As Bui saw it he had no choice but to stay and be executed on the heroin charge. If he gave evidence about the syndicate in Australia it might save his life by keeping him in an Australian jail – but all his family in the United States would be murdered.
AT 12.46am on 20 April, 1996, a United States citizen about to head overseas walked into the North America Shop, a duty free store at the Tom Bradley Terminal inside the frantically busy Los Angeles Airport.
He picked up four cartons of Marlboro cigarettes and took $65 from his pocket to pay. He was lucky. Not only were the cigarettes much less than the retail price, but he was presented with two black baseball caps emblazoned with a red M on the front.
It was part of a special promotion. From 1 June, 1995, and 30 June the following year one hundred and fifty thousand of the caps were produced for duty-free outlets within the United States and on its borders with Canada and Mexico.
When he bought the cigarettes the traveller had to produce his boarding pass as confirmation. It showed he was heading to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific flight 881 from Los Angeles. His allocated seat was 55B.
The man, Nguyen Hoa Ngoc, was not alone. In 55A, the seat next to him, was Bui Quang Thuan, twenty-three, who was to continue on to Australia on family business. Bui’s elder brother, another United States citizen, had already flown from Hong Kong to Australia a week earlier.
The brothers were on the way to Melbourne to kidnap and kill a man in Melbourne they had never met. It was nothing personal, just business.
The elder brother, Bui Tai Huu, twenty-seven, was not worried if the kidnap plot turned sour. He was a cold-blooded international hitman with prior convictions in the United States for manslaughter, drive-by shootings, and other violent crimes in San Francisco. His bosses knew he could be trusted to follow orders without question. In an organisation that required specialists he had developed his own niche. He was the executioner.
The Executioner had already visited Australia twice on business earlier in 1996. Both times he was involved in moving hundreds of thousands of dollars of drug money to Hong Kong.
He had a passport made out in a false name and in January had flown to Melbourne from Hong Kong, then travelled to Sydney, where he stayed for a week at the luxury Furama Hotel in Darling Harbour. At the busy ground floor reception desk he filled in his registration giving his address as Eastondale Avenue, Long Beach.
A few days later he was to meet his syndicate boss, Truong Hong Phuc, who had flown in from Hong Kong. Together they were able to collect $365,000 cash in the next three weeks. A further $214,000 was also transferred to Hong Kong and US accounts controlled by the group – known as ‘The Brotherhood.’
Police were to find that Truong went to a house in Sydney with a suitcase containing $250,000 in cash. A few days earlier he arrived with a plastic, Grace Brothers bag. It contained $50,000.
TRADITIONAL Australian gangsters tend to be territorial. They may dominate a street, a suburb or even part of a city, but they rarely go beyond the borders where they were brought up. Some have become huge shoplifters in Europe or bar owners and drug dealers in Asia, but few have had the organisational skills or the contacts to control international syndicates.
But there are networks in Australia that are part of crime conglomerates with branches around the world. Organisations that can develop a business strategy in London to target heroin addicts in Bourke Street or King’s Cross. Men who can decide from an office in Hong Kong to kidnap a man in suburban Melbourne because a woman who made a fortune in Russia would not launder the organisation’s drug funds.
By contrast, policing is hampered by being geographically based. Local police worry about crime trends in their suburbs, while senior police remain concerned about state-wide problems. There are ten main law enforcement bodies in Australia, each with its own problems and priorities. Police officers have power only in their own jurisdiction – outside their own area they are just tourists.
But an examination of The Brotherhood exposes classic organised crime aided by modern technology and also shows the problem that traditional policing has in combating international crime syndicates that ignore national boundaries.
The size of The Brotherhood will never be known, nor whether Truong, forty-one, was its undisputed international leader. But what can be established is that virtually anywhere in the world where there was a Vietnamese community Truong, or ‘Brother Phuc’, as he was known, had real power. People did what he asked – almost without exception.
When he was in Australia, he ran up a phone bill of $6000 in just four weeks. He made calls to Hong Kong, the United States, Iceland, Russia, England and Canada.
Bui, the executioner with a huge tattoo of a dragon on his back, made calls to Britain, Hong Kong, Macau, Hawaii and Vietnam during the same time. For police, Brother Phuc was difficult to track. He would ‘ask’ Vietnamese people he knew to transfer money to accounts in Hong Kong – nearly always around $9000, just under the amount checked by law enforcement authorities. They would be paid $1000 for their trouble.
