Chủ Nhật, 27 tháng 7, 2014

Mr. Tran’s Messy Life and Legacy


Bài hay trên The New York Times



The Hotel Carter and the Hotel Kenmore were among the Manhattan properties owned by Truong Dinh Tran, shown in 1994. Credit Clockwise from top left: Stephanie Berger for The New York Times; Edward Keating/The New York Times; and Michael Nagle for The New York Times


Truong Dinh Tran led a mostly uneventful life, unless you count spending two years in a North Vietnamese prison, swimming his way to South Vietnam, building a fortune in wartime, fleeing to the United States with a suitcase full of cash and another full of gold, installing himself and his four paramours and their children in a single-room-occupancy hotel on Manhattan’s West Side, becoming a subject of the biggest federal seizure of property related to drug charges in American history, and then donating $2 million to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund after Sept. 11. When he died, in 2012, Mr. Tran left a fortune valued at $100 million, at least 16 children by five women, one self-described wife, and no last will and testament.
In death, he became a case study in the uncertainty of all knowledge, especially as fought over by people vying to inherit his money — or, as one family member put it, people who “are masters of deception and very cunning when it comes to selling their truth.”
Photo
The Hotel Carter, on West 43rd Street. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times
In May, a Surrogate’s Court judge ruled that the fact that one of Mr. Tran’s partners swore she was single on her tax returns did not preclude her from claiming that she was married to him, and thus entitled to one-half of his estate. The ruling opened the door to a court battle that could involve 30 or more heirs and take years to resolve.
Through lawyers or directly, the parties involved declined or did not respond to requests for interviews for this article, but they have told their stories in extensive court documents.
One thing everyone involved can agree on: Somebody else is lying.
A sense of the absurd permeates even the driest of court depositions:
Lawyer No. 1: “Are you truthful?”
Lawyer No. 2, representing the woman who says she is Mr. Tran’s wife: “I will direct her not to answer.”
Lawyer No. 1: “Have you told the truth here today?”
Lawyer No. 2: “I will direct her not to answer ...”
Lawyer No. 1: “Have you lied in the lawsuit?”
Lawyer No. 2: “I will direct her not to answer.”
Lawyer No. 1: “Have you lied today?”
Lawyer No. 2: “I will direct her not to answer.”
By general agreement, Mr. Tran was born on Jan. 5, 1932, to a Roman Catholic family in Ha Tinh Province, in what later became the Communist-controlled Democratic Republic of Vietnam. After that, the facts get muddy.
In 1950, he met a woman named Ngu Thi. He married her in a church ceremony and eventually had four children with her. Whether the couple then made the marriage official by registering it with the state is a matter of debate. There is no contemporaneous record of their doing so — missing, some family members contend, in the “pervasive loss and destruction of records in Vietnam.”
Sometime after 1954, when the Geneva accords partitioned Vietnam into North and South, Mr. Tran was arrested by the new Communist government of North Vietnam and incarcerated for two years, along with his father, who died in prison. After his release, Mr. Tran went to the South, carrying “only a pair of boxers,” according to one account. He did not see Ms. Ngu again for more than 40 years.
There were other women in Vietnam, including four who bore him children. As one of the women, Hung Thi Nguyen, explained in an affidavit filed after Mr. Tran’s death, “At the time it was common in Vietnam for a man to have relationships with multiple women who were not his wife.” Mr. Tran took this custom to heart, sometimes setting up homes with several women or rotating among their apartments.
“I think he tried to be a father to all his children,” said Marc Bogatin, a lawyer who represented Mr. Tran and now represents one of his daughters. “For someone with so many kids, he was pretty devoted.”
Photo
A police raid at Mr. Tran’s Hotel Kenmore in 1994. Credit John Sotomayor/The New York Times
In 1959, in South Vietnam, he met a 16-year-old named Sang Nguyen, who had recently been crowned Miss Vietnam by the daily Women of Tomorrow. Ms. Sang impressed the judges with her desire to serve older adults and the disabled, promote health and fitness, and protect the cause of freedom, according to a biography included in her court papers.
According to Ms. Sang’s accounts, she and Mr. Tran were married in a civil ceremony on Jan. 1, 1960, and lived as man and wife until he died. Apart from the officiant, no one attended the wedding, she said. She and Mr. Tran had three children in Vietnam and a fourth in New York. As with Ms. Ngu, though, documentation certifying the marriage is open to dispute.
Various accounts describe the young Mr. Tran as penniless or affluent, but all agree that he was industrious and well connected. Once he reached South Vietnam, he started buying and selling military supplies, then formed South Vietnam’s largest shipping company, expanding to 24 merchant ships, hundreds of trucks and a shipping port. In affidavits, Ms. Sang said she helped him start the companies, invested money in them and served as vice chair of the shipping business and later vice president of his New York hotel business.
Photographs in the court records show a happy and prosperous couple with their children. Mr. Tran’s business was war, and in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, business was good.
