The gang that would be known throughout
Manhattan Chinatown as Born to Kill was founded by
Tho Hoang "David" Thai, who was born in
Saigon on January 30, 1956. After the
Fall of Saigon, with the help of his father, Dieu Thai, David Thai left Vietnam as a refugee in May 1975, where he then made his way to the U.S. Eventually, David Thai found himself in
Lafayette,
Indiana, where he lived in a small home for boys that was owned by the local Lutheran church, but in May 1976, with $150 in his pocket, Thai ran away from the church house and hopped on a
Greyhound bus destined for New York City. There, as a youth in New York City, Thai worked at various different jobs, ranging from being a busboy to being a dishwasher for a Manhattan restaurant, and in 1978, Thai met and married a fellow Vietnamese refugee. Struggling to provide for his new family however, Thai turned to crime, and in 1983, for a short period of time, David Thai was consigned as a member of the Vietnamese Flying Dragons, a small branch of the Flying Dragons gang, and as a gang member he occasionally committed robberies but was never caught. After a few years, Thai left the Flying Dragons and branched out on his own, establishing a budding multimillion-dollar counterfeit watch business. During the mid- to late eighties, many Vietnamese youths began arriving in New York City, and many of them, being ostracized by the Chinatown community, were homeless and lived on the fringes of the community. Using his newfound wealth, David Thai began to assist these street youths by freely offering them advice, money and a place to stay, causing many of them to feel indebted to Thai and follow him, forming the beginnings of the gang. In late 1987, law enforcement had cracked down on and weakened several of Chinatown's established gangs. The previous year, twenty-one members of the Ghost Shadows were arrested on racketeering charges. A few months later, eight members of the United Bamboo gang were arrested on similar charges, weakening Chinatown's traditional gang structure even further. With his watch business in place, Thai seized on the occasion by taking control of Canal Street, which would later become the gang's main base of operations. Using the profits from the watch enterprise, David Thai organized a meeting between him and several high-ranking members of a Vietnamese street gang that called themselves the "Canal Boys", but the gang's name would later be established as "Born to Kill" in 1988. The phrase Born to Kill was adopted from the slogan that U.S. helicopters and
soldiers had on their helmets during the
Vietnam War. During the late eighties, as the Born to Kill gang began to attract publicity and notoriety in Manhattan's Chinatown due to their criminal audacity, many smaller groups of organized Vietnamese criminals began to adopt the gang's name. This made Born to Kill a confederation of gangs, which allowed it to expand its criminal operations, exploits and territory into other cities, states, and countries such as Canada. While many these smaller gangs that had adopted the BTK's name were directly associated with the gang, other groups were not directly affiliated with the BTK, although they were identified as such by the media and some police jurisdictions. Most of the gang's members were Vietnamese youths who were sent out of their country a few years after the Saigon government had collapsed, in which afterwards they then spent months or years in refugee camps before being put into foster families. These youths then left their foster families and banded together, forming the nucleus of what would become the Born to Kill gang. During the gang's reign of Chinatown from the late eighties and early nineties, the Pho Hanoi restaurant located in the gang's turf on Canal Street served as an informal headquarters and meeting grounds for the gang. The gang's prowess is often attributed to the chaotic environment of guns and drugs in Vietnam. ==Activities==