The footage is almost too violent to watch. In the opening shot, a rabbinically bearded man sets a champagne flute on his VIP nightclub table and hands his iPhone to a woman. While she looks at the screen, a tall guy with an expensive-looking haircut walks up and grabs the bearded man's shoulder. He turns around and about a dozen bodies swarm him, landing punches, flipping tables, throwing glasses, bludgeoning him while he curls on the ground. The scene—one continuous, unbearable ten-minute take—ends with as many as nine mauled clubgoers on the floor.
Jordan Vogt-Roberts is a filmmaker whose most famous movie, Kong: Skull Island, has nearly as much blood and napalm as dialogue, but the first time he tried to watch the footage, at a police station in Saigon, he had to look away. “As a director, I love violent movies,” Vogt-Roberts told me. “And I love fight scenes. But after I watched that shit, I was just in fucking shock.” When the fight choreographer for Kong saw the footage, he called the scene messier and more graphic than anything he'd seen in theaters.
Vogt-Roberts had moved to Vietnam for refuge. It was a place where he wanted to make movies, not star in them. But there he was, watching a security tape of the time he almost died, wondering who could have done this to him.
In August 2017, a month before the attack, I met Vogt-Roberts in Saigon to write a profile about a rising-star director who left Hollywood for a simpler life in Vietnam. Standing on the Caravelle Hotel rooftop, gazing at the city twinkling below him, he looked absurdly confident. Wearing head-to-toe streetwear and sporting a beard that went down to his belly button, Vogt-Roberts pointed to the skyline to show me the neighborhood where he was house-hunting, and then he climbed to the other side of the guardrail and stretched his arms out over the skyline. “Sometimes you gotta pull some Batman shit,” he said, though, really, King Kong would have been the better reference.
The then 32-year-old director had earned the right to be cocky. In less than a decade, he'd fought his way from broke Chicagoan (directing shorts for future Silicon Valley stars Thomas Middleditch and T. J. Miller) to semi-broke TV guy (Comedy Central's Mash Up) to Sundance darling (Kings of Summer) to director of a box-office hit (Kong: Skull Island grossed over $566 million). His films blend his sensibilities—gamer nerd, comedy nerd, hip-hop nerd, Terrence Malick nerd—into arresting visual moments. A typical Vogt-Roberts shot is an ethereal nature scene framed through a first-person-shooter scope, or a flaming helicopter crash zoomed in on the chopper's dashboard Nixon bobblehead.
In 2015, he'd visited Vietnam with Kong location scouts and was enraptured by the country's craggy, psychedelic beauty. Vogt-Roberts had to talk Legendary Entertainment into filming there: Not many American films had been made in Vietnam before. Two years later, his movie, an Apocalypse Now-tinged take on the classic ape story, starring Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, and Samuel L. Jackson, set box-office records in Vietnam. The politburo went apeshit, installing hairy Kong fists in a cave in Quang Binh Province and turning part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site into a Kong village. They asked Vogt-Roberts to be Vietnam's first American-born tourism ambassador. Instead of staying in America to make another half-billion-dollar-grossing movie, Vogt-Roberts said yes.
In his capacity as tourism ambassador, Vogt-Roberts planned to bring friends and Hollywood producers to Instagram-friendly Vietnamese locations, speak at tourism conferences, and film a “Travel to Vietnam” video. And as if Vogt-Roberts's new part-time gig didn't prove his devotion to Vietnam, he also announced a major leap of faith: He was going to move to Saigon.
Five months into his tenure, Vogt-Roberts showed me his favorite dining experience: an unnamed garage restaurant in a District 5 alley where motorbikes zip by blue plastic stools and life-altering bánh canh noodle soup costs 80 cents. “Common knowledge would say, ‘Why would you move to Vietnam, coming off a movie like this?’ ” Vogt-Roberts told me, before answering his own question: “Because every time I come back here, I feel happy.” Throughout the night, strangers' cheers and selfies hinted that the director's love for Saigon was reciprocated; I understood why Vogt-Roberts's assistant called him a “one-man Vietnamese boy band” in an Instagram post.
