The cover page of Bruce Tran's bankruptcy filing

If nothing else, Bruce Tran has the knack for making news even when he’s not doing things.

What the CEO of VHN-TV and vice-president of the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California is not doing now, is that he’s not going to show up at a hearing on the collection of more than $1.5 million in judgment debt.

Because he’s filed for bankruptcy, and the law provide for the stay of all actions against the debtors until either the bankruptcy case is over or the bankruptcy judge lifts the stay.

Which was, of course, how people learned of the bankruptcy filing in the first place: His lawyer filed it in the collection action to stay a hearing.

Despite being on the hook for the judgment debt that may reach close to $2 million if legal interest is added, in his bankruptcy filing Tran claims debt of only between $0 and $50,000.

The Vietnamese American Federation, of which Tran is a vice-president, is a creation of the Interfaith Council, a religious group that sought to “unite” the various political fractions in the Viet community.

A very public election was organized for the Federation’s board. When the results came out, though, the organizers kicked two winners off the board. Tran was moved up the ranks and ended up as one of two vice-presidents of the group.

His term is up this year, and a new election is being organized. An organizing committee has been set up for the new election, but the process for choosing this organizing committee was a bit obfuscated and confusing; it’s unclear what role if any the Interfaith Council is now playing in this. 

Anyway, apparently worried that Viet Weekly editors may run (and, gasp, win), organizers inserted a new condition for candidates: You can’t run if you’ve traveled to Vietnam in the past year.

Tran also ran for mayor of Westminster in 2010 but lost to the incumbent.

The million-dollar judgment was one for fraud, awarded to Thomas Nguyen, his former partner and an entertainer better known in the Vietnamese community as Quoc Thai. The lawsuit is a result of a previous lawsuit (read about the previous one here).

In the previous lawsuit, Thomas Nguyen/Quoc Thai had sued Tran, Suzanne Nguyen, and the media company that Quoc Thai founded, VHN-TV. Quoc Thai had claimed that the defendants unlawfully freezed him out of his ownership in the company. The court had ruled that each defendant got 30%, a consultant got 10%, and VHN-TV must pay Quoc Thai $300,000.

But then Bruce Tran issued himself a huge number of shares, diluting Quoc Thai’s ownership down to 3%. So Quoc Thai sued again, and the $1.5+ million judgment resulted.

Suzanne Nguyen, too, filed for bankruptcy and got a stay of the collection against her.

Bruce Tran

Bruce Tran, one-time mayoral candidate for Westminster, and Vice-President of the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California, was found liable for more than $1.5 million for defrauding his business partner.

The judgment hit Tran and his associate Suzanne Nguyen with breach of fiduciary duty, conversion (i.e. theft), and also malice oppression and fraud justifying punitive damages. The verdict, being in a civil case, did not require unanimity, but the jury was unanimous anyway, ruling 12-0.

Bruce Tran is the Vice-President of a group named “Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California” (“Ban Đại Diện Cộng Đồng“). Voted in by a public election last year, the group answers to the Interfaith Council (“Hội Đồng Liên Tôn“).

The jury awarded the plaintiff Thomas Nguyen, a radio operator and entertainer known in the Vietnamese community as Quoc Thai, $1,485,000.

After the verdict was rendered, together with a finding that punitive damages are warranted, the parties stipulated to the punitive amount of $150,000.

Don’t know what the defendants were thinking when they stipulated. Such a stipulation would be inconsistent with any claim later (say, on appeal), that says the jury findings of liability is erroneous.

The lawsuit is a result of a previous lawsuit (read about the previous one here).

In the previous lawsuit, Thomas Nguyen/Quoc Thai sued Tran, Suzanne Nguyen, and the media company that Quoc Thai founded, VHN-TV. Quoc Thai claimed that the defendants unlawfully freezed him out of his ownership in the company. The court ruled that each defendant got 30%, a consultant got 10%, and VHN-TV must pay Quoc Thai $300,000.

But then Bruce Tran issued himself a huge number of shares, diluting Quoc Thai’s ownership down to 3%. So he sued, and this judgment resulted.

The Statement of Votes is a 2630-page document from the OC Registrar of Voters, breaking down votes by precinct for every race in the November election. There are also a few important subtotals. The document is provided in PDF format, so trying to re-analyze the numbers would not be possible – unless one is willing to pay for the original spreadsheet format.

Even at the level provided by the Registrar of Voters, a few interesting details emerge.

* In the city of Westminster, in each and every precinct, and also in every subpart of the vote-by-mail ballots, Mayoral candidate Bruce Tran lost to incumbent Mayor Margie Rice by significant margins. He’d get two digits while she’d get three, for example. The closest Tran came was in Precinct 39368 (in the southwest corner of Bolsa and Ward), where both candidates get 14 votes.

