Pushkin previously on the China townstaing.

When the verdict was coming in and the summations and rebuttals were happening, I was in intensive care with the new baby.

One of the things that was so amazing to me about Johnny Yenie's he looks so young.

Until you seem in person, you forget what a baby faced gangster could look like.

It was, you know, a case that truly, if you didn't believe the cooperators, you didn't have enough evidence to convict the defendant.

On Thursday, December tenth, nineteen ninety two, twelve jurors filed out of a small wood paneled courtroom in Brooklyn.

They were about to begin to deliveing the seventeen federal criminal charges against Johnnyang.

Among the charges that he'd coordinated the smuggling of heroin from Asia to the US via a bean sprout washing machine.

Other charges were related to him smuggling heroin through mail packages, but the biggest count was the first one that Johnny Yang was quote the principal, administrator, organizer, or leader of these schemes, the so called mastermind count.

If the jury decided that Johnny Yang was guilty of that he'd face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without pearl.

You actually talked to one of the jurors, right, that's.

My co reporter, shir Yu Wang.

Yes, her name is Joan Cohen.

She was twenty nine years old at the time and she was working on Wall Street for a JP Moore in.

I got picked, and I was like, this is going to be kind of difficult because I'm going to have to commute from downtown Manhattan over to Brooklyn.

What did she think of the trial?

According to her memory, the jury was mostly white people, people like her.

As a non Chinese speaking person.

I was hoping that the interpreter was actually doing it correctly, Yeah, because I was a little concerned about that because what if they got something wrong.

Yeah, that's that's a very fair concern, because I don't think that the None of the lawyers understood Chinese right now, not even a defense team.

No, none of them did.

And you know, Beryl said that she remembers that there is always more than one interpreter in the courtroom at the same time, so when one got tired, someone else could take over.

But still Joan's worry about understanding correctly what these witnesses were saying, makes sense because the whole case hinged on the testimony of cooperators, right.

And the other thing is, like pretty much everyone else in the world, she has a very vivid memory of one of the key cooperating witnesses.

While of course she was like so pretty and so like, I just was like, I can't imagine her committee of crime.

It was like so bizarre, Like I was surprised, honestly shocked that a woman would be involved in such unscrupulous behaviors.

I guess I was a little sexist in the sense of like, why would she do this?

This wasn't the last trial.

This was Johnny's trial, So what did Joanne think about the evidence against Johnny?

So the jury actually deliberated for a week, five days.

We're talking about each count.

Is he guilty of this?

He might be guilty of this the lesser account, but.

Is he the ring leader?

Really?

Really?

That was the big thing that caused the most in my recollection, the most deliberation, for lack of a better word, was yes, we feel he was guilty, but was he the mastermind?

Was he the mastermind?

That was the big question.

After the verdict, people were going to draw all sorts of conclusions about how gangsters like Johnny Yang are held to account by the justice system, and this reckoning would lead to big changes both in Manhattan's Chinatown and beyond.

I'm Lyddy Jinkot and this is the Chinatown Sting, Episode six, A sense of order.

So the jury deliberated for a long time.

They did yes, and the jury Joanne Cohen.

She remembers going back and forth about the mastermind count.

Because you're talking about somebody's life.

You don't want to get it wrong.

I don't know what sounds really mean, but I just felt like he wasn't smart enough to be that mastermind.

I don't know why I felt like that.

I just maybe from the testimonies of the other witnesses, but I don't know.

Maybe it was just a wrong judgment call at that age for me, But I just felt like, this is a pretty intricate operation.

You have to be pretty savvy, and I just, for some reason, I didn't see him in that role.

He just seemed like a regular person you'd see in China, kind of walking down the street.

You know.

I just nobody I would be afraid of just in passing.

Wow, I mean, Johnny does have a baby face.

Yeah, But how would you feel as a lawyer if you had spent four or five years trying to get this guy and then Jerry was like, I don't know, he just doesn't look like a mastermind.

I would be very, very frustrated.

As a lawyer.

You would.

See the case in a very different way, not like very different way, but like you focus on different things that may or may not stick out to the jury.

They might just trust what they see more versus what they hear.

Finally, on the afternoon of December fifteenth, the jurors sent out a note to the judge saying, we have reached a verdict.