He would give them money to buy mobile phones to be registered under their names. He would then take them so he could pass messages throughout the world without police knowing he was behind the calls.
Brother Phuc ran his network from his small house in London although the drug syndicate operated out of an office in Hong Kong. His syndicate was alleged to be behind the massive importation of heroin into Australia, including a shipment worth $25 million smuggled in to Sydney in specially-designed metre-high pottery vases and a $4 million shipment inside Buddha statues and children’s clothing.
Truong was small, polite and, in his own way, quite charming. He could afford to be pleasant because people seemed to always do what he wanted.
On 9 March, 1996, Truong turned up at a twenty-first birthday party in the Sydney suburb of Belmore. He was introduced to a couple he had never met and was told they were going to Vietnam the next day. He peeled off $10,000 in $50 notes from a wad held together by rubber bands. He asked the couple to take the money to his mother who was on holiday in Vietnam from England. They agreed without hesitation.
‘Brother Phuc’ then peeled off another $100 note and gave it to the couple’s baby boy.
THE small and elegant Ha Que Thi Mai is an international success story. A woman who runs and owns her own businesses around the world, she had made it big from her base in Russia where she was living with a former Soviet intelligence officer. In 1993 her son, Le Anh Tuan, migrated from Russia to Australia. Her Russion lover unravelled after the abduction and murder. His relationship with Ha broke down and when he was brought to Melbourne from Moscow for the committal hearing he was clearly mentally distressed. From the witness box of the Magistrate’s Court he gave the startling evidence that he was a Russian Tsar with the real name was ‘Prince Bigdash’. He said he spoke seven languages, had studied law and medicine and if anyone commented on the weather it was a KGB code to make him operational.
He was excused from giving further evidence.
Ha was an entrepreneur, an investment broker with a PhD in economics, and involved in the high fashion world. Independent police investigations have shown she would feature in any Australian rich list if her assets were publicly known.
Brother Phuc would not have needed to see a balance sheet to know Ha was wealthy. She was to spend about a month in the Regent Hotel and another month at the Hyatt in 1996. Being rich was to become a fatal liability for her eldest son.
The trouble was, an international businesswoman would be a handy ally for The Brotherhood. The theory being that she could move money out of the country, and drugs, in through her clothing business.
Brother Phuc went to see Ha in the Regent Hotel on 16 March, 1996. He proposed a partnership to import clothing. He believed it would be an offer too good to refuse.
At the meeting Brother Phuc said the real deal was to import drugs and Ha was later to tell police she refused the proposition immediately. He told her to think about it for a few days and not to dismiss it out of hand.
At the meeting Truong made a cryptic and, ultimately, blood-chilling comment. He said that if Ha was difficult that the ‘consequences for her family would not be good.’
For hundreds of years Asian organised crime groups have demanded compliance from others with a single threat: fail us and we will kidnap and kill your eldest child. It created fear in enemies and blood loyalty from subordinates who knew their-own families were not beyond reach.
What was going through Truong’s mind as he boarded the Cathay Pacific flight CX 104 to Hong Kong three days after the meeting will never be known. He might have believed he could force a partnership on the rich businesswoman, or he might already have been considering extortion.
Certainly, he already had details on Ha’s son, including his address in Glen Waverley and his movements in Melbourne.
When Truong landed in Hong Kong he rang Ha for an answer. He didn’t like what he heard. Stung by the rebuff, he demanded $400,000 as compensation for her stubbornness.
The threat didn’t go away. On 23 March Ha was visited again by a female associate of The Brotherhood, and told to pay the money. Five days later her son, Le, received a fax at his home for his mother from the ‘Happy Excel International’ in Hong Kong. It was an unlisted fax number but Brother Phuc had no problems obtaining it. The document contained details on how the money should be transferred in $100,000 lots to four accounts in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
On the same day a Melbourne man arrived at Tullamarine on a Qantas flight from Saigon. He would soon learn that he had been selected to be the driver of the kidnap team.
Within a week police seized heroin valued at $3 million in Canberra. The package contained the address of the ‘Happy Excel International Limited.’
By 10 April The Brotherhood was losing patience and the woman left a letter at the Regent for Ha. ‘Sister Mai. I went to your place and waited from 3.30 for a few hours and you have not returned yet. You have told me to come to your place to pick up the money to give the other man but you did not phone me for the entire evening … I have wasted too much time. Whenever you return phone me immediately, I have no more time to wait for you.’
Ha instructed her son to withdraw $20,000 to give to an agent for Brother Phuc. But it was like tossing a fish finger to a circling shark.
