garden Grove and the Los Angeles County city of Monterey Park.

Others have stayed close to home. “They are roaming the streets like wolves in a pack,” said Westminster Police Lt. Bob Burnett.

The youngsters have strong friendship bonds that were made between 1979 and 1981 in Indochinese refugee camps as they waited for admission to the United States. Once in the country, some ran away from sponsor families. Others were rather loosely sponsored to begin with.

“I have seen many, many saying they met in the refugee camps. They make these bonds in camp, and they maintain these contacts in the States,” Badey said. “When they travel from place to place, they have a contact and a safehouse. There is no blood relationship, but they refer to each other as brothers.”

In some cities, police attribute the crime phenomenon to young free-lancers, or transients. In other areas investigators believe the gangs are more organized.

“These kids can be pretty vicious. They don’t hesitate to use their guns or other weapons they have,” said Sgt. Jerry Ellis, who has tracked robbery, burglary, shooting and extortion cases in Houston’s 55,000-plus Asian community since 1982.

“The weapons are usually good weapons, not Saturday night specials,” he said. “We find everything from Smith & Wesson pistols all the way up to Uzi submachine pistols and high-powered rifles.”

The Vietnamese gangs “do anything from murder to mayhem,” said Sgt. Dan Foley in San Francisco. “There’s been a lot of speculation about who’s behind them, but we don’t know. There are people who organize the groups, but we don’t know who they are.”

Crime-solving is made difficult by cultural differences and the victims’ widespread fear of retaliation if they testify. In many cases, gang members tell their victims they will be killed if they report the crimes to police.

“The average young Asian criminal simply takes advantage of the embedded Asian sentimentalities, that is, people being untrustworthy of banks and keeping large sums of cash and valuables in their homes (and) businesses. That makes them easy marks for robbery and extortion,” Burnett said. “And many crimes go unreported to police because such bandits pressure victims into intimidation.”

There is another problem, stemming from the Vietnamese community’s casual attitude about firearms. Some cities, including Houston and Port Arthur, Tex., have had multiple murders resulting from arguments and feuds that police do not believe were gang-related.

Police across the United States, in some Canadian cities and even in Australia started comparing notes on Indochinese gangs when transient criminals began popping up in their communities:

- Through arrests, Arlington, Va., police traced the movement of one roving gang arrested there in 1985 from California to Houston; New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; Virginia; Philadelphia; Boston; Oklahoma City; Logan, Utah; Rapid City, S.D.; Seattle; Vancouver, Wash.; and Portland, Ore.

- In Boston, police raided an apartment Jan. 11, arresting three Vietnamese men, ages 18 to 20, wanted for attempted murder in a July, 1985, pool hall shooting in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. All three were believed to be members of San Francisco’s Wah Ching, a Chinese gang.

- On Feb. 5, four gunmen who claimed to be members of a gang preying on Southeast Asian refugees across the country were arrested in Salt Lake City for kidnaping a restaurant owner’s wife and young daughter after a holdup. Police said the suspects appeared to be Laotian and told the woman they were from a 10-member gang working out of New York.

- The gang phenomenon has spread rapidly in the last year to the Midwest. In Dodge City, police say local Vietnamese gangs are best known for raiding and robbing illegal gambling parties.

- On Jan. 2, eight members of a Vietnamese gang were jailed for the attempted robbery of a Lowell, Mass., jewelry store. The wife of the Cambodian owner was pistol-whipped, suffering a skull fracture. The suspects were from Boston, New York and California.

- On Florida’s Panhandle, police said, a roving gang whose members sometimes wore hoods was preying on Vietnamese families who lived in cities along Interstate 10 in late 1985. Three Vietnamese from Texas were acquitted last year after a Florida witness, who identified the suspects from photographs, was unable to make a courtroom identification in an assault-robbery case.

- In March, 1986, Boston police arrested six Vietnamese youths from Virginia wanted for robbing a Philadelphia variety store and throwing the owner’s 70-year-old mother down the stairs, breaking her nose.

“When we called Philadelphia, they only had a report about a stolen car,” Boston Detective Kathy Johnston said. “The victims hadn’t told them about the robbery and assault. Here was a case where we solved a crime before the local police knew about it.”

The gangs are certainly just a tiny fraction of the Vietnamese refugee community. The Vietnamese and American-Asians in general are certainly better known for their abilities, industriousness and reverence for education than for crime. The law-abiding strugglers trying to make their way in a new country are the primary victims of the youth gangs.

