FBI agent suspected of murdering couple

FBI agent suspected of murdering couple
COLD-CASE INVESTIGATION | Husband, wife were shot execution-style in their SUV in West Rogers Park in 2002 -- while baby sat in back seat

February 24, 2009

BY STEVE WARMBIR AND FRANK MAIN Staff Reporters

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.

Police dust an SUV for fingerprints after Timme and Vickie Le (inset)
were killed in the 3100 block of West Jerome in June 2002. Vo Duong
"Ben" Tran (not pictured), a former FBI agent, is a suspect in their
slaying, a police source said.

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.

Feds. If only their brains were as big as their egos.

So much for the vaunted hiring standards, background investigations and personality screening of the sainted FBI.

Federal Bunglers and Idiots seems more like it.

This does not surprise me. I have never met an FBI agent that impressed me.

Famous But Incompetant!

Most of the good, old school FBI guys are retired. The current crop is no better than the high school dropout working as a guard at the county prison.