THE KIDNAP victim, Le Anh Tuan, twenty-one, was born in Hanoi in 1977 and moved to Russia with his family after he finished primary school. He lived in a rented home in Moscow and, because his mother was already making money through her businesses, he was educated at home by a private tutor. He went to Moscow University to study linguistics before he decided to migrate to Australia.
He married as a teenager and fathered a daughter but the relationship broke up by the time he was twenty. In early 1996 Le was unemployed but had plans to use some of his mother’s money to set up a clothing business. His girlfriend was expecting a baby boy when he was abducted. He was dead by the time the baby was born.
Late in April a woman went to visit Le at his Glen Waverley home and asked him and his pregnant girlfriend to go to Hong Kong for a business deal, but his mother told him she feared it was a trap to abduct him. But The Brotherhod could reach out, virtually anywhere in the world. Later, Le found that a spare key he kept in a rice container had gone missing.
It was never found.
If Le feared he could be the target of a kidnap plot he did nothing to protect himself. If he had gone to the police at this time it might have been enough to frighten off the circling vultures, but by the time police were aware of what was happening, it was already too late.
Around 11am on 29 April, Le went to his new house in Fiona Court to allow an electrician to install new light fittings. The tradesman didn’t turn up so Le went back to his Regal Court home to ring him. Just over an hour later a neighbour looked out his bedroom window to see two Asian men chasing a third down the street. A green car reversed up the street and the man was bundled into the boot before the car sped off.
At the same time another neighbour looked out of her kitchen window. She saw two men punching a third who ‘appeared to be pleading for help and seemed distressed’.
She watched as the victim ‘put his hands together as if he was praying, begging for mercy, crying and shaking his head.’ He was thrown into the boot and it was slammed shut.
Both witnesses called the police. By 12.35 the Glen Waverley divisional van pulled into Regal Court and senior constable Mark Standish walked up the drive to find the house locked.
When police went into the house they found a note in Vietnamese. ‘You call mother to tell her that I have gone with the guys from brother Phuc’s company … those guys said to give mother seventy-two hours to pay the money.’
The deadline was set at midday on 2 May.
Who knows what would have happened if the two neighbours had not called the police? It is possible the money would have been paid and no-one would have known.
When police checked the scene there was little to indicate who the abductors were. But, as Senior Constable Standish walked up the drive, he noticed something on the ground.
It was a black Marlboro baseball cap … one of the two given to a passenger who had bought duty-free cigarettes in the Los Angeles airport nine days earlier.
POLICE now know that three men, including the American hitmen, the Bui brothers, went to Regal Court just before midday. The driver left the brothers, who used the key stolen from the rice container to enter the house and ransack it, looking for money.
When Le returned the brothers grabbed and beat him before forcing him to write the note.
They rang the driver on a mobile phone and ordered him to return. As they went down the drive Le broke away, knocking the cap off the head of one of the hitmen.
That night Mrs Ha called Brother Phuc from the criminal investigation office of the Glen Waverley police. There was no point in long discussions. The man who had organised the kidnapping said, ‘You have three days to transfer the money to Hong Kong, if no money, everything happen to Ang (her son).’ In another phone call nearly thirty minutes later he said, ‘Look, I have told you already I can do whatever I want. When you have the money prepared, ring me.’
Time was already running out.
DAY ONE (30 APRIL): The kidnap victim was being held in a house in Glendale Road, Springvale. The kidnappers used four public telephones in Springvale to make nine calls to mobile phones used by members of The Brotherhood. Police believe they were given instructions and regular updates on the progress of their ransom demands. Police went to the Federal Court to get warrants to start monitoring suspects’ mobile phones. The phone taps were to provide vital evidence but, ultimately, they would not help the kidnap victim. The tapes provided a chilling record, as the chances of Le living through the ordeal slipped away. Like a black box on aircraft, they were to show what went wrong and pinpoint when danger turned to disaster.
DAY TWO (1 MAY): Brother Phuc called the victim’s mother, Mrs Ha. She pleaded for her son, but he made it clear that paying the money was the first step in any negotiations. He said: ‘Now, I am sorting things out with you now, and that is you owe me money. Are you going to pay or not? You tell me. Do not discuss any other matter. Everything has its place. You must sort out one thing first before you can go on to the next.
The $400,000 – are you going to pay me or not?
‘You play games and there will be nothing good in it for you. Do you understand? You know my personality. You understand that? He will always stick to his principles, he won’t cheat anyone, but no-one should cheat him.
