Speaker 1: Pushkin previously on the China townstaing.
Speaker 2: When the verdict was coming in and the summations and
Speaker 2: rebuttals were happening, I was in intensive care with the
Speaker 2: new baby.
Speaker 3: One of the things that was so amazing to me
Speaker 3: about Johnny Yenie's he looks so young. Until you seem
Speaker 3: in person, you forget what a baby faced gangster could
Speaker 3: look like.
Speaker 4: It was, you know, a case that truly, if you
Speaker 4: didn't believe the cooperators, you didn't have enough evidence to
Speaker 4: convict the defendant.
Speaker 1: On Thursday, December tenth, nineteen ninety two, twelve jurors filed
Speaker 1: out of a small wood paneled courtroom in Brooklyn. They
Speaker 1: were about to begin to deliveing the seventeen federal criminal
Speaker 1: charges against Johnnyang. Among the charges that he'd coordinated the
Speaker 1: smuggling of heroin from Asia to the US via a
Speaker 1: bean sprout washing machine. Other charges were related to him
Speaker 1: smuggling heroin through mail packages, but the biggest count was
Speaker 1: the first one that Johnny Yang was quote the principal, administrator, organizer,
Speaker 1: or leader of these schemes, the so called mastermind count.
Speaker 1: If the jury decided that Johnny Yang was guilty of
Speaker 1: that he'd face a mandatory sentence of life in prison
Speaker 1: without pearl.
Speaker 5: You actually talked to one of the jurors, right, that's.
Speaker 1: My co reporter, shir Yu Wang. Yes, her name is
Speaker 1: Joan Cohen. She was twenty nine years old at the
Speaker 1: time and she was working on Wall Street for a
Speaker 1: JP Moore in.
Speaker 6: I got picked, and I was like, this is going
Speaker 6: to be kind of difficult because I'm going to have
Speaker 6: to commute from downtown Manhattan over to Brooklyn.
Speaker 5: What did she think of the trial?
Speaker 1: According to her memory, the jury was mostly white people,
Speaker 1: people like her.
Speaker 6: As a non Chinese speaking person. I was hoping that
Speaker 6: the interpreter was actually doing it correctly, Yeah, because I
Speaker 6: was a little concerned about that because what if they
Speaker 6: got something wrong.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's that's a very fair concern, because I don't
Speaker 7: think that the None of the lawyers understood Chinese right now,
Speaker 7: not even a defense team.
Speaker 1: No, none of them did. And you know, Beryl said
Speaker 1: that she remembers that there is always more than one
Speaker 1: interpreter in the courtroom at the same time, so when
Speaker 1: one got tired, someone else could take over. But still
Speaker 1: Joan's worry about understanding correctly what these witnesses were saying,
Speaker 1: makes sense because the whole case hinged on the testimony
Speaker 1: of cooperators, right. And the other thing is, like pretty
Speaker 1: much everyone else in the world, she has a very
Speaker 1: vivid memory of one of the key cooperating witnesses.
Speaker 4: While of course she was like so pretty and so like,
Speaker 4: I just was like, I can't imagine her committee of crime.
Speaker 4: It was like so bizarre, Like I was surprised, honestly
Speaker 4: shocked that a woman would be involved in such unscrupulous behaviors.
Speaker 6: I guess I was a little sexist in the sense
Speaker 6: of like, why would she do this?
Speaker 5: This wasn't the last trial.
Speaker 7: This was Johnny's trial, So what did Joanne think about
Speaker 7: the evidence against Johnny?
Speaker 1: So the jury actually deliberated for a week, five days.
Speaker 6: We're talking about each count. Is he guilty of this?
Speaker 6: He might be guilty of this the lesser account, but.
Speaker 5: Is he the ring leader?
Speaker 4: Really?
Speaker 1: Really?
Speaker 8: That was the big thing that caused the most in
Speaker 8: my recollection, the most deliberation, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 8: was yes, we feel he was guilty, but was he
Speaker 8: the mastermind?
Speaker 1: Was he the mastermind? That was the big question. After
Speaker 1: the verdict, people were going to draw all sorts of
Speaker 1: conclusions about how gangsters like Johnny Yang are held to
Speaker 1: account by the justice system, and this reckoning would lead
Speaker 1: to big changes both in Manhattan's Chinatown and beyond. I'm
Speaker 1: Lyddy Jinkot and this is the Chinatown Sting, Episode six,
Speaker 1: A sense of order.
