Читать книгу White Devil - Bob Halloran - Страница 8

IT WAS COLLECTION DAY, and all the aging Chinese men who ran the dozens of low-stakes gambling dens and popular restaurants in Boston’s Chinatown were prepared to pay that month’s extortion money. The envelopes full of cash were usually transferred with a broad smile that belied each victim’s begrudging nature. They no longer felt the fear of what would happen if they didn’t pay, because they always paid. So the fear was gone, long since replaced by something far worse—a weekly emasculation at the hands of an abnormally large white guy who had them by the balls.

“I was always polite,” John Willis says reassuringly. “My boss, Bai Ming, would send me, and he always said when you go to collect money, make them respect you. Sometimes you’d have a problem. You’d have to, you know, do damage. Whether it’s beating people up, or sometimes you might put their hand on the grill; do something to really get the point across.”

John began collecting for Bai Ming as a teenager in the late 1980s. The first time he ran into a problem was at a gambling den on Harrison Avenue. He went in and introduced himself to the owner, and told him he was collecting for Ming. The owner was as surprised as he was offended that a round-eyed white kid would enter his place of business and demand money.

“Who does this white boy think he is?” the owner said to another man in Chinese. “He should just leave and go fuck his mother.”

The two men continued speaking in Chinese, mocking John and laughing. John stood patiently for a moment before turning around and locking the door. He then proceeded to tear the place apart. He turned over tables, smashed chairs, and pulled the lights down from the ceiling. When he was done and the gambling den looked like a disaster area, John walked up to the owner and spoke softly but firmly to him in perfect Chinese.

“Next time just give me the money. Don’t insult me. Don’t disrespect me, and don’t make me go through this again, or it won’t be furniture I break. Understand?”

“Oh, you speak Chinesey,” the owner said, managing a smile.

“No, I don’t speak Chinesey,” John corrected him. “I speak Chinese. Now, go fuck your mother.”

JOHN WILLIS SMILED at the memory and inhaled deeply. Willis is a large, muscular man of English, Portuguese, and Cherokee Indian descent, made even larger by persistent steroid use. He keeps his hair cropped short in a neat and stylish crew cut. His eyes are blue. His face is round and handsome. He is much too serious to allow for a broad, carefree smile. Laughter is a luxury. He is all business all the time.

His moment of fond reminiscing ended abruptly when he heard the distinctive echo that can only be made when metal doors are slammed shut. He listened to the muffled whimpers of strong men crying into their pillows. Moments later the lights were turned out, and he felt the loneliness that darkness brings. He sensed fear all around him, and as he felt it growing inside of himself, he jumped down to the cold cement floor and he prayed.

John forced his large, muscular body into a modified lotus position, closed his eyes, and listened to his own heartbeat. He concentrated solely on its rhythm until the space between beats grew remarkably wide, and his breathing was shallow enough to be imperceptible. He pushed out thoughts of anger and self-pity, and wrestled with the self-awareness that caused him to both love and loathe himself. Finally reaching a more peaceful state, John thought about all the people he loved in his life. There were exactly two—his wife and his daughter. Prior to meeting his wife, Anh Nguyen, he had no familiarity with either love or fear, and the sudden appearance of both disrupted his core beliefs. Love and fear threatened his way of life. They made him vulnerable in ways that could get him killed, and he felt love, in particular, weakening him every day. It must be love, he thought, “because it brings a lot of pain.” His mind didn’t land on the notion that love brings a lot of happiness. There’s far too much conflict and guilt and rising thoughts of violence associated with love for it to ever offer John the false hope of pure joy. Love was far more likely to fuel his rage.

“Somebody hit my wife one time in a nightclub,” John recalled. “I was in New York, and somebody called me and told me. They’ve never seen that guy again. And nobody ever will. He shouldn’t have put his hands on her. The fact of the matter is the guy will never, ever do that again. Whoever knew about it, or was involved in it, they were getting whatever he was getting. When it comes to my wife, I’m not arguing. I don’t have a problem with taking out five or six guys just to get to the right one. Then it’s over. And I sleep a little better.”

The memory of having done the right thing helped John relax. He continued rubbing his thumb and forefinger gently, smoothly, and continuously for nearly an hour, and he thought only about his wife and daughter.

“May they be well, happy, and peaceful,” he said over and over.

John was so entranced by his meditative state, so singularly focused on his purpose, that he was able to achieve a serenity that stood in stark contrast to his surroundings. John Willis was quietly celebrating his forty-second birthday in jail. He would certainly celebrate his forty-third, and there could be as many as eighteen birthdays after that spent behind bars.

