The Mug Book

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0:45Julie Ha:New habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working it. Zootopia 2. Now available on Disney+. Rated PG. On June 3rd, 1973, a gang leader named Yip-Yi Tak was gunned down at a very busy intersection in Chinatown. Julie Ha is a journalist and a filmmaker. This murder was actually witnessed by probably dozens and dozens of people. When police arrived, they found a.38 caliber revolver. But they couldn't find any witnesses. Julie Ha says the locals in San Francisco's Chinatown were too afraid of gang retaliation to speak with the police.

1:37Julie Ha:There were more than a dozen unsolved murders in Chinatown attributed to gang warfare. It started to become actually quite a serious problem for the city of San Francisco because tourism in Chinatown was really like a main lifeblood of San Francisco's revenue. The police interviewed the only people willing to talk. The police were only able to get these white tourists who saw the killer for mere seconds from quite a distance away to come down to the station and look through mug books. Mug books full of photographs of Asian men. The white tourists were asked to point out anyone who looked like the shooter.

2:19Julie Ha:A couple of people stopped on the same photo of a young Korean man. His name was Chol Su Lee. Chol Su Lee was involved in a gun accident at his place the day before the murder. According to the police, Chol Su Lee had accidentally fired a gun in his apartment, and they questioned him about it. When police looked at the type of gun, it was a.38 caliber revolver. They did a ballistics test on the bullet from his apartment. When their ballistics expert did a test, they said it was a match, that the bullet that Chol Su Lee fired from his gun came from the murder weapon. Chol Su Lee was charged with first-degree murder.

3:05Julie Ha:An all-white jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. When the verdict was read, a reporter from the Sacramento Union wrote that Chol Su Lee, quote, Spat at the prosecutor and lunged toward him as jurors were filing out of the courtroom. Later, after he was restrained and put in a holding cell, that same newspaper reporter described Chol Suli as having tears welling in his eyes. Chol Suli insisted he was innocent, but no one believed him for years. Until a journalist heard about his story and wrote an article that would change both of their lives. This story comes from our friends at Side Door, a history podcast from the Smithsonian.

3:52Julie Ha:I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

4:01Julie Ha:Here's Side Door's host, Lizzie Peabody. It was a lazy summer afternoon in 1973 when Ronko Yamada was killing time at her friend's apartment. She was lying on the floor, flipping through the San Francisco Chronicle, when she saw an article that snapped her out of her summer haze. There was an article about all the killings in Chinatown, all the people arrested. And this person named Chol Soo Lee had been arrested for murder. Ronko knew Chol Soo Lee as the Korean kid hanging around her sister's jewelry shop in San Francisco's Japantown. He was sweet, and they were friends. But she knew him as Charles Lee.

4:43And I thought, this sounds like a Korean name. Is this the Charles that I know? So she made a few calls and confirmed that yes, Charles Lee was in fact Chol Soo Lee. And he was being charged with murder. I really didn't think that he had done this. But I wasn't 100%. I didn't know. Ronko did know one thing for sure, though. Cholsue could not afford a defense attorney. Ronko was a college student, so she couldn't afford one either. But she figured she could at least support her friend during his trial. So she drove to the courthouse in Sacramento. And while she was sitting there, in the courtroom, a young Chinese man approached her.

5:31And he was from Chinatown, San Francisco. And he said, you know, Cholsue didn't do that. and he knew who had killed Yip Yee-Talk. He said, we all know that Chol-Soo didn't do that murder. That was the first time that someone told me that he was actually innocent.

5:59Three years later, in 1977, a journalist named K.W. Lee caught wind of Chol-Soo's story. He was talking to a social worker in Chinatown named Tom Kim, when Tom happened to mention... He was really saddened by the fact that there was this young Korean immigrant who was in prison for a crime that he didn't commit. Sojin Kim is a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. This social worker felt like he hadn't had the means to be able to do anything to help or support him. KW was working as an investigative reporter for the Sacramento Union, the largest paper in California's capital.

6:41And he could tell right away that something smelled fishy. And I followed the smell. And things shouted at me. KW said that the first thing that failed his sniff test was the court record. The arresting officer, while he was on the stand, kept referring to Chol Su Li as Chinese. Calling a Korean a Chinese. Anybody who has a smattering, you know, of understanding Asian culture would find it, you know, very unreal. Cholsu Lee's story resonated with K.W. Lee, who both have the same last name because they both immigrated from Korea. K.W. was a generation older, though. And before we go any further, there's something you need to know about K.W.

