Free Whitey's Payback by T. J. English Page B

had risked his life making heroin deals and even contracting to commit a murder. The case was tried in federal court using the RICO statutes. Wong was grilled on the witness stand by eleven defense attorneys, who accused him of being, among other things, a Communist agent and a lifelong gangster.
    The trial resulted in the only conviction of a major triad group in U.S. history. Afterward, Wong inquired about his job. “They told me, ‘Mr. Wong, you are not eligible for a police job because you were a member of a criminal organization.’ ” Wong was dumbfounded. He had joined the United Bamboo solely as part of the investigation.
    Having testified against his fellow Chinese, Wong was ostracized in the community. The FBI told him there was a contract out on his life. He was offered relocation through the Witness Protection Program, which he refused, asking, “Why should I have to live my life in hiding, like a criminal?”
    Today, Wong works in a restaurant outside New York. He rarely shows his face in the city before midnight; his memories of the United Bamboo case haunt him. “They never did let me be a part of the team,” he says of the cops, agents, and prosecutors he worked with. “They never trusted me because I was not one of them. To me, Chinatown was at stake. But they didn’t care about anything except improving their careers.”
    If Chinese organized crime were still only a Chinatown problem, American lawmen would not be sounding alarm bells. The fact that second- and third-generation Chinese-American criminals have branched out, however, is impossible to ignore. There was a time when Chinese heroin dealers made distribution arrangements only with Italians. Now, police sources say, the Chinese are willing to deal directly with Dominican and African-American groups, the primary street-level distributors of China white. The Mafia, no longer the feared presence it once was, has been relegated to a lesser role.
    Far away from New York, in hill regions of the Golden Triangle, fields of poppies are in bloom. The plant’s slender four-foot stems are topped with brilliant, multicolored petals and a core bulging with opium. DEA intelligence reports say that the last three years have produced record crops of raw opium sap, which is extracted and used as the base ingredient for heroin.
    In many ways, the drug trade is just an example of the way the Hong Kong Mob has always done business, and it is the base for the triad’s international expansion. By exploiting their connections throughout the world, heroin brokers reap huge profits, which they in turn launder through Hong Kong banks or use to finance multimillion-dollar real-estate deals. “Some traffickers are quite well regarded,” explains a Hong Kong investigator with triad expertise. “To them, heroin is just a commodity like sugar. You could put it on the stock exchange. These people don’t have to look at users on the street in Washington, D.C., or New York. They aren’t concerned with some poor black kid in Harlem. It’s just a business, plain and simple.”
    Junkies all across America have reason to rejoice. Soon, the latest shipments of China white will be blanketing their neighborhoods. A new generation of heroin addicts is about to be born.
    In the Marion Hotel, Africa cooks up a righteous batch. This time, he remembers to tie off. The needle is poised; a vein is bared. Down the hall, a junkie moans, his voice reverberating through an open window and out into the street.
    Africa is asked if he ever wonders about the origins of his dope.
    “Who gives a fuck?” he replies. The needle enters his vein with a pop.

4
Cosa Nostra Takes the Big Hit
Playboy, September 1992
The Mafia’s official bird—the stool pigeon—is singing a treacherous song.
    By the time Mafia capo Peter Chiodo looked up from under the hood of his Cadillac, he had already been shot once in the ass. Weighing in at 547 pounds, Chiodo was an easy target. On a clear afternoon in May