5T (gang) - The Rise of 5T

The Rise of 5T

The 5T rose from Cabramatta youths who came to Australia with their parents after the fall of the Republic of Vietnam. The 5T gang started forming in the mid-1980s. It stands for five Vietnamese words starting with T; 'Tình', 'Tiền', 'Tù', 'Tội' and 'Tự, which mean Love, Money, Prison, Punishment, Revenge in English. However, 5T also means 'tuổi trẻ thiếu tình thương' which roughly translates to 'childhood without love.' 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.

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". 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." Newman campaigned strongly against the crime gangs in Vietnam and would receive regular death threats before his murder.