Crime Raids by County’s Asian Gangs Target Other Indochinese

Two weeks ago, in the darkness of late evening, five young Vietnamese men armed with handguns walked into the Long Beach apartment of a middle-aged Vietnamese woman and ordered her to lie face down on the floor.

“They said, ‘If you don’t do what we say, we’ll kill you.’ And she complied,” Police Sgt. Robert Titus said.

The young men, barefaced and brazen, took back to Orange County everything the woman had--about $4,000 in jewelry she had been unwilling to entrust to a bank.

Witnesses Fear Retaliation

Two weeks earlier, as the owner of a Cambodian market in Long Beach was locking his shop for the day, three unmasked Vietnamese in their 20s stole the purse of the merchant’s wife, firing three shots when challenged and wounding a passer-by.

And, in a third recent Long Beach robbery by a group of young Vietnamese, a Cambodian shop owner and his family were forced to lie face down while their home was looted of more than $24,000 in cash, jewelry and gold.

Again, the armed thieves did not bother to cover their faces. “Witnesses are deathly afraid of retaliation,” Titus said.

The robbers also count on their victims’ proven distrust of a criminal justice system that arrests lawbreakers and then releases them within hours on bail, he said.

As ranking officer of Long Beach’s small anti-gang unit, the sergeant has, out of necessity, acquired a quick expertise on Southeast Asian gangs. Since last fall, identified Asian gang crime has dramatically escalated in Long Beach, said Titus and other Police Department officers.

“I don’t think there is any question that Southeast Asian crime is a growing problem,” Deputy Chief David Dusenbury said last week. “It is serious, and a lot of it goes unreported.”

Asians themselves are the victims of a growing number of strong-arm offenses, such as robbery and extortion. But the criminal activities of Indochinese youths are reaching well beyond the 35,000-resident Asian immigrant community in the central Long Beach area, police said.

Nearly every Long Beach neighborhood has been hit by a rash of auto burglaries and thefts by Vietnamese youths from Orange County and, increasingly, by home-grown Cambodian and Vietnamese delinquents, police and Southeast Asian community leaders said.

Police said that last year’s dramatic 19% increase in automobile burglary--993 incidents more than the previous year--and 17% jump in auto theft--722 more car thefts than the previous year--were partly the result of Asian gang activity, especially in affluent eastern Long Beach.

Sharp increases continued during the first three months of this year, crime reports show.

In eastern shopping center parking lots, “it was getting so they would steal stereos as fast as drivers could park their cars,” a Long Beach undercover officer said.

Crackdown Reverses Trend

A crackdown this spring has reversed that trend, police said, but department statistics are not yet available to confirm the reduction.

In another response, the state announced Friday a $198,000 program to supervise gang members who are on probation. The initial targets will be 120 gang members from Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Westminster. Three probation officers will ride with police officers to check places the gangs frequent and will visit teachers and parents of the youths.

Long Beach has also become a destination for somewhat older roving bands of Indochinese criminals who move from city to city nationally, preying on their countrymen, several area police officials said.

Valuables Kept at Home

Southeast Asians are robbed because they often keep valuables in their homes, are easily intimidated and are reluctant to cooperate with police, who were frequently corrupt in their homelands, police said.

A local Asian crime specialist, who works undercover and requested anonymity, said he knows several cases in which local Vietnamese youths have hopped planes to commit crimes in other cities. For example, two were convicted recently of a jewelry store robbery in Toronto, Canada, he said.

“They’re highly transient. They plan robberies here and call for help from Houston or San Diego,” the officer said.

The thieves generate confusion by working out of town and using different names when arrested, he said. And the absence of any centralized computer file of Southeast Asian criminals makes the thieves’ job that much easier, Deputy Chief Dusenbury said.

One Vietnamese teen-ager, arrested five times by Long Beach police since last fall, has used a different name each time, Titus said, but a tattoo has revealed his identity.

