Pushkin previously on the China Townstand.

Of course, you're going to take a chance, even if it's on your life, because when it comes to a kid, everybody's gonna chooday kid.

My goal was to assess her, you know, to find out like who was she, what was her background, how smart was she?

How does she get involved in this business?

Onion was like a different regime.

He was like, go out make money everyone.

As soon as he found out that why and Michael Yu had float, he fled.

You turn right onto main Street when we go back.

Do I need to explain to zip car why the car is so dirty?

I don't think so.

She Yang and I I have driven three hours from New York to Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, a small town in the Poconos.

Then we left that town behind to travel what seemed like miles on a dirt road.

Finally we've arrived at a large house with a stone entryway at the top of a.

Hill supposed to be like the front entrance.

We're met by caretaker Sam Callahan, a shooting instructor who's agreed to give us a tour of this place.

Today.

It's a firearms training facility called the Double Eagle.

But back in the nineteen eighties, this was the property of Johnny Yang, a ka onion head or machine gun.

Johnny the head of the powerful Flying Dragons gang in Chinatown.

Johnny bought this compound after his gang had allegedly imported millions of dollars worth of heroin into the United States.

She and I heard that Johnny used to bring other Flying Dragons here.

It was a place where they'd relax and do some target practic By coming here, we're hoping we'll learn more about the elusive Johnny.

Side of things.

I kind of understand how it would be a gangster paradise.

You can come out here and come to my mansion and shoot machine guns.

I mean that sounds pretty appealing to me if I was going to be I mean, that's my business model now, just legally, you know.

Saminist business partners said that they didn't change much about this house when they bought it.

When she and I step in were transported back to the nineteen eighties, there's a pretty much the whole house has wall to wall purple carpeting.

Systems, an old like atari and like, and it was probably like top of the line initially because.

This is like a They have all the games pac Man, Missile Command, Space Invaders, indy five hundred.

There's also tons of bedrooms we look into everyone.

It's a pretty luxurious setup.

It's all a little disorienting.

So we'll come up.

Here and then I'll bring you back down the other way, because there's multiple ways.

Every room has multiple entrances and exits.

Walking through it feels like you're inside one of those Atari video games.

Something could pop out at you from any corner.

On the upside, you always have a way out.

Part of Sam's job is training police officers on how to use their weapons.

He seems like a rational, practical guy.

He sleeps here sometimes, and he says he's gotten a little freaked out more than once.

Every once in a while, you'll be in the house and you'll hear Clear's day footsteps running upstairs, things like that, and it's not like a boom.

It's I'm then a dooral slam, and I know I'm here alone, and I'll go and check that I'm here alone still, And i am here alone still.

We've had twelve of the same stories told by people who've never talked to each other at various times of the year.

Yeah, it's like a creepy, haunted.

And there's one part of the house that seems especially creepy through here is the pool.

Of course, there's an indoor pool, but after dark, Sam says, something seems to stir its waters, the.

Cabinets and everything in there.

You'll just hear a cannonball turn around, have ripples in the pool, as if like a human body was in the pool, and then it settles to nothing.

And then it'll happen three or four times throughout the night.

She You and I left the estate without a lot of clues about Johnny Yaning, but I kept thinking about that haunted pool and those ripples.

Decades ago, the prosecutor, Beryl Howell was also looking for clues about Johnnying after a jury convicted his underlings of importing and distributing heroin.

They flipped on him, but before she could have him arrested, he'd slipped away.

He was nowhere to be found, and Beryl's attempt to bring him to justice it would put the credibility of her cooperating witness Tina Wong to the test.

I'm Lidia Jane Cott, and this is the China Townstaning episode four, A ghost hand.

One time I asked Tina Wong if there are special names for winning hands in Majong.

She mentioned one.

It's a name for a hand that's really rare, thirteen unique tiles that make no pattern whatsoever.

If you're going for that, you're almost definitely going to lose.

But if you somehow manage to complete that hand, you've won big.

It's one of the highest scoring hands there is.

They call her like a ghost hand.

A ghost hand.

It's called the ghost hand because you never see it, because it's sold.

They say that if you eat that hand, yeah, either you got to get really bad luck, uh huh, or you're going to get really good luck.

The way Tina describes it, a ghost hand is a gambler's fantasy, a huge, unlikely win.

But in the spring of nineteen eighty nine, Tina's luck was looking pretty bad.

Even though she cooperated and testified against her former best friend, she was still potentially facing years in prison, and she felt like the people she used to know in her neighborhood were now avoiding her.

