A bank executive is off the hook for a 16-year-old Chinatown gang murder after jurors yesterday rejected the sole evidence against him — the word of two stoolie gangsters trying to cut their jail time.
Citibank operations supervisor Tat Li cried so uncontrollably when a Manhattan Supreme Court jury acquitted him yesterday that his glasses fogged up as he hugged defense lawyer Jack Evseroff.
“I’m still in a dream — but now, finally, it’s a good dream,” Li, 37, said afterward, surrounded by family members who were also crying for joy.
As a kid growing up in Long Island City, Queens, Li hung out with gun-toting heroin dealers from Chinatown’s notorious Flying Dragons gang.
Li doesn’t deny he was with gang member Freddy Lau, 27, when Lau was gunned down in a pre-dawn execution on Astor Place in Greenwich Village in 1983.
But he insists he wasn’t a member of the gang — and was running away from the gunfire as Lau died on the deserted street at the hands of a masked and hooded gunman.
Questioned, then cleared in the murder, the young Li went on to become a successful executive with a clean record, a loving wife, an infant son and a home in Fresh Meadows, Queens.
He says his peaceful life has been shattered for the past two years — ever since cops busted him out of the blue for Lau’s murder on the word of two gang members trying to barter their way out of 25-year-plus sentences.
“They weren’t even witnesses to the murder,” Li said of Nam Kar Cheng and Timmy Tsoi — admitted hit men and heroin dealers.
“Their only testimony was, ‘He told me he did it.’ It’s so scary to think I could have gone to jail for life because of that.”