Why was a Philly businessman’s murder so secret that the case was removed from court records?

A few minutes after leaving a sushi restaurant an hour south of Pittsburgh last November, Philadelphia businessman Boyke Budiarachman was walking toward his pickup truck when a man dressed as a parking attendant snuck up from behind and killed him with a gunshot to the head.

The next day, Westmoreland County police brought his dinner partner and Philadelphia neighbor, Keven Van Lam, in for questioning. The interview turned into an interrogation and two days later, on Nov. 7, 2022, Lam was charged with orchestrating the murder of the man he had worked with in his business of hiring, housing, and transporting immigrants for Western Pennsylvania meatpacking plants.

But if you were following the local media, none of that would be known. For 10 days, authorities would identify neither the dead man nor the suspect. And for four months, Lam, sat in a Westmoreland County lockup with nearly every fact of his arrest hidden from public view.

Reporters scouring the electronic dockets of the local courts could find no reference to him or the charges he faced.

Lawyers for three media outlets intervened in court, challenging the president judge of Westmoreland County’s agreement with the district attorney to seal not only the arrest affidavit that described the police version of events, but also to remove all references to Lam in the public record.

“This is a very public murder, in the middle of a shopping center, in front of the freaking Lowe’s …,” said Kristie Linden, a reporter with the Mon Valley Independent. “The No. 1 thing people worry about was if there’s a crazy killer running loose,” she went on. “They had someone in custody and they didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

And so rumor built on rumor, about a hunt for a hit man, and the potential involvement of federal agencies. Finally, in February a state Superior Court panel overruled the local judge and found that the media had the right to learn at least when the case would wind up in court.

It wasn’t until this October, 11 months after the slaying, that the case against Lam spooled out in testimony at his preliminary hearing, a court appearance in which two of Donald Trump’s Philadelphia lawyers sat in the room, Michael van der Veen and William J. Brennan, both of whom afterward said they were representing the accused orchestrator of the hit.

What had led to the shooting unfolded in the October hearing. Lam, according to Detective Rick Kranitz, had bought from Budiarachman a temp agency that provided jobs for about 500 foreign-born workers from 40 countries, plus three homes near the processing plants, and eight vans to transport them. Price tag: $789,000.

But Lam, 56, a U.S citizen who’d emigrated from Vietnam three decades ago, told detectives that Budiarachman had started squeezing him. After the deal closed in 2020, Budiarachman charged Lam $8,000 every two weeks to keep some of the temporary workers employed at the Fourth Street Foods butchering plant in Charleroi, where Budiarachman worked as a human resources manager.

At the same time, he also created a staffing agency that hired migrants for meatpacking jobs, competing with Lam.

“I feel bad,” Lam said in a 21-minute video played in court. “I buy the business from him … and he takes my people.”

His statements to detectives changed over time and as recording devices began rolling.

First he had said he paid $65,000 to a man named “Mr. Tuan” from South Philadelphia to shoot Budiarachman in the leg, the detective testified. Then Lam said he wanted him struck with a baseball bat.

But shortly before 7:30 p.m. on that Saturday night in November 2022, someone approached Budiarachman after dinner at the Samurai restaurant and shot him in the top of his head from close range. The gunman has not been identified. On the surveillance tape, the detective said, the killer looked to be a Black man dressed in an orange florescent vest, like the parking attendants wore.

Lam told police he waited around the parking lot as police and rescue workers arrived, then drove back to Philadelphia that night. Along the way, he called “Mr. Tuan” on a burner phone, then threw it out the window onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. His phone message: He’d leave $65,000 for Tuan in an envelope in his mailbox outside his home at 26th and Mifflin Streets in South Philadelphia.

Lyle Dresbold, one of Lam’s two Pittsburgh-based lawyers, argued that the confession was inadmissible. Lam had told investigators that during the interrogation he understood only 60% of what was said. The hearing lasted three hours in part because a Vietnamese-speaking interpreter translated all of the testimony.

The judge ordered Lam to stand trial for charges including first-degree murder, and to remain in jail without bail. A formal arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday.

The two men would eat dinner together every two weeks, according to the Adam Kornblau, a Jenkintown lawyer who represents Budiarachman’s widow. He described the two as business associates, not friends.

Budiarachman was 49, a native of West Java province in Indonesia. He owned a home on South 19th Street in South Philadelphia, where he lived with his wife and two daughters. He had worked for Fourth Street Foods in Western Pennsylvania since 2019, Kornblau said. Before that, he owned a company called Ezzy Labor LLC, which placed foreign-born workers with food companies, including Fourth Street.

Budiarachman’s family held a funeral service on Nov. 11, 2022 in Philadelphia, then flew his body to Indonesia for burial. “The family is first and foremost devastated by the loss of their husband and father,” Kornblau said. “They had a very close relationship.”

Lam’s company was called Prompt Management Services Inc. In 2007, he was accused of failing to pay employment taxes for two temp agencies he controlled, according to federal charges filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He pleaded guilty in 2009 to nine counts. He was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay restitution of $764,604.

“We don’t just throw people in jail in secret,” said Paula Knudsen Burke, the lawyer representing the media companies. “That is not something that should happen in the U.S.”

After watching the three-hour hearing on Zoom, Burke said she still isn’t sure why the case warranted such secrecy.

“There is nothing I see that is out of the norm in a criminal prosecution,” said Burke, who works for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and has represented The Inquirer to gain access to public records. “That affidavit was a single page. What is the investigation that caused this to be so secret? As far as can tell, it is not national security or some highly secret black-box operation. As far as we can tell it is not a 3-letter agency. It is Westmoreland County officials.”

Burke called it “very troubling” that the district attorney took “the extraordinary and unwarranted step of sealing a docket.”

The district attorney, Nicole W. Ziccarelli, disagreed. “The criminal complaint remained sealed as to not compromise the integrity of the investigation,” she said by email. “Rule 513.1, instituted by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, is the rule that permits arrest warrants to be sealed. All proper procedures were followed and the sealing was approved by a Common Pleas Court Judge.”

The Superior Court has said it will release a full ruling soon.

Lam’s Philly lawyers say they, too, don’t understand why the docket was sealed.

“I don’t know,” Brennan stated. Brennan had represented Lam in the federal employment-tax case.

Van der Veen surmised the secrecy was to give law enforcement time to build a case. “They were probably concerned with an investigation they hadn’t completed,” he said. “It was a bit unusual for us.”

Much remains to be seen, they agreed.

As for the mysterious Mr. Tuan, or a person fitting the description of the parking lot attendant, no arrests have been made more than a year after the shooting.

Inquirer news researcher Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.