Vietnamese Girl Gangs Become Armed, Violent

At 16, “Tomboy” is wanted for burglary. She has dyed amber hair, a knife-cut tattoo on her forearm that says “I love Tuan” and a way of hunching her shoulders that tells adults to drop dead.

She sits in silent fury under arrest in a lawn chair outside a motel room packed with 16 Vietnamese-American teens. Inside, a police search is turning up a switch-blade, a holster for an automatic, high-caliber bullets, a stun-gun, and what police think is stolen property.

Garden Grove police say Tomboy and the four other girls in the motel room are part of Orange County’s new Asian gang problem: groups of rival teen-age girls fighting with knives and arming themselves with semiautomatic weapons.

They call themselves “Wally Girls,” “Pomona Girls,” “Junior Wally Girls” and “Dirty Punks.” Police have identified at least six gangs, each with 10 to 20 members ranging in age from about 13 to 20.

Each female gang is allied with one or more male gangs, including the “Santa Ana Boy,” “Cheap Boys” and “Natoma Boys,” police say.

In the past month, the female gangs have begun fighting each other. It has become clear to police that they are not merely the girlfriends and groupies of male gang members, but are protagonists in crimes of their own.

“They say Vietnamese girls look innocent but they’re vicious,” said an 18-year-old member of the Dirty Punks of her fellow gang members.

Since Thanksgiving, female gangs in Fountain Valley and Garden Grove have engaged in a series of fist and knife fights. The rivalry culminated in a brawl in Santa Ana’s Centennial Park the night of Dec. 1, when five Vietnamese-American girls were stabbed, said Sgt. Frank Hauptmann, who heads Garden Grove’s Asian gang unit.

Two of the suspects in the stabbing are female, gang unit Officer Mike Martin said. One of the victims, a 16-year-old, had gashes in the head and back and a punctured lung, he said.

The next night, police were interviewing gang members on Brookhurst Street when they heard gunshots, and found a boy, a member of the Cheap Boys gang, shot in the arm, Hauptmann said.

While they were investigating, the officers heard more gunfire among four cars of teens on Brookhurst Street. When they spotted and stopped two of the cars later that night, they found two loaded semiautomatic weapons, and arrested seven male and female teens--including one Wally Girl--on charges ranging from assault with a deadly weapon to possession of loaded firearms in public, Hauptmann and Martin said.

Whether the girls are pulling the triggers or just carrying the guns isn’t clear, police said.

“We have found guns in cars that girls were in,” Martin said. “We have actual photographs of girls holding guns, posing in motel rooms. Handguns, automatics and revolvers. Tonight, I’ve been told every car out there, guys and girls, has guns. . . .

“I can’t say for sure whether or not they’ve shot anyone. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

Several female gang members said it is the boys who do the shooting.

“Girls only fight with knives or high heels,” said one girl gang member, who police said had been arrested for breaking into a car.

The escalating violence among the female gangs and their male backers prompted Hauptmann to order a crackdown. Friday night, 20 officers were sent out to interview as many gang members as possible, frisk suspects, confiscate weapons, and broadcast the Police Department’s new gang policy: zero tolerance.

The car belonging to the 18-year-old Dirty Punk’s boyfriend was stopped because police recognized the license plate as being identified in connection with the Brookhurst Street gunplay. Police say the boyfriend associates with the Cheap Boys.

In tight jeans, black boots and a black sweater, the Dirty Punk is slender and pretty. She brags about what a good fighter she is. She says the rival Wally Girls are complaining to police that the Dirty Punks “did the drive-by” on Brookhurst because the Wallys can’t hold their own in a fight.

“When it comes to fighting with fists, they can’t win,” said the young woman. “These girls are saying I did the shooting, but I was at work. . . . Why should we go in (jail) for something we didn’t even do? I have an alibi, that I was at work.”

The young woman, who came to the United States from Vietnam when she was 3, said her friends’ parents are powerless to control their daughters.

“They know, but Vietnamese parents, you know, if they’re strict, then the girls run away,” she explained.

In the Anaheim motel room, police find a dozen young men they identify as Santa Ana Boys and their friends, and four girls they identify as Wally Girls. The girls lounge on the beds, reading their horoscopes in Vietnamese and sassing the cops who are rummaging through their bags.

Officers ask them what they want to be when they grow up. Tomboy says she wants to be a cop. “I’ll catch only white people, no Vietnamese,” she snaps.

