The World - News from Sept. 11, 1987

Twenty-one senior Vietnamese officers were sentenced to long prison terms for using army money for a freewheeling black market operation that dealt in strategic goods, contraband, food, fabric and pornographic tapes, Radio Hanoi said. The corruption was on such a huge scale that it “created disturbances in the market and confusion in prices,” the radio said. It added that Gen. Nguyen Truong Xuan, commander of the garrison at Haiphong, northern Vietnam’s largest port, and 20 accomplices in three years raked in more than $612,000 in illicit profits. Sentences ranged up to 20 years, the radio said.