LIES, JUSTICE AND AMERICAN WAYS.

A young immigrant's life evolved from war to street scrime. Then he lied about his age, and his life changed forever.
By Dan Malone (Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News)

Luan Van Hoang was born in Vietnam and spent his childhood in the shadows of war and his teens in juvenile detention facilities and prisons in California and Texas.
When I first heard about him, Luan said he'd been sentenced to 38 years in prison when he was just 13. He had little formal education and the English he spoke had been learned on the streets or behind bars. He had few friends and was estranged from his family. He was sharing a cell with a convicted killer.
Luan and I were as different as any two people could be. Life had given me breaks that Luan had been denied. In the comfortable middle-class neighborhood where I grew up, the only war to touch my life was the one kids played after school. I have a highschool diploma and a college degree. I have never gone without food or shelter. I have a mortgage, a 401(k), and a career as a newspaper reporter, which is how our paths crossed.
At first, Luan was just another assignment. But eventually this assignment would change what I thought about journalism, justice, and friendship.

Ten years ago, I was one of two reporters at The Dallas Morning News assigned to check into the improbable story of a criminal known as Michael Nguyen.
In the view of authorities, he was the leader of a gang of thugs specializing in home-invasion robberies and preying on families in Dallas's growing Asian community.
In 1986, he had been arrested after the robbery of a Carrollton family and sentenced to 38 years in prison. He had served three years of his sentence when his cellmate, a convicted killer, mailed a letter about Mr. Nguyen's case to the newspaper.
The man claimed that Mr. Nguyen, who had been tried as a 17-year-old adult, was actually a 13-year-old named Luan Van Hoang who had lied to police about his name and address. The cellmate included the name and address of Luan's father, who he said, would provide the particulars.
In recent years, the law has gotten increasingly tough on juveniles who commit crimes. But it still wasn't legal in Texas to send a 13-year-old to prison. The editor who received the letter assigned a colleague of mine, Lorraine Adams, to interview Luan in state prison. He sent me to find and interview Luan's family in California.
Everything about the letter rang false to me. The story of a 13-year-old boy crying himself to sleep at night in a prison cell seemed ludicrous.
Besides, the source of this tale was a convicted killer. Convicts respirate lies. This had the marking of a scam one prisoner was working for another. Boarding a plane for Los Angeles a few days later, I was convinced I was wasting time.
I found Luan's father in a spartanly-furnished stucco home in Moreno Valley. Tien Van Hoang invited me into his living room, which was adorned with a crucifix, a Nativity scene and a velvet paiting of the Last Supper.
He told me his oldest son, Luan, was born in the fall of 1972, making jim just 13 at the time of the Carollton robbery. But the one document that could establish his age beyond doubt, Luan's birth certificate, had been lost when the family fled Vietnam in the early '80s, Mr. Hoang said.
From a tattedred manila envelope, Mr. Hoang retrieved a handful of photocopied documents from schools and immigration offices that recorded Luan's birth in 1972. Later he obtained a baptismal certificate from a Catholic Church in the family's hometown outside Ho Chi Minh City that showed the same birth date.
My skepticism began to fade on the flight back to Dallas. If Luan's cellmate was lying, then the records Mr. Hoang gave me had to be forgeries.
Mr. Hoang would have to be lying, too - and acting in collusion with a convicted killer half a continent away. A frail man who was worried about feeding his family and difficult to understand at times, Mr. Hoang didn't seem capable of such elaborate ruse.
Once back in Dallas, I compared notes with Lorraine, who had talked to Luan in prison. Luan's story, she said, was consistent with his father's story and with the details in the cellmate's letter.
The newspaper stripped the story we wrote across the top of the front page along with a color photograph of Luan peering out from behind prison bars. A month later, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Luan's conviction. And Luan, who we believed had spent ages 13 to 17 in state prison, was returned to a Dallas County jail.
Initially, it looked as though Luan might go free.
"We are happy to know this," John Vance, then the Dallas County district attorney, said in 1990. "If he is, in fact, a juvenile, he has no business being in our prison as an adult."
Noting that Luan already served more than three years in state prison, officials with Texas Youth Commission said they believed the interest of justice would be best be served by simply releasing Luan.
"If it were up to me," the agency's chief lawyer said, "I would say, 'Go out and sin no more.'"
But the prosecutors never accepted Luan's claim; they asserted that Luan was 16 at the time of the robbery - still a juvenile but old enough to be certified to stand trial as an adult and be sentenced to prison. They gathered records from juvenile authorities in California that recorded Luan's birthday on several dates between 1969 and 1972.
They presented medical evidence that they said demonstrated that he was closer to 15 or 16 than 13 at the time of the crime. The juvenile court judge ruled that Luan was old enough to be treated as an adult.
A strange transition had taken place. The criminal justice system - which had accepted Luan's word as the truth in 1996 - now believed he was a liar. And now I, who had once doubted his story, began to believe he was telling the truth.

