Jury finds woman guilty of extorting Angelil

Molly Ball

Friday, Oct. 29, 2004 | 11:02 a.m.

Yun Kyeong Sung was convicted late Thursday night of extortion for trying to get millions of dollars from the husband of Celine Dion to hush up a rape allegation.

After a three-day trial, the jury found Sung, 49, guilty of extortion, conspiring to commit extortion and as a witness soliciting a bribe. The most prominent evidence presented was a surreptitiously taped meeting in which lawyers for Sung and her husband tried to convince a lawyer for Dion's husband, Rene Angelil, to pay $13.5 million.

If the money wasn't paid, the couple's lawyers said, Sung and husband Ae Ho Kwon would conduct "a bombardment in the mass media" aimed at destroying Angelil's reputation.

In the taped meeting, which occurred on Jan. 16, 2003, Sung and Kwon are seen to say little, letting their lawyers, Joseph Hong and Michael Olsen, do most of the talking. The prosecutor, Chief Deputy District Attorney L.J. O'Neale, had to convince the jury that it was Sung and Kwon's idea to make the threats their lawyers articulated.

Sung's lawyer, Robert Langford, pointed out that the impression Sung got of the meeting, through a Korean interpreter, was confused, incomplete and often inaccurate, and that her lawyers' statements often didn't jibe with what Sung herself wanted to express.

But O'Neale called the lawyers "barking dogs" who only did Sung and Kwon's bidding. "We know that Ms. Sung and Mr. Kwon were the ones running the show -- they're the ones holding the dogs' leashes," he said.

O'Neale pointed out that Sung and Kwon had fired those lawyers at least once before, proving that they were closely monitoring the attorneys' actions on their behalf.

Further, O'Neale said, the lawyers' claims that they would pursue both civil and criminal complaints against Angelil if the money wasn't paid were mere idle threats. The lawyers knew that the civil lawsuit and the police investigation would come to nothing, he said.

"These barking dogs don't bite," he said. "They have false teeth." O'Neale pointed to the lawyers' statements that Angelil would be wise to pony up because, even if he won the lawsuit, Sung and Kwon would still be able to go on television talk shows with a jacket she claimed was stained with Angelil's semen. The jacket in question was to be turned over to Angelil's lawyer as a condition of the $13.5 million hush money.

"The lawsuit isn't there to be won," O'Neale said. "It's there as a gimmick, it's there as a gadget, it's there as a farce, it's there as a sham, it's there as a mechanism to extort the money."

Sung and Kwon had already received $2 million from Angelil to keep a fondling allegation quiet when, in 2002, they allegedly went back for more money, this time claiming Angelil raped her on the March 2000 night in question.

Almost simultaneously with their renewed demands for as much as $20 million, they filed both a civil lawsuit and a complaint with Metro Police. At the same time Sung was being prosecuted for almost $1 million in unpaid casino markers.

In increasing both the charge against Angelil and the amount of money they sought, Sung and Kwon were "upping the ante" and "going back to the well," O'Neale said. But Langford told the jury that the pair believed they were doing nothing illegal, and for good reason -- they were acting on the advice of lawyers they trusted.

In the evidence presented, he pointed out, it is the lawyers who threaten and cajole. "All of the acts are the acts of the attorneys -- all of the words, all of the letters," Langford said. If they had legally negotiated a settlement in 2000, Langford asked, why should they believe it would be illegal to essentially do the same thing two years later? Langford went through a transcript of the taped meeting in which the Korean utterances of Sung, Kwon, the interpreter, and lawyer Hong were translated to show that Sung and her husband were hardly abreast of what was going on, much less orchestrating a conspiracy.

The interpreter, who is not named, frequently mixes up civil, criminal and settlement proceedings in her translations, according to the transcript. She does not translate many discussions unless specifically asked to do so by Angelil's lawyer, and she summarizes lengthy and complicated passages in scant detail. Most importantly, Langford said, without the Korean translation of Sung's own words, her emotional motives are not evident. When her words are translated, it is clear that she is driven by grief, not greed, he said.

At one point, she says on the tape that the rape ordeal has ruined her marriage to Kwon and caused their son to leave. "Not only Rene Angelil's, Celine Dion's and (Angelil attorney) Martin Singer's life is important," she says. "Our life is important. I would like to forget everything."

Sung entered the first settlement because she was threatened, but she retained a lingering sense of injustice, Langford said. She revived the affair because it was tormenting her, not because she was greedy, he said, pointing out that several of Sung's Korean statements on the tape say that she doesn't care about the money.

Langford called the jury's attention to the fact that Hong and Olsen, Sung and Kwon's attorneys in the taped meeting, were never charged with a crime, even though the prosecutor repeatedly described them as "unindicted co-conspirators."

"The last hypocrisy of this prosecution is the fact that they never charged the attorneys," he said. The reason, Langford charged, was that the attorneys weren't the targets of the powerful people pulling the strings. "This case is about silencing one person," he said. "This is about making sure that nobody would ever believe her (Sung) again," because her credibility had been forever marred by the extortion charge.

O'Neale would not comment on why Hong and Olsen were not also charged with extortion, saying, "We are here to try Ms. Sung."

Kwon's trial on the same charges is scheduled to begin in January.