It was a sweltering summer day in 1990 and more than 100 Asian gang members and their families gathered at Rosedale Memorial Park Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey to bury 21-year-old Vinh Vu, the No. 2 leader of the violent Born to Kill (BTK) gang.
Suddenly, three men dressed in long coats that covered the automatic weapons they carried approached. These men then did the unthinkable: they opened fire on the mourners and chaos ensued. Frightened people ran in all directions, including the gang leader, David Thai, and 19-year-old Vietnamese refugee Tinh Ngo, called Timmy by his companions. More than 100 rounds were fired into the crowd. Five mourners were injured, but surprisingly no one was killed.
Tinh, like most typically teenage gang members, had no family in the United States and gravitated toward the mostly Vietnamese BTK gang for the same reason as the other gang members: He wanted a sense of family in a foreign land, people he could trust and converse with in his native language. Tinh never realized he would be drawn into a viper’s nest, where the 34-year-old Thai would order his subordinates to commit violent crimes — extortion, robbery and even murder — against other Asian immigrants, people who traditionally never reported crimes to the police.
Tinh committed his first dirty deed when he participated in the heist of a Chinese brothel in Chinatown. While Tinh didn’t enjoy the prank, he still gave her a sense of euphoria, knowing that he was now “one of the gang.” As he committed robbery after robbery, Tinh gradually began to question whether this violent life was for him.
David Thai feels that his minions across the United States are carrying out his chaos. In the late 1990s, Thai led a group of BTK, including Tinh, to Doraville, Georgia, to rob a Chinese curio shop owned by Odum Lin. Lin, who was not impressed with the barely-shaven gangsters, resisted and was shot in the side of the head.
Miraculously, Lin survived but Tinh did not know that the owner was still alive; he thought he was an accessory to murder. This senseless shooting sent Tinh over the top, and when he was arrested on a lesser charge soon after, he found himself met by a group of investigators, both federal and New York City officers, who were trying to build a case against the Born to Kill Gang, and its leader David Thai specifically.
Tired of gang life, Tinh switched easily and, under the guidance of New York City Detective Bill Oldham, ATF Special Agent Dan Kumor, and Assistant US Attorney Alan Vinegrad, began wearing a microphone during meetings with Thai and other senior BTK gang members.
In Born to Kill, TJ English, a former New York City taxi driver and author of another excellent book, The Westies, gives us a vivid account of Tinh’s secret activities that decimated the Born to Kill Gang. Tinh’s inside information was very accurate; Kumor and Oldham were even able to thwart several BTK robberies before they could occur.
At first, Tinh was terrified of wearing a wire. On one occasion, while Tinh was sitting in the living room of a safe house watching TV with other BTKs, another gang member noticed a red glow inside Tinh’s shirt. The glow was the battery light from his recorder that was slammed into his chest.
Thinking that he was now a dead man, Tinh ran to the bathroom, took out the recorder, and then sneaked into the living room to await his fate. Surprisingly, the other gang member was glued to the TV and barely noticed that Tinh had left the room and returned. Tinh muttered something about a bad locator to the gang member who had noticed the red light; the gang member believed Tinh’s explanation, and Tinh was safe, for now.
After Thai attempted to involve his gang in a robbery in concert with Italian mobsters from New Jersey, which was again prevented by Tinh’s inside knowledge of the impending event, Oldham, Kumor, and Vinegrad decided it was too dangerous for Tinh to remain undercover. They took Tinh off the streets and began the prosecution of Thai and other top BTK operatives. This resulted in Thai being sentenced to life behind bars without the possibility of parole.