More than three decades have passed since Boston’s infamous Chinatown Massacre and the FBI is willing to pay good money to catch the third and final killer.
In the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 12, 1991, five men were shot in the head — “execution-style,” the FBI would later call it — around a card table in a cramped, three-bedroom apartment located at 85 Tyler St. in Boston’s Chinatown, according to contemporary Boston Herald reporting. Another man was left critically wounded but would survive.
Police would discover the bodies of Chinatown locals Chung Wah Son, 58, Cuong Khang Luu, 26, and Man Cheung, 55, as well as the bodies of David Quang Lam, 32, who split his time between Dorchester and New York, and Van Tran, 21, of Boca Raton, Fla., among the detritus of the underground gaming hall operated by the Ping On “tong” — or gang — as well as some $200 in odd small bills, the Herald reported then.
None of the victims appeared to be robbed, so authorities figured pretty quickly that the hits had gone down as part of a power struggle between the area’s gangs and pretty quickly fingered three local thugs for the job: Warrants were issued for Siny “Toothless Wah” Van Tram, who lived up the block, Nam “Johnny” The Tram, and Hung Tien Pham, three men in their early 30s that police identified as associated with the Ping On, six days after the killings.
Despite reports coming in from all over following a May 3, 1991, airing of the case on “America’s Most Wanted,” Siny Van Tram and Nam The Tram kept on the run for more than a decade before they were finally arrested in China and then convicted of murder in 2005. They’re each serving five consecutive life sentences in prison.
But Hung Tien Pham is still on the loose, and the FBI is dangling a $30,000 reward for information leading to his capture and conviction. He was indicted ahead of the arrest warrant by a Suffolk Superior Court grand jury on five counts of murder, one count of armed assault with intent to murder, one count of conspiracy and one count of carrying a firearm without a license.
Hung was 31 years old when authorities say he participated in the killings. The FBI describes him in a wanted poster as 63 years old, born in North Vietnam, about 5-foot-2 to 5-foot-4, 115 to 135 pounds, and able to speak Vietnamese, Chinese and English. They add that he has at times been employed as a cook, waiter, bicycle repairman and a floor sander.
The FBI added that they believe he fled Boston to New York City following the massacre and there boarded a flight to Hong Kong that Feb. 1. The federal court in Boston issued a warrant for his arrest on Feb. 15, 1991, charging him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
The FBI asks that anyone with any information contact their nearest FBI field office or embassy or consulate or call the toll-free tip line at 1-800-CALL-FBI (225-5324).
In the 1980s, the Ping On had a chokehold on Chinatown’s criminal underground, the Herald reported. But then the local leader, Stephen Tse of Quincy, moved to Hong Kong and never returned. His right-hand man Michael Kwong kept things going for a little while before he was murdered in August of 1989.
“I thought the Ping On, with Michael Kwong’s death,” William Moy, then-moderator of the Chinatown neighborhood council said following the massacre, “that those days were behind us.”
Police told the media then that they had intelligence that new gangs were vying for power in Chinatown. The Herald reported that street sources were saying the new gang in town was “made up of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who are more violent, better armed, and show little taste for the rules which governed the older groups.”
“(The old gangs) got eliminated and they couldn’t control the young blood coming in,” one source told the Herald.
Herald file photo
Boston Police remove the body of one of the victims of the Chinatown Massacre on Jan. 12, 1991, at 85 Tyler St. in Boston’s Chinatown. (Herald file photo)