Luan, according to interviews and records, was born near Saigon during the Vietnam War. He was the son of a boatman, Tien Van Hoang, and his wife, Tinh Thi Cao. He was a young boy when the communists overran South Vietnam in 1975. His father, who had worked at a U.S. military supply post, was forced to enter a re-education camp and later escaped.
Luan says he and his family went into hiding and lived in fear of capture. They guarded their identities closely.
"In our country, you got no choice but lying, because that's the way the world works," Luan says. "You're in the position where that's the only way. Sometimes, you've got to lie just to survive."
In 1980, the Hoang joined several other families and left their homeland in a small boat, hoping to make their way to the United States, his father says. After 11 days at sea, they arrived at the first in a series of refugee camps. For the next two years, they lived in camps across Southeast Asia. Finally, in 1982, the Hoangs immigrated to the United States, settling in Orange County, Calif.
Mr. Hoang says he required his children to pray one hour every night. He let them watch TV only on Fridays and Saturdays. He recalls Luan doting on his younger siblings, playing volleyball at school and studying violin and piano.
"Our eldest son made us proud of him," he wrote in unpublished memoirs. "He was only 10. Coming back from school, he helped his mother with various chores, caring for younger brothers and sisters, cleaning the floor or the clothes…"
"Alas, those beautiful scenes are now dead souvenirs."

As he grew older, Luan says he found it difficult to make the transition from the uncertainties of his childhood in Southeast Asia to the free-for-all culture of southern California. America offered more freedom than Luan could handle.
Part of southern California had become havens for Vietnamese refugees; some of their children fell into lives of crimes.
"At that age, you have young blood in you," Luan says. "whatever is tomorrow is tomorrow. You are two young for you to think what's right or wrong."
From 1984 to 1985, Luan's records as a juvenile in California show that he was repeatedly detained by police for suspicion of petty theft, burglary, buying stolen property and car theft.
"I don't know what made me start doing the things I did," Luan says. "On weekends we like to go to parties, pick up a friend here, a friend there" and cruise from one destination to the next. "The whole time I was just thinking about having fun. I guess you don't think like that when you get old, but then fun is the first thing."
A pattern emerged after each arrest. Officials would detain Luan, then release him to his parents. Luan would run away from his home again, only to be arrested a short while later.
Wanting to fit in, he and his friends gave one another American nickname. Luan's nickname was Mike. He and his friends often indulged themselves by joy riding in stolen cars.
When arrested, Luan would lie about his name and age. Sometimes, he showed up in police records as Luan Van Hoang, other times as Michael or Nam Nguyen.
He was last arrested in California in 1985 when he and his friends were stopped in a stolen vehicle. Records show that his father exasperated by Luan's behaviors, told authorities to confine Luan until he learned his lesson.
While in a juvenile detention facility in Orange County, Luan made friends with a group of Asian boys. On Dec. 29, 1985, he joined a group of runaways headed for Texas.
"Six or seven of us just took off," he says. With less than a month to serve on his sentence, Luan's decision to leave was based largely on impulse.
"They all wanted to go, so I said, 'I'm going, too.'"
The group eventually settled near Dallas. Unemployed and wanted by California police, they soon resorted to robbery, preying largely on other refugees.
"At first, I didn't think we'd come here to rob," Luan says. But as his friends began making plans, Luan saw his option narrow. He couldn't justify staying with them "and, like, do nothing."
Uneasily, he says, he took on the role of lookout.

