GLENDALE / BURBANK : Lawyer Says He’ll Prove Defendant Was Framed

Prosecutors called the capital murder case against Garen Zakarian “airtight.”

But a defense attorney spun a web of international intrigue, telling jurors Monday that the Armenian mafia committed the crime and then framed Zakarian, whose discount travel business catering to refugees was undercutting their profits.

Lawyer Malcolm Guleserian, elaborating on a scenario only hinted at earlier, said he would prove it was not Zakarian but a man named Sissak Manukian who killed businesswoman and Glendale travel agent Benita Mikailian.

It was a startling beginning to Zakarian’s trial in Superior Court in Pasadena.

And it focused on two people who were not in the courtroom: Manukian, who has disappeared after telling police that Zakarian committed the crime, and Zakarian’s sister Anait, a co-defendant in the case who was mistakenly released from custody in July; authorities believe she has fled the country.

Mikailian, 42, was found dead of five gunshot wounds in her North Glendale office on the morning of Oct. 5, 1994; Zakarian was arrested the following day. Police have painted Zakarian as a desperate man who killed Mikailian to keep his own struggling travel business afloat, but on Monday, Guleserian portrayed him as a gifted businessman who was providing cheap travel for desperate refugees and was set up by ruthless competitors.

“He’s a creator, he’s not a destroyer,” Guleserian said of Zakarian, who operated the Econo Trans travel agency in Glendale with his sister Anait.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union and a wave of immigration from Armenia, Zakarian and his family founded the travel agency in the early 1990s and offered air fares to the U.S. that were often several hundred dollars cheaper than those offered by Armenian travel agencies, Guleserian contended. For years, Zakarian and his family have faced threats and intimidation from their competitors, he said.

“He was costing these people $400,000 to $500,000 per month, simply by virtue of the fact he had revolutionized the travel industry in Armenia,” Guleserian said. Guleserian said he was referring to a shadowy Armenian underground.

In an interview outside the courtroom, Guleserian said that Manukian worked for Zakarian at Econo Trans, but that he believes the man was “a plant” sent by Zakarian’s competitors in Armenia. He said he believes that Manukian had the “opportunities, the access and the motive” to murder Mikailian and then plant evidence implicating Zakarian in the crime.

Manukian was interviewed by police after Zakarian’s arrest and “completely implicated” the suspect, but has since vanished, Guleserian said.

But prosecutors maintained that the evidence in the case is clear and simple, and told jurors that it all points to Zakarian:

* Zakarian’s fingerprint was found on a silencer that was used with the murder weapon, a semiautomatic handgun recovered by police.

* Zakarian and his sister Anait were at risk of stranding a planeload of passengers from Armenia in a Paris airport, and desperately needed to get 80 airline tickets worth $42,000 from Mikailian and ship them to France. But they could not come up with the money.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling Norris said that two days before Mikailian’s body was found, the Zakarian siblings sent two $21,000 checks to her to pay for the tickets. Although the Zakarians were travel agents, they were not authorized by the Airline Reporting Corp. to print certain airline tickets, and often bought them in bulk from Mikailian.

But the check bounced and Mikailian refused to give the tickets to the Zakarians, instead keeping the tickets locked in a wooden cabinet under her desk.

*

Mikailian closed her office for the day on Oct. 5, but stayed to work overtime. Norris said that Zakarian visited her there and, once inside, shot her five times, four bullets fatally piercing her heart. Zakarian then grabbed a stack of 80 airline vouchers, which look just like plane tickets, from Mikailian’s desk.

* The vouchers were recovered from an associate of the Zakarians in Paris, and Zakarian’s fingerprint was later found on one of the documents, he said.

The next day, a man living three blocks from the murder scene found a .380 beretta semiautomatic handgun with a silencer that police later determined to be the murder weapon, and a .45-caliber handgun with a silencer. Both guns were in a sports bag in the bushes in front of the man’s home. Two days later, police arrested Anait Zakarian after an officer spotted her combing through those same bushes.

* Also in the bag with the guns were a pair of black pants, a pair of red gloves, and a single blue-and-red ski glove that police believe was worn by the gunman. The matching ski glove was found later in the Zakarian siblings’ apartment, Norris said.

But Guleserian said the sister was also innocent and was “duped” by the killers to retrieve the weapons.

Asked why Anait Zakarian has not come forward to proclaim her and her brother’s innocence in the case, Guleserian said, “I don’t blame her.

“The whole thing is a setup and the police absolutely refuse to consider it. They let the man who’s guilty go free. They have no faith in the government.”

Mikailian, a native of Iran, immigrated to the U.S. with her brother, Seroj Mikailian, in 1983, after both had spent several years living in Europe after the Iranian revolution. Mikailian had worked for several travel agents before opening her own business in 1989, her brother said.