The Underworld Podcast - Warlords, Narco-Pirates, & The Gangster King of Vietnam

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

Emerging from Saigon’s system of warlords and narco-pirates, Nam Cam built a criminal empire by making sure everyone — cops, politicians, media — was in his pocket. But that meant that when everything came crashing down, it crashed down hard, and he took out a decent portion of the city’s leadership with him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. It's 1225 a.m. on October 2nd, 2000, at a karaoke bar in central Saigon. A raucus ramshackle corner, a Vietnam southern metropolis, aka Ho Chi Minh City, where locals and tourists sing, dance and drink themselves into for stupor. But on this particular evening, the reverie is about to be shattered in spectacular,

bloody style. Sitting on chair outside the bar is Vue Huang Dong, better known as Dong Ha, or Dong the lesbian. Short and fierce, with a ponchant for bobs and black leather jackets, she inherited the empire of a terminallyal lover to become one of North Vietnam's most feared mob bosses, commanding loyalty through displays of flamboyant, almost ritual of, violence. Saigon's biggest gangster though, he does things differently. Tron van Cam, aka Namcam, had got his start in the slums of District 4, a maze of valleys and canals south of downtown Saigon, moving from back street gambling and cop fights to drugs, extortion and sex, all while playing off the powers that be. By the late 1990s, there's barely a top cop politician

or even journalist that isn't on Cam's payroll. That's good news for gangsters looking to pair up with him, perhaps to profit from Vietnam's roaring heroin trade, or off the backs of the thousands of Vietnamese desperate to be smuggled abroad. Dong Ha has bided her time like this for years, siding with Cam, building a criminal bridge between North and South Vietnam. But now she thinks it's time to move. Things have changed.

The lesbian isn't just looking for a partnership anymore. She wants to take Saigon for good. In September 1999, she makes her intentions clear in typical fashion, staging a fake birthday party at one of Cam's clubs, before ordering 20 of her men to hold shrimp paste, dead rats, snakes and human feces onto the dance floor. This is an insult that cannot go unpunished. Cam summons his chief enforcer and puts out a hit on Dung Ha. The enforcer reaches out to two more of his underlings. who discovered where the lesbian likes to go sing karaoke. Then, on October 2nd, they make their move, striding up to Dung Ha's chair and pushing past members of her entourage before pulling a pistol and shooting her point blank in the head. Clubbers scream and drop to the floor, the killers turn

and run, disappearing into the neon lit night. Dung Ha played the most dangerous game in Vietnam. She came for the king and she missed. But at her, her body lies stiffening in the midnight heat, powers elsewhere are about to come down on Namcam like a ton of bricks. And within a few short years, the man they call Vietnam's godfather will meet his own grizzly end. This is the underworld podcast. Hello and welcome all to the weekly show, some are calling the most coherent podcast in the Manosphere. I'm Sean Williams, a freelance reporter based ordinary layout. out of New Zealand. But today, as you can clearly see from some more amazing hotel artwork,

I'm in another very tiny hotel room, this time in Tokyo, Japan. It says good vibes above my bed, which is, I don't know, I mean, I'm a fan of noodles and tiny houses shaped like wedges and trains that go through neighbourhoods. So, yeah, the vibes are good. The vibes are good, man. It's just like the best place. It's the best place on earth. I can't believe this place. It is. It is. It is. Yeah, and agreeing with me is Danny Gold. Of course, my podcast partner of six years in New York City, who I was going to say is currently a morning about the baseball. But actually, you went to the game yesterday where Judge scored that Homer,

and that is insane. I mean, yeah, tell us about that and how's it going otherwise? Yeah, I'll keep it quick because people, you know, want to get to it. People hate anything that's not directly. Anything that diverges from the content. But yeah, dude, you know, incredible game. I don't think I've ever seen a live sporting event situation like that when, you know, two on, judge up.

He's down O2. The entire stadium is standing. I had the most insane seats, you know, like mid-level, but first row on first base line so I could see everything. Oh, my God. And the entire stadium is standing. He's down O2, runners on first and second, and just, like, bombs it. It was pretty sick.

And then, and then, most. Most importantly, for Underworld fans, they covered the spread. So, you know, we're doing, we're doing great over here. Oh, nice one. Yeah, I actually, I was walking past the national baseball stadium yesterday, and I saw the floodlights were on. So I ended up seeing like some college game, which was, oh my God, so cool. But anyway, yes, that is not the show, is it?

