“As a cop, just seeing how some people live, is not easy. I’ll never forget one call. The apartment was one small room that served as home to a woman and her six children. There were cockroaches crawling everywhere. The kids were just laying on the mattress and several were in dirty diapers. You say to yourself is this how people live? You want to help them but there’s only so much you can do. You’ve got to keep your perspective. You can’t change their lives, but you can find small ways to help them. Sometimes just treating them with respect is enough.” – Bobby Hom
As a lead investigator with the NYPD’s Southeast Asian Heroin Task Force, Bobby Hom spent years keeping illegal narcotics and human trafficking operations in countries such as Canada, Burma, Thailand, and Hong Kong out of New York City. Bobby was born in 1959 in the Bronx several years after his father emigrated from China. After the Police Academy, Bobby headed out onto the streets of New York where he learned what he calls the essential lessons of police work – commanding respect, developing empathy and the hard and fast rule that you can never take anything that happens to you as a cop personally.
Bobby did undercover work with the “Non-Traditional Organized Crime Task Force” where his days and nights were spent collecting evidence against criminal gangs in Chinatown who were engaging in a wide range of illegal activities including drugs, extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking. He worked one case where a girl was kidnapped, tortured and held for $40,000 ransom by a human trafficking ring run out of China.
Bobby has played a major role in the seizure of 150 pounds of pure heroin with a street value of nine million dollars – one of the largest seizures of heroin and drug money in law enforcement history. Bobby and his team traced the heroin back to Chang Chi Fu, the Burma-based Chinese drug lord, known as the “King of Opium.”
Bobby even made the evening news after saving the life of Cathy Palmer, a 36-year-old U.S. Attorney. He happened to be in her office when Palmer received a brief case she thought was a gift from her parents. Bobby sensed something was wrong. He opened the package and deactivated a spring-operated rat trap rigged to fire a sawed-off .22 caliber rifle when the case was opened. David Kwong, an informer who had worked on and off for the department, sent the package. Kwong’s plan was to kill Cathy, frame a drug suspect and then take credit for providing information that would solve the case.