News clippings from the mid-1980s describe the Hong Kong native as a budding entrepreneur in the apparel industry, behind a collection of labels like H Two O and Charlie U.S.A. A 1983 business news story reported that one of Hsu's companies, a San Francisco-based firm called Laveno, had sales of $400,000 and that the amount "should increase tenfold" in the coming year.
Hsu left Laveno in 1984; it went bankrupt a year later. Other clothing ventures followed a similar pattern. By the early 1990s, Hsu's business dealings had landed him in trouble with law enforcement officials as well as investors.
The most alarming episode came in 1990, when police in Foster City, south of San Francisco, stopped a vehicle that had run a red light at 3:40 a.m. Inside, police found four men. According to news accounts, a frightened Hsu managed to tell police he had been kidnapped.
News accounts say Hsu was assaulted, and his former girlfriend said he later showed her burn marks on his arm that he said were inflicted by his abductors.
Police took the other three men in the vehicle into custody. Among them was Kwok Chung Chow, then 30, who was a high-ranking figure in one of the leading criminal gangs in San Francisco's Chinatown. At the time, police speculated that the abductors intended to extort Hsu, but a lawyer's filing in Hsu's personal bankruptcy said he had been kidnapped "allegedly by individuals who are creditors of the debtor."
