David Thai
David Thai,, is a Vietnamese-American gangster. He was the founder and leader of the notorious Born to Kill gang during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was also responsible for running a massive illegal counterfeit watch operation and at his peak controlled the market and distribution of counterfeit watches in New York by means of "blackmail and extortion."
He was the official leader of "New York Vietnamese Born to Kill" from 1988 until his arrest in 1991, which was the combination of months of investigation by the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in conjunction with the aid of a former gang member who defected from the gang and became an undercover informant, helping secure the convictions of David Thai and several of his high-ranking officers.
Described as a sly, shrewd and lethal gangster, David Thai fashioned himself as a big brother and the protector to the Vietnamese community in Chinatown. Thai was described by crime writer T. J. English and many others as being well dressed, usually wearing "a tailored sports coat, silk shirt and loft leather loafers" alongside a pair of sunglasses, and was said to have resembled more a businessman than a gangster. During his interview with Peg Tyre after his arrest on murder charges in 1991 and other interviews that went on in the course of his trial, Thai often stated that he was trying to protect and help the Vietnamese community in Chinatown, often by giving the newly arrived refugees money and a place to live. In his interview with Tyre, Thai went on to describe that he sacrificed his first marriage due to his "love for his Vietnamese brothers".
On October 23, 1992, a United States federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced Thai to life in prison for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, robbery, extortion, and related offenses. Federal prosecutors claimed that David Thai's life sentence significantly impaired Asian gang activity in New York.
Early life
David Thai was born Thái Thọ Hoàng on January 30, 1956, in Saigon, South Vietnam, where his family lived in a home on Tôn Đản street. As a young teenager on the streets of Saigon, when he wasn't in school, Hoàng often acted as a mediator between the American G.I.s stationed in Saigon who were in search of drugs, and the Bình Xuyên, an independent military group during the time of the Vietnam War that was also responsible for funding and orchestrating many illegal activities in Saigon during the war. When Saigon fell at the end of the Vietnam War, Hoàng's father Dieu was jailed by the triumphant communists and sent into a reeducation camp, but Dieu was still able to secure Hoàng's passage out of Saigon, where he thereafter arrived in the U.S. three months later, going by the name David. Initially living in a small house for boys owned by a local Lutheran church in Indiana, in May 1976, David fled from the church house with $150 in his pocket and hopped onto a Greyhound bus destined for New York City.Life in New York and criminal beginnings
As a young lost youth in New York, Thai was able to survive in the city by bouncing from job to job, and by various accounts, worked as a busboy in Manhattan restaurants, and was also at one point a dishwasher for the famous Rainbow Room restaurant, located at the sixty-fifth floor of the RCA Building in New York. In his spare time when he wasn't working, Thai began to dabble into the makings of counterfeit watches by constructing a small counterfeit watch factory in his apartment, an industry that he would later come to dominate a decade later.In 1978, Thai briefly attended New York University, whereupon he met a fellow Vietnamese refugee from Da Nang who was also a student at the university. The two quickly married, and within months, Thai's wife became pregnant. Afterwards, both of them dropped out of attendance from the university and moved into a cramped apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Struggling to provide for his family with his jobs as a busboy and dishwasher however, Thai began making regular trips to Canal Street to delve into financial possibilities, and in 1983, Thai became a member of the Flying Dragons, one of the largest gangs in Chinatown at the time.
Because he was Vietnamese however, Thai and a handful of other Vietnamese members in the gang were cut off from the main gang's lucrative activities, and were forced to form their own sub-group known as the Vietnamese Flying Dragons, whom the Flying Dragons regularly employed to commit the riskiest and most dangerous crimes, since they viewed the Vietnamese as mainly "coffee boys". Seeing no future or further possibilities of advancing himself within the gang, Thai left the Flying Dragons sometime between 1986 and 1987 and began to solidify his control over the counterfeit watch industry in Chinatown, whereupon his profits quickly grew.
At around the same time Thai was establishing himself in Chinatown's underworld, many Vietnamese youths had begun arriving into the city; the majority of them were boat people who were severed from their families and cast adrift at sea prior to arriving in New York. Upon arrival, however, many of these newly arrived Vietnamese refugees struggled to survive in Manhattan Chinatown, mostly because the majority of the social services in Chinatown as well as the banks catered only to the Chinese, where only Mandarin or Cantonese dialects were spoken, thus forming a language barrier. In addition, due to the absence of previous generations of Vietnamese in New York City, there were no residential places where Vietnamese passed on living areas or apartments from one generation to the next, causing the newly arrived refugees, who could not afford to pay for an apartment on their own, to live on the streets.
