The Redemption of Lam Trang

Lam Trang runs a hand over his bald head, and his eyes crinkle at the corners. For a man of fifty-five, Lam is physically fit, not from time in the gym but from manual labor. His face remains youthful, though when he smiles, his bad teeth speak to a severe crack addiction in his distant past.

Lam stands on the corner of Broadway and Canal Street in New York City’s Chinatown. He appears lost in thought. Then a memory from long ago emerges from the dark chambers of his psyche to assert itself in the present moment. “It happened right here,” he says, adding, “I remember it like it was yesterday.”

It was on this section of Canal Street, thirty-six years ago, that the trajectory of Lam’s already tenuous existence took a gruesome turn for the worse. It was here, in front of what used to be a shopping mall, that Lam Trang shot and killed two men in cold blood.

Lam was nineteen years old, and an established member of Born to Kill (BTK), a Vietnamese street gang that rattled the area’s criminal underworld in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, BTK was at war with a gang known as the Flying Dragons. Near this spot, Lam had been brutally stomped by six members of the Flying Dragons. And months earlier, one of the young men he shot had beaten him over the head with a full liter bottle of Absolut Vodka until it shattered, covering Lam with broken glass, booze, and blood. They knocked him to the ground and stuck a gun in his face, saying, “If we see you around here again, we’re gonna kill you.” They left him there, unconscious. Lam remained in a coma for two days.

“I still have a knot on my head,” he says “Here … touch it.”

It feels like a burl on a tree, calcified over time.

Standing on Canal Street, pondering the homicide that ended two young lives and derailed his own, Lam takes in the full weight of his journey. He was released from prison seven years ago. He now lives in Columbus, Ohio, and doesn’t come to New York City very often. For Lam, this place is filled with disturbing memories. He has come here because I asked him to, but also in hopes of reconciling himself with the horrors of his past.

“I saw them from across the street,” Lam says, pointing to the area where he crossed Canal Street to confront his attackers. It was August 5, 1989, roughly six months since Lam had been beaten unconscious. “I was carrying two .38 snub-nosed specials, like I always did. BTK was at war with all the other gangs, so you had to be armed at all times. They saw me coming and started to run.”

Lam pulled out one of his .38s and aimed. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Canal Street was swarming with pedestrians. I asked Lam, “Weren’t you worried about all the innocent bystanders?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t care about that. It never crossed my mind. At that time, that’s the way I was. I had no conscience. I was a monster. I fired five shots. Every one of them hit the target.” Duc Ly, fifteen, and Thanh Lai, seventeen, were declared dead at the scene.

The killing of two people in broad daylight rocked the area. All of Chinatown was put on police lockdown, but Lam was able to escape. He hid out at a BTK safe house until he was supplied with false identification, after which he fled the city.

Lam spent two years on the run from police, before being captured in Stockton, California, and brought back to New York to face charges. He was imprisoned for twenty-eight years, during which he began a painful process of digging out from under a nightmarish past of drug abuse and violent crime that began when he was a child. As Lam considers his life today and ponders his future, he is consumed with a question that has occupied many great minds: Can a person who has committed acts so transgressive that he or she is deemed a danger to society ever make amends and find redemption?

My own experiences with the gang known as Born to Kill began in the early 1990s, when I began research on a book. Born to Kill: America’s Most Notorious Vietnamese Gang, and the Changing Face of Organized Crime was published in 1995 by William Morrow. I was able to tell the story of the gang from the perspective of Tinh “Timmy” Ngo, a BTK member who testified against fellow gang members at trial. Timmy’s testimony was devastating for the defendants. On March 30, 1992, eight members of BTK were convicted on charges of racketeering, robbery, extortion, and murder. After the trial, I interviewed Timmy extensively for the book. Along with telling me about his years in the gang, Timmy told me the epic saga of being sent out to sea from Vietnam as a refugee, part of a flotilla known to the world as “the Vietnamese boat people.” Timmy, who was thirteen at the time, settled in a refugee camp in Thailand and later came to the United States, living in a disastrous series of foster homes. He was part of a generation of Vietnamese youth known as trè bui dòi, “children of the dust.” They were outcasts, in some cases shunned even by members of their own communities.