The prosecution team, the defense team, the reporters, the onlookers, the jurors.

They all gathered back in the courtroom and the judge read each count out loud.

The jurors had decided that Johnny was not guilty of count one, being the principal leader of the heroin importation scheme, the mastermind count, the count that came with a mandatory life sentence without pearl.

He was also found not guilty of the counts brought by the Southern District of New York that he had conspired to import hair I went through a bean sprout washing machine.

But he was found guilty of counts relating to importing heroin through the mail, the counts brought by the Eastern District of New York.

In the end, it seems like the jurors believed the testimony of cooperating witnesses enough to convict him on those counts.

Throughout the trial, the reporter Gerald Posner had been chatting with other journalists.

They've been trying to figure out the strategy of Johnny's defense team and its lead attorney, Gerald Schargell.

We used to sort of be amazed at how he was making his case.

It didn't make sense to me when I heard it at first, which was not really contesting what you would call the heart of the charge and saying you have the wrong person.

But now they realized that maybe this outcome had been part of Johnny and his lawyer's master plan.

I remember Chargell said, we're very pleased with it because the fact that he didn't get convicted as the ringleader is just one member of this network.

Is the difference between doing life in prison without parole or getting out one day.

While Johnny's schemes were simple, his ability to orchestrate them all with barely a physical trace may have been enough to save him from receiving the harshest sentence.

But before the judge decided Johnny's fate, she first considered the fate of prosecutor Beryl Howells.

Two star cooperating witnesses, Wall and Michael Yu, also known as Fox.

Wall was sentenced to five years times.

She had already served in the MCC that jail outside of Chinatown while waiting for her own trial, waiting for Johnny's extradition, and waiting for Johnny's trial to conclude.

Maybe at first Wall had thought that MCC wasn't so bad, but when she spoke to us, she alluded to it sounded like horrible incidents.

Waugh said that if she went into details, she could get a whole bunch of different people into trouble, including the guards.

I should burn the whole mcc dow.

But she's not going to.

She's done talking with authorities.

I don't want to.

Hurt people if I say things and they'll hurt them.

Wall went home from jail to pick up the pieces of her life.

Her ex boyfriend Fox wound up getting sentenced to seven years plus probation.

He had already served much of that time, and the day after Wall and Fox are sentencing, Johnny himself appeared back in court.

The judge said she knew she was about to rip his family apart, but she told him, by importing Heroine quote, you ruin the lives of many other families and many children.

Johnny Yang was sentenced to twenty four years.

Beryl thinks that that was a fair outcome.

There are some prosecutors who want to win on all accounts and they want the highest sentence possible.

That really wasn't something that I dwelled on as a prosecutor, because he was convicted.

Like many inmates, Johnny served his time in different prisons, but it seems like he served at least a portion of a sentence in Raybrooke, a medium security prison so far north, it's almost in Canada.

We only have a brief glimpse of onion heads of life from that time.

It's in a memoir by John Gotty's son, John A.

Gotty, who also did time at Raybrook.

He calls Johnny a gentleman sellmate.

I can tell Beryl is proud of Johnny's trial, because I've seen her scrap books from that time.

One page has my boyfriend sister's birth announcement, the next page has some baby photos, and then barrels cut out and pasted, pages and pages of newspaper clippings.

They all have headlines like ex Chinatown gang boss convicted.

Just as Johnny's rise to power had a big impact on Manhattan's Chinatown, so would his downfall.

According to the former gangster Mike moy, newspaper articles about Johnny Ing's trial made ordinary residents of Chinatown feel more anxious.

Anytime these gang members hit the fund page of the news, well, actually hit the news.

They don't ever hit the funk page.

But whenever they hit the news in a Chinese newspaper, they become more fearful because they like, Wow, look what these guys are doing in Chinatown.

These guys are powerful, these guys are making the money.

They can basically do anything to me.

But Mike says he interpreted this coverage differently.

When I was a gang member at the time, I'm like, you know what, this is the nail in the coffin for these gangs.

We're done, we are done.

That was it.

Mike says that the reason gang leaders like Johnny Yang became so powerful was because they had the backing of the Tongs, those respected community associations.

The Tongues had the connection to the cops and the politicians, and the Tongues had the connection to the trias overseas.