Before rising from the floor, John took a moment to recognize the circuitous nature of his life’s journey. Sitting on the cold jail floor, alone and praying, was notably similar to when John was fifteen years old and convinced he would die on his kitchen floor. He was cold, hungry, and alone then, too.

“I wasn’t looking to do anything other than survive as a kid,” John says. “I went from surviving to basically taking everything I wanted. The way I look at it, there’s a lot taken for granted in this country. You go home, you shut your door, you’re inside, you have heat, you eat food, and you live there. But what happens when I’m a kid and my mom dies? There’s no more food, there’s no more heat. Now there’s a need to survive. I wanted to actually make something of my life. In the beginning, I was angry at the world, very angry that my mother had passed away and I was in a situation with no money. No nothing. I didn’t have family, because my sisters were caught up in drugs. I was basically taken in by a family who was Chinese. I grew up just a whole different species than what was around me. I found myself in a society that didn’t trust anybody, never mind somebody white, somebody American. And then to be given duty, honor, and respect—to me that was something I cherished, and to this day I do.”

What John offers there is a stripped-down summary of his life that attempts to explain why he chose an amoral, greedy, and violent path, but never broaches why he rejected an infinite number of alternate routes. His circumstances, dire as they were, taught him lessons that some would affirm and others would renounce. But from the time he was a boy, John Willis was convinced he knew what it meant to be a man. He was taught that a man is a soldier. And nothing more.

Willis didn’t fight on a traditional battlefield. He fought in the streets, and the enemy was constantly changing. Willis’ enemies were from rival gangs or the local police. Both were out to get him. There were the businessmen he robbed, and the victims he bludgeoned. All sought vengeance. There were prostitutes and gamblers, drug dealers and drug users, and countless others who would have loved to see John Willis taken down or taken out. But Willis survived it all. And what’s the point of surviving, if you’re not going to live a little? That’s why, despite his own best advice and against his own self-interest, he bought a Porsche, a Bentley, and a multimillion-dollar home. Those purchases were self-destructive, but they made him feel good. He knew the police took notice of a gangster flashing lots of cash, but like an addict, Willis needed to feel good, if only temporarily. Those purchases were not only his drug; they were evidence of his righteous pursuits. He was winning the war, so God must be on his side.

“I believe that God loves me,” Willis says with conviction, but anticipates his faith may be met with doubt, and adds, “You might say, ‘How could God love me?’ Well, if he doesn’t love me, he doesn’t give me anything. Some people he puts to the test. I’m all about the test. I really do think God loves me, and I love people. I’m not a monster. I love people, and I have a value for each and every person. But I also believe if you’re a person deserving of what you get, that’s what you get. That’s how it goes.”

And in John Willis’ world, he decides what a person deserves. For instance, the man in the Chinese restaurant who once brazenly told John to “shut the fuck up” deserved to be struck with an open hand and hit over the head with a Glock pistol. So, John did those things.

“And then I stuck the gun in his eye,” John continues. “He’s bleeding. People are looking at me and they’re scared. They took the guy into the bathroom and cleaned him up. For me it was nothing. He was no one. I turned, and had a drink with everybody. I thank God the man left, because I might have gone back in the alley and shot him. When I go back to the bar, I’m not shaking. I’m thinking—where do I want this to go? Did I go too far, or did I not go far enough?”

Such is the mentality of a street soldier. John is convinced now more than ever that a man fights every day for his own survival. A man is a self-centered creature who recognizes that contentment, like true happiness, is not only unattainable; it is the foolish pursuit of the embattled and desperate losers of the war. John Willis is a man. He lives these principles unwaveringly. He is a soldier who believes he is fighting the good fight, and that he is winning the war. Shedding his white skin, adopting a culture he was not born into, and surviving into his forties is proof of that, and surviving remains the greatest accomplishment of the man his enemies call the White Devil.

JOHN WILLIS was born May 11, 1971, at Boston City Hospital. He was brought home to a three-family house at 37 South Munroe Terrace in Dorchester. His father, an ex-con who worked as a carpenter, was a large, angry man who drank too much and beat his wife, Francine. When he ultimately ran afoul of the Irish Mob, he escaped to an Indian reservation in the mountains of South Carolina. It was better for everyone that he left, but John, who was only three years old at the time, grew to hate a father he never really knew.

So, John was raised by his mother, Francine, and her three much older children from a previous marriage. John’s brother, Richie, who owned the home and lived on the second floor with his wife and three daughters, took on paternal responsibilities. He helped with the bills and administered strict discipline. Richie was a hardworking man who built a successful carpet business. He had two passions: fishing on his large boat, and drugs. John says Richie did a line of cocaine every night when he came home from work.

