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| Yeo Woon-hwan, left, was one of the alleged key criminals who Hong Joon-pyo, now leader of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party, prosecuted when Hong led Korea's war against crime in the early 1990s. Yeo, a businessman, claims Hong framed him and says Hong is a man who will do anything to promote himself. / Korea Times file |
‘Hong used gift knife set to frame me'
By Jung Min-ho
Hong Joon-pyo owes his political rise to "Sandglass," the 1995 megahit TV series. The leader of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) was a star prosecutor in the nation's war against organized crime and that series was supposed to be about his daring fight.
But Yeo Woon-hwan, a businessman who appeared as a villain in Hong's story, has claimed he was the victim of Hong's trumped-up charges. He has said so for the past 26 years and now is being given what may be his final say in this long-running case.
Yeo said Hong portrayed him as the a "financer" of one of the biggest organized crime syndicates in Korea and he spent four years in prison for it.
He had denied the charges and there was no physical evidence. But the court found him guilty based solely on testimony from a member of International PJ, the violent crime organization that Hong claimed Yeo had control of.
At the time, the member's "testimony" was admitted by the court without giving Yeo or his lawyer a chance to contest it. That law was a relic from the Park Chung-hee dictatorship (1963-1979) that wanted to make the indictment of dissidents easier and expedite prosecution. The Constitutional Court ruled in 1996 that the clause was unconstitutional.
That means the foundation on which the court found Yeo guilty has gone and Yeo is now seeking another chance to prove his innocence.
Last week, Yeo applied for a retrial, saying the previous trial was wrong from the beginning and the verdict destroyed his life. A court is expected to make a decision in "several months."
"He (Hong) is a fabricated hero who made a success at the cost of my life," Yeo said during a recent interview. "He lied and everyone was fooled … Many years have passed since. But my family and I still suffer from the stigma."
The two met after Hong was assigned to the Gwangju District Prosecutors' Office in 1991. Yeo was a successful businessman who had several companies there.
Yeo's misery began at a golf clubhouse where another businessman, surnamed Baek, asked him to "go there and say hello to Hong first." Yeo refused.
After that day, tension started to develop between Yeo and the prosecutor. But they eventually met because they had some mutual friends in a small elite community there.
According to Yeo, the tension reached its peak when he returned a set of knives from Hong after it was delivered to him by mistake. Soon, Yeo realized that Hong had targeted him for being the boss of International PJ.
"I was stunned and furious," Yeo said. "But I never thought it would be difficult to prove my innocence because I was not involved in any gang activities. I never knew I would end up in prison."
The fight was hard; Hong was a famous prosecutor who knew how to use the media to his advantage and Yeo was a suspect with a criminal record of assaulting a person when he was a teenager.
Yeo was dumbfounded when he realized that the story of the mistaken delivery of the knives was dramatized in the media as one for a gang boss' blackmailing. "Based on Hong's lies, the media accused me of sending the knives as a death threat," he said.
The court rejected Hong's accusations against Yeo, citing a lack of evidence. But Yeo was found guilty of sponsoring a gang, based on the PJ member's confession.
It is still unclear why Hong targeted him or whether he saw him fair game despite the fact a failure could also damage his career. What's clear is that, through the media, the case made Hong a new political star who gained the image of "no compromise on justice."
Following the huge success of the TV series, he wrote a book about himself and made his way into politics. The image of the "Sandglass prosecutor" was his biggest political asset, which he always used to promote himself.
"I want the truth," Yeo said. "I'm 63 years old now. What do you think I get from this fight? I want to clear myself of what I never committed. This is the only thing I want."
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