Friday, Oct. 4, 2002 | 5:03 a.m.
FIGHTING ORGANIZED CRIME is never an easy task for law enforcement authorities.
Organized criminals are sophisticated, adept at disguising their illicit activities and eager to threaten or use violence to silence their victims.
When there are cultural barriers between police and a community terrorized by criminal gangs, the job of law enforcement is even more difficult.
Such is the case facing Metro Police as it sorts out a mini-crime wave within the fast-growing Asian community.
Traditionally Asian-Americans distrust police and don't report crimes against them, hindering the ability of officers to track down the culprits.
But that may be changing.
Police won't talk about it, but in recent weeks officers have taken reports on a rash of burglaries in southwest Las Vegas at homes owned by moderately wealthy Chinese residents.
Speculation is that Asian youth gangs, which have been on the rise in the 100,000-member community, may be responsible.
Having reports of the burglaries on file with police is in itself big news given the Asian community's history of not cooperating with authorities.
The reports are allowing officers to flush out leads and hopefully identify suspects. Though officers are certain an organized criminal group is behind the thefts, they haven't determined whether any of the 45 Asian gangs operating in Las Vegas are involved.
A secret intelligence memorandum being circulated within Metro says 16 homes have been hit from June through August in the area south of Desert Inn Road and west of Rainbow Boulevard.
A cadet who speaks Mandarin Chinese discovered similarities in the burglaries while taking statements from the victims, most of whom reportedly were either from southern China or Hong Kong.
In most of the cases, passports, green cards, Social Security cards and other forms of identification were taken from the homes along with cash, jewelry and small electronic items.
Stolen passports, police say, can be valuable commodities on the black market for those looking to smuggle people into the country.
Talk of the possible involvement of Asian gangs in the burglaries has been fueled by the observations of some of the victims.
One woman scared off a young Asian man trying to break into her house through a patio door.
Real estate agent Terry Chen, whose home was hit on Aug. 23, says he recalls seeing four Asian men in their 20s sitting in a car staking out his house a couple of weeks before it was burglarized.
The thieves, Chen says, took three passports, citizenship papers, about $3,000 in cash and $10,000 worth of jewelry after they ransacked his master bedroom.
Chen believes the suspects telephoned his home several times to make sure no one was there before they struck. At least seven unidentified calls registered on his caller ID just prior to the burglary.
"Everybody's kind of scared," Chen says. "They say it's unsafe to live in the southwest area."
But Capt. Tom Conlin, who runs Metro's southwest command center, says the burglaries aren't just confined to that part of the city, which includes the rapidly expanding Chinatown district on West Spring Mountain Road.
"It's happening all over town," he says. "We're concerned, and we're trying to pin it down."
The Asian community has stepped out of character to voice its concerns, too. The subject recently surfaced at a political debate sponsored by the Asian Chamber of Commerce.
"We want to make sure the police are taking this seriously," says businessman Frank Tsou, a member of the Asian chamber's political action committee. "We're hoping we can stop it at the very beginning."
If the wave of burglaries has done nothing else, it has awakened at least some local Chinese to the benefits of cooperating with law enforcement.
Consider that a plus for police as they try to crack this case and get a better handle on crimes against local Asians.
Who knows? Maybe this will serve as an example to other ethnic groups within the Asian community who traditionally don't trust police.
Maybe these groups one day will see the value of working with authorities.
And maybe fighting organized crime within the Asian community one day won't be so difficult.
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