John’s last memory of his brother is when Richie forcefully threw him down the stairs.

“I wish you were dead!” John cried out.

Two days later, Richie died of a heart attack brought on by his cocaine addiction. He was thirty-four years old.

“That really messed me up,” John recalls now.

Richie’s death caused Francine to go into a yearlong depression. She continued to do the best she could to make John happy. In fact, she spoiled John. Making good money as an executive at the Stride Rite shoe factory in nearby Roxbury, Francine lavished John with the best of everything. He had the finest shoes and clothes, the latest toys, and his hockey equipment was the envy of his blue-collar neighborhood friends. Suddenly, it all went away.

Perhaps if Francine had complained sooner about the pain in her calves and thighs, things would have been different, but a year after Richie’s death, Francine suffered complications from her diabetes.

“She went in for open heart surgery, and they took her legs,” John’s cousin Debbie recalls. “Gangrene had set in. She was a very, very pretty woman. A beautiful mix of Italian and Indian. She looked like Liz Taylor. But when they took her legs, that’s when everything went downhill.”

Francine’s depression grew worse. Her self-image was shattered. She was given big, heavy prosthetic legs that she lacked the strength to maneuver. She was an invalid left in the care of a fourteen-year-old boy.

“I think it was at this point that my life and my view of it changed,” John considers aloud. “I was mad at God and the whole world for bringing so much pain to my life.”

John’s sisters, Sandra and Linda, who were eighteen and sixteen years older than John, respectively, were busy with their own growing families. They thought Richie’s widow, Sonny, who still lived upstairs, was helping to take care of things, and she thought the sisters were, but it all fell upon John’s shoulders. He was left alone to cook, to clean, to shop, to give his mother her insulin shots, and to get her to the bathroom for showers and all other purposes. It was humiliating for both of them.

John loved his mother and did his best for her, but he was helpless when it came to her weakening heart and her overwhelming sorrow. Those things took her independence, her will, and ultimately her life. Francine Willis was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in Stoughton for additional care and rehab, but she died there. John was effectively an orphan at fifteen.

“He was extremely angry,” Debbie recalls. “That’s when the anger started. That’s when he stopped being Johnny. He started being something else.”

John never cried over his mother’s death, and he didn’t talk to anyone about it. He received no consolation from his sisters. In fact, the only conversation he had with Linda was at the wake when he scolded her and accused her of being stoned. He was only at the wake for ten minutes before he stormed out, and he didn’t attend his mother’s funeral.

That is the line of demarcation in John’s life. There was the time before his mother’s illness and death, and the time after. His life, his mood, and especially his path were forever altered. The spoiled, happy-go-lucky kid from the neighborhood had been transformed. The boy had prematurely become a man, and that meant fifteen-year-old John Willis was a soldier. From the day his mother died, he was ready for a fight. He’d fight any kid in the neighborhood and beat him senseless without fear of repercussion. He fought for survival. He fought back tears and sorrow, and even joy, and every emotion that began to scratch the surface. But his demons? Those he chose not to fight. His demons ran free.

Under normal circumstances, John would have been sent to live with either of his two sisters. He’d continue going to high school and upon graduation, he’d either find a job or go on to college. Other kids have endured greater hardships and gone on to live successful, respectable lives. But there was nothing normal about John’s circumstances.

First, no one wanted John. There was no family member, no teacher, no hockey coach, no Department of Child Services that reached out to help. He lived for a while at Linda’s apartment on Branch Street in Quincy with her husband, Vinny, and their children, but he was clearly not welcomed there. The apartment was too crowded, and the parties were wild. So John returned to live alone on the first floor of the house he’d shared with his mother.

Left to pay his own way, he dropped out of school and took a job with Vinny installing windows. He lived on a steady diet of Burger King hamburgers and fries, and steroids. He got the food from Debbie, who worked at Burger King, and he got the steroids from a couple of guys at the Universal Gym in North Quincy. He went from being a chubby kid to a ripped bodybuilder pretty quickly. Those who knew he was on steroids assumed the drugs were the cause of his abrupt and angry outbursts. They didn’t understand his rage went much deeper than that.

John survived that way for a year until Brant Welty, a close friend, told him he could get work as a bouncer if he said he was seventeen. John referred to him as his brother. They had known each other since elementary school, but after John’s mother passed, Brant’s family had welcomed John into their home as often as they could. John would never forget that kindness.