Speaker 5: So the jury deliberated for a long time.
Speaker 1: They did yes, and the jury Joanne Cohen. She remembers
Speaker 1: going back and forth about the mastermind count.
Speaker 6: Because you're talking about somebody's life. You don't want to
Speaker 6: get it wrong. I don't know what sounds really mean,
Speaker 6: but I just felt like he wasn't smart enough to
Speaker 6: be that mastermind. I don't know why I felt like that.
Speaker 6: I just maybe from the testimonies of the other witnesses,
Speaker 6: but I don't know. Maybe it was just a wrong
Speaker 6: judgment call at that age for me, But I just
Speaker 6: felt like, this is a pretty intricate operation. You have
Speaker 6: to be pretty savvy, and I just, for some reason,
Speaker 6: I didn't see him in that role. He just seemed
Speaker 6: like a regular person you'd see in China, kind of
Speaker 6: walking down the street.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: I just nobody I would be afraid of just in passing.
Speaker 5: Wow, I mean, Johnny does have a baby face.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But how would you feel as a lawyer if
Speaker 1: you had spent four or five years trying to get
Speaker 1: this guy and then Jerry was like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: he just doesn't look like a mastermind.
Speaker 5: I would be very, very frustrated. As a lawyer. You would.
Speaker 7: See the case in a very different way, not like
Speaker 7: very different way, but like you focus on different things
Speaker 7: that may or may not stick out to the jury.
Speaker 7: They might just trust what they see more versus what
Speaker 7: they hear.
Speaker 1: Finally, on the afternoon of December fifteenth, the jurors sent
Speaker 1: out a note to the judge saying, we have reached
Speaker 1: a verdict. The prosecution team, the defense team, the reporters,
Speaker 1: the onlookers, the jurors. They all gathered back in the
Speaker 1: courtroom and the judge read each count out loud. The
Speaker 1: jurors had decided that Johnny was not guilty of count one,
Speaker 1: being the principal leader of the heroin importation scheme, the
Speaker 1: mastermind count, the count that came with a mandatory life
Speaker 1: sentence without pearl. He was also found not guilty of
Speaker 1: the counts brought by the Southern District of New York
Speaker 1: that he had conspired to import hair I went through
Speaker 1: a bean sprout washing machine. But he was found guilty
Speaker 1: of counts relating to importing heroin through the mail, the
Speaker 1: counts brought by the Eastern District of New York. In
Speaker 1: the end, it seems like the jurors believed the testimony
Speaker 1: of cooperating witnesses enough to convict him on those counts.
Speaker 1: Throughout the trial, the reporter Gerald Posner had been chatting
Speaker 1: with other journalists. They've been trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: strategy of Johnny's defense team and its lead attorney, Gerald Schargell.
Speaker 3: We used to sort of be amazed at how he
Speaker 3: was making his case. It didn't make sense to me
Speaker 3: when I heard it at first, which was not really
Speaker 3: contesting what you would call the heart of the charge
Speaker 3: and saying you have the wrong person.
Speaker 1: But now they realized that maybe this outcome had been
Speaker 1: part of Johnny and his lawyer's master plan.
Speaker 3: I remember Chargell said, we're very pleased with it because
Speaker 3: the fact that he didn't get convicted as the ringleader
Speaker 3: is just one member of this network. Is the difference
Speaker 3: between doing life in prison without parole or getting out
Speaker 3: one day.
Speaker 1: While Johnny's schemes were simple, his ability to orchestrate them
Speaker 1: all with barely a physical trace may have been enough
Speaker 1: to save him from receiving the harshest sentence. But before
Speaker 1: the judge decided Johnny's fate, she first considered the fate
Speaker 1: of prosecutor Beryl Howells. Two star cooperating witnesses, Wall and
Speaker 1: Michael Yu, also known as Fox. Wall was sentenced to
Speaker 1: five years times. She had already served in the MCC
Speaker 1: that jail outside of Chinatown while waiting for her own trial,
Speaker 1: waiting for Johnny's extradition, and waiting for Johnny's trial to conclude.
Speaker 1: Maybe at first Wall had thought that MCC wasn't so bad,
Speaker 1: but when she spoke to us, she alluded to it
Speaker 1: sounded like horrible incidents. Waugh said that if she went
Speaker 1: into details, she could get a whole bunch of different
Speaker 1: people into trouble, including the guards.
