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Previously on The Chinatownsting, I was.

Talking through a customs agent in California who says, hey, well, just got three shipments of heroin.

Do you guys want the case?

It was like the first time we've ever seen anything like that.

Really, Basically, you're stay at home moms.

We're picking up these these law chamansa heroin.

We don't have that kind of money.

So to have that kind of money, you take a chance.

Federal authorities arrested Tina Wong on March first, nineteen eighty eight.

She was accused of receiving packages of heroin in the mail.

They took Tina to a jail in Long Island, miles away from her home outside of Manhattan's Chinatown.

And at this moment, the gravity must be hitting you.

Yeah, especially when they tell you twenty five years to life, which I didn't think was fair.

But I don't make the rules.

Tina was put in a cell.

She doesn't remember much else.

Are you crying?

Yeah, because I was mad, not at yourself, not at the rule.

Well, the whole thing everything.

The next day, Tina was taken in a van with a whole bunch of other prisoners the US Attorney's office in Brooklyn.

Agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency met her out front, put her in handcuffs and took her into a small office.

They handcuffed her to a chair, and she found herself face to face with Beryl Howell, the lead prosecutor in the case, the person who could argue that Tina should be put away for decades for heroin smuggling.

She's got this look, you know, like and no expression.

I thought she didn't like us, but you know, I know she had a job to do, so I'm not gonna be hating on her for that.

But I just thought that she really wanted us to go away for a long time.

And at the same time that Tina was sizing up Beryl, Beryl was sizing up Tina.

You know, to find out like, who was she, what was her background, what was her how smart was she, what was her educational background?

How did she get this business?

And to see how much of her story all hung together and made sense on details before we even started talking about any evidence she might have about other people.

They were both about the same age.

Beryl was thirty one at the time Tina was thirty, but the similarities pretty much ended there.

Tina grew up on the outskirts of Chinatown, the same apartment where she still lived.

She never finished college, neither did her parents.

Beryl's mom nearly completed a PhD in biology.

Her dad had been a colonel in the army, and she had grown up all over the US and abroad in Germany and the Netherlands.

She had a law degree from Columbia University.

So yes, she and Tina came from very different worlds and met under not the best of circumstances, but each needed the other person's trust.

Recently, I showed up at Tina's apartment to get an interview.

I told her the truth that Barrel Howell is my boyfriend's mom.

I was worried she'd close the door as soon as I said that.

But now I think that's actually why she let me in.

Beryl, have you seen her.

I hope she retired, because yeah, she's retired from chief judge them.

But then it's like you just become like a regular judge.

That Tina sounds lighthearted now, but she's still keeping tabs on what Beryl is up to because Beryl once held Tina's future in her hands, and in a way, Tina held Beryl's future in her hands as well.

I am Lydia Jean Kott and this is the China Townsting Episode two Onion Head.

Beryl is now a federal judge in Washington, d C.

She's overseen a lot of high profile cases.

When was a defamation case brought against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The case was brought by Georgia election workers, and they won.

It was a rejection of what Judge Beryl Howell called Giuliani's quote significantly tardy request for a bench trial and one of his latest art givens to dodge a jury that Howell called simply nonsense.

Also, Beryl's overseeing dozens of cases related to the January sixth Capitol riot.

Following President Trump's sweeping clemency for January sixth, defendants, federal judges who presided over cases are letting their discontent be heard.

US District Judge Beryl Howell rebuke the President's claim of injustice, writing quote this quote cannot let stand the revisionist myth relate in this presidential pronouncement.

And she ruled on Donald Trump's revenge on certain law firms.

The federal judge tonight has just permanently blocked the president's executive order that targeted a law firm which represented Hillary Clinton in twenty sixteen, and the ruling from Judge Beryl Howe is scathing.

So yes, this is the person that I know on a first name basis as Beryl.

When I asked her if I could do a story about her earliest major case, I was pretty confident she would say no.

Judges rarely give interviews, and Beryl has been under more pressure and scrutiny than ever before.

Not only did Beryl agree to be interviewed, she told me that she'd saved her notes from the Chinatown case.

What about legoes?

