Pushkin previously on the Chinatown stand.

First of all, you didn't think of nothing back then.

You're just thinking, oh, seize it to make money.

That was it.

There were a lot of dangerous gangsters out there in the Asian on the world who made a name for themselves, and Onion Head wasn't one of them.

This is therefore to command you, the said members of the Royal Hong Kong Police, to deliver the body of the said Johnny Ang known as Sweet Hung Eng Chung Tau and Onion Head, into the custody of the Commissioners of the Correctional Services and be there safely kept.

After spending over two years fighting extradition from Hong Kong, Johnny Angle flown back to New York City in the company of US marshalls.

It was November one, nineteen ninety one.

They took him to the MCC that's the Imposing Jail, not too far from Chinatown.

He would be held there while he awaited his trial.

It had taken a lot of time and money to get Johnny Ng back to the States.

It looked like a victory in the country's war on drugs, an effort that had been in the works for years.

The week Johnny was flown back to the US, Congress held yet another hearing on Asian organized crime and noted Johnny's return.

The hip Sing controls the Flying Dragons gang, located on Pell and Doyle Streets.

Johnny Aang aka Onion Head was the main leader until two years ago when he fled to Hong Kong.

As a result of federal narcotics charges, onion Head was extradited to the US.

But the reason this hearing stood out to me is because of two wisinesses who testified at it.

They both owned or ran small businesses in Manhattan's Chinatown.

They're among the few figures I've been able to find from this time who dared to make any public statements against the gangs, and reading over their testimony, it doesn't seem like the arrests of people like Onionhead made them feel much safer.

So this is from witness number one.

I went over the transcripts of my co reporter Shi Yuang.

This witness testified not only using a false name, but from behind a screen because he was so worried about retaliation.

I am a Chinese businessman who has owned two businesses in New York city in a Chinatown area, I have had the experience of being victimized by more than one gang.

I reported the incident to the police.

Very few merchants in Chinatown ever do this because they fear retaliation against themselves and their families.

Many also feared the police because they are in the country illegally and they're hesitant to have any contact with the author.

The gang scared us, and we always pay because we know that they have the ability to ruin our businesses.

I am testifying here today under a false name and behind a screen because I will likely be injured or killed if the gangs find out I am here.

I was really shocked at the end when he said that he's testifying behind like not only is he's using a false name, he's also testifying behind a screen because he's so worried about retaliation.

As a very small community rate like back then, Chinatown was only a few blocks, so by testifying, the business owners basically put themselves at hetre risk.

Yeah.

The second witness also testified behind a screen.

He said, I'm a manager at a restaurant located at the heart of Chinatown, New York City.

Because my business location is controlled by a gang named the Flying Dragons.

I'm constantly threatened and intimidated by them.

As a manager, I have to try to show them a very respectful manner, otherwise I put myself in danger.

Yeah, the leak for people to really try to settle down and support your family, just to earn himself a life, like a safe life to live around the area.

It's like, you don't know what will happen to you to your family, true business.

You don't even know what mistake quote unquote mistake that you would make when you were interacting with these gang people.

And that's why I think going to Washington and speaking out about what was going on was like a huge leap of faith, right right.

But would that lead to real safety?

They don't know, But they choose to take the step and just try to break the cycle that the gangs have created in Chinatown.

Congress clearly wanted to put a stop to the gangs, and so did people like Beryl Howell, the prosecutor who had been working on the Johnny In case for four years, and when he finally came to the US to stand trial, the moment of truth had arrived.

Beryl was now preparing to bring down Johnny the head of the powerful Flying Dragons Gang for good.

I'm Litty Jane Cott, and this is the Chinatown Sting, Episode five, The Mastermind.

As it happens, Beryl wasn't the only prosecutor trying to bring Johnny Yang to justice.

The prosecutor in another part of the city had been doing the same thing.

Her name is Karen Seymour.