Some people said, oh, you know, how could you read out your friend?

So we don't want to be around her.

I guess some people thought like that.

I'm not sure, but it kind of sounds like you felt a little bit like a pariah or something.

Yeah, just a little.

But I get over it because I know it's going to pass, and nobody could hold that old their life.

While some people were giving her a hard time for cooperating, the federal prosecutor Beryl Howell was giving her a hard time for not being cooperative enough.

When did it occur to you that the government thought you were lying?

Oh?

I always thought they thought I was lying from the beginning.

Yeah.

Now, Beryl wanted Tina to give for information about Johnny, the man she believed was at the top of the heroin importation scheme, but to this day, Tina insists she had nothing to offer on that front.

Did you know he was had to the Flying Dragons?

Not really, No, you just know that, Yeah, this person is up there.

You don't know who's number one?

Number two?

Are you?

Kind of like it's better not to know.

Actually I didn't really care.

But Beryl and the dagents didn't see how Tina could know so little.

After all, she'd gone on a vacation with Johnny to Indonesia.

Tina had to know something.

I was trying to tell them.

No, I know of him, I hung around him with law, but to talk personal things and stuff.

No, I said, Look, I don't speak Chinese, so I'm limited with the friends, you know, especially the guys.

But they would like keep like pressuring you.

So it was kind of like upsetting.

It was deeply upsetting.

Under the terms of Tina's cooperation agreement, she was supposed to provide her prosecutor, Beryl, with substantial assistance by sharing information that was quote full and complete and truthful.

In exchange, Beryl would inform the judge of Tina's cooperation, which would allow him to sentence her to less than the mandatory minimum of ten years in prison.

But if Beryl didn't think Tina was telling her everything she knew, the deal could be off.

And Beryl clearly did not think Tina was telling her everything she knew.

She made Tina take a polygraph test.

Tina was scared and frustrated, and she was worried that would impact the results.

I didn't know how to explain it, especially when you're like your head's gone a little kind of ways, because I was so afraid and upset, and I was trying to tell them that, but they didn't want to hear it.

They wanted to hear what they wanted to hear.

That's the way I felt.

The polygraph examiner concluded that Tina was giving quote deceptive responses in regards to Johnny ying.

But I was telling the truth.

So now you know that that thing's not one hundred percent.

Now.

She figured her fate was out of her hands.

She was out on bail, trying to rebuild her life.

She got her baby daughter back.

Fallen was now a toddler after living two years with her grandparents in Canada.

She didn't want to come back to me because she was used to her grandmother.

She was like devastated and she spill toye sign ease.

So I don't understand anything.

But Tina was teaching her the English words she needed to communicate.

They were reconnecting.

She learned quick, especially like ice cream old of snacks.

In the summer of nineteen eighty nine, Tina and Fallen were coming home from a shopping trip.

It was the afternoon.

Tina held the elevator doors open for someone, an Asian teenage boy.

She stepped in and pulled out a weapon.

Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light and that was it.

When Tina came to, she was on the ground.

She couldn't get back up, she couldn't feel her leg.

I was praying that he wouldn't like shoot me again because my daughter was there.

But the teenager ran away and Tina somehow crawled out of the elevator.

She told Fallen to knock on the door of the first apartment that they saw.

So I told my daughter, opened the door, opened the doors, and she knocked on the door.

But those people were scared.

They didn't want to open the door.

So I told him, I said, if you don't want to open the door, call the police.

In the hospital, Tina learned that she had been shot in the spine.

She had months of recovery ahead of her.

Do you know when you got your back, you don't realize how much you need your back.

You got to get up, you got to sit up.

Yeah, yeah, no, you need your back for everything.

Yeah, you don't realize that's all the starts to hurt.

Tina was relieved not to be paralyzed, but she had another problem.

Beryl that was the nail in the coffin.

That confirmed for me my sixth sense.

She was telling me only cherry picked parts of the truth, and that just wasn't good enough.

Yes, Tina had been shot and miraculously she survived, but now things were much worse than before because Beryl believed even more strongly that Tina was hiding something.

We'll be right back.

Beryl Howell does not play Mogong, but if she did, I am sure that a big part of her strategy would be just believing that she would win.

The other part be doing everything to ensure that she did win.

But in the summer of nineteen eighty nine, Beryl did not seem to have a great hand.

Yes, she had convinced a jury that Johnny's underlings Waw and Fox were guilty of conspiring to import and distribute heroine.