Oh my god, we have so many legos.

She my boyfriend and I searched all over her house for them.

The more under meet these things.

Oh my god, I can't believe we found this.

Before she let me have the goods, Beryl first went through all of the material to make sure it was all things that the public's allowed to see.

She's a stickler for the law.

My co reporter Shiru Wang's also a lawyer.

She hasn't had a chance to meet Beryl, but one day we sat down and talked about her about how it feels to see Beryl through the eyes of the people she once encountered as a federal prosecutor, people like Tina won't.

Does anything that Tina described about Beryl match what your personal perception or understanding of Beryl, or like, does it reflect anything that you have known about Beryl at that point?

Well, Tina talked about what it was like the first time that she met Beryl, and she said she was expressionless and seemed kind of scary.

I've definitely experienced being very intimidated by her.

When my boyfriend was little and they, you know, if they were in trouble, it was it was their dad that they would go to.

What does barrel look like?

She's blonde.

She has very expressive eyebrows, so if she's feeling skeptical of you, her eyebrows.

Go very very high.

There is once this tweet by a court reporter.

I think that said the way that Beryl raised her eyebrows, any kid would feel like they have to clean their room if they saw that face.

Oh my god, that's funny.

So yeah, I've known Beryl since I was an a elementary school.

I grew up down the street from her, but I really got to know her after I graduated from college.

By that point, she was a federal judge.

And you know, when I started talking to her about it over time, it was really cool to hear her talk about the law.

It felt like she was pulling back a curtain and really showing me how the law works.

And that's actually kind of why I decided I wanted to be a reporter who reports about the law because I wanted to share what I learned.

Basically, does she talk about work naturally at all of these family friends gathering or she's more like, if you have questions, come to me out answer that.

I mean, there's a lot about work that she can't talk about.

But she's passionate about the law, and she does talk about it.

It comes up all the time, including this case.

Definitely.

I think when I first heard about this case, and I think it was an evening after dinner, and it was one of those stories where everyone else had already heard it, but they were really happy to hear it again, kind of like a family legend where you love to tell it over and over again.

By the time she got involved in this case, where was Berrow in her career.

So she had actually just become a federal prosecutor.

I think she had had the job for about six months.

Okay, you know, you know, as a lawyer, it's a very big deal job.

It was kind of a dream job for her.

I felt like I was living a story every single day with every single investigation, and you know, it was all still fairly new to me and still very exciting to me.

It was in the spring of nineteen eighty eight, and if you think about the eighties, you know, most people you think about the crack epidemic, but heroin was a really big deal at the time too, especially in New York.

I think one out of forty people in New York were addicted to heroin.

That's crazy ratio.

Yeah, it's actually really a lot.

Yeah.

You know, for a long time, heroin was coming into New York through the mafia, but then in the mid eighties, the criminal underworld was going through a shift.

Federal law enforcement officials are celebrating what they considered to be a major victory in their war against organized crime.

A former head of the Sicilian mafia and sixteen other reputed organized crime figures convicted yesterday running one of the biggest heroin smuggling rings ever uncovered.

The government says the operation was masterminded by Sicilians and brought one billion, six hundred and fifty million dollars worth of heroin into the United States over the past five years.

The alleged American kingpin was Salvator Toto Catalano, linked by the government to organized crime and owner of this bakery and pizza restaurant in Queens.

In fact, so many of the dealings in this case took place in pizza parlor's that federal officials have dubbed it the Pizza Connection.

Federal law enforcement agents realized that heroin was coming into the States through these pizza.

Parlors, Unite sent pizzas.

I don't actually know what type of pizza parlors they were, but yeah, it was a huge bust and I think like twenty one mobsters were arrested.

But after the pizza connection, believe it or not, heroin was still making its way into New York City.

That's when the Senate started to have these hearings and investigations.

Asian criminal groups are emerging on the American landscape in the sense they're becoming more powerful, may become an alternative to traditional organized crime.

Law enforcement authorities, particularly federal cannot afford to wait until these organizations have fully emerged.

