Big Trouble in Little Saigon

The Head of the Asian gang unit pops a video cassette into his police-issue VCR. The screen erupts. In slo-mo black and white, showers of smoke and glass spray a windowside booth. The patrons scramble for cover. Two waiters root under a counter for shotguns and pistols. One, wearing a ruffled shirt and bow tie, lets the buckshot rip, and the gun's kick knocks him backward. Diners grab their weapons and file outside like a trained SWAT team. A woman straggles behind, swiping a tip from an evacuated table. Seems like they've run through this fire drill plenty of times.

We're watching a drive-by shooting at the Tu Hai restaurant in Garden Grove. California, as recorded by a security camera. A patron, or maybe the owner, has an enemy among Orange County's Vietnamese gangs, and in this neighborhood, this is how you have an argument.

"Shooting? What shooting? We've never had any shootings," insists a Tu Hai waiter during a visit a few weeks later. The restaurant's shattered windows have been replaced and reinforced with thick Plexiglas slabs. A protective shield rims the cash register. The waiter titters, shifting his weight. "We never have any problems."

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Roughly 800,000 Vietnamese now live in the U.S., and two of every five live in California. As new immigrants pour in, they're drawn to the more entrenched communities, especially the nurvo-deco business centers of Orange County.

Considered the nation's most conservative turf, it is home to Disneyland. Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral and the Nixon Library. Evangelists and pro-lifers are celebrities here. Planes fly into John Wayne Airport. In the heart of Orange County is the largest Vietnamese ghetto this side of the Pacific Ocean. An estimated 130,000 Vietnamese now call this home. Nearly all are refugees, "boat people" who fled after Saigon's fall in 1975. Orange County's Vietnamese are concentrated in the formerly quiet towns of Garden Grove, Westminster and Santa Ana. Most of these households speak primarily Vietnamese. They funnel their money into Vietnamese-owned shops. It is a self-contained world.

Commercial activity is strongest in Westminster's Little Saigon, an explosion of jewelry stores, herbal pharmacies and Parisian cafés. Here, immigration lawyers share office space with acupuncturists. Monks with shaved heads use the laundromat and Asian girls zip by in subcompacts with Are we Having Funnel bumper stickers.

As their culture struggles with the new society around them, the Vietnamese are haunted by enemies within. Many came to America looking for sanctuary, only to trade one form of terror for another. Vietnamese street gangs routinely extort, assault and rob their own people in this sealed society, focusing their violence against Vietnamese families and business owners, frightening them into silence. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll. 41 percent of Orange County's Vietnamese respondents offered gang crime as their community's number-one problem.

Police have identified as many as 74 Vietnamese gangs based in or passing through Orange County. Most members are mere boys, ranging in age from 12 to 20. They call themselves Cheap Boyz, Scar Boyz, Orange Boyz, Natoma Boyz, Mohawk Boyz, Oriental Boyz and Lonely Boyz Only. There are girlz, too, among them Dirty Punks. South Side Scissors, Banana Girlz and IBK---Innocent Bitch Killers.

"The Vietnamese youth get into trouble because they come to this country without parents," says Tony Doan, gang counselor for the Vietnamese Community of Orange County, Inc. Doan slipped out of Vietnam on a boat in 1980. He has been working with street gangs for four years. "They live with their sponsors, relatives, but so many problems. No one to take care of them. Lonely. They have empty time."

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Randy (names of most gang members have been changed) sits disconsolately in a chair, washed in the sterile lights of a police substation. One forearm bears the tattooed initials of family members who remain in Vietnam. On the other arm, a dragon slithers from the inner wrist to the crease in his elbow. He speaks softly and smiles a lot, which disrupts his skinny Wayne Newton mustache.

Randy has been in the U.S. ten years, live and a half of them spent behind bars. His memories of Vietnam are faint, though he holds a grudge against America for invading his country. "I remember my mom would take me, you know, hold my hand and step over people dead. That's all I know ... in Saigon," he says. "I lived there and I come over here, and see, like, feel lonely over here, you know, because I have no family. All I got is my uncle, my brother. I always alone." His eyes sink.