Brant had always been a good kid. As a seven-year-old, he washed car windows in Kenmore Square outside Fenway Park. He was a straight “A” student in elementary and middle school, and his employment record included time at Burger King, a Greyhound bus station, and his father’s watch and jewelry store in the Back Bay. Brant excelled in high school at Boston English in Jamaica Plain, and was offered a scholarship to Dartmouth College, but opted instead to become a jeweler like his father.

Meanwhile, John took a job as a bouncer at Narcissus, a Kenmore Square nightclub in Boston. The manager of the club, John Pop, didn’t know or care that John was only sixteen. The club needed bouncers who were unusually large, barrel-chested, and muscular, and John fit the description. They also liked the anger and fearlessness emanating from John’s eyes.

John took his job seriously. He ignored the loud music and the pretty college girls, and simply stood with his arms folded across his chest. John had been warned that the Asian gang kids from nearby Chinatown could be ruthless and violent, but his nervousness around them dissipated with each encounter, and he came to respect their excessive politeness. He was also envious of the expensive clothes they wore, the fancy cars they drove, and the money they flashed.

“All the things I want out of life,” John thought.

One night, a fight broke out between a group of preppy college kids and a young Chinese man named Woping Joe. John knocked one of the assailants out cold, but not before Woping Joe had been maced.

“So, I took Woping Joe to the back and began helping him rinse his face,” John said. “I turned to get some help and stared at six pissed-off-looking gangsters.”

The gangsters were late coming to Woping Joe’s rescue and assumed John needed a good beating, or worse. John stood his ground. His eyes darted from one face to another. There was a lot of indecipherable shouting in broken English, but he clearly heard the word “kill” several times, and he noticed the group had more than one gun and several knives.

“He cool,” Woping Joe loudly repeated several times, and after a brief discussion in Cantonese, Woping Joe was able to convince the small mob to file out of the bathroom. Woping Joe turned back and handed John a card with a number on it.

“Hey, white boy,” he said with a smile. “Here’s a number to call.”

John didn’t know why he saved the number, but as another bitter winter descended upon New England, he would soon discover it was a fortuitous decision. When he was unable to pay the heat or electric bills on a bouncer’s wages, his sister-in-law, Sonny, shut off the utilities on the first floor. John routinely came home from work, wrapped himself up tightly in a blanket, and lay down on his kitchen floor. He was sixteen years old, freezing cold, hungry, and alone in the dark.

One night in January of 1987, while the snow piled up outside his door, John felt the fear, anger, and frustration of his predicament overwhelm him. He curled into a fetal position and wondered how death would come to him. Would he slowly starve over a matter of days, or would he mercifully be taken in the night as he slept and froze to death?

Once he managed to shake off his moment of self-pity, John rose from the floor, bundled himself up in most of the clothes he owned, and walked through a snowstorm to a pay phone. He called his sister Sandra, who lived several towns over in Braintree with their grandparents and her three children. Sandra assured John that he could stay with them for a while, but after John used his last twenty dollars on cab fare, he arrived to find that Sandra wouldn’t open the door for him.

John slumped his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets. Out of one he pulled three quarters and a penny. From the other, he found the card with the phone number on it from Woping Joe.

“What other choice do I have?” he thought to himself.

In truth, if he had thought longer, or if he was guided less by anger and self-pity, he might have considered his aunt and uncle, Debbie’s parents. His aunt had been married several times and moved around a bit, and his uncle had moved back to South Carolina when his kids were grown. So, both of them would have taken some effort to locate, but John didn’t even try, nor did he reach out to Debbie, who was three years older, putting herself through school, and living in Chelsea.

“Could I have taken him in?” Debbie wonders now. “Could I have supported him? I don’t know, but I would have tried like hell. I would have made sure he wasn’t hungry and that he went back to school. Maybe I didn’t reach out to him. There were a number of people who could have helped. Sonny and his sisters threw him away like he was trash.”

John traipsed back through the snow and went looking for a second pay phone. He remembered why and when he had been given the phone number, but he didn’t really know what it was for, or who would pick up on the other end when he called. But as he fought the wind and the snow and walked several miles from Braintree to Quincy, he gripped the card tightly in his hand and did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He hoped.

The real beginning for John was that snowy January night in 1987 when he reached a phone booth on Furnace Brook Parkway in Quincy, unclenched his fist, and stared at the crumpled card with only a ten-digit number on it. With fingers numb from the cold, John dropped one of his last quarters into the coin slot and slowly dialed the rotary phone. After the third ring, Woping Joe answered.

“Ni hao,” Woping Joe said.

John had picked up a few Chinese words while working at the bar, and he recognized the greeting as the Chinese word for “hello.”