So yeah, in nineteen eighty three, Chinese dealers accounted for a three percent of the heroin that was coming into the city, and then three years later, according to these hearings, they counted for a twenty five percent, and.

That's a big jump, and the number was going up.

It was getting, you know, higher and higher.

Of course, when Beryl started as a federal prosecutor, she was briefed and knew about this.

Was I aware of Chinatown gangs, absolutely, But did I immediately think that these boxes being shipped through JFK were related to Chinatown gangs that wasn't the first thing on my mind.

I didn't really know.

You generally had no idea what was going to happen where these boxes, where this control delivery was going to lead you.

Yeah, not at all.

What was Barrow's impression about Chinatown before she took on his case.

So Beryl lived in Chelsea, which is not that far from Chinatown.

It was a place that she walked through a lot.

But through working on this case, Beryl also started to see that Chinatown was a more complicated place than she knew, and that also what she was asking from these women was really a lot.

They gave me an insight into all the you know, sort of the complexities and loyalties and pressures that were all unseen to a mere visitor from Chelsea going to Chinatown not that far but world's away.

So it was clear to Beryl that she had to understand more about Chinatown and the pressures her witnesses were under if she wanted to get any useful information from them about those mail packages and who was really in charge.

We'll be right back.

Beryl Howell's goal as a federal prosecutor was not to put a bunch of low level drug smugglers in prison.

She wanted to make an actual difference by building a case against whoever was at the top of the scheme, whoever was bringing millions of dollars worth of drugs and New York through Chinatown.

To do that, she needed.

The lower level people like Tina Long to tell her everything they knew.

But as I look through Beryl's notes, it seemed like she was getting one word answers and a lot of evasion.

Clearly, something was scaring these women more than prison, and that's something was in Chinatown.

So my producer and I did what we imagine Beryl might have done.

We headed downtown to do some investigating.

We found three people who could talk to us about how criminal networks in Chinatown worked back in the nineteen eighties.

When these women agreed to receive packages of heroin in the mail.

Henry walked around the shave with two white girls.

Henry Tann grew up in Chinatown and is now an author.

He's written five detective novels, all set here, and a little reluctantly, he's agreed to give us a tour of the neighborhood.

The building looks better than it did then.

We lived there on the dirt floor.

There was a railroad flat.

My brother and I had beds in the middle of department.

We were here for five years and maybe six.

We're on Pell Street.

It's a street so short it's almost an alleyway.

During the holidays, we'll be crowded.

Hip Sing would come out with their lion dancers and the street will be packed and it'll be fireworks.

The Hip Singh is a community organization.

The name roughly means cooperating for success.

They're buildings on the opposite end of the street from the apartment that Henry grew up in.

Further down the block on the right side, you see the golden doors and the official Hip Sing Organization.

In the eighteen hundreds, organizations called Tongs first formed in Chinatown's across the US.

They supported and protected residents.

Henry writes about the Tongs in his first novel, Chinatown Beat.

The Hip Singh was considered the working class Hong, and around the corner on Maud Street, the onl Tong was for merchants.

Henry slightly changes their names in his book.

The One was a businessman's benevolent association.

The number one high roller in America a coast to coast secret society no working man was able to join.

They sneered at the ship jumpers, the waiters and dishwashers, the laundrymen who joined their arrival hip chains.

By the time Henry was growing up, lots of people were ping dues to one tong or another.

They were doing this in exchange for the kind of help that they couldn't get or didn't know how to get from the US government way back.

They will receive the mail for their members because a lot of their members who lived in buildings didn't have mailboxes.

Because when people came here, you know, they were strangers in a foreign land, and they didn't speak the language, they didn't read English, and so this was the one place they could go to for any kind of assistance.

And the reason that the hip saying matters so much to our case is because the organization had another building, one right across the street we're now standing in front of.

It doesn't make you nervous to be here?

Should we go someplace else?

No, Well, I'm the one that looks shady, you guys.

Obviously, I'm being an interview only saying good things.

Henry's directed that last comment to a security camera that's pointing.

Straight at us.

He's joking.

I think.

In the nineteen eighties this was a gambling parlor.

Henry tells us that when he was a kid, he would watch men head down the basement stairs here it was off limits to children.

