TINH NGO may be just 22, but he has already fitted more drama than the full set of Shakespeare tragedies into his young life. It is only now that he enjoys the peace and quiet most American citizens take for granted.
Nobody knows his new name, where he lives, or what kind of job he does now that he has managed to get his life in order. Nobody, that is, except a few people in law enforcement who thank God for the day he was brought into a dingy Brooklyn jail cell in 1991.
He has always been known as Timmy, both to the thugs who christened him long ago, and to the police who used him to break one of the most vicious, violent gangs ever to operate on United States soil.
The path Timmy has travelled since his birth in war-torn South Vietnam and escape as one of countless boat people, progressing through a bloody career with New York's infamous Born To Kill gang, is not a plot from a drugstore crime novel: his journey mirrors the plight of thousands of young Vietnamese whose rootless existence in their new homeland lands them on a relentless conveyor belt to petty crime, violence and murder.
Timmy recently emerged from his witness-protection programme to tell his story to New York author T.J. English, whose new book Born To Kill delivers an action-packed account of the gang's reign of terror between 1988 and 1992. It also provides enough insight into its members' lives to remind us that gangsters, even the most vicious and murderous, are human too ... particularly, English believes, the ones who have evolved from the wreckage of the Vietnam War.
'What always interested me about Chinatown was how and why the gang problem was so persistent,' he says.