SPDWah Mee’s killing floorMemories of the Wah Mee massacre seem to have faded, except in Chinatown. They still remember street thugs Willie Mak, 22, Benjamin Ng, 20, the primary gunmen, and third man Tony Ng, 26. They came into the basement gambling den off Maynard Alley early on the morning of Feb. 19, 1983, to rob the 14 people inside. Mak and Benny Ng also intended not to leave any witnesses, and after hog-tying everyone, shot them all. It wasn’t impulsive: They brought no masks to disguise their faces, only surgical gloves to hide their fingerprints.Mak and Benny Ng are in for life today. But Tony, 54, according to a state sentencing-review board, could be out within five. After more than 30 years in stir, he will be ready to live with the public again. He made “bad decisions,” the board says in its ruling from last week that could lead to Ng’s possible release in 2014. “He is now described as a person who can ask for help.” You know – like the people who were asking for help as they lay awaiting one-by-one execution on the floor of the Wah Mee, once known as the Blue Heaven.Nonetheless, Tony Ng was different from Benny Ng (no relation) and Mak, who liked guns and loved using them. They gambled at Wah Mee where mostly Chinese restaurant owners and employees illegally waged thousands in cash nightly over Pai Kau and mah-jongg, complicated games of tiles. The two were connected to other murders and were involved in numerous assaults, robberies, burglaries and rapes. It was the same old story: a couple guys already on the police radar who continued to run amok.Tony Ng, who did no shooting, was convicted of 13 counts of first-degree robbery. While three decades in prison arguably seems time enough, the question for some is how you separate the man from the slaughter. In his 1997 book Wah Mee, Todd Matthews reiterates the point that Tony, who owed Mak $1,000, was threatened with death if he didn’t join in what he thought was only a heist.Less than twenty-four hours before the killings, Ng borrowed $1,000 from his girlfriend and took the money to Mak. He wanted out and hinted that he was going to let the police know what Mak had in mind for the Wah Mee Club. The two men went to the Mak residence and met in an adjacent storage shed. Ng offered the money to Mak, but it was refused. Mak pulled a gun from the back of his belt and fired a bullet at the floor, barely missing Ng’s feet. “You know too much already,” Mak said, “You got to go. If you tell the police, I’ll kill you. If you back out now, I’ll shoot you, your family, your girlfriend, and burn down your parents’ restaurant. Now go home. I’ll pick you up later. If you’re not home, I’m going to kill you.” As Tony Eng’s attorney John Meunster told the jury at his trial, “All evidence shows that, fundamentally, [Tony] is a decent person. The prosecutor seeks to brand him a murderer because he yielded to fear.” And as author Matthews notes, the jury, after two weeks of testimony and thirteen hours of deliberation, acquitted Ng of the murders and convicted him of robbery and second-degree assault. Why? Juror Diann Fouse told reporters, “We felt he was under duress for being in there in the first place. I believed Ng’s testimony. I don’t think he lied. That’s my gut feeling.”Conversely, “I can’t believe we attended the same trial,” said Jeannie Robertson, the sister of one of the victims, after the verdict. “It’s an unspeakable insult. It’s outrageous. He acted in concert with the two other defendants. If the jury bought that duress garbage, then they should have acquitted him of all charges. It’s ludicrous.” The sentiment was similar at a 2009 parole hearing for Ng, where community member John Lew said he always thinks of that long-ago scene inside whenever he passes the old Wah Mee site. To him, it is a haunting blemish, “not just for the families in this room, but it’s a blemish [for] the whole Chinese community.” So it comes down to proximity – how close one is to the story. If Ng is released, it will be justice or travesty depending on your distance. No one, however, is likely to forget the hero of the tale – the fourteenth victim. Thirteen died that morning but a man named Wai Yok Chin, 61, was only wounded. Like the others around him, bound with nylon cord, face down on the floor, he laid silently after the barrage of bullets, bleeding from the slugs that tore into him. Hoping he might live, he concentrated on what his assailants had looked like, and in his mind began to reconstruct the crime.

Once the trio left with the money, Chin stumbled out the door and was able to relate information to police that led to the arrests and – thanks to his court testimony – the convictions of all three. He later wondered if he’d been protected by a lingering family spirit: His brother, once a bartender at the Wah Mee, had died in the same room years earlier from a massive stroke. In 1993, Wai Chin died at age 71. It was, his family said, from natural causes.