FBI agent suspected of murdering couple
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | 24 Feb 2009 | STEVE WARMBIR AND FRANK MAIN
Posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 10:14:37 AM by BGHater
COLD-CASE INVESTIGATION | Husband, wife were shot execution-style in their SUV in West Rogers Park in 2002 -- while baby sat in back seat
A former FBI agent is a suspect in the 2002 murders of a married couple shot to death in their BMW on the North Side while their 3-month-old child sat in the back unharmed, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.
Vo Duong "Ben" Tran, 41, was an FBI agent in 2002, when the victims, Timme and Vickie Le, were killed execution-style in West Rogers Park, court records show.
Tran, who investigated organized crime for the FBI, was fired from the bureau in 2003 after he allegedly admitted to FBI officials that he tried to bribe a Vietnamese official when he traveled to the country, among other infractions.
The Chicago Police cold-case unit is investigating the murders. Initially, Tran was not a suspect but detectives recently received information from the FBI raising the possibility that he was involved, a police source said. Cold-case detectives want to question Tran. Police declined on Monday to discuss their evidence in the slayings.
Tran is on trial in California on charges of planning to rip off a drug house, but in reality, the whole matter was an FBI sting operation.
During the investigation in California, he was secretly recorded by a confidential informant as he spoke generally about past murders and about other people he wanted to kill, as well as ways to avoid arrest, court records alleged. Chicago police have asked the FBI for copies of those recordings, a law enforcement source said.
Tran allegedly told a government informant that he had been a sports bookmaker and wanted to kill people across the country who owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"I want blood," Tran said, according to a government transcript. "I have to make sure it has to be done right because all my hits, they are clean."
In another recording, Tran allegedly talked about shooting people "in the eye, f - - - - - - blow out of the, the back of the brain."
On his MySpace social networking site, Tran inserts a chilling quote in the "About Me" section: "Man knows no pain till he's taken a man's life."
The former FBI agent has faced criminal charges twice before -- one for allegedly impersonating a police officer, another time on gun-related charges. But he beat both cases.
Tran's attorneys in the California case argue he wasn't doing anything wrong but simply trying to help law enforcement by playing along and gathering information about the drug house ripoff.
Federal prosecutors counter it was much more than talk, pointing to the arsenal that Tran and his alleged accomplice had assembled to rob the drug house. The weapons and equipment included a fully automatic machine gun; a semiautomatic assault rifle with a silencer; a .22-caliber Ruger with a silencer and netting to catch discharged casings; 600 rounds of ammunition; four bulletproof vests, and zip ties to tie up people expected to be inside the drug house.
Tran's alleged connection to the double murder in Chicago first came to light in court documents filed by prosecutors in the California case as part of a list of other alleged bad deeds by Tran that could be introduced at trial.
Family members of the victims were stunned when told of the prosecution's filing. Before she was killed, Vickie Le ran a popular Gold Coast nail salon, and her husband owned a restaurant in Uptown. Vickie Le's brother, Vu Hoang, said he did not know if the couple knew Tran.
Prosecutors have referred in a court filing to Tran and Timme Le as former business partners.
"I am completely flabbergasted by the whole thing," Hoang said.
