Authors: T. J. English
They had traveled barely one block when Shadow Boy swerved to miss an oncoming car and smashed head-on into a utility pole. The car wasn't traveling fast enough to seriously injure the passengers, but everyone was rattled. From the street and sidewalk, stunned pedestrians looked on as Nigel, Shadow Boy, and Cindy stumbled out of the car into the afternoon sunlight.
An off-duty prison guard from Rikers Island happened to be driving by. He stopped, got out of his car, and approached the crippled Impala. Instinctively, Shadow Boy pointed his 9mm at the guard, and they began wrestling over the gun. Cindy disappeared. Nigel ran and flagged down a taxi. Shadow Boy dropped the gun and also ran. Johnny,
meanwhile, had been pinned inside the car when it collided with the pole. He was arrested by cops arriving on the scene.
Since the robbery had taken place on Canal Street in the middle of BTK territory, word spread fast. Both David Thai and LV Hong were livid. Not only had neither of them authorized this half-assed attempted robbery, but the black canvas bag full of jewelry was never recovered. Apparently, somebody had absconded with the loot!
When Tinh Ngo first heard about the incident, he knew there was going to be trouble. The day after the robbery, Tinh and two members from the Brooklyn faction of the BTK ran into LV Hong on Canal Street.
“Where's the gold?” LV asked Tinh and the others. At the time, Nigel Jagmohan was also living at the small apartment on Forty-fifth Street.
“Nigel say he leave the gold behind,” answered Tinh. “Maybe the police got it.”
The answer didn't seem to satisfy LV Hong, who was clearly upset that his authority had been disregarded. Not only had an unauthorized robbery taken place in his territory, but he knew the owner of the jewelry store. “This thing make me look bad,” he complained.
Tinh and the others knew that few gang members respected LV Hong. Unlike Amigo, his predecessor, LV was the strong-arm type, often threatening other gang members to keep them in line. Some felt he had been flown in from Texas by David Thai precisely for that reason.
Now, two days later, LV Hong was mercilessly whacking the hell out of Nigel.
“No, please,” Nigel pleaded between blows to the head, “I don't have the gold. I didn't take it.”
There were nearly a dozen gang members in the apartment at the time. Everyone sat or stood, awkwardly silent, avoiding eye contact.
LV picked up a clock radio from a nearby dresser, raised it high in the air and brought it crashing down on Nigel's head. The radio shattered, sending pieces of plastic shooting across the bedroom floor.
Nigel still insisted, “I don't have the gold.” This angered David Thai even more. Without warning, he stormed into the bedroom and began kicking Nigel, who had fallen to his knees on the floor.
“You lie, motherfuck! You lie!” screamed David, his reedy voice
cracking with emotion. He kept pummeling Nigel, whose shirt was torn, his hair matted with blood.
Finally, a couple of gang members pulled
Anh hai
off. “No,
Anh hai
, we take care a this,” advised Shadow Boy. David Thai walked back into the front room where Tinh Ngo stood transfixed by the mayhem.
“Sit down,” David ordered Tinh.
Tinh sat.
“You know why we beat this guy?” David asked.
“Why?”
“'Cause yesterday I go to Canal Street and I almost get arrested. I almost get arrested 'cause this guy rob the jewelry store and he don't let anybody know.”
While David Thai fumed, LV Hong stomped into the kitchen and returned to the bedroom holding a wooden cutting board. He began beating Nigel with the solid cedar board, smacking him again and again.
Tinh winced each time the cutting board slammed into Nigel's skull with a loud
whuuump!
“I know this motherfucker couldn't be trusted,” David Thai said to Tinh. “I know he couldn't be trusted 'cause he not one of us, okay? He not Vietnamese.”
Tinh nodded. Initially, he wondered why David Thai was making such a grand display of this beating. Now it was clear.
To the BTK, Nigel was an outsider. He'd been born and raised on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, though his parents were originally from India. In 1988, when Nigel was just fifteen years old, his family emigrated to New York City. The Jagmohans initially lived in Brooklyn, then moved to the Bronx, where Nigel began hanging out with a group of Vietnamese and Cambodian teenagers he met at Skate Key, a local roller-skating rink. Soon Nigel was making trips to Canal Street to scheme and commit crimes with his newfound friends.