Thanks for everyone. By the way, he signs up to the Underworld podcast, Patreon. We love you. You're the best people in the world. And when my son is old enough, I'm going to make him record a special thank you video to the people who helped him through school. Yeah, it's not me, Danny. I didn't help him at all. And there's not a day that goes past in my life without me thinking about that.

Okay, Sean. That's patreon.com slash an underworld podcast. Bonus episodes of just $3 a month to support or on Spotify and iTunes, you can do the same. And, you know, every episode now gets demonetized on YouTube. I don't think it's a conspiracy or Google out to get us. I think it's just the algorithm getting triggered by the fact that we say the word, the word heroin or cocaine 47 times an episode

or talk about bodies being dissolved in acid so it is what it is but you know if you want to support us despite that sent us $3 a month on pageon.com and what can you do? Yeah man it's there's some good stuff I'm gonna be I think like in about four hours after we do this show I'm heading out to meet

Richard Lloyd Perry he wrote the people who eat darkness he's lived in Tokyo forever and we're gonna talk about like cults and organized crime and stuff like that I'm gonna be a bunch of other people here I'm going to meet an ex-Ecusa priest, and I'm going to do a show on that as well. So we've got some stuff coming up. If you want to get in touch with tips, abuse, story ideas, the underworld podcast at gmail.com.

Is there anything else? Should we dive in? Let's do it. Okay. Yes, this is a story. You know what it's about. It's about the most famous gangster in Vietnamese history, Namcam. Because I was in Saigon, aka Ho Chi Minh's City a fortnight ago.

Great place. Yeah, really mind-blowing city. And part of that trip. I spent a day in District 4, which is this tight-knit Warren of alleys and high-rises. It's barely 1.5 square miles in size. It's really, really small, surrounded by canals and rivers, but it's home to almost a quarter of a million people. And I took my mic and my phone and a gimbal. It looked like a complete tool.

So we'll have some video of the neighbourhood. A couple of really interesting little interviews I did. This is the flourishes, the kind of sort of little editorial flourishes you come into us for, apart from our looks, of course. So here we are, right? This is District 4, and Stephen, my guide and I are on the hunt for Namcams' original home. You can see how cramped the streets are. It's different to other central parts of Saigon.

If you look up District 4 Saigon on YouTube, you're going to find a bunch of influencers, not including me now, claiming to be exploring Vietnam's most dangerous hood, which is a load of bull. By the way, this place has really cleaned up in the past decades of so. They're like there's artisanal cafes and galleries and surroundings and surrounding. Stores, it's not, it's not dangerous at all. Yeah, the most dangerous hood videos are like a global influencer epidemic, man. Though to be fair, like in the Gloides of Ice, we had this like running joke in the office

about some of the, more, I guess you could say less credible producers or host. There was always like one moment in every episode where they turned to the camera and go, they told us not to go any further, that it wasn't safe. But we decided to go anyway. And that just became like a running bit that we had, which was in like every episode. Yeah. Name names? that. Yeah, I always do. I should say, like, this place is completely legit. It's really lovely,

actually. It's a nice neighbourhood. But I was visiting Vietnam as a quote-unquote tourist, and Stephen, my guide, he definitely wasn't supposed to be showing a reporter around Nam Camp's old hood. As you're going to find out, like, they don't really want people knowing about this history. So he had to kind of, you know, be a bit careful, and I couldn't just go around speaking to the camera, partly because that is what weirdos do. And it's partly why people were a little bit scared to speak to us. So this is Namcams old house, right? You can see it on the video. And like this guy says, he's quickly made it out of the slums and into the city. He's turning gambling cash into extortion, drug smuggling and other big time criminal businesses. But how did he get his start in Saigon's underworld? And for that, we're going to have to

take it back a while, right? All the way back, in fact, to the 1920s. So Saigon, if you don't know, Vietnam is this kind of elongated kidney, right, along the eastern side of Southeast Asia. It's right at the foot, the city. It's not far from Penhompin in Cambodia. It's surrounded by water and cleaved by a series of rivers and canals, not to mention a port that hosts cargo en route from Macau, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Shanghai, all over the rest of the world, right? So in Saigon, the sea, the water is king.

