GETTING A HOLD ON THE TRUTH
Los Angeles Times
imes/topstories/la-me-kidnap-20100503,0,6473187.st ory
May 3 2010
Former wrestler says he abducted a man to get evidence of a contract
killing, but prosecutors say it was a $1-million kidnapping gone wrong.
As a young wrestling champion in Soviet-era Armenia, Vagan Adzhemyan
was accustomed to head-on confrontations with his foes.
Twenty-five years later, he says, a business dispute in Southern
California resulted in the hiring of a hit man to kill him, and
Adzhemyan reverted to the mano-a-mano ways of his past.
He and at least one cohort accosted the man whom he believed hired the
hit man in an underground parking garage in the San Fernando Valley.
They beat him, zapped him with a Taser and hustled him into the
back of a van. Over the next five days, with the help of a South Los
Angeles sandwich shop owner and part-time marijuana cultivator, they
shuttled the bound and blindfolded man from place to place to avoid
detection. Adzhemyan also secretly recorded interrogations in which
he attempted to get the man, Sandro Karmryan, to implicate himself
in the supposed murder for hire.
"They put me in a corner," Adzhemyan, who speaks with a heavy Armenian
accent, said in a recent interview from the Metropolitan Detention
Center in downtown Los Angeles. "I had two choices: Either kill this
guy or record him."
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Federal prosecutors see it differently.
They contend that Adzhemyan, 42, is nothing more than a common criminal
who kidnapped Karmryan and demanded a $1-million ransom. They said
Karmryan was bleeding from an untreated bullet wound and on the verge
of death when he was rescued during a raid by Los Angeles Police
Department SWAT officers. Adzhemyan later concocted the story about
being in fear for his life in an attempt to justify his actions,
they said.
"What he says — and what he did — just doesn’t make any sense,"
Assistant U.S. Atty. Robert E. Dugdale said.
After hearing Adzhemyan’s account on the witness stand at his trial
last year, U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Nguyen told jurors that even
if everything he said were true, there was still no legal justification
for his actions.
Adzhemyan’s attorney, Harland Braun, interpreted it as a not-so-subtle
hint to find his client guilty.
Nonetheless, after four days of deliberations, the jury was
deadlocked. Half of the 12-member panel accepted Adzhemyan’s argument
that he had no choice but to do what he did.
Prosecutors get another chance at the case in a retrial that began
last week. This time, the judge has barred any evidence related to
why Adzhemyan committed the crime, ruling that it is irrelevant to
his guilt or innocence.
So-called justification defenses are rarely allowed. They can be
presented only if a judge determines, among other factors, that the
defendant was facing imminent danger of serious harm or death and that
there was no reasonable legal alternative to the defendant’s action.
So, much of what follows is a story that jurors will probably not hear:
Born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1968, Adzhemyan began wrestling as a boy.
At age 17, he says, he was European champion in his weight class in
freestyle wrestling. He says he was invited to the United States to
pursue wrestling by the then-coach of the U.S. Olympic team.
As an adult in the U.S., Adzhemyan had long since stopped wrestling
competitively, but his life continued to revolve around the sport,
he said. He runs a wrestling school in North Hollywood, he says,
and organizes international tournaments. He is still recognizable in
the Russian Armenian community based on past success in the sport.
His recent troubles began when a friend, Suren Garibyan, asked if he
could help arrange financing for a woman who wanted to buy a house.
Adzhemyan said he approached Karmryan, an acquaintance who worked at
a friend’s trucking company and dabbled in mortgages on the side.
Adzhemyan said Karmryan agreed to secure a $500,000 loan for which
Adzhemyan and Garibyan would each receive 5% finders’ fees.
But as months passed and the loan did not go through, Adzhemyan said,
he became suspicious. After spending $25,000 of his own money to
help the would-be borrower clean up her credit, Adzhemyan says, he
ultimately discovered that the $500,000 loan had already been funded
and that Karmryan and others were planning to keep the money.
Adzhemyan said he made some of these discoveries on a wrestling
tournament trip to Armenia and Russia last year, which is also when he
learned that Karmryan had supposedly taken out a contract on his life.
Unsure what to do, Adzhemyan said, he hid out in Moscow for three
months because he did not want to return to Los Angeles and place his
wife and children in jeopardy. He said he believed the police would
do nothing because he had no proof that his life was in danger. So
he decided to get some proof, he said.
Adzhemyan and Garibyan tracked Karmryan to his parents’ apartment
in Van Nuys, where he was visiting. With him was Arshok Rogoyan,
whom Adzhemyan accused of being the hired killer.
When the two men got out of their truck early on the morning of July
29, Adzhemyan, Garibyan and, according to prosecutors, two other
men they had brought along as additional muscle pounced. They began
beating Karmryan and Rogoyan, and shocking Karmryan with a Taser.
During the scuffle, Rogoyan drew a gun and shot Karmryan in the
buttocks. Rogoyan managed to escape as Karmryan was forced into
the van.
As Adzhemyan and his crew drove around with their badly bleeding
prisoner in the back of the van, Adzhemyan said, he realized he
hadn’t thought his plan through — that he didn’t know where to go
next. He began making phone calls to friends and associates until he
made his way down the list to Galvin "Shaun" Gibson. Adzhemyan said
he met Gibson while shopping for commercial property on a stretch of
Crenshaw Boulevard where Gibson owns a sandwich shop.
He said that he told Gibson of his "very difficult situation," and
that Gibson reluctantly agreed to help. He allowed Adzhemyan to keep
Karmryan in an upstairs office at the restaurant and, later, at his
home in Mira Loma, where the second floor had been converted to an
indoor pot farm.
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When SWAT officers raided the house Aug. 3, they found Karmryan
lying on a mattress "with a bruised face, Taser burns on his body,
ligature marks on his wrists and ankles, barely able to move [and]
… near death," according to court records. A large pit bull had
been left to guard him.
Karmryan had been regularly beaten during his captivity, prosecutors
allege. It was under these conditions that Adzhemyan conducted his
interrogations — sometimes at gunpoint — and got Karmryan to "admit"
that he had tried to arrange to have Adzhemyan killed. A recording
of the interrogation was played for jurors.
Prosecutors contend that the only victim in the case is Karmryan. At
the first trial, Karmryan’s parents testified that they received a
$1-million ransom demand for their son’s release. Relatives in Russia
received similar demands, the parents said.
Garibyan has admitted his role in the case, but did not agree to
testify against Adzhemyan, according to sources familiar with the
matter. Gibson has pleaded not guilty. He did not testify in the
first trial and is not expected to testify in the retrial.
Though it’s unclear how much of his story he will be allowed to tell
this time around, Adzhemyan will testify again.
"You couldn’t keep him off the stand," Braun said.