C6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022
“Then [Lamborn] shot him.”
White’s mother, who sat in the
front of the courtroom, crumpled
after Pak described the killing and
pressed a white tissue to her eyes.
Other testimony later revealed
that Lamborn got a tattoo of
“Gravedigger” etched over one
eye after the killing.
White’s slaying was just one
high-profile act of violence con-
nected to the gang. Members were
also implicated in the 2016 killing
of George Mason University stu-
dent Hosung “Steven” Lee, al-
though not specifically charged.
Kevin Park, 27, testified that he
and his childhood friend Lee at-
tended a “Project T” party one
Saturday in April 2016 advertised
on Snapchat.
Park said it turned out the
event was a three-day drug- and
alcohol-fueled bash thrown by the
Reccless Tigers. They arrived to a
Herndon Airbnb packed with Ti-
gers and members of other gangs,
including the Asian Boyz.
Park told jurors a fight erupted.
Gang members swarmed Lee,
pushing him back through a liv-
ing room, the kitchen and then
out of the house. Park said heeventually found Lee lying on the
ground outside.
“It looked like he was beaten up
pretty badly,” Park testified.
Park told jurors he didn’t real-
ize it, but Lee had been stabbed.
Park and some friends loaded Lee
into a car and took him home.
Park testified that he put Lee in a
bed at his parents’ house and put
ointment on his friend’s face.
The next day, Park learned Lee
had died during the night.
“We were just there to mingle
with girls,” Park said. “We were
young college kids.”
Gang members testified that
the Reccless Tigers were formed
around 2010 or 2011, growing out
of small Korean American gangs
that soon diversified.
An association with Tony Le,
who was also a member of the
Asian Boyz gang, helped grow the
operation. Tony Le set up the
gang’s marijuana farm in Hayfork,
Calif., and pot was mailed back to
Virginia, according to testimony.
The gang formed a group for
prospects called “Club Tiger,”
prosecutors said. There was also a
female offshoot called “Lady T”
and another named “Tiger Side”
that operated in concert with the
Reccless Tigers, according to tes-
timony. Lamborn, representing
himself at points, described the
Tigers as affiliated with the noto-
rious California-based Crips gang.
Lamborn sidelined his attor-
neys and gave his own closing
statement, saying he did not take
part in White’s murder.
White’s killing brought the
gang under increased law en-
forcement scrutiny, and numer-
ous arrests followed. Many gang
members and associates had pre-
viously pleaded guilty to crimes
associated with the gang.
Trump described White’s deci-
sion to come forward to testify
against the Tigers as courageous
in his closing statement. Trump
said prosecutors, judges, defense
attorneys and juries can be re-
placed in the justice system, but
not witnesses.
“Without witnesses, this proc-
ess doesn’t work,” Trump told the
courtroom. “That’s the message
these defendants tried to reject.”
He added later: “Brandon White
walked into a courtroom, took an
oath and did his duty.”an upscale neighborhood mod-
eled on an English village in Rich-
mond.
Peter Le and Lamborn got out
and marched White into the
woods, Abdulkadir told jurors.
They were soon joined by Yoo.
Abdulkadir stayed behind in the
car and soon the quiet, bitterly
cold night was shattered.
“All you hear is gunshots,” Ab-
dulkadir testified.
Peter Le, Lamborn and Yoo re-
turned to the cars, but White did
not.
Some of the most dramatic tes-
timony came from one of the
original Reccless Tigers, Spencer
Pak, who provided key details
about what he was told happened
in the woods.
Pak, whose best friend was Yoo,
told the courtroom he was reluc-
tant to testify. He was required to
take the stand as part of a deal
with prosecutors in which he
pleaded guilty to drug distribu-
tion and a gun offense.
Pak relayed a conversation he
had with Yoo shortly after White’s
slaying. Yoo “said he was handed a
knife from Peter [Le] and stabbed
[White] in the back,” Pak testified.Meanwhile, prosecutors said,
Nguyen had gotten a police report
from his lawyer that made clear
White had spoken to the FBI.
