Two “honest” cafe owners were “provoked” into kidnapping a former employee and holding him for ransom after finding him with his hand in the till, a court has been told.
Details of the terrifying kidnapping may finally be revealed after Dominic Tran was sentenced in the New South Wales District Court last month, almost a year after married couple Nathan Yeung and Ann Ngo learned their fate.
The trio were co-owners of award-winning Vietnamese restaurant Mama Hong’s on Sydney’s lower north shore when they noticed cash mysteriously disappearing in March 2022.
The restaurant is located in Lane Cove, one of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs, with a median house price of $3.2 million.
At 9 pm on March 22, Yeung and Tran were alerted that someone was inside the cafe and ran there to find a former kitchen helper trying to take money from the cash register.
Court documents reveal he had been using a copy of the keys to sneak into the restaurant and steal money every few days. She had stolen $2,500 from the trio over two weeks.
Ann Ngo and Nathan Yeung admitted to kidnapping a former employee and holding him for ransom after finding him with his hand in the till.
Yeung and Tran grabbed the former employee before he could escape and the victim was hit with a flurry of slaps, punches and kicks.
They tied her hands, took her belongings and cut her hair before Yeung slapped her face twice with the lid of a plastic bucket.
The cafe owners then shoved him into a car before picking up Ngo as they drove to the victim’s mother’s home in Chatswood to demand their money back.
According to court documents, Ngo later told police that the trio hoped to “work it out, you know, without having to go to the police.”
The victim’s mother was not home, so Ngo called her to tell her that her son had been “stealing (cafe) money” and “comes every night” to rob the business.
‘He has taken a lot of money. If he doesn’t give it back to me, I will take him to the police now,” Ngo told him.
The former employee’s mother agreed to return the stolen $2,500 and requested a video of her son stealing from the business.
Ngo sent him the company’s bank details and a still image from the cafe’s CCTV footage showing the former employee with his hand in the till.
He also took a photograph of the young man while he was bleeding from his nose in the rear passenger seat.
Once Ngo was satisfied the money had been paid in full, the business partners took the victim to a park in Drummoyne and cut the zip ties restraining her hands.
The victim spent three days in the hospital to receive treatment for his injuries.
The kidnap ringleaders, Yeung and Ngo, were surrounded by family and friends when they were sentenced in the New South Wales District Court in June last year.
As they waited to learn their fate for kidnapping their former employee, Yeung tenderly kissed his wife on the forehead.
The court was told he was overcome with anxiety and stress at the time of the offenses and was paranoid after being defrauded previously.
“My Yeung acknowledged that his actions were impulsive, reckless and disproportionate to the situation,” Judge Andrew Scotting said.
Glowing references presented in court praised the chef as “hard-working,” “kind” and “dedicated” and praised Ngo as “caring,” “compassionate” and “hard-working.”
“All references described the offense as out of character,” Judge Scotting acknowledged.
He noted that the couple had used their cafe to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders and described them as “respectable members of society.”
The judge determined that the kidnapping had been a “spontaneous and unplanned response to the victim’s robbery” of Yeung and Ngo at a time when they were both living with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The victim provoked the aggressors by abusing their trust and taking advantage of them on multiple occasions,” he stated.
“I am convinced that the criminals would not have committed the crimes without this serious provocation.”
Yeung slapped him twice with the lid of a plastic bucket.
Judge Scotting found that both kidnappers had shown remorse for their actions and acknowledged the harm caused to the victim and the community.
“They have learned an important lesson from events and are unlikely to offend again,” he said.
He sentenced Yeung to an intensive correctional order lasting one year and nine months for detaining a person in company with the intention of collecting a ransom and causing actual bodily harm.
The sentence will expire in March of next year.
Ngo received a 10-month intensive correctional order for detaining a person at a business with the intention of collecting a ransom. She has already served her sentence.
Almost a year after their sentences were handed down, the couple’s business partner Tran was sentenced last month in the New South Wales District Court for his role in the saga.
He was sentenced to a 15-month community corrections order for assault occasioning actual bodily harm in the company of another person.
His sentence will expire in July next year.
The court was told that Mama Hong’s was forced to permanently close its doors after news of the violent kidnapping broke.