It's the biggest city in French, Indochina, and its underworld is governed by a collection of piratical warlords called the bin juiyan. I know I'm butering the Vietnamese apologies. Imagine Walter World or just a wet Mad Max, which is Waterworld, right? Yeah, I mean, I know any of this. It already sounds fascinating, but I've been doing a bunch of reading recently about, like, Shanghai and Southern China and South China Seas and like the early 20th century, like 1900s.

And it isn't saying how much, like, piracy was there. Like the amount of just like madman. pirate gangs of like, like just gangsters, just like preying on that whole region, which was an insane amount of trade because you had Hong Kong and that whole area of southern China. It's really like Riverbow Pirates, stuff like that. It's really fascinating stuff. Yeah, your library is an interesting collection of books at the moment that you're reading and stuff on. It's also, I think there's like a national hero in China. He's like, one of their national heroes is a 14th century pirate, I think. He's like their kind of Marco Polo.

But yeah, like in Saigon, it's a similar kind of history, right? The guys in charge are the guys with the boats. So these guys, the bin Juin, they make their money, bribing poor officials of contraband, they're kidnapping and extorting the rich, they're operating brothels and running protection rackets of prostitutes and gambling dens. And some of them do the robbing hood stick.

They pump money back into poor neighborhoods. But others simply take advantage of the poor. In the beginning, these guys are anti-French, like all good thinking people should be. The colonialists maintain the order in the heart of the city, the part now known as District 1, where almost everybody who's visit the city will have stayed. But just south of it, especially in the Venice-like canals and streets of District 4, Saigon is a wild west.

It is lawless, and it's under the complete control of the Binjouien. In 1941, Japan occupies Saigon, and the bin Shuian uses their criminal connections to steal weapons and ammunition, with which Vietnamese nationalists can drive in out the French from the region altogether. The French run wider Indochina, and the Binjouien, the pirate gangsters, they are causing havoc right in the middle of it. Writes the academic Michael Bastogne, quote, The Binjrian themselves were the byproduct of poverty, of rotten government, devolved power through a kaleidoscope of groups,

but also colonial intransigence, followed by global geopolitical forces, albeit in a localized setting. I mean, we might need to get that translated from academic ease into English. Like, we get the gist of what he's saying, but like, buddy, you know, write like a human being. Come on. Yeah, please, guys, just stop writing like that. Anyway, now we're up to 1945. The war is drawing to a close and the Japanese are booted out of Saigon.

What was like the Japanese occupation of Saigon like? I mean, we know, like, in China and other places in Southeast Asia, it was brutal. Was it kind of brutal in Saigon at all? I actually don't know a lot about that. I went to one of the museums in Saigon, the one where it's mostly about the Vietnam War, but there was a little bit on the Japanese occupation, and it wasn't particularly nice.

But I don't think they did the same kind of stuff like they did in the Philippines and Korea. I don't think there was quite that. I think they ruled through a proxy, a bit like a fishy sort of government. But yeah, maybe we should, I should look into that. It's really interesting stuff. Anyway, the victorious French in the war, unbelievable.

given that they are serial surrenderers, are back in control of the city. But they've got a new problem, right? And this is another one they can't handle, and it's called communism. And the binjui-en go all in on the Reds. They instigate a workers uprising later that year, which is put down. But in September 1945, a lieutenant in one of the biggest gangs orders the massacre of 150 European men, women and children. And the French respond by mass arresting and executing gangsters

and communists, and that is met in turn by attacks on French positions across southern Saigon by an army of 5,000-plus pirates led by the city's most feared kingpin, Baduang. This brutal fighting continues for months, the binjouienne against French colonial troops. But on February 16, 1946, Barduang, the big kingpin, he's killed in a French air raid. And in the wake of his death, the binjrian splits and they turn on one another. The result of which is that Saigon's underworld broadly switches its allegiance to the French. The French then agreeing to turn a blind eye to their criminal pillaging so long as they pledged to fight the communists that are already taking over North Vietnam.

And this they do well, so well in fact that the French reward the Bintrean with monopolies on lucrative Saigon trades at the ports and in trucking. And it's in this world that Namcam is born. In 1947, the fifth child of a poor family. in District 4. The young boy is a born rebel by all accounts, and in his teens, he's taken under the wing of an influential gangster by the name of Huen, Thai. Namcam becomes a lookout and a street dealer for Thai's brother-in-law, sigh. So Tai and Sai at Namcam. In 1954, Vietnam shakes off the French and becomes a Cold War battleground. You've got Ho Chi Min's Communists in North Vietnam,

backed by the Soviet Union and China, and South Vietnam, backed by America and its allies, based out of Saigon. And by this time, there is a new cash cow in town. And it's named Danny, yes, your friend of mine, heroin. I was going to guess rare earth minerals. No, that's just 99% of our WhatsApp chat at the moment. Some of mine are doing really well. Anyway, I'll talk you about last.

