Authors: T. J. English
“I'm prepared to let the robbery plans develop,” Kumor said to the others. “Let's see where this leads. But we've got a problem. We
gotta stop this robbery before it happens. And there's absolutely no room for error.”
This time, the investigators figured, it was unlikely they would be able to prevent the robbery without tipping their hand. There was no ruse they could think of to explain their fortuitous appearance at a robbery involving half a dozen BTK members
and
a couple of Italian-American coconspirators. Using Mother's Day as an excuse or having Bill Oldham stand around in a police uniform was obviously not going to work.
“This is it,” declared Kumor. “When we move in to make the arrests this time, it's for keeps.”
The investigators worked late into the evening of August 6 mapping out the logistics. Two separate surveillance teams would follow David Thai and Lan Tran from Thai's Long Island home into the city. Another surveillance team would sit on the BTK safe house where Tinh was staying in Brooklyn. Another crew would be responsible for watching the meeting site in Manhattan, wherever that turned out to be. Still more agents would guard the watch factory the gang was planning to rob, once they found out where that was.
Another team of more than a dozen agents and cops would be responsible solely for making the arrests. The assumption was that all the robbers would be armedâalthough at this stage, the investigators weren't even sure how many robbers there were going to be.
All told, the operation would involve nearly forty cops and agents culled from the NYPD's Major Case Squad and Emergency Service Unit, two local precincts, and ATF.
Early the following morning, by 7:30
A.M
., Kumor, Oldham, and two other ATF agents were positioned roughly one block from David Thai's suburban abode, a modest wood-shingled house in a quiet, colorless section of Melville. Clean, smoothly paved streets and green lawns blanketed the area; birds chirped their greetings as a new day dawned. Crowded into Kumor's maroon Mustang with tinted windows, the lawmen sipped from cups of coffee and waited.
Around 8:30
A.M
., an entourage emerged from the front door of the house that included David Thai, Sophia, Lan Tran, LV Hong, and Number Ten.
Agent Kumor raised a Kodak video camera and aimed it toward the group. “Okay, boys,” he announced. “It's showtime.”
The group piled into David Thai's gray Jaguar, parked in the driveway in front of the house. Thai took the wheel, Sophia sat in the front passenger seat, and the other three jammed in the back.
The surveillance team followed Thai's Jaguar through Melville and out onto the Long Island Expressway. Both vehicles crawled through bumper-to-bumper traffic. A pale brown tinge of exhaust hovered along the roadway. Just past the vast expanse of New Calvary Cemetery in Queens, Thai veered to the right and exited onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The towering skyscrapers of Manhattan glistened from across the East River as Thai continued west to the Manhattan Bridge. With the surveillance car following, the Jaguar exited the expressway and zipped across the bridge into Chinatown.
A few minutes later, at the intersection of Walker Street and Sixth Avenue, the Jaguar pulled over and stopped. Lan Tran, LV Hong, and Number Ten climbed out and headed toward the Kinh Do restaurant, half a block away. David Thai drove on.
From the Mustang, Agent Kumor called a secondary ATF surveillance team on his two-way radio. “Get a video camera and set up on Kinh Do, at Nineteen Sixth Avenue,” he ordered.
Kumor and Oldham elected to stay with David Thai. A few blocks to the east, near the corner of Walker and Broadway, the Jaguar again pulled over to the curb, this time alongside a pay phone. The lawmen watched as Thai got out of his car and made a call, then hung up almost immediately. Evidently, he had just paged someone, most likely Tinh Ngo.
At that moment, miles away in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, yet another surveillance team was watching 757 Forty-sixth Street, formerly Blackeyes' apartment, now the latest BTK safe house. A few minutes after David Thai hung up the phone in Manhattan, Tinh emerged from the apartment building. From their surveillance vehicle, Agent Don Tisdale and Detective Alex Sabo watched as Tinh walked half a block down Eighth Avenue to the AK&Y Laundromat.
Tinh often used the Laundromat as a private office of sorts. From a pay phone on the wall, he returned beeper calls to those in his life
to whom he had become hopelessly beholdenâhis ATF overseers and David Thai.