As we dropped ice cubes into hot beers, the conversation moved from what had drawn Vogt-Roberts to Vietnam to what had pushed him away from Los Angeles. He said he'd been overwhelmed by the stress of being a high-profile director in Hollywood and “beaten the fuck up” by his hard-charging life back there. Vogt-Roberts had just gotten surgery on a vocal cyst, and he let out a black-lung cough while he lit a cigarette. Beneath his camo jacket were scars from third-degree burns he'd suffered when a janky fire pit in the Valley exploded on him. That had earned him two weeks in an intensive-care burn ward, right before he began filming Kong.
But more traumatic than that, he said, was what happened on December 1, 2016, when the Skull Island promotion campaign was starting to churn. Halfway through a studio meeting, he looked at his phone and learned that someone had just leaked a nude picture of him. Vogt-Roberts feels that the hairy, belly-out photo was an attempt to devastate him (successful) and get him removed from Kong (unsuccessful). It was, he said, “the worst feeling of my life.” (One year later, he’d find himself on the other side of a public conversation regarding consent. On December 19, 2017, adult film actress and director Dana DeArmond tweeted that Vogt-Roberts kissed her after she said “No, thank you,” when they met for drinks in 2010, three months after wrapping the pilot for Mash Up. Reviewing texts from the night and afterward, Vogt-Roberts thought the kiss was consensual; DeArmond insists that it was not.)
Following the photo leak and the burn ward, Vietnam was a sanctuary. After an anxiety attack in California, he spent New Year's hiking alone through Son Doong, the world's largest cave. After that, Vogt-Roberts leapt headfirst into the “warm, authentic, beautiful place.” Beyond his government work, he was mentoring student filmmakers. He gave a local TEDx talk about the importance of taking risks. He delivered meals to the homeless. Then, at night, Vogt-Roberts said, he liked to “wild out.”
I was unsure what exactly he meant by “wilding out,” so he took me to XOXO, a rowdy nightclub overlooking Saigon's sprawl. The playlist was heavy on Lil Jon, but I experienced two local staples: inhaling nitrous oxide “funky balls” and watching fans beam at Vogt-Roberts. (As Kong actor and close friend Jason Mitchell would say later, “Jordan is the king of Vietnam. I've never seen shit like it.”) People who recognized Vogt-Roberts because of his facial hair either toasted him or mobbed him. I watched him stretch out his arms for a selfie with some admirers and begin dancing to “Outta Your Mind.” One month later, at the same club, “the king of Vietnam” would face a different reception.
Here's what Vogt-Roberts remembers from the night of September 9: It was past midnight, and he had the best table in the club, in front of the DJ booth. He leaned back on his couch with his friends, including stuntman Ilram Choi (Kong's fight choreographer and Andrew Garfield's double in two Spider-Man movies) and Vietnamese-American filmmakers Timothy Linh Bui and Danny Do. They looked out at the crowd. At a slightly less good table behind them were approximately ten buff dudes with high-and-tight haircuts and gold chains. Do leaned over to Choi and pointed backward. “See those guys? They're the real deal.”
Otherwise, it was a normal scene at XOXO. Green lasers bounced off the white funky balls. Lil Jon rattled the subwoofers. Vogt-Roberts's crew shared champagne and tropical fruit. A man in a hat and a man with a beard harassed two women at Vogt-Roberts's table, groping them and asking them to leave Vogt-Roberts and join them, but the women shooed them away.
In the early hours of the morning, Choi saw at least ten men looming over Vogt-Roberts, swinging haymakers at his face. While the music continued to play, Vogt-Roberts covered his head and backpedaled into more fists. He fell onto the sofa, and the scrum threw him onto the floor, taking turns kicking him from all sides while he curled into the fetal position. Choi realized, “Jordan is going to die, and no one is going to do anything about it.”
Vogt-Roberts was lucky to have Spider-Man at his table. Choi crawled on the spine of the couch while the men took turns kicking Vogt-Roberts's ribs. The biggest attacker had Vogt-Roberts in a headlock, clubbing his face with his right fist, and Choi jumped down and uncorked the headlock, throwing his body between his friend's and everyone else's. The couches parted as Choi dragged Vogt-Roberts to safety.