"I made friends in school. I went to their house, and I see the whole family sittin' down at the table at dinnertime, when they got Dad, Mom, sister, brother, and I think, How come their family is so happy? I don't have it. Whenever I feel like eating. I have to cook it myself. Eat it myself. It make me sad."

He met some gangsters during a trip to Texas. A buddy invited Randy home, got him drunk and asked for his help in a burglary. "They told me, 'Let's go do something,' you know? I said, 'Let's go do it. I'm on the move.' "

Randy started rolling with a Texas gang based south of Houston, sharing a house with about ten other gang members. "I made friends. These guys care for me more than my family. So I cared for the gang. Whatever they do. I do. Especially, I don't want to look bad, be called chicken. You know, I want to be somebody."

Randy's gang began living in motel rooms. They'd make a hit and return to the rooms, ready for a criminals' pajama party. That suited Randy's teenaged gonads fine, because he could take girls to his room, something verbolen by his brother back in Orange County.

When asked what he liked about America, he answered with the same word every other Viet used: "Freedom. You can go anywhere, you can eat anyplace, and nobody gonna bother you. In Vietnam---I just got a letter from my mom not too long ago, and she told me if you got a chicken and you want to eat one, you have to let the Communists know before you can kill it."

Granted freedom---and Government approval for all the Chicken McNuggets he could eat---Randy went wild. His first crimes were puny---stealing car radios or breaking cash boxes on video games. "It's fun, you know? It's more exciting when you go and steal with about four or five guys, driving around, looking for a car that's got a stereo. You have to pick the lock to get in there. Sometimes people chasing you. When you get back, you get high and talk about it and laugh. It's more fun than to stay home."

Free-falling through America. Randy plunged from petty crime to armed robbery. He targeted Vietnamese because they usually kept their gold, cash and jewelry at home. "When I go into a house. I go through the window or knock on the door. See, if they open the door. I'm gonna put a gun on 'em. Tell 'em to be quiet."

Like most Vietnamese gangs, Randy's crew cared about money, not turf. They were startlingly mobile, able to pull jobs on both coasts within 48 hours, driving or plane hopping from scene to scene. Randy hit the road in a stolen Trans Am, breaking the law at each pit stop. "Long as I make the money today, I live for today," he says. "I don't believe in nothing."

In each new city. Randy and his friends hooked up with what police call the Vietnamese Underground Railroad, a continent-wide network of cafés, pool halls and restaurants sympathetic to Viet criminals. Through word of mouth (and via fax, modem and cellular phone), they knew the "safe houses" from L.A. to Boston. Vancouver to Tijuana. If the law busted a gangsters' coffee shop in Orange County. Randy's gang in Houston knew about it the next day.

Texas lawmen eventually nailed Randy for armed robbery. He served two years in prison, locked in a segregated wing with 13 other Vietnamese. He says that many of his friends were killed in prison riots. "When I was young, I was crazy," he says, his right leg bobbing up and down. "When I was going out. I didn't like people lookin' at me. If the guy got a heart, I'd start lighting him. That's the way I am. I got pulled a gun on my head once, right here on Brookhurst. I told him to go ahead and shoot. I think I was bad, OK? Bad-ass. Especially when I got the gun with me." He bursts into laughter.

Set loose from a Texas prison, Randy fluttered back to Orange County. When he botched an armed robbery in Westminster, a Vietnamese homeowner planted two lead caps in his abdomen. At the time, Randy wished he'd died.

"When I got shot. I don't want to live. I'd give up my life, you know: I don't even care anymore. And I passed out. After I woke up. I thought I was no more. I don't know nothing."

Randy's now on parole, and he's not eager to get back with his old friends. He says gang life is getting too hairy. When he started moving with gangs in 1983, the worst weapon he saw was a knife, maybe an occasional revolver. Now it's high-tech ballistic warfare.

But it's not for Randy. Not anymore. (continued on page 154)Little Saigon(continued from page 84)

He has a steady girlfriend and a job delivering furniture. It pays $1000 a month---the same amount he would make sacking just one house. But five months out of jail, Randy swears he'll never go back. "All my friends, most of them in jail right now. And some of them, if they not in jail, they die. And if they not die, they're married."

