Trouble Hmong Us

There is a house in Bryn Mawr with a hidden room. Inside this room are stored the spoils of America’s secret wars: Chinese swords, ivory carvings from Thailand, religious relics from Tibet and Laos, American M-16s from the war in Vietnam and Kalashnikov AK-47s carried by the armies of drug warlords in what used to be called Burma.

This Bryn Mawr home belongs to an Irish-American who worked as a helicopter pilot for a CIA front company called Air America. Air America flew clandestine missions in Southeast Asia in the '60s and '70s. A neighborhood kid in Southwest Philly, this man joined the Army, learned to fly helicopters, and then went to work for Air America and other CIA front companies in the late 1950s.

The pilot says he helped secretly evacuate the Dalai Lama when Chinese troops in Tibet began targeting spiritual leaders there. The pilot also says he flew missions to North Vietnam and Laos, sometimes rescuing downed American pilots or special forces teams caught behind enemy lines in the 1960s and '70s. He heroically risked his life many times to save both soldiers and civilians.

But as much as his colleagues were impressed with the bravery of this Air America pilot, the chopper pilot himself felt that, compared with the Hmong tribesmen he encountered on his many missions, his own courage in no way resembled the fierce warrior ethos of the Hmong guerrillas.

The Hmong, an ethnic Chinese people who populate the mountainous regions of Laos, Vietnam, Burma and Thailand, were used as scouts, snipers and secret warriors by American Green Berets and other U.S. military special forces units because they were extremely brave under fire and skillful at guerrilla warfare.

But when American involvement ended in Vietnam in 1975, the Hmong were left to their own fate. Those who escaped with their families spent years in Asian refugee camps before finally being resettled in the United States.

West Philadelphia is one of the places the Hmong refugees eventually came to call home. For many Hmong families here in Philadelphia, the culture shock was overwhelming. Men renowned for their fierceness in battle in their own land felt like defeated, isolated and economically impoverished victims in this new place.

Because of this isolation from mainstream society, Asian gangs often targeted the Hmong for extortion and shakedown schemes. But the new generation of Hmong, some born in America and some born in Asian refugee camps, are acting quite differently from their parents.

Many of the younger generation of Hmong are choosing to reject their parents' culture and are embracing all things American. A significant number of West Philadelphia Hmong teenagers have adopted the hip-hop music and street slang of their predominantly African-American neighborhood.

And a small percentage of Hmong have now formed their own criminal gangs. Tired of seeing their parents' small businesses victimized by Asian thugs, primarily Vietnamese-American street gangs like the VTK, and feeling victimized themselves at school and at home by thugs -- the Hmong gangs have begun to carry weapons.

In the last year, according to police sources, there has been a significant increase in Hmong gang activity. Still, it is not anywhere on the scale of crime committed by other Asian organized-crime groups in the Delaware Valley. But what worries police is what may happen in the future.

In other parts of the country, Asian crime experts are seeing a disturbing phenomenon: Hmong gang members, along with Vietnamese-American gangsters, are being recruited into the Crips and Bloods gangs.

The Crips and the Bloods are two of the largest street gangs in the U.S. Both started on the streets of Los Angeles and are primarily composed of African-Americans, with a very small Latino and white membership.

But law enforcement agents have found evidence of Hmongs joining Bloods and Crips gangs on the West Coast and in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and central Wisconsin. And police have discovered a link between young Hmong gang members in Philadelphia and Minneapolis -- a gang associate in Philly with family ties in Minneapolis.

"In Philly," one police source told City Paper, "you could eventually see Asian and black gangs selling Southeast Asian heroin and cooperating on everything from illegal gambling rackets to prostitution rings."

"You have drug warlords in the Golden Triangle, who with the help of the United Bamboo triad, now have the ability to move heroin and other drugs from Asia to the West Coast without the middlemen. The drug lords can now sell directly to the Bloods and Crips in L.A. Eventually, some young Hmong gang member in West Philly is going to end up being the source for half the heroin in our region. That's a scary thought. And a very good possibility."

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February 27, 2003
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