I had flown to Hong Kong for extradition hearings, and so this was the case I really really cared about, and I wasn't about to give it away for someone else to try.

Karen had been pursuing a separate case against Johnny based on events that happened in the spring of nineteen eighty eight after federal authorities had disrupted the mail package scheme.

Johnny did not lie low.

Instead, he responded, allegedly by looking for new ways to bring drugs into the country.

And this is where we need to take a side journey into the world of restaurant equipment.

According to the government, Johnny had asked a friend of his, a guy nicknamed Fat Qualk, if he had any ideas for smuggling heroin, and Fat Quok did he had a cousin named six finger Loo, who had six fingers on one hand and a noodle shop in Boston.

Six Fingerlo said he had ordered bean sprout washers from Hong Kong and the machines had arrived without being searched by customs, so why not just had heroin in one of those.

And so that was what Johnny Ing was approached, and he said, okay, yeah, let's use it.

Let's load up heroin.

Courtdox would later say, Fat Quock and six finger Loo flew to Hong Kong.

Once they got there, they procured a bean sprout washing machine.

It's about the size of a large and narrow bathtub.

Inside it has these spinning cylinders that moved the water around to remove the debris from the bean sprouts.

Six Fingerloo spent all night welding these cylinders so he could hide one hundred and seventy pounds of heroin inside of them.

So what Johnny Ing was able to do on like before where he was sending small packages, is do this sort of mother load shipment of this Southeast Asian heroin, which was very, very valuable.

This shipment worth millions of dollars made it out of Hong Kong all the way to Logan Airport in Boston, but then.

The DEA intercepts it.

They replace the heroin with you know, a fake, and they deliver it.

It goes to this guy, six finger Lou.

He picks up the machine and they arrest him.

But they didn't really want just to get six finger looed because they knew that he's the lowest to blow the real goals to get up the chain, and so they flipped him, so to speak.

They basically cut a deal with him immediately.

The plan had been for six Fingerloo to drive from Boston to Newark to deliver the bean sprout washing machine to his cousin fat Quock, and that trip went ahead, except now six Fingerloo was escorted on this drive by undercovered DEA agents.

When Lou arrived in mid tam Manhattan, he met up with his cousin and this other guy who was also involved in the scheme.

Six Fingerloo claimed he was too tired to take the bean sprout machine out of his car, so they did, or began to, because as soon as they touched the machine, they were ambushed by DEA agents.

And then that led to the case against Johnny A.

Karen was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, a federal prosecutor's office in Manhattan.

She was working on the sprout washer case because that's where the bust happened.

Howell was a prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, a federal prosecutor's office in Brooklyn.

She was working on the mail package case because the successful bust by federal authorities on that scheme happened in Brooklyn.

But now Judge hold both prosecutors that since these cases were against the same defendant, they should combine their efforts.

All cases against Johnnyang would be tried together in the Eastern District of New York, which seems logical except for one thing.

I mean, you know, because the Eastern and Southern District New Yorker were, you know, great rivals.

The rivalry between the Eastern District and the Southern District is sometimes compared to another rivalry between the Mets and the Yankees.

The Southern District in Manhattan is like the Yankees.

It was created first under President George Washington.

Many famous financial fraud cases are tried in the SDN Y The Eastern District in Brooklyn is like the It was founded later under President Lincoln's administration.

To this day, the ED and Y is still perceived to be the scrappier office.

Now the Yankees and Mets were being asked to play on the same team on the Mets home turf.

Beryl remembers hearing that they're going to be working together, and she wondered how her rival prosecutor would take it.

Probably a fight Ben and Karen's shoes.

She probably wouldn't be a little bit nervous, you know, like trying.

A case in photo Dutchess.

She didn't know in a courthouse, she didn't know.

Beryl had partnered with Kathy Palmer, another prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, and Karen Seymour says she had no idea how this was going to work out.

But they couldn't have been more fun and more lovely, and we all became very fast friends, and we together, you know, not knowing each other very well before, just joined forces.