I mentioned Lam Trang in the book, especially his role in the double homicide on Canal Street, but I had not yet met or interviewed him. It had been twenty-nine years since the publication of Born to Kill when, in October 2024, I was contacted by a woman who was working as a volunteer mentor in the New York State prison system. In an email, she told me she had befriended someone whose name I might recognize, someone I mention in my book. His name was Lam Trang.

She told me that in many years of doing prison outreach, she had rarely met anyone like Lam, who accepted responsibility for his crimes and was seeking to move forward with a renewed curiosity and enthusiasm for life. Intrigued, I made contact with Lam by phone. It took some convincing for Lam to agree to be interviewed; he is somewhat reclusive by nature and was not enthusiastic about reliving his past.

I admitted to Lam that I had my own reasons and regrets. Authors who focus on true crime often begin and end with the criminal exploits of their subjects. The criminal is put away in prison and discarded by society – and by the author who made them notorious and profited from the telling. If it was true that Lam Trang was engaged in a sincere effort to redeem his life, I felt I owed it to him, and to the entire group of young Vietnamese men and women I had written about, to tell the rest of his story.

Also, I told Lam, it could be inspiring for others – whether currently incarcerated or, like him, recently released into society – to learn about his trajectory from hardened gang member and longtime inmate to being a man concerned with living well and connecting with the divine.

Once Lam agreed to participate, his commitment was total. We conducted a series of interviews over the phone and eventually in person, and he connected me with other sources, including his closest gang brother from the BTK days.

Violence had been a persistent factor in Lam Trang’s life as far back as he could remember. The effects of the Vietnam War on the village where he was born – Khu Dân, in the Mekong Delta region – were cataclysmic. When the United States military fled Vietnam in 1973, the People’s Army moved in and established martial law. Families like Lam’s, which had supported the American military, now found themselves under the boot of the victorious communist regime; many adult males were forced into re-education camps. At the same time they faced the devastating effects of an American embargo, which left people starving. Children ran wild in the streets. Lam was the oldest of five kids. He tells me of an incident that occurred when he was twelve that would determine the direction of his life:

My sister came home and told me that a guy had been picking on her and beat her up. So I went out and beat this guy up. He was my age. He then went to his older brother, who was a year older than me. That guy came to get me, and I beat him up too. So they went to the oldest brother – he was fifteen. All three of them jumped me and beat me up pretty bad. I went to my uncle and told him what happened. He said, “You gotta stand up for yourself.” I said, “This guy is fifteen, I’m twelve. He’s much bigger than me. How am I gonna do it?”

Lam’s uncle showed him how to create a rudimentary weapon. They took a T-shirt and put three large grapefruits inside, wrapped them up, and then wielded it like a club. When the day came for Lam to confront the oldest brother, he improvised. Instead of grapefruits, he put three large rocks inside the shirt.

I hit the guy once in the ear area. I almost killed that kid. He fell down on the ground. He tried to crawl away bleeding all over the ground  The asphalt on the street was scraping the skin off his arms and knees. He was a mess. I walked away. When his family found him they put him on a stretcher and carried him over to my house.

At Lam’s house, when his father was told what happened, he called for Lam’s aunt to bring a bamboo broom from the kitchen. All of Lam’s siblings and cousins were there, as well as the family of the fifteen-year-old boy who had been beaten. Lam’s father made Lam bend over a piece of furniture and began beating him with the broom. “He hit me about eight times, so hard that the bamboo split into pieces.” Then he said to Lam, “Next time, you don’t fight.”

In tears, Lam shouted, “That’s not right! Look at him! He’s bigger than me!”

“Don’t talk back to me!” his father roared. He instructed the aunt to go get another bamboo broom. Young Lam didn’t wait around. He bolted from the room and out of his home.

For two weeks, he lived with friends or in the street. Eventually, his parents tracked him down and brought him back home. While Lam was gone, his parents had made the decision to send him out to sea. As Lam remembers it, “My mother was the one who told me. She said they were sending me to the United States. I had no idea what that was. In Vietnam at that time, during the embargo, we didn’t have any American movies or television or foreign newspaper. We were completely isolated. I thought maybe I was taking a trip to some other part of the country. I had no idea.”