The fall of Saigon to Communist forces in 1975 meant several things to Mr. Tran. With his fortune and himself at risk, he found both a need to act quickly and an opportunity for mythmaking.
“Though I understood the grave risks involved in doing so,” Mr. Tran wrote, in a document headed Personal Background, which was included in Ms. Sang’s filings, “I immediately sent my ships to the embattled ports of Da Nang, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang and Cam Ranh, and directed my staff to assist the endangered Americans.” In all, he wrote, his ships rescued 8,520 Vietnamese and American civilians and American troops.
Others have disputed Mr. Tran’s claims about evacuating Americans, and Mr. Tran himself told conflicting versions of the events. Richard L. Armitage, who supervised the American naval evacuation, said later that by the time Mr. Tran’s ships left, there were no American soldiers to be evacuated, and that the United States forces did not use merchant ships to evacuate American civilians.
Mr. Tran often told of leaving Vietnam with two suitcases full of gold because he could not get his money out of the banks. In a 1994 interview with The New York Times, he said the gold was worth “maybe a million,” then corrected himself to say it was worth “less than a million.”
But Thanh Van Nguyen, a village boy who claims Mr. Tran adopted him in Vietnam, said in an affidavit that he left the country on a ship with Mr. Tran carrying two suitcases, “one containing approximately $7 million in U.S. currency and the other containing approximately 25 kilograms of gold,” all belonging to Mr. Tran. Four of the mothers of his children left with him or on other ships.
He also left behind gold and money “beyond description in today’s terms” for Ms. Ngu and her children, one of her sons later attested. After reaching the United States, Mr. Tran periodically sent cash and other parcels to the family, according to her sons’ affidavits.
Mr. Tran brought his extended family to New York, where he bought the first of his hotels, the 23-story Hotel Opera, a single-room-occupancy residence on Broadway by 77th Street, in 1975. In one suite, he lived with Ms. Sang, her children and two of his mistresses, Cham Thi Nguyen and Hoa Phan, according to an affidavit filed by Ms. Hung, another mistress. Ms. Hung said she refused to share a household with the others and lived with her children on another floor. As Mr. Tran bought more properties — first the Hotel Carter on West 43rd Street, which under his aegis was voted the “dirtiest hotel in America” for three consecutive years on the website TripAdvisor, and then a hotel in Buffalo — his family life became more circulatory. Ms. Hung’s affidavit describes Mr. Tran alternately “staying with Cham at the Hotel Carter, with me in my suite at the Hotel Opera, and with Ms. Hoa, Ms. Sang and Ms. Sang’s children in their suite at the Hotel Opera.”
Ms. Sang, in court papers, denied that Mr. Tran spent such time with other women.
In between family and business obligations, Mr. Tran made time to attend Mass every day at the Church of the Holy Cross on West 42nd Street, according to a letter in court papers from the Rev. Peter Colapietro, who was a priest there.
Mr. Tran developed a signature management style: slashing security and housekeeping staffs, stockpiling health and safety violations and retelling his Vietnamese rescue story in court to demonstrate his good character.
In 1985, he bought the 641-unit Hotel Kenmore on East 23rd Street — once the home of the authors Dashiell Hammett and Nathanael West, and by then the largest single-room-occupancy building in New York — for $7.9 million. Three years later, he took over management of the 735-room Times Square Hotel on West 43rd Street, over objections from tenants and city officials. At the Times Square, Mr. Tran collected rents as high as $2,640 per month from the city to house homeless families, even as the number of health and safety and building code violations climbed past 1,500. City inspectors said they saw drug dealers and heard gunshots in the halls. In January 1990, the city took over the hotel.
At the Kenmore, drug dealers and prostitutes worked openly. From January 1991 to the middle of 1994, there were 189 narcotics arrests or complaints at the building. Prosecutors said roving bands of crack dealers took over whole floors, robbing and even killing older residents for small sums of cash.
The hotel was not pretty, but it was home — at least to Ms. Cham, who managed the building and lived on the second floor with five of Mr. Tran’s children. Mr. Tran lived in three rooms at the Hotel Carter. He did not deny that drug trafficking was rampant at the Kenmore, but neither did he make apologies for his clientele, telling The Times in 1994: “Those big hotels, Helmsley and Trump, they send the bad people to Truong. The city should thank me for taking care of so many poor and homeless.”
Photo
Mr. Tran, at right, with his self-described wife, Sang Nguyen, and an unidentified man.
The city disagreed. On June 8, 1994, federal and city police officers stormed the Kenmore, arresting 18 people and seizing the building on the grounds that it was a drug den. Mr. Tran and his family were not charged with any crimes.
Mr. Tran fought the seizure without success. But this year a police informant at the Kenmore told The Times that he had planted drugs and guns on innocent residents and lied about them to help management get rid of troublemakers. The informant, Earl Robert Merritt, now 70, said he “helped send hundreds of people out in handcuffs,” of whom “I’d say 80 percent were innocent.”