And it was three women against Johnny Ang.

Johnny Yng's lead defense attorney was Gerald Chargell.

Chargell was a big deal in New York City.

He'd been the lawyer of Italian American mobster John Goudie, nicknamed the Teflon Dawn because no criminal charges ever seemed to stick to him, at least for a while.

After multiple high profile trials, he did eventually get life in prison.

Chargell has since died, but he's interviewed in the documentary America's Most Evil Machine Gun, Johnny.

You're smart, privileged to represent Johnny Yng when you're fighting for someone's liberty or for someone's life.

A very weighty and heavy responsibility, but one that I welcome.

While Chargell welcomed his new client, three women prosecutors prepared their case.

They'd surmounted international boarders, institutional rivalries, and reluctant witnesses to build an argument that Johnny was a major heroin smuggler and a mastermind.

Still, the prosecutors knew their case had one major weakness and it was going to be the hardest obstacle of all to overcome.

Before in a trial, there are pre trial motions.

In Johnnyng's case, the pre trial phase dragged on and on.

I was able to reach two defense lawyers on Johnny's team about what it was like to work for him.

One didn't want to talk to me on the phone, but she sent me an email saying, quote, he was a nice guy.

Something I remember because I'm a dog person, is that he trained his two Kane Corso dogs to meet his kids at the school bus stop and accompany them home.

Johnny's other attorneys said she didn't want to be recorded because she like how defense lawyers are usually represented in the media.

But she told me that Johnny paid for his defense team in cash.

He told her that the money came directly from gatherings in Chinatown to support his defense.

It was in small, crumpled bills.

She had to spend hours counting them.

He was either very loved or very feared.

She said.

I told Beryl about that.

Was it in five tens and twenties?

Yeah, And he told them that it was not drug proceed money, but it was instead five tens in twenties that he'd collected at parties from friends who believed in him.

And that's what she told you.

Beryl looked at me skeptically, her eyebrows raised, and I got a sense of how intense this pre trial back and forth might have been between the prosecution and the defense.

Beryl thinks that at one court appearance or another, Johnny may have noticed something about her she was pregnant.

It just seemed like he was, you know, seeing my shape change as time went on and thinking, hmmm, yes, this might be very helpful if the prosecutor who'd been living with this case for a number of years wasn't able to try this case.

Beryl thought Johnny and his team might be creating delays on purpose.

All told, Johnny spent almost a year in pre trial attention.

His trial was finally scheduled to begin on November sixteenth, nineteen ninety two, and for Beryl.

It was sort of a race against time.

This was going to be a big trial.

It was expected to last a few weeks, and Beryl's baby was expected in a few weeks as well.

Have you been to the crehouse in Brooklyn?

Yeah, I made super close to office.

My impression was like wood everywhere, like it had like yeah, like wood paneled ceilings and like a wood floor, and and then you know there was like also.

Fully, you're doing a trial within the cabinet.

Yeah, it was like within a small cabinet, Like there's not even that many seats for people to watch the trial.

But I talked to this one reporter, Gerald Posner, who was there at the time.

I was only there for like three probably three days, but it was packed.

It was a great New York City trial.

He had written a book about the international heroin trade, so that's why he was at this trial.

And he was particularly interested in what Johnny looked like because he could see Johnny sitting at the defense table.

One of the things that was so amazing to me about Johnny, and he looks so young.

You know, we've seen pictures of him and everything else, but until you seem in person, you forget what a baby faced gangster could look like.

I expect him to come back from this extradition battle of three years.

And having run.

This is one of the largest hair when rings around and becoming a leader of the Fine Dragons and everything else is going to prematurely age him.

But it didn't.

So Yeah, So Johnny was thirty six years old, very young.

Oo, he was actually young at the time of the trial.

And I have a photo of him from the time.

Okay, his mugshot.

Yeah, like people could mistaken him as like a like a late twenty year old in this photo.