7:27He's a character. He cursed every other word. I was like, wow, I didn't realize you could use the F word in so many different parts of speech. KW is one of those people you remember meeting. The first time I saw him in person was at a community forum that was held in the L.A. Times building in downtown Los Angeles. Sojin is one of KW's unofficial biographers. And K.W. got up there and were like foaming at the mouth and like yelling. And I was at the back of the room and I could see like the saliva like gathering at the sides of his mouth as he yelled into the mic. K.W. had a reputation for absolutely hating corruption and wrongdoing.

8:12For him, it was personal. See, K.W. Lee had left Korea for the United States in 1950. His full name is actually Kyung Won Lee, and he was born in 1928. And he first, he comes to the United States as a student to study after World War II and right on literally the eve of the Korean conflict. KW despised the political corruption that had taken hold in his native South Korea. His plan was to get a degree in the United States and then return to Korea to speak out against authoritarianism. But he soon found himself in Tennessee, writing about lunch counter sit-ins in protest of racial segregation. Then he moved to West Virginia, the heart of coal country.

8:58He's a corrupt political system, and it really, like, really angered him because he thought, in this country, you know, I'm seeing this thing that, you know, I wanted to go back to Korea and fight against through, you know, an independent press. And so I think he dives into that here in his new home. Whether it was coal miners struggling to put food on the table, politicians personally profiting from their office, or entire systems that seemed to favor the powerful over the vulnerable. He really was like a champion or an advocate for the underdog. And if he sniffed out injustice, he was going to write about it.

9:31He was going to expose it. In 1970, K.W. left Appalachia and headed to California to work for the Sacramento Union. That would be when, for the first time, he said, he would get to write about a fellow Korean immigrant like himself. in the story of Chol Soo Lee. It was 1977 when K.W. Lee heard of Chol Soo Lee. And his interest was piqued. What if this young Korean-American was innocent? But K.W. was a Sacramento reporter. The murder of Yip Yee Tak had happened in San Francisco. His city editor was like, you're my chief investigative reporter. You're supposed to be working on, like, capital exposés.

10:13And so K.W. had to sort of make a deal with his city editor. You know, he said, OK, let me work on this on my own time at first. Let me see if I can uncover enough evidence to show that this guy may be innocent. So off the clock, K.W. got to work. K.W. actually was quietly investigating this without even contacting Cholsuli at first. He said because he didn't want to get this guy's hopes up. Because if, in fact, he uncovered evidence to show that this guy was guilty of this murder, he was just going to drop it and, like, quietly walk away. Instead, he was uncovering evidence, you know, that was quite alarming to him, and that was proving that this guy was likely innocent.

11:00But this evidence wasn't the only thing that was alarming. During his investigation, a news report flashed on KW's TV screen. Inmate Chosu Lee is charged with murder in the stabbing death of a fellow prisoner. Chosu Lee said that he killed this man who was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang in self-defense, but authorities charged him with murder. Because this was his second murder charge, this would become a death penalty case. The guy KW suspected to be falsely accused of murder had just appeared to commit another murder while in prison. But KW did not stop his investigation. Instead, he wrote a letter to Chol Soo in prison.

11:44Dear Chol Soo Lee, My name is Kyung Won Lee, and I am a Korean who came to America in 1950 at the age of 20 to study. I attended universities and have been working as a newspaperman since 1957. I have been a reporter with the Sacramento Union since 1970. A few months ago, I met Tom Kim of San Francisco's Korean Community Service Center. He said his gut feeling was that you got a raw deal in a San Francisco shooting case, and that you couldn't have done it. Tom Kim feels, and I feel the same way, that nobody has given a damn about troubled Korean boys trying to make a go in their adopted country.

