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Truong Dinh Tran
More about the man who was instrumental in the kidnapping of Abp. Thuc

Trường Đình Trần (January 5, 1932 – May 6, 2012), was a Vietnamese American  businessman and hotelier.  Starting in the 1970s, Tran owned several New York City hotels that became noted for their problems with crime, building safety, and cleanliness.

Tran was born in Ha Tinh province in north-central Vietnam to a Catholic family.  He married Ngu Thi in 1950 and had four children with her. Sometime after 1954, Tran and his father were imprisoned by North Vietnamese authorities for two years.  After his release in 1958, ati age 26, Truong relocated to Saigon in South Vietnam, motivated by the need to pursue economic opportunities beyond the constraints of his northern origins.  In South Vietnam he had children with four other women.

Tran was the principal owner of the  Vishipco Line, the largest shipping company in South Vietnam in the 1970s. As a shipowner, he earned millions of dollars hauling cargo for the United States military.  His actions during the last day of the Fall of Saigon  have been the subject of debate. Tran stated that he used his company's resources, including commercial ships and hundreds of trucks, to aid in the evacuation of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians and military personnel to escape from Vietnam.  He let his ships, inclusive the Truong Xuan (with Captain Pham Ngoc Luy) carry free more than 3,000 Vietnamese fleeing Saigon after the Communist invasion.  He claimed that his ships also helped evacuate thousands of American military personnel and civilians.  Richard Armitage, the American official who oversaw the U.S. naval evacuation, disputed this as false because all U.S. military personnel had already evacuated and American civilians did not evacuate on merchant ships.

Tran left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, the day that Saigon fell to the communists.  Tran boarded one of his eleven ships and traveled to the United States with two suitcases of gold.  Truong departed Vietnam with approximately $7 million in cash and gold, underscoring the scale of wealth accuмulated.

Tran entrusted the suitcases to James Dau, a 25-year-old associate he had informally adopted in 1960, instructing him to disguise himself in ragged clothing and feign deafness and muteness to evade robbers, while using an alias to conceal his prior role as an air traffic controller.  Accompanied by one of his mistresses and her sister, the group proceeded to Saigon's port, bypassing throngs pleading for passage on Tran's vessel, and departed aboard one of his ships just before North Vietnamese troops arrived on April 30, 1975.  During the voyage, Dau concealed the assets inside the ship's exhaust system to safeguard them from potential threats.  The ship first reached the Philippines, followed by Guam, where refugees were processed; from there, Tran and his party continued to Arkansas, depositing the cash and gold in a bank to secure their holdings upon U.S. arrival.  This maritime exodus, leveraging Tran's shipping expertise, enabled him to preserve capital that later funded his American ventures.  This information derives primarily from Dau's 2012 Manhattan Surrogate Court testimony and Tran's own account, which emphasize the perils of robbery and regime change without independent corroboration of exact asset values.

Tran began his hotel business in New York City in 1975, first with the Hotel Opera, a single-room occupancy, on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. and then Hotel Carter in 1977, in Midtown Manhattan (Times Square), a purchase which also included Hotel Lafayette, in Buffalo, New York.  For the Hotel Opera he paid $1.1 million, with a reported 30 percent cash down payment and the remainder mortgaged over 15 to 20 years. In October 1977, he purchased the 640-room Hotel Carter in Times Square for $1.5 million, providing a down payment of about $300,000 and financing the balance via a mortgage. Through the years, there were many other real estate holdings.
 
Hotel Carter went on to develop a reputation as America's "dirtiest hotel" (pictured above).  Subsequent investments followed a pattern of targeted acquisitions in high-traffic Manhattan locations using minimal upfront cash and debt financing. He expanded to include properties like the Kenmore Hotel on East 23rd Street and the Times Square Hotel, operating them as budget accommodations catering to transients and tourists despite chronic issues such as poor maintenance and crime.  This approach prioritized cash flow generation in prime real estate over property upgrades, with the Hotel Carter alone yielding high profitability amid Times Square's volume-driven demand. Tran purchased the Hotel Kenmore on 23rd Street in 1985 for $7.9 million. The hotel was seized from Tran by the US Marshals Service in 1994 because of deplorable conditions and rampant drug crime within the building; this was the largest federal seizure of property related to drug charges in U.S. history.  In 1988, he purchased the Times Square Hotel; the hotel was seized by the city in January 1990 for its numerous safety code violations.

Properties like the Kenmore Hotel on East 23rd Street were described by the FBI as a "virtual supermarket for crack cocaine," with thieves and dealers freely operating due to reduced security; federal authorities seized the Kenmore in June 1994 amid drug-related probes, marking a major intervention in his operations. Over nearly 16 years, city officials issued hundreds of health and safety violations for issues including buildings reeking of garbage and urine, with new citations accuмulating despite prior fixes, indicating persistent neglect that exacerbated urban decay and tenant risks across holdings like the Carter, Opera, Longacre, and Lafayette.  These operational shortcomings contrast sharply with his financial gains, suggesting a pattern where profit maximization compromised public welfare and regulatory compliance.

In 2007, Tran began to suffer from cardiovascular disease.  He died on May 6, 2012 without a will to clarify paternal or spousal ties.  Tran maintained multiple concurrent and sequential relationships with women, resulting in a large family structure that included at least 14 children from four wives, according to accounts from family members involved in estate disputes.  He reportedly rotated living arrangements among these women and their offspring in his New York City hotels, such as the Hotel Carter, fostering a non-traditional household dynamic.  Other reports describe relationships with up to five or six women, yielding at least 16 children, though exact figures remain contested amid legal claims.  Legal filings highlight non-marital children from earlier and later unions, including alleged sons and daughters from purported prior marriages in Vietnam, underscoring the opacity of his marital history due to cultural differences and lack of docuмentation.  Tran's complex family life led to a protracted legal battle over his $100 million estate.  Following his death, control of properties like the Hotel Carter passed to heirs amid legal disputes, with the hotel eventually sold in 2015 for $191.8 million after renovations.

No one sent him there. He chose to go.