Le Van Vien

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Le Van Vien (aka Bay Vien, Vien the seventh) (1904-1970) was the leader of Binh Xuyen, a powerful Vietnamese criminal organization. During the Bao Dai regime (1948-55), he made arrangements with regime, by which Binh Xuyen was given control of their own affairs in return for their support of the regime. He flew to Paris after his unsuccessful attempt to take power from Ngo Dinh Diem.

[edit] Biography

Born in Vietnam, Vien was head of the Binh Xuyen and was hunted by the French in the 1930s and 1940s until he and a number of his cohorts were eventually captured and sentenced to confinement in the penal colony on Con Son Island. Ba Duong, meanwhile, had become a labor broker for the Japanese and entered into a relationship with the Japanese secret service's southern Vietnamese rezident Matsushita Mitsuhiro; a pivotal clandestine operator who performed under industrial cover as the director of Dainan Koosi, and was controlled by the Japanese Consul General in Hanoi, Yoshio Minoda.

Matsushita arranged for the kempeitai to free disparate Binh Xuyen personalities and component gangs from Con Son in 1941. Thereafter, under Japanese patronage the Binh Xuyen rapidly grew both in organization and influence.

Bay Vien escaped Con Son in early 1945 and returned to Saigon where he engaged in insurgent politics in collusion with Ba Duong and the Japanese. On March 9, 1945, the Japanese staged a coup against the Vichy French administration, jailing all French police. The Binh Xuyen were given amnesty and Bay Vien was installed as a police official by the newly established government.

In August 1945, the Viet Minh's chief of Cochin China, Tran Van Giau, formed an alliance with Bay Vien and Ba Duong against the French. When the Viet Minh called a mass demonstration on August 25, 1945:

"...fifteen well armed, bare chested bandits carrying a large banner declaring 'Binh Xuyen Assassination Committee' joined the tens of thousands of demonstrators who marched jubilantly through downtown Saigon for over nine hours."

Following the British supported French counter coup in September 1945, the Viet Minh withdrew from Saigon, leaving Bay Vien as military commander of Saigon Cholon with a force of a hundred men. Bay Vien promptly formed an alliance with Lai Van Sang's two thousand man student group, the Avant-Garde Youth. Together with a number of Japanese deserters, they engaged the French. By the end of October, they were pushed back to the Rung Sat in a waterborne retrograde action which displayed as a key element the deployment of some 250 stay-behind agents.

The Binh Xuyen stay behind agents promptly engaged in a ruthless campaign of terror and extortion. A constant influx of men, money and materiel quickly established the Binh Xuyen as a well-armed, disciplined force of approximately 10,000 men.

A dispute arose between Ba Duong and the Viet Minh in January 1946 and in February 1946 Ba Duong was killed in strafing raid by French aircraft. Sensing a shift in the political tide, Bay Vien seized the opportunity to consolidate his hold on the Binh Xuyen and achieve dominance. Thus, in the wake of Ba Duong's death, Bay Vien began secret negotiations with the French Deuxième Bureau for exclusive rights to territory in Saigon, ultimately leading to a March, 1948 agreement with Savani which was formalized on June 16, 1948. The French government announced that it "...had decided to confide the police and maintenance of order to the Binh Xuyen troops in a zone where they are used to operating." Thereafter, the French turned over Saigon block-by-block and by April 1954, Lai Van Sang was director-general of police and the Binh Xuyen controlled not only the Saigon-Cholon capital region but a sixty-mile strip between Saigon and Vung Tau, exercising full political and economic control. United States observers of the process laconically refer to the Binh Xuyen in this era as a:

"...political and racketeering organization which had agreed to carry out police functions [for the Government of Viet-Nam] in return for a monopoly on gambling, opium traffic and prostitution in the metropolitan areas."

Thus did the fox guard the hen-house and thus did Viet-Nam's prototypical criminal syndicate gain control of the southern Vietnamese underworld in its entirety, until the United States precipitated battle of April 28 to May 3, 1955, when they were forced back to the Rung Sat jungle and President Ngo Dinh Diem gained control of Saigon. Bay Vien fled to exile in France and the organization fragmented, again resuming its clandestine form.