Crime and impunity

When Ban Tsan was stabbed in a SoMa nightclub, the SF police had a chance to stop a bloody conflict in the city's Asian underworld. Instead, they did nothing

Getting away with murder

Part one of a three-part series

By A.C. Thompson

acthompson@hushmail.com

By the time he reached San Francisco General Hospital, the man could barely speak. He'd been stabbed twice, once in the chest, once in the stomach, and now, at about 3:25 on the morning of July 25, 2004, a glistening stretch of his small bowel spilled out from a puncture wound near his navel. Someone had literally gutted him.

Figuring the police would want to investigate, a hospital staffer picked up a telephone and dialed 911. On the phone, the 911 dispatcher pressed for details. "You got a name?" asked the dispatcher, according to a transcript of the conversation.

"Um. At this time, in his condition, you can barely get anything out of him," replied the hospital aide, adding that he'd been able to latch on to one key clue: The attack "took place at 6th and Harrison. I'm assuming at the, uh, night club they have there."

"OK. Is it pretty serious?"

"Uh, yeah," responded the staffer. The victim's "intestines" were "hanging out." He was suffering from "multiple stab wounds."

Allow us to move from the micro to the macro for a moment. It's not hyperbolic to say that the city and county of San Francisco is wrestling with a full-blown homicide boom. Last year 96 people died violently within this seven-by-seven-mile grid, making it the bloodiest year in a decade, statistically speaking. The body count is up from a contemporary low of 58 in 1998.

Murder stalks the city in many shapes. There have been strangulations. Bludgeonings. Knifings. At least one killer torched his victim. And there have been lots and lots of shootings.

As the daily newspapers have reported, homicide detectives are cracking only a small sliver of the cases coming their way; according to police department figures, cops made arrests in fewer than 20 percent of the slayings that occurred in 2005. As we went to print, at least 74 of last year's homicide cases remained open and unsolved. It seems you truly can get away with murder in this town.

There are plenty of ideas about improving the SFPD's ability to put the handcuffs on killers. Some think the department should do more "community policing" – in other words, cops should actively communicate with the citizenry instead of simply responding to emergency calls – especially in hardscrabble neighborhoods like Vis Valley and Bayview. Some say the department, which has a personnel shortage, including a dire lack of detectives, needs to hire more officers – fast. Some feel the SFPD and the District Attorney's Office should coax reluctant witnesses into coming forward by creating a top-notch witness protection program and offering hefty cash rewards for tips.

There's merit to each of these notions (and some of them have their flaws).

But there's another concept that hasn't yet been articulated: The cops could get off their butts and actually do their jobs. See, when it comes to the man who was disemboweled, the police seemed to have everything they needed to make an arrest. Yet when faced with this grisly – possibly lethal – crime, they inexplicably chose to do absolutely nothing.

. . .

The stabbing victim was Ban Tsan, a 25-year-old Cantonese-speaking man of Vietnamese extraction. To survey the internal damage, surgeons hurried Tsan into the operating theater, sedated and anesthetized him, and took a scalpel to his abdomen, slicing a foot-long opening in his belly. According to hospital records, they quickly determined he had a "massive evisceration of the small bowel" and a "through-and-through evisceration of the jejunum," the jejunum being a roughly eight-foot-long section of the small intestine. Then they went to work knitting his guts back together and closing the hole in his chest.

As the doctors set about saving Tsan's life, the 911 dispatcher was busy directing police to the hospital. At 3:33 a.m., computerized police logs show, the dispatcher sent out a digital message about Tsan's stabbing, including key facts: He was at General, he'd been knifed at "6th/Harrison at a club," and he was suffering from "very serious wounds."

By 3:34, beat cops Steve Bacolot and Victor Arrebollo were on their way to the emergency room. When they got there, they found that Tsan was already in surgery and wouldn't be available to talk to them for some time. Nobody at the facility could tell them much about the incident, so they left the building – and, according to police logs, promptly closed the case.

Last April, Bacolot, an 11-year veteran, was asked in court to explain the extent of the probe into Tsan's stabbing. His statements were stupefying.

"Well," Bacolot told the court, "we went into the emergency room, asked for the stabbing victim that came in.... My partner spoke to a doctor and he said the guy was in surgery, so there was nobody to talk to."

