Seeing Red

Tuan Pham and his Capital Market became targets later. As Rosha explained to a jury’s satisfaction, Pham was dragged into the crosshairs by an estranged former son-in-law named Dean Do, once married to a daughter of Pham’s who is mentally ill. A few years before the bishop’s visit, they split in a messy divorce—but not before Do got the daughter to sign a letter charging Pham with offenses ranging from moral turpitude and “allowing his children to be promiscuous” to extortion and arson. The daughter later recanted the letter publicly, explaining that she had been off her medication. The charges were fabricated.

Do still had the letter, however, and learning than Pham was the bishop’s driver, he took it to the protest leaders. Soon copies appeared on the Internet and on the windshields of cars parked at Pham’s church. A copy of the letter, along with other documents critical of Pham, went to the White House. The mere appearance of controversy, Rosha says, spiked Pham’s reappointment to the Vietnam Education Foundation.

Lan Pham says that her father’s position with the foundation was turned against him: It involved cooperation between the United States and the Vietnamese government, “so that was working with the Communists.” Pham joined the protesters’ list of Communist lackeys, and the Capital Market was denounced as a front for funneling money to the Communist regime in Vietnam.

A 2004 street demonstration in front of the grocery was followed by what Rosha calls a whisper campaign to the effect that anyone who shopped at the market would be denounced as a Communist, too.

“One of the most poignant moments at the trial,” Rosha says, came in testimony from the priest at a Catholic church attended by some of Pham’s children. “I had to subpoena him because he didn’t want to be part of this,” Rosha says. The priest admitted on the stand that he had shopped at the Capital Market for years, “but after the attacks started, he didn’t want to be a target, so he stopped coming.”

Rosha, who is a major in the Minnesota National Guard, expected to be sent to Iraq shortly after the district court verdict. His deployment was delayed, but during the appeals process Tuan was represented by Pat Tierney, a partner with Collins Buckley Sauntry & Haugh of St. Paul.

“I do a lot of defamation work, suing newspapers and TV stations,” Tierney says. “The injury in defamation cases is always devastating . . . . But in [Pham’s] case, nobody would even talk to him. His business went from relatively profitable to closing the doors in a matter of months. Even his friends stopped coming.”