Murder-for-hire case against Philly businessman was wrongly kept from public view, appeals panel says

The case against a Philadelphia businessman accused of ordering the murder of a competitor was wrongly kept on a secret docket by a Westmoreland County judge who “abused” his discretion, an appeals court has ruled.

The Superior Court of Pennsylvania on Wednesday found that basic information about the criminal charges and the identity of Keven Van Lam, 56, should have been made public.

For 10 days, after Boyke Budiarachman, 49, was shot to death outside a sushi restaurant in southwest Pennsylvania by a man dressed as a parking attendant, authorities would neither identify him, nor the suspect who sat in lockup for four months with nearly every detail of his case hidden from view.

Lawyers for three Western Pennsylvania newspapers challenged the president judge of Westmoreland County’s decision to not only seal the arrest affidavit that described the police version of events, but also to shield all references to Lam from the public record.

The appeals court last year ruled that the affidavit could be withheld until a preliminary hearing, but that the public had an immediate right to know details such as the charges, the identify of the defendant, and when the case would be heard.

The opinion, written by Superior Court Judge Victor Stabile, noted that prosecutors never specifically asked that the case be withheld from the docket, nor did the local judge, Christopher Feliciani, offer any findings for why that extraordinary should step be taken.

“Our criminal courts operate under a presumption of openness,” the appellate judge wrote.

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

Motive for the November 2022 slaying finally emerged last October, when a detective testified that Lam had paid $789,000 to Budiarachman for a temporary employment agency that provided food-processing jobs for about 500 foreign-born workers from 40 countries, plus eight vans.

Lam, according to the testimony at the October hearing, told detectives that Budiarachman charged Lam $8,000 every two weeks to keep some of the workers employed at a butchering plant in Charleroi, where Budiarachman worked as a human resources manager. At the same time, Budiarachman created his own staffing agency that competed with Lam’s.

The defendant is accused of ordering a hit on Budiarachman — who was 49 and owned a house on South 19th Street in Philadelphia — paying $65,000 to a man identified as Mr. Tuan, of South Philadelphia, to rough up his business associate with a baseball bat. But after Lam and Budiarachman went to dinner in a Rostraver Township strip mall on Nov. 5, 2022, a man approached Budiarachman in the parking lot and shot him in the top of his head at close range, killing him.

Prosecutors told the judge that secrecy about the case would give investigators more time to find any co-conspirators. Neither the South Philadelphia man who supposedly arranged the hit nor the alleged shooter has been charged.

Lam is scheduled for trial in May.