Yeah, he has like a little mustache and a goateee.

He's wearing these big, like gold rimmed aviator glasses.

And what stood out to me is he does have a little puff of hair.

He's just looking straight ahead.

It's kind of like driver's licensed photo vibes.

But that was not his vibe in court during the trial.

He didn't take the stand.

It's usually not smart to do that as a defendant, and Johnny seems like he was a pretty smart guy.

But he was apparently pretty expressive during the trial.

Yeah, I heard that, you know, according to newspaper articles and stuff at the time, he was smiling all throughout.

Johnny's actually known for always smiling.

But his smile it's kind of hard to tell whether it's like a friendly smile or like the passive aggressive smile, like a threatening smile.

Yeah, so we're in a trial.

What was the opening statement?

Like, how did they start the case?

Like the mail package trial, Beryl started this one, and she began by talking about these mail packages that had tea and stuffed animals and also heroin.

Then she described how the bean sprout washing machine was intercepted by a customs agent in Boston, and then this is what she said to the jury.

Now, these two huge shipments of heroin were discovered months apart, opposite ends of the country by two different customs inspectors.

But you were going to learn during the trial that these schemes had one thing in common.

The mastermind behind both of these heroin shipments was one man, the defendant, Johnny Yang, the man sitting at the defense table.

I have Beryl's notes from the trial and on one page she has the word mastermind.

It's written in all caps.

She wanted to prove that Johnny was the quote principal, administrator, organizer or leader of the enterprise, right right.

This was the first charge against him, and it was also the most serious charge because you know, if Johnny was found guilty of this, he was facing a lifetime in prison without parole.

I mean, she spent years obviously investigating and collecting evidence and information, talking to witnesses, trying to get them to turn their back against Johnny.

Well, the truth is, the case was going to be tough because Johnny was so good at insulating himself from both of these schemes.

So there's very little material evidence.

They had some and some of it they were saving till the end of the trial.

But really the whole trial depended on the testimony of these cooperating witnesses, right.

And one of the prosecutors, the one from the Southern District of New York, Karen Seymour, she talked to me about this.

It was so cooperat or dependent.

This is a case where there was very clear evidence about the drug deals, but it wasn't so clearly linked to Johnny Ing, And so it was a case that truly if you didn't believe the cooperators, you didn't have enough evidence to convict the defendants.

Tina Wong wasn't testifying at this trial right after she was shot.

Beryl felt like she was hiding something and she didn't trust her enough to put her on the stand.

So Beryl had two main cooperating witnesses, Waw and Michael u are Fox.

They had been in jail for years now, waiting for their own trial, waiting for Johnny's extradition, and then waiting for Johnny's trial to start.

They really didn't want to testify against him, but doing so was their only way out.

True.

Remember, Waugh told us that even now she's still worried about being viewed as a snitch.

I will you come out to the street.

People know you Smith, you know you talked about you gave him mouth.

Uh huh, would be bad.

It's like you're gonna have people that don't like you, you know what I'm saying, And you don't want that.

So that's what I'm saying, in fact, is something would honor.

Okay, come on, come on interview with me.

That it sounds like a very difficult decision to make in face of something that's so huge that's going to change your life.

Where do you choose to protect yourself or to honor something that you hold high values of, like your friendship, like your connection with other people.

Yeah, and Foxbolt the same way.

He wrote a letter to Beryl, literally begging not to have to take the stand.

I asked Beryl to read a little bit of what that letter said.

I'm writing to you because I started having panic and feel the pressure is coming from both inside and outside.

So if it's possible, please exclude me from testifying at Johnny Ng's trial because I'm just a small figure in his case was the one.

I'm only her puppet from the beginning to the end.

I have to run and hide from place to place, just like a wreck to stay alive.

So please do a little consideration for me.

So, yeah, this whole case, it basically rested on these witnesses who really did not want to be testifying, and you know, they'd also been convicted of crimes.

