Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Thursday, March 24. I’m Justin Ray.
When reporters Harriet Ryan and Matt Hamilton were investigating last year the influence that Los Angeles lawyer and “Real Housewives” figure Tom Girardi had at the State Bar of California, they came upon a tantalizing piece of information.
An agency investigator had sneaked into the bar’s headquarters on a weekend in 2015 and snapped photos of a confidential case file of a complaint against three L.A. attorneys for “moral turpitude,” according to a draft lawsuit by bar lawyers.
Their search to unmask the attorneys’ identities led them to a world far from the boozy lunches and glamorous parties of (now bankrupt) Girardi and his (now estranged) wife, Erika Jayne.
The case file concerned the Armenian genocide, the slaughter that claimed the lives of an estimated 1 million and scattered hundreds of thousands of refugees across the the globe.
A group of L.A. attorneys — all descendants of genocide survivors — mounted class-action lawsuits two decades ago to collect on life insurance policies for victims of the genocide. They came away with settlements totaling $37.5 million, but as a new Times investigation shows, the process of delivering money to Armenian families and charities did not go as planned.
To get to the bottom of what happened, the Los Angeles Times successfully petitioned a federal judge to unseal dozens of records in the case. Reporters sifted through several of the thousands of applications for settlement money that were stored at the library at Loyola Law School. (The haunting photos that illustrate the investigation are from the archived applications and photographed by our colleague Hamlet Nalbandyan.)
The investigation describes how the litigation that carried the hopes of the Armenian community devolved into a corrupted process marked by diverted funds and misconduct.
“It makes me sick,” a relative of one genocide victim said.
[Read the story: “A ‘blood money’ betrayal: How corruption spoiled reparations for Armenian genocide victims,” in the Los Angeles Times]