Foot Soldiers Add Violent Twist to Asian Street Gangs : Crime: International gangsters are using recruits in the Southland for carjacking and smuggling operations.

Bright, articulate, polite and full of promise, 16-year-old Coung Minh Hoang will soon go on trial for murder.

Authorities say the Vietnam-born teen-ager, homeless at age 13 and abandoned by his parents, carved out a life for himself among the growing population of Chinese gangs in the San Gabriel Valley.

It was a life of days spent far from school and of nights gambling.

It was a life in tutelage to his gang dai lo , or big brother.

It was a life that, authorities allege, eventually led Hoang to wait in an Alhambra parking lot and kill a stranger for her luxury car.

The April 5 attempted carjacking and shooting death of Kathy May Lee, 27, a Monterey Park real estate agent, jolted Southern Californians more accustomed to the random crimes often associated with Latino and African-American gangs.

This was not a case of a gangbanger stealing a car on a whim or taking a life for revenge. The way authorities tell it, Hoang, acting on his superiors’ orders, committed a calculated killing that offers chilling insight into the intricate web of Asian organized crime in Southern California.

Lee, who was on an errand to buy fabric for her wedding, was killed for one reason: Someone she had never met, thousands of miles away, coveted her car.

Hoang’s bosses, according to Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators, were older members of the Wah Ching, an Asian crime group with links to three-century-old criminal societies in Hong Kong.

The car Lee was driving--a gray Lexus that Hoang allegedly tried to take by force, only to flee after the shooting--was requested by a buyer, most likely from mainland China, who was willing to pay two to three times the $49,000 price tag for that model of luxury car, authorities say. The high price is a bargain compared to the duty fees and red tape that routinely double the cost and make delivery tedious.

Smuggling trade

If the killer had escaped with the car, the Lexus would have been hidden inside a 40-foot-long wooden shipping crate labeled “rubber tires,” “household goods” or “scrap metal” and shipped to Taiwan from the docks at San Pedro on board a battered freighter. Weeks later, a buyer in China would have opened the door for a first drive.

The volume of this kind of smuggling has reached such proportions that eight months ago U.S. customs officials began monitoring shipments out of San Pedro. So far, they have intercepted $4 million worth of stolen cars, said Dave Stevenson, an agent with the National Insurance Crime Bureau in El Monte, an insurance industry group.

The theft and smuggling operation, although not new, is being used increasingly by Asian organized crime members, whose hirelings have become more violently visible on the streets, auto theft experts say.

Young foot soldiers such as Hoang provide the front-line carjackings, robberies and burglaries, experts say. Without them, the army of sophisticated older, organized criminals could not exist.

“It’s not a surprising scenario,” said Glenn Masuda, a child psychologist at Asian Pacific Family Center in Rosemead. “It happens more frequently than people are willing to acknowledge.”

Hoang faces a hearing Thursday in Pasadena Juvenile Court to determine if he should be tried as an adult. If found guilty as an adult, he could get a life sentence.

There are about 10,000 Asian gang members in Los Angeles County, belonging to more than 100 gangs. Hoang occupied the lowest rung in a hierarchy that experts divide into roughly three levels. At the top are international Asian gangsters--immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan--who belong to foreign-based criminal organizations that specialize in immigrant smuggling, extortion, home invasion robberies and prostitution.

The most well-known of the organizations are triads, formal hierarchical organizations with strict rules and ceremonies deriving from their 16th-Century origins as secret political societies. According to a 1992 U.S. Senate investigation, more than 50 of these groups exist in Hong Kong, with as many as 80,000 members there.

So vast are some of these groups that members must rely on subtle rituals and secret signs to identify each other.

For example, a member will arrange restaurant table settings--chopsticks, rice bowl and water glass--to form a Chinese gang symbol, then place his hands discreetly across his chest, fingers placed just so, to indicate rank. Others will recite half a poem and wait for the correct recitation of the remaining half from the other gang member.

A step down from the international triads are the less well-organized, U.S.-spawned Asian gangs, such as the Wah Ching and Black Dragons.

Originally set up to protect immigrant Chinese workers in the early 1800s, the Wah Ching evolved into a criminal organization so well known that its name is nearly a generic term for Asian organized crime. Ordinary hoodlums with no gang ties now toss out the name to intimidate victims, authorities say.

At the bottom of the hierarchy are fluid, ever-changing street gangs, composed mainly of teen-agers like Hoang. Many of these youths say they band together for protection from Latino gangs whose mannerisms, hand signs, graffiti and baggy clothing they increasingly mimic. Some are multicultural, accepting Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Latino, black and white members. They coexist within the same turf and move from city to city.

