[UPDATE at end] The Little Saigon website owner accused of running an international satellite piracy operation now faces accusations that he destroyed thousands of records after a federal judge in Orange County ordered him to comply with Dish Network subpoenas.
For a recent Moxley Confidential, Vietnamese immigrant Tan Minh Nguyen assured me that he is not a pirate, doesn't know how to break complicated satellite access codes and didn't knowingly allow any of the 177,000 members of his website to post illegally obtained information.
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Yet, Nguyen–a 44-year-old, single-father of two young boys in
Westminster–is in serious trouble. According to court records, he twice
failed to show up to scheduled hearings in U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna's Santa Ana courtroom and has not fully complied with court orders issued more than three months ago.
Nguyen
claims he's been overwhelmed by a corporate giant tossing complicated
legal documents at him, but Selna is so far siding with Dish Network.
Last
month, Selna said he was considering fining Nguyen more than $100,000 for contempt of
court and incarcerating him if he didn't begin to
obey his orders.
It's never a good idea to test the patience of a federal judge and the situation grew more dire for Nguyen today when Dish Network lawyers David A. Van Riper (of Tustin) and Chad M. Hagan and Stephen M. Ferguson (both of Houston) announced that they had hired computer forensic specialist Steven Rogers, a retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police tech crime section.
Rogers, who is president of Digital Evidence International,
analyzed a DVD that Nguyen claimed was a complete copy of his
website, ftaforall. According to Rogers, thousands of records had been
deleted including data about the administrator, the administrator's
private messages and email contacts.
“Data had been altered,
modified and, in some instances, relevant evidence deleted at or near
the time the defendant created the DVD,” he concluded.
That
forceful assertion could be strike three for the lawyer-less Nguyen. He may want
to prepare to be taken into custody by U.S. marshals at the July 9
hearing inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse.
Nguyen, who bought his domain name through GoDaddy.com and fled communist Vietnam on a boat as a boy in 1978, has not responded to repeated attempts for a follow up interview.
Dish Network officials claim that satellite pirates cost the company millions of dollars annually in lost subscriber fees.
[UPDATE, July 10, 2012: Yesterday, Judge Selna ordered Nguyen to submit to a deposition by Dish Network lawyers and will considered pending potential contempt of court fines at a hearing in several weeks. Nguyen told me that the the company's experts have tampered with the website file he surrendered to them. He also claimed that the company's main lawyer threatened to wreck his life and make sure his two young boys don't have money to go to college.]
Go HERE to read my original story about the case.
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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.