“Not much. We come here a lot less than we do to places with one-tenth the occupants, and that’s usually only because some outsider is raising Cain. They keep to themselves, take care of their own problems, and stay out of trouble. The interesting statistic is how rarely we are called. They’re so quiet it makes us suspicious.”
She smiled and shook her head at the irony. “There’re other reasons, of course, but they’re all just as vague. Like, why it is that when most of them work in West Leb and Hanover, they sleep over here? It’s not necessarily cheaper, and it’s an inconvenient commute. All we’ve been able to figure is they’re taking advantage of the two jurisdictions. Work in one state, live in another, it keeps the cops from getting to know them too well-same reason they’re kept on the move. I can show you a couple of restaurants that have worn paths in the grass running from their back doors to the interstate.”
She shifted in her seat restlessly. “But it’s all smoke and no fire. The Border Patrol and INS come down here once in a while, wander around, set up a roadblock on I-91, catch a few illegals. For those few days, the population drops. And as soon as the feds are gone, they’re all back. The seven Asian restaurants in the area do good business-like a ton of other people around here-but retail turnover is hot and heavy, especially in food. Rents go up, competition is fierce, and when the economy wobbles, even the best go under… Except for those seven. They just keep plugging away, paying all their bills in cash. And it’s not because they’re great advertisers or community boosters. They do zero along those lines. It all sounds like money laundering at the very least, but we’ve never found a shred of evidence. We can’t even say all the owners are in cahoots with the crooks, ’cause we’re pretty sure most of them are as coerced as the illegals. They either have to play along, or they’re shit out of luck. Basically, you could call us racist paranoids about all this stuff, and I wouldn’t be able to prove you wrong.”
I nudged her toward the topic at hand. “You must’ve had some problems, though. You filed a report on Michael Vu with Dan Flynn. What was that about?”
She pulled over into a side street and killed the engine in the shade of a large maple tree. A pleasant, flower-scented breeze drifted in through the open window.
“That creep,” she murmured and turned to face me, her gray eyes narrow with anger. “He’s in the third group-the bloodsuckers that keep the others in place. I look at these people, they come from the far side of the world, pledging thirty to forty thousand dollars to some shit to get them over here, and they end up like gerbils in a box, working for years so they can pay off their debts. The FBI says alien smuggling is the most profitable of all organized Asian crime activities. I can believe it.”
She paused, took a breath, and then resumed. “We had a case a few years back. A small group was using a motel room as a warehouse for stolen goods-mostly clothing, bundles of it, stacked to the ceiling. They were going around to all the big retail outlets and robbing them blind. We nailed the actual thieves-never got the bosses-and found out they came from Fukien Province in China. They were illegals who hadn’t been able to keep up on their debt payments to the smugglers by doing legitimate work, because every time they saved enough to make a deposit, they were robbed, sometimes six times in a row. Finally, the smugglers-the same ones who were ripping them off, of course-gave them a choice between being killed or tortured-or having their families take the rap back home-and becoming thieves. They were given a quota. The men we talked to had been doing this for years, and still they weren’t even close to settling their debt.
“The kicker is we only talked to the men, because the women we caught with them were bailed out as soon as the paperwork cleared-never to be seen again. We found out it was so they could work as prostitutes in the city until their tab was settled. A vice cop I know in New York told me that. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, ‘they keep ’em locked up.’ One girl he knew had to turn four hundred tricks before they let her go.” She paused and looked out at the quiet neighborhood around us. “The saddest thing is that when I asked the men we caught how they felt about it all, they had no anger for the people who’d abused them. They were just humiliated at having been caught and probably getting deported. It was the shame they’d brought on their families that really got to them.”
“Are all the transients you see on their way south?” I asked after a few moments.
“It’s a mix. The same New York cop told me they have employment agencies to place illegals and legals both, all over the country, so we probably get some of those. My guess is that most of them are in a pipeline, though. Not, as I said before, that we have proof of any of that.
“The handlers don’t add up to much in numbers,” she continued. “No more than twelve at most-and while they come and go, too, they tend to be more stable, which gives us a chance to get to know them. That doesn’t mean they ever get busted, of course. We know they’re crooked only because they act that way-they shepherd what I call the worker bees, they come and go from the restaurants without paying their tabs, they drive around in expensive cars, and they basically look like enforcer types.
“Michael Vu was one of them, although he didn’t run with the others-he was flashier and a lot more arrogant, which I guess is why he drew my attention. I nailed him twice coming out of restaurants with a red envelope full of cash-red is a good-luck symbol, like a neon sign saying ‘extortion’-but the owners wouldn’t ’fess up. Everything was all smiles and politeness, and Vu went on his way both times, with the money. That’s why I filed his name with Dan-it was the only way I could get even… Pathetic.”
“If he didn’t run with the others,” I asked, “what was he then? An independent? Part of a different gang?”
She didn’t answer immediately, giving herself time to reflect. I became aware of a bird high above us in the tree, singing for all it was worth, lending an incongruously cheerful note to our conversation.
“First off,” she said finally, “I don’t think there are any independents among the crooks-not truly. Everybody’s connected-through race, through religion, family, geographical origin, you name it. You kick one hood over here, and everybody knows it from San Francisco to Hong Kong. The confusion comes because various groups freelance a lot. I hear the Vietnamese are bad that way, but they also contract out to the tongs, or to each other, or to anyone else who needs muscle, especially when cash is low. Makes it hard to pin them down, not knowing who and when, or even if, they’re tied to somebody.
“Michael Vu came out of nowhere, and until you brought him up, he’d disappeared into nowhere, but I still think somebody ran him, and I’d bet that somebody ran the guy who ran him, too. I definitely got the sense Vu called a lot of his own shots-like when he extorted those restaurants. That was pure freelance stuff. But I felt he wasn’t his own boss either-that he kept within some limits that’d been set for him.”
“Any idea why he left?”
“Nothing I could prove. Corporate shuffling, maybe. He was only here a few months, but we’d see him in phone booths and at the post office sometimes, and we followed him to a meet with some people in a motel room once-we never could get an angle on who they were. They used phony names, paid in cash, and drove a rental car. But he sure wasn’t tied to the local boys. They hung out together some, but I always sensed some hostility. We even heard tell of a shoving match between him and one of the head guys here, not long before he left.”
“You think he was in competition?”
She hedged her response. “Could be. There was no violence between him and the locals except that one time, as far as we know-but there was always that distance. Now that you mention it, given his style and the short time he was here, it’s possible Vu was testing the market, putting the squeeze on people to get a reaction and a little spare change, and then reporting back to some boss… It would fit.”