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Cracking Down on Little Saigon’s Crime Syndicates

By Associated Press

Organized crime has thrived since the 1970s in Orange County’s Little Saigon community. Now law enforcement officials are taking it on in a focused crackdown.

More than a dozen agencies, from the Westminster police to the U.S. Customs Service, are targeting the area. The FBI has formed a special squad and local police have dispatched detectives as far away as Vietnam and China.

In the last month, authorities have busted gambling and counterfeit clothing operations, as well as credit card scams and what they described as the county’s largest supplier of the designer drug Ecstasy.

Criminal enterprises in central Orange County have spent years quietly taking control of everything from video poker games to loan-sharking, according to police. The groups prey on an immigrant community often hesitant to report such crimes.

Last month, police broke up a crime ring that allegedly supplied Orange County’s Asian American community with most of its illegal gambling.

Fifteen people were rounded up in a pre-dawn raid by federal and local officials in the Little Saigon district Sept. 29. Their alleged leader, Son Thanh Nguyen, 32, was already in jail on a weapons charge.

Nguyen, authorities said, ran a sophisticated operation that used “stealth” video machines that, with the flip of a switch, could be changed from legal arcade games like “Pac Man” to video games of chance.

People playing the games of chance could deposit as much as $20 at a time. The machines are fixtures in most of Little Saigon’s Vietnamese cafes, authorities said, adding that in some instances gang members threatened cafe owners who were reluctant to install them.

The gang was believed to have made more than $300,000 a year from their operation, which authorities said was expanding outside of Orange County.

“These are problems that have been going on for years in Little Saigon,” said Mike Clesceri, head of a district attorney’s office task force. “This is an area that had gone neglected because we were after the violent criminals.”

In some cases, yesterday’s street gang members have become today’s syndicate leaders, said Randy D. Parsons, an FBI supervisory special agent who heads the bureau’s Organized Crime Squad in Orange County.

“If you look at the time frame,” Parsons said, “some of the people who were gang members and committing violent crime in the early ’90s have graduated to ... the middle managers and leaders of the more organized efforts.”

The FBI reported last month that several members of the Wah Ching operate in Little Saigon. One of the most prominent of the Asian crime groups, the Wah Ching has ties to centuries-old criminal societies in Hong Kong.