“Ni hao,” he replied with an inherent South Boston accent that revealed his identity.

“Hey,” Woping Joe said, “you’re the white boy from the bar. What do you want?”

John explained the predicament he was in, and to his astonishment, Woping Joe told him someone would be by in ten minutes to pick him up. John waited inside the phone booth where it was still freezing, but at least it was dry and the wind wasn’t cutting through the hole in his jacket. Tragedy had hardened him so much that John had forgotten how to feel scared. So, ten minutes later, when two cars, a brand-new Acura and a BMW, rolled up on him, and a Chinese stranger said, “Get in,” John got in without hesitation.

He was taken to a large three-family house in Braintree where he was immediately surrounded by more than a dozen Asian gangsters. Most of them only glanced up at the white boy in their midst. Others stared him down. John stood nervously in the middle of the room. He noticed each of the gangsters had a gun tucked into his waistband. He saw the latest electronics. He heard music blaring from an expensive stereo, and he smelled a delicious aroma he’d later learn was Chinese noodles. It was a sensory overload that should have made John turn and run, but it didn’t.

“It was so badass!” John remembers. “I loved it!”

Several Asian women came out of the kitchen and were told by the men to serve dinner and set another place. John struggled to use chopsticks, which brought about plenty of laughter at the table, and that laughter only grew when John surrendered, picked up his bowl, and shoveled the food into his mouth with his thick fingers. The gangsters followed suit and good-naturedly copied John, who couldn’t help but laugh himself. It was a fun-filled family dinner like John had never experienced. He looked around the room and saw faces quite unlike his own, and yet he felt at home. He couldn’t know at the time that the seeds had just been planted for something that would grow strong inside him. Those were the seeds of loyalty and respect, and they would be nurtured over time. They were the seeds of an easier way. Never again would John face difficult decisions about right or wrong. If someone gave him respect, he returned it. If someone failed to show him respect, he showed that person what a mistake that was. There was a surprising simplicity in honor. And John would find weeding out the complexities of conscience or societal norms made it easy to accept otherwise unacceptable behavior.

“I can never say enough about these people,” John says sincerely. “As far as being family oriented, your brother is your brother, you know? Things are just the way they are. You don’t ask questions. It is what it is. To be taught a different culture, to live that culture, and to experience things that I have experienced, I have no regrets for anything that happened to me.”

John sat at the Asian gangsters’ dinner table that first night unaware that the direction of his life had been permanently and irreversibly altered. Unwittingly, Woping Joe had just become the catalyst for everything that would happen in John’s life from that day forward, and that included all things inspiring and reprehensible. Woping Joe thought he was simply repaying a debt. John had helped him in the bar that night, so Woping Joe was obliged to return the favor. That is the Chinese way, and John would come to believe that it was the best part of a Chinese culture that has its roots going back thousands of years. Strength and loyalty to his brothers meant so much to John that he had the phrase tattooed on his arm. It was an indelible reminder of how to live.

“I’m never going to walk away from the people. They took care of me in my life. That’s kind of a vow that you make; you never, ever walk away from the people that took care of you and care about you, ’cause that makes you no different from anybody else. Always honor your people. Honor your friends, your family. You know, respect and loyalty to your brothers that haven’t ratted on you, you know what I mean? I’m not gonna change, not in that aspect.”

John slept on the floor that night, but this time there was a carpet beneath him and the house, like his heart, was warm. John had found peace, and he found a family. The next day he would find another family, one even more long-lasting, one with dozens of fiercely loyal brothers willing to fight and die—or kill—for each other.

WOPING JOE brought John to a Vietnamese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown. This time, there were about twenty Asian gangsters demanding to know who John was and why he was there. Woping Joe vouched for John. They shared a meal of pork chops and rice with fish sauce, and John was in the gang. It was that easy. The rest of the initiation process included a shopping spree.

“I tried to say ‘no,’ but Woping Joe wasn’t hearing that,” John says. “So we went shopping and that was the beginning of my new life. It was the first time I ever went shopping without worrying about the price. If I didn’t have enough to cover something, my new friends paid. I soon learned we all stood together as a family, and that was a feeling I’d been searching for my whole life.”

As a white kid, John’s assimilation into the Chinese gang culture was unprecedented, but surprisingly easy. He walked comfortably among a group of hard-core criminals, undaunted by the language barrier and the cultural differences, and free of any moral ambiguities that might have shown weakness or caused him to hesitate. He didn’t judge them except to respect them, and that’s what they were looking for in a recruit.

