Bài hay trên 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.”
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.”
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.”
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
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