One activity that has always created bad blood between local residents and the police is the sale of counterfeit merchandise. In October and November of 1994—apparently unbeknownst to Captain Chan—the NYPD conducted a series of counterfeit raids in a commercially dense section of Canal Street. The raids were brought about by a legal action on behalf of Ralph Lauren, Guess, Timberland, and other popular manufacturers. Although the raids were not carried out by officers from the Fifth Precinct, the residue from these raids is something local cops will have to deal with for months to come.
It’s certainly no secret that counterfeit watches, leather jackets, perfume, and other goods are routinely sold on Canal Street. Most merchants would not dispute the claim. The merchants’ complaint—aired in a series of interviews at the law offices of Shiauh Wei Lin—was not that the raids took place, but the manner in which they were conducted.
The raids culminated one morning when some twenty officers from a special midtown counterfeit squad descended on a number of stores near the intersection of Canal and Broadway. Most of the stores had been raided before, so the merchants were familiar with the routine. This time, the police followed a different procedure. “They came in like it was a war,” says one store owner.
Gates were pulled down so that onlookers on the sidewalk could not see what was happening inside. The merchants claim the cops were laughing with one another, trying on jackets, and loading merchandise into plastic garbage bags without looking to see what was counterfeit and what wasn’t. One officer removed a videotape from a VCR on which their actions would have been recorded through a security camera mounted on the wall. No receipts were given, nor was any attempt made to itemize what was being seized. One merchant claims police confiscated $20,000 worth of
legitimate
merchandise from his store. These counterfeit raids are a classic example of the kind of clumsy community relations that have contributed greatly to the NYPD’s negative image in Chinatown.
The intersection where these raids took place has long been a nexus of gang activity. For years, these merchants have been extorted by members of both the BTK and a faction of the Ghost Shadows. Most work twelve-hour days, seven days a week. What money they make usually goes into overheads, city and state taxes, and fines of one kind or another for allegedly selling counterfeit.
“These people struggle to survive,” says Shiauh Wei Lin, who is considering a class action suit against the NYPD to find out where the merchandise goes after it is seized. “They cannot afford to take a hit like this.”
Asked about the raids in his Fifth Precinct office, Captain Chan opts for the role of the dutiful commander. Unequivocally, he supports the action of the NYPD and expresses little sympathy for the merchants. “It is incumbent upon these people to know whether or not they are selling counterfeit merchandise,” explains Chan. “They are jeopardizing themselves and their stores when they do this.”
Aside from the issue of counterfeit, however, is the question of whether or not the raids were conducted in a manner that was counterproductive. As Chan knows, merchants in the Canal Street area are a tight-knit group, recent Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants who depend on one another for security. One day, local officers may return to this intersection to investigate a violent robbery or a gang murder, and they will be asking for cooperation. These merchants, remembering their treatment at the hands of the police, will be reluctant—if not hostile. The police will walk away, perhaps cursing under their breath about those inscrutable Asians who, for historical and cultural reasons, never cooperate with the police.
Asked about this, the captain either does not comprehend the question or chooses to sidestep the issue. “If any of the merchants are not happy,” says Chan, “we can meet with them and give them additional information and inform them what the laws are. My doors are always open.”
Captain Chan can certainly expect a steady stream of overtures from the local populace, many of whom will presume a higher degree of sensitivity toward the community from him than that of his Caucasian predecessors. So far, he has been well received by the established business and community associations, though he gets lower marks from community activists, street-level merchants, and others whose standing within Chinatown’s sometimes rigid economic caste system is less exalted. As for Asian-American police officers, there is a similar split.
“I think Tommy Chan’s promotion is a big step forward, at least symbolically,” says Detective Bruce May, president of SCALE (Supreme Council of Asians in Law Enforcement), a recently formed umbrella organization that includes Asian officers at the city, state, and federal levels.
