EUROPE: Vietnamese Criminal Gangs Could Resurface

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

BERLIN, Mar 12 1998 (IPS) - In a hermetically sealed bunker in Dusseldorf, three Vietnamese have been handed down life sentences for blood-curdling murders on the streets of the German capital and other cities.

In Berlin, the trial of Le Duy Bao, 26, leader of the Ngoc Thien gang, known as “The Merciful” is still underway for the merciless way in which he tortured and killed his enemies. Together with 15 members of his gang, he is on trial for conducting a reign of terror on the streets of the German capital between 1992 and 1996.

The charges include murder, blackmail and extortion, mostly linked to Berlin’s illicit smuggled cigarette trade, controlled by Vietnamese. At hand are 32 defense lawyers – attempting to use every delaying tactic and procedural loophole in the book, three public prosecutors 13 interpreters and nine judges.

The acts of the Vietnamese gangsters are so gruesome that special commissions to investigate Asian gangs have been set up in most German states. Documentation being presented at the Le Duy Bao trial presents the most detailed picture of the structure, membership and operations of the half-dozen Vietnamese gangs operating on Central European soil.

Some 60 murders have been attributed to Asian gang warfare in Germany, mostly linked to cigarette smuggling. In one case in the North German town of Halle, specially trained “executioners” recruited from the Vietnamese army set upon their victims with samurai-swords, decapitating one. In another, the skin of a victim was ripped off.

Chopper attacks and shootings, however are the preferred methods. And police say the gangs are so fearless of being caught, they carry out their ghastly acts unmasked, knowing that the Vietnamese community has been terrorised into silence about giving any kind of evidence against them.

Cigarette smuggling is a lucrative trade particularly in the Eastern part of Germany where demand for cheap cigarettes is high. Smugglers evade Germany’s punitive cigarette taxes and sell branded cigarettes on the streets. Losses to the state in tax revenue have been put at one billion marks (600 million U.S. dollars) a year, according to Federal estimates.

Smuggling from Poland to Germany expanded after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and was controlled by North Vietnamese who had lived for years in East Germany as contract workers. They claimed political asylum and began to move to the cities, particularly Berlin. The lucky ones found jobs in the restaurant trade or as hawkers, while those without jobs became prime targets for recruitment into the illicit cigarette trade.

Police investigators say, however, that the worst murders have been carried out not by former contract workers but illegal Vietnamese immigrants smuggled later into Germany by human trafficking gangs in the early 1990s. They are forced into the illegal cigarette trade to pay off their “transportation” fees. Others are thought to have been “parachuted” in by criminal masterminds in Vietnam.

Some 40,000 Vietnamese live in Germany, double the number on German soil in 1989. And police believe 10,000 of them are members of underground gangs.

By the mid-1990s Vietnamese control of the underground cigarette market was so well entrenched that according to a report by the German Federal Office for Organised Crime in 1996, “some 100 million marks (60 million dollars) has so far been transferred to Vietnam”.

A special Vietnam Commission set up by the German criminal police believes an underground bank launders the money and sends it as gold and US dollars to Vietnam, where the practice is alleged to be condoned because of the foreign exchange it brings into the country.

The Quang Binh and Ngoc Thien gangs between them controlled two thirds of the illegal cigarette market with some 1,200 outlets on Berlin streets. Anyone wanting to sell on these streets had to pay 12,000-15,000 Hong Kong dollars a month to the “soldiers” of rival gangs. Anyone paying to the wrong gang was in danger of being murdered as a “traitor”.

According to police, the leaders live in Poland or the Czech Republic with front line “commandos” regularly travelling back and forth over the border to keep the “troops” in Germany under control and report back to their chiefs in their “safe zone”.

The capture in September 1996 of Le Duy Bao, and other members of the Ngoc Tien gang was seen as a great victory for the Berlin criminal police. Nine of the gang members now on trial, including Le Duy Bao, were caught when they robbed a Vietnamese family and kidnapped their five-year old daughter. The police homed in on them when they made a 400,000 Hong Kong dollar ransom demand.

But police are far from certain they have broken the back of Vietnamese gangs whose decade-long turf war has been likened to the Mafia wars in Chicago and New York in the 1920s and 30s. Just this week three Vietnamese tried to chop off the hand of a compatriot for refusing to pay up protection money for operating a cigarette stand.

While the trials are revealing hitherto unknown details about the extent and structure of the Vietnamese gangs in Europe, police say their ability to extort and blackmail may still be growing even though the era of cold-blooded street murders may be over. And, they say, members of the Vietnamese underworld are moving in on the city’s Chinese population in a bid to control Chinese restaurants.

A startling number of Chinese restaurants in key city locations have been sold into Vietnamese hands in recent years. “And the transaction is not always voluntary on the part of the seller,” according to Detlev Schade of the Berlin Criminal Police, and a former head of the Vietnamese investigation team. The money for such purchases, the police believe, comes from the proceeds of activities linked to cigarette smuggling.

Cigarette sales on the streets of Berlin have dropped. But the cigarette trade has not stopped completely. The gangs do business from their own apartments. In late Feburary, Winh Wan Ti, the 34 year old head of the Nghi Xuan band was arrested, caught while trying to extort money from a Vietnamese cigarette seller.

He had taken over from the previous chief known only as “Hali” who was behind the 1995-1996 turf war, and who had been arrested last autumn in the Czech Republic. Police say the gang has regrouped and taken up their lucrative business once again.

“Many of the illegal cigarette-traffickers are merely waiting for a new chief to emerge,” says Schade.