On the evening of Jan.29, 1986, a Vietnamese immigrant named Cau Dong Tran was finishing dinner with his wife and their 4-year-old daughter at their home in Carrollton. The doorbell rang and a voice outside called out Mr. Tran's nickname, "Ming."
Mr. Tran opened the door and was overrun by four young men, two brandishing handguns. During the next 20 minutes, Mr. Tran was separated from his family, blindfolded and led through his house while his assailants searched for valuables, according to court records.
"Shoot! Go ahead, shoot! If you guys don't, let me do it," one robber yelled.
Mr. Tran's blindfold was removed so he could open then safe in his bedroom.
Then one of the robbers, trying to determine whether Mr. Tran would be able to identify them, pressed a gun into his eyes and asked, "You know who I am? You know who I am?"
Luan says he was present at the robbery but, as a lookout waited outside the house. The robbers left with several thousand dollars of the Tran's valuables and a handful of inexpensive jewelry - and they also left Luan behind.
Carrollton police found Luan at a nearby car wash, looking for a ride. They found the costume jewelry lying on the ground. Luan was the only person ever arrested and charged in Tran's robbery.
Once in custody, Luan resorted to lying - as he had in Vietnam and California. Lying about his identity, he says, would shield his family from the dishonor of his acts, and also prevent police from connecting him with California juvenile record.
He told police he was a 13-year-old named Tuan Nguyen. He was detained overnight under that alias. The next day police, believing they were dealing with a teenager too young to prosecute, took him in search of a relative. During that search, he escaped.
He remained free until April 24, when he was re-arrested in Irving. This time he told police he was a 17-year-old named Michael Nguyen - a decision that would forever color how the criminal court system viewed him.
Luan was identified at trial by Mr. Tran as one of the robbers who entered his house. The jury found him guilty and sentenced "Michael Nguyen" to 38 years in prison. He arrived at the Texas Department of Corrections on Aug. 7, 1986, and spent three years in prison before his cellmate's letter arrived at the newspaper.
The News published articles raising questions about Luan's real name and age. Soon after, the court overturned Luan's first conviction, moved him to the Dallas County jail and ordered a second trial.
After several court delays, his second trial finally began in August 1993. As he had in his first trial, he elected not to testify. It took the jury 15 minutes to come back with a guilty verdict.
In the sentencing phase, Luan's attorney attempted to show that Luan had tried to better himself while in prison, working, studying, staying out of trouble. But the jury wasn't swayed. It returned with a 40-year sentence - two years longer than his original sentence.
Another 10 years were added to his sentence after Luan was indicted and convicted of perjury - for taking the stand during his certification hearing and swearing that he was born in 1972 - instead of 1969.
Whatever our intention had been in 1990 - righting a wrong, helping a hapless teenager - they had been turned upside down in 1992.
There is a photograph of Luan in my office taken by a News photographer. Memory tells me it was taken the moment Luan was resentenced. The photographer snapped her shutter as Luan twisted his head over his left shoulder and raised his eyebrows, as if he were looking at me, seeking explanation for the inexplicable.
As things turned out, Lorraine left Dallas for another newspaper job about the same time Luan returned to prison. And when Luan couldn't get through to her on the telephone, he started calling me.
The calls made me uncomfortable. I wanted only to deal with Luan antiseptically as the subject of a story, but there was nothing left to write.
Journalists are taught to keep distance from the people they write about - to keep a clear line between our lives and theirs.
The professional callus we develop let us dispassionately record the words of a grieving mother, splattered blood on white walls, or a young life being thrown away.
As we continued to talk the way I thought about Luan began to change. He was headed back to prison for a longtime. His court appeal looked bleak. His family was hundreds of miles away. He was as alone as a person could possibly be.
Slowly I realized Luan didn't need a reporter any more. He needed a friend. Crossing the line, I decided to be one.