Nguyen — who is serving a 14-year
prison sentence after eventually
pleading guilty to felony unlawful
wounding and drug conspiracy —
emailed his girlfriend the papers,
with instructions to get the word
out — White was a “snitch.”
Gang member Peter Le hatched
a plan to kidnap and kill White,
according to the testimony.
Fahad Abdulkadir, a gang pros-
pect, told the jury that Peter Le
gave him two options to pay off a
nearly $17,000 drug debt. Ab-
dulkadir could work on the Ti-
gers’ marijuana farm or he could
deliver Brandon White.
Abdulkadir chose the latter.
On Jan. 31, 2019, he and a child-
hood friend lured White from his
grandmother’s Falls Church home,
Abdulkadir testified. Instead of
taking White to get drugs, the pair
took him to a Giant parking lot
where gang members forced
White into a waiting vehicle.
Gang members caravanned
down I-95 in two cars. They even-
tually stopped in a roundabout insold drugs — lots of drugs,” Assis-
tant U.S. Attorney James L. Trump
told jurors in his opening state-
ment. “But they also threatened
and intimidated anyone who
crossed them.”
In August 2018, prosecutors
said, White was beaten by gang
member David Nguyen over a
drug debt. White landed in the
hospital with broken ribs and or-
bital bones.
When White was released, the
gang tried to buy his silence. They
offered to forgive his drug debt
and give him five or six thousand
dollars to dissuade him from testi-
fying against Nguyen, according
to court testimony. When White’s
girlfriend was delivering their
first child in the hospital that fall,
his cousin showed up and tried to
persuade White to take the money.
But White said his injuries cost
him $74,000 — far more than the
gang was offering. “I’m going to
testify,” he t old his cousin, accord-
ing to the testimony. “What they
did to me is not cool.”
White knew the potential cost.
He had already been talking to an
FBI agent about how the Tigers
used violence to keep enemies
quiet.
At different points, the Tigers
had thrown a Molotov cocktail
through the window of a woman
who was sleeping in her living
room and tossed another at a resi-
dence where a mother was forced
to flee her home with her young
children, prosecutors said. A third
family put their home up for sale
after Tigers firebombed it twice.
“Traumatized. I can’t even go in
public without being scared for
my life,” White wrote in one mes-
sage to the FBI agent. “I hope and
I’m more than sure I’m not the
only one in this messed up situa-
tion, just a lot of them are young
or too afraid to come forward.”
White took the stand to testify
against Nguyen at a preliminary
hearing on Nov. 19, 2018. Then he
went into rehab. When the FBI
agent offered to put him up in a
hotel for safety, White said he
would rather have the money to
buy his newborn daughter a crib.
The agent said that wasn’t possi-
ble, and the conversation ended
there. The last message he got
from White was wishing him a
merry Christmas.All four face up to life in prison
when they are sentenced Sept. 9.
F riday’s verdict comes after
years of intimidation that helped
some members of the Reccless
Tigers evade legal consequences
and allowed the gang to grow into
one of the most ambitious and
potent criminal organizations in
the D.C. region. It was ultimately a
single witness who helped initiate
their downfall.
Jurors heard witnesses de-
scribe how small-time drug deal-
ing among a group of Fairfax
County high school friends metas-
tasized into a sophisticated mari-
juana and cocaine operation that
included offshoots of the gang on
both coasts, a marijuana farm in
the hills of Northern California
and millions of dollars in revenue.
The case was the final piece of a
sweeping prosecution that has led
to nearly 30 associates of the gang
being charged in recent years. Still,
remnants of the Tigers remain ac-
tive and a prosecutor pointed out
that one member even sat in the
courtroom during part of the trial.
