A 46-year-old Little Saigon man is in custody today after being a federal fugitive from Texas for allegedly threatening to publicly release a homemade sex tape of himself and a married woman if she didn’t pay him $50,000 to keep her adultery quiet.
The Vietnamese immigrant, Minh San Nguyen (a.k.a. “Minhson Hoang Nguyen” or “Anthony Nguyen”) was located by the FBI this month in Westminster, and now faces extortion charges stemming from a two-count, 2009 grand jury indictment.
The defendant will be transported by the U.S. Marshal from Orange County to Dallas for a potential trial.
According to the FBI, the victim (we’ll call Jane Doe) admitted that in 2000 she had a year-long affair with Nguyen, then a coworker at a Dallas area electronics plant, and she became pregnant with a son during the period.
Doe told agents that Nguyen lost his job in Texas in 2002, moved to Albany, New York and eventually began threatening to reveal the sex tape, the boy’s parentage and the affair to her husband, co-workers and church friends if she didn’t pay him.
To bolster the plot, he allegedly sent Doe a nude screen-still from the recording.
In fear, the woman made several payments totaling $1,000, but decided to tell husband and authorities about her predicament after the demands increased to $50,000.
Claiming innocence after his capture, Nguyen has told the FBI this is a case of mistaken identity.
In a contradictory version, he also asserted that the $50,000 was Doe’s promised payment for getting her pregnant with a male child after she’d had three daughters with her husband, according to court records.
Whatever the truth, special agents in Dallas recently showed 50-year-old Doe the defendant’s current California driver’s license and she confirmed they arrested the right person, according to the FBI.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.