The kids coming up today are a different breed from Randy. They're relatively affluent and Americanized.

Spoiled by freedom, they come off like suburban brats on a joy ride. "I got one friend who just got out of jail," Randy says. "His parents have a jewelry store, and he get everything he asks them. New car? His parents buy him a new car. Everything he gets. But he still hangs around, goes off with people. I don't know why. I asked him, 'What do you do that for?' 'Just for fun,' that's what he tells me."

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The Garden Grove Police Department keeps three albums of snapshots of Viet gangs. Some photos were confiscated from the gang members themselves, who like to document their exploits in glossy color. The subjects pose with reptilian grace. Leafing through, you see them hoisting machine guns, snarling like wolverines, lying in pools of blood. One proud crew surrounds a Need Helps Please Call Police sign. A gang member's bare shoulder shows red teeth marks made by a cop's attack dog. The Four Ts flex their tattooed logo---Vietnamese words, all starting with the letter T, meaning love, money, prison and crime.

Sergeant Frank Hauptmann, the man with the exploding-restaurant video, hands me a picture of a Vietnamese family, victims of a home-invasion robbery. They huddle outside their ransacked apartment like scared kittens. Garden Grove police traced clues to local gang members, who matched descriptions given by victims. The gang was carrying guns and a roll of duct tape identical to that used to bind and gag the family. "We knew---'We got 'em," Hauptmann says. "The sad part is, we went back, and [the victims] wouldn't identify 'em."

There are reasons for this. In a closed community, news and threats travel fast. And many Vietnamese are puzzled by the U.S. justice system. When they see gangsters back on the streets hours after being arrested, they figure that payoffs, not bail, are at work. Fearing reprisal, they clam up. Hauptmann also points out that the Vietnamese grew up dealing with corrupt secret police, so they assume that all American lawmen are corrupt as well. "They don't want to report anything unless they've been shot or stabbed and they can't move," he says with a sigh.

For similar reasons, the Vietnamese press in this country is virtually silent on the matter of gang violence. Garden Grove police officer Al Butler is investigating possible West Coast involvement in last September's murder of Triet Le, a Vietnamese magazine columnist who lived in Virginia. Triet lambasted the Vietnamese left and right with equal verve, and his boldness may have cost him his life. Since 1980, nine Viet editors and publishers have been targets of assassination attempts, including a Garden Grove publisher killed in 1987 arson.

In Westminster, a dusty corridor leads to the cramped, waxy, coffee-stained offices of a Vietnamese tabloid. I meet the publisher, a man with an impeccable manner and a trimmed beard; all in all, a smashing guy---until gangs are mentioned. Suddenly, he's not so cooperative. He has never met any gang members? No, sir. Never written about them? No. Ever heard about the problem? I think I've heard of it. I wish I could help you, but I don't know anything about it. My secretary will show you the way out. Have a nice day.

As evasive as their victims, Viet gangsters almost always deny being gang members. They usually avoid external symbolism such as graffiti and "colors." Scars are the best visual tip-off. In half-psychotic displays of endurance, Viet gangsters sizzle their flesh with cigarettes. This practice may be related to the hot-coin scarification of Southeast Asian folk medicine, a technique for drawing "bad blood" and toxins from the body. The cigarette scar, typically on the hand or arm, now indicates a willingness to break the law. When gangsters cruise cafés and restaurants searching for accomplices, they look for dead, mottled flesh.

Kong has a big scar between the knuckles of his middle and index fingers. It looks like a chewed blob of bubble gum. He covers it with a pool cue and slams the 13 ball into the side pocket. He admits to running some car-insurance scams with gangsters, but he denies being a gang members.

Kong went to school in the high-lands near Saigon during the Vietnam war. He remembers American soldiers: He says they gave some of his classmates poisoned candy, killing them. When the Communists took over, the U.S. began to look like the lesser of two evils. After 17 failed attempts, he escaped from Vietnam on a boat five years ago. He'll return next year to visit his family.

"I'll open a Disneyland in my country," he says, smiling. "In Vietnam, you know everybody. But all the money in America make on person fight against the other. They don't talk to each other. You don't know name, what they do. Americans don't even look in my eyes. They see who I am, they hate me."