--oOo--

Luan Van Hoang's world was a series of jails, prison cells and dormitories. Each visit reminded me that this would be a friendship forged on unequal ground. I was always free to go. He always returned to manacles, steel bars and razor wire.
We swapped letters and cards over the years, mine typed out on a word processor and Luan's in his distinctive scrawl. Sometimes, he sent artwork he made in prison - a self-portrait, a courtroom scene, and ink sketch of Christ on a handkerchief.
Mostly, though, Luan and I got to know each other over the telephone in countless collected calls.
Inevitable, they began the same way: The phone rang, and an automated voice informed me there was a collected call from a correctional institution. Luan pronounced his name at a prompt, then the automated voice gave instructions on how to accept the call.
"Mister Dan," Luan always began. "How are you doing?" The way he talked, though, the question came out sounding like two words: "Misterdan, hoyuduin?"
We discussed his appeal, the monotony of life behind bars, our families, his hope for the future. He worried about how he'd disappointed his parents and wondered how he would ever make up for the years wasted in prison.
"You don't do the time for yourself," he said. "You do it for the ones you love."

I had first met Luan in 1990 while investigating a claim that he had been only 13 when sentenced to 38 years in prison.
Over the years, I learned that Luan - known to the Texas prison system as Inmate No. 623156 - made good use of his time. He completed his GED, studied small engine repair, learned how to bake and worked toward a junior college degree.
His appeal lingered in the Texas court systems until May 1997, when the state appeals court overturned his second conviction, this time on a technicality.
Luan, for a second time, was returned to the Dallas County jail. Unable to make two conviction stick, prosecutors offered him a deal: Plead guilty to the Tran robbery and your prison sentence would be cut from 40 years to 20.
Because he has already served almost 12 years in prison, he would be eligible for parole as soon as the plea-bargain papers were processed.
This would have been an easy and pragmatic decision for many people. But Luan agonized over that it would mean to plead guilty just to be released.
He wondered what would happen to him if he stood trial a third time for the Tran robbery. And he questioned whether a guilty plea would really set him free.
Luan discussed the offer with his attorney, Bruce Anton. As a final precaution, Mr. Anton says he called the Texas Department of Corrections to see if Luan would actually be released if he accepted the plea.
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials had recently stepped up efforts to deport immigrants who had served time in U.S. Prisons. And Mr. Anton wanted to make sure Luan wouldn't be released by TDC only to be picked up by the INS.
"I called TDC records and talked to the legal department," Mr. Anton says. "I asked if there was anything, any detainer, anything in his file. They said no."
Luan decided to take the offer. "I was afraid I would be in [prison] for the rest of my life," he told me.
So Luan pleaded guilty. He was shipped back to Huntsville, where his paperwork would be processed - and he would be released.
The next call I was expecting from Luan was from a pay phone in the free world. I thought I'd buy him a decent meal somewhere, then put him on a plane to be reunited with his family in the Northwest.

On the evening of Jan. 25, 1998, Luan was placed on one of the big white Blue-Bird buses that the state uses to transport inmates within the prison system for the trip to Huntsville.
Arriving at the Walls Unit a little before dawn, Luan began what was to be his last full day in state custody. Corralled through a series of holding tanks, he was fingerprinted, issued clothing for the free world and given his release money.
"They gave me a long-sleeve white shirt and red pants," he recalls. "They dressed me out and gave me a check for $50."
Prison officials typically release inmates twice daily, once in the morning and once again in the afternoon. Luan missed the afternoon release and had to wait until morning.
Assigned a new cell, he crawled into the top bunk and passed a sleepless night, full of questions. "What am I gonna do when I get out?" he recalls asking. "How I'm gonna get home? The whole night I couldn't sleep. What it would feel like to be free? To walk out of that gate?"
The following morning, Luan was taken to another room. Lunch came and went. Around 3 p.m., another guard called his name. This is it, he thought. The wait is over.
That's when Luan learned that he wasn't the only one to provide false information in the case. "I'm here to notify you," the guard said, "you have a detainer from the INS."
Despite the TDC's assurances to Mr. Anton, records obtained by The News under the Texas Public Information Act show that the INS had placed a hold on Luan on May 18, 1995. Intentionally or not, a corrections official had misled Luan's attorney.
Luan was transferred to an INS holding facility outside of Houston.
Because Luan was an immigrant, his conviction for robbery made him what the INS calls a "criminal alien" - someone the law required to be deported.
On March 25, 1998, following a four-minute hearing, Luan was ordered to be returned to his "homeland."
The war in southeast Asia has been over for more than 20 years, but diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the United States are so strained that Vietnam refused to accept the return of Vietnamese citizens whom U.S. immigration courts have ordered deported.
The immigration court had given the INS orders it could not carry out. Unable to deport Luan, and unwilling to release him on parole, immigration officials decided to keep him locked up - undefinitely.
At first, I thought there had to be some sort of misunderstanding. Surely, Luan, having already spent nearly a dozen years in prison, wasn't now facing a possible life sentence.
His case, I found out, was hardly unique.
The INS has about 3,000 people in long-term detention. Most of those will be deported or released within months. But as many as 300 so-called "lifers" - some of whom have not been convicted of any crime - have been held for three years or more. Many come from Vietnam, but there are also citizens of Laos, Cuba, Thailand, Iran and China - men and women no country on earth wants.
I made a few calls, then flew to Houston.
Luan was escorted to a conference room inside the prison to meet with me. He was wearing bright yellow v-neck prison scrubs with a white T-shirt. The chain to the rosary he wore around his neck was barely visible. His hair was shaved short on the sides and slicked back on the top. He was as baffled and shocked by his situation as I was.
"I finished my time and now they decide to lock me up again - and for what? What is my crime?" Luan asked me.
It was a question I could not answer.
Even more disturbing than being held indefinitely was the possibility that Luan might one day be deported to Vietnam - a country he hadn't seen in 17 years.
Luan says if he or others were returned to Vietnam, the government there would view them as undesirables. "They would kill us," he says. "First thing that comes to mind is we're traitors. Either they'd kill us or put us on some kind of small island and just keep us there as prisoners. They ain't gonna let us go sky free."