Lam was just one of many migrants in what has been called the Vietnamese boat people crisis. From 1978 to 1983, the most intense period, more than 300,000 people fled Vietnam or were forced out by the communist government, though the crisis lasted over a decade. Thousands of people died on the South China Sea or were victimized by pirates. In refugee camps spread throughout Southeast Asia (primarily Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia) those who survived the crossing were herded into tents and other makeshift living quarters.

Along with families, thousands of unaccompanied teenage boys and girls were cast adrift. The boat journey out of Vietnam was bad, but the camps were hellish. All these years later, what Lam remembers most about the camps was that the most abusive authorities were fellow Vietnamese refugees who had been assigned to govern individual housing blocks. “They were more violent and abusive than the Indonesian military who ran the camps,” says Lam. It was a harsh lesson that Lam retained during his years in Chinatown: if those with power mistreat even their own people, it’s better to be the one inflicting pain than the one on the receiving end.

After three months at the camp in Indonesia, Lam was transferred to another camp in Singapore, where he remained for a year. After an interview with US immigration officials, he was told that he was being put on a plane and sent to the United States.

In 1984, Lam landed at Newark International Airport. “All I had was a few shirts and a pair of jeans in a plastic bag. I didn’t even have a pair of socks – I was wearing flip-flops in the middle of winter. I was just walking around, lost in the airport. I spoke very little English. Finally, a Vietnamese guy, maybe fifty years old, said to me in my language, ‘Is your name Lam Trang?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Come with me.’”

Lam was taken to a doctor for inspection and told that he had hepatitis. He was taken to the Mount Loretto Orphanage on Staten Island and put in quarantine, where he remained for three months. This was Lam’s introduction to the United States, sitting alone in quarantine staring out a window, unable to communicate with anyone.

Eventually, Lam was released. Like many other young Vietnamese immigrants, he went through a number of foster homes. In one, a Taiwanese family on Staten Island, Lam was attacked by the son of his foster parents. “He threw me on the floor one day. He took an apple and crammed it in my mouth and put his knee on my chest. When he let me back up, I went and grabbed a butcher knife. He ran. So I chased him around the neighborhood, and they called the cops on me. They handcuffed me, arrested me, and put me in jail.”

It was Lam’s first taste of incarceration. A social worker argued before a judge that since Lam was only fourteen he could not be held in an adult facility. They let him go.

By now, Lam realized there was no place for him in the mainstream world. He felt alienated from everyone and everything, isolated by language and cultural differences. He was called “gook” or “chink” or “slant eyes” by white and black kids. He had no friends.

Mug shot of Lam Trang at age nineteen. Photograph courtesy of T. J. English.

That began to change when he was put in a group home on Vanderbilt Avenue with other Asian kids his age. “There were thirteen people at the group home. We started drinking beer and smoking weed. I was the group leader. We beat up kids in the neighborhood and took their money to buy beer and weed. Soon, some guys from a gang heard about us. So they came over from Manhattan and Brooklyn to recruit us. They brought some weed and hung out. They took us out to rob some people. They said, ‘We’ve got a place over on Ninth Avenue in Brooklyn. Leave the group home, come with us.’”

For those who had survived the boats and the camps and the foster homes, it was an exciting time. They were budding hoodlums who began to coalesce around their wayward lives as “children of the dust.” For these Vietnamese youth, it felt monumental. They were taking control of their lives by forming a Vietnamese gang that would alter the landscape in Chinatown. Aged sixteen, Lam would smoke crack cocaine for the first time, beginning an addiction that he describes as turning him into a zombie.

By now, the loose collection of Vietnamese refugees who had formed a gang were calling themselves Born to Kill. One day, Lam, his friend Nicky, and two others went to a tattoo parlor on Delancey Street in Manhattan, near Chinatown. As they watched the tattooist’s needle pierce their flesh and imprint the ink into their skin, they felt empowered. They were among the first to have a BTK tattoo. Soon, everyone in the gang would have one.

Gangs in America were certainly nothing new. Irish, Italian, and Jewish street gangs had formed in many American cities in the early decades of the twentieth century, and by the late 1940s, Mexican gangs were added to the mix. Chinese gangs formed in San Francisco, New York, and other US cities in the 1960s.

