Robberies at Asian Homes on the Rise : Crime: More than 200 military-style ‘home invasions’ have been reported in California since 1988.

WESTMINSTER —  From the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, to the immigrant enclaves of Orange County and the housing tracts of the San Gabriel Valley, the method is identical.

Four or more masked men, often Southeast Asian gang members, knock on a door in an Asian neighborhood and force their way inside at gunpoint. Leaving a lookout posted outside, they systematically secure the house, herd the occupants into one room, tie them up with electrical cord, rope or duct tape, and ransack the house looking for cash, electronics and jewelry.

If the robbers think the victims are still hiding their loot, they threaten and sometimes beat one family member to force the others to talk.

The robberies are planned and executed with such military-style precision that police have dubbed them “home invasions.” More than 200 have been reported in California since 1988, and authorities believe the attacks are becoming more widespread and more violent than ever.

In Westminster, police said, bandits dunked a 2-year-old’s head in a toilet bowl until the mother handed over $500 in hidden cash. In Hayward, victims were shocked with a stun gun, and in Stockton, robbers scalded an elderly woman with boiling water. Pistol-whippings are common, and at least seven victims have been killed.

Not all of the suspects are gang members, but most seem experienced. They sometimes case homes up to two weeks before a robbery, or tail winners home from gambling clubs and then hit their houses a day or two later. Some bandits park their getaway cars around a corner to avoid identification. Most wear gloves.

Home invaders have been known to cut telephone lines and gag and strip their victims to give themselves more time to flee. One band in San Jose used CB radios to communicate with their lookout.

“They’ve become more sophisticated, more organized, and have better intelligence on who they’re hitting,” said San Francisco Police Sgt. Dan Foley.

Likewise, state and local law enforcement officials say they have stepped up their efforts to curb what many see as a national increase in activity and violence by loose-knit, highly mobile Southeast Asian gangs.

For example:

* In New Jersey, seven people were injured last month during a shoot-out at the funeral of a member of “Born to Kill,” a New York City Vietnamese street gang. Other Born to Kill members have turned up in Texas, Orange County and Los Angeles in recent months. In January, Stockton police investigating a jewelry-snatching arrested four young men sporting “BTK” tattoos only to discover that one was wanted for murder in New York, Stockton Police Sgt. Tom Gaumer said. Born to Kill members are also active in San Francisco.

* In Long Beach, six people have died since October in what Police Detective Norm Sorenson called a “blood feud” between Latino and Cambodian gangs.

“Cambodian youths were preyed upon by traditional black and Hispanic and Samoan gang members for years, and now, out of necessity . . . they’ve started copying and emulating the other street gangs,” Sorenson said.

The Cambodians have adopted the colors and tattoos of their Latino rivals, and from the Vietnamese, Sorenson said, they have learned the technique of home invasions. “I’d say we have four or five a month,” he said. “There have been rapes in our cases, and we recently had one man killed when he tried to disarm the gunman.”

* In San Jose, where 34 home invasions have been reported since November, investigators believe young gang members may have been recruited and led to at least one victim family by a former North Vietnamese Army cadre.

After a rash of incidents during the Tet Lunar New Year’s celebrations, police launched a crackdown, making 12 arrests, setting up a bilingual hot line, and asking the Asian-American community for more cooperation.

“If one of our white areas here had 30 home invasions, you’d see people at City Hall yelling or screaming, but the Vietnamese accept it as a way of life,” said one Vietnamese-American resident. “People are very scared, and also they are ashamed.”

Authorities are at a loss to explain how the home invasion phenomenon began or why the method of the crime is identical from Sydney to Stockton. They have no evidence of international crime links, and speculate that the similarities are because of international copycatting.

The stylized robberies first attracted notice in Vancouver, Canada, in the mid-1970s, when both suspects and victims were Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, said Vancouver Police Constable Bob Cooper.

“These type of (crimes) were popular in Hong Kong, which is why a lot of older traditional Chinese people will take great pains to hide their wealth, because they don’t want these things to happen at their homes,” Cooper said. “It’s a time-honored tradition.”

Beginning in the 1980s, however, most home invaders and their victims have been Vietnamese or ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, with a few Cambodians, Laotian and Hmong suspects, authorities said. Police believe information about how to commit the crimes is exchanged in pool halls, cafes or crash pads where young, tough, refugee camp survivors congregate.

There, out-of-town gangsters who won’t be recognized join local people who can identify wealthy targets, police said. Within minutes of the crime, they are gone.

“Maybe they experienced the violence that the Thai pirate inflicted on them, or maybe it’s the hardships they endured in the refugee camps, but violence is not something new to these people,” said one Asian detective who asked not to be identified.

In a suburb of Sydney where about 32,000 Asians have settled, Asian gangs were committing home invasion robberies last year at the rate of five or six a week until some perpetrators were nabbed and the incidents stopped, said Detective Senior Sgt. Warren Chambers of the New South Wales police department.

“The offenses that are committed there are no different than the offenses that you have committed in Orange County: the intimidation of families, the robberies, the violence, the tying up of family groups,” Chambers said.

As in the United States, the robbers always threaten to return if the victims contact police or testify against them, he said. In fact, however, such retaliations almost never occur, authorities say.

Asian immigrants are especially vulnerable to such crimes because many distrust banks and tend to keep valuables at home. They also share a reluctance to confide in police, an attitude often reinforced by the Western system of letting suspects out on bail.

Officials in several cities noted that suspects who make bail sometimes contact their victims and explain that they have paid the police to let them out of jail. Asian victims view this as bribery, said Chris Yoshida, an Asian crime analyst at the California Department of Justice.

“He knows he’s out on bail, but to a victim, that’s how it looks: He gave them money and he’s back on the street,” Yoshida said.

Also thwarting police efforts is the mobility of the Asian gang members, who claim no turf, regularly travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to commit crimes, and switch cities when police pressure mounts.

“It was not unusual for us to see an individual here one day, and within 24 or 48 hours get a call from the San Francisco police saying they were checking him on Grand Avenue,” said Vancouver’s Cooper.

Westminster police arrested two suspects last week in the latest of five home invasion robberies during the last month. One of the suspects was a transient, and the other was from New Orleans, said Police Detective Marcus Frank.

The robbery was typical: Five suspects armed with an Uzi assault rifle and a handgun broke into a home, held a gun to the head of a 3-year-old, rounded up and bound another child and four adults, and made off with $4,000 in cash and jewelry.

Yoshida has noticed a rise in home invasions in Sacramento and then San Jose during periods of quiet in Los Angeles. But because local police departments do not keep separate statistics on home invasion-style robberies, it is difficult to know exactly how many are taking place or to connect suspects who move across jurisdictions and states.

“It’s hard to identify a suspect by name alone,” Yoshida added. “They move their names all backwards and forwards and they use aliases and they go around without ID, so unless you (finger) print them and hold them until the prints come back, you don’t know who you’ve got.”

The state attorney general’s office has backed a bill sponsored by Assemblyman Phil Isenberg (D-Sacramento) to establish a three-year, $140,000 pilot program to help victims of the crimes and better track suspects, said Randy Rossi, chief of the Bureau of Organized Crime and Criminal Intelligence in Sacramento.

Among other things, the bill would set up a multilingual telephone hot line to encourage reporting of such crimes and other gang activity, provide victim assistance and witness protection, and create a data base on suspects.

The bill, AB 4141, is scheduled for a hearing before the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Rossi said.