Speaker 5: I should burn the whole mcc dow.
Speaker 1: But she's not going to. She's done talking with authorities.
Speaker 9: I don't want to.
Speaker 10: Hurt people if I say things and they'll hurt them.
Speaker 1: Wall went home from jail to pick up the pieces
Speaker 1: of her life. Her ex boyfriend Fox wound up getting
Speaker 1: sentenced to seven years plus probation. He had already served
Speaker 1: much of that time, and the day after Wall and
Speaker 1: Fox are sentencing, Johnny himself appeared back in court. The
Speaker 1: judge said she knew she was about to rip his
Speaker 1: family apart, but she told him, by importing Heroine quote,
Speaker 1: you ruin the lives of many other families and many children.
Speaker 1: Johnny Yang was sentenced to twenty four years. Beryl thinks
Speaker 1: that that was a fair outcome.
Speaker 2: There are some prosecutors who want to win on all
Speaker 2: accounts and they want the highest sentence possible. That really
Speaker 2: wasn't something that I dwelled on as a prosecutor, because
Speaker 2: he was convicted.
Speaker 1: Like many inmates, Johnny served his time in different prisons,
Speaker 1: but it seems like he served at least a portion
Speaker 1: of a sentence in Raybrooke, a medium security prison so
Speaker 1: far north, it's almost in Canada. We only have a
Speaker 1: brief glimpse of onion heads of life from that time.
Speaker 1: It's in a memoir by John Gotty's son, John A. Gotty,
Speaker 1: who also did time at Raybrook. He calls Johnny a
Speaker 1: gentleman sellmate. I can tell Beryl is proud of Johnny's trial,
Speaker 1: because I've seen her scrap books from that time. One
Speaker 1: page has my boyfriend sister's birth announcement, the next page
Speaker 1: has some baby photos, and then barrels cut out and pasted,
Speaker 1: pages and pages of newspaper clippings. They all have headlines
Speaker 1: like ex Chinatown gang boss convicted. Just as Johnny's rise
Speaker 1: to power had a big impact on Manhattan's Chinatown, so
Speaker 1: would his downfall. According to the former gangster Mike moy,
Speaker 1: newspaper articles about Johnny Ing's trial made ordinary residents of
Speaker 1: Chinatown feel more anxious.
Speaker 10: Anytime these gang members hit the fund page of the news, well,
Speaker 10: actually hit the news. They don't ever hit the funk page.
Speaker 10: But whenever they hit the news in a Chinese newspaper,
Speaker 10: they become more fearful because they like, Wow, look what
Speaker 10: these guys are doing in Chinatown. These guys are powerful,
Speaker 10: these guys are making the money. They can basically do
Speaker 10: anything to me.
Speaker 1: But Mike says he interpreted this coverage differently.
Speaker 10: When I was a gang member at the time, I'm like,
Speaker 10: you know what, this is the nail in the coffin
Speaker 10: for these gangs. We're done, we are done.
Speaker 5: That was it.
Speaker 1: Mike says that the reason gang leaders like Johnny Yang
Speaker 1: became so powerful was because they had the backing of
Speaker 1: the Tongs, those respected community associations.
Speaker 10: The Tongues had the connection to the cops and the politicians,
Speaker 10: and the Tongues had the connection to the trias overseas.
Speaker 10: So it was that power base that they had.
Speaker 1: As soon as gangster started getting convicted, Tong leaders severed
Speaker 1: their relationship with the gangs. They didn't want the FEDS
Speaker 1: going after them as well.
Speaker 10: No Tongs want to be associated with any criminal activities anymore.
Speaker 10: They're being washed like a hawk, and.
Speaker 1: The FEDS just kept bringing new cases against many of
Speaker 1: the gangs, including the Flying Dragons. About a year after
Speaker 1: Johnny was convicted, thirty three members of the Flying Dragons
Speaker 1: were indicted on racketeering charges under the Racketeer Influenced and
Speaker 1: Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO, the same law prosecutors had
Speaker 1: used earlier to go after the Italian mafia.
Speaker 10: If you were a Flying Dragon member, you don't want
Speaker 10: to be known as a Flying Dragon member, whereas before
Speaker 10: the RICO you advertise the fact that you are a
Speaker 10: Flying Dragon member.