The gang members who were
convicted Friday — Tony Le, his
brother Peter Le, Young Yoo and
Joseph Lamborn — operated with
impunity, marketing drugs to
high-schoolers and middle-
schoolers with slick branding. Af-
filiates had business cards and
tiger-emblazoned T-shirts and
trumpeted a fast and violent life-
style on Instagram and Snapchat.
In one video played in court,
Yoo wears a Versace robe popular
with the Tigers and points an
assault rifle at the camera while
lip-syncing to a song. In others, a
gang member tosses cash in the
air at a club.
Defense attorneys argued that
their clients were falsely implicat-
ed by other gang members hoping
for lower prison sentences and
that prosecutors had failed to
prove their clients took part in
certain crimes.
The centerpiece of the nearly
four-week trial was the slaying of
21-year-old Falls Church man
Brandon White, who was killed in
2019 after trying to stand up to the
gang.
“His killing exemplified what
this gang did for a decade. They
TIGERS FROM C1
Gang members found guilty of conspiracy charges, including killing of witness
U .S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA
T he wooded area outside Richmond where Brandon White’s body was found in 2019. White had
testified against a Reccless Tigers gang member after he was beaten o ver a drug debt.Like It’s Hot.” (It is admittedly diffi-
cult to follow the song’s instruc-
tions, one rappeller said, while sus-
pended by a rope in the rain.)
But two by two, they went over
the edge anyway. Among those
who stepped up to the challenge
was Carrie Sue Geiger, 53, who
works as a case manager at New
Hope’s Mondloch House.
“I’m not an adventure seeker by
nature,” she said, a streak of purple
in her hair hidden by a blue climb-
ing helmet. “I had no intention of
rappelling, but here we are. We
raised enough money that I had to
do it.”
She was interviewing a client at
Mondloch House, a supporting
housing initiative in the Groveton
area that includes an eight-bed
shelter and 20 apartments, when
she showed him a promotional
photo from another event put on
by Over the Edge. Immediately,
the man pointed out someone inthe crowd wearing a tutu.
“You have to do the same,” he
told Geiger. So she showed up
Friday with her daughter and a
small posse of friends, all of them
decked out in sheer tutus they had
obtained for the occasion.
Up at the top of the Hilton, she
didn’t look down. She did a test
run with her harness. She was
feeling good.
Then it was her turn to take a
step back onto the ledge. Her foot
slipped, and as climbing guides
pulled her back up, she started
shaking. But Geiger thought of her
chronically homeless clients —
who struggle with substance-use
disorders, intellectual disabilities,
physical impairments, or some-
times all three.
“If they can handle everything
they have to deal with,” she
thought to herself, “I can get my-
self over the side of a building.”
Just not ever again, she added.BY TEO ARMUSTwo by two, clipped into bright
blue harnesses, the volunteers fol-
lowed the same high-wire chor-
eography: Turning their backs
against the edge of the hotel roof,
they took a step back onto the
ledge — and then, jumped off.
From down below, it looked like
something out of a heist film. Two
bodies slid down a foot at a time,
suspended in the air by a rope, as
their legs propped them up
against the 14-story concrete wall.
It was an uncommon sight for
this part of Northern Virginia. The
boxy beige buildings of Arlington’s
Crystal City neighborhood are bet-
ter known for desk-bound defense
contractors than for SWAT-style
stunts performed outside.
That, perhaps, was the point.
On Thursday and Friday, about
80 people, including two local elect-
ed officials, a Washington Post re-
porter and a member of the D.C.
Divas women’s football team,
dressed in full pads and uniform,
rappelled down the side of the Crys-
tal City Hilton to raise money and
awareness for New Hope Housing.
The Fairfax County-based or-
ganization operates homeless shel-
ters and supportive housing facili-
ties across Northern V irginia. For
months, it had been planning the
event as a way to fund services thathave become even more critical
during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Affordable housing, homeless-
ness, unhoused people isn’t some-
thing that gets the attention that it
needs,” said Jeff McKay (D), chair of
the Fairfax County Board of Super-
visors, who scaled the hotel wall in
loafers and a county-branded polo.
