Favored Son, Playboy - Angry Man -- Martin Pang Had Fast Cars, Fast Life, Violent Marriages

Outgoing and friendly on the surface, calculating and vindictive underneath, Martin Pang has long been someone it doesn't pay to cross, acquaintances have said.

Even by his teenage years, he had picked up the nickname "Pyro Pang" for threatening to burn the homes and business of people who wronged him.

From his youth, Pang developed an appetite for expensive playthings, a taste enabled by his parents' wealth and generosity. He loved fast cars, speedboats, rental airplanes and exotic vacations.

He fancied himself as something of a secret agent, with night-vision goggles and suction cups for climbing walls. And when his temper flared, he could be dangerous. He broke one ex-wife's back, shattered the jaw of another, and severely beat a fiancee, though none of the attacks resulted in a criminal conviction.

The favorite child

Born Sun Hing Wah in Hong Kong in 1955, he was the youngest of five children in an impoverished family. Unable to care for him, his parents put him up for adoption.

At six months, he was adopted by Harry and Mary Pang of Seattle, who also adopted a 2-year-old daughter from another couple and named her Marlyce. Martin was always the favorite child, and his adoptive parents had trouble saying no, whatever he requested, say those who knew the family.

Harry and Mary Pang have long been warmly regarded in the Seattle area; he as quiet, she as outgoing and both as hardworking and honest.

They sold a small grocery store in Seattle and went into partnership with Mary's sister, Ruby Chow, producing frozen Chinese foods. Chow later quit the business when she and Mary had a falling-out.

Operating the business under the name Mary Pang Food Products Inc., they bought an old warehouse in the International District on Seventh Avenue South. By the mid-1980s, the business was taking in more than $1 million a year.

As the business prospered, the Pangs moved to Mercer Island and a house with a sweeping Lake Washington view.

Martin Pang began forging a reputation for recklessness as a teenager.

`A really angry, angry person'

A former neighbor said he once shot out the Christmas lights on her house. Another time, he used his steel-toed boots to kick a hole in a Mercer Island High School wall.

He attended college for two years, then dropped out, depending on his parents for work and income - and a hefty company expense account.

Two longtime employees at the food-processing plant, Lisa Wai Hing Lew and Shizuye Okimoto, said they rarely saw Martin Pang at work for more than a few minutes, even when he held the title of company president.

Between 1978 and 1989 he was married four times. None lasted more than 19 months, and each ended in a violent incident.

His first wife, Jeanne Wyke, left Pang after she was hospitalized for a broken back, broken nose and broken eardrum after an attack by him in 1979. She said after they separated, Pang killed two of her pets and threatened to burn down her house.

His second wife, Sandra Jean Spencer of Bellevue, said she met Pang skiing and they lived together two years before getting married.

She said he once struck her with the back of his hand, breaking her jaw, and another time he gave her a black eye and threatened to kill her parents.

The third wife, Rise Live Johansen, said Pang read "Soldier of Fortune" magazine when he wasn't skiing, racing cars or practicing martial arts. She described him as "a really angry, angry person."

His fourth ex-wife, Karlyn Tierny, told police Pang had tried to hire someone to kill her.

In his own spotty business ventures, Pang started a company to sell designer jeans and opened a Bellevue restaurant with his mother named Mary Pang's Restaurant. Neither lasted.

He also tried to find work as an actor, landing a small part as a rescuer in an NBC-TV movie about the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

When he was 22, Pang reported a modest $6,700 salary from the food-products company but charged more than $30,000 in personal expenses to the company and drove a company-leased $35,000 Porsche 911S.

Through the 1980s his salary grew to $55,000, and the company expense account even paid the costs of his divorces.

A Mercer Island man who had a business disagreement with Pang in 1988 told police he found that flammable liquid had been poured over shrubs and wooden landscape posts in his front yard, and that someone had apparently tried to light it, but the damage was minor.

That same year Pang filed for a personal bankruptcy, and his parents covered his legal expenses.

In 1993, he admitted slapping a woman he was engaged to. They never married. The reaction was automatic, he told police, because he was trained in the martial arts.

Pang was arrested and ordered to take classes in anger management, and when he completed the requirements of his probation, the case was dismissed under the state's deferred-prosecution law for first-time batterers.

He told of arson plans

In recent years, the family's frozen-food business began having financial troubles. "We have just barely been keeping our heads above water," Pang said in court papers filed in a child-support case.

An acquaintance of Pang's said Pang began to talk about burning the building down as a way to generate money, saying that even though he didn't own a financial interest in the company, he would expect his parents would give him some of the insurance proceeds.

He told several other acquaintances, as well, that he was planning to torch the building.

Before the fire, an informant told the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that Pang was planning to have the building burned. The building was placed under surveillance for a time, but shortly after the watch was discontinued, the building burned.

Seattle Times reporter Duff Wilson contributed to this report.