Five masked young men robbed a Chinatown bus company’s office at gunpoint on Sunday afternoon, binding five people with duct tape and fleeing with thousands of dollars in cash, the police and the company’s president said.

The robbery occurred at 15 Division Street, at the offices of Golden Express Company, one of several low-cost bus lines in Chinatown that take passengers to and from Atlantic City.

The president of the company, May Chow, said the five men burst into the third-floor office shortly after 12:30 p.m.

“There were these five guys, five young fellows wearing ski masks,” Mrs. Chow said. “One of them jumped over the counter and said: ‘This is a holdup, I’m not kidding. Where is the safe?’ I told him there is no safe in the office. He said, ‘Where is the money?’ I went back and got money from my bag.”

Mrs. Chow said the robbers spotted envelopes with the weekend’s earnings and took them. “They took our sales,” she said. “Three days’ worth. We haven’t really gotten the total yet, but it’s more than $27,000.”

NEW YORK -- Sixteen people linked to Asian organized crime were arrested overnight by a task force of FBI, NYPD, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigators for allegedly extorting bus companies, WNBC.com has learned.

Law enforcement sources told WNBC.com that a federal indictment charges the individuals with various acts of violence and extortion targeting operators of bus companies which do business between New York and east coast cities.

Fifteen of the arrests took place in the New York City metropolitan area and one other person was arrested in Florida, sources said.

Details about the charges are expected to be released later today as the those arrested appear in federal court in Manhattan.

Fifteen of the arrests took place in the New York City metropolitan area and one other person was arrested in Florida, sources said.

archives 2005 » jan. 5th
IMMIGRATION
Borderline Realities

When Mexican men and women living in South Philadelphia become crime victims, they're often too afraid to tell the police.

by Kate Kilpatrick

One day in his first year in the U.S., Rubén, now 26, left his apartment at 15th and Bainbridge, where he lived with seven other men, to go to work. With the other men at work too, the house was empty all day.

When Rubén returned that evening everything was missing--the TV, VCR, PlayStation, telephone, stereo, CDs (most of them Mexican), air conditioner, bed covers and clothes. Their collective hidden savings--totaling $11,000--were gone. None of the men spoke much English, or knew where to turn for help. One of the men told his boss, a restaurant owner, who said that because they were illegal, there was nothing he could do. No one contacted the police.

This story's far from unusual. Those in South Philadelphia's Mexican community say they're the victims of countless crimes--muggings, bike thefts, robberies, armed assaults, rapes--that never get reported.

Rubén's friend Jaime, 26, sums up a common experience: "You can drive, but you can't [legally]," he says. "So most Mexicanos go for a bike. In the restaurant business you get off at 12 or 1. If you're a dishwasher, you probably get off at 2. If you live at Seventh and Tasker, or Fifth or Fourth and Morris or Dickinson, mostly that part is bad. We can't afford to pay expensive rent to live on Fitzwater or Bainbridge. So most of the Mexicanos in South Philly live in dangerous places. I know a lot of my friends were assaulted by guys trying to get their bikes. We can't get a bank account, so we keep the money in our pocket. I don't know how they know that. We keep all our money until we send it home. So a lot of people get robbed."

A fight over a Chinatown discount bus route ended in a stabbing death on Thursday night, the police said.

The victim, identified by the police as Zhen Ji Li, 31, of East Broadway, was stabbed nine times shortly after 9 p.m. at Pike and Henry Streets and was pronounced dead at the scene. The police arrested Lei Chen, 25, of Indianapolis, charging him with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon.

According to an investigator, an off-duty agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service saw the two men struggling and held Mr. Chen at gunpoint until the police arrived. The agent was not identified.

The two men involved in the episode knew each other and worked together for one of the Chinatown bus companies, the police said.

''It appears to be a dispute over money, how much was going to be remunerated, I guess, for the purchase of a bus route, a bus company,'' Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday.

The highly competitive bus companies, which carry passengers from New York's Chinatown to Chinatowns in Philadelphia, Washington, Boston and other cities, have been linked to recurring violence here. It was unclear yesterday whether the fight was connected to previous conflicts in the neighborhood.