Dude, they're doing incredible. I should have listened to you a month ago. They're all up like 200%. It's insane. It's actually mad. We should just do that on the Patreon. People should just follow us. We should just give financial advice.

I think we get a license for that. We should be giving financial advice for that lot. Oh, my God. Yeah. Bet on the Yankees and invest in rare earth mineral stocks. That's where this podcast was always going to end up. Anyway, Saigon becomes a key transshipment point for heroin heading out from Asia into the biomarkets of North and South America, New York, Montreal, Mexico City Buenos Aires.

It's shepherded by the Binjouien and ferried mostly by Corsican gangsters through the port cities of Gaziantep and Istanbul in Turkey into Marseilles and other. European port cities. We've spoken a bunch about this kind of route, right? I think these might be two separate things and correct me if I'm wrong, because the French connection was just you know, it was mostly they were the course against they were moving the heroin or opium

to be turned into heroin from Turkey to Marseille to America, usually through New York. And correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the Vietnam connection, which was some of those same guys, but not the same network. And that was, you know, it was slightly different, right? It was slightly different. There was some of the same guys involved.

Yeah, we should do a separate show on this because there is loads of quite dense kind of stuff to get through with the history and how that route differed from the stuff coming from like central Asia and down into Turkey and whatnot. But yeah, all of which is to say that this is like a huge business, right? I mean, yeah, the main route, like you said, was the one through Turkey, but this is also making a lot of money. Guys, you can feel it in the air. The leaves are changing colors. You can see it. The holidays, They are coming up fast, but it's not too early get your shopping done and actually have fun doing it. Uncommon goods makes holiday shopping stress-free and joyful with thousands of one-of-a-kind gifts you can't find anywhere else.

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Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. Drfer. And every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling true crime story connected to that exact day in history.

From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, morning cup of murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled,

then sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. American GIs are pouring into Saigon at this point, of course, and they're bringing their own cottage industries of sex, drugs and booze for the Binshuian. And among them, one man stands head and shoulders above all other gangsters. And this is Bay Vienne, the second generation in today's Vietnam gang episode. Now this guy's life has more than a little of the Bond villain about it.

He lives in central Saigon, where its Notre Dame Cathedral currently stands, and he's surrounded by a crocodile-infested moat, decades before Pablo Escobar had his hippos, right? So this guy also keeps a collection of pythons, a leopard, and a tiger in a cage, and rumours swirl, of course, that Bay Viet feeds disloyal henchmen to the tiger, although, as we've learned from previous shows on organised crime and big cats, that's probably a legend. The French connection, however, and the Vietnam connection, is making so much money that it attracts gangsters from all kinds of places to Saigon.

The Corsicans are joined there by Armenians, Algerians, Chinese, and many others, in fact, and all of them are paying Bay Vient to get gear on and off at the city's docks. By 1954 is the richest man in the city with a personal army of some thousand, men. But as the war in Vietnam continues and Saigon becomes a nest of spires, turncoats, and rebels, one man alone cannot control the chaos. So Bayvian's empire splits into four separate groups, each headed by one of Saigon's so-called four kings. And one of them is Swin Thai, with his brother-in-law base, Sai working under him, and Namcam working under him. So the two brothers, and Namcam are our little guy who's going to become the big guy under one of them.

Yeah. But also, when this split happens into four, is it like they're all operating under that one guy? Or does he just kind of fade and the other four split up his territory? Yeah, the latter. So they kind of like carve up the city, basically. He can't take control of the entire place now. It's too teaming with all kinds of stuff going on. So they kind of split it into sections according to these four big kingpins. And one of which, yeah, is the guy who Namcam is working for. And in December 1962, Bayside stabs a man to death protecting a gambling den, and Nam Cam, he's just 13, right? He takes the fall.