They had agreed to cooperate, but Beryl's ultimate target, Johnny Yang, had fled.

Beryl received information that he was most likely somewhere in Hong Kong.

Were you like, oh shit, so Vera, Are you like we're going to.

Get him back?

Oh?

I just knew we were going to extract him and bring him back, And her.

First step towards getting Johnny back, she needed to complete her indictment against him in the United States.

Beryl got to work interviewing her two newest cooperating witnesses, Waw and Fox, who were both in custody.

They told Beryl what she was hoping to hear.

They said that Johnny was the head of the heroin importation scheme, that they both worked for him, coordinating the delivery, the pickups, and the drop offs of the packages of heroin, all at his direction.

For example, Waugh said that Tina had met her in front of a bakery in Chinatown.

Tina gave her a box and then wa gave the box to Johnny.

But what was weird is that Tina had never mentioned a handoff like this, And when Beryl brought up the subject of Johnny, Tina seemed evasive.

Tina, you know, I liked her.

I mean, she was very outgoing, you know, in so many ways that in answers to some questions where she wouldn't be, she seemed to be a little bit more thoughtful or a little bit slower and responding.

Those were cues to me that was I getting the whole story.

Beryl wondered if maybe there was something going on with Tina, something that she felt like she couldn't share.

And then Beryl got the news that Tina had been shot point blank in an elevator, right next to her three year old daughter.

My reaction at the time, to the best of my recollection, was oh, my god.

You know, I hope nobody on my watch got hurt.

And did I miss something?

Did the agents miss something about her security?

I felt responsible for her and liked her, you know, I didn't want to hurt on my watch.

Beryl was convinced the shooting could not have just been a coincidence.

Tina's potentially a witness in a federal trial against a powerful, dangerous drug trafficker, and then she's nearly killed.

But when Beryl tried to talk with Tina about who might have done this and why she got nowhere, Tina was.

Not forthcoming about who shot her.

She couldn't remember details about the identity of the person who shot her, what he was wearing, and it was definitely a man.

It was all too much, the contradictions between Tina's testimony and law and Fox's statements, the failed polygraph test, and now this shooting.

All these things together convinced Beryl that Tina knew more about Johnny than she was sharing with her.

I felt like there had been a breach of trust there, that she had abused my trust, And at the same time, I felt badly that the one person in her life that might be able to protect her, that she couldn't bring herself to trust us enough to tell us everything that was going on in her complex life.

I've heard three theories about who might have shot Tina.

Theory number one, Johnny had someone do it to keep Tina from saying something that could hurt him if he ended up going to trial.

This is Beryl's theory theory too, and amped up teen acting on his own accord.

That's what Mike Moy, the former gangster and host of the Utube channel Chinatown Gang Stories, suggested when I told them about what happened.

He says that it wasn't onion head style to endanger someone's family.

An elevator shooting in front of Tina's daughter just doesn't sound like something he would authorize.

But Mike Moy also reminded me that it was the teen gangsters who carried the guns, and they could be hot headed.

My personal opinion on this.

There's a lot of people.

Who's very loyal to onion Head, so with something like this that happened is very odd and someone maybe want to make a name for themselves or whatever, you know.

So that's my speculation on that.

Theory.

Number three is Tina's own theory looking back, I don't know.

It could be Fox too, who knows.

Oh maybe was Wa told somebody I don't know.

You don't think Wa would do that to you?

To you, I.

Wouldn't want to think that.

But since I went to court and I testify against them too.

The one time I met with Wall I asked her about this.

Only gamble, Honey, was it the fas No, he's a chicken.

In case you missed that, she said, no, he's a chicken.

The truth is we'll never know who shot Tina.

No one was ever convicted.

In fact, no one was even charged.

But even though Tina survived, Beryl felt like the shooter had accomplished exactly what he set out to.

Do, and it was clear to me that she was even more buttoned up than she had been before.

So I really did think that the shooting had worked to make sure she stayed quiet.

Beryl could see she wasn't going to get any more information out of Tina, and it also caused her to reconsider everything Tina had told her previously.

She was done for me as a cooperating witness.

Still, Beryl was able to gather enough evidence against Johnny Yang from her witnesses.

Wall and Fox brought her case in front of a grand jury, and they returned an eighteen count indictment against him.

A global man hunt for Johnny was underway.

Johnnyng had been living in Hong Kong for about a year.

He seemed to have a pretty comfortable life there.