And so that meant that Johnny's lawyer, Gerald Chargell, he only had to do one thing.

He had one simple task.

To attack the testimonies, like their credibility.

Exactly, because all you need is reasonable doubt, right.

Yeah, I mean that's true, because jury they're all humans.

Yeah, and I feel like people love to think they're very good at like catching liars.

Yeah, being like a true detective.

So one of the first witnesses to take the stand was one of the women who received the heroine packages for Johnny, So some one pretty low down in the scheme.

I think those women largely who testified who received packages didn't really most of them have that much to say about Johnny ing.

But they set the stage really well and I thought they had a lot of credibility.

And then who came next.

Waw, she took the stand and on direct you know, Beryl asked her questions and she said that she gave these women's addresses to Johnny, and she did the scene in Johnny's direction, and john even was pressuring her to get him more and more addresses.

And he was the quote boss of this heroin ring.

And I spoke to another reporter who was there at the trial.

His name is Frederick Dannon, and he was writing for the New Yorker.

He actually still remembers law's cross examination.

The moment cross would begin, Chargao would start projecting his question before he even left the defense table.

And he used the tall guy and he used his body.

It was almost like a charging line.

It's like a boxer coming out of ringsight, like the round begins and he's already on his feet.

He wants to get into the fight.

Here is a little segment of how it went.

Do you want to play sharkeel because you're a.

Lawyer, Sure, I will try to be as intimidating as poise.

Yeah, try and leap at me across the table like a lion.

You so drugs, right?

Yes?

And you did drugs?

Yes?

You work in the gambling parlors.

Yes, you cheated on your texas didn't you probably did?

Yes?

Would you lie to get out of jail?

No?

Never no, because you wouldn't stoop to something like that, would you.

No, no further questions.

He didn't even give her any time to think.

Yeah, well, it's like bang bang bang bing bang.

I've seen that before.

It's kind of like the defense they would be like just answer yes or no.

I'm not asking for more.

But like in that way, they're leading the witness to say something that they might not admit to.

Chargelle definitely rattled her.

I mean you could see from her body language that like he unnerved her a little bit.

It's crazy to think about WAW going through this while Johnny is sitting at the defense table.

Here she was betraying him and then being attacked by this lawyer.

So that was bad for a while.

Then who's next to get put on the stand?

Her ex boyfriend Michael Yu Fox, even though he begged not to do this, he did have to take the stand, and that DA agent Peter Mattesser.

She remembers things going even worse for Fox than they did for Wall.

I think, Michael, you really took a meeting from Chargo.

So the trial took some time, right, yeah, like three weeks.

Do we know anything about people outside of trial?

Reacting to it like from the gangs from Chinatown.

According to the trial transcript, there was a guy who was sought to be Johnny's brother, and he approached one of the jurors when they were walking out of the courtroom and he said, do you believe in the witnesses?

Oh?

And then he said, God bless you.

Oh, I feel like there's like some violations.

It's like you shouldn't really do that.

Yeah, you shouldn't do that.

What was the part that Beryl remembered most from all of this?

So for her, the most memorable part is actually like an administrative part of the trial, the charging conference.

You probably know it comes after all the evidence has been presented and it's before the summations and the verdict.

So basically the to you know, posing sides meet with the judge and they go through the language for every single charge and the instructions that they're going to give to the jury.

And Beryl was the one who was going to present at this charging conference, and she was nine months pregnant at the time, and there were seventeen charges against Johnny.

So this charging conference was very long.

In my recollection, it was about three to four hours and I stood for the whole time well low heels, and when you're nine months pregnant, you've got so much compression on your lungs.

It's hard to do public speaking in the normal way because you can't fill your lungs with enough air to give your normal delivery.

So it was hard to catch my breath.

And I stood through the whole charging conference in questions that Judge Reggie had for me, and she never invited me to be seated to respond to her questions.

And I went into labor that night.

