Alleged Gang Leader, His Lawyer Shot to Death in San Francisco

Police on Saturday were investigating the shooting deaths of an alleged Vietnamese gang leader and his lawyer, who was a fund-raiser for Mayor Willie Brown and a close friend of the city’s district attorney, Terence Hallinan.

Dennis Natali--a well-known attorney at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice--was found with a bullet through his back early Friday. Police said he was slumped over the steering wheel of his BMW, which had crashed into a fire hydrant near his Fillmore district home, sending a plume of water shooting into the air.

About eight minutes after the car crashed, an unidentified Asian assailant gunned down Cuong Tran, an alleged gang boss, outside the trendy Pierce Street Annex bar in front of a crowd of people.

Just before the gunman fired the final shots and fled, he appeared to whisper something to Tran, bar owner Lorenzo Lopez said.

Unidentified sources told both of the San Francisco daily newspapers that the 40-year-old Tran had become an informant in a federal probe of Asian gang activity. However, Tran had yet to testify, officials said.

Recently, Natali, 57, represented Charles Luu, one of the co-defendants with Tran in a murder conspiracy trial.

San Francisco homicide detectives are investigating whether organized crime figures ordered the two men killed, or whether Tran, a former karaoke club owner, was killed by business rivals, Lt. David Robinson said.

“Right now we’re putting these pieces together,” Robinson said, adding that no suspects had been identified.

San Francisco police called it a major case and described Tran as a leader of the “TL Gang,” which allegedly terrorized San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Geoffrey Anderson, head of the Organized Crime Strike Force, declined to comment, as did FBI spokesman George Grotz.

Police say Natali had phoned his wife, Sheila, shortly before his death at about 1:30 a.m. Friday to tell her he was a few blocks from their apartment and would be home soon.

She learned about his death when she saw footage of his crashed car on a television news report. She has declined interviews with reporters and will not say why Natali was out at such an hour.

One official told the San Francisco Chronicle that Natali may have been lured out by those who killed him.

“This is very devastating,” said Dan Addario, who is head of Hallinan’s investigators. “He will be missed.”

“You have to be very careful when you get involved in these kind of cases,” Hallinan said.

Both of the shooting victims had their own past legal troubles.

Natali was known within the legal community to have had a serious cocaine problem in the early 1980s that nearly destroyed his career, although he had recently rebuilt it, lawyers told the San Francisco Examiner.

In 1988, the state Supreme Court suspended Natali from the State Bar of California for three years for making false representations to clients, failing to perform services for which he was retained, failing to perform competently and violating a court order.

Tran emigrated from Vietnam in the early 1980s and has a wife and two children in Philadelphia, one lawyer told the Examiner. Tran, who dressed fastidiously, also drove a BMW and was extremely polite.

In 1993, the FBI and San Francisco police investigated Tran for allegedly extorting money from a massage parlor employee who had amassed a $180,000 gambling debt.

Later that year, police and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raided Tran’s cafe and karaoke club, confiscating a pipe bomb, guns and cocaine, the Examiner reported.

And, in December 1994, a grand jury indicted Tran and two other San Francisco men, including Luu, on charges of conspiring to murder an aquarium shop owner.