He had an apartment and a new residential complex with a pool.

He shared it with the woman who he later said was his wife, as well as two children, and he had an office in a neighborhood that shoe you knows quite.

Well, seems to joy.

That's kind of like Times Square equivalent if you think about New York, Like if you were first time tourist in Hong Kong, that's like a most checkout spot, Like everybody would take a photo at the street with the stores, mall, shopping mall surrounding and like all these neon lights kind of thing like set up there and his office was in this new building.

It was called the Silver Cord Center.

He's run away from the States, but he's in this like tall, huge building, like the most famous part, you know, the center of Hong Kong.

Basically it sounds like, yeah, he didn't stay low.

So, you know, Beryl filed this indictment against Johnny, and then Interpol was alerted that there was this extradition request out for him, and a local investigator named Anthony Pang got a tip.

He heard that Johnny had been working out of this new office building, so he and a bunch of other officers headed over and he actually describes the moment where he saw Johnny in that documentary America's Most Evil Machine Gun and Johnny I tip.

On his shoulder, I said, are you Johnny said yeah, but he was calm.

He didn't put up row a fight or something like that.

So he was taken into custody and it seems like he was quite chill.

I mean, yeah, but what else could he do when he was just like literally cornered in his own office by all of those officers investigators.

Yeah, so at that point he was arrested to put in a detention center.

Did he have to go back to the US after that.

So you would think that the hard part would be finding Johnny in Hong Kong, but actually the hard part was getting him back.

For historical context, as you know, at the time, Hong Kong was still under British control, but recently the UK and China had signed a treaty where Hong Kong was going to be transferred to China by nineteen ninety seven.

Today, Hong Kong has almost as many millionaires as it has high rises.

But for how much longer is the question?

Right now, nineteen ninety seven is viewed by most with trepidation.

Many are resigned to having to leave when the cash register rings for the last time.

So the US government really wanted Johnny back in their custody.

This should be very possible to bring Johnny back, right, Yeah, But Hong Kong kind of like a unique legal culture.

Like I talked to this barrister in London.

His name was Alan Jones, and she's an expert in extraditions.

The legal system in Hong Kong was staffed largely by expats from the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and a lot of them were people who had tended to be running away from things, either because they hadn't done well in known countries, or divorces or scandals or some silver or other or taxes.

And he actually worked on Johnny's case.

He was arguing for Johnny to be extradated.

There was an expression that they would call filth failed in London, try Hong Kong.

That was the story.

I used to go there about every six months for four or five years, and every time I go, I'd find that somebody I had a drink with the previous time had been arrested or run away something.

It all murdered in one case.

So these are lawyers in Hong Kong who maybe are not like the most like pro rule type of lawyers.

They're willing to do anything a lot of the time.

Like it's you know, it's the frontiers of the law.

Basically, it's for people who have broken the law, are doing the law.

In that context, in the historical context, assuming that Johnny would be extradited, what was the process.

It's a really long, complicated technical process that Alan the barrister talked to me about.

So you'd have to have witness statements and exhibits, paper exhibits, just as in an ordinary domestic court proceedings in its early stages, and then you can make your extradition request that had to go government to government in those days.

They had to be sealed and stamped, and it had to go through the diplomatic channel.

And on the US side, it was Beryl's job to provide Alan Jones and his team with all of this evidence that they needed to prove that Johnny should be extradited.

It was getting calls from the Crown Prosecutor asking questions about the extraditional request, and at some point when the hearing was coming up, the Crown Prosecutor suggested to me that it would be very helpful if I were there.

So the Burrough actually go to Hong Kong.

She and the d agent PAYTMA tester.

They flew over there.

You will have to smoke in the plane inspect that.

Beryl gets so infuriated about the smoking, so she was like, she got the flight attendant to move us.

We got moved to like business guys.

She's like, I'm not Chitney one all these I'm like, good for you.

It was like, man, come on, move up here.

So yeah, she doesn't hold anything back right now.

So then leg after they flew down there, what happened at Johnny's extradition hearing?

So Beryl didn't speak, you know, she was just there to help the prosecutors make their case there, but she did see Johnny, this guy she's been chasing for over a year.

Beryl said, she just wanted to know one thing about Johnny.

What thing, Well, you know, his nickname was Chun Paw, which is onion head.

And it had always been described to me that his nickname had been given to him as a kid because his hair stood up straight.

And so the first thing I wanted to look for is did he live up to his nickname or not?

Did his hair actually stand up?

I think it was disappointed.