A couple years later in 1964, he sentenced to three years in prison for, quote, intentionally causing bodily harm. No shit. And he's released just one year later, so this is just another one to add to that massive list of brutal gangsters who've served a clownishly short prison term in their early age. After his release, remember this guy is still only 16 years old. Namcam is dispatched to serve in the South Vietnamese army, and he remains in the system until the end of the war in 1975 when Saigon falls to the communists and Vietnam is united as one country. Although, he doesn't really serve as a regular grunt.

He bribes and manipulates his ways to a logistics role, which is going to be the blueprint for the way he runs his criminal business after the war. Here's some more District 4, ASMR, by the way. This allegedly is Namcam's old street. It's interesting speaking to locals in District 4 that sort of nobody knows much about his early years. He seems to have been one of just many local mobsters, right, who made their money from gambling and other street-level crime. All the way through this period, Namcambe is getting in legal trouble for his gambling operations, cockfighting, numbers, games, stuff like this. But after each arrest, his star continues to rise, either by making criminal friends behind bars,

or by befriending influential figures in law enforcement and politics. In 1989, he flexes these news contacts after yet another arrest when he, quote, atones for his crimes by snitching on the location of 20 secret casinos across Saigon. All of the casinos are raided and shuttered by the cops, but none of them, surprise, are run by Namcam. So he's figured out by this point that instead of fighting the authorities, like the early pirates of Saigon, he can work with them, using them.

to wipe out his underworld enemies. Around the start of the 1990s, therefore, Namcam's empire branches out from District 4, and he sets his eyes on District 1, the heart of Saigon. But Namcam didn't just pitch up on any street. He came here, the place you can see in the video. This is called the Hwin-Tukang Black Market,

a high-rise maze of tenements, market stalls, billiard halls and brothels, standing right on the border of Districts 1, and four. Now just looking at the place, you can see what a thriving criminal marketplace it must have been like 35 years ago, when the city was nowhere near as developed as it is now. Cramed, full of people, a perfect place to sell watches and radios, for example, which is exactly what Namcam did. He's the chief of an empire that runs across the entire city and includes not just roulette tables, but card games, cockfights, match fixing on top level football matches, right? Namcambe also extorting,

protection money from bars, clubs and restaurants across Saigon, and he puts a huge amount of his profits into bribes for officials and local police chiefs to make sure everything that he does is protected and above the law. Few would even try getting in his way, but in the rare case the bribes can't keep somebody from going for his empire, Namcam isn't afraid to get his hands dirty. In one episode, he gets rid of a rival gangster by having henchmen pour acid in the guy's face. This entire time, Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security has been going above the police's heads to run an investigation on NAM camp.

In 1995, they detain him and they send him to a re-education camp. But he pays thousands of dollars to an assortment of politicians, judges, and even the head of the state radio station to lobby on his behalf. In 1997, October, he's released, almost a year early. Has he been re-educated? No, he has not. And by October 1999, he's opened even more gambling dens in across the city by now aiming for high rollers, and he's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on, quote, diplomatic expenses. This might not seem like a lot of money, right, compared even to Asian gangsters at the time.

But remember that Vietnam has a GDP per capita of 1999 of under $400. So Namcam is making insane amounts of cash compared to the average guy in district four. He also holds tons of lavish parties for bribed officials, including cognac brandy and platoons of sex workers. One police reporter even gets a brand new car in return for not writing about Namcam. So his bread and butter, though, it's the gambling, yeah? Yeah, yeah, always has been. Yeah, yeah, from the start. He's just like opening bigger and bigger casinos, kind of like making a bigger, I guess, going for higher and higher rollers all the time.

At the same time, Namcam is beginning to branch out of Vietnam. He's hooking up with some truly global criminals. So he's just about to sort of branch outside the country. He travels to Macau, Hong Kong, South Korea and the US, trying to extend his business into drugs, bigger casinos, and sort of financial frauds on foreign soil. But perhaps for the first time since he arrived on the scene, Namcam is about to face a hefty challenge from a rival gangster.