* In Precinct 39274, which includes the house Andy Quach crashed into when he was driving drunk, he finished third, but ahead of both other Viet candidates. The result for that precinct is: Alin Hamade 72, Penny Loomer 57, Andy Quach 52, Tri Ta 45, Joy Neugebauer 34, Khoa Do 27, and Ginger Waugh-Borden 20.

* In the overlap of the City of Westminster and the 68th Assembly District, an area that can be considered a stronghold of Van Tran influence with Vietnamese voters, the top finisher for Westminster City Council is Tri Ta, and the second place is taken by Khoa Do. Quach comes in third. Within the confines of the data provided by the Statement of Votes, this may support a conclusion that Van Tran followers support Tri Ta, Khoa Do, and Andy Quach, in that order.

In that same Van Tran stronghold, the Vietnamese-American candidate to replace him, Phu Nguyen, scored 7551 votes to Alan Mansoor’s 7362, thus lending support to a conclusion that the majority of Van Tran’s Viet supporters vote for Phu Nguyen, just to a lesser extent.

* Another identifiable Van Tran stronghold is the overlap between his Assembly district 68 and the Congressional district he was running in, the 47. In that overlap, he bested Loretta Sanchez 12,693 to 11,012. He also finished ahead in his old city Garden Grove, finishing 12,602 to 11,612.

And of course Tran lost in places he’s expected to lose. In the city of Santa Ana, for example, he got less than half of Sanchez’s votes,  10,577 to 21,831.

He did lose in a few surprising places. In the North side, where the 47 overlaps the Assembly 72, Tran lost 6,483 to 9,105.

* Many Viet candidates got an overwhelming percentage of their votes from vote-by-mail. In the race for the Westminster City Council, for example, the ratio of vote-by-mail are, from high to low:

Khoa Do 75.7%
Tri Ta 70.9%
Andy Quach 57.0%
Ginger Waugh-Borden 53.2%
Alin Hamade 52.6%
Penny Loomer 51.7%
Joy Neugebauer 51.6%

In the 68th Assembly race, it’s:

Long Pham 79.6%
Phu Nguyen 54.8%
Alan Mansoor 53.5%

In the 47th Congressional:

Van Tran 61.5%
Loretta Sanchez 51.5%
Ceci Iglesias 46.8%

However, because Tran’s grand total is behind by 13,000+ votes, Sanchez actually got more votes by mail than him, 26,195 to 23,174.

Across the country, except for a few bright spots, most Viet candidate fall flat, losing their races, sometimes spectacularly.

Now, of course, there is such a thing as a “Vietnamese bounce” – late absentee ballots cast mostly by Vietnamese – which has caused people (including the Bolsavik here) to sometimes prematurely announce the demise of some campaigns.

But, from the way things look, even the Vietnamese bounce won’t help this time.

Starting with the highest ranking Viet elected official, U.S. Rep. Joseph Cao, he of the claim to fame as the only Republican to vote for health care reform.

Two years ago, Cao won in a year where most Republicans lost. Now that most Republicans are winning, Cao lost spectacularly, 34%-64%, and conceded early in the night.

Another Viet Congress hopeful, California Assemblyman Van Tran, ended the night trailing Rep. Loretta Sanchez 42%-51% with all precincts counted. The distance to be made up is 4,993 votes, a spread widely considered too wide for late absentees to cover.

And the man who had hoped to replace Tran in the Assembly, Democrat Phu Nguyen, fought valiantly in a district with 1/3 more Republicans than Democrats and in a Republican-leaning year. Phu Nguyen got all the way up to 44%-56%, and fell 8,000 votes short.

Two groups lost big in Little Saigon. One is an organization calling itself, well, actually, not sure what its English name is, but it held a public voting all over Little Saigon earlier this year, resulting in a committee of 7 that’s supposed to be the official representatives of the community. Its grandiose Vietnamese name translates into the Committee of Representatives of the Community.

The Vice-President of the group is Bruce Tran, owner of VHN-TV. (Click here for all entries tagged Bruce Tran.) Tran ran for mayor of Westminster, and lost big time, 19%-71%.

The spokesman of the committee that organized that public voting, Charlie Chi Manh Nguyen, ran for the Huntington Beach Union HSD, which reaches into and covers parts of Westminster. With 3 positions available, Nguyen ended in 4th place with a little over half the votes the 3rd place person got.

The other group that lost big is SBTN-TV, the media giant that had backed Hoa Van Tran for OC Supervisor. This time, SBTN stands behind the Westminster City Council race for Khoa Do, a show host who’s well thought of in the community, having volunteered for several popular community events. Despite the might of mass media thrown in, Do ended up next to last place.