The attackers dispersed, and Vogt-Roberts got up, bloodied and dazed but relieved to have escaped: “What the hell happened?” Before Choi could answer, a man jumped toward them, gripping a large liquor bottle. As lasers glowed around him, the airborne man swung the bottle and cracked Vogt-Roberts's forehead open. The club lights came on, illuminating the tourism ambassador falling onto the dance floor, blood running down his face.
The attackers headed for the elevator, but then one said, in a North American accent, “Where's my fucking cell phone?” They turned back to retrieve the phone and apparently decided that as long as they were there, they might as well assault more expats. When the music cut out, the soundtrack became bottles shattering, knuckles hitting flesh, windows smashing, clubgoers screaming “Ði, di, di!”—“Go, go, go!”—and bodies hitting the ground.
Choi had fought in countless movies, but he had never seen this kind of violence before. Choreographed Hollywood fights are tidy and uncluttered; filmmakers want viewers to see what's going on. This violence was hard to follow and hard to watch. At one point, a scrawny blond expat got knocked over and knocked out. The biggest gangster walked over and stomped repeatedly on his skull.
Several clubgoers say they never saw XOXO security guards step in during the attack. (XOXO's founder disputes this.) Once the club was destroyed and the attackers had located the missing cell phone, they took the elevator down to Le Thi Hong Gam Street and vanished.
Several XOXO patrons ended up in the hospital that night. They included Timothy Linh Bui, expats from other tables, and Vogt-Roberts. On September 11, a Vietnamese news site published this headline: "Kong Director Hospitalized After Alleged Bar Fight in Saigon." When I e-mailed from back in the United States to say I was sorry he'd gotten into a fight, Vogt-Roberts replied: “Dude. This was not a fight. I was almost killed as were others. This was a fucking assault by insane gangsters.”
He sent me a photo from his bed at the Franco-Vietnamese hospital. Gashes in his scalp ran toward a crater on his forehead. A CT scan and other tests revealed a fractured skull, contusions, hemorrhaging, and a cerebral air pocket. His head wrapped in gauze, Vogt-Roberts Facetimed Jason Mitchell. “I was in tears,” Mitchell said later. “I couldn't help it. I've never seen him that vulnerable. After [the fire-pit explosion in which] he blew himself up, he was joking around in the fucking hospital. But this time shit got deep. It got really deep.”
Vogt-Roberts spent ten days in that bed, climbing out of a morphine haze and trying to find out who assaulted him. He texted people familiar with Saigon's crime and nightlife scenes, many of whom had the same response: It's better if you don't look into who did this. When Vogt-Roberts would ask why, his terrified friends hinted that his assailants were protected and that their reach was global.
As he was driven away from the hospital after being discharged, Vogt-Roberts looked out the untinted windows of the van and had a full-on panic attack. Surrounded by an ocean of motorbikes and possibly wanted by mobsters, he was an easy target in a glass box. When he reached the Park Hyatt, he took the back service elevator up to the presidential suite and finally calmed himself down enough to sleep.
A couple of hours later, he woke up to a beep and a thump. Recognizing the sound of an opening door, he leapt out of bed and grabbed the steak knife from his room-service tray, crept up to the bedroom door, and pressed his ear against the wood, channeling Metal Gear tactics while his mind swirled with adrenaline. He headed knife-first into the living room. Empty. Then he edged over to the bathroom, where he discovered that the noises were a greeting from the mouth of his Japanese toilet.
The next day, Vogt-Roberts visited the office of the Vietnamese Crime Investigation Division and watched XOXO security footage of the attack. Even though a handful of people who were in the club that night had told him that his assault was seemingly random, he worried that he was about to watch himself provoke his own beating. “I remember I wasn't being an asshole,” he says. “I remember I wasn't instigating. I remember getting punched in the fucking side of the face. But you never fucking know. You're out at a fucking nightclub.”