One day, when he was finally old enough, he followed those men inside.

You step into a cloud of cigarette smoke.

You could barely breathe, and all these men, mostly men, smoking and gambling, and they would play thirteen cards, Subsam Jam, seven cards, chuck Jam, majong here and there.

What was the vibe?

Was the vibe lighthearted?

Was it serious?

How did it feel down there?

Well, it was all of that.

I mean, you know, if you're winning, you know you're giddy.

If you're losing, your grumpy.

But twice on these men they have with this very guttural way of like being loud, and because of the dialect, sounds like they're always cursing, even when they're not cursing.

Henry already knew by then that he wanted to be a writer, and he knew he wanted to write about this world.

You can't whip out a pad and pencil and start taking notes.

So I would go in the bathroom and I would roll up my sleeves and I would write things on my arm up and down my own and then when I get home and I wake up the next morning, I would remember.

This gambling parlor was operated by one of the most powerful gangs in Chinatown, the Flying Dragons.

It was also their main hangout, kind of like their HQ, and this gang would come to matter a lot to Baryl.

Part of the reason the Flying Dragons were so powerful is because they reported to the Hip sing that influential community organization with the Golden Pagoda across the street.

They had their glorious building where they took care of their business and where they funded the gang kids.

They kept that out of sight.

Because while the Tongs helped families, they also exploited them.

In the nineteen eighties, the leaders of the Hip Singh didn't just earn money from collecting member dues.

They also earned money from this gambling parlor and other gambling parlors all over Chinatown.

To help with the seedier parts of their operations, they recruited teenagers.

Teenagers like Mike Moy.

Because I grew up being bullied, not being bullied by fellow Asians.

I was being bullied by the whites, blacks, Hispanics.

Was physically beat up.

Oh, everything, everything, everything.

Mike moy was also born in Chinatown.

He says that many tongues were connected to youth gangs.

It was kind of like an open secret.

The Hipsyng Tongue Association they affiliated with the Flying Dragons, the Online was affiliated with the gold Shadows, and then you have the Somezing Association, the dun Lawn Associations associated with the dun Lawn Gang.

So these were three major gangs in Chinatown during that time, from the seventies into the mid eighties.

These were the Flying Dragons, the Gold Shadows, and the dun Lag.

Like many people we've spoken with, Mike points out something important, the whole gang system of Chinatown did not arise in a vacuum.

If I had to summarize why these gangs exist, I can summarize it in one word.

Racism.

That is the core.

The root of the issue is racism.

Okay, what does racism it created these gangs.

When Mike was fifteen, he was approached by an older gang member in a pool hall.

The man had seen him there before.

He had been watching him, and he knew exactly what to say to a lost Chinese American teenager.

Bullying was it was pretty bad, you know which.

It was constantly every day, it was something new, and I'm.

Just sick and tired of it.

So that hit a chord with me.

And since I joined a gang, I can tell you I never got bullied of it again.

How did people know not to billy you?

It's the way you carry yourself.

I mean, once you join a gang, you feel like you have the whole gang behind you.

You think you're invincible.

Mike didn't join the Flying Dragons.

He joined a gang called the Fox Chang.

But all the gangs worked pretty similarly, he says.

When teens joined them, they often moved in and lived with other gang members.

They supply us with the safe house.

When we move from safe house to safe house, we can live five to ten fifteen per apartment.

We don't go home to mom and dad.

So in a way, there's a special bond there.

It's like family, a family.

Whose members were loyal to each other no matter what.

It's different in Chinatown because that's all you have.

Who's going to back you up, who's going to who's going to help you.

It is your fellow brothers who's going to help you.

I mean, nobody did anything for us back in those days.

But to stay in this family, teams like Mike had to fulfill us some pretty severe requirements.

They recruit the young kids to do the shooting because it's a slap on the risk for them.

They get caught with a gun, it's a slap on the risk.

So anyone who's doing all the shootings, most of the shootings are under the age of fifteen or maybe even sixteen, so they recruit them to carry the guns.

Through Mike, I met another former gang member named Peter Chin.

