Gang Busters

The tip came from a trusted informant.

Eleven young Asian gang members were holed up in an Inglewood motel, plotting to kidnap the owner of a South Bay computer company and terrorize his family unless the businessman handed over his multimillion-dollar inventory of computer chips.

By early morning, the Asian Organized Crime Unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had swung into action. Undercover detectives were dispatched to the motel. More scattered in nearby cars. A helicopter circled, ready to tail the suspects from the air if the ground pursuit grew too obvious.

“We followed them around all day,” recalls Det. Bob Franks, a computer crime expert with the unit. “They went to the computer chip company a couple of times. Then they went to the owner’s residence a few times. Then they all met en masse at the motel and caravaned back to the business, where one car pulled up to the back door. At that point, we felt intervention was appropriate.”

At 5:10 p.m. on Feb. 12, officers poured out of their unmarked cars, arresting 10 men and one woman in their 20s who are now awaiting trial. In their cars, detectives found loaded semiautomatic handguns, duct tape, police scanners and--most ominously--hand-drawn maps of the intended victim’s Torrance business and his residence in Palos Verdes Estates.

The owner, who had been robbed twice before, declined to talk to The Times for fear of drawing more attention to his business but expressed appreciation to the sheriff’s unit for its fast police work.

Not to mention surprise.

“He was a little shocked at seeing a bunch of guys jumping out of cars in their raid jackets,” Franks says dryly. “They didn’t know about this investigation beforehand.”

Busts like this have boosted the visibility of the Sheriff’s Asian Organized Crime Unit and upped their street credibility in the immigrant Asian community, which traditionally has been leery of reporting crime because of cultural and language barriers.

In recognition, on May 1 the team will be awarded the first “unit citation” by the International Assn. of Asian Crime Investigators. The team’s leader, Sgt. Tom Budds, will be recognized as the outstanding local investigator of the year. The awards will be given when more than 1,000 Asian crime investigators from 100 countries converge on the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim for the group’s annual meeting.

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The honor is all the more remarkable because the unit is barely 5 years old and includes no Asian American or Asian-language-speaking members. It was formed in 1991, following a decade in which hundreds of thousands of immigrants from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea and throughout the continent poured into Southern California. Today, nearly 1 million people of Asian descent reside in Los Angeles County--more than 10% of the population.

Many of the newcomers brought capital and entrepreneurial skills, opening everything from mom-and-pop businesses to sprawling shopping centers. While the vast majority were law-abiding, a tiny but powerful fraction belonged to highly sophisticated Asian organized crime syndicates.

The best known are the Chinese triads, formal organizations with strict rules and ceremonies founded in the 16th century as secret political societies that now operate throughout the world. Their 50 groups in Hong Kong claim 80,000 members, according to a 1992 U.S. Senate report.

One rung down are the looser U.S.-based Asian gangs such as the Wah Ching and Black Dragons, which have evolved into criminal organizations in their own right and often work hand in hand with the triads.

At the bottom are the ever-changing street gangs, composed mainly of teenagers, some of whom are clean-cut A students, while others are dropouts who have adopted the hand signs, graffiti and baggy clothing of black and Latino gangs. This is the churning labor pool from which older Asian criminals recruit musclemen to commit everything from carjackings to extortion, computer chip robberies to home invasions.

“The Asian organized crime groups are like any diversified multinational business corporation,” explains Larry Morrison, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who has prosecuted many of these cases. “They’re into everything that’s profitable.”

They can also be extremely violent. During home invasions, family members are often tied up and pistol-whipped while gangsters remove cash, ID cards and family photos from the victims’ wallets.

“We know where you live and what your family looks like,” they warn. “If you go to the police, we’ll come back and kill you.”

Eddie Leung, a Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking sheriff’s deputy assigned to the Walnut station, says many of the immigrants heed the warning out of fear. Police in their native lands aren’t always above corruption, and immigrants have no reason to believe that American cops will protect them from gangsters, Leung explains.

It’s up to the Sheriff’s Asian Organized Crime Unit and Sgt. Budds to convince them differently. A seasoned homicide detective, Budds was lead investigator in the “Twilight Zone” movie helicopter crash. In 26 years with the department, Budds has also investigated one of “Freeway Killer” William Bonin’s grisly murders, received a county medal for investigating corruption within the Sheriff’s Narcotics Division and won a national police award for his investigation into an L.A.-based Italian organized crime family.

By 1991, Budds had noticed a disturbing trend in major crimes. Many bore all the earmarks Budds associated with the Mafia except the players were all Asian.

“We knew there was a lot of crime because people were telling us,” Budds says. “We saw that the Chinese triads had representatives here on our streets.”

So Budds lobbied his bosses to establish a formal Asian Organized Crime Unit. His superiors agreed, and the squad was launched five years ago with six detectives drawn from vice, gaming, fraud and major crimes.

The team printed up business cards in Chinese and English. Some bought their own cellular phones to sidestep the department’s red tape. They contacted Asian community, business and political leaders to explain their mission and courted the Asian-language press. Today the unit has eight members and Budds says he could use 100.

“From the beginning, our phones were ringing off the hook,” he says. “We give victims our pager numbers and answer them immediately, no matter what time it is. It’s a matter of being true to our word. When we put people in jail, victims don’t have to worry about retribution and that’s gotten us a lot of trust. It’s been a real arduous outreach and a very personal one.”