Speaker 1: After Johnny was sentenced, no one replaced him.
Speaker 10: I will say Anya Head was the last real leader
Speaker 10: of the Flying Dragons.
Speaker 1: By the mid nineties, pretty much all the major gangs
Speaker 1: of Chinatown had dissolved. Mikes's new groups sprung up using
Speaker 1: the old gang names as a way of capital on
Speaker 1: how much people previously feared them. But in Mike's view,
Speaker 1: these new gangs were really just a bunch of kids.
Speaker 10: When you talk about the real, actual members of the
Speaker 10: Flying Dragons, it was gone. That's it.
Speaker 1: It's like when the franchise fins off and it's like
Speaker 1: the seventh eighth sequel. It's like, no one's watching that anymore.
Speaker 10: Here exactly exactly, It's like so many different spirrills Thia,
Speaker 10: let's say, Godzella.
Speaker 1: Without the connection to the Tongs. The new gangs had
Speaker 1: nowhere near the same power or influence in the community.
Speaker 1: They didn't last long. People stopped having to worry about
Speaker 1: getting caught in the crossfire during gang shootouts, small business
Speaker 1: owners stopped having to pay extortion fees. By putting Johnny away,
Speaker 1: it does seem like Beryl Howell, along with many other
Speaker 1: federal authorities, played a role in changing the facts on
Speaker 1: the ground in Chinatown. As for Mike, he did a
Speaker 1: one hundred an eighty degree turn. He joined the NYPD.
Speaker 1: One of the neighborhoods he was assigned to patrol was
Speaker 1: Brooklyn's Chinatown. At first, Mike worried what if he ran
Speaker 1: into former gangsters. He knew what would they think about
Speaker 1: his new job, but he got too busy to keep
Speaker 1: thinking about stuff like that. When he joined, Mike was
Speaker 1: one of only a few hundred Asian officers in the NYPD,
Speaker 1: a small percentage of the force, and out of those officers,
Speaker 1: only a handful could speak with crime victims in Cantonese.
Speaker 10: They feel more comfortable in dealing with me because I'm
Speaker 10: able to speak their language, their dialect, and I'm able
Speaker 10: to explain the entire process to them, what's necessary, what
Speaker 10: they need to do every step of the way to
Speaker 10: take the fairly unknown away.
Speaker 1: Other cops I've interviewed told me they had trouble at
Speaker 1: convincing residents of Chinatown to help them solve crimes. Mike
Speaker 1: sounds frustrated when I bring this up, like it's something
Speaker 1: he's heard a thousand times before.
Speaker 10: When you were an Asian person going in and you
Speaker 10: don't speak English, and you walk into the priests, and
Speaker 10: if you get that, you feel like you're getting victimized again. Now,
Speaker 10: if you treat the complaint like how you treat your mom,
Speaker 10: I think that will take away allow of these issues
Speaker 10: that we're talking about.
Speaker 1: After more than two decades on the force, Mike retired
Speaker 1: and he noticed that nobody seemed to be talking about
Speaker 1: what he had lived through back when gang life was
Speaker 1: all he knew.
Speaker 10: I've been waiting all these years for someone like me
Speaker 10: to come out and at least share some of the stories,
Speaker 10: but there wasn't even one.
Speaker 1: So he got back in touch with some people first,
Speaker 1: just a few old friends.
Speaker 10: Today, I have a short story to share with you
Speaker 10: about the Flying Dragons.
Speaker 1: The former gangsters Mike interviews on his YouTube channel are
Speaker 1: now mostly in their fifties and sixties. Some of them
Speaker 1: share their stories in English.
Speaker 10: I remember walking this is about middle.
Speaker 3: Of the night and the boss of Cashows, Carrly, broke
Speaker 3: on me.
Speaker 10: Some in Cantonese, we homegonge so huge.
Speaker 1: You see Mike talking to one guy wearing aviator glasses,
Speaker 1: another with an eighty style mullet. But even if their
Speaker 1: fashion sense is a little stuck in time, they all
Speaker 1: say they've moved on. They now have jobs running construction companies,
Speaker 1: working in real estate as restaurant owners. Members of once
Speaker 1: rival gangs who once couldn't even be seen on each
Speaker 1: other's streets, can now be seen making sense of the
Speaker 1: past together on Mike's channel.
