Born and raised in Haiphong, Dung Hà was a high-ranking criminal member in the city, and during her peak in the 1990s, she and Năm Cam were considered as the two great mafia bosses of the Vietnamese underworld.
The street on which she lived on was near the edge of the bustling Iron Market (Chợ Sắt), which at the time was one of the busiest sectors in the port city of Hải Phòng, with many businesses lined up selling wares such as shrimp paste and dried fish.
Dung herself was said to have been free-spirited and wild in her youth, and from early on she dropped out of school and quickly became a female gangster near the Tam Bạc bus station.
In the middle of 1986, while robbing a pedestrian walking on the street in the Iron Market, Dung Hà was caught and arrested, where she then later spent 12 months in prison for the crime.
It was not until Hùng Warbler utterly obliterated the business at the Tam Bạc bus station that Dung Hà finally decided to leave his side.
[3] After Hùng Cốm was arrested, sentenced to death and transferred to a solitary cell for death row inmates at the Hải Phòng detention center, Dung Hà went to the outside of the prison and hatched a bold escape plan against the Trần Phú detention center; using a grenade to intimidate the supervisors within the prison walls, Dung brought alongside a dozen of her followers to block the road and make way for Hùng Cốm to escape to the sea, where a train was waiting to take him to HongKong.
The people of Hải Phòng at the time soon became used to seeing pictures of Dung Hà with her hair cut short like a man, along with her dressed in men's clothing, riding a Ringbell motorcycle on the street.
[1] In the late 1990s, Dung Hà of the north and Năm Cam of the south were considered as the two great powers of the Vietnamese black society or underworld.
Knowing of Hải “Bánh”, a mobster from the north who migrated to the south to joined forces with Năm Cam's and became incredibly wealthy in the process, Dung Hà decided to do the same.