5T (gang)

The 5T was a Vietnamese crime gang active in the Cabramatta area of Sydney, Australia, in the final two decades of the 20th century. It was active in distribution of heroin in that area as well as home invasions and protection rackets and was suspected of involvement in the 1994 assassination of John Newman, the Member for Cabramatta in the NSW State Parliament. Their leader, Tri Minh Tran, was murdered in 1995 leading to a gradual breakup of the gang.

Rise of the 5T

The 5T rose from Vietnamese youths who came to Australia with their parents after the fall of the Republic of Vietnam. Over the following decade, many Vietnamese families settled around the Cabramatta area. The 5t gang started forming in the mid 1980's. It stands for five Vietnamese words starting with T; 'Tình', 'Tiền', 'Tù', 'Tội' and 'Tự Tử', which mean love, money, jail, guilt, and death (through suicide) respectively in English, although an alternative meaning was "Young People Lack Love" [1] . Gang members apparently were tattooed with the emblem consisting of a straight horizontal line and 5 joined vertical lines.

Tri Minh Tran rose to leadership of the 5T gang by the age of 14 in 1989. He was born in Vietnam in 1975 and arrived in Australia at the age of 7 as a refugee. By the age of 11, he was arrested for carrying a sawn-off shotgun and in the next couple of years was suspected of the murder of two rival gang members tung nguyen & micheal ngo from the KVBz Gang.

The 5T gang became the dominant players in the Cabramatta heroin trade especially at street level. In January 1988, the Sydney Morning Herald warned: "Criminal gangs in the Vietnamese community are increasingly heavily armed, are moving into drugs and gambling, establishing links with Australian crime figures, and becoming involved in standover rackets in their own community". [2]

John Newman first warned of the Vietnamese gangs including the 5T in 1989 in NSW State Parliament saying: "The Asian gangs involved don't fear our laws. But there's one thing they do fear and that's possible deportation back to the jungles of Vietnam, because that's where, frankly, they belong." [3] Newman campaigned strongly against the crime gangs in Vietnam and would receive regular death threats before his murder.

Heyday of the 5T

In the two years between July 1992 and 1994, there were 1,360 people charged with heroin-related offences including 50,000 for supply of heroin and 6969 juveniles ref|5. Public attention was focused on the 5T gangs after the murder of John Newman in September 1993 and Tran was widely suspected after Newman's deaths given the number of death threats the politician had received. Phuong Ngo, a member of the Cabramatta local council was eventually convicted of Newman's murder in 2001.

Breakup of the 5T

After the gangland style execution of Tri Minh Tran, the 5T began to experience issues within the gang. They could not properly function without an organised structure, let alone without their founder and leader. This lead to the failure of group re-establishment, especially after many members left the gang due to a major power struggle and internal feuding. The death of Tri Minh Tran certainly left a huge negative impact on the 5T; and with more and more gang members leaving, they were no longer a dominant force in the Sydney underworld. Several former members of the 5T went on to form their own gangs. The main successor of the 5T was a gang called Madonna's Mob, but in similar circumstance to the original 5T, broke up when their leader Ro Van Le was subsequently gunned down outside the Cumberland Hotel in Bankstown in 1999 shortly after being released from jail. Another branch of the now defunct 5T was a gang called The Four Aces, which still may be active to this day. In addition to ex-5T members creating their own gangs, several were recruited in to the Black Dragon and Red Dragon gangs, which are both an offshoot of the Big Circle Boyz triad. Both the Red Dragons and Black Dragons made news headlines when they were believed to be inducting members from local high schools as young as thirteen years old into their gangs.

References

* [http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s72739.htm "Four Corners" story on organised crime in Cabramatta 1997]
* "The Sydney Morning Herald" "Cabramatta gangs raged as police turned on each other" 11 July 2001
* [http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:lNbMmioQ_8QJ:www.australian-news.com.au/The%2520rise%2520of%2520Middle%2520Eastern%2520crime%2520in%2520Australia.pdf+5T+Cabramatta+Priest&hl=en&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a Tim Priest article in "the Australian" on trends in crime gangs in Australia]
* [http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/23/24gangs.htm "Sunday Herald" "Crackdown on the high school gangs" March 24 2002]
* "Sun Herald " "5T 'Madonna' shot dead", 07/02/1999

Footnotes

#1997 "Four Corners" Op. Cit.
#"Sydney Morning Herald" "Police warn on Viet gangs" 2 January 1988 cited in Parliamentary Joint Committee Report.Parliament reported on Four Corners Op Cit.
#Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence "Australian Drug Intelligence Assessment 1993" page 40 cited in Parliamentary Committee Report Op Cit
#NSW Crime Statistics cited in Joint Parliamentary Committee Report Op. Cit.
#"Sun Herald" Op. Cit.