http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2764606,00.html
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."
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