What distinguished Born to Kill was its relationship to the underworld structure of Chinatown in New York. Since the late 1960s, gangs had been covertly affiliated with the business associations, or tongs, that controlled the area and ran a thriving black market of counterfeit products, mostly watches, purses, and jewelry, on Canal Street and elsewhere. The territories of Chinatown in Manhattan and more recently burgeoning Chinatowns in Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, were divided up by the various tongs. Occasionally, disputes over territory broke out and the gangs went to war, but since the early 1980s, the gangs had honored the boundaries declared by the overseers.

BTK changed all of that. They did not honor the system as it stood. They were not overseen by a tong with longstanding roots in the community. By force – through extortion, shootings, and bombings – they took over Canal Street, the center of the area’s fake merchandise business. David Thai, once he established himself as leader of this new generation of Vietnamese renegades, expanded a counterfeit watch business that, according to prosecutors, grossed millions of dollars annually.

Nicky, age sixteen, showing off his BTK tattoo. Photograph courtesy of T. J. English.

Like many of his peers, Lam not only accepted the gang’s reputation as crazy and untamable, but internalized it as a core aspect of his identity. “We liked that everyone in Chinatown was afraid of us,” he says. “It made us feel powerful, like we had to be taken seriously.”

Lam, Nicky, and their crew became one of the most feared factions in the gang. After the double homicide on Canal Street, with Lam on the run from law enforcement, Nicky became involved in one of the gang’s more notorious crimes. Along with Timmy and four other gang members, including David Thai, Nicky traveled to Doraville, Georgia, outside Atlanta, to take part in a series of robberies. Offshoots of BTK had sprung up in cities throughout the United States, including the South. It was common for New York factions of the gang to travel to buy guns and drugs, and to go on regional crime sprees. In Doraville, they had devised a plan to rob a small jewelry store located in a strip mall, a crime in which Nicky and Timmy took part.

During the robbery, one of the gang members got into a violent tussle with Odum Lim, the Cambodian store owner. Lim fought valiantly but was outnumbered; he was stabbed multiple times and shot in the head. Miraculously, he survived.

Back in New York, Nicky reunited with Lam, who had briefly returned to the city from his time on the run. During this period, Lam committed another homicide. During a street robbery in Brooklyn, when the victim resisted, Lam shot the man. He says that it was not his intention to kill the guy. The man lay in a coma for a week and then died. Once again, Lam Trang was wanted for murder.

Timmy, meanwhile, had become disgusted with the gang after the violent robbery in Doraville. He began cooperating with a joint task force of federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and detectives from the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad. As part of the investigation, Timmy wore a wire and circulated among his fellow gang members.

The gang suspected there was an informant in their midst but didn’t know who it was. Lam and Nicky decided to go on the run together. They fled by Greyhound bus to Stockton, California.

It didn’t take long for Lam and Nicky to get into trouble. In Stockton, they hooked up with a local BTK faction. One night at a pool hall, Lam, Nicky, and some gang members they were living with got into a shootout with a rival gang called the Tigers. The BTK crew was greatly outnumbered and forced to flee.

Later that night, the house where they were staying was raided by a SWAT team of local police. Lam and Nicky were apprehended and separated; they would not see each other again for many years.

Nicky was sent back to New York to face prosecution for his crimes there. Two NYPD detectives came to California to retrieve Lam, who was handcuffed and placed in a debriefing room for the detectives to question. “What gang are you in?” one of the detectives asked.

 “I’m not in a gang,” he said.

 “What about that tattoo? BTK. What does that stand for?”

“It means I like bacon, tomato, and ketchup.”

One of the detectives immediately bashed Lam over the back of his head with a phone book. Lam lurched forward, smashing into the wooden table, and fell to the ground. The two detectives commenced kicking and stomping him. “It seemed like there were more than just two guys beating me. I think they were joined by local guards or police.”

Afterward, Lam was taken to an infirmary. A shocked nurse took one look at Lam and said, “What the hell happened to him?” One of the detectives said, “He resisted.”

When Lam Trang finally, inevitably, wound up in prison, he was not afraid. He had pleaded guilty to two murder indictments, the double homicide on Canal Street and the murder in Brooklyn. He was given twenty years for one and fifteen years for the other, with the two sentences to run concurrently.

