It’s been a good month in court for a San Jose businessman dubbed the “Godfather of Little Saigon,” entangling a local councilmember, an embattled power broker, a Trump administration bigwig and suggestive Vietnamese aphorisms.
Politically influential San Jose bail bondsman Hai Huynh has seen favorable turns in two dramatic courtroom battles in the last few weeks — one with District 7 Councilmember Bien Doan and another with once ally-turned-enemy David Duong, the Oakland recycling mogul and power broker with San Jose connections. Huynh appears close to advancing a defamation lawsuit against Doan, who painted Huynh as a dangerous criminal last year after Huynh criticized Doan’s political closeness with Duong. To fend off Huynh’s lawsuit, Doan has retained the private law firm of President Donald Trump’s campaign advisor and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
A superior court judge on Tuesday denied Doan’s anti-SLAPP motion — a legal tool used to quickly dismiss lawsuits meant to silence or intimidate someone — while also casting doubt on Huynh’s central argument that Doan acted with malice and slandered him. The tentative ruling isn’t final and the case isn’t close to finished. Doan’s office declined to comment.
Meanwhile, Duong on Aug. 15 dropped a defamation lawsuit against Huynh over charges of communist connections — as Duong faces his own legal trouble with federal prosecutors over a bribery scheme that took down former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. Last year, Huynh had labeled Duong a lackey of the Vietnamese government for taking Oakland officials on trips to Vietnam, where Duong’s company Cal Waste Solutions expanded. Duong’s defamation lawsuit openly challenged Huynh to prove his claims. But several months later, Duong was named in a Jan. 9 federal indictment that put his Vietnam trips under the microscope.
Duong said he dropped his lawsuit against Huynh in the spirit of community healing.
“This year marked 50 years after the war of Vietnam,” Duong told San José Spotlight. “We dropped the lawsuit to show our community that we can work together to grow our community stronger in the next 50 years.”
Legal battles
But where one legal battle ends, another begins. Huynh is now being sued for harassment by Queenie Ngo, a top staffer in Doan’s District 7 office. Ngo has accused Huynh of threatening her life with warnings of fatal stabbings, according to a copy of her restraining order request. Huynh’s legal team rejected the charge. They said Huynh was responding to a comment Ngo made to Vietnamese-language media with warnings of legal action using the Vietnamese maxim “bút sa gà chết,” which roughly translates to, “When the pen slips, the chicken dies.”
Ngo declined to comment.
Huynh said he’s being attacked on multiple fronts over his public denunciations of Bay Area political cronyism.
“Because I tried to expose political corruption and pay-to-play schemes the last few years on social media, David Duong and his cronies have tried their best the last two years to silence me through a fabricated workplace restraining order, which Councilman Bien Doan and the city of San Jose lost, frivolous defamation lawsuits and bold lies,” Huynh told San José Spotlight. “Now Bien Doan’s aide, Queenie Ngo, is using the same playbook as her boss and filed another frivolous and baseless (restraining order).”
The latest developments stem from a dramatic legal showdown last year between Huynh and Doan. Doan accused Huynh of threatening his safety and having mob ties to convince a judge to grant a restraining order against the bondsman. Doan — with the help of the San Jose City Attorney’s Office — pointed to Huynh being named in a 2000 casino sting that accused Huynh of loansharking and witness intimidation. Huynh was ultimately dropped from that criminal case.
Huynh argued Doan sought to use the restraining order to shun him from community events, as Huynh was frequently critical of the District 7 councilmember’s closeness with Duong and his business group, the Vietnamese American Business Association, which organized the Vietnam trips. The hearings brought myriad big names in Little Saigon out to testify, and revolved around the trauma of older Vietnamese American refugees who fled the Vietnam War. San Jose has the largest population of Vietnamese people for a city outside of Vietnam.
Last year’s court hearings also called Duong to the stand, who alleged Huynh’s name struck fear in the community and called him the “Godfather of Little Saigon.” Duong also accused Huynh of hounding over old debts. Huynh said he helped rally local support in Little Saigon for Duong’s first citywide recycling contract in San Jose. A judge ultimately sided with Huynh, citing no evidence of organized crime connections. Huynh later sued Doan for defamation, while Duong sued Huynh for defamation over the communist label.
Duong took issue with the label which carries significant, and occasionally violent, emotional weight. Anti-communists drove a string of political assassinations in the U.S. between 1981 and 1990.
Duong previously told San José Spotlight being labeled a communist posed a danger to his family and put a bull’s-eye on his back.
Huynh said the interconnected courtroom sagas are vindicating him in real time.
“Everything I have been exposing the last five years about pay-to-play schemes (in) Bay Area cities … are now part of federal indictments and Bay Area headlines,” he said.
Editor’s note: Cal Waste Solutions has contributed to San José Spotlight.
Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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