But from the vantage of the surveillance camera, Vogt-Roberts saw that he was only handing his phone to a Vietnamese woman who wanted to know his Instagram handle. It was the same woman who had rejected the gangsters a few hours before. Off to the side, a bearded man and a buff dude with a B on his hat—the men who'd been declined—pointed at him and dispatched a lackey to go up to him and disrupt his conversation with the woman. When a man grabbed his shoulder from behind, Vogt-Roberts responded, “What the fuck?”
Two weeks afterward, barely out of a ten-day hospital stay and facing what he was told could be permanent brain damage, Vogt-Roberts watched himself get beaten nearly to death. After he saw the liquor bottle fracture his skull and knock him onto the floor, he tried to stare through the video screen and pretend it wasn't real. But he couldn't look away from the brutal facts: He was sitting, broken, in a Vietnamese police station, and the men who'd broken him were out there, anonymous and free.
On September 20, Vogt-Roberts flew home. Beverly Hills specialists determined that he had a concussion and that his skull fracture was more serious than he was told in Vietnam. “Today was just a series of doctors looking me very deeply in the eyes and saying, without bullshit, that I was very VERY close to being dead,” he texted me. Weeks after the attack, he still felt aftershocks— dizziness, pain, vertigo. His plan to buy a house in Saigon was replaced by a decision to heal in America.
Sitting on his couch in East L.A., though, Vogt-Roberts longed for Vietnam. “The main thing that was helping me feel creative and feel refreshed,” he said, “the thing that was helping me bounce back to normal life—not only did that get taken away from me, it got taken away from me through an assault and trauma.” To make things even worse for Vogt-Roberts, he could only guess about the prospects of the investigation: The Vietnamese police hadn't told him who their suspects were or whether they were close to catching them. He called his mother, whom he hadn't spoken to in weeks. “You're exceptionally good at powering through,” she told him. He thought to himself, What if this is the time that it all breaks? What if this is the one thing I can't push through? Vogt-Roberts realized there was one thing that would help him move on: bringing his mystery gangster assailants to justice. He wanted to send what he called “an Obi-Wan-type message: Strike me down and I'll come back more powerful than you ever imagined.”
Using Facebook Messenger, he began conducting his own investigation, piecing together scraps of information gleaned from friends and XOXO clubbers. The first intel he received was that the culprits weren't local; they were Canadian. Most likely, they were Vietnamese-Canadian drug traffickers who moved to Vietnam to escape pressure in Vancouver or to broaden their global distribution chain. Or as a friend put it, “to live like kings, sleep with models, and start fights.”
In almost every Blame Canada conversation, Vogt-Roberts's sources named two possible suspects: “Cuong” and “Kenny.” These guys had apparently destroyed two other Saigon nightclubs. After days of investigative heavy lifting, Vogt-Roberts texted me the names, and, while I stood in line for a bagel in Brooklyn, I joined the international crime investigation: going to Google and typing “Kenny Cuong Vancouver Vietnam.” The second result was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's wanted list. It showed a photo of Ken Cuong Manh Nguyen, a man with a tiger tattoo on his right shoulder and a scar near his right eye. Kenny was unlawfully at large after killing a rival gang member outside a Vancouver nightclub in 1999.
I sent Vogt-Roberts a text that said, “Yo, could this be the guy?” “Maybe,” he responded. “I'll send it to some people.” He went on Facebook Messenger and passed the link around. Talking to one friend, he asked, “This isn't him, right?” But the friend responded with a blue thumbs-up: affirmative. Piecing together bits from other sources—witnesses at XOXO, victims of other attacks, a mutual friend of the gangsters—a picture began to emerge. Vogt-Roberts believed that two Canadian gangsters, both named Cuong, led the XOXO rampage that night, and he was fairly certain that Ken Cuong Manh Nguyen was one of them.
Vogt-Roberts and I temporarily shelved the magazine profile and started to play full-on Hardy Boys. We dug through court files and nightclub photos, comparing our notes every week. With new revelations, he'd text me: “Holy shit are we in a David Fincher movie???” We spoke to people immersed in the world of Vietnamese organized crime and, when local Vietnamese cops were less than forthcoming, of Canadian law enforcement.
