Triads and the Yakuza

By Ed Magnuson

A crime-commission hearing details the Asian connection

The key witnesses wore black robes and cowls and testified through voice-altering devices. A Japanese gangster held up his hand to show how he had chopped off half his ringer to prove his repentance after having been disrespectful to his leader. He had put the severed finger in a small jar and sent it to the gang boss. One expert on the Chinese gangs told how members drank wine laced with both human and chicken blood while being initiated into their crime societies. He claimed that they condoned the murder of infants so that the tiny bodies could be stuffed with heroin and carried across international borders by young women posing as the mothers of sleeping babies. And a Vietnamese gang member testified that the head of his crime network was none other than Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant former Premier and air force boss during the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam.

The allegations were presented at a three-day hearing in New York City held by the President's Commission on Organized Crime. Led by Federal Judge Irving Kaufman, it was created in July of last year to investigate, publicize and suggest ways to lessen the impact of organized crime in the U.S. The hearings last week focused on Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese gangs. Attorney General William French Smith, the lead-off witness, warned that "organized crime has entered a new historical phase--its international phase." Judge Kaufman contended that some of the Asian gangs terrorized their immigrant communities and accounted for fully 20% of the heroin smuggled into the U.S. Said he: "We cannot ignore this threat on American life."

Witnesses testified that a Japanese crime cartel called the Yakuza has moved into the U.S. with drug smuggling, gunrunning, gambling and pornography. The members operate under a brutal and feudal discipline and often tattoo their bodies from shoulders to thighs using needles that penetrate a quarter-inch, teaching initiates to withstand pain. One Japanese businessman claimed that four high-stakes casinos are run by the Yakuza in Manhattan in cooperation with the Mafia.

Witnesses described the Chinese crime incursion as the work of ancient Triads (the name stems from their triangular symbol). Police Chief Jon Elder of Monterey Park, a Los Angeles suburb, testified that his city had had eight shootings in just the past few months among Asian gangs seeking "power and supremacy" in the town, which has a population that is 35% Asian. He described one victim of a ritual Triad punishment as having been slashed 200 times with a saber, deliberately left maimed but alive. A commission investigator claimed that a prosperous businessman in Manhattan's Chinatown, Edward Tse Chiu Chan, heads Triad criminal activities in New York. Chan has been subpoenaed to be interviewed by the commission and has refused to comment publicly on the charges.

The Vietnamese gangs pose as anti-Communist groups seeking freedom for their homeland, witnesses said, but they actually extort money from Vietnamese merchants in the U.S. They torture their rivals and threaten or kill journalists who try to expose them. One Vietnamese woman told how her publisher husband, whose magazine had carried articles about the gangs, had been warned to stop. When he did not, she said quietly, "gunmen came into where he worked and shot him to death." Another witness claimed that former South Vietnamese army officers led by Ky run a 1,000-member Vietnamese crime network in the U.S. Ky, who fled Viet Nam when U.S. troops pulled out in 1975, lives in Huntington Beach, Calif, and owns a liquor store. He contends, "I'm not a Mafia chieftain. I'm not a gangster. I'm a poor man. I would love for the Government of this country to take official action and investigate these allegations to clear my name." The commission is not expected to turn in its report until 1986.

--By Ed Magnuson.

Reported by Kenneth W. Banta/New York

With reporting by Kenneth W.Banta