Given all that Lam had been through in his young life, prison almost seemed logical. It was yet another ring of hell. He wasn’t happy to be there, but he was incapable of caring. “I was numb,” he says. “I had no feelings. At first, I continued to get high in prison. In court and with the prison authorities, I didn’t really understand what was being said. I needed a translator for everything, and they didn’t always provide one.”

Violence had been such a persistent aspect of Lam’s life that he wasn’t surprised when it came his way in prison. Because Lam was small, others tested him constantly, thinking he was an easy mark. “That was their first mistake. I didn’t take shit from nobody, and I was a fighter.” The phone area of most facilities is where fights take place. Disputes over use of the phone lead to physical confrontations. Inmates use nearby mops and buckets as weapons. “I used the phone receiver. I would wait until someone got close to me, then I would beat them with the receiver and strangle them with the cord.”

He soon realized the futility of his actions. “Out on the street, I was a man of action, but in there, my routine was controlled by the prison. After a while, you have no choice but to look inward at yourself.” While looking inward, however, Lam still had to deal with others in the prison. In the years ahead, there would be more violence. In Auburn, a state prison in New York, he assaulted an inmate who was preying on him sexually. Lam was now 135 pounds, and this guy was big – maybe 200 pounds. Lam attacked the guy in the yard using the method that had initiated his life of violence as a twelve-year-old boy. He took a shirt and placed two sixteen-ounce metal cans of Jack Mackerel fish inside. Lam confronted the sexual predator in the yard and beat him with the makeshift weapon. “I hit him two times. All his boys ran. I kept hitting him. I knocked him out. I probably hit him thirty more times after that.”

Lam heard somebody shout, “Drop your weapon!” Then he was hit with a powerful blast of water from a fire hose that knocked him off his feet. “About five or six corrections officers swarmed over me. They used zip ties on my ankles and wrists. They dragged me from the yard all the way into the elevator, where they beat the hell out of me. They kicked me, punched me, and beat my head against the wall. Whatever they could do to me, that’s what they did. I got an even worse beating than I gave the guy in the yard. They put me in the infirmary. Again, the nurse looked at me in horror and said, ‘What the fuck happened to him?’ The sergeant said, ‘We told him to stop, and he didn’t. That’s what he gets.’”

In solitary confinement, with multiple contusions and a broken femur, Lam had his first epiphany. It was not lost on him that the weapon he had used in the yard was nearly the same as the one he had used as a child back in Vietnam. It seemed as though his life was in a never-ending loop of violence. Unless he found a way to end this pattern, nothing was going to change. It might take a while – he was in prison, after all, where physical violence occurred often – but for the first time in his life he felt a clear desire for a life free of violence.

Many years later, when Lam was in his fifteenth year of incarceration, he and Nicky serendipitously reconnected at Elmira prison. Nicky was being transferred from one facility to another and would be held at Elmira for approximately one month. The men had many opportunities to talk. Excitedly, Nicky explained to Lam that recently he had undergone a religious transformation and was “reborn.” He now followed the path of Jesus Christ and spent most of his time reading and studying the Bible.

Nicky told his friend that he had begun by reevaluating the life they had lived in the gang. “We did so many horrible things. I realized that I needed to repent for those things, accept responsibility, and ask for God’s forgiveness.”

Lam did not immediately reject what Nicky was saying. In fact, he had already begun to feel remorse. Nicky moved on to another facility, and Lam was left to ponder how his closest friend in the gang was now a born-again Christian. He was mulling this over when a fellow inmate mentioned to Lam that he might want to take a yoga class being offered in the prison. That sounded a little less demanding, and might be a step in a healthy direction.

Lam was now in his forties. When he started the yoga class, he was thinking of yoga purely in physical terms, as a way to stretch and keep himself limber. But on the first day of class, the teacher gave him some literature about the spiritual underpinnings of yoga. For the first time in his life, Lam was presented with the concepts of karma and dharma.

In Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, karma is the law of cause and effect. You do good or bad in the world, and you reap what you sow. Lam understood karma. In the underworld, “payback is a bitch” is a common saying. His whole life, cause and effect had made Lam feel like a hamster running on a wheel.