Each morning, there was a meeting at a restaurant called Dong Kahn, where several leaders of a local Asian gang comprised of Chinese and Vietnamese men discussed their gambling and drug business. The gambling was done inside Chinatown. The drugs were sold outside Chinatown. John was quickly passed off to another young Chinese man they called Eric. John lived with Eric and adopted the role of enforcer when it came time to collect gambling debts or drug money. John went from being a poor white kid to being a Chinese gangster literally overnight. It was an odd transformation, but one John adapted to very quickly. He loved learning about the Chinese culture, but he was actually being exposed to a mutated philosophy that exists only in the Asian underworld. While his gang leaders talked about and demanded respect, they routinely intimidated, extorted, and stole under a flag of self-righteousness that inexplicably satisfied a warped rationale for their violence and criminality.

“You might say, ‘Normal people don’t kill people,’” John begins. “Well, we were not normal people. Normal people don’t deal with the things we deal with. We dealt with the street, but we dealt with it in a way that was, in our eyes, correct, you know? And that’s just the way it goes.”

It was all starting to make sense to John. A series of events and self-realizations answered the questions he had asked when he was cold and alone. When he faced danger or imposed pain on another human being without fear of consequences or reciprocity, and without so much as his pulse rising, he knew he was born for this. The extreme violence he was exposed to never shocked him or triggered a flight response. Rather, he found it suited his personality.

“I remember walking into a strip club in Chinatown, and I got jumped by some Italian gangsters,” John recalls. “It was over a stripper who didn’t make a difference to me. I didn’t even know her real name. Well, some guy sucker punched me in the face. Broke my nose. And then another guy pulled out a big knife and went to stab me. As he pulls the knife out, the other guys grabbed me. So the kid I was with pulls out a Mac-10 machine gun. Thank God!”

John was seventeen years old when that happened. No shots were fired, but the appearance of the machine gun served as a warning. John casually walked to the bar with his friend, got some ice for his nose, ordered a drink, and stayed to watch the stripper who was at the heart of the altercation. Overall, it was a pretty good night.

After joining the gang, John spent about a year and a half in Boston’s Chinatown working as muscle. His job was to be the imposing figure that stood by quietly while the Chinese and Vietnamese gang kids collected money from the gambling dens for their bosses. John’s impact was significant, and it was rewarded with an opportunity to rise through the ranks. As if he were a legitimate businessman, he was transferred to New York, where he would receive additional training.

In order to reach his new home, John and a couple of Vietnamese gang kids stole two cars and drove to New York’s Chinatown. As they parked along Canal Street and observed the mingling of merchants, customers, and tourists, the three teenage boys had no way of knowing they were in the middle of a war zone.

The opposing gang factions typically operated peacefully within their own zones of power and influence. The borders were well defined. Certain streets belonged to certain gangs. But well-established gangs like the Flying Dragons and Ghost Shadows were being threatened by extremely violent upstart gangs like the Green Dragons, and especially the Canal Boys, who preferred to be called Born To Kill, or BTK.

John was seventeen when he arrived in New York in 1988. By then, the Green Dragons were well on their way to taking over Queens, and a Vietnamese emigrant known as David Thai had broken away from the Flying Dragons and organized BTK. He gathered nearly one hundred Vietnamese refugees, spiked their hair, and dressed them in black suits with dark sunglasses. Together they terrorized merchants and shopkeepers throughout Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens with a rash of robberies, extortion, and extreme violence.

BTK solidified its reputation for using extreme measures in 1988 when its members threw a bomb into a police cruiser, injuring two officers. It was Thai’s way of letting police know that he didn’t appreciate several merchants under his control being arrested for selling fake Rolex watches. The brazen attack also served notice to police that BTK was at the forefront of Chinatown’s growing phenomenon and incipient problem. There was an influx of unpredictable and uncontrollable Vietnamese gangs. And John moved right into the middle of it. Canal Street was the central place of operation for BTK, and John’s first New York apartment was above a gambling den at 74 Canal Street.

This was the BTK’s territory, but Thai was wise enough to work with instead of against the Hip Sing Association, one of the most powerful tongs in Chinatown. The tongs were secret brotherhoods and, like gangs, were powerful and often involved in criminal activity. Hip Sing was run by Benny Ong, known to law enforcement as the godfather of Chinatown, but known to everyone else as Uncle Seven, a nickname he received because he was the seventh child in his family. Uncle Seven had served seventeen years in prison for murder. He was convicted in 1937, when he was thirty years old, but whispers throughout Chinatown perpetuated a belief that Uncle Seven never committed the murder, but instead had taken the rap for someone more important within the organization. That kind of loyalty made him a hero in Chinatown, and a hero to John. David Thai decided it was wiser to make friends with an eighty-one-year-old legend than to go to war with him.