So it was that power base that they had.

As soon as gangster started getting convicted, Tong leaders severed their relationship with the gangs.

They didn't want the FEDS going after them as well.

No Tongs want to be associated with any criminal activities anymore.

They're being washed like a hawk, and.

The FEDS just kept bringing new cases against many of the gangs, including the Flying Dragons.

About a year after Johnny was convicted, thirty three members of the Flying Dragons were indicted on racketeering charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO, the same law prosecutors had used earlier to go after the Italian mafia.

If you were a Flying Dragon member, you don't want to be known as a Flying Dragon member, whereas before the RICO you advertise the fact that you are a Flying Dragon member.

After Johnny was sentenced, no one replaced him.

I will say Anya Head was the last real leader of the Flying Dragons.

By the mid nineties, pretty much all the major gangs of Chinatown had dissolved.

Mikes's new groups sprung up using the old gang names as a way of capital on how much people previously feared them.

But in Mike's view, these new gangs were really just a bunch of kids.

When you talk about the real, actual members of the Flying Dragons, it was gone.

That's it.

It's like when the franchise fins off and it's like the seventh eighth sequel.

It's like, no one's watching that anymore.

Here exactly exactly, It's like so many different spirrills Thia, let's say, Godzella.

Without the connection to the Tongs.

The new gangs had nowhere near the same power or influence in the community.

They didn't last long.

People stopped having to worry about getting caught in the crossfire during gang shootouts, small business owners stopped having to pay extortion fees.

By putting Johnny away, it does seem like Beryl Howell, along with many other federal authorities, played a role in changing the facts on the ground in Chinatown.

As for Mike, he did a one hundred an eighty degree turn.

He joined the NYPD.

One of the neighborhoods he was assigned to patrol was Brooklyn's Chinatown.

At first, Mike worried what if he ran into former gangsters.

He knew what would they think about his new job, but he got too busy to keep thinking about stuff like that.

When he joined, Mike was one of only a few hundred Asian officers in the NYPD, a small percentage of the force, and out of those officers, only a handful could speak with crime victims in Cantonese.

They feel more comfortable in dealing with me because I'm able to speak their language, their dialect, and I'm able to explain the entire process to them, what's necessary, what they need to do every step of the way to take the fairly unknown away.

Other cops I've interviewed told me they had trouble at convincing residents of Chinatown to help them solve crimes.

Mike sounds frustrated when I bring this up, like it's something he's heard a thousand times before.

When you were an Asian person going in and you don't speak English, and you walk into the priests, and if you get that, you feel like you're getting victimized again.

Now, if you treat the complaint like how you treat your mom, I think that will take away allow of these issues that we're talking about.

After more than two decades on the force, Mike retired and he noticed that nobody seemed to be talking about what he had lived through back when gang life was all he knew.

I've been waiting all these years for someone like me to come out and at least share some of the stories, but there wasn't even one.

So he got back in touch with some people first, just a few old friends.

Today, I have a short story to share with you about the Flying Dragons.

The former gangsters Mike interviews on his YouTube channel are now mostly in their fifties and sixties.

Some of them share their stories in English.

I remember walking this is about middle.

Of the night and the boss of Cashows, Carrly, broke on me.

Some in Cantonese, we homegonge so huge.

You see Mike talking to one guy wearing aviator glasses, another with an eighty style mullet.

But even if their fashion sense is a little stuck in time, they all say they've moved on.

They now have jobs running construction companies, working in real estate as restaurant owners.

Members of once rival gangs who once couldn't even be seen on each other's streets, can now be seen making sense of the past together on Mike's channel.

Probably freaking a couple thousand feet away from the tattoos the courthouses.

Funny that how we operate down in the Taratal as a gang back then, But we're so close to the precinct and the freaking U the courthouses.

Yeah, but we weren't scared.

Because of Chinatown gang stories, Mike has become a kind of information hub for people who used to be part of the Asian underworld.

He says he's been getting updates about Johnny from people in touch with him directly.

Johnny was released from prison in twenty ten.

He served twenty years of his twenty four year long sentence.

I've heard that Johnny's in Hong Kong and he has a business importing lobsters from Maine.

Mike won't confirm these rumors, but he tells me that Johnny has also moved on from his life of crime.