12:24Also, recently I was shocked to learn that you were being charged with slaying an inmate at Tracy. It may be late, but never too late. I can do one thing at least. I want to write about the problems you have run into as a bewildered and helpless Korean boy in America. And maybe society will listen. Sincerely, Kyungwon Lee

12:52When Chol Soo Lee got the letter, he wrote to his friend, Ronko Yamada. Dear Ronko, What I'd like to know right now is as much as I can about Kyungwon Lee, because I want to be sure to know if he is for me or against me. Mr. Lee told me he's known Tom Kim for some time, and I would like for you to talk with Tom Kim and let me know his views on Mr. Lee. And is Mr. Lee sincere in wanting to be an aide to me? Love, Cholsu Ever since she'd sat in that courtroom at his trial, Ronko hadn't stopped working to free her friend, Cholsue. She even started going to law school to learn every legal option available.

13:32She became Cholsue's person on the outside. So after he wrote that letter to Ronko, he fired off another one to KW, saying, You should get to know this woman, Ronko Yamada, who's my friend and who has been helping me. And so finally, KW and I were able to get together. That's how we met. It was a dark and stormy night in Sacramento when Ronco met K.W. Really. She said the rain was blowing sideways as she looked out the window of the coffee shop and told him everything she knew about Chol Tsu Lee. After the meeting, K.W. would spend the next few months interviewing Chol Tsu in prison, going to Chinatown to talk to sources, and diving deep into court documents.

14:17And on January 29, 1978, people in Sacramento opened their Sunday edition of The Union to see the headline, The Americanization of Chol Soo Lee, Part 1, Lost in a Strange Culture, by K.W. Lee. Deep in the volatile Tracy prison for young convicts, a 25-year-old Korean man waits in a maximum security cell facing a possible death penalty. Convicted killer Chersu Lee stands accused of fatally stabbing a fellow inmate last October 8th, a first-degree murder offense with special circumstances calling for capital punishment. At the time of the prison slaying, Lee was serving a life term for the 1973 street corner killing of a reputed gang leader as a hired gun in San Francisco's Chinatown.

15:09This was the first in a two-part series. You might expect that this story would go into detail about the killing in Chinatown, but that's not what KW did. The first story actually just delves deeply into Chol Soo Lee's background, his personal story, his biography. Chol Soo Lee was born in South Korea. He never knew his father and spent most of his childhood with his aunt and uncle in Seoul. When he was 12 years old, he moved to San Francisco to join his mother there. He said that he thought she must be rich because she had hot water and a gas stove. But really, she was living in poverty, working two jobs.

15:50And while she struggled to pay the bills, Cholsu struggled at school. He didn't speak English, so the school placed him in a bilingual class for Chinese students. He did not speak Chinese either, and they didn't differentiate between a Korean kid and a Chinese one. The article goes on. In classrooms, he found himself in regular lessons in a sink or swim situation. In schoolyards or on hallways, he was constantly picked on because he was very short for his age. And he didn't know English except how to say his name and age. At school, he's bullied because he doesn't know the language. He doesn't know how to speak English.

16:34Chol Tsu actually fights back against the bullies and is often disciplined. In one of these cases of bullying, a vice principal accused Chol Tsu of being the aggressor. This made him so angry, he kicked the vice principal. Instead of getting help, he was arrested, convicted of battery, and sent to Juvenile Hall. Later, he was sent to a mental institution. The doctors diagnose him with schizophrenia, and then later a Korean-speaking nurse talks to him, and they realize that he just can't speak English. It must have been just such a nightmare for him. Quite alone. Thus began the Americanization of Char-Soo Lee, with good intentions and benign ignorance, paving the road to a private hell for the bewildered boy from Seoul, Korea.

17:31I feel like in retrospect, in KW, it probably sounds like psychological babble. But it's also about him. It's also about KW. KW later said he saw himself in Chol Su Lee. He told journalist Sandra Jin in the 1994 interview. It was just by the grace of God I have eluded the faith that fell on him. Because there is a very thin line between him and me. I was lucky. He was not lucky. Part two of KW's story on Cholsu Lee came out the next day. This one was a deep dive into the case against Cholsu.

18:14Julie Ha:We'll be right back.