Speaker 11: Probably freaking a couple thousand feet away from the tattoos
Speaker 11: the courthouses. Funny that how we operate down in the
Speaker 11: Taratal as a gang back then, But we're so close
Speaker 11: to the precinct and the freaking U the courthouses.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but we weren't scared.
Speaker 1: Because of Chinatown gang stories, Mike has become a kind
Speaker 1: of information hub for people who used to be part
Speaker 1: of the Asian underworld. He says he's been getting updates
Speaker 1: about Johnny from people in touch with him directly. Johnny
Speaker 1: was released from prison in twenty ten. He served twenty
Speaker 1: years of his twenty four year long sentence. I've heard
Speaker 1: that Johnny's in Hong Kong and he has a business
Speaker 1: importing lobsters from Maine. Mike won't confirm these rumors, but
Speaker 1: he tells me that Johnny has also moved on from
Speaker 1: his life of crime. He's doing well. Will you tell
Speaker 1: him that I'm.
Speaker 5: Doing this podcast.
Speaker 10: He knows, he knows I sent the message out there.
Speaker 1: In Beryl's household. The Chinatown Sting is a family legend,
Speaker 1: a story everyone's heard many times. But after years of
Speaker 1: investigating it, still didn't really understand what exactly it is
Speaker 1: about this case that stuck with Beryl. What did she
Speaker 1: take away from it? I think the answer has to
Speaker 1: do with why she chose to become a prosecutor and
Speaker 1: a judge in the first place. How she feels when
Speaker 1: she walks into a court.
Speaker 2: The etiquette of a courtroom is like so clear, you.
Speaker 1: Deal with the most messy things in life there, but
Speaker 1: it's also like the most orderly.
Speaker 2: There is a sense of order in the courtroom. Who
Speaker 2: speaks first, you know, is your emotion, the plaintive, who
Speaker 2: has the burden. There's an order to sort through the
Speaker 2: complex issues that human beings have among themselves in the courtroom.
Speaker 1: Even though Johnny's conviction was one of Beryl's hardest won
Speaker 1: courtroom victories, when she thinks back on the Chinatown Sting,
Speaker 1: the moment that sticks with her didn't happen during his trial.
Speaker 1: It's weird what you remember what you don't The moment
Speaker 1: that Beryl remembers best happened years before. It involved a
Speaker 1: woman who received mail packages of heroin but chose not
Speaker 1: to cooperate. She was about thirty years old, she was
Speaker 1: from Taipei, and she didn't speak English. I never got
Speaker 1: to interview this woman, but according to the court documents,
Speaker 1: she agreed to receive these boxes to help pay for
Speaker 1: her wedding. She was pregnant during her trial for heroin importation.
Speaker 1: Shortly before it was over, she gave birth to a
Speaker 1: baby boy. She was then found guilty. Around this time,
Speaker 1: her husband, a restaurant manager, was murdered by a gang
Speaker 1: member after refusing to pay an extortion fee. Beryl Howell
Speaker 1: had been able to ask for leniency for other defendants,
Speaker 1: but this woman had never been a cooperating witness and
Speaker 1: she didn't have any information that would lead Beryl up
Speaker 1: the latter any further. She faced a mandatory minimum penalty
Speaker 1: for what she'd done. A decade in prison, leaving her
Speaker 1: baby without either of his parents.
Speaker 3: That was hard.
Speaker 2: It was hard for me. It was so hard for
Speaker 2: Judge Wexler sentencing this new mom to jail for ten years.
Speaker 2: So she's going to have to give up her child
Speaker 2: for ten years.
Speaker 9: It was very very hard.
Speaker 2: For Judge Wexler. My recollection is that he called me stoneface,
Speaker 2: and I thought to myself, he has no idea what's
Speaker 2: going on inside. I do remember that being very very hard,
Speaker 2: and it was very hard.
Speaker 1: While trying to bring down Johnny, Beryl confronted a flaw
Speaker 1: in her orderly system. She couldn't do it without cooperators.
Speaker 1: She had been using the mandatory minimums as a threat
Speaker 1: to convince them to work with her, but threats alone
Speaker 1: weren't always enough.
Speaker 2: They have to trust that you're going to be fair
Speaker 2: with them and that you're going to live up to
Speaker 2: your promises.