It’s not as if other Viet candidates for council fared any better. Incumbent Andy “DUI” Quach burned tens of thousands on the race, and ended up 48 votes behind the other Viet incumbent, Tri Ta. It looks like there will no longer be a Viet majority on the Westminster city council, as challenger Penny Loomer – almost a winner two years ago – took the first spot, leaving Quach and Ta sort out among themselves the 48 votes plus-or-minus whatever late absentees, for the second position available.

Also running in the area is former Councilman Tony Lam, the first Vietnamese-American to win public office. Returning to politics seeking a seat on the Midway City Sanitary District, he ended dead last.

There is one local bright spot. In the city of Fountain Valley, businessman Michael Vo, owner of a traffic school, finished ahead of two incumbents to win a seat on the city council. (In this same race, another candidates reputedly also supported by SBTN ended in the single digits.) This marks the first time an OC Viet candidate wins without the votes of Westminster/Garden Grove.

And there’s an out-of-state bright spot. State Representative Hubert Vo in Texas held off a powerful challenge by his Republican opponent and is leading by around 1000 votes when the election office there went to sleep and stopped updating its web site for the night.

The supporter is Vo Long Trieu, a former Minister for Youth Affairs in the government of South Vietnam and a frequent writer of opinion pieces in Vietnamese-language papers. The accuser is one Henry Vuong, who wrote up his experience with Bruce here. The accusation is that Bruce is a nasty guy etc but the gist of the physical altercation is that Bruce dared Vuong to hit him, Vuong did, and ended up getting pummeled.

A third-party witness from a nearby business told Nguoi Viet Daily News that he watched the fight from the beginning and saw Bruce Tran lock Vuong in a chokehold and keep on punching him.

Bruce Tran’s reaction was pretty cool and calm. He told Nguoi Viet that the fight was 8 years ago, when he was young, and not like he is now. He said “men fighting each other is such a normal thing.” But if someone insists on holding it against him, then there’s nothing he can do about it, he said.

On Viet Weekly, Bruce brought out his wife to say what a great guy he is. Interestingly enough, Bruce never brought out other people mentioned in Vuong’s blog, including his former business partner.

Anyway, so Vo Long Trieu on his ad (click on pic for full ad) says he really wants to “satisfy his ethnic pride” by seeing a Vietnamese elected mayor of Westminster.

And hey so what if Bruce beat some guy. Vo Long Trieu draws the comparison with an alleged incident where Napoleon physically kicked his foreign minister in the stomach. Trieu, who loves to pepper his conversation with French words, misspelled the foreign minister’ name, Charles Talleyrand, as “Taylérand.” And he concludes, “a hot temper does not mean a lack of leadership skills.”

The Bolsavik has no idea where Trieu got his Napoleon anecdote from, but Trieu’s little story shows Trieu’s idea of an admirable “leader” is someone who reversed the course of democracy, overthrew a constitutional government, waged war wantonly, went down in disastrous defeat twice, caused untold devastation to his own country, killed off 1.4 million of his fellow countrymen (when the total population of men, women, children, elderly was just 29 million), and turned the rest into widows, orphans and invalids.

If anything, it reveals a lot about Trieu, maybe a thing or two about the ministry that Trieu used to lead and hopefully is part of the explanation for the shortness of his tenure there.

One candidate for mayor plus three for city council, add up to a rather sedate slate of Vietnamese-American candidates running for public office in the city of Westminster.

The excitement that would have come with the mayoral race never materialized. Incumbent Margie Rice will face former Garden Grove Planning Commissioner and head of VHN-TV Bruce Tran (Mr. I’m Not Threatening You in the video at the end of this entry; he’s to the left in the photo above).

Tran earlier was voted onto a 7-seat board member of a community group called the “Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California.” The group is intended to be some sort of umbrella representative of the community. The top three vote getters were to be President and Vice-Presidents. Tran placed the communicative power of VHN-TV fully behind his candidacy, and placed, well, 4th.

Accusations soon arose, however, that the 3rd-place finisher cheated. Tran was vocal in opposing her, and she was kicked out, Tran moved up to third, and got a vice-presidency. Then Tran also got into a fight with the 6th-place finisher, who was later also out of the board.

So, both of the 3rd and 6th-place winners, Ty Dao (Đào Bích Ty) and Hai Duong (Dương Đại Hải) pulled papers to run in the mayoral race, obviously out for revenge in an attempt to sabotage Tran’s campaign. 

The two never completed their paperwork, however, and Tran is clear to be on his own and take on the incumbent this November.

