23 September 2003 :

The Ho Chi Minh City Court announced that the head of one of the biggest smuggling rings to be found in Vietnam, Do Thi My Phuong, a 45 year old woman, received a Presidential commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment. Phuong, known as the "smuggled alcohol queen", had been sentenced to death by the Ho Chi Minh City Court in 2001 for smuggling 119 containers of goods, mostly containing alcohol, worth 127.5 billion Vietnamese dollars ($8 million), and paying bribes totalling hundreds of thousands of US dollars. Her 27 underlings, who included many customs officers in southern Long An and Can Tho provinces, were sentenced to between 4 and 14 years imprisonment.