Nigel wasn't the only non-Vietnamese youth to become associated with the BTK. The gang was a loose enough confederation that almost anyone who took part in crimes with gang members on a semi-regular basis could call himself BTK. There were Cambodians in the gang, and a few Chinese. There were many Amerasians, some partly of African American descent. There were even a few Puerto Rican and Dominican teenagers who helped out with BTK crimes in the Bronx.
Non-Vietnamese members were allowed to join in robberies and home invasions. They may even have been allowed to associate themselves publicly with the gang. (Nigel, for instance, had attended Amigo's funeral and was present during the cemetery shootout in Linden, New Jersey.) But for those gang members who could not speak Vietnamese, the gang's inner sanctums would always be beyond their reach. And as outsiders, they were the first to come under suspicion when things went wrong.
If David Thai had beaten and pummeled a fellow Vietnamese the way he and his Canal Street
dai low
were presently punishing Nigel, Thai would have risked alienating some members of the gang. But Nigel was lanky, his East Indian skin the color of mocha; he spoke English with a curious accent, a mixture of his parents' Indian roots and his own Trinidadian upbringing. Clearly, he was not one of them. This made him expendable in the eyes of
Anh hai
.
“Tell me!” shouted LV Hong. “Tell me where is the gold!”
By now, Nigel had been beaten so badly he was unable to respond.
“Get this motherfuck outta here,” David Thai proclaimed disdainfully. “Let him go.”
Nigel was helped to his feet by a couple of gang members and led to the front door of the apartment, which opened onto Forty-fifth Street. The door was opened and he was pushed out onto the sidewalk, his face badly mangled, his body bruised. He would spend the next three days and nights in a hospital with severe internal hemorrhaging, cracked ribs, and a fractured skull.
Inside the apartment, the gang members remained silent. Eventually, David Thai stood. “Anyone steal from the gang, anyone lie to the gang, this is what happen to them.”
Anh hai
checked to make sure no blood had splattered on his clothes, then added, “This motherfucker, he lucky he still alive.”
Nigel Jagmohan's righteous ass-whupping frustrated Dan Kumor, Bill Oldham, and others involved in the BTK investigation. Tinh Ngo had paged Oldham not long after the incident and told him all about it, but there was nothing the investigators could do.
Not that they would have squandered the entire investigation by
bursting in and making arrests over one beating, however bloody it might have been. The investigators were committed to stockpiling enough information and evidence to put a slew of gang members away on multiple counts. The problem was, individual crimes like this hellacious beating would continue to go unpunished unless they found a way of securing more compelling evidence. As of now, all they had on the beating was Tinh's partial eyewitness account, with no corroboration.
From the beginning of the investigation, Kumor and the others had discussed the idea of having Tinh wear a secret recording device. For agents and prosecutors, incriminating conversations captured live on tape are the ultimate form of evidence in court. In this case, however, the investigators had first broached the subject more as a fantasy than an actual strategy.
For one thing, it seemed unlikely that Tinh would ever be in a position to illicit incriminating dialogue directly from David Thai. Thai seemed to respect Tinh. Maybe he even trusted Tinh more than the average
sai low
now that Tinh had been with the gang for almost two full years. Nonetheless, Tinh had rarely been privy to the detailed planning of the gang's criminal acts in the past. Like most everyone else, he was kept in the dark until the time came to actually do the crime.
There were also obvious dangers involved in having Tinh wear a recorder. Under any circumstances, asking a C.I. to circulate among fellow criminals wearing a hidden recording device is no small request. With the BTK, nobody had any doubt that if Tinh was discovered with a recorder strapped to his body, he would be killed instantly. In short, the benefits to be gained by wiring Tinh had to be carefully weighed against the risks involved.