As Thai's successful watch business continued to grow, his name became well known throughout the back alleys, pool halls and skating rinks throughout New York that many Vietnamese commonly visited. Hearing stories of a wealthy successful businessman who could take care of his own, many Vietnamese youths began approaching Thai and asked for his assistance, which he usually freely obliged to by giving them money, advice, and at times, a place to live. Eventually, Thai was able to build a small gathering of young Vietnamese men around him, whom he often employed as muscle-men to extort from local shop keepers and merchants on Canal Street, or as assemblers of counterfeit watches in safe houses as part of Thai's growing counterfeit watch business. Before long, Thai and his group began to organize and collectively call themselves the "Canal Street Boys". Eventually, however, the name "Born to Kill", a slogan that had originated from the helmets of American GIs from the Vietnam War was gradually used in favor of "Canal Street Boys", and it would eventually become the gang's official name that news media and state police would come to know them by.
The "Born to Kill" gang
Formation
In June 1989, in a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, David Thai orchestrated the first major gathering of the Born to Kill gang, in which nearly every gang member attended. At the time, the Born to Kill gang and many of the Vietnamese gangs in New York were in general small unconnected groups that each had their own designated gang name and were only loosely affiliated with one another. During this meeting however, Thai made it strictly clear that all of the many separate Vietnamese factions within the city would go under a single name and banner: Born to Kill, which would override any other name that any of the smaller groups had chosen for themselves. As a result, instead of being a loose confederation of loosely associated gangs, Born to Kill and the Vietnamese gangs in the city coalesced into a single criminal organization that from then on acted under a united hierarchical leadership system, with Thai as the head or the Anh hai of the newly established collective.In the course of the meeting, Thai had forced all of the gang members who wished to join the gang to sign a paper contract that was passed from table to table throughout the meeting. The contract mainly emphasized the point that gang members had to swear allegiance to the gang, to never cooperate with police, and most importantly, according to Thai, to never undertake criminal action without the permission of the local gang underboss. Thai did however, according to the contract, permit gang members to leave the gang, but only under the condition that they scrape their BTK tattoos off their skin and leave the vicinity of New York altogether and never return.
Counterfeit watches
Thai's most lucrative source of income was the sale of fake Rolex and Cartier watches, an industry that he had spent several years trying to monopolize. Thai's primary method of forcing local merchants and shopkeepers in Canal Street to buy his watches was simple; as the leader of a violent band of criminals, Thai didn't need to be subtle: "Buy my watches or I'll kill you." On other occasions, David sometimes went out on his own to present himself as a conciliator between the local merchants and his own gang, claiming that he could stop the Vietnamese youths from extorting and robbing their businesses, but only if they purchased his merchandise.In 1988, as Thai's profits grew, New York police became increasingly aware of Thai's illegal watch business; they raided his Canal Street store on multiple occasions. In response, on one instance, when police gathered in front of Thai's store on Canal Street, Thai ordered his members to shower the police with firecrackers from the top of the building. After several successive police raids however, which Thai claimed to have cost him $100,000, Thai decided to order one of his gang members to blow up a police vehicle. The explosion severely damaged the unattended police vehicle and wounded two officers while eleven bystanders suffered minor injuries. In another instance, when Thai's illegal counterfeit watch business came under the watchful eye of a private investigator named Leech, Thai was rumored to have put up a contract on Leech's life.
In 1989, Thai was charged with criminal possession of forgery devices, being accused of possessing 41 printing stamps which he allegedly used to alter 2,000 wristwatches by falsely imprinting them with brand names such as Rolex and Cartier. Thai's defense moved to dismiss the charges, contending the mere fact that he was in possession of forgery devices failed to prove that he acted with the intent to defraud. Thai's motion to dismiss the charges, however, was denied.
When Thai was finally arrested on murder charges alongside several other indictments, he boasted on the TV program 48 Hours that he made $13 million from the sale of counterfeit watches in 1988 alone.