A high-ranking Vancouver-police source told us that Kenny Cuong was a member of the Chinatown Boys, a gang of street enforcers for major Canadian gang members. Because of its geography, ecology, and drug laws, Vancouver is a global drug-trafficking hub. And ever since the American War (as they call it in Vietnam) flooded Canada with Vietnamese refugees, the Vietnamese-Canadian connection has run deep.
Cuong was arrested for the Vancouver club murder, and he received full parole in 2012. Among other restrictions, the parole board mandated that he reside in Canada, avoid other gangsters, and, prudently, stay away from nightclubs. These guidelines were lightly enforced—according to the Mounties, he “was granted permission by the Parole Board of Canada to travel to Vietnam from April to May of 2015 and failed to return.”
The Vancouver-police source told us about Cuong's involvement with the so-called United Nations, a multicultural drug syndicate that imprints “U.N.” on the kilos of cocaine it distributes—and on deceased members' graves. According to a U.N. expert with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, it did multi-million-dollar deals with El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel, sending airplanes and helicopters over the U.S.-Canadian border. One of the leaders of the group was a “multi-million-dollar drug guy” named Billy Tran. The Vancouver-police source heard that Tran is “living like a king” in Vietnam, where he likely helps pull strings in a Vancouver drug war against the Red Scorpions/Wolf Pack, a conflict he says has claimed more than 60 lives.
Vogt-Roberts passed on the information to the Saigon police, and on September 27, 2017, in his capacity as tourism ambassador, he published a statement about the attack. He promised that his wounds didn't diminish his love for Vietnam. He wrote that the attackers “do not represent this consistently amazing country nor the souls of its people.” He expressed his “full faith that the authorities will bring this gang of thugs to justice.”
Months passed, the gangsters remained at large, and we weren't anywhere closer to finding out who the other Cuong was. Vogt-Roberts called the American embassy and the Vietnamese police, but they had little to report. There was only so much Vogt-Roberts, still suffering dizziness, exhaustion, and depression, could do to solve the case in America, thousands of miles from where he believed the men who attacked him were still living free.
He said he'd tried everything to stop obsessing over the attack, “from drinking too much to partying too much to fucking being serious about meditation to reading books to finding a trauma therapist. Every possible thing.” Nothing worked. His life was a wreck. So in January, five months after his assault, he decided to try the only thing left: returning to Vietnam. I went with him.
On the flight over, he wrote himself a note: “Yes, my existential crisis about the film industry is real. Yes, I'm unsure of how to create the best relationship with my parents, but fundamentally that's because those things were broken. Now I have to do the fucking heavy lifting of actually figuring out what that means.”
Together in Saigon, we got drinks with a mutual friend of the gangsters, bought funky balls for fellow victims, and met XOXO employees for Vietnamese coffee. We heard some enticing details—that one of the Cuongs supposedly drives a souped-up Mercedes with a license plate that contains 6666, that Billy Tran and his henchmen live in a luxury riverside apartment complex in Saigon—but nearly everyone claimed that they couldn't identify the attackers. People were afraid, it seemed, to publicly accuse major drug lords known for disproportionate violence.
One night, I had what felt like a close call. A source who had been at XOXO on September 9 and who was said to be familiar with Saigon's criminal networks asked me to meet him for a vaguely described, off-the-record dinner at an address he texted to me. When I arrived on the back of a motorbike taxi, I looked up and saw a luxury high-rise—one of the flashy new waterside developments bringing South Beach to the Saigon River—and realized that the source wanted me to meet him inside the same complex I'd been warned about before. Billy Tran's supposed building. Shaking, I asked the taxi driver to keep moving, quickly.
I woke up to a text from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We'd sent them photos of the gangsters at XOXO, and an official had written back: “Max, I have somebody that will ID both. He knows them well from policing them in the 90's and early 2000's. He is willing to go on the record.” I went to the kitchen table and texted the new source at 8:59 a.m. He texted back at 9: “Call me now.”