‘You better understand. There are still many games. I am not saying that it will be such and such. Do you understand? But with you playing games you have overstepped the mark a little.
‘I have misjudged you. You are too low. I accept that I am stupid. I do not blame you any longer.’
The mother may have sensed that the chances of her son being returned alive were ebbing away and she started playing for time. ‘I am only thinking of my child. But the time before I have already said to you to allow me until the end of May. But you did not understand me and did that thing.’
Brother Phuc remained unmoved: ‘Why did you allow it to reach that stage?’
DAY THREE (2 MAY): Brother Phuc called Ha Que Thi Mai at 10.45am. He said ‘(For) the matter to be resolved between you and I if you want to be happy it will be joyous and if you want to be unhappy then it will be sad.’
There were further calls and threats at 10.57am then, two minutes later, he extended the deadline until that night. Later he again extended until noon the next day.
‘There will be someone coming to collect the money. But if something should happen to my people coming to collect the money, then you will accept full responsibility. Everything is caused by you. You have brought everything about by yourself. Therefore you have to accept the consequences. No matter how tough things get, you will have to bear the responsibilities … You have played one game after the next, In short, you can’t win.’
Ha asked if her son is alive. Phuc replied: ‘Now, you do not mention that matter too early okay. This matter, you sort out my money, that amount of money for me okay. After it is done then I speak to you … I promise you that I will take care of it properly for you. With my character of paying back in kind both vengeance and debt, do you understand? There … that is my only request. If you do that to my satisfaction then there is no problem … the money, if I collect it in full, all matters shall be happy … Whether you pay me or not is determined by your conscience. Everything, family happiness and the like is up to you to decide. I have told you many times, not just today.’
DAY FOUR (3 MAY): Brother Phuc extended the deadline until midday. When the money was not moved to the four Hong Kong bank accounts Le Anh Tuan, a young man who had been about to buy a house and have a family, was killed on the orders of a man he had never met.
In the days Le was held in the Springvale house he had refused to eat. Finally his kidnappers fed him sedatives and he was shot dead while sleeping. He was shot in the right side of the head – execution style – and would have died instantly.
His body was then dumped in an aqueduct in Mile Creek, Noble Park.
At 2.25pm, Bui Tan Huu, the executioner from Long Beach, rang the kidnap driver from the Melbourne Airport. Bui and his brother flew to Sydney that afternoon. Their work in Melbourne was done.
But Brother Phuc was still determined to get ‘his money’ and continued to talk to Mrs Ha. In one phone call the mother tried to draw him into incriminating statements. ‘I am telling you the person coming to pick up the money is only a black pawn. You should remember that. The person is totally not privy to anything, okay? I have already told you that I am not going to say anything over the phone … apart from the matter of asking you to repay the money … Now, you do not have to talk to me on the phone any more. That’s all.’
He starts refusing to take her calls. She rings and another man answers the phone, telling her brusquely, ‘You do not talk over the phone. You cannot solve anything. Don’t treat us like children. We are not children. You must understand, this is not Vietnam where you can trick people. Don’t think like that.’
Later, she rang again. The man, believed to be Truong’s brother-in-law, said: ‘If you intend to play with the big brothers then you go ahead … There are people keeping an eye on you. You are not playing fair. That is why they do not want to phone you yet … There is someone keeping an eye on your every move. Don’t think that things are so simple. You do not have to worry about anything. If you play fair then nothing will happen. It will be beautiful forever. That is all.’
DAY FIVE (4 MAY): Even though Le was already dead, Brother Phuc continued to demand the money. The following day the three ‘black pawns’ were ordered to collect the ransom at Spencer Street railway station.
Two of the men, including a former captain in the North Vietnamese Army, flew from Sydney for the collect.
Police now know Brother Phuc had some of his men watching the drop-off point and they identified some of the police waiting. But the man in Hong Kong was prepared to sacrifice his collectors in the hope they could still get the money.
At 9.28am, 10.26am, 11.07am, 11.25am and 11.40am Ha received phone calls from The Brotherhood in Hong Kong and was told to bring $400,000 to Spencer Street. She was told to take the money to Bus Stop thirty-one, where she was to hand it over to the ‘black pawns.’ But at 11.54am she received another call: ‘You do not have to come. The way you play is pretty ordinary. You don’t have to come … There is also someone standing there waiting for us already. You stay there. If you feel like playing games, then you go ahead.
‘On your side, every move you make, we know. There are people there already … They have been keeping watch since this morning.