“Tommy Chan is a nice guy, very intelligent,” says another Chinese-American detective. “But don’t kid yourself. He’s one person. For the department at large, I don’t think his promotion means anything.”
“Andy Chow” is a veteran officer assigned to a prestigious citywide unit. He was raised in Chinatown. Like other Asian-American officers not affiliated with SCALE or any of the other official police fraternal organizations, Chow’s feelings reflect a deep-rooted bitterness expressed in varying degrees—almost always off the record.
In contrast to recent recruitment efforts in which the NYPD claims to offer a fair working environment for Asian Americans, Chow feels the department is still a white male-dominated universe mired in an outdated, racially motivated system of approval. “The job is rigged. Everybody knows it. Advancement is not based on performance. It’s who you know, who you drink with.” Chow claims to know one sergeant who got ahead because he mowed his chief’s lawn. “I’m telling you, it’s who you know and who you blow.”
“The department is afraid to be fair with minority officers,” adds Chow. “They’re afraid it will bring down the morale of the department overall. Chinese, Hispanic, black officers know this. That’s why they’re reluctant to try to do anything to rock the boat. The odds against them are too large.”
Chow laughs when asked whether or not law enforcement is prepared to deal with the complexities of Asian organized crime and the gangs. “Every now and then, some Caucasian officer comes forward and declares himself an expert on the subject. It’s a joke.” Chow claims that there are very few officers in the department who speak fluent Foujou, the dialect spoken by Fujianese immigrants—and Fuk Ching Gang members. Language has always been a primary stumbling block for law enforcement when dealing with Asian gangs and their victims. Disdainfully, Chow mentions a recent move by the NYPD to send ten to fifteen officers to a language-training course to learn the dialect.
“Foujou is a very difficult language even for fluent Cantonese and Mandarin speakers,” says Chow. “You need to speak it every day. Now they’re going to send a group of mostly white cops to a class to learn Foujou? C’mon! Maybe they learn how to count to ten, maybe they can say hello and order a meal. But they can’t communicate with the community. They don’t know jack shit. But this is typical of the job. They think they can put a Band-Aid on a major head wound.”
In November 1994, at a press conference to announce the indictment of the Flying Dragons, Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declared, “With today’s indictment, the last of the major Chinatown gangs has been prosecuted and dismantled.” Aspiring young gangsters throughout Chinatown might have chuckled at the irrelevance of White’s proclamation.
In fact, some journalists and law enforcement analysts have for years been warning of a new incursion of Asian criminals into New York. In 1997, Hong Kong will be coming under the domain of the People’s Republic of China, and that city’s large triad-based underworld has begun to move money and manpower into Canada and a number of other U.S. cities. In the recently completed federal trial that resulted in the conviction of Clifford Wong, it was alleged that the Tsung Tsin Association, one of Chinatown’s wealthiest tongs, has already established itself as a beachhead for the Sun Yee On, an international criminal brotherhood based in Hong Kong.
With a fresh set of players arriving to stake their claim to local rackets, law enforcement can expect the area’s multilayered Asian crime-scape to become even more challenging. In the past, an inability or unwillingness on the part of police to vigorously address criminal developments as they unfolded has helped make it possible for a vast underworld to evolve. A tradition of police indifference has helped make it possible for established gangs to constantly regenerate, ensnaring hundreds of Asian youths and making life for the community’s street-level merchant class a sometimes perilous struggle.
Now the local police establishment and some federal law enforcement agencies claim to have gotten themselves up to speed, with more Asian officers and increased manpower focused on a violent underworld that stretches far beyond New York to communities in Hong Kong, Europe, Canada, and numerous U.S. cities. It may be some time before this claim can be fairly evaluated, but given the tragic human consequences for Ying Jing Gan, the parents of Chong Hui Chen, and other Chinatown residents who have been on the receiving end of police screwups in the past, it is a claim that cries out for careful and continued scrutiny.
I received news this week of the death of George Whitmore Jr., an occurrence noted, apparently, by no one in the public arena.