“Those Canal Boys, BTK, were friends with my boss,” John says, referring to Uncle Seven. “Those guys ran around the country just killing and doing whatever they wanted to.”

That, of course, created a number of enemies for BTK, and that led to the murder of Vinh Vu, an underboss in the gang and one of its most popular members. Vu’s high profile made him an attractive target. So, on July 25, 1990, when Vu exited a massage parlor on Canal Street he was gunned down by several gunmen firing from the front- and backseat of a car. Three days later, Vu’s funeral was disrupted at the cemetery when three gunmen opened fire on the mourners. Seven people were wounded.

“I was around when all this stuff happened,” John says. “These guys were like my people, but these guys were renegades. They were crazy. They didn’t follow the rules of the Chinese, because the majority of them were Vietnamese. When I grew up, there was a sense of loyalty to everybody. Like, we didn’t just go out and cause problems. If you had an issue you had to talk to your boss to see what you could do. You didn’t want to overstep your boundaries. There was honor. There was a sense of family.”

Surrounded by the violence but not an active participant in the war, John went about the business of learning his trade. He watched how Uncle Seven conducted his business with a comforting presence and a firm hand. Although he walked with a cane, Uncle Seven seemed to glide through Chinatown with a dignified grace that accurately reflected his stature, but also belied his potential for cruelty. John thought about the time Uncle Seven served in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and he was inspired by the amount of respect Uncle Seven must have had for the real murderer. It saddened John to see that kind of respect disregarded by the next generation.

“I sit here in prison today,” John says. “I could’ve told on people for murders and different things. But I’d rather take it and have my face, you know what I mean? People who put me in this position, the ones who ratted me out, there’s always a time where people will have to pay the piper, one way or the other.”

For gamblers who failed to pay, extorted merchants who complained, and robbery victims who dared to resist, the penalties were dramatic displays of force. John, who only needed a menacing glare or his fists to get people to hand over their money, was shocked the first time he and a few other gang members cased a check-cashing store. The men who delivered the cash to these stores were easy to spot. They were the ones with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. When one man refused to give up his suitcase, someone in John’s crew chopped off the man’s hand with a machete. John watched the hand hit the ground, and then picked up the briefcase and ran. Later, he counted $40,000, and handed it over to a very pleased Uncle Seven.

“Yeah, I’ve seen guys get their hands chopped off,” John says flatly. “This guy, first of all, he’s involved in something he shouldn’t have been involved in. I said, maybe my hand will be chopped next. Maybe I should learn a lesson from that.”

On another occasion, John unknowingly went after a check-cashing business owned and operated by the Italian mafia. John got the money, but he was nearly killed in the attempt. While running down the street, John turned a corner and heard a loud shotgun blast. He looked back and saw a large hole in the wall next to him. That was his last check-cashing heist.

The first shots John ever fired from a gun were moments after he and his crew robbed an illegal sweatshop. He raced down the street with bullets whistling over his head, and while ducking and still running away, he reached back and fired wildly in the general direction of the shooters. Innocent bystanders could have been killed, but John was in survival mode.

“That really opened my eyes,” John says. “This was for real. That was the first real sense I got that if I didn’t shoot, I’d be dead.”

Wanting desperately to impress Uncle Seven, John did as he was told and a little more. For instance, he learned to speak Chinese. John practiced constantly with his best friend in the group, a young Asian man who went by Sam.

“You have to speak Chinese,” Sam told him. “How else will you get the girls?”

Sam began by teaching John one word at a time. Glass is “boi.” Table is “toi.” Door is “munh.” John wrote them all down on flash cards, unconcerned with proper spelling. He just needed to pronounce the words correctly. Listening to a lot of Chinese music and singing songs at karaoke clubs helped. Watching dozens of Chinese movies with subtitles helped more. His favorite movie was Moment of Romance, starring Andy Lau as a gangster who falls in love with a good girl. John still relates to it well.

“I have the soundtrack, and I listen to it,” he says. “It takes me back to when I was younger.”

In the beginning, John often spoke in broken Chinese, and he routinely spoke it backward, but he was happy to be understood and proud to be respected.

“It wasn’t me that taught myself Chinese,” John says humbly. “God taught me. He gave me what I needed to survive.”

John’s fluency in the language didn’t happen until he began living with the Laus, a Chinese couple, in Queens. They taught him to speak fluent Chinese with an authentic Toi Son accent, and they instilled in John the importance of Buddhism as part of his new Chinese culture. John soaked it all in, and he had no trouble reconciling the life lessons he learned and the actual life he was leading.