Speaker 1: For the legal system to work, people have to trust it,
Speaker 1: and for them to trust the system, they have to
Speaker 1: believe that it will deal with them justly. Now that
Speaker 1: she's looking back on her career as a prosecutor and
Speaker 1: a judge, Beryl hopes that she's remembered for one thing.
Speaker 2: That no matter what position of power I held viz.
Speaker 2: Via another person, that I never lost sight of the
Speaker 2: human being standing in front of me, and that I
Speaker 2: treated people respectfully and fairly.
Speaker 1: But Beryl still wonders about the people who did cooperate
Speaker 1: and helped her win her first big case. What did
Speaker 1: they make of this encounter?
Speaker 2: I know what that did for me in understanding better
Speaker 2: about their world. But what I don't know is that
Speaker 2: they feel that they understood more about a world they
Speaker 2: didn't know by spending time not with me particularly, but
Speaker 2: with the agents and being in the courtroom. Whether that
Speaker 2: had any effect on them as they went forward.
Speaker 1: In other words, did they ever perceive her ultimate goal
Speaker 1: to bring order injustice out of the courtroom and into
Speaker 1: the world. I found myself thinking about my conversation with
Speaker 1: Beryl about trust and order when I went to visit
Speaker 1: an immigration courthouse, a gray building just a few blocks
Speaker 1: away from Chinatown. As federal authorities have ramped up deportations,
Speaker 1: that atmosphere has become tense. I told shew you about
Speaker 1: what I saw. It used to be that immigration authorities
Speaker 1: wouldn't They would stay away from immigration courthouses because they
Speaker 1: knew people might fear them, and then that would make
Speaker 1: them more reluctant to go in for their regular you know,
Speaker 1: immigration proceedings, et cetera. But now that's changed. Now it
Speaker 1: happens when you go in for your immigration hearing there's
Speaker 1: federal agents who are stationed outside of the courtroom and
Speaker 1: they look really intimidating. Their faces are totally covered with
Speaker 1: like pandanas and they wear baseball caps. And then when
Speaker 1: I was there, they were standing outside of the door,
Speaker 1: and then when the person comes out from their hearing,
Speaker 1: they all kind of like approach. This person was a
Speaker 1: woman and she was with her lawyer, and they asked
Speaker 1: her to show them some documentation, and you could tell
Speaker 1: she was you could tell she and trying really hard
Speaker 1: to keep calm, and she looked through her like folders
Speaker 1: and she showed some papers and then they let her
Speaker 1: go through. But there's all these videos of times where
Speaker 1: people who then ended up getting grabbed by these agents
Speaker 1: and taken into detention centers.
Speaker 12: A quick encounter and without warning, these two immigrants who
Speaker 12: just left the mandatory hearing taken away by federal immigration agents,
Speaker 12: disappearing behind this stairwell. Critics say this administration is finding
Speaker 12: ways to bend the law with claims that non citizens
Speaker 12: no longer have due process rights.
Speaker 1: When I was in the immigration courthouse, I was thinking
Speaker 1: about how much Beryl built her case by relying on
Speaker 1: testimony from cooperating witnesses who are pretty much all immigrants,
Speaker 1: And it made me wonder about what it would be
Speaker 1: like if Beryl was trying to build her case against
Speaker 1: Johnny today and once again she was entirely dependent on
Speaker 1: witness testimony.
Speaker 7: And then like how she would be able to get
Speaker 7: them cooperate. Nowadays, because you see media coverage about police violence,
Speaker 7: like how immigrants were being treated unfairly, that might cast
Speaker 7: a shadow over a people's impressions of the police officers.
Speaker 7: Maybe they would wonder, is that really a safer option?
Speaker 7: So might just go to jail. I don't choose the
Speaker 7: prosecutor to return with a fair outcome or like a
Speaker 7: fair bargain with me. It's a little difficult to imagine
Speaker 7: how the case would proceed right now, like say in
Speaker 7: the twenty twenties.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, it's easy to see how the Chinatown sting
Speaker 1: back then could have just ended with the prosecution of
Speaker 1: a few low level drug couriers. It might have never
Speaker 1: gotten up. The ladder reached the leader of the gang
Speaker 1: hiding out in Hong Kong, got him back to the US,
Speaker 1: and then gotten him convicted. Because for prosecutors to do that,
Speaker 1: they needed cooperating witnesses, and that cooperation comes with a
Speaker 1: heavy cost to those who offer it, even if they
Speaker 1: don't end up serving the full sentences that they could
Speaker 1: have received. Tina Wong told us that she still feels
Speaker 1: that Beryl never fully understood the pressures that she was
Speaker 1: under when she was made her decision.