That's Khoa Do standing to the right. Bruce Tran is seated second from left.

On the council side, the two incumbents Tri Ta and Andy Quach, he of the smiley face fame, are facing a whole slew of challengers, including Vietnamese who was prominent in the protests against a Vietnamese singer.

Khoa Do, a personality on Vietnamese-language radio, is running as a change from the old guard. At the planning meeting to welcome their hero Ly Tong and plan the protests at Anaheim Arena, Do served as the moderator of the meeting. That’s him to the right in the photo.

What should have been a straightforward ceremony turned into a political foodfight that’s escalating day by day.

Among the rituals of Viet elected officials is to show up on Black April and pay respect at the altar to soldiers who died – or sometimes an altar to the country. Like OC Supervisor Janet Nguyen (far right) and Westminster councilman Tri Ta (left) in the photo above, taken in 2009.

It’s just the way it’s been for years. And since the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial was erected about 9 years ago, that site has become the place to be on the day that commemorates the fall of Saigon.

This year, instead of just showing up at a ceremony, Janet Nguyen apparently wanted to hold one of her own.

So she applied for and received an “Intent to Meet” permit to hold the Black April event. (Click on pic to view larger size in new window.) An “Intent to Meet” is almost as good as an event permit, except that you can only have less than 300 people, and you can’t have a sound system.

Which may be a problem because most Black April events pull in 1000+ in attendance.

It is assumed that the Supervisor opted for the lesser permit because it doesn’t require a hearing before the City Council, where three members are Viets that Janet Nguyen doesn’t like. Or trust. Or something like that.

OK, so far so good. Until Lactan Nuygen, the president of the “Vietnamese-American Community of Southern California” (one of several with names like that) tried to apply for a Special Event permit. He found out the Supervisor already has the place to herself on April 30.

So, he called Janet Nguyen, and things spiraled downward from there.

Nuygen said he couldn’t talk to the Supervisor, her staff wouldn’t talk to him, they wouldn’t return his calls.

Nguyen and her staff, however, said they were called while in Washington DC – so they couldn’t talk and, besides, they couldn’t jump at the beck and call of whoever! (That’s an almost exact translation of what Nguyen’s chief of staff Andrew Do said.)

One thing led to another, and now both sides are point fingers accusing the other of trying to monopolize Black April. The Register’s Deepa Bharath had a report here on March 19.

And into all that stepped two Westminster Councilmembers, Frank Fry and Andy Quach.

On March 22 they invited a number of community groups to meet and work out something. Not much got worked out, many still want to just kick Janet Nguyen out of the commemoration. Protest leader Neil Nguyen said that no individual has the right to interfere in an event that belongs to the community, just like an individual “cannot organize a Cinquo de Mayo celebration” – which is almost certainly not true.

As the discussion wore on, however, Bruce Tran took over the meeting.

Actually, at first the head of VHN-TV (and candidate for Westminster mayor, as soon as he finishes moving from Garden Grove) started shouting, demanding that the councilmen use their power to revoke Janet Nguyen’s permit.

“And if your power isn’t good enough, we’ll take it away from you,” Tran said.

When the shouting got a little out of hand, Fry took it as a threat and wanted him removed.

So Tran argued that “it’s not a threat, a threat is when someone puts a gun to your head.”

But nonetheless he sat down for a few minutes.

And then he stood up again, and started talking loudly again. He demanded that something be done about Janet Nguyen’s permit. Like yanking it or something.

And then he suddenly because the de facto chair of the meeting. People only talked when he wasn’t. He directed the flow of discussion. He even interpreted Frank Fry’s statements for him.

Check the video below. It’s simply amazing how Tran faced more than a dozen community leaders and two elected officials and seized the floor from all of them.

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Tran was attending a community meeting put together by the Hội Đồng Liên Tôn, a group of Vietnamese religious leaders and activists. When he came up to speak, the moderator introduced him as a candidate for mayor of Westminster.

Tran spoke, and said nothing of his candidacy, but it’s too late. The Viet Herald daily newspaper wrote it down, and printed it.

Tran is the head of VHN-TV, a satelite station, and of VAN-TV, a digital station broadcast locally on channel 18.7.

Since March of 2009, Tran has been a member of the Garden Grove Planning Commission as Dina Nguyen‘s appointee. So apparently he lives in both Westminster and Garden Grove.

In 2007, Tran was one of 20 business people honored at BizCon, an event put together by the Orange County Presidents Council, a collaboration of 20 ethnic business and community groups and government agencies.

During the 2008 elections, Bruce Tran and VHN-TV were active supporters of county supervisor candidate Hoa Van Tran.