‘You have been talking on the phone for a long time and they know what you are talking about. They have been listening on your phone. Happy or sad, it’s up to you.’
When police moved in to make the arrests at 11.59am ‘The Captain’ was on his mobile phone talking to his controllers in Hong Kong. The three collectors were taken to the St Kilda Road police station. Police then noticed a bulge in the captain’s mouth. He was attempting to swallow a list of phone numbers including Brother Phuc’s Hong Kong mobile number.
Hours after the arrests in Melbourne, Brother Phuc flew out of Hong Kong to Vietnam and then back to his base in London.
At 12.57pm Brother Phuc rang the executioner in Sydney and in a three-minute call he told him they had been betrayed. In the next few weeks both American hitmen slipped out of Australia and flew to Vietnam.
After the arrests at Spencer Street Station, the Royal Hong Kong Police Force Organised Crime and Triad Bureau hit five homes and offices identified as connected with The Brotherhood through international bank records.
At one of the flats in Kowloon were two men. One was Nguyen Hoa Ngoc – the man who had received the Marlboro promotional cap and flew with one of the Bui brothers from the US on 20 April.
During the search they found the original fax message demanding $400,000 from Ha. They also found a novel called Until Proven Guilty. Written inside it were two telephone numbers. One was the Sydney motel where the Bui brothers stayed from 3 to 5 May and the other was the Los Angeles home of the hitmen’s parents.
Fingerprints on the fax also matched those of the person who mailed 1.3kg of heroin to the Australian Capital Territory in April 1996.
On 7 June the body was found in the Noble Park drain and police knew they faced an international murder investigation. Senior Detective Steve Tragardh of the homicide squad had a contact in a tobacco company who was able to provide information on the US Marlboro promotional caps. This breakthrough took the investigation to Los Angeles.
Detectives were able to identify six people involved in the kidnapping – two from Melbourne, two from London working from Hong Kong and two from the United States.
The old mates’ network proved effective. A Victorian police inspector rang a friend from the Hong Kong force and asked for help. An Australian Federal Police agent in California used personal contacts to get local detectives to help find one of the kidnappers. A Melbourne policeman rang a friend at New Scotland Yard and the Flying Squad began searching for Brother Phuc.
On 17 June, 1997, Officer Zbigniew Hojlo from the Oakland Police Department and Sergeant Frank Sierras from the Emeryville Police Department flew from San Francisco and then drove to the Long Beach City College, where a man called Bui Quang Chuong was studying history. They said they wanted to talk to him over local extortion and fraud crimes. The nervous Bui puffed on cigarettes during the interview. One friendly policeman leant over and told him that while the office was officially non-smoking he could drag away freely as long as he made sure he put them out. Just to make sure, the policeman added, could he spit on the lit end of each butt to make sure they were out? The suspect was happy to oblige.
The kidnapper was relieved he was not asked any questions about Australia and left believing he was in the clear.
What he didn’t know was the police were carefully putting the three butts into a special exhibit container filled with a bag of dry ice, ready for Hojlo to fly it to Melbourne to be DNA tested.
The tests established that Bui was likely to have once worn the baseball cap found in the Glen Waverley driveway. While the evidence wasn’t enough to extradite Bui from the US, it showed police they were on the right track.
The investigations finally identified the suspects in the US, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Australia and Britain.
ABOUT ninety minutes out of Hanoi, in the Ha Tay Province of Vietnam, the Ministry of Public Security has built the Provisional Detention Centre. The jail is so remote that many of the inmates – and most of the guards – have rarely seen a white face.
When Steve Tragardh of the Victorian homicide squad and federal agents Stewart Williams and Laurie Grey headed from the Australian Embassy through Hanoi’s chaotic streets on their way to the jail they knew they would have only one chance to talk to the man who, they believed, had killed Le in Springvale.
The investigators were tied to a strict timetable. They could interview Bui Tai Huu, the executioner who had flown to Australia from California to kill, but only from 9.30 to midday and again from 2pm until 4pm. Midday to 2pm had been reserved for lunch with the prison chiefs, as the guest of one Colonel Nam. Tragardh had so many questions that he requested to skip lunch. He was told this would be an insult – no lunch, no interview.
They arrived at the sprawling, single-storey prison, were taken to a room and sat at a table. Bui was ushered in. There were no shackles or handcuffs. There was no need. There was nowhere to run. Bui seemed relaxed, despite being interviewed for a murder that would earn him a hefty jail term in Australia. He refused to make admissions on tape but chatted amicably with Tragardh ‘off the record.’