Speaker 9: Well, I don't really think she learned about all world.
Speaker 1: Why do you say you don't really think she learned
Speaker 1: about your world?
Speaker 9: Until you live it, you can think you know it,
Speaker 9: but no, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: After she was shot, Tina moved out of Chinatown to
Speaker 1: a different part of the city.
Speaker 9: If they could do this, what else could could happen?
Speaker 9: You know, I don't want to take a chance like that.
Speaker 1: In Chinatown. Tina had always struggled to find work. Now
Speaker 1: with a criminal record, it was even harder.
Speaker 9: Daryld told me, oh, just tell the truth. And when
Speaker 9: I told the truth, I didn't get the job.
Speaker 1: Tina kept applying for jobs and kept getting rejected for
Speaker 1: about a decade until she finally found employment as a
Speaker 1: hotel cleaner.
Speaker 9: Okay, I'm not saying we shouldn't get off with a
Speaker 9: slap on the wrist, but after that you know, like,
Speaker 9: don't mock them so they can't get a job. You know,
Speaker 9: I think that's one thing that they should change.
Speaker 1: Maybe Tina wishes none of this had ever happened, or
Speaker 1: that she had made different choices, but she's not really
Speaker 1: one to dwell on regrets, and she's also not one
Speaker 1: to assign blame to herself or to others.
Speaker 9: Everybody's got the thing they got to do. That was
Speaker 9: Beryl's job. So she did her job. So I think
Speaker 9: she knew she you know, thought she was helping. I'm
Speaker 9: pretty sure she did help.
Speaker 1: Would you take that job? What Beryl's job?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 9: I have too good of a heart.
Speaker 5: I feel sorry for people.
Speaker 1: What Tina's most proud of in her life is her daughter, Salin.
Speaker 9: That she grew up to be a good person. You know,
Speaker 9: she don't get herself in trouble. She don't like do
Speaker 9: bad things to people. You know, she works very hard.
Speaker 9: She say some money, she's good to me. Yeah, so
Speaker 9: that's all you can ask for.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 1: Tina says she's lost touch with not just Wall but
Speaker 1: all her other friends who are involved in the mail
Speaker 1: package scheme. How did everything that happen change? How you
Speaker 1: look at friendship.
Speaker 9: Well, I always know that a good friendship nothing can
Speaker 9: break it.
Speaker 1: Today, Tina says she's lucky to have some good friends,
Speaker 1: many of them she knows from Chinatown, but they're a
Speaker 1: different crew. She says that when she's with them, she
Speaker 1: has the sense that everything's in order.
Speaker 9: You feel like safe, you know, you feel that you
Speaker 9: can say anything. You could be yourself.
Speaker 1: The Chinatown Sting is written and produced by Me Boddy,
Speaker 1: Eugene Kott, and reported by Me and Hu Yu Wang.
Speaker 1: Our senior producer is Emily Martinez. Additional production by Sonia Gerwit.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton, with additional editing by Karen Schakerji.
Speaker 1: Our story consultant is wrong shaou Ching. Our executive producer
Speaker 1: is Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by John Sung,
Speaker 1: sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Our fact
Speaker 1: checker is Kate Furby, and our show art was designed
Speaker 1: by Sean Carney. All voiceover work by Tally Leong. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to a few more people at Pushkin who made
Speaker 1: the Chinatown Sting possible Gretta Cone, Sarah Nix, Christina Sullivan,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Rattner, Amy Hagadorn, Kiara Posey, Jordan McMillan, Jake Flanagan,
Speaker 1: Owen Miller, and Sarah Bruger. Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick,
Speaker 1: Mark Jacobsen, Frank Joe, Terry Eggert, Mingley, Joe Flame, the
Speaker 1: Late Neil Mariello, and Yaboogie. For more information about this episode,
Speaker 1: check out our show notes or visit Pushkin dot fm
Speaker 1: slash Chinatown. The ton of Town Staying is a production
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. No, was that lucky? Did he just talk?
Speaker 9: You heard it right?
Speaker 7: I heard it?
Speaker 1: What did he say?
Speaker 3: Hello?
Speaker 9: Does that be?
Speaker 1: Don't know a stranger anymore?