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It has helped that the squad is free of scandal, unlike its counterpart, the LAPD Asian Crime Investigation Section, around which accusations have swirled in recent years.

In 1993, an LAPD patrol sergeant was fired after a review panel found him guilty of collecting on bad checks for Koreatown business owners. Later this spring, an LAPD detective will go on trial on charges of soliciting a bribe in Koreatown.

Budds declines to comment on the LAPD but says sharing intelligence with other agencies is crucial to his investigations of highly mobile criminals, who often hop on planes and travel thousands of miles to commit crimes.

A typical multi-agency raid might involve 35 undercover officers from the sheriff’s unit, the FBI, the INS, U.S. Customs and local police jurisdictions, some of them clean-cut, others sporting full beards, beer guts or cowboy boots. This is the reality of undercover policing on the Pacific Rim in the late 20th century: The Wild West meeting the even wilder East.

After raiding one suburban San Gabriel Valley home suspected of housing a sex slavery operation, detectives hauled out johns who had been locked in bedrooms with naked young women. A Chinese soap opera blared on the TV. On the kitchen stove stood a still-warm wok with barely seared chicken while a Buddhist “spirit altar” lit with flickering red candles and a copper bowl filled with persimmons and grapes graced the counter.

Some of the unit’s recent hits:

* Recovery of more than $30 million in counterfeit computer software, CD-ROMs and holograms that led to the uncovering of an international network of criminals with connections in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.

* Cracking an immigrant slavery / prostitution ring in which young Thai women were smuggled into Rosemead, promised legitimate jobs, then forced into prostitution. Two defendants pleaded guilty to pimping and pandering and are now in prison.

* Recovery of 10,000 stolen credit card numbers, which represented a potential loss of $15 million to the industry. All three suspects pleaded guilty.

* Busting a home invasion ring suspected of more than 200 robberies in the San Gabriel Valley in less than a year. In the month after seven Vietnamese gang members were convicted, police logged only one home invasion in that area.

While they’re not exactly cops walking a beat, members of the Asian Organized Crime Unit must also cultivate community contacts. One recent morning, Det. Michael Soop visited a computer chip company in South El Monte that had been robbed twice in two years.

The owner, a 28-year-old Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong--let’s call him Terry--was so nervous about another robbery that he too didn’t want his identity or company name revealed. But he spoke warmly of Soop’s work.

“The police have been out several times and it makes me feel good to know they’re around because it’s scary, especially when you have a big shipment coming in,” Terry says. “If we got hit again we wouldn’t be able to get insurance.”

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Despite earning the confidence of business owners such as Terry, Budds estimates that more than half of Asian organized crime in Los Angeles County continues to go unreported.

Adds Joaquin Lim, a city councilman in Walnut and vice president of his city’s Chinese-American Assn.:

“There’s still a distrust of police. Asian business owners fear gang members and feel intimidated when they walk into the sheriff’s department because of the language barrier.”

Lim suggests that squad members spend more time visiting Asian American associations to introduce themselves and gain the trust of community members. But with eight detectives responsible for millions of people across a hundred square miles, that isn’t realistic, say the police, who are already putting in 70-hour workweeks.

But it brings up an interesting point.

The Asian unit is entirely white and none of the men are fluent in any Asian language. When the squad launched an investigation into Vietnamese gangs last year, the department had to bring instructors down from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey to give four detectives a crash course in Vietnamese.

So why doesn’t the Sheriff’s Department in one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the United States have any Asian American detectives on this unit?

“We’ve gone out and tried to recruit Asian deputies,” Budds says, “but those in my core group have to have 10 years experience as detectives before they can even qualify for our unit and [Asian deputies] don’t always choose career paths into detectives.”

Lim says cultural reasons also play into the imbalance. Many in the Asian community want their children to study medicine, law or engineering. “Asian families discourage their kids from being policemen.”

The detectives say being white usually doesn’t stop them from doing undercover or surveillance work. Hugh Lloyd, a former detective with the unit, once parked his 300 ZX a block away from a suspected brothel, pulled out his binoculars and a camera, and snapped photos and jotted down license plate numbers as a stream of men entered the house, stayed about 40 minutes and then left.

“Nobody even noticed,” says Lloyd, a hard-boiled detective who has since taken early retirement and moved to Thailand.

“Those guys are thinking of other things, they’re not thinking about the police.”

To compensate for a lack of language skills, the unit has developed a network of informants who call in tips. Translators are available around the clock. And the squad uses liaison officers such as Leung as go-betweens for the victims.

One Walnut businessman who was dubious about the police at first is James Zhai, who owns a construction firm in Chino. Late last year, business associates with mob connections from China began threatening to kill Zhai and his family unless he forked over $400,000 in extortion money.

After thugs fired four bullets into his office, threw black paint on his door and pulled a gun on him, Zhai was desperate enough to call the Walnut sheriff’s bureau. They patched him through to Leung, who persuaded Zhai to tell his story to the Asian crimes unit.

Sheriff’s detectives came and interviewed Zhai, staked out his house and office, wired him for sound when he met with the extortionists and eventually arrested one man. A second has fled the country. And Zhai’s stereotypes about police have been shattered forever.

“They treated my situation as their own problem,” says an amazed Zhai. “Truly, I am very grateful to them, because they gave me back my life. I told all my friends. If your situation is really serious, you can get help.”