By Jason Kandel
Staff Writer
GLENDALE — It wasn’t the price of cucumbers but murder that Eddy Gyulnazaryan and his pals were talking about that day back in March 2001 in the backroom of his Atlas Pick pickle factory.
Rival Russian-Armenian gangs were at war and Gyulnazaryan, a beefy 40-year-old family man with the gift of gab, wanted some people killed.
As he fired off several rounds into a stack of phone books, Gyulnazaryan made an offer that couldn’t be refused — a $5,000 contract to “eliminate” a man who had gotten under his skin.
What Gyulnazaryan didn’t know was that one of the pals was wired. He had turned and become a confidential informant working with an organized crime task force that was able to use this information to win convictions of the ringleader and five others on charges of solicitation of murder.
At least 14 murders, 100 attempted killings and seven kidnappings have been blamed on Russian-Armenian gangsters operating across the San Fernando Valley region since 2000. The groups are fueled by lucrative white collar frauds — including credit card, immigration, auto insurance, cigarette tax evasion, identity theft, welfare and health care.
“They’re very much organized criminals. They’re very violent. They’re dangerous,” said Glendale police Sgt. Steve Davey, who heads the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force, comprising federal, state and local authorities. “They’re not afraid of using violence to solve their disputes. They shoot up homes and cars. It’s like the 1930s New York mob.”
According to court documents and interviews, Gyulnazaryan wanted to hire hit men to kill four unidentified men, two from Long Beach. There also was a plan to hire jailed Latino gang members to kill two of his rivals, Emil Airapetian 25, and Armen Sharopetrosian, 26, who were also in jail.
Authorities said “there have been many documented shootings” between the rival Russian-Armenian gangs in recent years.
Police said in court documents that they believed Gyulnazaryan’s group was “heavily involved in credit card fraud, MediCal and Medicare fraud, check fraud, drug trafficking, extortion and numerous shootings, assaults and other violent crimes … and have access to large sums of money obtained through their various criminal enterprises.”
A break in the case The FBI got their break when Gyulnazaryan asked one of his closest allies, with whom he had previously worked on auto insurance fraud scams, if he would carry out a hit.
That man, who was not identified, had been an informant for the FBI before. From then on, he agreed to wear a wire and secretly record conversations among the group.
Offers of up to $20,000 were made to “eliminate” members of rival criminal organizations. But the jailhouse killings proved too complicated to carry out.
In March 2003, police raided the homes of Gyulnazaryan and his associates Gayk Tadevosyan, 40; Gagik Galoyan, 55; Anthony Armenta, 25; Andranik Safaryan, 24; and Edgar Hatamian, 23. Gyulnazaryan pleaded no contest Thursday to solicitation of murder charges and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The others pleaded no contest to solicitation of murder charges and were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to nine years. Galoyan received a nine-year suspended prison sentence and five years’ probation.
Galoyan had grown up with Gyulnazaryan in Armenia and went into business with him at the pickle factory, which closed down two years ago.
“These guys have come from Armenia. They have known each other for years. They have grown up with each other,” said Galoyan’s attorney, Fred Minassian. “My client is known in the Armenian community as an elder statesman. In no way is he a mobster.”
Gyulnazaryan’s attorney, Michael Levin, said his client is not violent and did not head up an organized crime ring.
“My client has got a big mouth. He likes to talk. But what the (police) got on tape makes him sound like Tony Soprano,” he said. “He’s a hard-working family man.”
Russian mob history Authorities said Russian mobs became more and more prevalent in the United States in the 1990s as people from former Soviet bloc countries began emigrating here. They settled in New York, Brighton Beach, Fla., and Los Angeles. Up to 6,000 people are connected with 15 loosely organized crime groups in the United States that include Ukrainians, Lithuanians and, locally, Armenians.
In Glendale, where about a third of the 204,000 residents are Armenian, police estimate that there are about 500 Armenian criminals connected to organized crime.
Police have been challenged in trying to crack the rings because of a lack of resources, a lack of familiarity with the culture and victims too afraid to report the crimes.
Sukharenko Alexander, a senior fellow of the Organized Crime Study Center of the Far East State University, said Russian-Armenian syndicates are part of large international crime networks. They have seemingly infinite resources and escape routes to countries with no extradition treaties.
“This allows them to launder huge amounts of money, smuggle drugs and stolen vehicles, and import criminals to carry out contract murders and fraud,” Alexander said.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s Detective Alex Gilinets, who works the Major Crimes Bureau, said the groups are not always bound by strict rules or regulations like the old-time mobs and can be more violent.
“It’s, who can I make my next big buck with?” Gilinets said.
Sara Vinson, a criminal intelligence analyst with the state Justice Department’s Eurasian Organized Crime unit, said victims are too scared to come forward.
“Their fear of organized crime groups is bigger than their fear of our criminal justice system,” Vinson said. “A lot of them have family back home that they can’t protect, and they have that hanging over their head.”
LAPD Detective Martin Pinner is having a hard time getting witnesses to come forward from a murder in North Hollywood. Karapet Ksadzhikyan, 50, was ambushed by two men in a suspected mob hit as he walked to his bread delivery truck outside his home in the 13000 block of Archwood Street on Nov. 24.
“No one cooperates,” he said. “No one’s saying anything. No one knows anything.”
Glendale police and city officials, including Mayor Bob Yousefian, himself an Iranian-Armenian-American, has been pushing for more cops, especially Armenian-speaking officers, to fight the scourge.
But they face an uphill battle. Many deny there is an organized crime problem.
“We don’t have the manpower to dedicate officers to task forces,” Yousefian said.
“We’re getting to the point that we have this huge elephant standing in the middle of the room, and we all have closed our eyes. Everybody is saying there is no elephant there. We have an issue. We need to deal with it.”
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