Trường Đình Trần (January 5, 1932 – May 6, 2012), was a Vietnamese-American businessman and hotelier. Starting in the 1970s, Tran owned several New York City hotels that became noted for their problems with crime, building safety, and cleanliness.
Life in Vietnam
Tran was born in Hà Tĩnh province in north-central Vietnam to a Roman Catholic family. His actions during the last day of the Fall of Saigon have been the subject of debate. Tran stated 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 (with Captain Pham Ngoc Luy) carried free more than 3,000 Vietnamese fleeing Saigon after the Communist invasion. He claimed that his ships also helped evacuate thousands of American military personnel and civilians; Richard Armitage, the American official who oversaw the U.S. naval evacuation, disputed this as false because all U.S. military personnel had already evacuated and American civilians did not evacuate on merchant ships. Tran boarded one of his eleven ships and traveled to the United States with two suitcases of gold.
Personal life
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.
Tran regularly attended mass at Holy Cross Church.