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19:59In a Sunday edition of the Sacramento Union in 1978, journalist K.W. Lee had introduced the people of Sacramento, California, to Chol Soo Lee, a young Korean immigrant facing a death sentence. The next day, K.W. ran the second part of his two-part story, posing a question to his readers. Did Chersu Lee assassinate Yip Yitak in 1973 on a contract from the Wacheng Gang amid a rash of gangland murders in San Francisco? This is an excerpt from that article, which he titled, Alice in Chinatown Murder Case. The Sacramento jury believed that Lee was the hired gun who cold-bloodedly pumped three bullets into the 32-year-old talk at the intersection swarming with Sunday tourists and inhabitants.

20:52KW, in his investigation, he went into Chinatown in San Francisco many times just to do the legwork, to talk to people in the community. And they said it defied common sense for this Chinatown gang to hire Chol Soo Lee, a Korean, to kill this very high-profile Chinatown gang leader. The prosecution's thrust, based on intelligence reports that the Korean acted as a trusted Chinatown gang enforcer for money, defies the common sense and experiences of the Asian community. KW's article lays out a detailed outline for why Chol Soo Lee was unlikely to have committed the Chinatown murder. And he found that the biggest flaws in the city's case against Chol Su boiled down to two things, the murder weapon and the witnesses.

21:47To refresh, the police uncovered a.38 caliber gun near the crime scene, and they had matched it with the bullet Chol Su Lee had accidentally fired into his own wall the day before the murder. Before the murder trial took place, though, this was challenged by Chol Su's then defense attorney. They challenged that ballistics test, and they discovered that it was not a match and that this was a mistake. The police department actually admitted it was a mistake before the murder trial. But still, the police and the DA, they still went ahead with the prosecution of Chol Su Lee. The gun wasn't actually a match, and the police knew it.

22:32But they thought they still had a case against Chol Tzu Lee because of the witnesses. But remember, nobody who lived in Chinatown came forward as a witness. They were too afraid of the gangs. So the only eyewitnesses were out-of-towners. And the IDs made by these witnesses were not as rock-solid as jurors were made to believe.

22:56Ronco says after the shooting, six witnesses had been brought to the police station. There, officers handed them a photo book full of Asian men's faces, or mugs, and they were told. Oh, just pick anything that's similar. Pick any similarities with the person that you saw. Some of the witnesses picked Cholsu because his hair looked similar to the killer. Or maybe his eyes. But they told the police they weren't actually identifying the person in the photo as the suspect. They were pointing out similar facial features. And some people even said, I'm picking this because something looks similar, but I know for a fact it wasn't him.

23:39This is not the person I saw. They chose a total of five mug photographs, having characteristics similar to the man they saw shoot the victim. They made no identification of the suspect. What's more, the witnesses noticed that the person who shot Yip Yi Tak was about the same height. So when they described the killer, they said, It was a person who was between 5 '6 and 5 '10. Chol Su was actually quite short. People often describe him as around 5 '2. At most, he was 5 '4. By no stretch of the imagination would you imagine him being between 5 '6 or 5 '10. The witnesses also described the shooter as being clean-shaven, and Chol Su had a mustache at the time of the murder.

24:27But even though Chol Su Lee didn't fit the description, he was the only person from the mug book that police brought to the station for a physical lineup. Chol Su was marched into a room, stood shoulder to shoulder with a handful of random men, and the witnesses were asked to make an ID of the shooter. And they choose Chol Suli, but it's not even that this is the person that they saw in Chinatown, Kiyipi Tak. This is the person that they remember, really, from the mug book. Ronko and KW argued that police had been pushing the witnesses toward Chol Suli the entire time. You almost can't fault the witnesses.

25:09the police slowly over time persuade them to believe that the person they have chosen is in fact the one. But even if the police hadn't steered the witnesses toward Chol Su Lee, there was another problem with their IDs, one that's explained in this TV news investigation of the case. Now what would be the problem, say, with the witnesses who were standing over on that corner? Why couldn't they make a positive identification? Well, if you look over there, there's an Asian couple standing over there. Now look away, because you only had no more than three or four seconds. Suppose that you're looking at a book with hundreds of Asian faces in it and asked to pick out a few faces a few hours later.

25:54See how difficult it is? Cross-racial ID. It's an enormous problem. If you're not Asian, you're not likely to identify someone who is Asian as easily. Research has shown that, quote, an eyewitness trying to identify a stranger is over 50 % more likely to make a misidentification when the stranger and eyewitness are of different races. And not a single one of the witnesses identifying Cholsu Lee was Asian.