And at the end of the 20th century, that looks like Dung Ha. You'll recognize Dung from the Code Open. so you know this isn't going to end well for her, but she's an interesting character in her own right, not least because she's a woman, which it probably doesn't need saying, is not the usual mobster profile of the time. Born in 1965 in Haiphong,

the major port city into Hanoi, close to Harlong Bay, Dung rises through the ranks of Hanoi's underworld by being a complete nutcase unhinged, basically, mixing charm with a ponchant for violence, and managing to control fleets of young men to do her bidding. Dung thrives on public displays of power, bar fights, nightclub brawls, and at one point she leaves a rotting pig's head in a rival Kingpin's karaoke bar, very godfather, and the polar opposite of Nam Camus, for the most part, there's quiet, stealthy operator,

who'd much rather go the way of the peso than the plomo. In her 20s, Dung begins an affair with one of Hifong's biggest mob bosses, a guy coated in tattoos who's been in and out of prison his entire life. Here's the website, Saigonier, quote. The consensus seemed to be that Dung used this relationship, a way to gain power and boost her profile in Haiphong. Her first love didn't last long as addiction turned her man from a feared mob boss into an easy manipulated drug addict.

In this moment of weakness, Dung usurped his power and dominated his thriving casino business. By the time he died of HIV, Dung had solidified herself as a mob boss. Dung's next move is to hop in bed with an even bigger gangster, a guy called Hong Kong. problem is he gets arrested for murder and robbery pretty much straight after they get together and he's sentenced to be executed so dung plots to spring him from prison going nam cam's way bribing prison authorities drying to talk her way into the facility on hung's judgment day dung hooks up with a convict on the inside who says he'll help hung escape and he pays off gas to turn a blind eye while she brings him a bag as a farewell present but this isn't candy

saucy photos or even Panini World Cup football stickers in the bag. It is grenades. I don't know why I thought of Panini stickers. What the hell was I thinking? Yeah, I don't even know what that means, but I just take it like just a Sean thing at this point. It's the obsession of every young boy in suburban England. It is not any of those things, Danny. It is, of course, it's grenades.

I mean, why not? Why not have grenades in there? Hung grabs these grenades and alongside his convict friend, he gets as far as the prison gates, threatening to blow everybody sky high. But at this point, it's quite funny, the plan really falls down. Because now they're just two guys standing in a heavily fortified courtyard holding grenades. So the guards just shoot the fellow convict dead, and they march hung back to his cell, and he hangs himself soon after that.

This is, why didn't she just give him a gun? Like, why the grenade? What is going on? This is, it's fair to say, a pretty big failure for Dung. But she takes it on the chin, or rather, the scalp, because soon after hung suicide, she chops our long hair off, trades in dresses for jeans and boots, and usually rides around Haifong with this beautiful girl riding pillion on her motorbike.

Dung becomes known as Dung the lesbian, not the most imaginative nickname, but in mid-1990s she sentenced to three years prison for racketeering, losing a lot of her criminal momentum. When she emerges, in 1998, she moves south, ditching her life in high school. fong for the big prize, Saigon. A first Namcam hopes to recruit Dong into his crew, but the lady's not for turning again. And rather than join forces with Vietnam's most powerful gangster, despite having few contacts and having witnessed the deaths of at least two kingpins she was close to, she opts for a different

plan, Dung Beetle. Get it? Dung, yeah. Oh, God, that's even worse when I say it, man. In September... It's not good. It's not good, isn't it? On September 29, 1999, Dung pulls her fake birthday stunt, the one from the cold open,

getting 20 of her gang members to hurl assaulted dead animals and dog shit all over the dance floor of one of Namcam's premier Saigon nightclubs, Monaco. This is too much for Namcam, and he has his men blow Dung's brains all over the sidewalk on October 2000. It's the most spectacular killing in Vietnamese underworld history. And finally, something no police chiefs, despite, whatever backhanders they're getting can ignore. But while NAMCAM might look to a future unencumbered by marauding lesbian mobsters, the hide doesn't last so long for him. In May 2001, the Vietnamese government launches a new investigation into his criminal empire, Operation Z-501. Soon, officials discovered that

12 hitmen had traveled from Hanoi to Saigon two months before the shooting and that Namcam was behind it. Cops then arrest Namcam's executioner and he soon rats on his boss, telling the guys at Operation Z-501 that Namcam has masterminded this entire thing. That October, cops raid one of Namcams gambling dens in District 8, right next to District 4. They then arrest a large number of his crew, and then, a couple months later, they arrest the big guy himself. He's at the home of one of his mistresses. Most people, of course, expect Namcams to survive the ordeal. He survived everything else.

