Little Saigon construction worker Khoa Dang Pham enjoyed hanging around his drug dealing buddies and he didn't think about the potential consequences because the cocaine, women, guns and expensive vehicles proved too tantalizing.
Pham's legitimate employer, girlfriend, little sister and cousin all say that Pham is a compassion, decent person who made a onetime mistake and will live the rest of his life crime free.
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Feess dashed Pham's hopes for probation or house arrest and instead handed him a 42-month trip to a federal prison.
When the drug dealer emerges back into society, he'll have to serve three years of supervised probation.
Using a veteran, paid informant with Mexican Mafia ties as well as visual and telephone surveillance, undercover Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officers nabbed Pham as well as accused ringleader Hai Van Pham, Thi Oanh Ta, Dung Tien Doan, Linda Pham, Augusto Recinos Asencio, Juan Cebreros Iribe, Natividad Escobar Cardenas, Jorge Noel Cardenas Escobar, Luis Cataneda and Alfredo Gonzalo Alcocer.
So far, only two other conspirators have been punished: Linda Pham received a 48-month prison sentence; Jorge Escobar got 51 months.
The Little Saigon/Santa Ana based drug ring trafficked cocaine locally and to Canada and Australia.
Go HERE to read prior coverage of the undercover DEA operation's success.
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.