“You’re looking well, Ms. Cooper,” he said. “There was a suggestion in one of the tabloids that you’d suffered an accident since I last saw you.”
“I appreciate your concern. I’m just fine, so you might have me confused with someone else,” I said. “I’ve been out of town for a while.”
“And you, Detective Chapman,” Kwan said. “Are you working overtime? Sunday morning, so early? What brings you here? The endless saga of Wolf Savage?”
Mike was right about Kwan’s comfort level. He kept fussing with the lapel of his smoking jacket and adjusting the knot of his belt.
“Yeah, but the plot has kind of thickened since the other day, Mr. Kwan.”
The man rested his forearms on the desk. “In what way?”
“Well, let’s start with your relationship with Paul Battaglia.”
“I’d hardly call it a relationship,” Kwan said. “We were acquaintances, as I told you.”
“Then I suppose Battaglia just stopped by to get your signature on his petition,” Mike said.
“Petition? You’re not making sense, Detective.”
“You know,” Mike said, “the way politicians go door to door, collecting signatures of registered voters to get on the ballot.”
“I signed nothing.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Mike said, leaning in the moment the fumbling started again. “I was being facetious. But we know that Paul Battaglia was here with you the week before last. Ms. Cooper and I saw him walk out your front door.”
George Kwan shifted his eyes to look at me.
“We’re not fucking with you, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said. “Why was the district attorney paying you a visit?”
“Look, Chapman. I’ve got a lot on my mind. It must have been about the Savage murder. It must have been to tell me your department had identified the killer,” Kwan said. “He knew my company was trying to buy a piece of Savage.”
“Battaglia was swift, but he didn’t have a crystal ball, Mr. Kwan. For all we knew at the time the DA left this building, you could have been the killer,” Mike said. “We didn’t have half the answers on that particular afternoon.”
“Then I’m mistaken,” Kwan said.
“Press the redo button and start over.”
“Start where?”
“Where do you live, Mr. Kwan?” I asked. “What’s your home base? Is it in China?”
“Right here, Ms. Cooper. I was born and raised in New York. This is my home.”
I was surprised by that information. I knew that Kwan Enterprises was headquartered abroad. We’d learned that during the Savage investigation.
“I didn’t know you were American,” I said. “Perhaps it’s the accent that fooled me.”
“A British secondary school in Hong Kong,” Kwan said. “But I lived on Pell Street, just a couple of blocks behind your office, for most of my young life.”
Mike jumped on that fact. “Isn’t it your father, in Hong Kong, who runs the business?”
“You’ve done some of your homework, Mr. Chapman, but not all.”
“What did I miss?”
“My father was the black sheep of the family,” Kwan said. “He ran away from home—first to Los Angeles, and then east to New York, where I was born. When I was a kid, I could stand on the fire escape of our fourth-floor walk-up on Pell; I could see Paul Battaglia’s office—you know, Ms. Cooper, that huge corner office he has.”
“I know it well,” I said. “When were you last there?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, just like I expect you’re both doing,” Kwan said. “I never mentioned being in his office. But growing up on the mean streets of Chinatown in those days, all the parents used to point to that bay of windows and tell us the district attorney was waiting for us there. Kind of like the bogeyman in fairy tales.”
“Why did they threaten you?” Mike asked. “Were you a gang kid?”
Mike was going straight for the Ghost Shadows.
“The gangs were everywhere in the ’hood,” Kwan said, reaching for a cigarette. “Smoke, either of you?”
We both declined, but the cigarette holder and Dunhill lighter were two more signs of Kwan’s seemingly elegant affectations.
“You either joined one by the time you were twelve, Detective, or you would likely not have survived to become an adult.”
“So you did?”
“My mother wasn’t Asian, Chapman. She didn’t get the whole picture.”
“American?”
“Latina, from Mexico. My father met her in LA,” Kwan said. “What my mother didn’t understand was that the gangs in Chinatown were just following the traditions of ethnic crime groups that had come before them.”
Kwan inhaled, held the smoke, and blew it out slowly.
“They attacked their own before they even thought of branching out into other areas of the city, into other neighborhoods. So we were all in the danger zone—sign up to play, or become vulnerable to their reach.”
“Was your father involved?” I asked.
“You can’t really blame him,” Kwan said. “He was trying to make his own way in a country that wasn’t very friendly to immigrants who didn’t speak the language.”
“Friendlier than now, I’d bet,” Mike said.
“I’ll give you that, Detective.”
“What did he do?”
George Kwan was fidgeting with his smoking jacket again, now adjusting the cuffs. “Every ethnic group had gangs that staked out their turf,” he said. “That’s the history of mob activity in America. During Prohibition, the Jews—like Arnold Rothstein—took over smuggling liquor all over the country.”
“Narcotics too,” Mike said.
“The Mafia was next to find a way to infiltrate legitimate businesses and take over control,” Kwan said. “Construction, trucking, garbage.”
“Before they got into narcotics,” Mike said, beating the same drum.
“They denied it for a long time,” Kwan said, “but then there were the Pizza Connection convictions, in the late eighties.”
That Southern District trial was still the longest in federal prosecution history . . . more than a dozen mobsters found guilty of importing heroin and laundering the money to send back to Sicily, using pizza joints as fronts for trafficking around the metropolitan area.
“And Asians?” Mike asked.
“We always had the gambling dens in our own backyard,” Kwan said. “That’s how it started. Street gang against street gang, Chinese against Chinese neighbor, figuring to go mainstream with bigger cash cows someday, once they were powerful enough.”
“Narcotics,” Mike said, again.
“Absolutely, Detective. It was the Green Dragons first, stepping out of our world and into major crimes,” Kwan said. “They’d had enough of extorting their own people—that was petty cash to them—so they went after the drug business, citywide.”
There was a point in time, in the 1990s, that Chinese gangs controlled two-thirds of New York’s heroin-smuggling business. Even before my prosecutorial career, the newspapers had made that fact plain.
“Was your family involved?” Mike asked.
Kwan put his head back and blew smoke in the air. “I know you’ll check out everything I say, Detective—although there are probably more Kwans in the NYPD record files than there are Smiths—so, yes, some of them were involved.”