Kong says he has more money and fewer friends than he did in Vietnam. "The kids see all the money here and they want it, too. Quick. Back in Vietnam, you have no money. No gangs, too. You do a crime and run, but you have no place to run. The police catch you, they beat you. Here, it's too easy to do crime. It's easy to get away. You have money, you can go anywhere. A hotel room, another state. I like America. I like freedom. Kids join gangs here because it's the American way."

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Silk-shirted Vietnamese kids jerk arrhythmically on the dance floor, generating a cloud of designer cologne. Unlike L.A.'s black and Mexican gangs, the Vietnamese don't dress like tattered guerrillas. They prefer Begas-style uniforms---call it Saigon Vice: moussed pompadours, loud polka dots, crisp disco suits and Italian shoes. Many wear beepers. Tonight, it's impossible to tell a dancing gangster from a dancing insurance salesman.

Johnny-O, the club owner, left Vietnam in 1975, ricocheting from Paris to Orange County. He wears pop-bottle glasses and a baggy olive suit. Policing the front door, he is flanked by two black security guards with metal detectors. Johnny's the exception, a Viet who reports everything to the police. He hates gangs, and the feeling is mutual. "They spread the rumor they will shoot the people who come here, to try to scare my customers," he says, as if biting into a lime. "When I resist, they tell me, 'You will see your time, man.' "

Johnny says that one gang vandalized his car three times. They tried to set it on fire on the fourth try, but they torched the wrong car. They stabbed someone outside his club a few months (continued on page 162)) Little Saigon (continued from page 154) back. They've followed him, his wife and his sister home, demanding protection money. "You cannot be polite to these people," he says. "If you are polite, they'll think you are afraid of them."

Johnny refuses entry to a snazzy pair of males wearing pointy, steel-tipped shoes. "One thing about American culture is violence," he says. "I tell my wife I don't want to buy toy guns for my kids. I think the Vietnamese are not a violent society. They see too many violent movies here, and they step a little bit into the movie. To get a gun is too easy. That's influenced them a lot." He has a point. The current street price in Orange County for Uzis and AK-47s is about $150, less than the cost of a cheap VCR. Why watch Rambo when you can live it, out on the street?

Johnny has seen a few movies himself. "I don't call people like these gangsters cold," he says. "I call them crazy. They try to chop-chop-bang! They try to beat people's families. But if they try to rob me at home, they'd better be fast. And if they try to hurt my baby, I will show them like Chuck Bronson in Death Wish."

One of Johnny's rejects sits near the club on a coin-operated kiddie ride. Johnny's not too popular, eh? "Yeah, he's popular," says the kid, rocking back and forth on a toy airplane. "He's the number-one man on the hit list."

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Minh, 22, is a junkie. His right eye was permanently ruptured with a baseball bat years ago in a gang scuffle. It's a milky and motionless gray marble. His good eye looks straight into mine, but the other one's somewhere else, some-place far off.

Minh belongs to one of the "Boyz" clubs. A hyperkinetic chain smoker with a honking voice, he is scared of nothing. "A lot of people think that talking to Americans is talking to undercover FBI," he says, standing between two stone lions at the Asian Garden Mall. "I ain't worried about it, you know? I can take care of myself."

He's fresh out of the pen after clocking a sentence for a robbery in which the store owner was shot. Minh even did a little time in Vietnam. "Compared to jail over there, jail here ain't shit," he says. "I'd rather do ten years here than one year in a Vietnamese jail. Especially if you're under eighteen. You get a nice bed, three meals a day. It's easy."

Minh says gang members are cultural boat people floating in a cultural limbo. "They don't feel Vietnamese and they don't feel American. They're somewhere in between. They come over here with no parents, they try to go to work and to school, but they say, 'Fuck it,' you know?

'Let's play the American game.' So I came here, I met the wrong people and I slide down and down."

Pretend-bored Viet girls stroll by in lobster-colored make-up. Minh's good eye wanders. A pained woman scuttles across white linoleum, asking people if they've seen her runaway daughter. "The parents in Vietnam are very strict," Minh says. "They come over here and they want to be strict like in Vietnam. They want us to bow, to obey. But it's different over here. If the parents are too hard on them, they say, 'Fuck it. Fuck you,' and they go. This is America, so we don't listen. Freedom, you know?"

