Vietnamese Immigrant Gets 7-Year Sentence for Assassination Attempt

A judge, swayed by a psychiatric report warning that Be Tu Van Tran’s anti-communist fanaticism may again drive him to violence, on Friday sent the Vietnamese immigrant to prison for seven years for a 1986 political assassination attempt in Garden Grove.

Just four months ago, when the 33-year-old Tran entered what amounted to a guilty plea in the shooting of a former Saigon housing minister, his lawyer predicted that the Santa Ana man would only have to spend a few months in jail.

But Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald, saying he would not condone violent attempts to prevent free expression, told Tran bluntly in court Friday, “If you want the credit for the crime, you also must do the time.”

A slight and withdrawn former deliveryman, Tran became a popular hero among strident anti-communist factions of the local Vietnamese community after he claimed credit for stalking, shooting and critically wounding Tran Kanh Van, who had been portrayed as a communist “lackey” by militant immigrants.

In confessing to the March 18, 1986, attack, Tran told police that he was driven by rage to shoot Van after the Westminster businessman was quoted in a Los Angeles Times Magazine piece as espousing normalized relations with Vietnam. Tran has since given conflicting statements about his role.

But defense attorney Robert Weinberg, maintaining that the passive but politically fiery Tran took responsibility for the shooting only as a “badge of honor” in the fight against communism, continued to insist Friday that his client may be innocent.

And Weinberg added in an interview that, in light of the stern sentence, his legal maneuverings have clearly backfired. The attorney expressed reservations about having Tran enter in May what is commonly known as a “slow plea.”

Under that rarely used legal arrangement, Tran gave up his right to a jury trial--a trial that could have reopened war wounds in the Vietnamese community--and effectively pleaded guilty to the crime of attempted murder.

He had faced a maximum nine-year sentence under the arrangement, but Weinberg--raising the ire of the judge--had publicly voiced confidence that his client would not spend more than a few months in jail.

That prediction proved wrong Friday as Fitzgerald first rejected Weinberg’s motion for a new trial and then refused to set the defendant free on probation or give him minimal jail time. Weinberg said he would appeal.

Fitzgerald, unswayed by Weinberg’s claim that newly discovered evidence proved his client’s innocence, said he considered Tran “a danger to society, a substantial danger, especially to those who would ever espouse the thought of a reunified Vietnam under communist control.”

The sentence was a victory for Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans, who told Fitzgerald that Tran’s attack and the glory he took in it afterward are particularly heinous affronts to a society that values free expression.

“He’s proud of (the shooting),” Evans said. “He’s not remorseful.”

In delivering the sentence in the Santa Ana courtroom, Fitzgerald cited a diagnostic study by the State Department of Corrections that said Tran has reluctantly expressed only “superficial remorse.” The mental-health professionals who examined Tran described him as a possible manic-depressive and said that his “fanatical” commitment to anti-communism suggests that “should his political cause deem it, he will re-offend regardless of the consequences.”

Defense attorney Weinberg said he was puzzled by Tran’s lack of remorse in the corrections report. “He’s intelligent enough to fake it,” the attorney said.

While Tran told state and local health officials that he did not shoot Tran, he was quoted in the corrections report as saying that the shooting was “a good lesson” for the victim “because he was a traitor, he worked for South Vietnam, (and) now he supports North Vietnam.”

The victim, Tran Khanh Van, now living in hiding, wanted to attend Friday’s sentencing but did not at the urging of local prosecutors who feared for his safety. Those present at Tran’s sentencing, including half a dozen of the defendant’s supporters, had to pass through a metal detector before entering the courtroom.

Van, ambushed as he walked from his Westminster real estate office to his car, was shot twice and seriously injured. The attack came about 10 weeks after Tran was quoted in The Times’ magazine as saying: “The only way to change Vietnam’s repressive Marxism is to work with those who will become the next generation of leaders.”

Van has insisted he was misquoted but told officials preparing the Tran report that he has nonetheless been subjected even today to continued threats and harassment from extremist anti-communists.

Tran, meanwhile, became the subject of a laudatory book after taking credit for the crime and has been revered by some in the local Vietnamese community as an inspiring role model in the bid to take back their native land from the communist regime.