"Amid burning incense the three men performed obeisance and spoke their vow. 'We three, Liu Pie, Kuan Yu, and Chang Fei, though of separate birth, now bind ourselves in brotherhood…We could not help our separate births, but on the self-same day we mean to die. Shining imperial Heaven, fruitful Queen Earth, witness our determination, and may god and man jointly scourge whichever of us fails his duty or forgets his obligation.'"
-- Lo Kuan-chung

The day before the heist, Willie Mak went shopping for a restaurant. He and a friend, Stanley Yuen Tse, drove to Lyndon, Washington, north of Seattle in Whatcom County. The young men eyed the restaurant but decided that it was too expensive.

Restaurant-shopping was not new for Mak. He and Tse had been considering a restaurant purchase for quite some time. But any prospective plans to purchase always fell through. One restaurant was filled with old equipment. Another restaurant was too small, and the owner wanted cash.

Later that evening, Willie Mak went to the Gim Lun Association gambling club and lost about $2,000. Broke and in debt, he then borrowed five-hundred dollars from Hong Chan, a cook at the Hong Kong restaurant.

Later that evening, at around 10:00 p.m., Mak met Tony Ng and they went to the Wah Mee Club to gamble.

Both men started with one-dollar and two-dollar bets that quickly grew to four hundred dollars bets. They lost horribly, but whether they even cared about their losses is doubtful.

They had bigger plans.

The next morning, at around 6:00 a.m., they met Benjamin Ng at a diner in South Seattle. They briefly discussed the robbery before leaving the restaurant just before 7:00 a.m.

The following night, Saturday, February 18, 1983, the three young men met in the parking lot of the Kingdome. They swapped cars with Mak's nephew and returned to Mak's residence. In the basement of the Mak residence, there was a pool table littered with guns, nylon cords, and a duffel bag. They met briefly before disembarking.

Benjamin Ng met a friend at a video arcade in the University District. He complained of a sore throat and returned to his parents' home in South Seattle, where he took some medication. He then drove his car to Chinatown, where he ate dinner with Tony Ng and an unidentified friend at the Tai Tung restaurant on South King Street. The three young men shared a booth, ate dinner together, and showed no signs of any abnormal behavior.

After dinner, Benjamin Ng, Willie Mak, and Tony Ng met briefly at the closed-for-construction Hop Sing gambling club -- just across the alley from the Wah Mee. Mak had been given a key to the club, despite the fact he had only been a member of the Hop Sing tong for less than two weeks. The three men went their separate ways and, later that evening, Mak met Tony Ng outside the Wah Mee. Both men were concealing weapons. They rang the buzzer and a security guard positioned inside the office immediately recognized the two young men.

The guard buzzed them inside.

Willie Mak and Tony Ng loitered around the Club for awhile, watching a Sonics game on the television. There was idle chatter among the patrons, the occasional laugh, and the sound of Mah Jongg tiles clicking like teeth. Tony Ng scanned the menu. He was clearly nervous. He sat down and ordered some tea. An old man offered Ng a bite of his food and they chatted a bit. There were only seven or eight people in the Club, most of who were gathered around the gaming tables. Others were tending the bar and another man was working as a guard inside the office. Mak and Ng had made it to the Club before midnight, just as they had planned, but Benjamin Ng was nowhere to be found. Mak grew angrier, seething over his accomplice's absence.

Shortly after midnight, Benjamin Ng crossed South King Street and entered Maynard Alley South. He was carrying a brown paper bag filled with a handful of pre-cut nylon cords. Ng was buzzed inside the Club and the three men got to work.

"Hands up!" Benjamin Ng yelled. The guard inside the office was held at gunpoint, so that he could identify arriving guests and admit them into the Club. Tony Ng was instructed to check the backroom. The patrons were ordered to the floor at gunpoint. The nylon cords were removed and used to hog-tie the victims. As more guests filtered into the Club, they found their friends and fellow gamblers lying on the floor. The arriving guests were ordered to the floor and hog-tied with the others. Restaurants were closing and Club members were retiring to the Wah Mee for drinks and gambling. In less than ten minutes, the number of patrons at the Club doubled.

Benjamin Ng and Tony Ng began emptying the victims' pockets. "You guys want money?" a victim told the robbers. "Take it from John Loui." Loui was one of the wealthiest victims, the manager in charge of finances and hiring at the Wah Mee Club.

"Shut up!" Mak replied, in Chinese. "You are not allowed to say anything!"

The victims didn't believe they were going to die. They thought the incident was nothing more than a robbery and the fact they had been tied up individually only helped further this belief. With the victims tied, the three men could successfully rob the Club and flee the scene without anyone following in pursuit. Or so the victims thought.

Satisfied with their lootings, Mak told Tony Ng to wait in the area between the two security doors. Ng followed Mak's instructions, carrying a bag containing more than $6,000 in cash. While Ng waited, Mak and Benjamin Ng opened fire on the Club. One by one they killed each victim, shooting up to three bullets into the head-and-neck areas of their victims. The guard in the office was shot twice. Mak stood at the top of a small set of steps that led from the bar to the gaming area, firing at the victims. More than thirty shots were fired on fourteen victims, all of the bullets making contact with the victims. The floor of the Club quickly filled with blood.

"Is that all the bullets?" one of the killers asked.

Indeed, there were no more bullets.

Satisfied that the victims were dead, Mak and Benjamin Ng met Tony Ng near the entrance.

The club reeked of alcohol, cigarette smoke, and carnage. Music poured out of a stereo, filling the room with eerie noise. The three men, fleeing the scene in a borrowed red Opal belonging to Mak's nephew, drove to the Mercer Island floating bridge. They threw the guns over the side of the bridge -- a nearly flawless disposal, except that one of the weapons didn't clear the bridge's guardrail and, instead, skidded across the shoulder of the road. They parked the car on the side of the road. Mak got out of the car and scoured the shoulder of the road, before finding the weapon and properly dropping it into Lake Washington.

Chapter Five | Your friends were killed. Help us catch the persons responsible

This story originally appeared as a serialized feature in Asian Focus newspaper