Pattern of Violence Goes Back to 1800s, Experts Say

When the editor of a foreign-language weekly who had a reputation for outraging his right-wing opponents was shot at close range on a street corner, his supporters and law enforcement officials suspected a political assassination.

But the first suspect arrested in connection with the 1943 murder of Carlo Tresca, editor of the Italian socialist newspaper Il Martello, was Carmine Galante, who eventually was released and went on to head one of the more powerful Mafia organizations in New York.

As with crime within other past and present immigrant groups in the United States, violence in Vietnamese exile communities in recent years appears to follow a familiar pattern that stretches back more than a century, experts say. With political differences transplanted intact from their native land and police often ill-equipped to deal with violence directed by one immigrant against another, the lines between terrorism and ordinary criminal activity are easily blurred.

Today, as state and local authorities wrestle with the question of whether particular crimes within Southeast Asian enclaves are the work of terrorist groups, the task of determining motives is key.

When Tap Van Pham, publisher of a weekly Vietnamese-language newspaper, was killed in the firebombing of his Garden Grove office Aug. 9, some believed it was an act of political terrorism; others said it more likely was the work of extortionists or other common criminals.

Responsibility Claimed

Since then, Garden Grove police investigators have concluded that a communique claiming responsibility on behalf of an obscure anti-Communist group is genuine. But some in Orange County’s Vietnamese community remain skeptical.

“Historically, violence is a pretty common feature of immigrant communities,” said Brian Jenkins, chairman of the political science department of the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. “It tends to be a first-generation phenomenon. Language and cultural barriers discourage the first generation from going to the authorities.”

“Crime is a shortcut for social mobility,” said Rita Simon, a sociologist and dean of the School of Justice at American University in Washington, D.C. “People with talent and not enough education can make their way up the financial ladder by using special skills.”

Successful first-generation criminals who 60 years ago dreamed of sending their children to Harvard or Yale to become doctors and lawyers, Simon said, may now dream of sending their children to MIT or UC Berkeley to become computer programmers.

Achieving Success

“We reward success in America, and we’re not so scrupulous in examining the way in which that success is achieved,” Simon said. “Every immigrant community takes advantage of that.”

Groups settling in large numbers in the United States since 1850--Irish, Chinese, Italians, Greeks, Poles and Eastern European Jews--all have experienced intra-group violence, the experts say, with criminal elements preying mostly on fellow immigrants. As long as the violence did not spill over into the larger community, law enforcement officials in urban areas were unable or unwilling to the overcome the barrier of language and cultural differences in order to investigate.

“Penetrating that is a monumental task,” said Anthony R. Crittenden, an Asian-crime specialist with the state attorney general’s office.

After the first generation, as the immigrants’ standard of living improves, they move out of ethnic ghettos, Jenkins said. The area of operation that provided a “concentration of victims” shrinks, and the criminal activity diminishes.

While much attention on the West Coast has focused on violence within Vietnamese communities, on the East Coast immigrants from Hong Kong and Korea are following similar patterns.

What is going on in these Asian-American communities today is “very similar to the kind of street life that you saw from the 1870s and 1880s among European groups,” said Simon, author of “Public Opinion and the Immigrant.”

The nature of the crime that predominates in immigrant communities, Jenkins said, depends on “the kinds of criminal activities that existed in the countries they came from,” but it usually includes some variety of extortion.

“It’s the most insulated of activities,” Simon said. “Extortion you can really control by yourself.”

Sometimes, Jenkins said, political differences that are carried by immigrants to their new homeland become intertwined with criminal violence, and “there is a tendency to put a political cover on what is a more ordinary personal crime.”

“People bring with them the conflicts and animosities that divided them in their home countries,” said Simon, citing the issue of anti-communism.

“It’s a pattern we’ve seen with many exile communities,” said former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, who was concerned with political violence in Florida’s Cuban exile community in the 1960s. The resort to violence was a result of “the intensity of emotions” felt by those displaced by the revolution,” Clark said.

The Cuban revolution of 1960 and the exodus of Cubans to Miami added a new dimension to large-scale immigration and assimilation, Simon said.

Drug Trade

The vast majority of Cuban immigrants were honest and hard-working, eager to integrate themselves into American life. But some in the community became identified with the drug trade--until they were displaced by Colombians--and later money laundering.

As in the Vietnamese community today, said Jorge Dominguez, a Cuban-born professor of government at Harvard University, “the boundaries of anti-communism and mere thuggery were unclear.”

Dominguez recalled the case of one prominent Cuban exile with what he called “a diversified illegal portfolio”--a government official under Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, a former Havana gangster with ties to the CIA. When he was killed in Miami, Dominguez said, it was difficult to determine the motive.

But as far as the police were concerned, the hallmark of the Cuban exile community was political violence in the 1960s. The virulent anti-communism expressed by Cuban exiles, some of whom were trained by the CIA for anti-Castro missions, translated into sustained violence against anyone voicing support for normalization of relations with Cuba. The charge of “pro-communism” became a catch-all for anyone against whom there was a grievance.

“There was petty extortion in the Cuban-American press,” Dominguez said, especially among weekly publications. “You had to pay off a political paper so that you would not be denounced as a Castro double agent.”

Things became more complicated when, in the 1970s, the Cuban government permitted exiles in the United States to return to the island to visit relatives and to bring goods (later only money) with them.

Cubans Warned

Hard-line anti-Communists warned against making the trip, saying, according to Dominguez, “In so doing you’re contributing to legitimizing this regime (in Havana),” since normalization of relations with the United States would be “the final symbol of success (for Castro).”

Although the matter created a bitter debate within the Cuban community, and a charter company operating flights to Havana was threatened, thousands of exiles ultimately made these visits without significant retribution. The anti-Communist credentials of those who made the trips were not seriously questioned. There was even speculation that the trips provided some intelligence opportunities for the U.S government.

The level of paranoia in the Cuban community in south Florida rose again in 1980, when Castro permitted the departure of more than 100,000 people to the United States from the port of Mariel. Exiles were ecstatic to have their own relatives released, but there was widespread belief that among the Marielitos were agents of the Cuban intelligence organization. Members of the Vietnamese community harbor some of the same fears about the boat people who fled Vietnam.

That Cuban agents have been sent to the United States “is not a fact in dispute,” Dominguez said, but “the number of such agents is tiny, whereas the charge is extremely common. The charge invariably is unsupported and typically made against people who are advocating a change of policy in one way or another.”

In south Florida, the violence may be fading, as the Cuban community evolves into “a more sophisticated political force,” Jenkins said. “One doesn’t talk about a bomb placed by a political extremist anymore. You talk about a huge bloc of political support that can swing an election.”

Dominguez agreed.

“Anti-communism remains a central issue of concern,” he said. “What has changed is the resort to violence.” That is now infrequent, and in its place there has been a “shift toward more civilized politics.. . . They seem to be putting aside invective, abuse and insult.”

Still, he cautioned, “if you’re looking for examples that the community is intolerant, quite violently so, you can find them.”