Chinatown
“They do a few crimes. They get away. They do a few more. They get away. Then a murder. They’re on their way.”
It was during Frank’s latest incarceration that three young Asian men entered the Wah Mee private gambling club off Maynard Alley in Chinatown on the early morning of February 18, 1983, as Seattle’s most tragic vice-related crime began to unfold. They put on their gloves, took out their guns, and turned the day into Seattle’s worst mass murder: thirteen dead. The Wah Mee club had thrived during the tolerance policy days, when winners could take home a $1,000 pot from one of the Pai Kau and mah-jongg betting games, with the house taking its 5 percent. It continued to exist in the eighties because of a City Hall attitude to not spend much time going after Chinatown’s mostly harmless late-night gaming and bottle clubs—where members brought their own booze to be served up to them—and because the police force had few Asian members who could get in on the secretive action.
The Wah Mee (“Beautiful China”) was once called Blue Heaven, writes historian Todd Matthews. “As its [earlier] name implied, it was a place for dancing, drinking, gambling, and partying. The Wah Mee Club’s roster of members had always been a ‘who’s who’ of the Asian community....
Around the gaming tables, gamblers sat with grim faces, swapping stories while concerned with the matter at hand: winning and winning big. The Wah Mee thrived, but problematically. It endured several “rashes” of crackdowns over several decades, usually when new mayors were seeking the seat of incumbents and bringing to the forefront a gambling tolerance policy that had existed in the city of Seattle for nearly a century. The Wah Mee grew cautious of its members and began to lean more toward patronage that consisted of family associations, tight-knit circles, and select tongs—a patronage limited essentially to Chinese members who knew the management. Eventually, the Wah Mee Club went “underground.”
By 1983 security ruled. A guard sized up guests through a peephole into Maynard Alley, and another guard rechecked them as they came through a set of steel doors and down the stairs to a pastel Chinese parlor of tables, chairs, and a bar. The place was wired with a warning buzzer and panic alarm to alert mangers to intruders. Yet street thugs Willie Mak, twenty-two, and Benjamin Ng, twenty, the primary gunmen, had played at the club before and knew how to get in. On February 18, bringing along a third man, Tony Ng, twenty-six—no relation to Ben—they launched a plan to rob the fourteen people inside, mostly Chinese restaurant owners and employees. Mak and Benny Ng, at least, did not intend to leave any witnesses, and once they entered the gaming area, they raised their guns, ordered everyone onto the floor, tied each one with their hands behind them, and proceeded to shoot them all. Some waited in agony for their moment to die as the killers walked around and methodically shot each player one by one. They brought along no masks to disguise their faces, only surgical gloves to hide their fingerprints.
Tony Ng had thought it was just going to be a heist; he had originally agreed to go along to help repay a $1,000 debt he owed Mak. But the day before the shootings, Ng got the money from his girlfriend and tried to back out. He didn’t want any part of the robbery. Mak refused. Well, Ng said, he just might go to the police then. Mak fired a warning bullet into the floor, telling Ng he’d kill him—along with his family and girlfriend—if he did. “Now go home,” Mak added. “I’ll pick you up later. If you’re not home, I’m going to kill you.”
Willie Mak and Benny Ng had been a two-man Chinatown crime wave for almost a decade, starting in the seventies. Mak liked to shoot at barking dogs and fire wildly out the window from his moving car. After the massacre, it came out that the two were connected to three other murders and were involved in numerous assaults, robberies, burglaries, and rapes. Ben Ng, with an uncontrollable temper, once set his girlfriend’s cat on fire in her bathtub. He also shot and killed a seventy-one-year-old jogger, Franklin Leach, who happened to run past Ng and Mak while they were dumping a safe, taken from a burglary, in Lake Washington. The year before, 1982, two Chinese women, Lai Lau, forty-five, and her mother, Lau Chung, seventy-one, were killed by two Seattle robbers. A witness who came forward after the Wah Mee shootings said the women’s killers were Mak and Ng.
Two weeks before Wah Mee, Ben met with the leader of Hop Sing Tong Association, one of Chinatown’s many secret, but usually peaceful, societies. Within the Hop Sing, however, there was another secret society, led by a self-styled godfather. A person who attended the meeting heard the godfather make a special offer to Ng for his rite of passage from adolescence—he had just turned twenty.