He's doing well.

Will you tell him that I'm.

Doing this podcast.

He knows, he knows I sent the message out there.

In Beryl's household.

The Chinatown Sting is a family legend, a story everyone's heard many times.

But after years of investigating it, still didn't really understand what exactly it is about this case that stuck with Beryl.

What did she take away from it?

I think the answer has to do with why she chose to become a prosecutor and a judge in the first place.

How she feels when she walks into a court.

The etiquette of a courtroom is like so clear, you.

Deal with the most messy things in life there, but it's also like the most orderly.

There is a sense of order in the courtroom.

Who speaks first, you know, is your emotion, the plaintive, who has the burden.

There's an order to sort through the complex issues that human beings have among themselves in the courtroom.

Even though Johnny's conviction was one of Beryl's hardest won courtroom victories, when she thinks back on the Chinatown Sting, the moment that sticks with her didn't happen during his trial.

It's weird what you remember what you don't The moment that Beryl remembers best happened years before.

It involved a woman who received mail packages of heroin but chose not to cooperate.

She was about thirty years old, she was from Taipei, and she didn't speak English.

I never got to interview this woman, but according to the court documents, she agreed to receive these boxes to help pay for her wedding.

She was pregnant during her trial for heroin importation.

Shortly before it was over, she gave birth to a baby boy.

She was then found guilty.

Around this time, her husband, a restaurant manager, was murdered by a gang member after refusing to pay an extortion fee.

Beryl Howell had been able to ask for leniency for other defendants, but this woman had never been a cooperating witness and she didn't have any information that would lead Beryl up the latter any further.

She faced a mandatory minimum penalty for what she'd done.

A decade in prison, leaving her baby without either of his parents.

That was hard.

It was hard for me.

It was so hard for Judge Wexler sentencing this new mom to jail for ten years.

So she's going to have to give up her child for ten years.

It was very very hard.

For Judge Wexler.

My recollection is that he called me stoneface, and I thought to myself, he has no idea what's going on inside.

I do remember that being very very hard, and it was very hard.

While trying to bring down Johnny, Beryl confronted a flaw in her orderly system.

She couldn't do it without cooperators.

She had been using the mandatory minimums as a threat to convince them to work with her, but threats alone weren't always enough.

They have to trust that you're going to be fair with them and that you're going to live up to your promises.

For the legal system to work, people have to trust it, and for them to trust the system, they have to believe that it will deal with them justly.

Now that she's looking back on her career as a prosecutor and a judge, Beryl hopes that she's remembered for one thing.

That no matter what position of power I held viz.

Via another person, that I never lost sight of the human being standing in front of me, and that I treated people respectfully and fairly.

But Beryl still wonders about the people who did cooperate and helped her win her first big case.

What did they make of this encounter?

I know what that did for me in understanding better about their world.

But what I don't know is that they feel that they understood more about a world they didn't know by spending time not with me particularly, but with the agents and being in the courtroom.

Whether that had any effect on them as they went forward.

In other words, did they ever perceive her ultimate goal to bring order injustice out of the courtroom and into the world.

I found myself thinking about my conversation with Beryl about trust and order when I went to visit an immigration courthouse, a gray building just a few blocks away from Chinatown.

As federal authorities have ramped up deportations, that atmosphere has become tense.

I told shew you about what I saw.

It used to be that immigration authorities wouldn't They would stay away from immigration courthouses because they knew people might fear them, and then that would make them more reluctant to go in for their regular you know, immigration proceedings, et cetera.

But now that's changed.

Now it happens when you go in for your immigration hearing there's federal agents who are stationed outside of the courtroom and they look really intimidating.

Their faces are totally covered with like pandanas and they wear baseball caps.

And then when I was there, they were standing outside of the door, and then when the person comes out from their hearing, they all kind of like approach.

This person was a woman and she was with her lawyer, and they asked her to show them some documentation, and you could tell she was you could tell she and trying really hard to keep calm, and she looked through her like folders and she showed some papers and then they let her go through.

But there's all these videos of times where people who then ended up getting grabbed by these agents and taken into detention centers.

A quick encounter and without warning, these two immigrants who just left the mandatory hearing taken away by federal immigration agents, disappearing behind this stairwell.