Charles Bourdon, a lawyer for Tsan, questioned the cop. "OK. And you understood at that time that this was a very serious wound and that the person was in need of immediate surgical assistance?" he asked.

"If he was in surgery, I guess, yeah," Bacolot replied.

Bourdon, a seasoned attorney who handles everything from high-profile bank robberies to disputes over fruit shipments, wanted to know if Bacolot had arranged to send officers to the site of the attack – the dance club Ten 15 Folsom, which despite early confusion on the part of the hospital staffer, is near the junction of Seventh and Folsom Streets – to interview witnesses and collect evidence.

"I don't recall any arrangements [being] made," Bacolot said.

"Do you know of anybody who did make arrangements to secure the crime scene?"

"No, sir."

"Did you do anything to follow up a day or two or sometime later when Mr. Tsan was still in the hospital recovering from these stab wounds?"

"No."

"Did you make any arrangements for other officers to follow up and come back later to take a statement from Mr. Ban Tsan?"

"No."

In fact, Bacolot admitted, he and his partner hadn't felt it necessary to write up a police report, even though they were clearly dealing with an attempted homicide – and there was no guarantee Tsan would live. The initial inquiry into his evisceration lasted exactly one hour and 16 minutes.

Thanks to the talents of the surgery squad, Tsan did survive, and four days after the stabbing, his girlfriend, Safia Bubakar, called the police from Tsan's hospital room. This time two different cops came out and interviewed Tsan, but once again, the officers, for some reason, didn't bother creating a written report. Not surprisingly, there's been no progress in the case.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Bourdon in an interview, noting that Tsan, unlike many crime victims, provided the cops with details about the assailants and their motives, as well as the names of witnesses who saw the crime. "The police have just done nothing. It's appalling."

At the SFPD, spokesperson Neville Gittens, a sergeant, indicated police brass were investigating any possible snafus. "We do take these situations seriously, and we're looking into it to make sure this doesn't happen again," Gittens told the Bay Guardian.

. . .

If police had bothered to look into the case at all, they would've found a simmering underworld drama featuring guns, a machete, a reputed bookie, a purported hit man, multiple allegations of extortion, and the whiff of organized crime. In short, there was an abundance of grime and a wealth of suspects – and if they'd decided to act, they might've been able to stem further carnage.

It all goes back to October 2003, when Tsan, a trim, muscular guy with a huge dragon inked on his shoulder, got into a very heated dispute with a man named Jeremy Lee.

Lee, 35, owns a joint called the Maze Cafe and Bar, on Geary Boulevard in the Richmond District. One October night around midnight, Lee says, Tsan and two associates showed up at the bar, pushed him into the men's bathroom, and stuck a semiautomatic handgun in his face. Supposedly they wanted $20,000. Lee says they took his wallet, pocketed the cash and cards, and vowed to return the following night to collect the rest of the money.

When Tsan and company returned, they walked right into a trap: SFPD was waiting. For his alleged role in the supposed shakedown, Tsan got hit with a pile of felony charges, including armed robbery, extortion, grand theft, and burglary. All total, the trio allegedly heisted more than $3,500.

But Bourdon believes Lee may be more than a simple bar proprietor – in court he peppered him with a series of questions suggesting Lee may have a sideline business as a bookmaker.

Bourdon maintains the beef between Tsan and Lee got ugly when Tsan came looking to collect a $10,000 gambling debt Lee refused to pay. Tsan has pleaded not guilty in the case.

Under oath, Lee has denied any involvement in illicit betting, and in an interview he told us, "I have nothing to do with gambling." But he's not exactly an angel: Cops in 2002 arrested Lee at the Maze, charged him with criminal conspiracy and extortion, and set his bail at $20,000; they also detained eight of his employees. The raid was carried out by members of the elite Violent Crimes Task Force, acting on evidence that Lee and a male associate were terrorizing another man of Chinese descent, police reports indicate. The duo allegedly demanded $20,000 to clear up a personal dispute, telling the victim to pay up "or else something may happen."

According to a police report, Lee's associate informed the victim that he'd "hired 3 people who had followed [the victim] and his family around for the past 3 months. He stated that he knew the daily routine of [the victim's son] and that something could happen to him." Through a Cantonese-speaking translator, the victim told the task force that Lee's associate was a "gang member" with the resources to carry out his threats.

