Lawrence Wu

Delinquency History: Arrested for attempted murder, fighting and other crimes relating to his involvement with an Asian gang. Spent a few days in a New York City jail cell and a brief period on probation.

It was a simple plan. Lawrence Wu would walk down a street in New York City, trying to look like an ordinary kid as he managed to hide a gun up his sleeve. If the then 15-year-old saw any members of a rival Chinatown gang, his orders were to shoot them dead, and to toss the gun into another gang's neighborhood. He would then hop a cab to Times Square where he would meet someone from his gang to smuggle him out of the city.

For an hour, he paced up and down the rival gang's territory. "I was so nervous, and I thought, I'm not standing around here for another split-second with a gun up my sleeve. I'm getting out of here." Realizing how unprepared he was for gang-assigned killing missions, he later fired off a couple of practice shots inside the gang hangout.

"My ear was shaking, and my arm nearly flew off," Wu says. "I would have been stunned by my own shot. Looking back now, I know I would have gotten caught. It was such a stupid plan."

As a student at Columbia University School of Law, Lawrence Wu knows the waiver provisions in New York State that could have changed his life forever. He knows now, kids as young as 13 who are charged with murder are automatically sent to adult criminal court in New York, and if found guilty, face long prison terms.

"I was lucky in the sense that any different set of circumstances could have led to a very different result," Wu says.

Luck, and the law, allowed him to leave his street uniform of spiked, bleached hair and black leather jackets behind him. Today, wearing neatly pressed khaki pants and a dress shirt, the 23-year-old is at the top of Columbia's academic heap. Wu is editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review, one of the most prestigious law journals in the country, and is about to embark on a career in corporate law. But he counts his blessings. "I think it is definitely true that a system of second and third chances is very important," Wu says. "I know that from my own life."

Getting to the Ivy League should have been easier for Wu. The son of Chinese immigrants who had degrees in engineering, law, and library sciences, both he and his two older brothers passed the test to gain entrance to Stuyvesant High School—one of three top New York institutions that skims the cream of the crop out of the city's public schools. While earning straight A's in elementary school, family life became "dysfunctional" in his early teens after his father left home, saddling his mother with managing the home, and raising him.

"We suddenly became lower middle class," he says. "It always seemed like we were teetering on bankruptcy." Starting in junior high, and continuing in high school, Wu's grades began to slip. He moved neighborhoods—from schools where he was the only Asian child (and often, the target of racial taunts)—to a high school where half the kids were Asian, and where joining one of the half-dozen gangs was considered an instant jump to "coolness."

A student at The Columbia University School of Law, Lawrence Wu knows the waiver provisions in New York State that could have changed his life forever. He knows now, kids as young as 13 who are charged with murder are automatically sent to adult criminal court.

"They were universally feared by everyone, and I thought, this is wild and fun, and I started hanging out with these kids," Wu says.

When he returned home with some low grades, his mother promptly kicked him out of her house, and he gradually dropped out of school, and gravitated towards the gangster life.

Lawrence Wu chose to join one of the city's many Asian gangs, and became a foot soldier for an international triad that ran gambling, prostitution, and enforcement syndicates from New York to Hong Kong. Killing missions, like the failed run, were rare events. One other time, he waited in a movie theater to execute some rival gang members, but they never showed up. Instead, Wu earned $80 a week from his Dai Lo ("big brother") to watch his territory, shake down store owners, deliver his packages ("I suspect they were drugs and guns, but I didn't ask"), and be available for fighting.

Most of the time, Wu said, the gang gambled and partied, "wasted time, and looked for trouble." Eventually, trouble found him. His first contact with court came when he was the sole gang member arrested when the police broke up a fight. "I had an injury from the day before, so I was limping away while everyone was running," he says. He was held at the police station on 23rd St. until his mother came and had him released to her custody.

While on probation, he met a juvenile probation officer who graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School—one of New York's three specialized high schools, along with Stuyvesant. "We had an instant connection, and because I was from Stuyvesant, he said there couldn't be a big problem," he says. "That was the last I heard of the charge."

He was arrested for fighting a second time in Flushing, Queens. "They never asked for ID, so I gave a false name, and put down my grandmother's address," Wu says. "I never heard of it again, and for all I know, I could have a big fine accruing."