After talking with Luan, I met with the INS officer assigned to his case, Joe Montemayor.
Mr. Montemayor reviews the records of the INS detainees in the Houston facility and decides which ones might be worthy of release. I told him what I knew of Luan, how I had become his friend, and gave him a copy of Luan's father's memoirs and of his baptismal certificate.
I flew back to Dallas more depressed than I had been when Luan was resentenced to prison for 40 years. In my mind, the system had come to treat Luan as a disposable human being. I didn't know if he would ever get out.
I remember Luan's cellmate's initial letter, about the boy who cried himself to sleep at night in a prison cell with a convicted killer. And I remember what Luan told me as he ponder his uncertain fate in the hands of the INS.
"Ain't no more tears for me," Luan had told me.
Returning to work, I discussed Luan's situation with my editor. As we were deciding what to do, Mr. Montemayor called with news that seemed impossibly good.
Mr. Montemayor had taken an interested in Luan. He decided to take a chance. He recommended to the INS district director in Houston that Luan be released on parole to live with his family.
Mr. Montemayor was calling to tell me that Luan, after 12 years in confinment, was being released the very next day.

-- oOo --

Luan has been free for almost two years. When first released, he rejoined his family, which had relocated to the Pacific Northwest, and worked in his father's landscaping business. For a while, clerk in a convenient store. He bought his first car and moved into an apartment of his own.
Recently, he told me he has found a girlfriend and is beginning to think about marriage.
It's not possible to know with certainty the ultimate truths about Luan's past - his age or his role in the robberies. There have been too many lies and too many questions. His future, too, remains uncertain.
But during the 10 years I've known Luan, I've never been able to find in him the man whom police, prosecutors and a frightened Asian community saw 15 years ago: a menacing gang leader who would press a gun barrel into another man's eye and threaten to pull the trigger, a cunning schemer who tripped up on his own lies, a man who one police officer said had "tasted the blood of his victims."
Nor do I believe that the system that repeatedly put him behind bards ever saw the Luan I got to know: a child swept up by war, a teenager struggling to fit in a strange world, a remorseful son obsessed with the trouble he brought his family, a young man full of hope.
My wife, Kathryn, and I went to visit Luan and his family shortly after his release. It was the first time I had seen Luan in the free world and I almost didn't recognize the person waiting for us outside his apartment. The long-sleeve white shirt and black jeans he was wearing were a far cry from the bright prison scrubs I'd last seen him in. He looked like a young man from Any City, U.S.A., someone with promise of life still before him.
Over a Sunday lunch of egg rolls Luan's mother had made, we talked, for a change, about his future instead of his past.
"I feel like I'm coming to America for the first time," Luan told me. "It's just like stating all over from the beginning."

Moral of the story:
"Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness." (Seneca).