The man we are going to discuss today owns an accolade it’s said not held by any other
person, and that’s the fact that according to the FBI he is the only white guy ever to
gain high esteem inside Chinese organized crime.
He’s somewhat of a legend now and you might say has a kind of mythical status.
He is indeed known as The White Devil, but he was born simply John, John Willis.
Having made a name for himself with the Chinese Mafia he even has a Cantonese name and that
is Bac Guai John.
So, without any further ado, let’s have a look at how John became the devil.
Vice magazine wrote in 2016, “John ‘White Devil’ Willis rose to the highest echelons
of Boston's Chinese mafia.”
But what do we know about John the child?
Unfortunately there isn’t all that much information available about Willis as a kid,
but it seems he had a hard start in life.
We are told he grew up in the 1970s and was looked after by his mum after his father abandoned
the family.
But then disaster struck when he was 14 years old when his mother suddenly passed away.
The teen it’s said then had to fend for himself.
In a feature in Rolling Stone it’s written, “He was once just another hockey-playing
Catholic kid in this working-class Boston neighborhood,” but that kid grew into a
man that became a crime lord in the underworld.
That article tells us he muscled his way into that underworld and soon became a kingpin.
When we say muscled, it’s written he had a tendency towards violence, with one U.S.
attorney calling him, “a very dangerous, violent man.”
But his main business was not violence but selling illegal substances, or rather selling
legal substances illegally.
His product was oxycodone, something often called pharmaceutical heroin.
We’ve all heard of the devastating opioid crisis in the USA, and so now you know one
of the main players.
How much money he earned through his enterprises is not known, but Rolling Stone estimates
in a short time he made around $4 million.
Willis according to that article said he made ten times more than selling those highly addictive
pills.
Apparently he spent a lot of that money on fast cars, boats and strip clubs.
As is often the case with such people, it all came crashing down.
Crime pays, but as we all know, not many people get away with it for long.
Willis was eventually arrested and sentenced to 20 years for drug trafficking and money
laundering.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and we should ask just how he managed to make
his way into the Chinese underworld and then demand respect in those circles.
“My life’s been pain,” he told Rolling Stone, and the tattoo on his arms consisting
of Chinese characters will tell you that as the word means “pain”.
He then said, “I’ve struggled for everything that I did.”
According to Willis, his father had left the family because he had no choice.
It seems it might not have been such a bad thing in some ways as he was violent and an
alcoholic.
The father got his money from working as a carpenter but he also did jobs for the Irish
mob.
Those jobs were simple: Collect money and hurt people.
It seems the father hurt the wrong man at some point, a man who was a mobster, and if
he didn’t get out of Boston his life would soon be over.
It was a rough and tumble existence, with Willis saying his tough town of Dorchester
was also the stomping ground of perhaps the most infamous Irish mobster, Whitey Bulger.
But young Willis said he had sworn to his mother that he wouldn’t waste his life.
He got fit, played hockey, kept on the right side of the tracks while his brother and sisters
had decided they would spend their childhoods on the wrong side of the tracks.
Willis said he kept well away from drugs and crime, but he had some of his dad’s DNA,
and that was a predisposition for violence.
At just a young age he was sent to a special school for troubled kids after beating another
kid up.
Things went from bad to worse when his brother, still young himself, suddenly died of a heart
attack.
You might wonder how someone so young could go that way, but Willis said that his brother
was prone to days and nights not sleeping with his only fuel being what some people
call “marching powder.”
But things would get even worse, and you might even sympathize for this man despite him being
part of an epidemic that ruined so many American lives.
That’s because now brother-less, Willis was about to experience another tragedy.
His mother had diabetes, but just a year after the death of her son she lost her legs because
of the disease.
Only amputation could save her life.
With her remaining children being delinquents it was left to Willis to look after her.
We are told he bathed her and wheeled her around the family home.
And then tragedy struck again.
When Willis was just 14 she died, too, also of a heart problem.