By early May, a few weeks after the beating of Nigel, Kumor, Oldham, and the other investigators were inclined to take whatever risks were necessary. They had recently begun almost daily surveillance of some of the gang's key members, tailing Lan Tran and others as they drove from BTK safe houses in Long Island and Brooklyn to Canal Street. So far, the best evidence of a criminal conspiracy was surveillance photos of gang members hanging out in front of restaurants and pool hallsâphotos they hoped would eventually substantiate the relationships that existed among the various subjects of the investigation.
To bolster this newly accumulated evidence, they needed voices,
intimate conversations between members of the gang discussing crimes past and present.
On the morning of May 8, 1991, Kumor and Oldham arranged to meet with Tinh at the Municipal Building, where they had rendezvoused a couple of times before. A short walk from City Hall, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, the building was a downtown landmark.
It was around 3:00
P.M
. when Tinh crossed under the building's historic Corinthian colonnade. He liked the hustle and bustle that engulfed the Municipal Building daily, with numerous subways spilling passengers into the station in the basement of the building. And there were always plenty of lovers, young and old, making their way to the marriage license bureau on the second floor.
Tinh took an elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the cavernous marble hallway to a small deserted office where Kumor and Oldham were waiting. After pleasantries were exchanged, Kumor got right to business.
“Timmy,” he asked, “what do you hear about upcoming jobsâyou know, robberies, home invasions, anything like that?”
“Yes,” replied Tinh, “there's a big job I hear about. More than one robbery. In Philadelphia.”
“BTK in Philly are gonna do a robbery?” asked Oldham.
“No. Some of us drive down there to do the robbery. David Thai plan all this himself. I don't know much about it yet.”
Tinh told the two investigators that he had heard through Uncle Lan that a handful of gang members, including Tinh, Lan,
Anh hai
, and others, would be driving in two cars to Philadelphia, much as they had on their Connecticut and Georgia excursions. They would be staying at a BTK safe house somewhere in the city, and were supposed to be leaving within the next few days.
“Wow,” Kumor responded. “That soon?”
“Yes,” said Tinh. “This is what they tell me.”
Kumor glanced at Oldham, who shrugged and nodded his head as if to say, “Now's as good a time as any.”
“Listen, Timmy,” began Kumor, “we have something we want you to do. We want you to carry a tape recorder, a mini-cassette. We want you to try to tape some conversations. Conversations with David Thai,
Lan Tran, anybody you can.” Kumor took a small Sony recorder out of his pocket. “Lemme show you how to strap this on.”
Tinh looked at the recorder in Kumor's hands as if it were a loaded gun being pointed in his direction. “You want me to carry this recorder?” he asked, trying not to sound too startled. “You want me to record people's voices?”
“That's right,” Oldham answered. “We want to use these recordings as evidence in court. We need this to bring charges against David Thai.”
The idea of secretly recording conversations was so imponderable to Tinh that he couldn't even think of anything to say. Besides, Kumor and Oldham were not asking him if he wanted to wear the recorder. They were
telling
him that this was what they needed him to do.
“The best way,” offered Kumor, “is to hold it in the waistband of your pants. Run the microphone wire up your side. We can tape it. Poke a hole on the inside of your breast pocket, the pocket of your shirt. Nobody will see the mike inside your pocket.”
The recording method Kumor was suggesting might have seemed remarkably unsophisticated, but he and Oldham had actually given considerable thought to the subject. They could have used a Nagra recorder, the device normally employed by law enforcement personnel for secret recording operations. Or they could have outfitted Tinh with a Kel transmitter, another commonly used device that allows conversations to be transmitted to another location, where they are taped on a reel-to-reel recorder.
In Tinh's case, neither of these methods seemed suitable. The Nagra, which was about five inches long, four inches wide, and an inch deep, was too big. The Kels came in two varietiesâone that fit on a person's waist like a beeper but was somewhat unreliable, and another that fit into a shoulder holster, a method that was cumbersome and sometimes easily detectable.
The Sony microcassette was not designed for undercover police work. Chances were, the quality of the recordings would not be as good with the Sony as they would be with the Nagra. But the Sony microcassette was smaller and, the investigators felt, more suitable for what they had in mind for Tinh.
“You want me to use this right now? Today?” asked Tinh, still trying to fathom exactly what it was he was being asked to do.