On a sun-drenched afternoon this month, the Hotel Carter, the last significant asset in Mr. Tran’s holdings, stood as a transitional symbol of the new Times Square. Cleaned up and offered for sale this year, it drew 25 bids reaching close to $180 million, promising a return to respectability, more or less — a “gentleman’s” club on the street level offered “Japanese body sushi.” No visible signs remind a visitor of the summer day in 2007 when a woman’s body was found in a trash bag in one of the rooms. An aquarium filled with plush stuffed fish greeted visitors on the entry stairs.
It was at the Hotel Carter, starting in 2007, that Mr. Tran began to suffer health problems — first he needed a coronary bypass, then he had a debilitating stroke. He had kept order over his extended family; his failing health set off a battle for control.
Mr. Tran owned 80 percent of his holding company; Ms. Sang, Ms. Cham, Ms. Hung and Ms. Hoa each owned 5 percent. Ms. Sang accused Ms. Cham, Ms. Hung and one of Ms. Ngu’s sons, Bac Tran, of forcing her out of the Carter’s operations and letting the hotel deteriorate. In 2009, she brought a shareholder suit against the man that she said was her husband, Mr. Tran, and the holding company for negligence and mismanagement, and she asked the court to appoint a receiver. She said in a deposition, “Bac is very, very mean boy.”
John M. Callagy, a lawyer for Ms. Sang, said that relations within the family were never comfortable and that the buildings were mismanaged even before Mr. Tran’s health declined.
The others, in turn, accused Ms. Sang of using Mr. Tran’s poor health to seize control of the hotel, then line her pockets and those of her children. “The first thing she did,” Bac Tran said in a deposition, speaking through an interpreter, “she go to the hotel, she call everybody coming down to the lobby, all the worker one by one, from now on, nobody here the boss. I’m the boss. You all have to listen to me.”
The elder Mr. Tran accused Ms. Sang of burning through $2 million in company money during his absence “through a combination of improper personal expenses, and bad management decisions.” His affidavit continued, “The Hotel does not need to be protected from me, but needs to be protected from plaintiff.”
Mr. Tran’s death in 2012 only escalated the fighting. Within two days, family members were in court battling for control over his remains and his death notice.
By this time, Ms. Ngu was dead. Ms. Sang claimed to be the surviving spouse, thus entitled to half of his estate. Ten children from other mothers banded against her, arguing that she was never married to Mr. Tran, both because he was already married to Ms. Ngu and because Ms. Sang lacked the proper documents to support her claim. Also, they pointed out, as early as 2001 both she and Mr. Tran were listing themselves as single on their tax returns.
The coalition opposing Ms. Sang soon fell apart, especially as their lawyers cited unpaid legal expenses topping $500,000 and asked to withdraw from the case.
“It was personally very stressful having to maneuver around so many different personalities within my extended family,” Stephanie Tran, one of Ms. Hung’s daughters, wrote in an affidavit. “I sometimes felt sorry they” — the lawyers — “had to deal with us too.” The lawyers’ request, like Ms. Sang’s shareholder suit, remains unresolved.
Ms. Sang has claimed that Mr. Tran did not live with any of the other women, but only with her. Witnesses on the other side, going back to Vietnam, argue that Mr. Tran had no special relationship with Ms. Sang, and that the two never lived together. Eventually, the court will have to rule first on whether Ms. Ngu and Mr. Tran were legally married under Vietnamese law, then on whether the teenage Ms. Sang and Mr. Tran were married, and then — everyone into the pool! — which of the offspring can prove themselves to be Mr. Tran’s biological or adopted children.
At the Hotel Carter, profits are up since the court appointed a temporary administrator, Stanley Parness, who ordered repairs and prepared the property for sale. But little is smooth in the Tran saga. Mr. Parness died on July 8, temporarily suspending the sale.
Bradley Kulman, a lawyer from Mr. Parness’s firm, said the sale would most likely go through by the fall or winter. New owners are expected to pour $100 million or more into renovations, Mr. Kulman said. The strip club’s lease may be the last surviving remnant of the woolly old days. The times have changed, and Times Square with them.
On a recent evening, tourists with roller bags came in and out of the lobby of the once-derelict Carter, passing new hotels and restaurants nearby. The vermin, the corpse and a longstanding sign promising guests “You Wanted in Time Square & Less” are memories they do not share.
Among the residents upstairs are still some members of Mr. Tran’s extended tribe, but they have agreed to move out by the time of the transfer, Mr. Kulman said. Thus will end Mr. Tran’s imprint on the neighborhood he made his adopted home.
He was a man of his times, profiting from war in the 1960s and ’70s, and from urban decay in the 1980s and ’90s, then fading into a cleaner, safer Times Square — and into contentious court proceedings that will continue long after the last trace of his empire is gone./.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/nyregion/mr-trans-messy-life-and-legacy.html?_r=0

Không có nhận xét nào:

Đăng nhận xét