He was alone in the world, unsure how he would navigate it.
“It was tough, I ain’t gonna lie,” he said about that time.
“You grow up, you become a man, in an hour.”
It was tough because social services had no idea he was living alone.
They thought he was living with his sisters, but they were hooked on substances in another
part of town and rarely visited young John.
He said he didn’t even know how to cook, look after himself, and because he had very
little money he couldn’t even heat the house in winter.
He was fortunate enough though to have some friends and he would often eat at their houses,
and then suddenly cash started coming in.
Even as a young teen, he was tough as a rock.
This landed him a job as a bouncer at a local club, and we are told he had no problems whatsoever
with dealing with drunken guys causing trouble.
He was full of rage, said one of his childhood friends.
The girl said about him, “He’s never dealt with his mother’s death, never dealt with
the fact that his father left.”
This is how he got himself into gangster-dom.
It’s said one night a fight broke out between a Korean gangster and a Chinese gangster.
Willis’ boss had always told him to stay well away from these guys as they were dangerous,
but Willis helped the Chinese guy and beat the Korean.
The Chinese man had had some mace sprayed into his eyes during the altercation so young
John took him to the bathroom and helped him get the stuff out of his eyes.
We are told this act of kindness was gratefully received and on the way out of the club the
Chinese gangster handed the teenager a note.
It read, “Here’s my number.
if you ever need something, call me.”
A friendship was born, an unlikely one too, given John was basically just a kid and Asian
gangsters are not known for taking on white guys.
We should say, though, if you look at photos of this 14/15 year old boy, well, let’s
just say he is built like a human tank.
Time passed and on one particular evening Willis had no cash to his name and he was
hungry.
He went to his sister’s house and she refused to answer the door.
He thought, ok, what the hell, and he called the number of the Chinese guy.
According to Willis when this guy answered the phone he said, “Hey, white boy!”
He said in no time at all a bunch of Asian guys turned up at his house in BMWs.
All these guys were dressed immaculately he said and they just told him to get in the
car.
They took him to a large house in South Boston where the man who he had helped was waiting.
His name by the way was John Joe.
Upon entering the house Willis saw what to him looked like the interior of a palace.
He said there were guns everywhere and a lot of rather beautiful-looking women.
These guys he said treated him like family immediately.
They fed him, told him to relax and watch some movies with them.
He soon found out that he was with part of the “Ping On” gang, which had been connected
to factions of the Chinese underworld for centuries.
They were powerful, demanded total loyalty, and they were ruthless if you crossed them.
But John Joe had a soft spot for this orphan, and he knew that he could be useful given
his size.
As he was just a kid, too, he would no doubt be loyal.
Willis said John Joe told him, “Don’t go back to work.
From now on, you stay out here.”
He gave him 500 bucks and then said get rid of those terrible clothes, my boys are taking
you shopping.
Willis said to Rolling Stone, “These people took me in, took care of me, like, you know,
I was their brother, their son.
So that became more important to me than anything else.”
What’s perhaps strange is that Willis was still going to high school now and again,
but the gangster life started taking up more of his time.
He was sent to other cities to learn how things worked in the underworld, noting that other
gangs and acquaintances of the Chinese mafia would look at him strange.
They didn’t usually come in tow with some rather bulky white teenager.
He said it was hard, though, at times, because he wasn’t treated like one of them and they
spoke Cantonese to each other.
He wasn’t exactly welcomed by all members of the gang, but John Joe always had his back.
He was given a gun and ended up meeting Chinese crime lords in places such as New York city.
He was soon doing jobs, or what he referred as heists.
He showed he wasn’t scared, even when things got hairy and he got shot at.
This impressed his fellow gang members and Willis said he soon became one of the brothers.
He learned to read and write Chinese and this made his relationship with his brothers stronger.
He then said he learned from these guys and started to adapt his personality to Asian
culture.