The biggest question marks for police are how organized these gangs are and whether there is some sort of national Vietnamese crime network controlled by a few individuals. Answers on local organization vary from city to city. There is no clear picture on whether there is indeed a national Vietnamese crime hierarchy.

“There is an activity going around the country with certain individuals popping up again and again. We have identified an organized criminal activity. It’s not a network now, but they’re getting there,” said Supt. John Gifford, head of the Boston police intelligence division. “They have a loosely organized network. Now, they’re just fleeing areas where they’re hot to areas where they’re not.”

Police believe Vietnamese street gangs, preying on local businesses and illegal gambling parlors in Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood, may total more than 150 youngsters controlled by two or three “captains” who in turn answer to a Big Brother. That man, in his late 30s, lives in the suburbs and holds a legitimate 9-to-5 job, investigators said.

In addition, police see the Vietnamese gang’s emergence in Boston as a strong challenge to the city’s Chinese Ping On crime group.

“We don’t want to glamorize these clowns,” Gifford said. “The entire Asian community shouldn’t take the blame. Most are industrious, hard-working, upstanding people. This small group and its quasi-domestic terrorism is a real detriment. They put a fear in the hearts of the people.”

In New York City, there are no known Vietnamese gangs, but three main Chinese gangs do have Vietnamese members who speak Cantonese, said Sgt. James McVeety, supervisor of the Police Department’s Oriental Gang Unit, nicknamed “the Jade Squad.”

“Our observations are that these Vietnamese are in the beginning stages of their membership and have to do yeoman’s duty. They do a lot of enforcement work, a lot of the fringe stuff,” McVeety said. “They are certainly not youth gangs, although teens are in the gangs. They are street gangs. They are very much organized crime. They exist for one thing--money--and they get it through extortion, protection, robberies and gambling.”

Virginia detective Badey testified last fall before a Senate committee looking into emerging criminal groups. He has pleaded time and again for intense federal assistance in coordinating Asian gang data. Such information is relayed from city to city by street-level investigators.

“I’d like to see some kind of a clearinghouse, an organized investigative approach to this whole thing. An awful lot falls through the cracks,” Badey said. “Unfortunately, the federal agencies aren’t paying enough attention to it.

“I don’t know what the hell it takes to get a priority set. They (federal agencies) have an Italian and Corsican mind-set. They just discovered the Sicilians, and that’s where their mind-set is. I’ve been thrown out of more federal offices because people think I’m a jerk. The feds don’t want to look at it.”

In some cities, it is also difficult to convince local officials they may have a problem, Badey said.

He found a batch of stolen driver’s licenses and credit cards in an envelope in an Arlington gang member’s pocket during an arrest last April. The envelope was addressed to a Vietnamese man in Oklahoma City.

“When I called Oklahoma City police and asked about the man in question, they told me I was crazy, that there were no Vietnamese in their city,” he said.

Badey called a local federal agent he knew and asked for a favor--look for the man named on the envelope. The agent found the man--and a Vietnamese community of 3,000 centered in the city’s vice district.

Getting victims to cooperate is often impossible, especially in cities where there are no Asian officers or interpreters on the police force.

“They are easy prey. They are people whose only experience with police was bad. If you dealt with the police in Saigon, you probably never had the chance to tell anybody about it,” said Lowell, Mass., Police Capt. John Cullen. “The concept of a friendly police is not known to them. They are afraid to report it to anyone.”

Some cities have refugee assimilation programs that mainly reach law-abiding Vietnamese.

“Quite a few of these youths are without families, and they don’t have the support system that was always there in the family,” said Ngoan Le, executive director of the Vietnam Assn. of Illinois, which assists a 12,000-member community in the Chicago area.

“This problem is very upsetting. We are trying to do as much as we can to curb it and stop it altogether,” Le said.

“These kids are an embarrassment to the community. They don’t want people to think all Vietnamese are like that,” Boston’s Johnston said. “They want a miracle from us--that we can just round them up and get rid of them, like exterminators--or they just pretend these kids aren’t even there.

“To these kids, going to jail isn’t bad. You get three square meals a day and a roof over your head. I’ve been told that on more than one occasion. It’s a serious problem that has to be dealt with. We just can’t close our eyes to it and allow it to continue. If we do, they’ll just get stronger.”

Badey said he has been frustrated time and again when trying to encourage the local community to develop programs that would divert gang members from their criminal ways.

“All I hear is lip service,” he said. “We in America help our unknown, unfortunate brethren. You don’t see that with the Vietnamese. They just look down on them.

“It’s a cultural thing. It’s not ingrained to help others. In an agrarian society with hundreds of years of war, individual survival is paramount.”