Dharma was something else: a sense of righteousness, the belief that living within a moral code leads to enlightenment. To discover a framework of moral laws and spiritual discipline blew Lam’s mind. It was a major lightbulb moment. He had been living life according to the law of karma; he needed to learn how to live according to the principles of dharma instead.

Nicky was released from prison in 2008, nearly nine years before Lam. Immediately upon his release, Nicky became actively involved in religious ministry. While living in Brooklyn, he began participating in the Vietnamese Evangelical Church in Lower Manhattan. He also became involved in Times Square Church’s prison ministry. Having spent his final few years in prison studying scripture and religious teaching, he was filled with an overwhelming desire to spread the gospel. “I really loved reading and studying God’s word,” he says. “It completely transformed my thinking. Jesus gave me a compassionate heart and love for people. He showed me how the enemy works, how he comes to steal and kill and destroy. So now when I see somebody suffering, homeless, or whatever, I see myself back when I was with the gang. When I see people hurting, I see that they are spiritually in prison. They have no idea why they do the damaging things they do.”

In 2021, Nicky heard from a friend that Lam was out of prison. He passed along his phone number and asked Lam to give him a call.

“Nicky and me, we were like brothers,” says Lam. “But when you get out of prison, you don’t want to burden those you know with your problems. I needed to take care of business first, find a place to live, a job.”

When he was released from prison, Lam lived for a time at Pastor Gary Chin’s group home in Flushing, Queens. For over twenty years, Pastor Chin, a former Chinese gang member, has presided over Prison Community Outreach, a ministry that helps inmates reintegrate into society. “Lam was a hard worker,” Chin remembers. “He had discipline. He was one of the easy ones. I appreciated having him around, because he was a positive example to the other guys.”

Working in conjunction with the US Department of Labor, Pastor Chin’s ministry placed Lam Trang in a job as a sheet metal worker. For the formerly incarcerated, everything is a test. Chin says, “A guy comes out of prison after many years, he’s totally lost. Our job is to guide them, show them how to make it.” Lam was soon making a decent living and made a down payment on his own studio apartment in Flushing.

Meanwhile, Nicky married the daughter of a pastor and moved into a house in Port Jefferson, Long Island. When Lam and Nicky finally spoke, they were overcome with emotion. Nicky chartered a fishing boat and a guide, and he and Lam went out fishing for an entire day. Out on Long Island Sound, they reconnected as brothers. Decades earlier, they had run the streets as teenage members of the notorious BTK; now they were on the far side of middle age, trying to figure out what was left for them in life.

Excitedly, Nicky filled Lam in on his evangelical work. One of the things he had been doing was traveling to Asian churches, mostly Vietnamese, and speaking about his conversion from a gangster to a follower of Jesus Christ. Lam listened carefully. He wanted to believe that he too was on a journey toward redemption, but he wasn’t sure what that would require. Nicky explained that by sharing their testimony with other people – especially young males who were facing some of the same temptations that had ensnared them when they were young – they would be doing God’s work. “There is no higher calling,” Nicky told Lam.

Lam and Nicky reunited. Photograph courtesy of Dao Tran aka “Nicky.”

Periodically over the next two years, Lam and Nicky traveled to Vietnamese churches around the Eastern United States to give testimony about their lives. They had once made these drives together to buy guns and drugs or to conduct robberies for Born to Kill. Now they were driving to speak in churches about their new life. One of the pastors introduced Lam and Nicky to his congregation by saying, “They used to be members of a gang called Born to Kill. Now they know they are born to love.”

“It takes a lot of courage for me to get up in front of people and tell my story,” says Lam. Initially, he was nervous. Usually, Nicky began with a verse from the Bible, and then Lam recounted examples from his life that supported the verse. They were a powerful duo. Young men came up to Lam afterward, mesmerized by his life story. Lam could see the power his words had with these youth who were facing the same kinds of decisions he had faced in his early years.

Lam also accompanied Pastor Chin to juvenile detention facilities in the New York area. For seven straight years, he visited detention centers on Thanksgiving Day to serve meals to young inmates and talk about his experiences as a BTK gangster who was in the process of changing his life for the better.