While police check for outstanding arrest warrants, a 19-year-old pulls up her T-shirt to show a bulging stomach. She says the baby is due in February. A 20-year-old has two fading bruises on her face. She says she got them in the fight in Centennial Park, but insisted she doesn’t know who hit her.

As police arrest Tomboy and take her away in handcuffs, the 20-year-old whispers that Tomboy didn’t really do the burglary. What happened, she said, is that another Asian girl had a fight with her parents and invited the gang members to come over and rob her own house. But the grandmother came home unexpectedly. Tomboy, who had stayed in the car, got away, but the girl who had initiated the robbery gave police Tomboy’s name as one of those responsible.

Police have documented up to 40 male and female Asian gangs based in or passing through Garden Grove, Hauptmann said. The male gangs’ stock in trade is burglary (car radios, stereos, cash and gold jewelry) and auto theft, often with whittled-down master keys for Toyotas, Nissans and Mazdas, he said. Several girls have been arrested for breaking into cars, but they more frequently engage in shoplifting and petty theft, police said.

Asian gangs claim no particular turf, law enforcement authorities say. Garden Grove police say that their girl gangs stick close to home most of the time, frequenting local skating rinks and bowling alleys. The males, however, are highly mobile, popping up in Orange County, Los Angeles and San Jose in the course of a weekend, and sometimes committing crimes as far away as Houston and Canada, police said.

Gang members often use motel rooms as staging grounds for crime capers or just to get together. Police say one person will rent the room, then invite a dozen friends to sneak in the back door.

The recent surge in both male and female teen gang activity has Garden Grove police particularly worried, because it coincides with an increase in the violent, terrifying robberies that police have begun calling “home invasions.”

Typically, eight or 10 gang members, aged 14 to about 28, will target a Vietnamese family known to keep cash or jewelry at home, Hauptmann said. They knock on the door, force their way in with automatic weapons, round up every member of the family, and scream at, beat and threaten them until they hand over the money.

“Home invasion robberies have been around for several years now, but the frequency is picking up,” Hauptmann said. “We’ve had five or six in the last two months.”

One former Junior Wally Girl worked as a front for such robberies, Martin said.

“She would knock on the door, she would make contact with the victims,” Martin explained. “They would open the door and the guys would go in.”

The girl was arrested for robbery and is now in jail, he said.

Home invasions are also growing more violent. In the past three months, three children have been threatened or harmed to make their parents cooperate. In one case, the assailants held a gun to an 8-year-old’s head, and in another, they held a child’s hand or foot under hot tap water until he screamed, Hauptmann said.

In another, the robbers burned a child with a cigarette. “They would put the cigarette onto the child and demand more money,” Hauptmann said. “The parents would keep saying, ‘We’ve given everything, we don’t have any more.’

“We call them little terrorists.”

Vietnamese community leaders are startled by the phenomenon of female gangs.

“I was shocked to hear that,” said Long C. Le, a Vietnamese-born English teacher at Fountain Valley High School. “I’ve heard of girls hanging out with gang members but I never heard that they formed their own gangs.”

Le said normal adolescent identity problems are made worse among Vietnamese refugees because of the cultural and social dislocation they face, and because their family structure has often been undermined or destroyed by the Vietnam war, life in refugee camps and immigration.

In some cases, gang members are orphans, or have only one parent, or are living with relatives or foster parents, Le said. In other cases, parents who themselves are poorly educated or do not speak English come to depend on their children for help, which undermines their authority, Le said.

“They develop a kind of inferiority complex when dealing with their children. And their children, because they speak the language, tell them one lie after another,” Le said.

Mai Cong, chairman of the Vietnamese Community Social Service Center, said parents who may be working long hours, raising younger children, and struggling to establish new lives here, can offer little help to older children.

“The adults themselves are having trouble assimilating, integrating, understanding,” she said. “So it’s difficult for them to help the children to understand.”

Police say many of the gang members are runaways, while others are out of control.

“Some of the parents have been threatened by their own kids,” Martin said. “In Vietnam, if the kids acted like this, they’d be beaten. Here, (the parents) are aware of the child abuse laws--because the kids throw them at them--and so they expect the police to do their discipline for them. And we can’t.”

Problems of identity and self-esteem are especially acute among Vietnamese-American teens who are not doing well in high school or college, because of the extremely high value their culture places on education, Le and others said.

To such children, they said, the gangs offer a sense of belonging that school, family, and a wounded community have not been able to provide.

“I don’t think it’s adolescent rebellion,” Le said. “I think it’s despair.”