He actually joined a gang at thirteen.

That was shortly after his family immigrated to the US from the outskirts of Hong Kong.

Oh was the youngest guy.

That's why how my name came about.

Kid.

They called me Kit.

They kid, come here, come on, come with kid, So they called me Kid Jai.

Yeah.

Kid Jai went on to become the leader of the Ghost Shadows, the main rival to the Flying Dragons.

The gang headquartered on Pell Street.

Kijai wound up serving twenty years in prison under the Rico Act.

Later, he co wrote a book about his experiences.

It's called In the Ghost Shadows.

Pretty Much all the gangsters in his book have nicknames.

There's Potato spha rib I asked him and his co writer Everett Dumourier about that.

Were there people who hated their nicknames?

Who hated their their names?

Yeah?

Thank you book, Spinky, Yeah, he goes, no way it.

She is gonna be proud of that.

Can you can you change your nickname?

Or are you stuck with it?

No?

You can't change one, just stuck.

You stuck with it.

Now.

Kidji can laugh about this time, but the truth is he barely survived it.

As a teenager, he remembers one time being in a nightclub when an ex cop from Hong Kong showed up.

That man had been involved in a dispute with the gang.

He walked in and just started shooting.

He turned about, he saw me.

He pointed a lot for it, then hesitated for a second.

I'm not gonna shoot.

You, okay.

He left.

After the X cop left, Kidji looked around the bar, trying to make sense of what happened.

Two people had been killed, people he knew.

He started to count the spent bullets so.

I walk over a knee wulm spot.

I counted his bullet.

Nine ship and then the girl got one in the head.

That's ten.

One was on the wall, and one just shot somebody behind the neck.

Scraped it all right.

That's that's one, and one on the one's wall, the one that he said, not gonna shoot this jack.

Gays don't have a bullet at him because the fight.

It's whoa back then.

Shootings like this happen often, but they only really made the news when they're particularly bloody or if someone from outside of Chinatown got caught in the crossfire.

In the last six month, Chinese street gang activity is erupted in violence throughout parts of the city.

There have been at least eight known Chinese gang related homicide.

Threats from gangs are phrased in the worst way imaginable, the way that leaves it all up to your own imagination.

For example, we know who your wife is, we know what she looks like, we know who your children are, we know where you live.

In nineteen seventy seven, a restaurant owner named Mann Bundley partnered with the police on a campaign to convince people to report gang violence in extortion.

He was a respected voice in the community, known as Chinatown's unofficial mayor, but not long into the campaign, someone came into man Bundley's restaurant, pulled a knife out from a Manila folder, and stabbed him five times.

Mc moy said the stabbing sent a clear message.

No one who speaks out against the gangs is safe.

They can get to any resident in Chinatown.

So that's why the fear is there, because there's no place for the residents to go.

The resident of.

Chinatown will not move over to Staten Island in those days.

They're not going to move to Jersey.

They're trapped in Chintown because they don't speak the language where they're going to go.

This fear seems to be a thing of the past to mcmoy.

Now, he hosts a YouTube channel about his former life and interviews other former gang members.

Welcome to Chintown Gang Stories to they have a special guest.

And he wanted to make extra sure that I gave his channel a shout out.

It's called Chinatown Gang Stories and you should really check it out.

So that's Mike moy's way of handling what he's been through the past seems to weigh much heavier on the writer Henry Chang.

He never joined a gang, but when he was a teen, a friend of his was stabbed because his friend's older brother defied a gangster.

The guys who stabbed his friend were never.

Caught after that night.

I never walk around unarmed, really, so I'm armed right now.

Henry Chang's novels are all set in the Chinatown that he grew up in, and they follow a character named Jack Yu, also from the neighborhood, who works there as a police detective.

What do you get over there, Jack, thirty five forty g's what all the time that would it costs to turn you against people who used to be your friends.

Jack's face tightened.

We only bust the bad ones.

Bullshit.

We take care the bad ones.

You guys just come for the money to count the bodies.

Jack looked up from the courtyard.

So the oyster colored sky above the rooftops they used to run across.