“Before I did anything, I prayed,” John says.

While he was living with Jackie Lau, who, along with his brother Peter Lau, owned businesses in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Queens, John settled into place as an enforcer and a bodyguard. It was another opportunity for him to see firsthand how Chinese leaders ran their operations. The very fact that he was living with his boss told him that in this insular world people took care of their own. And John, in turn, would take care of them.

As their armed bodyguard, John traveled with Jackie and Peter all over the country as they tended to a variety of business interests. John enjoyed visiting new cities, but he especially loved the fast-paced energy of New York. Being with the Lau brothers gave John a special status and certain privileges. He was with them when they frequented an underground club at the Hollywood Bowl on Woodhaven Boulevard where high-priced escorts flirted in sexy outfits.

The first time John went to the club, he entered nervously. He was concerned that the off-duty police officers guarding the door would take his gun from him when the alarm went off on the metal detectors, but the cops just waved him through. Once inside, John still had a job to do, so he didn’t drink or pick up women, but he beamed with pride as he looked around and realized that he had made it. He fit in at a place filled with rich and powerful people. He was a little over two years removed from starving on his kitchen floor, and now he had more money than he knew what to do with. John’s primary job was to collect protection money from neighborhood stores, but he made most of his money robbing the gambling dens. He and his crew even robbed the cooks at restaurants on payday for what little money those men had. John also got involved with running drugs, and eventually, selling them himself.

He also learned the fine art of a specific form of extortion known as Wat Yan. It was a simple process of letting rich Asian college students or foreign businessmen get drunk enough to start shooting their mouths off. Once they realized they had insulted the wrong people, they paid whatever it took to escape the consequences.

One night when a few of the other men who lived at Jackie’s house in Queens got into a fight, a New York City SWAT team showed up and stormed the house with guns drawn. Shots were fired and one of Jackie’s men was killed. Jackie was arrested along with his brother Peter who had pulled a gun on the cops and threatened them. One of the very few Asian police officers on the force was able to calm everyone down and avoid further bloodshed. John was not arrested, so it was his responsibility to collect the funds necessary to bail out everyone else. It was part of the code.

“We follow a set of rules,” John explains. “If you’re my brother, that means something. You stick together. God forbid, you get arrested and your bail is twenty thousand dollars. Well, we’re all running around with big, thick, gold bracelets on that are worth eight to ten thousand bucks. You take them off. You trade them in to get the money, and you get your brother out. No thoughts. No nothing. You do it.”

But rules come with consequences, and in John’s Chinese family, the consequences were often severe. One of John’s gang brothers named Tony had escalated the fight at the house that resulted in the SWAT team raid. Tony wasn’t killed for his unintended mistake, but he did have his legs broken. John brought Tony to Chinatown where two other men enforced the order. Tony understood.

John also understood that gang violence and retaliation were simply the result of those gangs playing by the rules. So, when a disc jockey working at Jackie and Peter’s waterfront nightclub was shot in the head and killed in October of 1990, John understood it was a proper response to the BTK shooting at the funeral three months earlier. After all, the DJ was a member of Ghost Shadows. And John wasn’t surprised when one week after the DJ’s murder, three members of BTK were killed execution style right out in front of the Lau’s club.

After his nearly two years of residency-like training was completed in New York, John moved back to Boston’s Chinatown. He quickly learned that the FBI was watching him closely. It was the early fall of 1990, and John was walking down Beach Street in Chinatown when he noticed a dark car driving slowly by him. When the car went by for the third time, John jumped in front of the car, forcing it to stop. John slammed both his palms down onto the hood. The passenger in the front seat of the vehicle rolled down his window and called out to John.

“Uncle Seven’s dead!”

The man spoke unemotionally and John, despite learning someone he greatly respected had died, reacted the same way. He walked over to the passenger side of the car where the man identified himself as an FBI agent and showed John his badge.

“Why you telling me?” John asked. “I don’t know anybody named Uncle Seven.”

“No?” the agent asked, surprised. “Ever been to New York?”

“Nope. Just a Dorchester kid. Never been nowhere.”

At that point, the agent pulled out a surveillance photo of John in New York wearing the exact jacket he was wearing now.

“Wanna change your answer?” the agent asked.

“You wanna go fuck yourself?” John replied.

With that as his exit line, John put both hands on the roof of the car and did a short drumbeat. He walked away with his head held high and his chest puffed out. He thought about his clever response to the agent, and he smiled. He realized he was important enough to be harassed by the FBI, and his smile grew. Yes, it was another good day in Chinatown.