Tinh called
Anh hai
. “It's you and Tieu today,” David told Tinh. “Tieu” was a nickname they sometimes used for Eddie Tran.
“Okay,” Tinh answered.
“Both of you dress up nicely, okay? Wear good clothes. I'm gonna drive to Brooklyn now, be there right away.”
With Kumor and Oldham following, David Thai drove out to Sunset Park. Tinh was ready to go, but Eddie Tran, just out of prison and not anxious to take part in BTK robberies, was still in bed.
“Get the fuck up!” ordered
Anh hai
. They waited while Eddie reluctantly got dressed.
David, Tinh, and Eddie headed back to Manhattan. In Thai's Jaguar, they drove north on Sixth Avenue past the Kinh Do restaurant into Greenwich Village. At Sixth Avenue and Third Street, in front of an outdoor basketball court bustling with activity, Thai dropped off Tinh and Eddie Tran. Not long afterward, they were joined by Lan Tran.
From a distance, Kumor and Oldham watched while Uncle Lan, dressed respectably in black pants and a silk shirt buttoned to the collar, stood on the street corner trying to make himself as visible as possible. He was holding a large manila envelope, waiting to meet the Italians.
Meanwhile, David Thai parked his Jaguar in front of a McDonald's on West Third Street, just half a block from where Lan was standing. He, Sophia, and LV Hong got out and disappeared inside the McDonald's.
Forty minutes later, a black Cadillac with New Jersey license plates pulled up slowly in front of the basketball court.
“It's the Italians!” Dan Kumor exclaimed from the front seat of the surveillance car. He watched as two beefy white males got out of the Cadillac. Lan Tran immediately walked over and they began to chat.
“I'm gonna try to find a decent observation post,” Kumor told Oldham and the other agents. “You guys stay here.”
Kumor jumped out of the Mustang and walked along Sixth Avenue, across the street from the Cadillac. He came to a corner apartment building and began pressing buzzers until a tenant came to the door.
“Look,” said Kumor, flashing his ATF badge. “I'm a federal agent.
We've got some police business under way here. I need an apartment that faces Sixth Avenue where I can sit and conduct surveillance for a while.”
The man looked skeptical, but he brought Kumor up to his third-floor apartment.
Kumor could hardly believe the view. Directly across the street from the apartment window, Lan Tran was talking with the two Italians. Tinh Ngo and Eddie Tran stood in the background, watching a group of kids playing basketball. Kumor pulled up a chair and hunkered down, this time aiming a 35mm camera with a zoom lens at his subjects.
Short and squat and in their mid-thirties, the two Italians didn't exactly look like high rollers. One was bald on top with black, closely trimmed hair on the sides. The other was slightly taller, with the inflated physique of a habitual steroid user. Both were dressed casually in sleeveless shirts and blue jeans.
Although the investigators didn't know it yet, the robbery was scheduled to take place at Sun Moon Trading Inc., a large watch manufacturer a few miles away. According to the plan, the Italians would go in first, posing as plaincloths cops, using a fake search warrant that Lan Tran had brought along. Then Tinh, Eddie, and Lan would storm the warehouse, steal everything in sight, and bring it down to the street. The Italians had called a couple of accomplices to meet them in a getaway van at the scene. As usual, David Thai would play no role in the actual robbery. Rather, he would lurk in the background waiting to receive the stolen bounty.
At one point, Thai did appear on Sixth Avenue to speak briefly with the two Italians, then disappeared once again inside the nearby McDonald's. Moments later, the entire operation almost went up in smoke when a tow truck began hoisting up Thai's Jaguar, which was parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant.
Oldham quickly approached the driver of the tow truck. “Whoa there,” he exclaimed, “I need you to leave that Jaguar right where it is.” Oldham discreetly flashed his detective's shield.
The Jaguar stayed put.
Eventually, the Italians climbed into the front seat of the black Cadillac, and Lan Tran, Tinh, and Eddie Tran climbed into the back. The car pulled away from the curb and headed north on Sixth Avenue.
Kumor dashed from his observation post to the surveillance car outside. “We better stick with the Caddie,” he said to the others, throwing the Mustang into gear.