It's not about money, Jack said, Lucky sneered.

It's all about money and damn thing funny.

So this was the state of things in the mid nineteen eighties with gangs in Chinatown.

They were a protection racket connected to powerful community organizations, and for decades law enforcement officials had pretty much looked the other way.

But now they were suddenly paying attention because one gangster had figured out a way to make a lot more money.

While I was reporting this story, I found a Justice Department memo from the nineteen eighties.

It was for law enforcement officials and it listed the names of Asian gangs and their leaders, including one gang leader named Johnny Yang.

The memo called Ang the leader of the Flying Dragons.

That's that gang that had its headquarters on Pell Street.

There is a little asterisk next to his name with a note that said Aang is believed to be one of the most important heroin distributors in New York.

Machine Gun Johnny Yang became a full fledged gangster in March of nineteen eighty three when his boss was found full of bullets and scores of Flying Dragons became his drug minions.

I forgot how dramatic the narration yeah in that documentary was you have.

To love it.

It's from a TV series called Gangsters America's Most Evil Machine Gun Johnny and it was broadcast on Cable TV in twenty twelve.

I still feel like it's being a little bit exaggerating.

Oh, this documentary is.

He's taking his fellow flying dragons, driving them from New York to his spot in Pennsylvania as a farm, and they're doing machine gun practice.

He's copying the Hollywood movies about Chinese gangsters with the overcoat hanging off his shoulders, buying luxury goods.

You know, it's what every Chinese gangster thinks they should look like.

That's machine gun Johnny.

It's just funny because like somehow people have met Johnny in real life and when they described him, it doesn't feel like how they portrayed it in the documentary.

And to that point, I realized that it's only law enforcement who called them machine gun Johnny.

The people who you know lived in Chinatown.

For example, Mike moy knew him by another nickname.

That's not so badass.

Why was he called onionhead?

All right, So here's the mission out there.

People.

I've seen some documentaries on YouTube saying that he was nicknamed onion head because if you cause him, you know, he'll make you cry.

That is not true.

That is absolutely not true.

He's called onion head because of his hairstyle and the shape of his head.

It's like a spring onion.

I guess yeah, it's kind of like the mini mohawk that you just have, like some here on top of the head.

Oh, all this time I thought it was just sticking up by accident.

Well, we'll never know.

Has any of these people described what Johnny was like even before he became the head of the gang.

Yeah, he immigrated from Hong Kong to the United States when he was twelve years old, and he joined this gang, the Flying Dragons, pretty soon after.

Because he usually joined as a teenager, you know, he didn't really make much of an impression.

He just kind of seemed like, you're in the background gang member.

In fact, I couldn't really find much about him in the media until around the time of the Pizza connection trials.

I think the impact on the mafia of these cases and the convictions today have been devastating.

The efforts by the DA and the FBI and Custom Service and the US Attorney's offices.

If it continues, it's not going to be in mafia.

I think Johnny then realized that there was sort of a vacuum this big group, the Italian mob, that had been bringing in heroin had been busted, and now people in New York, you know, they still wanted heroin.

And at the time, there was a lot of really high grade heroin that was being processed in this area around Burma Laos, Thailand.

It was called the Golden Triangle, and heroin would be smuggled from there into various places, including Hong Kong and China.

So Johnny started going to Hong Kong.

And I know this because actually Kidjai, one of the gangsters that we talked to earlier, he saw him on one of the strips to Hong Kong.

It was the best club in Hong Kong.

And so when I was walking in with one of the the data the movies start right yep, we passed by him and I saw him sitting with another man that I don't recognize.

So looking back, Kidji thinks he might have actually witnessed Johnny trying to secure connections to start importing heroin into New York.

Okay.

On his YouTube channel, Mike moy talked to this guy Cowboy who was in the Flying Dragons under Johnny aka Onion.

Onion must like a different regime.

He was like, go on, make money everyone.

It was like the Soviet Union when they disbanded.

You give a freedom, they gonna say to yourself, what the follow one would do with it?

We don't know how to.

Make money except distributing drugs.

So that was the new era.

Interesting.

If there's a way for them to make a lot of money in a short time, why not.