“I can sell you a bulletproof vest,” the godfather said.
Ng shook his head. He didn’t need protection.
“I shoot people,” he said. “People don’t shoot me.”
At Wah Mee, with everyone hog-tied, Ng even argued with Mak over how to shoot people.
“Let me kill them with the big gun,” Ben said, referring to a large-caliber weapon they brought along. Willie said, “No. It makes too big a noise. Use the small one.” He handed over his small gun, and Ben went to work.
Not much moved them. After the Wah Mee shootings, Ben went home to bed, and Willie went bowling.
“You don’t look at the end, you start at the beginning,” then-prosecutor and later Superior Court Judge William Downing said in an interview, reflecting on the evolution of Mak and Ng from misdemeanants to mass murderers. “They do a few crimes. They get away. They do a few more. They get away. Then a murder. They’re on their way. Everything builds up to that day,” Wah Mee. “In that respect, it’s not an unusual story.”
But while thirteen would die that morning in 1983, the fourteenth victim, a man named Wai Yok Chin, sixty-one, was only wounded. Like the others around him, face down on the floor, he lay silently after the barrage of bullets, bleeding from the slugs that tore into him. Hoping he might survive, Chin concentrated on what his assailants had looked like, and in his mind began to reconstruct the crime. Once the trio left with the money, Chin stumbled out the door and was able to relate information to police that led to the arrests and—later, thanks to his testimony—the convictions of all three. He later wondered if he’d been protected by a lingering family spirit: his brother, once a bartender at Wah Mee, had died in the same room years earlier from a massive stroke. In 1993 Wai Chin died at age seventy-one. It was, his family said, from natural causes.
Mak, the ringleader and main shooter, was sentenced to death—a sentence later overturned. Like Ben Ng, he is now doing life without parole. Tony Ng, who did no shooting, was convicted of thirteen counts of first-degree robbery but acquitted of murder. That left open the possibility of parole, and three decades later, he may be on the verge of it. A small crowd showed up for his 2009 parole hearing, asking that he not be released, ever. Some talked about the alleyway as a disturbing, ongoing force in their lives. Community member John Lew said he always thinks of that long-ago scene inside whenever he passes the old club site. To him, it is a haunting blemish, “not just for the families in this room, but it’s a blemish [for] the whole Chinese community.” Others still lamented the original jury verdict that absolved him of murder.
Tony Ng’s attorney John Muenster had told the jury at his trial, “All evidence shows that, fundamentally, [Tony] is a decent person. The prosecutor seeks to brand him a murderer because he yielded to fear.” And juror Diann Fouse told reporters then, “We felt he was under duress for being in there in the first place. I believed Ng’s testimony. I don’t think he lied. That’s my gut feeling.” Members of the state Indeterminate Sentence Review Board seemed to now share some of that sentiment. In 2010 they opened a path for Ng’s release.
“It is the board’s unanimous decision,” read the ruling, “that now is the time to parole Mr. Ng to his final count,” meaning he could be reviewed for release on a regular basis starting within four years. “Mr. Ng has admitted that his participation was due to bad decisions that he made,” stated the ruling. “He is now described as a person who can ask for help and who understands the impact that his actions have had on an entire community, including his own family.”
The victims’ families, remembering the impact on them, hardly agreed. Arguably, as the jury decided, Ng’s role was mitigated by his own horror at what was happening when the shooting began. And perhaps he’d done the necessary time for the crime: thirty-some years for robbery. But “bad decisions”? It seemed a less than artful description of what happened on the Wah Mee’s killing floor and a thin rationale for Tony Ng’s possible return to society in 2014. “The sadness hidden in me all of a sudden came out, worse than a flood,” said one family member, Lin Yee Yock Wong, to the board. “I want to ask the offender, ‘Do you still dare to ask for parole and release?’ That’s a shame.”
Others said they were still shocked that nice Seattle would have such people as the Chinatown killers.
But the city has its aberrations. Take the guy who killed thirty-eight Mafioso.