The gangs are the labor pool from which older Asian criminals recruit musclemen to commit petty thefts and carjackings and collect extortion money, experts say.

And that, according to police, was how Hoang became snared.

The boy entered Asian organized crime three years ago as a 13-year-old runaway from a foster home, sources close to the case said.

“He’s the classic young man who can do anything he wants to do,” said one source. “He could be a really nice young man.”

Although information about Hoang is limited, sources close to the investigation and court documents tell this story:

Born in Vietnam, Hoang came to the United States and Southern California at age 5 with his parents and a younger brother.

After Hoang’s father abandoned the family early on and headed for the Midwest, Hoang’s mother tried to rear the two boys herself in Long Beach. But her elder son’s unruliness made her despair. At age 12, Hoang and his younger brother were put in separate foster homes. Their mother left for Northern California. Neither parent has contacted the boys since, authorities say. Alone, Hoang felt the pain and anger of abandonment.

“His mom is tied to a lot of mixed emotions for him,” said one source. “He missed her a lot.”

At 13, Hoang ran away from his foster home and took to the streets of the San Gabriel Valley, where he found acceptance in an Asian gang and the guidance he had been missing.

Sonny Chu, a 32-year-old alleged Wah Ching member, took the Vietnamese boy under his wing. With a dozen aliases and a string of arrests for burglary, assault, battery, petty theft and extortion, Chu led a street gang called the Chinese Mafia Boyz.

Although Chu could not be reached for comment, sources say he became Hoang’s dai lo, or big brother. Chu “showed face” by treating Hoang and other youths to free dinners, video games and movies.

Hoang now had a family. He lived rent-free, usually with three or four other boys, in houses or apartments provided by older Wah Ching members in Long Beach and in Alhambra, Hacienda Heights and other San Gabriel Valley locations. To earn their keep, Hoang and the others ran errands for the higher-ups. They also guarded their warehouses, small businesses and nightclubs.

School was out of the picture, but Hoang picked up other skills. He became expert at carjacking, usually Hondas and Toyotas, and at committing so-called follow-home robberies and burglaries.

Along the way, he acquired a juvenile court record. An arrest warrant for burglary was outstanding at the time of the Lee shooting.

Power struggle

Hoang occasionally spent his nights gambling at the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens. No one noticed the teen-ager among the 800 gamblers who regularly throng the club’s smoke-filled Asian Pavilion. Like the others, he played the card game Pan 9, slamming down the brass cup holding red dice. But he was not a lucky gambler and soon owed money to loan sharks.

Overall, though, he was a grateful young man, a source close to the case said.

“He has a great sense of loyalty,” the source said. “To his mind, loyalty is everything.”

Ironically, the group to which Hoang pledged his loyalty was itself fraying, breaking apart in a power struggle over the reassertion of centuries-old Chinese criminal traditions, authorities say.

The alleged Southern California head of the Wah Ching, Tony Young, 40, of Monterey Park, faced rebellion from a younger, more violent faction.

The faction, known as the Hung Mun, or Red Door, was allegedly led by Paul Liu, identified by authorities as Young’s former lieutenant, and a dai lo to Hoang’s alleged mentor, Sonny Chu.

The struggle was outlined in affidavits filed by law enforcement officers in Los Angeles Superior Court in support of a search warrant allowing officers to raid 32 locations in the San Gabriel Valley on May 12. The raid was part of an effort to crack down on increasing Asian gang violence.

Young and Liu denied any criminal involvement in Asian gangs or any rivalry. Both say they are puzzled that police have characterized them as criminals. They assert that officers obtained false information for the affidavits, which contend that Liu sought to form an alliance with the Chih Kung Tang, a Chinese triad, and the Shang I Assn., a Los Angeles Chinese-American trade group that law enforcement investigators say is linked to Hong Kong triads.

Spree of violence

The rivalry, according to Detective William Howell of the sheriff’s Asian Gang Unit, was rooted in the fact that “a lot of these guys (from the Wah Ching) were getting away from the old ways, the traditional ways of silence. The kids were too Westernized.

“They were taking on the (dress, behavior and boastful) ways of traditional (black and Latino) gangs and it was getting them caught. . . . The Shang I was trying to regroup the criminal organizations by reverting back to the old ways and ceremonies.”

The effort by traditionalists to control Asian gangs prompted a series of shootings, murders and other crimes in the San Gabriel Valley, the affidavits said.

