'That man destroyed families': Owner of Dallas' terrifying Han Gil Hotel Town pleads guilty (2024)

Updated at 3:38 p.m.: Revised to include a quote fromErin Nealy Cox, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas.

Soon, very soon, the Han Gil Hotel Townwill be destroyed. Before year's end, the bulldozers and excavators will move in, tear it to pieces and haul the remnants to a landfill.But when the moteldisappears, it will not be forgotten.

That is because the Han Gil, once a nursing home and then ahellhole offRoyal Laneonly blocks fromHerbert Marcus Elementary,was a place where meth and co*kewere manufactured and sold. Where women were trafficked. Where people were beaten, burned and shot. Where young men and women overdosed, their corpses dumped in faraway locations.

One man allowedthis happen: Amos Su Young Mun, the owner.

In court documents signed this week, the 65-year-old Mun admits he filled his pockets withcash collected from gun-toting dealersso they could use his rooms to "openly sell drugs." The Seoul native admits, as well, to knowing about the overdose deaths of a 21-year-old manon June 24, 2018,and a 20-year-old woman in December.

In hundreds of pages' worth of court documents filed in federal court since spring, prosecutors accused Mun of doing much worse, such as deleting video recordings of bodies being carried out of the motel. But when he appeared in federal court Friday afternoon, Mun — clad in bright-orange sweats and matching Croc-like clogs, his hair long and gray — pleaded guilty only to"maintaining a drug involved premises."

Which is a cold, dispassionate way of describing the atrocities that took place inside the Han Gil.

For this, Mun faces no more than 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to$1 million; sentencing is scheduled to take place few days before Christmas. He will also let the feds take possession of the Han Gil. Prosecutors and city officials hope toget it razedin the coming months. The building, its doors now wide open and its hallways strewn with trash and horrible memories, cannot vanish fast enough.

Mun's plea "describes how he brazenly facilitated and profited from the criminal conduct by dangerous individuals operating out of his hotel," said Erin Nealy Cox, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. "[Mun's] business directly impacted the safety of this community and his conviction allows us to permanently rid the neighborhood of this horrible place."

In the spring, the U.S. attorney's office indicted more than a dozen people tied to the Han Gil; several have already cut deals with the government. Three remain on the run. The feds this week picked up one woman, Monica Saucedo,along Park Row in South Dallas.Saucedo's boyfriend wasEric Dewayne Freeman, the 44-year-old dealer called "Stuff," whoconfessed to selling drugs and splitting the proceeds with Mun and dumping the bodies of young men and women who overdosed at the motel.

Saucedo was in court Thursday, pleading not guilty to charges that she helped Stuff sell drugs. The feds say she beat a woman with a wooden chair leg before Stuff burned the victim with a butane torch.

For months, Mun claimed he, too, wasn't guilty of any wrongdoing. Until this week.

I asked Tom Pappas, Mun'sattorney, why his clientchanged his mind. Because others had already cut deals? Because he didn't want to be the last man standing, the one who stood trial after everyone else sang to the feds?

"It's because he recognizes that he has some responsibility for making the mistake of renting those rooms to those people," Pappas said. "And he wants to try to do what he can to make it right."

A little late for that, I told Pappas.

"We can fight over how much or how little he knew, and at the end of the day whether hedid or didn't, he should have known, and he's accepting responsibility for that," Pappas said. "He just wants to accept responsibilityand deal with the case and move on. The reality is he didn'tkill anybody. He wasn't a drug dealer."

No. He just let it happen. Let people sell at the Han Gil. Use at the Han Gil. Die at the Han Gil.

Mun and his wife lived at the motel, using one of its six wings as their private residence, according to Drug Enforcement Administrationagent James Henderson. In the agent's February affidavit, Henderson said the Muns "rarely, if ever, [had] traditional guests renting room at the Han Gil." Instead they rented tomiddle-class and white-collar users from Coppell, Frisco, North Dallas,who paid$200 a week to stay.

Dealers had to pay more — "at least $560 per week," Henderson wrote.

Court documents filed in early March includeseveral photos of Mun, taken from surveillance videos captured on cameras he set up throughout the hotel. In several stills he appears to be collecting cash from Freeman, the man called Stuff, who satbehind a desk in a room crowded with customers lined up for product.

In another photo, Mun sits with his back to the camera, counting bills handed to him by a woman. In front of them is a bed covered in cash.In at least one photo, Munappears to be holding a rifle. In court documents filed this week, Mun said he "often possessed a firearm."

Mun had intended to fight his incarceration before trial, butchanged his mind at the last moment. Prosecutors believethat's because he didn't want videos from the Han Gil shown in open court.

Pappas told me Mun had once been a butcher, and that he went through a divorce, remarried and sold the shop to buy the Han Gil. The Dallas defense attorneysaid his client intended to "fix up the motel," except "things blew up and got out of hand."

Places like the Han Gil exist all over this city. But federal prosecutors say they have never seen a case this ghastly or grim. They still don't know exactly how many people died at the Han Gil, of overdoses or gunshots.

The question arises, again and again, still without a suitable answer: Why was nothing done before March, when the feds raided and shuttered the Han Gil? Cityattorneys sued the Muns in February 2018, alleging dozens of code violations. So they knew something. Fire inspectors reported seeing drugs and cash; so, too, did Dallas police officers who filed a small mountain of reports over the past year. So they knew something, too.

But nobody did much until Coppell cops noticed kids from their town were dying there.Then, quickly, it fell to the feds to do something.

I sentMun's plea toBrian Goudy, whose 21-year-old brother Justin Bruckman, one of those Coppell kids,died at the Han Gil.

Prosecutors have said that Bruckman was there visiting friends from Coppell on June 24, 2018, when he overdosed. Court records show thatMun and Stuffwouldn't let Bruckman's friends call 911 because they didn't want cops crawling all over the hotel.

"Twenty years isn't enough," Goudy said. "He didn't let the police get calls when my brother could have used medical attention.That's murder in my eyes. To let things go down like that, to profit off it, with no regard for human life, just for a couple of dollars? It's an insult."

Goudy had hoped Mun would stand trial. He wanted to testify. He wanted to see Mun pay for what he'd done —and for what he failed to do the night his younger brother died.And now he will not have that chance.

"That man," Goudy told me, "destroyed families."