A Little Saigon bikini bar owner victimized by an loan shark ring FBI agents say used at least one Westminster Police Department (WPD) officer as an enforcer has settled her civil lawsuit out of court.
Following the August 2013 arrests of Fountain Valley businessman Kevin Khanh Tuan Do and WPD officer Anthony Duong Donner, businesswoman Hanh Le filed her lawsuit claiming she had been harassed and threatened to make illegal 60 percent annual interest payments on a $170,000 loan from Do.
Terms of the settlement were not made public in papers filed this month inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse.
Hanh reported that when she was late on payments on-duty police officers tied to Do repeatedly “carried out drive-bys” at her residence, entered her business and home without permission, directed high-intensity spotlights from their patrol vehicles into her shop, harassed her patrons under false pretenses, sent threatening messages and conducted bogus traffic stops on both her and her customers.
On March 2, mediator Jad Davis reported to U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter that a late February meeting between the parties resulted in a “complete settlement” of the civil case.
Do, a 1991 Vietnamese immigrant who associated with local politicians Andy Quach and Tyler Diep, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his loan sharking operation and received a punishment of probation for two years plus a $5,000 fine after a Catholic priest vouched for his integrity.
Donner, a Golden West College law enforcement program graduate, is scheduled to face criminal trail next year with Judge Carter.
Though he was initially named in Le’s lawsuit as a defendant and later dropped, Kevin Baker, WPD’s chief, cooperated fully with FBI and Department of Justice officials during the loan sharking investigation.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.