O.C., HOUSTON LINKED BY CRIME : SOUTHLAND'S ASIAN-AMERICAN GANGS FIND ROUTE TO LONE STAR STATE PROFITABLE TRIP.

Byline: Gordon Dillow The Orange County Register

When investigators started looking for the Vietnamese gang member suspect who is accused of killing California Highway Patrol Officer Don J. Burt, they knew there was a better than good chance they would find him here.

The ties between criminal elements in the Orange County Asian-American community and those in this sultry Texas Gulf Coast city of 1.6 million people are strong and getting stronger.

``Gang members come here (from Orange County and other cities) to visit and do business and to hide,'' says Officer-Investigator Charles Cash of the Houston Police Department's Anti-Gang Unit.

Investigators and anti-gang experts stress that gang members represent only a minuscule percentage of the Asian-American population - less than 1 percent here in Houston, according to most estimates. But they also say that crime in Houston and crime in Westminster or Garden Grove often feature the same faces.

``A lot of the (Asian gang members) I prosecuted for home invasion and extortion had extensive California connections, both familial and business,'' says Kim Ogg, a former Houston anti-gang prosecutor who now heads the mayor's Anti-Gang Office. ``There are a lot of ties back and forth.''

``It's a two-way street,'' agrees Mike Taylor, a Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent with the multi-agency Asian Organized Crime Task Force in Houston.

``Your crooks come out here and our crooks go out there. They're very mobile. . . . it would be an unusual week if we weren't exchanging intelligence and information back and forth'' between Houston and Orange County.

Anti-gang officers here would not specifically discuss the case of Hung Thanh Mai, 25, the suspect in the Burt murder who was captured here Wednesday after investigators in Orange County found evidence linking him to the Houston area.

But anti-gang experts note that Asian gang members in both Texas and Orange County exact a heavy toll on their communities through extortion, home-invasion robberies, credit card and check fraud - and even murder.

And often, perhaps even in a majority of cases, the crimes are not reported to police by members of an isolated and sometimes insular community that has traditionally not trusted law enforcement.

The Houston area's Asian-American population is roughly equivalent to that of Orange County: about a quarter million in all, including about 80,000 Vietnamese-Americans.

In parts of southwest Houston, ``pho'' or noodle restaurants outnumber doughnut shops in the mini-malls. And on Travis Street in downtown Houston - named after the commander of that ultimate Texas shrine, the Alamo - Vietnamese music blares from the shops in the Cong Thanh Mall.

As in Orange County, many Vietnamese-Americans came here as refugees amid the great waves of immigration after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. But many others arrived here in a kind of internal migration - from California.

``A lot of Vietnamese people came here from Orange County because the living costs are so much lower,'' says Zheng Wang, professor of criminal justice at Texas Southern University and co-chairman of the Houston Mayor's Anti-Gang Advisory Board. ``So there are many ties between the two communities.''

Wang says some of those ties - the criminal ones - are maintained by what he calls the ``traveling Vietnamese gangs.''

Wang describes a kind of ``grand circuit'' of Asian-American gang crime that stretches from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Francisco to Orange County to Houston to New Orleans, with gang members skipping from city to city to commit crimes.

``That's a feature of the Vietnamese gangs - mobility,'' says Wang. ``Often the local guys will case a job - a home invasion or a restaurant robbery - and then they bring in out-of-town guys to do the crime. Then they get out of town. There's a definiBte pattern.''

It's a pattern familiar to many members of the Vietnamese community here.

``People come here from other places to hide,'' says Hoang Ngoc An, a Vietnamese writer.

Despite the notoriety of Asian-American gangs, especially in the wake of such crimes as the killing of Officer Burt, Ogg of the Mayor's Office estimates that less than 5 percent of Houston's 10,000 or so gang members are Asian-Americans.

But Wang, meanwhile, sees a disturbing trend as evidenced by Burt's murder.

``The Vietnamese gangs are becoming more violent,'' he says. ``It's a problem here. And it's a problem there.''