A year later Lee pleaded to a misdemeanor charge for vandalism – for trashing the victim's house – while his associate was convicted of extortion.

. . .

Back to the hostility between Tsan and Lee.

About nine months after he was busted for extortion, Tsan was at Ten 15 Folsom when, he says, he was approached by two very dangerous men affiliated with an Asian crime syndicate, who told him to "quit fucking with Maze" and proceeded to punch knives into his torso.

If that's true, it suggests the stabbing wasn't some random assault. It looks more like a targeted assassination attempt.

Tsan – who gave Bourdon permission to relate his account to us – said he could ID the hit men, and passed their names on to the police during their second visit to the hospital and, later, to his lawyer.

We dug up a bunch of intriguing information on one of these alleged assassins, a man we'll call Mr. X. For starters, Mr. X was popped by the police in 1998 for brandishing a machete and illegally possessing a concealed, loaded firearm. He allegedly used the machete to intimidate three Latino men near a gym on Gellert Boulevard in Daly City, which led to an indictment for exhibiting a deadly weapon in a "rude, angry, or threatening manner," as well as two gun charges, according to court records.

X pled to one weapons charge, paid a small fine, and was cut loose.

We spoke with a well-placed source with an extensive knowledge of the Asian criminal rackets who said, "I know [X] from the streets. He's really fucking crazy. He shoots people all the time." In an interview, the source, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, linked X to a series of gruesome murders and attempted murders, including another, more recent, stabbing at Ten 15 Folsom (one guy got stuck in the face; another took it in the chest) and a triple shooting in 2000 in front of the San Francisco bar Attitudes, a massacre that left two men dead. All of the cases remain unsolved.

Our source says X is deeply involved in the drug trade, moving coke, weed, and ecstasy, as well as collecting debts and carrying out orders for bigger mobsters. "What can you do with this guy? You either kill him, or wait for him to kill you," he said.

We followed up on these leads with a law enforcement source. This person, an expert on Asian gangs, is well aware of X and believes he's heavily involved in the drug business. "He's definitely involved in organized crime. Without a doubt," says this source.

Asked in court in October whether he was familiar with X, Lee offered an ambiguous, equivocal answer.

"Yes, I ..." he replied. "Not really. Not really." But he did acknowledge that X and the other alleged hit man named by Tsan patronized his bar on occasion.

When we interviewed Lee, he insisted he wasn't connected in any way to the hit on Tsan, whom he portrayed as a "gangster." "I have never wanted to hurt anybody like that," Lee told us. Tsan's story, he said, "is just nonsense. It's all bullshit."

. . .

Late last year, after a deluge of letters from Bourdon to police chief Heather Fong – one sample comment: "It seems virtually nothing has been done to bring the perpetrators to justice" – the SFPD finally did something about the gutting of Ban Tsan. The department sent a detective, James Hill, to question him. However, by this time, a year and a half after the stabbing, things in Tsan's life had changed quite dramatically.

See, these days Tsan's residing at the county jail. He himself now faces attempted murder charges – charges he adamantly refutes. The police theory is this: Tsan settled his feud with Lee in September 2004 by unloading a handgun into his stomach while Lee, driving home from the Maze at about 2 in the morning, sat at a stoplight in his idling BMW X5.

Blood draining from his innards, Lee sped to the Taraval Police Station, where the cops for once actually asked the simple question: Whodunnit?

As for the noninvestigation of Tsan's stabbing, Bourdon has some theories of his own. Maybe, he muses, the perps have "connections" within the ranks of law enforcement. Or perhaps the cops don't particularly care about Tsan 'cause they've pegged him for a stone-faced thug. "I think they figure Ban Tsan is an underworld figure and he got what was coming to him," Bourdon speculates. "So they're not going to bother to investigate. They're not treating Ban Tsan like they'd treat any other citizen."

Let's hope we're dealing with an isolated incident, since it's more than a little worrisome to think the cops are in the habit of jettisoning violent felony cases, the kind of cases that could well lead to more bloodshed. But with the homicide rate verging on triple digits – and so many of the killers going unpunished – you have to wonder.