When we come back, the jury gets to hear about a piece of material evidence and it relates to Tina Wong.

Right before Johnny Ying's trial ended, Beryl gave birth to a baby girl.

She weighed seven pounds twelve ounces, so she wasn't there when the prosecution gave its final bit of evidence to the jury, and it had to do with Tina Wong.

When she and I interviewed Tina, she told us a lot about that trip she took in nineteen eighty eight to Asia.

It was with her childhood friend Wah and WA's boyfriend Fox, among others.

She told us about visiting Indonesia and how they.

Went to the beach and see these little crabs.

There's like a thousand in them, so it looked like the rock is black.

But when you go there, it's white.

Because all the crabs look white.

Walk away, it's like thousands.

But Tina had spent the first part of this vacation in Hong Kong.

That portion of the trip, she was vague.

Me and this other girl, we go shopping and while we'll go off, So I don't know what she was doing, and I didn't want to know.

That trip to Asia it turned out to be very important for the government's case.

Kathy Palmer, the other prosecutor from the Eastern District of New York, talked about it during her closing arguments.

Remember, this case hinged on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, and Johnny's lawyer had done a pretty good job of making those witnesses seem untrustworthy.

Johnny had been very careful to work through a web of intermediaries so no one could trace anything directly back to him, but he'd made a slip.

Federal authorities had phone records of calls in and out of Johnnyng's Hong Kong apartment, and one of those phone calls from way back in nineteen eighty eight went from that apartment to the New York home of someone associated with the trade, Tina Wong.

The call happened on Tina and WA's last day in Hong Kong before they all went to Indonesia.

It was a two minute phone call.

The prosecutor speculated that maybe Tina was in Johnny's apartment and made that call to tell her husband that they were going to Indonesia.

Who knows.

But what's important is this, that phone call was material evidence linking Johnny directly to Tina, and therefore to Wall and Fox, who are all convicted of heroin smuggling.

The prosecution presented this evidence at the end of the trial.

Take a look at the records, the prosecutor told the jurors, and that was close to the last thing they heard other than the jury instructions before they filed out to begin deliberating.

Tina Wong wasn't at Johnny's trial, but she still played a role.

Unwittingly.

She said she doesn't remember either being in Johnny's apartment or calling home.

I don't remember any phone call, so now I kind of feel bad that I get somebody in trouble.

You do, yeah, I mean, if you want to get in trouble, get in trouble on your own.

I don't want to be the close of it.

Would he get in trouble.

The jury went off to deliberate all the counts against Johnny Yng, including the biggest one, whether or not he was the mastermind of these schemes to smuggle in millions of dollars worth of heroin from Asia.

But Beryl, after years of fighting to get to this moment, was beyond reach.

She was still in the hospital with her new baby.

We both came down with a fever, and that's very very serious for a newborn.

And so that next week, when the verdict was coming in and the summations and rebuttals were happening, I was in intensive care with the new baby.

So I had my mind done very very different things from the outcome of the trial.

While Beryla was with her baby in intensive care, the rest of the prosecution team and the defense team hung around the courthouse waiting.

The hours turned into days, and the days dragged on.

At some point, prosecutor Karen Seymour says, she started to get nervous.

We felt good about our case.

We believed it.

We believed our witnesses, but you just never know when it comes to the jury way.

It was a little bit of a millbiter.

Johnny Ing and his counsel, they were very, very cocky.

We had learned that Johnny Ing had booked the Peaking Duckhouse in Chinatown for a big party and a big celebration, and he invited all of his Flying Dragon buddies to join him.

They thought they were winning this case.

Coming up on the final episode of The Chinatown Sting.

We're talking about each camp.

The big thing that caused the most conversation, the most deliberation, was he the mastermind.

The Chinatown Stang is written and produced by Me, Buddy Eugenekott and reported by me and Shu 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 shau 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 Karney, all voiceover work by Telly Leong.

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

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