TWO WOMEN SHARED MUCH, EXCEPT FATE

Toronto resident lives in fear of men who duped her into smuggling
heroin

They were both Toronto seamstresses, born in Vietnam just a couple of
years apart. Both were stopped by customs agents as they attempted to
do a favour for a "friend."

That's where the similarities end.

One was stopped in Toronto, where she convinced police she was
unwittingly snared in the net of a sophisticated drug smuggler. The
other, stopped in Hanoi as she tried to board a flight to Toronto,
spent four years in a rat-infested cell before being dragged - gagged,
blindfolded and bound - before a firing squad last month.

"I am so lucky . . . so very fortunate," said the one who lived, a
delicate-looking 41-year-old. "It could have so easily been me."

She was arrested at Pearson International Airport on April 19, 1996,
carrying $3.5 million worth of heroin hidden in four decorative
lacquered panels.

That was just six days before 43-year-old Nguyen Thi Hiep and her
mother Tran Thi Cam, 74, were apprehended at Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport
carrying five similar panels packed with heroin.

The woman caught in Toronto, who co-operated in a police sting to
entrap the smugglers who set her up, remains afraid that the men she
helped put in prison - or their associates - will find her. That's why
she wants to be known only as Lally.

"I still worry," she admitted in a recent interview in a downtown
Toronto restaurant. "I don't tell anyone I know what happened, in case
those men might come back and find me . . . in case they try to get
revenge on me."

In both cases the heroin was packaged in clear plastic bags 0.62
centimetres thick, 10 centimetres wide and 20 to 25 centimetres long.

"I read about it in the newspaper. I feel really bad for the woman who
got executed," Lally said. "It is so tragic . . . so unfair that her
mother had to stay in jail.

"Why don't they just let her free?" Lally asked, speaking in broken
English as her daughter translated.

"We are so similar, I hear. We both are seamstresses. We are about the
same age, both born in Vietnam, both asked to carry lacquered panels
back to Canada from Vietnam for the same people, almost at the same
time. We were both offered $100 to carry the panels."

Lally didn't know Nguyen, had never met the woman's mother. The first
she heard of the second incident, she said, was when Toronto police
began their investigation into her story.

Lally came to Canada from Vietnam in 1984, a year before Nguyen and
her family, and became a Canadian citizen in the early 1990s, shortly
after Nguyen did.

"I knew they would never let her (Nguyen) live," Lally said. "It is a
well-known fact what the punishment is for anyone caught carrying
drugs in Vietnam . . . I just didn't think it would be so soon."

Lally said it was the first time she had been asked to carry a package
for anyone. She did it because she believed that Vietnamese people
should help each other, she said.

"Never again," Lally said.

She co-operated in a Toronto police sting to help catch the men who
set her up.

Heroin squad Detectives John Green and Carl Noll, who launched the
probe, believed Lally, and she was cleared by Toronto courts.

Officers set up a wiretap at her home. It wasn't long after Lally's
return from Vietnam that the phone rang: the drug smugglers were on
the line and anxious to know where their heroin-filled panels were.

Phu Hoa of Mississauga - the mastermind behind the international drug
ring - and his associate Tran Ly are behind bars for their role in the
smuggling ring. A third man, Chu Dong, is serving a two-year sentence
in the community.

Lally was released from a Toronto detention centre on April 25, 1996 -
the same day that Nguyen and her mother were arrested. But Lally keeps
her secret from most.

"I hear people talking about it . . . in the Asian community. They are
all very interested to know who the Toronto woman was who got away.
They don't know it's me," she said softly. "I just stay quiet."

And now, she said, her heart breaks for Tran Thi Cam, Nguyen's aged
mother.

"I'd like to help her, but I don't know what to do," she
said.

Nguyen was secretly executed at dawn on April 24. Her mother is
serving a life sentence at Thanh Xuan detention camp, 30 kilometres
outside Hanoi.

Lally, safely ensconced in Toronto, still marvels at her close
call.

"I am a good person," she said. "I never do drugs, I never sell drugs.
I never import drugs. I don't even smoke cigarettes."

Lally had gone to Vietnam to visit her sick mother. She left March 31,
1996, en route to a small town a 10-hour drive from Ho Chi Minh City.

It was her first trip outside Ontario since she arrived in Canada 14
years earlier.

Her nightmare began after she agreed to carry a package of lacquered
panels from Ho Chi Minh City to Toronto for people who befriended her
on the journey to Vietnam.

"I remember everything clearly," she recalled. "I wrote it all down
like a diary."

During the long Cathay Pacific flight from Toronto to Hong Kong, Lally
said, she met a 50-year-old man who described himself as a supermarket
owner from Kitchener, a second man called Tran Ly, and a woman.

They asked about her family and where she lived. By the time they
stopped over in Hong Kong, they asked for her mother's phone number.

Lally reluctantly gave it.

After she arrived at her mother's, she recalled, the men phoned
several times. "The third time (Tran Ly) phoned, they asked me to
deliver a package, a gift for their friends in Toronto. They said it
was lacquered paintings."

As she was getting ready to board her flight to Toronto, Tran Ly
appeared at the airport with a heavy package wrapped in a white nylon
bag, secured with yellow tape. The package bore an Islington Ave.
address and a phone number.

"It was very heavy," she said. Ly gave her a Canadian $100 bill to pay
for the extra weight.

"Now I think, 'How could I have been so stupid?' " she confessed.
"Carrying that package could have got me killed, too."

When Lally arrived at Pearson International Airport at about 10 p.m.
on April 19, 1996, customs officers became suspicious of the package.

They x-rayed it.

"You have a big problem," they told Lally, as some 10 uniformed
officials suddenly encircled her.

Lally saw the panels for the first time as officials unwrapped them
and stuck a probe inside to search for the heroin, while other
passengers watched in amazement.

"The law states you can't import drugs," the officials told
her.

"I told them I didn't understand," she recalled of that awful moment,
when she shook like a leaf with fright. "I told them that I needed an
interpreter."

Lally was taken to a small room and her bags were searched. Outside
the customs area, her worried family waited for more than three hours.
At long last, they had her paged over the loudspeaker system.

Officials soon arrived and took Lally's daughter to the small room
where her mother was being held. Lally, who had been sitting on a
chair crying, ran to meet her daughter.

"Your mom imported drugs," officials told Lally's daughter.

"This is impossible," Lally's daughter remembers telling officials.
"She's not that kind of woman. My mother would never do that."

Lally spent five nights in the West Detention Centre, released only
when her brother-in-law put his house up as bail. Then she was taken
to an interview with the heroin squad.

"I am very lucky to meet John Green," Lally said. "He believed in
me."

But there would be no John Green to save Nguyen. The detective
travelled to Vietnam in 1997 to investigate Nguyen's case, but
officials kept him away from her.

"She was already on death row," Green said in an interview a year
ago.

Superintendent Ron Taverner, head of Toronto police special
investigations services, has said he found it disturbing that
Vietnamese authorities didn't review a 50-page document on the case
prepared by Noll and Green before executing Nguyen.

Lally breathed a sigh of relief it was not her standing before a
firing squad.

"I think," she ventured carefully, "I had God on my side."