Attack on Baker: Business Climate Also Suffers

“They shot me for no reason,” he scrawled on a bedside note pad.

Bun H. Tao was writing because he could not speak. At 4:32 a.m. on the morning of March 31, while he was baking doughnuts in his aunt’s shop in Cypress, a pair of gunmen came within millimeters of killing him.

One slug struck Tao’s heart and liver. Another hit him in the leg. Today Tao remains in intensive care at the UC Irvine Medical Center.

You remember Tao. He was featured in this space in a column about hard times among the Cambodian immigrants who have come to dominate the doughnut business in California. Tao’s Santa Ana doughnut supply house contributes to the livelihood of Cambodian families throughout Southern California.

Here is a man who was lucky to have avoided the killing fields of Cambodia, only to feel the reaper’s fetid breath in Orange County. Never mind the environmental regulations and the cost of workers’ compensation. If we’re not careful, crime will kill the business climate in this state. It already nearly killed Tao.

Although the statewide crime rate per 1,000 residents has been flat overall, the rate of violent crime rose 33% from 1982 through 1991, according to figures provided by the state attorney general’s office. The robbery rate rose 10%. The rate of bank robberies rose 20%.

Crime is nothing new in the doughnut business. Doughnut shopkeepers must put up with the usual round of holdups and unsavory customers, and during the riots a year ago, 40 to 50 Los Angeles-area doughnut shops burned.

B&H; Distributors, Tao’s doughnut supply company, has also been a victim of crime.

“Last year and this year, we lost $10,000 in truck batteries,” says Ning Yen, Tao’s partner, who adds that cartons of coffee and other merchandise have also been stolen. “It happens all the time.”

Yen believed that he and Tao were safe here in America.

Yen spent three years in the Cambodian jungle, living on snakes, plants and anything else he could catch, enslaved by the Khmer Rouge until he managed to escape in 1979.

Now he worries about his safety in Santa Ana. For protection, B&H; installed a video camera and a fence topped with razor wire.

But was the attack on Tao plain old robbery? It looked like it. The two men seemed to be after money, and asked by investigators if his assailants were robbers, Tao responded affirmatively.

Yet Rose Donuts, the store in which Tao was shot, was on a side street, not a main thoroughfare. Nor is Cypress the kind of place where such things happen every day.

Says Cypress police Lt. John Schaefer: “This is not a typical crime for us.”

And assuming that robbers act rationally, why rob someone baking in the middle of the night? Since the shop hadn’t begun the day’s sales, it should have been obvious there wouldn’t be much in the till.

Also, according to the police, there was still some money around when the gunmen left.

“It is awfully bizarre for somebody to walk into a store and shoot a guy twice and walk out, and there’s still money left in the store,” Lt. Schaefer says.

The police have also considered a number of other possibilities. Might Tao be the victim of extortion?

An old friend of Tao’s, another Cambodian in the doughnut business, says extortionists threatened him a couple of times several years ago. Soon after, he moved to the East Coast for awhile.

Now he lives in Northern California, tries not to work late and avoids being alone. But he says he doesn’t worry too much: “I died three times in Cambodia already.”

Sandra Blankenship, president of the Cambodian Business Assn., says there has indeed been trouble with protection rackets extorting money from Cambodian entrepreneurs, but that as far as she knows, that problem was solved a couple of years ago with the help of police. And Tao’s assailants weren’t Asian; often, in protection rackets that prey on immigrants, the predators prey on their own.

Business debts? B&H; Distributors was hurt by the recession and competition in the doughnut business.

Many of its doughnut-shop customers couldn’t pay their bills. Police are checking whether Tao might have borrowed money from someone whose idea of collecting involves gunfire.

Or was it more personal? Tao was fond of gambling, but Ning Yen says Tao confined his betting to occasional trips to Las Vegas.

Despite his grave injuries, it looks like Tao will make it. Over the weekend, his condition was upgraded from critical to fair.

We won’t know, until he can once again speak, whether his view of California has changed. But his partner probably spoke for him when he said flatly: “It’s not a safe place.”