By: Vickie Kasemmi
As the people of South Vietnam fled the country, as the North Vietnamese communists invaded, on April 30, 1975, no one noticed a young man making his way to the port with his suitcases. Why would they? The answer lay in his suitcases – and it looked like $7 million in cash and gold.
The money belonged to Truong Dinh Tran, a shipbuilder who ended up one of Manhattan’s most notorious hoteliers, whose violent, drug-ridden Hotel Carter in Times Square was the filthiest in the city for three years running. The man carrying the bags was James Dau, who was “adopted” by Tran in 1960, when he was just 11 years old. By the time they fled Saigon, Vietnam, the 25-year-old had lived a life by Tran’s side.
Dau was born to a Catholic Vietnamese family that escaped to the south part of the simmering nation in the 1950s, and first encountered Tran at a seminary, where Dau’s father worked as a cook. The two men came from neighboring villages in the north and by 1960, Dau’s father asked Tran to adopt his son to give the boy “a better chance in life,” Dau explained in Manhattan Surrogate Court papers.
“I then moved in with Mr. Tran and never lived with my natural parents again,” Dau recalled in the legal filing.
Tran didn’t want to leave Saigon. “But when he started seeing people trampling on each other to scale the [American] embassy’s gate to force themselves inside, he realized that South Vietnam would collapse quickly into communist hands,” Dau said in court papers.
Tran told Dau to be ready. They filled the suitcases with cash and gold.
“He told me to dress in torn clothing and pretend I was deaf and dumb, which I did to avoid being robbed,” Dau said.
Tran gave Dau a new name, to hide his Air Force service, and the pair set off for the port with one of Tran’s mistresses and her sister, passing crowds begging for a way out on Tran’s ship.
“We left the port in Saigon immediately before the North Vietnamese army arrived,” Dau said.
“I hid and guarded the two suitcases inside the exhaust of the ship,” he continued.
They went to the Philippines, then Guam, then Arkansas, where the cash and gold was put in a bank. Tran sent Dau back to Guam to oversee his ship, and moved on, buying hotels in Buffalo and New York.
Dau last saw Tran during a 1982 New York visit, when, he says, he declined a request to stay and help with the business because “his other children were there and I didn’t want to further burden him.”
Drugs and prostitutes were so rampant at Tran’s Kenmore Hotel on East 23rd Street, the FBI seized the 620-room building in 1994.
Over the next four decades, Tran turned the money into a $100 million fortune that was inherited by 14 children and four wives, who have squabbled over it for years since the 80-year-old died in 2012, without making himself a will. They each stand to inherit between $2.5 million and $3.3 million.
But adopted son Dau wants his fair share.
Now whittled down by taxes to just $60 million, the estate is awaiting a judge’s decision on whether to include Dau among Tran’s nearly two dozen heirs.
The rest of the family has already acknowledged Dau as a member of the extended clan who deserves his piece of the financial pie, according to court records. Dau, now 70, only needs a Manhattan Surrogate Court judge’s final approval.