After one ring, a stern older man with a bouncy Fargo accent picked up. The source, who asked to be identified as a “retired Vancouver-gang investigator,” began talking about the United Nations crime ring and what he called “gang crapola.” He said he'd immediately recognized the two men in the XOXO photos. The bearded man was indeed Ken Cuong, he told me. He'd known Kenny through homicide investigations and street run-ins, and he was very glad the gangster was in Vietnam instead of Canada. Then he turned his attention to the photo of the buff guy with a B on his hat.
“That's Billy,” the retired investigator said. “The red hat is Billy Tran. He also goes by Viet Cuong Tran. Numerous times I've dealt with him. He's kind of a quiet guy, but he's not someone to cross.” I began to shiver. Even though our suspect literally wore a red hat with his first initial on it, the Hardy Boys had never dreamed Billy Tran could have been involved. We thought we were hunting down henchmen, not an international crime boss.
Two days later, Vogt-Roberts and I met in his hotel suite. Before he started talking, he took out a hotel notepad and wrote, “Like in Russian hotels, I've been told this room is bugged.” I remembered the rumor relayed by the retired Vancouver investigator that a powerful member of the United Nations drug syndicate owns one of the biggest hotels in Saigon. I really hoped it wasn't Vogt-Roberts's hotel.
I picked up the notepad and wrote: “Vancouver ID'd both Cuongs!” “Wait, really?” Vogt-Roberts said out loud. “Yep,” I wrote. “Photo confirmation.” Vogt-Roberts put his hands on his head. Forget the bug. I needed to tell him the news faster than I could write.
“On Tuesday,” I whispered, “a gang investigator in Vancouver confirmed Kenny Cuong's and the other Cuong's involvement in your attack. The bearded man with the expensive haircut was Kenny, and the weight-lifter dude with a B on his hat was Cuong. His name is Cuong Tran, but he goes by Billy. Billy Cuong Tran. Billy Tran.”
In the following months, there would be a lot more Hardy Boys work. Vogt-Roberts would attempt to figure out who his other assailants were, clear bureaucratic log jams between Canada and Vietnam, hire lawyers, and somehow try to influence global extradition laws. Then, in late June, he and I would get a text from a Canadian-law-enforcement source: “It looks like Kenny Nguyen was just arrested in India.” The next day, the Vancouver Sun would run a photo of Kenny Cuong Nguyen in Goa, India, glaring into the camera after authorities shut down a ketamine-smuggling operation he was running with two other Canadian traffickers.
Responding to the news, Vogt-Roberts sent me a characteristically long text, which he asked me to quote in its entirety: “AYYYYYE! When I first said I wanted to make sure these guys were caught, so many people looked at me with a defeatist attitude that justice like this couldn’t be served with ‘these dudes.’ It broke my heart because the resilience, warmth, and graciousness of Vietnam changed my life in ways and it has become clear that no amount of pain will ever skew my appreciation for that country. I suppose the INSANE thing is...after sending you this text nearly a year to the day when you first emailed me—I sit here now thinking: I wouldn’t have traded the bizarre introspective emotional insight I gained from this experience for anything. It helped me understand myself and my relationship to the world more clearly. With that being said, I hope they have GQ in Indian prisons.”
Kenny Cuong likely faces 12 years in an Indian jail or extradition to Canada or Vietnam, but Billy Tran remains at large. The authorities are chasing leads in Bangkok and elsewhere. While the global search continues, Vogt-Roberts told me, he finds some solace in a memory of his last visit to the Hanoi police station:
An investigator sat a Bush-era Dell Vostro laptop on the wood table and played the XOXO tape for him again. Vogt-Roberts rewatched couches flipping, glass shattering, bodies being swarmed, Spider-Man leaping, a liquor bottle cracking his skull and toppling him to the ground. He reached the moment in the tape that, just a few months ago, he’d had to look away from. This time, he kept watching. He knew who the men leading his attack were. He knew they had run away and that he had come back. Vogt-Roberts watched the video to its end, and for the first time, he saw himself get up.
Max Marshall is a writer in New York City. This is his first article for GQ.
This story originally appeared in the July 2018 issue with the title "Attack on Skull Island."