else after all, and pretty much anybody with any semblance of power is in the man's pocket. But not this time. The man leading the case against Namcam is a leading military general, and he's known to be unbiable because he doesn't mind, quote, eating communal meals and sleeping in a bed at the interior ministry itself. I mean, a leading communist who's actually maybe genuinely a communist, like, yeah, rarer than hen's teeth. Anyway, in early 2003, the historic Namcam and associate's trial begins at Saigon's grand old Palace of Justice. Beautiful building, well worth checking out. It's the largest process in modern Vietnamese history. And it doesn't just go for the kingpin himself. 154 others, officials, police officers, members of the media, are in the dock

with him. Writes Time magazine, quote, since Namcams tentacles reached far into the government, the case simultaneously became Vietnam's biggest corruption crackdown. Two of the 18 government officials on trial within this month were members of the Light Central Committee, the Communist Party's 150 member main decision-making body. Bonjour, compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget.

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cure ad a deeper level of care shop the full collection on amazon or visit curad dot com to learn more one of the accused was hoachiman city's police chief for years another the national radio chief is accused of writing a letter in 1996 that helped secure cam's early release from a re-education camp for a previous arrest apart from the courtroom proceedings more than a hundred police officers and other officials have been suspended from duty because they're suspected of being on camp's payroll The Vietnamese state faces a bit of a quandary with all this. Does it maximise coverage of the Namcam trial to show that it's cracking down on gangsters and corruption? Or does it suppress the full extent of the crimes, fearing that citizens would lose their faith in their rulers?

In the end, leaders in Hanoi chose a middle path. The trials opening hours are broadcast live on national TV, showing Namcam handcuffed and dressed in striped prison scrubs. Reporters aren't allowed inside, presumably to allow the regime to cut the feed, if anything too embarrassing. is said, and a party official warns the press that they should report, quote, only what is good for the nation. On June 5, 2003, the court reaches its verdict. Namcam is guilty of murder and bribery and is sentenced to death. Four other members of his crew received the same sentence, one of whom breaks down in

the dock as it's read out. Namcam remains unmoved throughout the proceedings, which include being fined $77,000, which the court says, quote, equals the amount of bribery is committed. half of his property is also confiscated. Yeah, even for a poor country, like 77,000 doesn't seem like that much. Like, I could have become the campaign Vietnam, I feel like right now. Yeah, it's not a lot of money, is it? No, I think he probably did several million more than that.

Almost a year later, at 3.30 a.m. on June 3rd, 2004, Namcam and his four fellow death row inmates are woken by guards at a prison in Longbin, a rural part of eastern Saigon and told to write final letters to their families. Namcam writes to his daughter, a Buddhist, telling her he regrets what he's done in his life, and to his two grandsons to urge them not to repeat his actions. The group are giving fresh clothes and a meal. A 5 a.m. squad cars bring the five men to a firing range nearby. Two of them keep talking and laughing throughout, and then they faint when they spot coffins

and freshly dug graves beside the Grange. A judge then reads out a rejection of clemency. as crowds gather around the grounds. And at 5 a.m., multiple shots ring out. Namcam is dead. And that is pretty much where our story ends today, guys. We started with one execution, we ended with another. It's just a kind of uplifting content you're all here for.

Organized crime, of course, in Vietnam, doesn't die with Namcam. As late as 2008, I read a really interesting report. Saigon is then one of Asia's key transshipment points for heroin and meth coming out of the Golden Triangle and into Europe and the United States. It's not a huge amount of information on that these days. It could probably do with a bit of reporting. But today, Vietnam's underworld has gone more white collar, whether in scam compounds lit across Southeast Asia,

you can see our previous show with Nathan and Lindsay for more on that, or massive, like, gang-busting frauds. Last year, for example, billionaire Saigon businesswoman Trong Milan was sentenced to death for a 44 billion dollar fraud on one of the country's biggest banks, which, yeah, which, I mean, when you think of the GDP per capita, just a generation that goes $400, is that kind of, is that progress? I mean, I don't know, whether or not it is, that is about as close as you're going to get to a positive end anyway. Let's play this one out with some goofy footage of me on the back of a moped because why not?

Yeah, anyway, patreon.com, that's the normal podcast for more bonus episodes. I can't wait to see this footage, to be honest with you. Yeah, Spotify, iTunes. I'm not sure this is the future for me sitting around with a gimbal and an iPhone, like an influencer. Yeah, it's not, it's just embarrassing. I don't know how people do it for a living. Anyway, until next week, folks. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.

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