When bullets rang out this month in his Chinatown nightclub, Richie Ceng immediately hit the floor - a razor-sharp reflex from a lifetime of violence.
The crack of a .40-caliber gun and the flash of a muzzle were familiar to Ceng, as familiar as murder and robbery and his own nickname - Airplane - from a youth spent running a crew for a notorious Chinatown gang, the Ghost Shadows.
"That is in the past for me now," insisted Ceng, 29, who runs Yello, a Mulberry St. hot spot for Asian celebrities and jet-setters.
"Those are the old days. It feels good to be straight now."
But NYPD Asian gang experts - including detectives who have watched Ceng's rap sheet grow to more than a dozen arrests since he was 14 - are still keeping a close eye on him.
"The idea that Airplane is now running a club as a silent partner is frightening," said one NYPD gang expert. "This is a guy who did time for murder, an organized crime leader."
Cops have been flooding Yello looking for the shooter who opened fire in the club Nov. 9. A confrontation between hip hop star Jin and aspiring rapper Raymond Yu ended with a bullet in Jin's friend Christopher Louie, 23, who survived the attack...
...Yello opened after Ceng was released from federal prison in 2001, having served five years for setting up the 1996 robbery of a Chinatown man who was trafficking in illegal food stamps. The job went horribly wrong when the target's 17-year-old son put up a fight and was shot dead...
Posted by jsmooth995 at November 30, 2003 11:27 PM