Critics say this administration is finding ways to bend the law with claims that non citizens no longer have due process rights.

When I was in the immigration courthouse, I was thinking about how much Beryl built her case by relying on testimony from cooperating witnesses who are pretty much all immigrants, And it made me wonder about what it would be like if Beryl was trying to build her case against Johnny today and once again she was entirely dependent on witness testimony.

And then like how she would be able to get them cooperate.

Nowadays, because you see media coverage about police violence, like how immigrants were being treated unfairly, that might cast a shadow over a people's impressions of the police officers.

Maybe they would wonder, is that really a safer option?

So might just go to jail.

I don't choose the prosecutor to return with a fair outcome or like a fair bargain with me.

It's a little difficult to imagine how the case would proceed right now, like say in the twenty twenties.

In retrospect, it's easy to see how the Chinatown sting back then could have just ended with the prosecution of a few low level drug couriers.

It might have never gotten up.

The ladder reached the leader of the gang hiding out in Hong Kong, got him back to the US, and then gotten him convicted.

Because for prosecutors to do that, they needed cooperating witnesses, and that cooperation comes with a heavy cost to those who offer it, even if they don't end up serving the full sentences that they could have received.

Tina Wong told us that she still feels that Beryl never fully understood the pressures that she was under when she was made her decision.

Well, I don't really think she learned about all world.

Why do you say you don't really think she learned about your world?

Until you live it, you can think you know it, but no, I don't think so.

After she was shot, Tina moved out of Chinatown to a different part of the city.

If they could do this, what else could could happen?

You know, I don't want to take a chance like that.

In Chinatown.

Tina had always struggled to find work.

Now with a criminal record, it was even harder.

Daryld told me, oh, just tell the truth.

And when I told the truth, I didn't get the job.

Tina kept applying for jobs and kept getting rejected for about a decade until she finally found employment as a hotel cleaner.

Okay, I'm not saying we shouldn't get off with a slap on the wrist, but after that you know, like, don't mock them so they can't get a job.

You know, I think that's one thing that they should change.

Maybe Tina wishes none of this had ever happened, or that she had made different choices, but she's not really one to dwell on regrets, and she's also not one to assign blame to herself or to others.

Everybody's got the thing they got to do.

That was Beryl's job.

So she did her job.

So I think she knew she you know, thought she was helping.

I'm pretty sure she did help.

Would you take that job?

What Beryl's job?

No?

I have too good of a heart.

I feel sorry for people.

What Tina's most proud of in her life is her daughter, Salin.

That she grew up to be a good person.

You know, she don't get herself in trouble.

She don't like do bad things to people.

You know, she works very hard.

She say some money, she's good to me.

Yeah, so that's all you can ask for.

You know.

Tina says she's lost touch with not just Wall but all her other friends who are involved in the mail package scheme.

How did everything that happen change?

How you look at friendship.

Well, I always know that a good friendship nothing can break it.

Today, Tina says she's lucky to have some good friends, many of them she knows from Chinatown, but they're a different crew.

She says that when she's with them, she has the sense that everything's in order.

You feel like safe, you know, you feel that you can say anything.

You could be yourself.

The Chinatown Sting is written and produced by Me Boddy, Eugene Kott, and reported by Me and Hu Yu Wang.

Our senior producer is Emily Martinez.

Additional production by Sonia Gerwit.

Our editor is Julia Barton, with additional editing by Karen Schakerji.

Our story consultant is wrong shaou Ching.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Our music was composed by John Sung, sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Our fact checker is Kate Furby, and our show art was designed by Sean Carney.

All voiceover work by Tally Leong.

Special thanks to a few more people at Pushkin who made the Chinatown Sting possible Gretta Cone, Sarah Nix, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Rattner, Amy Hagadorn, Kiara Posey, Jordan McMillan, Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, and Sarah Bruger.

Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick, Mark Jacobsen, Frank Joe, Terry Eggert, Mingley, Joe Flame, the Late Neil Mariello, and Yaboogie.

For more information about this episode, check out our show notes or visit Pushkin dot fm slash Chinatown.

The ton of Town Staying is a production of Pushkin Industries.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

No, was that lucky?

Did he just talk?

You heard it right?

I heard it?

What did he say?

Hello?

Does that be?

Don't know a stranger anymore?