Los Angeles Daily News
March 16 2005

Valley link in weapons sales

Feds say ring smuggled arms

By Jason Kandel, Staff Writer

Members of a Russian-Armenian organized crime ring, including six
suspects from the San Fernando Valley, have been charged with
plotting to smuggle $2.5 million in black-market military weapons
into the United States, federal officials said Tuesday.
The suspects sold the weapons — including rocket-propelled grenade
launchers, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and other Russian
military weapons — to an FBI informant who posed as an arms
trafficker with connections to al-Qaida, officials said.

Although the weapons are of the type that homeland-security experts
fear could be used by terrorists, officials said the suspects were
smuggling the arms for profit.

“They didn’t care who they were selling to,” said Paul Browne, a
spokesman for New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. “They
were motivated purely by greed, and they’ll go to jail for that.”

Browne said the investigation into the weapons operation began about
a year ago as part of a probe into medical-insurance and credit-card
fraud schemes being run by an organized crime syndicate.

Using wiretaps on seven phones and intercepting 15,000 conversations,
investigators tracked the suspects to South Africa, Armenia and the
Georgian Republic, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday
in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The two accused of being ringleaders — Artur Solomonyan, an
Armenian, and Christiaan Dewet Spies, a South African, both living
illegally in New York — and 15 other suspects were arrested Monday
night and Tuesday morning in roundups in New York City, Los Angeles
and Miami, officials said.

Among those arrested were Garegin Gasparyan, 28, of Burbank; Tigran
Gevorgyan, 21, of Glendale; William Thomas, of Los Angeles; Artur
Solomonyan, 26, who has homes in New York and Van Nuys; and
Solomonyan’s brother Levon, 24.

Police still were searching for Armand Abramian, 27, of Glendale.

According to the criminal complaint, the smuggling ring sold the
informant eight illegal weapons — most of them military assault
rifles, including two AK-47s and an Israeli-made Uzi machine gun. The
dealers delivered three of the guns in New York City, three in Los
Angeles and two in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

In recent weeks the suspects made a $2.5 million deal to sell the
informant more powerful weapons, mainly Russian-made, officials said.
The suspects were accused of giving the informant photographs of the
weapons and saying they were holding them somewhere in Eastern Europe
and were ready to get them shipped to the United States.

The photographs of the weapons were displayed at a news conference
held Monday in New York City.

Los Angeles Police Department officers say they have noticed a spike
in Russian-Armenian organized crime, especially in medical-insurance
and credit-card fraud, but not in military weapons.

“We’ve never had this type of case in Los Angeles,” said Cmdr. Mark
Leap, the second in command in the LAPD’s Critical Incident
Management Bureau.

“It’s certainly a concern that people would sell these types of
weapons strictly for profit, and they don’t care who they sell them
to. That’s one of the challenges of law enforcement — to uncover
these kinds of conspiracies and make sure the weapons don’t fall into
the hands of terrorists.”