Before they were well into the story guards stopped the interview. It was time for lunch with the Colonel.
It was a banquet of pond fish, dogmeat, rice and jail-made brandy. Colonel Nam sat between Tragardh, whom he nicknamed ‘The Strong One’ and Williams, ‘The Handsome One’. He grabbed at the blond hairs on Tragardh’s arms and head, saying he had not seen a fair-haired person before.
He told the Australians that all the food and brandy had been prepared by inmates. Tragardh told him that wouldn’t happen in Australia for fear that the prisoners would adulterate the food. Nam smiled when the statement was translated to him. He then explained it was not a problem here because if a prisoner tried that … the remainder of the explanation did not need to be translated, as the prison chief slowly ran his finger over his throat.
After lunch Tragardh was able to share a beer with Bui. Then he played his best card. The executioner was in jail because he had been arrested with a kilogram of heroin in Vietnam. If he stayed he faced certain execution, but if he gave evidence in Australia he would serve a sentence in Melbourne and leave jail alive.
But there was no deal. Bui said he wouldn’t be going back to Australia with the visiting detectives. As Bui saw it he had no choice but to stay and be executed on the heroin charge. If he gave evidence about the syndicate in Australia it might save his life by keeping him in an Australian jail – but all his family in the United States would be murdered.
That was the power of Brother Phuc. According to the executioner, Truong could order an innocent family in America to be slaughtered from his jail cell in Melbourne, and would do it without hesitation. For the man who had executed other people himself, it was a case of ‘if you live by the sword, you die by the sword.’
WHEN Brother Phuc was finally escorted onto the British Airways 747 at Heathrow by Extradition Squad detectives from New Scotland Yard, few on the packed flight knew he was a murder suspect heading to Melbourne for a Supreme Court trial.
Truong was brought in before any other passengers were allowed on the flight. He was handcuffed to Steve Tragardh and they sat in the last row of three seats in economy. Their handcuffed hands were hidden discreetly under a jumper.
The prisoner was wedged in the window seat, next to him was Tragardh and in the aisle seat was the head of the homicide squad, Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins.
For security reasons, the two detectives and the suspect were allocated their own toilet, which remained locked. The reason was simple. Police feared another passenger could plant a weapon in the toilet for Truong to grab.
Tragardh told the man that he had hunted around the world they could all relax and enjoy the flight if he understood that he no longer gave the orders. On this trip he had to remember at all times that he was a prisoner and not a passenger.
Truong nodded in agreement. He had one request. ‘Please, could you put a handkerchief under the handcuffs?’ The Victorian policeman asked why. The prisoner indicated he was concerned the chunky metal cuffs could scratch his gold watch. It was a Gucci, worth more than a month’s pay for a policeman. During the flight the handcuffs were removed and the suspect was allowed to scan the menu.
A flight attendant asked if he wanted a drink. He automatically answered, ‘red wine’, the habit of dozens of first class trips. Tragardh reminded him that this was not a pleasure flight. He settled for Coca Cola. If Brother Phuc was worried about the court battle ahead it didn’t affect his appetite. He ate Moroccan chicken, Italian salad, a cheese and tomato omelette, stir fried chicken with black bean sauce, pickled vegetables and a chocolate dessert.
After one meal he lent over to Tragardh and said with a smile, ‘Better than prison food.’ Which, of course, is a matter of opinion.
Truong later said that he had difficulty understanding English. The problem was so great that the courts would later order that transcripts of the committal evidence should be translated to Vietnamese at a cost of $60,000.
But his language problems did not seem to worry him on the flight. He managed to kill time on the plane listening to the comedy channel – in English. And he laughed at the right places.
BROTHER Phuc was sentenced to an effective twenty-five years in jail for kidnapping and murder by Justice Frank ‘The Tank’ Vincent in the Melbourne Supreme Court. For the sentencing, all visitors to the court were searched and checked with metal detectors because of fears of a plot to free Truong. He stood in the dock as Justice Vincent’s remarks were translated to him. At the end the accused, neatly dressed in a blue shirt and pressed slacks, bowed to the judge and his legal team. He then turned to the body of a court and began passing instructions to a group of Asian men and women.
He put his hand to his mouth in a gesture to his supporters that they should immediately start making phone calls. He was now a prisoner, but he still called the shots.
POSTSCRIPT: Mrs Ha is a devout Buddhist. She has decided to move to Melbourne because she wants to be near the spirit of her son.