The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

36 THOMAS A. BASS
As described by William Cassidy, who has written a lively account
entitled Southern Viet-Nam’s Criminal Traditions (1991),
“What we know today as Saigon began as a collection of villages
some eighty kilometers inland from the coast, known originally
as Prey Kor, or ‘the Land of Forests,’ a refuge and hiding place
from and for the pirates that harassed seagoing traffic to the
south and river traffic to the west. The area presented a vortex
of piracy and banditry. The Malay pirate fleet operated inland
from Poulo Condore. The Champa pirate fleets operated southward
from below Hué. Funanese and Cham bandit gangs monopolized
the overland routes.”
By 1859 a new band of pirates—the French—had captured
Saigon, and by 1862 Emperor Tu Duc had ceded a big
chunk of Cochin China to his new European overlords. Cambodia
fell in 1863, and by 1884 the entire region was under
French control. The French suppressed coastal marauding,
preferring to control sea traffic and tax it for themselves. This
forced Vietnam’s gangsters to move inland, where they became
river pirates, hiding in the swampy regions southeast of
Cholon—Saigon’s Chinatown. In Cholon itself the river pirates
ran bordellos, opium dens, and gambling halls. The staging
area for their criminal activities was an area called Rung Sat, the
Jungle of the Assassins. Here, in the hamlet of Binh Xuyen, coalesced
a yeasty mix of swamp bandits, Cholon street thugs, escaped
contract laborers from the Michelin rubber plantation,
and members of various criminal associations linked to Chinese
Triads and Vietnamese secret societies.
By the early 1930s, the Binh Xuyen pirates had welcomed
into their ranks a young street hoodlum named Bay Vien.
He was captured by the French and imprisoned on Poulo Condore,
but he got a lucky break when the Japanese assumed
control of Vietnam in 1941. They released the Binh Xuyen
gangsters from Devil’s Island and began employing them as a
useful tool for ruling the country. After the Japanese coup d’état
on March 9, 1945, when French citizens in Vietnam were