The game he played with the law caught up with Wu when he was arrested as an accomplice in a brutal beating of someone he thought was a rival gang member. "One of my friends had a lock, put his finger through the ring, and we walloped this guy with a "fist of fury," and basically bashed his head to a pulp," he says. The injuries were so serious, the police arrested him in Chinatown and charged him with attempted murder. Not only was the charge serious, but this time Wu was arrested and held by Chinatown police—a precinct that had a reputation for being particularly brutal with the young Chinese gangs.

"It is hard to have a general rule of culpability when there are so many individual circumstances."

Before they took him to the station, Wu says the police beat him and his friend in the back of their car. "They know where to hit people without making marks: the neck, the solar plexus, and they hit you with their elbows, so they don't get marks," he says. "They knew they couldn't shut us down, so this was their way of finding equilibrium, and menacing us." He was held in a dingy, dark adult jail cell for two days with the other kids, and tells of one of the officers who handed him a cheese sandwich after rubbing it against the railing of the cell.

His mother got him a lawyer, who told him there was a chance he could go to jail for a couple of years. He was released to his mother's custody, and in the intervening weeks, the person he had beaten recovered, and did not suffer any serious long-term health consequences, and the charges were dropped.

Wu says the whole experience was a catalyst for him to leave the gang. "It scared the bejesus out of me, and my other friends started talking about going to college and stuff like that," Wu says. "It made me feel like, this gangster stuff is getting old."

However, Lawrence Wu knew, you don't just leave a gang. One built-in safeguard is that he had used a false name with his gang, and they did not know where his mother lived. At about the same time, people in his gang started getting killed, or arrested in an FBI sting operation. "A year later, there was an article showing that twenty-five high up members of the gang were sent to jail," he says. "Before that, a rival gang started this war campaign against us, and people started dying. I was lucky I got out when I did," he says.

But not lucky enough, he points out, to avoid getting beaten up by members of a rival gang at a party, even though he said he was no longer in the gang, and was dressing like "a preppy, college person," trying to blend in.

He never looked back after that. Wu moved back in with his mother, got a job as a teller at Chemical Bank, and began the process of catching up in school. He took his GED, and got accepted to Queens College, and eventually made up his lost years. "I was excited about college, and I studied hard, but I had a small English vocabulary, and I had to learn how to write again," he says. "I was reading words like 'polemic,' and I had to look up what they meant."

As he transferred to more prestigious schools, first to New York University, and then to the State University of New York at Binghamton, he wrestled with his new-found faith as a Christian. For a time, he thought of becoming a missionary, and became a youth leader in a Chinatown church and at his college.

During his time as a Christian, he began to think about the damage and pain he caused his family, particularly his mother. "I noticed how much she seemed to have aged over the nearly two years I was gone," Wu says. "It saddened me to think how the whole experience exacted a tremendous toll on my mother." His mother invited him back in, no questions asked, helping him make the transition from gang life, to school. In university, Wu's studies centered on rationalistic philosophy and biblical criticism. He found it increasingly difficult to intellectually justify his faith.

"Based on my experiences, I can say that a system of second chances is necessary."

Eventually, Wu says he found it impossible to maintain both his intellectual convictions and his traditional faith, and he "unconverted." Shortly after Wu's unconversion, he reunited with his high school sweetheart whom he dated when he was a gangster. He chose Columbia Law School over Harvard because he was certain they were going to get married and he wanted to stay close to her in New York. His decision paid off, as they got married before his second year of law school.

Lawrence Wu put in 40 to 100 hours a week as editor-in-chief of the Columbia University Law Review—one of the greatest honors a student can receive in the school. He oversaw every step of the production of one of the nation's most prestigious law journals. "I tried to see that every single piece was substantively better," he says.

When asked what he thinks of the recent spate of tough-on-crime juvenile justice legislation—laws that would have made his own reclamation more difficult—Wu soberly deliberates over the competing legal values. "I know a lot of people from the gang that I would want to see locked up," he says. "They really are irredeemable. But it is hard to have a general rule of culpability when there are so many individual circumstances. It's hard to say where the line should be drawn." He says he is hesitant to say anything on public policy unless he has enough information, and dislikes the common tendency to make rash judgments. But it doesn't take much consideration for him to reject recent Congressional plans to make juvenile records available to universities.

"It won't have a deterrent effect," Wu says. "If I'm a 14-year old kid, do I actually care that my record won't be expunged before college? The only thing it is punishment for the sake of punishment, and there are other ways to exact punishment that are more socially useful."

"I hate and despise when people just say things, without giving the matter serious thought," he says. "People have different circumstances that require some degree of individuation, and that it is terribly difficult to have a general rule, especially when it comes to exacting criminal punishment."