Michael Batson

By 1954 Bay Vien (“Bay the Seventh”), an illiterate gangster once impoverished and homeless, had become the richest man in Saigon with immense wealth at the head of a criminal-military organisation thousands strong, and the key to the French presence in Cochinchina. He was the leader of a powerful Vietnamese criminal enterprise decreed by the Head of State, Bao Dai, as an independent army within the Vietnamese National Army. Through his crime syndicate, the Bình Xuyên, who were once river pirates, the French Deuxieme or “2eme Bureau”—the military intelligence bureau of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps—countered the growing power of the Vietnamese nationalist parties, kept Viet Minh (the Independence League of Viet Nam) fighters off the streets, and battled the growing influence of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for control of what was later to become, South Vietnam. The Bình Xuyên themselves were the by-product of poverty, of rotten government and devolved power through a kaleidoscope of groups but also colonial intransigence followed by global geo-political forces albeit in a localised setting. Colonialism was attributable to the French, who after World War Two got help from the British, and the later Cold War factors can be blamed on the Americans—all representatives of arguably the most dangerous creatures in human history, white men in suits. The key to the Bình Xuyên’s power was money, buckets of it, and they got it through