San Jose, Seattle and Houston are all part of a circuit that includes Orange County and Long Beach and that is traveled by Southeast Asian gang members, Titus said. Boston, Toronto and Dodge City, Kan., are also among at least two dozen cities frequented by the loosely knit gangs, a wire service reported in February.

Long Beach police acknowledged that they have only begun to understand the workings of Asian gangs and have no clear idea of how many youths are committing the crimes. They said their arrests indicate that individual Asian gangs may have no more than a few members who operate as a team in thefts. Unlike long-established Long Beach black and Latino gangs, the Southeast Asian gangs usually cannot be identified by dress or gang name.

In Orange County, which has 100,000 Indochinese refugees out of about 600,000 nationally, police officials have had more experience with Asian gangs. But they, too, said they do not know the number of gang members.

Lt. Robert Burnett of the Westminster Police Department, who has likened Indochinese youth gangs to “a pack of wolves,” said last week: “They go where the opportunity is. . . . They hold no jurisdictional boundaries. Wherever the Southeast Asian population is, that’s where they go.”

Series of Violent Crimes

Garden Grove Police Capt. Stanley Knee said that in 1986 his city had a violent series of robberies and shootings by Asian gangs.

“I think the potential is there for these groups to be as violent as the Chinese gangs, and certainly as violent as the Latino and black gangs,” Knee said.

Burnett and Knee, both recognized as Asian youth crime experts, said they suspect that Vietnamese gangs from their cities are now active in Long Beach.

That has been confirmed by the Orange County Vietnamese gang graffiti showing up on walls in the Cambodian community in Long Beach, Knee said. And Garden Grove officers have been told of fights between their Vietnamese gangs and Long Beach Cambodians at a dance earlier this year.

Long Beach police said, however, that disputes between Vietnamese and Cambodian youths are often set aside in the name of opportunity.

One Long Beach officer said: “You see mixed gangs. Vietnamese are starting to get Cambodians in there and train them, because there are a lot more Cambodians in our city. You are starting to see Cambodians turn up as suspects, where a year ago you didn’t see that.”

Reports of Extortion

Although local police said they have received just four formal extortion complaints from Indochinese businessmen since November, 1986, Asian community sources tell them that perhaps another 15 are being forced to pay protection money. Most of the victims run bars and restaurants, one officer said.

Police said they think they have had just four complaints of Asian youth robbery in the last four months, although they said they have no formal system for categorizing such crimes. And officers in the organized crime unit said they know of at least four other such robberies that were not reported.

John Westland, who has sponsored the immigration of many Cambodian families and is the business partner of a Cambodian, said he has heard about dozens of robberies of Cambodians.

“It used to be that the Vietnamese were doing it to the Cambodians. But now the Cambodians are getting into the act too, and it’s just a shame,” Westland said.

As a few Cambodians have grown to trust some Long Beach police, they have told them of extortion without identifying themselves as the victims, Titus said.

“It’s always, ‘My friend is having a problem. What can you do to help him?’ That creates a problem for the investigation and another problem for the prosecution.”

Once in court, even those who press charges often refuse to testify when confronted by gang members, said police in Long Beach and in Orange County.

Thefts by Asian youths in the larger, non-Asian Long Beach community are easier to combat, police said. But, at first, they were hard to attribute to a specific source.

Police did not tie the skyrocketing rate of auto burglary and theft to Asian gangs until arrests last fall began to confirm the connection, officers said.

“That was when we started having huge numbers of auto burglaries in the Belmont Shore-Belmont Heights area,” Titus said. “They were out there and organized, taking 15 or 20 expensive car stereos a night.”

In some cases, burglars as young as 12 would work for Indochinese in their 20s, police said.

“One guy said he was recruited from San Diego right off the street by an older Vietnamese person,” Titus said. “He’d give them a little on-the-job training on how to steal radios, and they’d receive a hundred dollars a night from him.”

Working in teams of three, the youths can complete a burglary--mostly on high-end Toyotas and BMWs--in minutes, Titus said. Orange County police said Datsun Z cars are also popular targets of Indochinese gangs. The stolen stereos can quickly be sold for $50-$100 each.