Law enforcement agencies band together to fight rising triad menace

COMPARE Manhattan's Chinatown today to what it looked like only a decade ago, and there are some startling changes. What used to be a compact area centred on a few blocks around downtown Mott Street has mushroomed.

Chinese restaurants, warehouses, and hardware stores have spread stealthily into the old Jewish areas of the Lower East Side and the trendy gallery district of Soho, and even muscled in on the old Mafia domain of Little Italy.

And that is just Manhattan. Thriving Chinatowns have also sprung up in Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey.

The number of undocumented illegal immigrants makes it impossible for the United States authorities to even calculate how many tens of thousands live in these communities. And while old New Yorkers look on with their usual jaded cynicism at the expansionof legitimate Chinese business, they shake their heads each time the local headlines relay more news of its sinister undercurrent - the explosion of Asian gang crime.

As recently as five or six years ago, US law enforcement officials would have been the first to admit they had little knowledge of how the gangs operated, nor insight into how to stamp them out. Chinese gangs took control of heroin trafficking from the Mob; street murders were commonplace; extortion of businesses as rife as it is on the streets of Tuen Mun. Sweatshops and massage parlours were crammed with indentured labour from China, fresh off the boat or plane.

But slowly, steadily, the authorities are beginning to fight back - and 1993 has finally begun to see the tide turning. No one will claim the wave of Asian crime can ever be stopped, but the signs are there it can be slowed. New York's jails are crammed with triad members awaiting trial for the full range of felonies, after a series of operations dealt swinging blows to some of the most prominent gangs in town.