He’d always been aggressive and would often lose it in public, but he learned that such
outbursts are a loss of face and shameful.
Being hot-headed was for stupid people, and one should always keep one’s cool in public.
He learned that it was important to respect your elders as they had wisdom to give, and
by 1990 he had got the name Bac Guai John and was well respected in the Chinese underworld.
This once loud and aggressive Catholic kid had now become a respectful but still dangerous
man who had turned from the church towards the Buddhist temple.
Word got around and soon Willis was the preferred enforcer for some high-ranking Chinese mafia
bosses.
One particular mob boss took a liking to Willis, who it’s said admired his strength and dedication.
Willis said he was always taking notes, watching how this boss ran his empire.
He got the name Dragon Boy from this boss, and that was due to Willis being incredibly
strong.
Willis had to show that strength many times, saying in the 90s there were widespread gang
wars and many executions.
He had to be careful, and at times he had to hurt people.
He said he'd never been convicted of murder, but didn’t say he hadn’t killed anyone.
We should also say that at this time he was making a lot of money selling heroin.
He had become more than just an enforcer, but then he got 5 years for dealing in the
year 2000.
Five years later and he stepped out of jail and stepped into a Mercedes CL600.
Shortly after he met his wife to be, a 19-year Vietnamese girl.
When he asked her for her number in a club she said, “What are you, a white kid with
an Asian fetish?”
After a few months of dating she started asking where all his money was coming from and why
he often had cuts and bruises on his knuckles.
He didn’t want to lie anymore and just said, “I’m a gangster.”
He then changed his Merc for a Porsche 928 S4, which was perhaps indicative of business
going well.
And then one evening he was asked to sit at the table of a man nicknamed Sky Dragon, someone
said to be right at the top of the Chinese underworld.
They got along well, and Sky Dragon even told him he’d heard good things about him and
had a lot of respect for a young white kid who could learn Chinese and rise so high in
such an unfamiliar territory.
But despite gaining all this respect, and even though he said he still had a lot of
love for the guys that had invited him into their house many years ago, he wanted to do
something on his own.
It would soon become apparent to him that there was a line of business he could operate
that no one else in the Chinese underworld had taken advantage of.
This was distributing what was known on the street as Oxys.
Due to lax regulations and the pharmaceutical industry churning these pills out in their
millions, Willis found a way to get his hands on them.
He was well aware that this was a more lucrative business than the smack trade he had been
involved in.
That stuff was stigmatized, but those little pills embossed professionally could be devoured
by anyone not wanting to associate themselves with the word “junkie.”
Soon much of middle class America would develop backaches and Willis had the antidote to the
pain.
He then got some of his own white boys together, other Southies.
But to be in the gang, you had to embrace the Asian gang culture he had learned.
You had to be respectful and loyal, you got the tattoo and you joined the family.
Willis and his gang were buying the pills for $9 and selling them for $15, and they
were selling thousands and thousands of them each week.
They were making huge amounts of money, but blowing most of it on a very decadent lifestyle.
“Money, nice cars, big houses are nothing without the ones you love,” Willis said
to Rolling Stone, adding that he had gone off course.
His Asian brothers knew too well that this was not how to live.
They kept low profiles and their heads above water, but Willis didn’t have his mentors
around as he was now living in Florida.
He began to lose the plot, once tearfully telling his cousin, “I’m a monster.
I don’t know any other life.”
The FBI had a case on him anyway and his arrest was imminent.
That happened and he was taken away from his loving wife.
She has since said she is waiting for him, and he might well get out in 2028.
She said their love for each other hasn’t waned, but she hopes to live a simple life
one day with her white devil.
Asked if he will change his life when he gets out, Willis answers, “What life is it?
This is who I am.
Can you go in the jungle and take the stripes off a tiger?”
But he says while he is what he is, there’s no way he will get back into the criminal
life again.
There should be a movie coming out soon about the White Devil, but after watching this show
what do you think about him?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video The White Death.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.