Among them was the Aug. 26, 1992, murder of Dolby Lee at the U-2 Nightclub in Alhambra. Liu was standing next to Lee when Lee was shot to death, allegedly by William Man, a club employee. Man escaped and is at large. Although witnesses said Man argued with Lee, investigators believe that Lee, as Liu’s right-hand man, was killed protecting Liu, the intended target because of the rivalry with Wah Ching leader Young.

On Jan. 12, police found 37 bullet holes in the windows and frames of the Shang I offices in Chinatown. The shooting followed a November incident in which Liu was seen escorting Chih Kung Tang triad members to the Shang I offices for a top-level meeting. The violence prompted the association to move to Rosemead.

The next day, a chiropractic center in Alhambra was shot up. Police found at least 13 bullet holes in the walls. Investigators later learned Liu was a silent partner in the center.

Two days later, the Sing-A-Long Chinese nightclub in the City of Industry was vandalized. About 45 suspected Wah Ching youths entered the club at 1:30 a.m. and threw glasses and bottles and broke glass shelves. Investigators believe that the club was vandalized to pressure Liu. The club was a source of income for him and he was allegedly receiving protection money from the owner.

In the midst of the increasingly violent power struggle, Coung Minh Hoang allegedly went about his business untouched.

That business, authorities say, included the April 5 attempted carjacking that ended in Kathy Lee’s death. She died of a gunshot wound to the chest after an assailant tried to take her Lexus as she drove into an Alhambra fabric store parking lot in the afternoon.

Lee was doing wedding errands that day and planned to select material at the store for her bridal dress. She was driving her family’s car instead of her own Honda Accord. Careful with her parents’ luxury sedan, she had shifted into reverse to straighten the car in the parking space when she was shot.

Police quickly identified Hoang as the gunman, but he eluded them for nearly two months. He might still be at large, Asian gang specialist Howell said, if Red Door leader Liu had been successful in reviving Asian organized crime traditions--particularly the tradition of silence.

Instead, the Sheriff’s Department was tipped off to Hoang’s whereabouts. According to investigators, Hoang fled to Pomona after the shooting and found refuge among the small Vietnamese community there. But police spotted him and the youth bolted, this time across the country to Pennsylvania.

After Pomona, the search pointed to Mexico, Texas and Hong Kong, but detectives were essentially at a loss. Then, after the May 12 raid, they got another tip. Hoang was in jail in Dormont, near Pittsburgh, a caller said. Investigators phoned Dormont police and found that Hoang had been arrested for a home invasion robbery.

“If Liu had been successful, it would have made it a lot harder to penetrate the organization,” Howell said.

Laying low

Today, relative calm prevails in the San Gabriel Valley. The May 12 raids were followed by 38 more search warrants for 52 locations, the seizure of more documents and guns and the arrest of six others suspected of Asian gang-related crimes.

“I’ve got so much stuff it would take my team alone an entire year just to analyze it,” Howell said.

But the victory may be short-lived and only local.

A few days after the May raids, more than 300 Asian men--all of them Wah Ching members or associates, according to investigators--attended a business meeting at a Chinatown restaurant. They were allegedly given an important message by those who took the microphone: It was time to lay low. Stop claiming Wah Ching membership. Wait to see what the Sheriff’s Department does next.

But those in attendance were the older Wah Ching, business owners in their 30s and 40s, authorities said. Out on the streets, 15-year-old dai los are still reaching out to even younger kids, psychologist Masuda said.

“A lot of dai los are recruiting a whole new generation of kids,” he said. “We’re going to have a whole new bunch of gang members in another four or five years.

“Then, oh yes, we will have a serious problem.”

The Hong Kong Connection

Asian gangs and Hong Kong criminal societies, or triads, represent just part of a global smuggling trade operating out of the busy Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. About 7,000 cars are shipped from there monthly, but countless others may be smuggled out, often in containers labeled as household goods or personal property. The stolen cars are targeted for overseas buyers, who may be willing to pay up to three times the usual price of an American luxury car. Here is how the theft might work:

1) A buyer in mainland China wants a left-hand drive Lexus. He contacts a friend who knows someone in a Hong Kong triad, a unit of a centuries-old criminal society.

2) A Triad member in Hong Kong sends a fax to a member of the Wah Ching--an Asian crime group with links to the triads--in the Los Angeles area, “ordering” such a Lexus.

3) A Wah Ching member in Los Angeles sends a youth from an Asian gang to steal a $50,000 Lexus off the street. The stolen Lexus is loaded into a wooden container and trucked to a port for shipment.

5) Marked misleadingly as “household goods,” the container carrying the Lexus is shipped to Taiwan or Hong Kong.

6) Car is smuggled to the mainland China buyer.

SOURCE: National Insurance Crime Bureau