Yeah.

Later Mike Mooy told me that this moment in the late eighties is when Chinatown really started to change.

The money started pulling in, and you can actually see and feel it because everyone was benefiting woman, including all the way down to the cab drivers, the waiters, the restaurant owners, the gambling houses.

So when you have a billion dollars in drug money coming in and the circulating within those couple of block radius, everyone was benefiting from it.

Everyone.

According to later court documents and news articles, Johnny owned a two hundred acre estate in Pennsylvania, a house in Long Island, a mansion basically, a Jaguar, a Mercedes Benz, a Lotus, just a tip of car, twelve black Nissan pathfinders, twenty two snowmobiles and eighteen three wheeled all terrain vehicles.

Twenty two snowmobiles is crazy maybe he's buying up for the whole game.

I heard that he would bring them out to a shooting range she had in Pennsylvania.

If a gangster won the shooting competition, he would give them like a pathfinder or a snowmobile or something.

It's like Jeopardy at Johnny's house.

To me, it seems like Johnny was flashy, but the reason what made him stand out wasn't that he was particularly violent, like the documentary paints, it was that he was very good at business.

There were a lot of dangerous gangsters out there in the Asian on the will who made a name for themselves, and Onionhead wasn't one of them as far as you know, being dangerous.

He didn't have the reputation of a shula a killer.

So that's who Beryl Howell was after Johnny Ing her target came into focus as she tried to figure out what connected the woman she had in custody these mageng players with the heroin trade they had.

Through their gambling at gambling parlors, accumulated debt to the gambling parlor, and to pay off the debt they could accept these boxes of heroin.

Beryl started to make some progress getting people to talk to her at least about which Majong parlors they were going to, and that was actually a huge clue.

When the information came in through interviews with the cooperating witnesses that they were paying off debts to the particular gambling parlor that was operated by the Flying Dragons.

The agents and I knew immediately that this was a Flying Dragons operation and had a I think it was very well known that Johnny Ang was head of the Flying Dragons and that he had to have known were these and approved of these very valuable shipments being shipped.

Beryl was interviewing these women who had been arrested, but each played what seemed like only a tiny role.

They might receive a package or remove it from one place to another.

It all seemed very well designed to protect Johnny.

He was still out of reach.

He was our ultimate target, absolutely.

But Beryl did start to figure out that there was one woman who seemed to be overseeing the whole package moving side of the operation.

Her name was Wah and she was a well known person in the Majong parlors.

Beryl actually gave her a nickname, although only in her own mind.

Wicked Wall.

She was recruiting them to get involved with something with very serious penalty consequences, and they had children and families, so yes, what she had been doing was wicked.

Beryl thought that this recruiter Wah, she might be her link to Johnny Wall was also Tina Wong's childhood best friend.

So Beryl wanted Tina to tell her everything she knew about Wall.

And all of that brings us back into that small office in Brooklyn, with Tina handcuffed to a chair looking at Beryl's face, which to her seemed expressionless.

Now Tina had to weigh her options.

On the one side, it isn't that good to ride out a friend.

Were you thinking about like the dangers like that you could maybe get killed because you were cooperating?

Yeah, I was telling them that, I says, you know, if I do.

This aside to you don't cooperate, Yeah, what happens then.

A chance to twenty five years to life and then don't get to see my door to grow up.

So you got to weigh out the choices.

Despite all of her research, all of her investigation, Beryl still didn't know the full import of what she was asking Tina to do you or the price that Tina would pay.

But maybe that's because Tina wasn't telling her.

Coming up on the next episode of The Chinatown Sting, how do you get people to do whatever you.

Want for you?

Because I'm swat I could convince them.

You know.

The Chinatown Sting is written and produced by Me Liddy Jeene Cott and reported by Me and Shoe Yu Wang.

Our senior producer is Emily Martinez, additional production by Sonya Gerwit.

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

Our story consultant is Wrong shout Ching, Our executive our producer is Jacob Smith.

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

By Jake Gorski.

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

All voiceover work by Tally Leong.

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

The Chinatown Stag is a production of Pushkin Industries.

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