Jurors View Asian Boyz Videotape

Jurors watched a chilling homemade videotape Thursday in which members of the feared Asian Boyz street gang appeared to boast of executing victims with gunshots “between the eyes, point-blank.”

The tape, which gave Van Nuys jurors a taste of gang life, was the climax of the testimony of Truong Dinh, the gangster-turned-informant who provided commentary as it was shown in court.

In three days of testimony, Dinh implicated seven former gang members who are defendants in the trial, each accused of murder. Prosecutors allege the group is responsible for seven slayings and 18 attempted slayings in a crime spree beginning in 1995.

Dinh and two defendants appeared in the video, boasting of their violence as they smiled, clapped hands and passed around a handgun. The lens zoomed in on a poster of the elaborate letters ABZ, signifying the Asian Boyz gang.

The topic of the profanity-filled, drunken conversation, Dinh testified, was two separate shootings in which the gang allegedly killed six people.

“See what happen to their homeboys six feet under the ground,” Bunthong Roeung said on the tape. “Shoot [everybody] to the front, to the back, to the leg. . . . Especially to the [expletive] temple and right between the eyes. Point-blank, cuz. Point-blank.”

Authorities allege Roeung, Sothi Mehn, Son Thanh Bui, David Evangalista and Roatha Buth, Kimorn Nuth and Ky Tony Ngo committed a string of killings in a bid to become the most feared Asian gang in Los Angeles. Five of the defendants face the death penalty if convicted.

One alleged gang member was an honors college student at the time authorities allege the gang was attacking strangers and committing burglaries and home-invasion robberies.

The defendants all emigrated with their families from Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines. Police say they preyed mainly on fellow refugees.

Investigators said they did not suspect the same small group was responsible for the 13 killings they now attribute to the gang until an Asian Boyz member turned state’s evidence and was gunned down the day before he was scheduled to testify in 1996.

The Los Angeles Police Department has gone to great lengths to protect Dinh, ushering him to court through back hallways under escort and positioning officers outside the building on the first day of testimony. Seven deputies in the courtroom block every entrance and exit.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Baird told jurors as the trial opened this week that she would present evidence of several weapons recovered by police. But Dinh’s testimony, and that of another gang-member turned informant, is at the heart of the case.

Defense lawyers have attacked Dinh’s credibility, with one, Daniel Nardoni, accusing him of falsely implicating his friends to save his own skin.

Since he began testifying Tuesday, Dinh has painstakingly recalled details of shootings he participated in or witnessed. He described running freeway gun battles, with gang members shooting out windows with two and three guns and reaching over the roof of their car to fire at the targets in another car. He recalled the ambush and slayings of rival gang members outside a Van Nuys apartment complex.

But the most dramatic evidence was the videotape Dinh said the gang made after drinking too much beer at one gang member’s home in Taft.

In the tape, Dinh complimented Roeung, saying he “grew up with that 12-gauge” shotgun.

Once you pull the trigger of a gun, Roeung told the camera, “You ain’t got no heart.”