Tran Dinh Truong
Trường Đình Trần, a Vietnamese-American, was born in South Vietnam.Biography
Tran was the principal owner of the Vishipco Line, the largest shipping company in South Vietnam in the 1970s. As a shipowner, he earned millions of dollars hauling cargo for the United States military. His actions during the last day of the Fall of Saigon have been the subject of debate. Tran states that he used his company's resources, including 24 commercial ships and hundreds of trucks, to aid in the evacuation of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians and military personnel to escape from Vietnam. He let his ships, inclusive the Truong Xuan carried free more than 3,000 Vietnamese fleeing Saigon after the Communists invasion.
Tran left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, the day that Saigon fell to the communists. Tran boarded one of his eleven ships and traveled to the United States with two suitcases of gold.
He began his hotel business in New York City, first with the Hotel Opera on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and then Hotel Carter in Midtown Manhattan and Hotel Lafayette in Buffalo, New York. Along the way Tran owned and operated other New York hotels as well, including the infamous Hotel Kenmore Hall on 23rd Street which was seized from Tran by the US Marshals Service in 1994 because of deplorable conditions and rampant crime within the building.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States he contributed $2 million of his personal funds to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund and in 2003, the Asian American Federation honored his actions. In 1984 during the famine in Ethiopia, he also purchased two helicopters valued at around 3.2 million dollars for the hunger relief organization in Ethiopia. In August 2005, he donated $100,000 to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
In May 2004, Tran was awarded a Golden Torch Award, by the Vietnamese American National Gala in Washington, D.C. Mr. Tran was also on the Board of Directors of The United Way of New York City.
