Columbia Law Review Editor Turned a Page in Leaving Gang Life

It’s only a half-hour subway ride from gritty, crowded Chinatown to the upper Manhattan campus of Columbia University, where earnest law students hustle purposefully from classroom to library.

But Lawrence Wu, editor in chief of the Columbia Law Review, has come a lot farther than that since he wore his hair spiked and bleached and quit high school to join a Chinese gang.

As a teenager, he patrolled his gang’s turf on East Broadway and shook down shopkeepers for protection money. Today, at 23, he screens scholars’ briefs for publication and writes essays on the legalities of human cloning.

“It’s like I’ve lived really different lives,” said Wu, leaning back in his chair at the law review’s modern office. “What’s important to me has changed so dramatically. When I think back to that time, it’s like I’m trying to think of someone I used to know.”

As a gang member, Wu narrowly escaped a drive-by shooting and then an attempted-murder charge that scared him out of gangs for good.

“Things really could have been so different for me,” he said. “I could be sitting in jail now, or I could have been dead.”

Instead, he is in his third and final year at one of the nation’s toughest law schools, preparing for a career as a corporate tax attorney. As law review editor, he has reached the top of the academic heap.

Wu, neatly dressed in a button-down shirt and khaki pants, said it was ordinary teenage rebellion that drew him to the gang.

He was born in Queens to Taiwanese immigrants and reared by his mother, a librarian. She moved the family to the wealthier Forest Hills neighborhood when Lawrence was in junior high. He won admission to Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s most competitive public schools.

But during his first year, he began skipping classes, picking fights and hanging out with gang wannabes who dressed in black and spiked their hair. Wu, who was 6 when his father left the family, said he felt drawn to the rule breakers by a desire to lash out against his disciplinarian mother.

“I was just looking to rebel, like a bomb waiting to explode,” he said. “It seemed perfect at the time.”

What began as a desire to look cool soon escalated into something more serious. At 14, Wu joined a Chinatown gang called Tung On, or T.O.

He dropped out of Stuyvesant; began sleeping at gang apartments in Chinatown and Flushing, Queens; and cut off contact with his family for more than 18 months.

The high school’s “gangsters” were “all very cosmetic, but in Chinatown . . . things are very different,” Wu said. “When I was there, the big thing was controlling heroin and running guns.”

T.O.’s leaders also had their hands in prostitution and extorted money from small Chinatown businesses, Wu recalled. His own role was at the lowest levels; he never rose beyond street thug, he said, because he didn’t prove his loyalty by committing murder.

“There were times when I came very close, when I was on runs to do killing missions, but the person wasn’t there,” Wu said. “I proved myself because I got into a lot of fights, but I hadn’t done the ultimate yet.”

He recalls strolling along a street in the heart of a rival gang’s territory with a gun stuck up a jacket sleeve, hoping for an excuse to use it.

“I would have gotten caught for sure,” he said. “It would have been the end of me.”

At least seven friends and acquaintances were killed in gang violence, one while getting a haircut, Wu said. “It could have been me,” he added.

T.O. was the enforcement arm of a larger tong, or Chinese fraternal organization, said Peter Kwong, director of Asian American studies at Hunter College and an expert on Chinatown gangs.

Such groups sometimes serve as mutual assistance associations for Chinatown business owners but often engage in extortion, gambling and immigrant smuggling, Kwong said. “The community is very much dominated by these powerful organizations,” he said.

Tung On was active in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, but Chinatown’s gang activity has since subsided, Kwong said.

By the age of 16, Wu was growing dissatisfied with gang life and began to think about doing something more positive. He saw high school friends making plans for college, and it made him eager to move on too.

“It was really a gradual realization,” he said. “It just became more and more obvious that I didn’t want to stay [in a gang]. . . . Maybe I started feeling I was getting old.”

His life, he recalled, “was really going nowhere. If I stayed involved in gangs, I was going to either die or go to jail or become some grocery worker.”

His frustration turned to fear when police charged him with attempted murder for a fight in which a fellow gang member allegedly beat a man with a metal lock. The case never went to trial and charges against Wu were eventually dropped, he said.

He was frightened by the close call, though, and decided to leave T.O. and move back home with his family.

“It was a harrowing experience,” he said. “It kind of woke me up.”

He said he was brought up with no religion, and became a religious Christian after leaving the gang. He began hanging out again with high school friends, although he never re-enrolled at Stuyvesant.

While his old gang friends were arrested, Wu was planning for college. He studied for the high school equivalency exam and was accepted at Queens College, where he struggled to make up for more than 2 1/2 years of missed school.

“It was so hard for me in the very beginning,” he said. “It took me so long to read things. It was frustrating.”

Before long, though, he was earning A’s and dreaming of becoming a lawyer.

At Columbia, he works 40 to 100 hours a week at the law review and recently won more than $30,000 from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.

Many of Wu’s classmates at Columbia are shocked to discover that he did not finish high school, said one friend, Banu Ramachandran, writing and research editor at the review.

“Most of all when I think of Lawrence, I think of somebody who is just really friendly and reasonable and down to earth and respectful of other people,” she said. “You don’t meet very many people who get to go to Columbia law school who’ve really had rough lives.”

Wu’s older brother, James, 29, said he worried about Lawrence during his gang days but never really doubted that he would turn himself around.

“He got lost,” James Wu said. “He simply rejected authority and went the way of the wild . . . but he found himself again.”