Also this issue: He's Seen It All Daily News photographer Elwood P. Smith celebrates 65 years of shooting the city. -Deborah Bolling

August 22-28, 2002

city beat

Silent Threat

Illustration By: bill westervelt

Korean Americans don't talk much about the gangsters in their midst.

by Brendan McGarvey

You might see her on television one day reading the news. J is a young, pretty Korean-American woman who wants to be a TV broadcaster when she graduates college.

Raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, J is the child of two hard-working immigrants from South Korea who run a successful business in Philly. Her parents work hard six days a week but their focus is on the academic and social achievements of their only daughter.

She attends a university in the Midwest. This week finds J packing up for her senior year. In a few days she'll make the drive back to school.

It seems that at the end of every summer, J finds herself reminiscing about her first college boyfriend. J met him at an on-campus party attended primarily by Asian-American undergrads. He was several years older than her. Also the child of South Korean immigrants, he was raised in the Bronx and now was studying to be an engineer.

But he had a secret. A month after J started dating him she learned that he was a member of a violent Korean-American street gang called the Korean Killers.

J wasn't particularly bothered by this. Her new boyfriend was quiet, self-confident and preppy looking -- except for the giant tattoo of a dragon arched across his back.

Many times J tried to get more information out of him about his gang connections, but he told her only that he was no longer active in the Korean Killers. "He said he was only an honorary member," J told City Paper in an interview in a Manayunk restaurant earlier this week. "He really wouldn't talk about it.

"I was curious," J explained, "about what kind of crimes he committed. I wanted to know if he was safe from his former friends in the gang. I wondered what did he have to do to get into the gang and why did he join in the first place? But he refused to talk about it."

While other Asian-American gangs like the Flying Dragons and the Viet Ching are better known, there are several powerful Korean-American mobs in the United States. They are the Korean Fuk Ching, the Green Dragons, the Korean Killers and the Korean Power, the largest Korean gang on the East Coast.

In the United States the Korean organized crime groups came into existence in the late 1970s and early '80s. Today they operate in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and in cities in Canada. They're involved in extortion, home invasions, gambling, drug trafficking and prostitution.

Some of these gangs have connections to the Japanese Yakuza and to Chinese Triads, two of Asia's largest organized crime groups. These Korean-American gangs, in some cases, have important links to Korean crime syndicates in South Korea.

In rural South Korea, young girls are often abducted from their villages by gangsters who run prostitution rings. Many of the kidnapped girls end up working for international prostitution racketeers who make millions by moving these women from Korea to the U.S. and pimping them.

The gangsters set the girls up in sham marriages with American soldiers stationed in South Korea. When the soldiers return to the States, they're paid a second fee to turn their "wives" over to Korean-American criminals who put the women to work in massage parlors and "spas" across the country.

In Philadelphia law enforcement sources have found Korean gang members involved in prostitution parlors and suspect their involvement in an international heroin trafficking syndicate which moves heroin from Hong Kong to Vancouver, and then onto Toronto and down to New York and, in some cases, Philadelphia.

Korean-American gangsters often target fellow Asian-American business owners and new refugees through "home invasion" robberies. The gangs smash their way into the homes of Asian immigrants and beat their victims until they reveal where their valuables and money are hidden. Many recent Asian immigrants keep their money at home or invest in jewelry, particularly gold.

A Korean businessman who lives in Cheltenham says, "Don't use my name because my community will be very angry that I'm speaking to you. We don't have as great a problem in Philadelphia as New York or Los Angeles does, but we've had Korean Power and Korean Killer gangs coming through here for years.

"The gangs will rob one of us but we almost never report these crimes to the police," he explains. "The Korean-language media here won't cover these crimes and our community leaders will vehemently deny it ever happens. It's embarrassing so we don't talk about it. That's our culture. If we don't talk about it, it didn't happen."

J knew there were Korean gangsters in Philadelphia. But she had never met any and no one in the Korean community in Philly was ever willing to talk much about this painful subject.

Koreans and their first-generation children normally remain part of a highly conformist society. In a culture in which a child must speak to his elders in a deferential manner, there is a sense of communal shame that some children are involved in violent gang activities.

Korean parents often choose to ignore the evidence, even when the signs are all there -- cigarette burn scars on their child's arms, or the fact that their kids are driving Hondas souped up like miniature NASCAR cars.

During winter break her freshman year, J was in New York City with her boyfriend. They were inside a nightclub on 32nd Street normally frequented by Asian Americans.

We were dancing and he says, "Let's go upstairs", J recalls. "We get to the next floor and a group of guys -- all Korean -- line up and start bowing to me and bowing to him. They were all members of the Korean Killers."

That's when J realized her boyfriend must have held a high rank in the gang.

"He was very smart at school. I realized then he must have been very smart, because he was helping run the gang. It was clear that all of the members feared and respected him. And physically he wasn't that big a guy, maybe 5-foot-6 and skinny."

J eventually broke up with him. "He was going to be graduating soon," she explains. "And I needed somebody who was going to be around for a while."

She never told her parents that her former boyfriend was a gangster. "My father would have exploded if he found out."

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