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I stumble into a gaudy Westminster club through a wood-bead curtain, past a small Buddhist shrine. Rainbow lasers lacerate the smoky room. Beneath a spinning mirrored ball, a girl sings over recorded tracks. An m.c. follows with jokes in Vietnamese, then is displaced by a performer best described as Robert Goulet by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A woman, her hair pulled and sprayed into a spiky black Hydra, slinks up to my table. She calls herself Madame Le and wants to know why I'm there. She summons a linebacker-sized white man, who grins cunningly and sits across the table, saying nothing. Madame Le rubs up against me. Uh, no squid tonight, thanks. I retreat.

Madame Le's business cards sit near the toothpick dispenser in a pastry shop down the road. In a color photo, she kneels beside flowers, looking as harmless as a pit viper can possibly look. She's an entertainer, perhaps? "No, she's the club owner," says the cashier, blushing like a schoolboy. "She knows how to do business. Hee, hee!"

You can get anything you want at Madame Le's---prostitutes, heroin and firearms. It's the classic American outfit, giving the people what they want.

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"Everything, basically, has increased: the numbers, the violence, the mobility," says Orange County deputy probation officer Robert Gates. "They're very good students with regard to criminal behavior. They tend not to make similar mistakes twice."

The current regime in Vietnam has complicity in those rising numbers. In January 1990, the government began releasing political prisoners from Communist "re-education camps." Thirty thousand ex-cons and their families, about 100,000 Vietnamese all told, are on a waiting list for American visas. An estimated 200,000 more are waiting to get on the waiting list. Experts guess that 40 percent of the new refugees will wind up in Orange County.

Tran, who is one of the first political prisoners to be released, has been here only nine months. His nose, like his homeland, swerves left and right in an S shape. Back in the late Seventies, when he had been jailed for being a member of the South Vietnamese army, a gang of Communist jail guards broke it.

Shortly after arriving in the U.S., Tran wrote a poem called A Fairy Tale, dedicated to boat people killed at sea. He gave me a copy, altered only by a thick crust of white-out covering his real name. This is an excerpt:

Millions of Vietnamese have passed by Most of them died Some in fishes' stomachs Some tied in bags Some scattered all around Others' legs and hands bound In many different positions, indeed But only one purpose all together they meet That is, fleeing for freedom.

A small fraction of American Vietnamese are Communists or Communist sympathizers. Tran, who has known violence all his life, is again ready for war. "We are setting up a big front," he says.

The kids on the streets are one generation removed from Tran's war. They speak better English than their parents. At school, they learn to view their ethnicity as a millstone. Aching to assimilate, they acquire a distaste for things Vietnamese. With sometimes alarming tackiness, they are becoming American. Orange County's Viet music industry begets Elvis impersonators. Madonna clones and clumsy versions of Me So Horny. Free tabloids and newspapers bear such headlines as "Sammy Davis Jr. Khong Theieu No" and "U TUOI 60. Client East Wood Het Con Ngau." Parents desperately hang on to Vietnamese customs as their kids absorb The Simpsons.

The United States is a great place to run away from the past. It's easy to change your name and address, even your face. Minh the one-eyed gangster recently bought a new eyeball. He can't see any better, but people have stopped looking at him as though he were a freak. The kids here hang together and decipher America for themselves. They rent videos and watch thrill-a-minute combinations of Disneyland and Armageddon, a world where war and entertainment are synonymous. Gangs learn to solve their problems the way Chuck Bronson does.

"Because of the freedom of America---sometimes I feel it's crazy." Tran says. "Your Government, and newspapers, and TV, and cinema---it's so violent! I even watch TV sometimes and I feel something sucking me in. Sometimes even I'm affected by the violent films," he says, upper lip twitching. "Even my nephews, cousins, see films and go. 'That was a good film. The guns shot really fast.' They imitate. The violence is all around us."

" 'Here, it's too easy to do crime. You have money, you can go anywhere. I like America. I like freedom.' "