“If I could take a risk myself to raise
awareness about something most
people don’t think about, I have a
great responsibility to do that.”
Most of the volunteer rappellers
had to raise at least $1,000 to partic-
ipate, and they did so in style: There
was a group of family friends in
multicolor tutus. A man who wore
his harness over a white blazer thathe asked other volunteers to sign. A
petite woman in pink, flanked by
her Bible study group, said she was
ready to take the leap after God
gave her the okay.
Greg Garcia, a television pro-
ducer who has roots in Northern
Virginia, raised $30,000 after writ-
ing on Twitter that his wife Kim was
“going to push me off of a building.”
“Greg’s not a big fan of heights
but Kim is a big fan of seeing Greg
scared,” the couple wrote on their
fundraiser page. “So here we are.”
The experience is facilitated by
a Nova Scotia-based organization
called Over the Edge, which puts
on rappelling fundraisers around
North America for nonprofits. In-
side a ballroom in the hotel, they
took the volunteers through a
safety training and got them out-
fitted into harnesses.
“I’m feeling a little bit nervous,
but really it’s the cause that made
me feel, ‘I have to do this,’ ” said
Arlington County Board member
Matt de Ferranti (D), minutes before
going up. “I’m thrilled to do it, and
I’ll also be thrilled when it’s done.”
The views from the top of the
Hilton are commanding: Off to
the east, the brutalist
c oncrete-and-glass architecture
of Crystal City, punctuated by the
occasional plane taking off from
Reagan National Airport. Off to
the west was a wider view of Ar-
lington — the Air Force Memorial,
the apartment towers in Ballston,
the green tree canopy that covers
the rest of the county. Down be-
low, cars zooming past on the
highway.
From 160 feet into the air, it was
difficult to hear the small crowd on
the ground cheering and blasting —
what else? — Snoop Dogg’s “Drop ItVIRGINIA
A bold jump over the edge of a building, 160 feet up, to fight homelessness
CRAIG HUDSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Arlington County Board member Matt de Ferranti rappels from the
Crystal City Hilton’s roof for the New Hope Housing fundraiser.BY MARTIN WEILThe first week of May ended
with both a bang and a splash:
with two days of rain that trans-
formed Washington into a me-
tropolis of moisture, a principali-
ty of precipitation.
By 5 p.m. Saturday, a total of
2.21 inches of rain fell in 41 hours,
as drops and droplets fell hour
after hour, with intensities some-
times light, sometimes heavy and
sometimes only barely discern-ible. At times we seemed to wit-
ness only a slow descent of mist
from dark gray skies.
But the combination of Friday’s
inch and Saturday’s 1.21 inches
brought a watery two-day total
that exceeded any two consecu-
tive days so far this year.
Those figures sufficed to admit
Friday and Saturday to the rain
record book with a symbolic
bang.
B ut around midnight Friday, as
Saturday was about to begin,some in D.C. heard a startling
sonic bang; a sudden clap of
explosive thunder. It boomed as if
a refrigerator had toppled onto
the kitchen floor.
In the darkness of a cloud-
cloaked night, it s eemed to signal
the onset of some of the heaviest
rain of the two days.
A lmost 0.9 inches poured
down in three early Saturday
hours. Seen or unseen, it helped
stamp the past two days as the
year’s wettest such period.THE REGIONThe year’s wettest one-two punch50% Off InstallationENTRY DOORSPECIAL OFFER202-816-8808 DC301-661-3168 MD703-552-4480 VAVA #2705029456A | MHIC #46744 | DC #67000878 | NC #77474
Quality Entry Doors Installed In One Day
Professional, Highly Trained Craftsmen
Sliding Patio Doors and French Doors Available!
12 months 0% interestNO payments for 12 monthsmonthly payments as low as $59.**with approved credit.
Offer expires 5/31/22