Assassination Attempt Leads to Stiff Sentence

A judge, swayed by a psychiatric report warning that Be Tu Van Tran’s anti-Communist fanaticism might 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, noting Tran’s reputed lack of full remorse, 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A slight and withdrawn former deliveryman, Tran become a hero among strident anti-Communist factions of the local Vietnamese community after he claimed credit for stalking, shooting and critically injuring 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 a desire for normalized relations between Vietnam and the United States. Tran has since given conflicting statements about his role.

Defense attorney Robert Weinberg, maintaining that 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.

Weinberg added in an interview that, in light of the stern sentence, his legal maneuverings have clearly backfired and that he now regrets the decision to have 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--which had threatened to rip open emotional war wounds among 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 Judge Fitzgerald--had publicly voiced confidence that his client would not be ordered to spend more than a few months in jail.

Fitzgerald 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.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans argued to the judge that Tran’s attack and the glory he took in it are a particularly heinous affront to a society that values free expression. “He’s proud of (the shooting),” Evans said. “He’s not remorseful.”

In delivering the sentence, 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.”