Giving talks to prisoners was one thing, but out on the street and on the job, Lam’s commitment to living nonviolently was often tested. He was a hard worker. For a time, he had a job installing air conditioning units in office buildings and condominiums. Surrounded mostly by whites, blacks, and Latinos, Lam kept to himself. Most of the workers were twenty or twenty-five years younger than he. Lam would often be assigned to work with a younger apprentice because of the expertise he had acquired on the job since his release from prison.

On a job site in Columbus, Ohio, where Lam has been living and working for several years, there was a foreman who seemed to have a problem with Lam. He approached Lam and asked, “What’s going on, Lam? The work is slow in your sector. I don’t want you taking it easy.”

That day, Lam was working with an apprentice who was still in training. The foreman knew this. “Really,” said Lam, “are you gonna come and lecture me about my work?”

“Yeah,” said the foreman, “because I don’t see you doing anything.”

One of the other foremen stepped in and said to the guy, “Hey, don’t talk to Lam like that. He’s doing all the work around here. Don’t mess with him.”

The guy said, “Oh, OK, my bad.” He stomped away.

Lam tells me, “You think it was over? It wasn’t. Two or three more times, the guy harassed me about my work, even though all the other foremen on that job knew I was a good worker. That guy, I don’t think he likes Asians. Finally, one day when he harassed me again, I told him, ‘You’ve known me for years now, and I’m not the slow one around here. I’m a good worker, and I never mess anything up when I work. Do you agree with what I’m saying?’ He said, ‘Lam, I know you’re good. I like you.’ I said, ‘No you don’t. Why are you bullshitting me? You talk down to me, and I don’t like it. I’m telling you now for the last time, don’t ever talk to me like that again.’”

The guy glared at Lam and walked away. “For the next month, I worked extra hard for that guy, just to show him,” says Lam. “One day, he came to me, gave me a check, and said, ‘You know, Lam, there’s no more work around here. We gotta let you go.’ I looked at him. I was angry, but I controlled myself. I took the check he gave me and, right in front of him, I tore it up into little pieces and let it fall to the ground. I took my tools and left.”

The road to enlightenment is sometimes stony. It would take Lam weeks to realize that responding the way he did, tearing up the check and walking away rather than confronting the foreman with violence, was for him a major victory.

“I knew when I first met Lam that he was committed,” says Paul de Vries, president of New York Divinity School, who for over twenty-five years has overseen workshops with ex-convicts who are trying to salvage their lives. In 2021, Lam enrolled in a class led by Dr. de Vries at a Baptist church in Manhattan. “He was conscientious and driven to do well. He was concerned about redemption. He wanted to know, with the things that he had done in his past, whether he could be worthy of forgiveness. I told him none of us is worthy, not even the saints. Saint Augustine spent his entire adult life struggling with his own sinfulness.”

For Lam, it was not merely a question of “getting right with God”; he was sure it would require going out into the world and doing good works. De Vries says, “I suspect that Lam’s feeling is that he needs to exhibit God’s love not just through prayer or understanding of scripture, but through his relationships and the way he interacts with the world around him.”

Many people think “once a criminal, always a criminal.” In their eyes, a criminal can never be trusted again. “I can never satisfy those people,” Lam says. “And so I don’t even try. For me, to make amends for the life I lived, I look inside. I am trying to prove to myself that I am worthy of love and respect. Because if you can’t love and respect yourself, how can you have it for society, or for another human being?”

These days, Lam lives with a girlfriend and with his mother in a two-bedroom apartment.

For the years he was in the BTK gang, and during most of his time in prison, his mother simply did not exist for him. She emigrated to the United States in 2008, while he was incarcerated. In 2017, on the day Lam was released from prison, she picked him up outside the prison. Lam says, “I was still mad at her. In the car I said, ‘Mom, if you hadn’t sent me away on the boat, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have had to go through all this.’ She started to cry. I felt bad about that. From that moment forward, I got over it. I forgave her.”

Today, taking care of his mother is Lam’s primary endeavor outside of his job. She fell recently and had to be hospitalized. Every day, before or after work, Lam visits her. He sits by the bed and holds her hand. Some days, he stays overnight and sleeps on the floor beside her bed. Often, his mother doesn’t even know that he is there, but he knows. “I’m not cold-blooded any more. At this point in my life, I’m doing well.”