That Whitmore could die without a single mention in the media is a commentary on a city and nation that would rather bury and forget the difficult aspects of our shared history.
Forty-eight years ago, as a New York City teenager, Whitmore was initiated into an ordeal at the hands of a racist criminal justice system. For a time, his story rattled the news cycle. He was chewed up and spit out: an ill-prepared kid vilified as a murderer, then championed as an emblem of injustice and, finally, cast aside. That he survived his tribulations and lived to the age of sixty-eight was a miracle.
I first met Whitmore in the spring of 2009 while doing research for a book that posited that his experiences constituted an important sub-narrative to the racial turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Finding him was not easy. I eventually tracked him down in Wildwood, New Jersey, nor far from where he’d been born and raised. I found a man who was broken but unbowed, humble, with glimmers of an innocence that had been snatched from him a long time ago. For a time in his adolescence, he’d been infamous. By the time I found him, he was anonymous, and that was okay with him.
Back in April 1964, like a horrifying urban-jungle version of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, Whitmore began a nearly decade-long ramble through the justice system that still boggles the mind. It started on a misty morning when Whitmore, nineteen years old, African American, raised in poverty, and a grade-school dropout, was taken by a handful of New York City detectives into the Seventy-Third Precinct station house in East New York, Brooklyn. After a twenty-two-hour interrogation by numerous detectives—all of them white—he was coerced into signing a sixty-one-page confession detailing a series of horrific crimes, including, most notably, a brutal double murder of two young white women on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The case had become known in the media as “The Career Girl Murders.” The killings took place on the same day—August 28, 1963—and perhaps the exact time that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The confession was front-page news. The Brooklyn cops who were involved congratulated themselves; one was given a special award for exemplary work. But the confession was a fraud. To most objective observers, it didn’t seem likely that Whitmore could have committed the murders. At his arraignment, he told the judge that he’d been coerced into admitting guilt. Few cared: He was a disposable Negro who’d been raised in a shack alongside a junkyard in Wildwood—a “drifter,” described in one account as “possibly mentally retarded.” He was indicted, imprisoned, and declared a monster.
America was just on the cusp of the civil rights revolution; it was a time of pernicious institutional racism. A black kid had been railroaded, and he wasn’t the first nor would he be the last. But the detectives had made the mistake of pinning on him the city’s most notorious open murder case, which brought about a higher level of scrutiny than the average homicide.
The case quickly began to fall apart. The detectives claimed that they had found a photo of one of the career girls in Whitmore’s wallet when they arrested him. He’d told them he’d found it at the murder scene and stolen it, they said. None of it was true. (He did have a photo on him, but it was not of either of the victims.) On the day of the murders, witnesses had seen him sitting in an empty catering hall in Wildwood, where he was working at the time, watching King’s speech on television.
Despite a mounting belief among some civil rights activists associated with the NAACP, and a few intrepid journalists, that Whitmore was innocent, he remained in prison, facing two death sentences. Depressed, frightened, and alone, he pondered his imminent demise at the hands of the state. He asked other inmates, “If you were going to be put to death, which would it be? The chair? Lethal injection? What’s the least painful way to die?” A teenager, having committed no crime—ever—at that point in his life, pondering what means of execution he would choose: This was his reality.
It would take nine years for Whitmore to clear his name. It wouldn’t have happened without the help of many lawyers, a few newspaper reporters, and the civil rights activists. Though the “Career Girls” murder charges were dropped early on—and the actual killer, Richard Robles, was eventually tried and convicted—Whitmore had also been forced to confess to another murder charge, and the assault and attempted rape of a woman in Brooklyn. There followed a numbing cycle of trials, convictions, convictions overturned, retrials, and appeals. Whitmore went from being a nobody to being a perceived murderer to being a terribly “wronged man” and back to being a nobody. In prison, he learned to make rotgut hooch and, trying to dull the pain, became an alcoholic.