Agents Target Little Saigon Crime Groups

Federal and local law enforcement officials are in the midst of a major crackdown on organized crime in Little Saigon, hoping to make a dent in the racketeering and drug outfits that have flourished since the 1970s.

More than a dozen law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Customs Service and Westminster police, have investigations underway in Little Saigon. The FBI has formed a special squad to focus on organized crime in Orange County’s Asian community, while local police have dispatched detectives to Vietnam and China.

An FBI crime survey of the area completed last month reported activity by a number of members of the Wah Ching--one of the best-known Asian crime groups with links to the 300-year-old criminal societies in Hong Kong.

The survey also noted that businesses in Little Saigon were victims of protection rackets and extortion by organized syndicates, said Randy D. Parsons, an FBI supervisory special agent who heads the bureau’s Organized Crime Squad in Orange County.

Some of the syndicates maintain international ties to help launder money and traffic counterfeit goods, stolen property and narcotics, he said. Many of the ranking members of such groups are former members of street gangs who have put aside feuds with rivals to concentrate on financial profits, he said.

“If you look at the time frame,” Parsons said, “some of the people who were gang members and committing violent crime in the early ‘90s have graduated to . . . the middle managers and leaders of the more organized efforts.”

Earlier this week, county officials announced the breakup of a $5-million counterfeit clothes ring based in Little Saigon. Last week, federal and local authorities said they had dismantled the county’s largest Asian crime syndicate, arresting 15 alleged suppliers of illegal gambling machines.

Last month, a task force of local, state and federal agencies announced it had foiled a murder-for-hire plot and stopped the bulk of Orange County’s trade in the drug Ecstasy when it targeted leaders in one of the nation’s most notorious Asian crime syndicates.

Not First Effort Against Crime

The recent spate of busts represents the largest--but not the first--effort to stamp out the criminal element. Agencies are pooling resources to infiltrate and dismantle the crime syndicates. Waning street gang violence is allowing police to give more attention to organized crime groups, which focus more on financial profit than territory.

“These are problems that have been going on for years in Little Saigon,” said Mike Clesceri, head of a district attorney’s office task force that has made some of the busts. “This is an area that had gone neglected because we were after the violent criminals.”

Today, officials said they are aided by such high-tech equipment as pinhead-sized cameras that informants can wear undetected. Many agencies--notably Westminster police--have more bilingual officers who can win the trust of both crime victims and criminal associates.

The crackdown has won general support in Little Saigon, where many officials and residents believe that video gambling and drugs lead to other crimes such as robbery and assault.

But some say law enforcement must take into account the culture of Vietnamese immigrants, who come from a society without trademark laws and where knockoff fashions are common.

Immigrants “work on the assumption that there’s nothing wrong with it,” said Lan Quoc Nguyen, a Westminster attorney and community activist. “That’s the way of life in Vietnam and it’s still rampant. . . . [Copyright law] is a Western concept that will be hard to enforce.”

Westminster Councilman Tony Lam said he applauds the efforts to root out gambling and drug problems in Little Saigon but shares some of Nguyen’s concerns about fashion counterfeiting.

“All of this has gone on for several years and all of a sudden . . . the police try to make a big stink about this,” he said. “We should give them some kind of warning or citation instead of making it a big crime.”

Clesceri said such arrests are a necessary part of efforts to undermine criminal syndicates that often use profits from one illegal activity, such as merchandise counterfeiting, to fund another. Moreover, he insisted, selling knockoffs as the real thing does have victims.

“I would say ask Polo, ask Ralph Lauren, ask Tommy Hilfiger whether they feel it’s a victimless crime when they’re losing millions of dollars,” he said.

While there are no statistics that detail the extent of organized crime in Orange County’s Asian community, recent busts have brought the problem into sharp relief.

In all, law enforcement agencies have launched more than 100 probes of organized crime groups with links to Little Saigon over the last year, and officials said they are finding more the harder they look.

“They’re pretty entrenched, because they were going on so long, until they reached a level where we perceived they were a problem,” said Westminster Police Det. Tommy Rackleff, whose department began its effort three years ago. “We keep unearthing other types of crimes that have been going on for a while but that no one has reported.”

Police and prosecutors have also opened a second front in their battle by working to reduce the suspicions that immigrants traditionally hold toward law enforcement. The district attorney’s office began an outreach effort last year, while the FBI has established a hotline number--(714) 245-5242--to report crimes in confidence, if need be.

So far, the efforts appear to be paying off, authorities said. But officials acknowledged that there is room for improvement.

In one recent operation, federal agents had to track down victims of extortion from wiretaps because the victims were reluctant to come forward, said U.S. Atty. Marc Greenberg.

“It’s still difficult,” Greenberg said. “We’re still not getting the witness cooperation from the community that we need.”

Community activists said they will be pleased if the efforts take criminals off the streets but worry about outside perceptions.

“Some of us may be concerned that the busts that are targeting the Vietnamese community may give an unfair impression that the community is ridden with organized crimes or dangerous criminal rings,” said Nguyen, the attorney.