I think he maybe had a more well clothed hairstyle.

Beryl returned to New York.

As the extradition process dragged on and on.

Johnny was making the most of Hong Kong's filthy lawyers.

He'd hired this one guy whose nickname was never plead guilty Gary.

The months turned into two years.

Johnny remained in Hong Kong as he fought extradition in New York.

The government's key witnesses.

Waw and her ex boyfriend Michael Yu remained in custody in the MCC that jail that looks like a square death star outside of Chinatown.

If Johnny returned, did have to testify against him.

Meanwhile, Tina Wong was facing sentencing.

Her hearing was scheduled for the same day as the sentencing of all the other low level operators.

She was looking at a mandatory minimum of one hundred and twenty months or a decade in prison, unless she received a special dispensation for cooperating.

She had no idea if she'd get any mercy.

On March eighth, nineteen ninety one, Tina Wong took the Long Island Railroad to a courthouse in Hall Park.

The journey was over an hour long, but it fell even longer.

If Tina got the mandatory minimum, she wouldn't be coming home again for a long time.

I had people praying for me.

She was praying for you, my friends.

That you must have been like stressing like crazy on the train there.

Yeah, of course, because you don't know what's going to happen.

But I said, whatever happens to happen, let me just go and get it over with.

If Tina had one thought years ago, she was lucky.

This was the moment where she felt her luck had truly run out.

All the odds were stacked against her.

As she stood in the courtroom, her mind was going so many places so fast.

She could hardly process what was happening.

Do you remember when the judge said the.

Sentence no, well I knew was that was free?

Do you remember what that felt like when you realize.

That I probably was too shocked.

Tina and another woman who had cooperated both got time served.

The judge decided that the months they had already spent in jail had been long enough.

They were under probation, but they were free to go home.

They boarded the Long Island Railroad back to the city together.

As they walked down the aisle searching for a place to sit, they saw a familiar face.

I bumped into bedroom and then she said to me, I remember, she goes you guys are lucky that judge liked you, And I was thinking, yeah, you wanted to put us away forever.

You know, twenty five years to life is no joke.

But I don't hold no animosity.

Yeah, she had her job to do you know, so it is what it is, but.

You didn't sit together.

No, did she think I was being snarky or does she think I was saying because if I said that, because I felt then like I feel now, which is respect for how well they navigated.

They were navigating so many different pressures.

They were navigating children being mothers, they were navigating cross cultural current between the immigrant world and the American world.

They were navigating making money and then they get caught up in illegal drug smuggling.

I was just one of the pressure points in their life being brought to bear.

I don't think she thought.

You were being snarky, but I think she did think that maybe he felt like she had gotten away with something and she was really lucky to get away with it.

And she did get away with something because she didn't tell the whole truth and everything she knew.

Beryl may sound harsh here, but the fact is she did not tear up the Tina's cooperation agreement.

She told the judge that even though she didn't think Tina had been entirely truthful, she had still provided her with substantial assistance and that's why the judge was able to give her time served somehow.

In the end, Tina had pulled the tiles that she needed to complete her own ghost hands.

Do you feel like it worked out just because you're lucky?

What is it luck skill?

We'll never know, But the main thing is that I'm out and I had a second chance.

Very soon after Tina went free, Beryl finally got a little luck of her own.

In the spring of nineteen ninety one, a judge ruled that the government had the right to seiz Johnny's estate in Pennsylvania, which they alleged he had purchased with the proceeds of his criminal activities.

A few months after that, Johnnyang lost his last appeal.

One of the longest extradition cases in Hong Kong's history was finally over.

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 Sui Hung Eng Chung Tau and onion Head into the custody of the Commissioners to Correctional Services and be there safely.

Captain Johnny Yang was coming to the US to stand trial for him.

The game was only just beginning.

Next time, on the Chinatownsting.

Then when he arrived in New York City, then it was sort of a race against Todd.

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

He wants to get into the fight.

We felt good about our case.

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

The chinatownstan is written and produced by Me Liddy Jine Kott and reported by Me and Chuy Wang.

Our senior producer is Emily Martinez.

Additional production by Sonya Gerwit is Julia Barton, with additional editing by Karen Chakerji.

Our story consultant is Rongshau 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 Kelly Leong.

For more information about this episode, check out our show notes or visit Pushkin dot fm slash Chinatown Binge the entire season of The Chinatown Staying ad Free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus.

Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus.

Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, and exclude binges of other true crime podcasts throughout the year