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The Vietnamese gangs pose as anti-Communist groups seeking freedom for their homeland, witnesses said, but they actually extort money from Vietnamese merchants in the U.S. They torture their rivals and threaten or kill journalists who try to expose them. One Vietnamese woman told how her publisher husband, whose magazine had carried articles about the gangs, had been warned to stop. When he did not, she said quietly, "gunmen came into where he worked and shot him to death." Another witness claimed that former South Vietnamese army officers led by Ky run a 1,000-member Vietnamese crime network in the U.S. Ky, who fled Viet Nam when U.S. troops pulled out in 1975, lives in Huntington Beach, Calif, and owns a liquor store. He contends, "I'm not a Mafia chieftain. I'm not a gangster. I'm a poor man. I would love for the Government of this country to take official action and investigate these allegations to clear my name." The commission is not expected to turn in its report until 1986.
—By Ed Magnuson.
Reported by Kenneth W. Banta/New York