The morning dew had long since given way to a typically clammy August afternoon, and the streets were thronged with pedestrians. Kumor and the others followed the Cadillac as it crawled slowly through the city streets, carefully obeying all traffic lights and signs. After ten minutes or so, the Caddie pulled over to the curb in front of a nondescript office building, in a part of midtown Manhattan known as the Flatiron District.
“All units, meet in the vicinity of Twentieth Street and Broadway,” Kumor announced over his two-way radio.
It was approaching four o'clock, and the narrow midtown streets were bathed in long, creeping shadows cast by the industrial tenement buildings that dominate the Flatiron District. The two Italians and the BTK boys piled out of the Cadillac and stood on the sidewalk in front of a corner deli. Once again they seemed to be stalling for time, waiting idly for another set of accomplices to arrive.
By now, there were nearly two dozen agents and cops dispersed among the seven or eight surveillance vehicles that had converged on the area. Tisdale and Sabo were among the last to arrive, in a black sedan. They pulled over to the curb at the intersection of Broadway and Twenty-first Street and waited for the robbers to make their move.
Less than a block away, the Italians had begun to get restless. The shorter of the two crossed over to the far side of the street and began checking out cars double-parked in the area. The other Italianâthe one pumped up like a poor facsimile of Sylvester Stalloneâheaded north on Broadway in the direction of Tisdale and Sabo.
Because they were seated with their backs to the Italians, Tisdale and Sabo didn't notice the Stallone lookalike until he was right on top of them. For a second, their eyes met. Then the Italian turned and walked back toward the BTK crew. The two watched in the rearview mirror as he threw his hands in the air and said something to Lan Tran.
Uncle Lan looked in the direction of cops.
“Uh-oh,” said Tisdale, asking his partner, “Should we bolt?”
“It doesn't matter now,” lamented Sabo.
Lan walked up to their car and boldly looked inside. By then, the Italians were already climbing back into their black Cadillac.
“Shit,” mumbled Tisdale. He picked up his two-way radio as soon as Lan walked away. “We've been made,” he announced over the air to the other agents and cops. “I repeat, we've been made.”
Pooooooof!
Nearly nine hours' worth of careful, methodical surveillance had just gone up in smoke. The Italians drove off. Within minutes, Uncle Lan, Tinh, and Eddie had flagged down a cab, jumped in, and disappeared. The agents had no choice but to return to the ATF offices, dragging their asses behind them.
In the investigation's tenth-floor headquarters, the air was rank with dejected mumbles and curses as the various agents turned in their car keys and two-way radios.
“Who's got the aspirin?” one yelled.
“Better yet, who wants to get a fuckin' drink?” moaned somebody else.
Within a few hours, Dan Kumor felt better. And it had nothing to do with aspirin or alcohol. In reality, the investigation was going wellâtoo well to let one day's turn of events throw everyone into a deep funk.
Granted, the investigators had been close. When the robbers converged on Twentieth Street and Broadway, the agents were five minutes away from swooping down, making the arrests and bringing the entire five-month investigation to a head.
So it didn't happen
â
so what?
thought Kumor. The busted surveillance hadn't been a total loss. For one thing, they were able to glean additional information about the Italians. From the license plate number on the Cadillac the investigators were able to identify the two beefy homeboys as Michael DiRosario and Frank Russo, of West Orange, New Jersey. Both men appeared in the government computers as small-time associates with the Lucchese and Genovese crime families, although there was no evidence that either was a “made man,” an official
soldato
in the Mafia.
The BTK had done business with DiRosario and Russo before. Among other things, the Italians helped bankroll
Anh hai
's massage
parlor at 300 Canal Street. In return, Thai had cut the Italians in on the proceeds of numerous BTK robberies in and around Chinatown and Little Italy. He'd been about to cut them in on their biggest bounty yet, the inventory of a thriving watch warehouse owned and operated by a fellow Vietnamese immigrant.
Now that the surveillance had been burned, Kumor and the others had to decide what to do next. They were even pondering extending the investigation, until they put Tinh Ngo on the phone with David Thai later that evening.
“You know,”
Anh hai
told Tinh, “I was thinking while I was coming to Brooklyn to pick you up, the police followed all the way.”
“The police followed you?” asked Tinh, trying to give the question an appropriately startled reading.