Travel Agent Described as Financially Desperate

Federal prosecutors made what could be their last attempt Wednesday to convince a jury that former Glendale travel agent Garen Zakarian should be sent to prison for the 1994 slaying of a business associate.

A prosecutor described Zakarian as a financially desperate businessman who killed Benita Mikailian, another travel agent, and stole 80 airline tickets from her office on Oct. 5, 1994, in order to avoid seeing his own business come crashing down.

“He [Zakarian] had the guns, he had the motives, and all the evidence points to the defendant, and it points to no one but him,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Christopher Tayback said. “No one else stood to gain, no one else had the [tickets] immediately after the murder.”

It was the third time Zakarian has been tried on charges related to Mikailian’s killing. In December, a Pasadena Superior Court jury acquitted him of capital murder charges, but after spending just two months as a free man Zakarian was rearrested on federal robbery and weapons charges stemming from the same crime.

Then in July, a federal jury convicted him on two offenses--possessing a firearm and a silencer with obliterated serial numbers--but deadlocked on four counts of robbery, conspiracy and interstate commerce violations associated with the killing.

Tayback and co-prosecutor Warrington Parker, both of whom postponed plans to leave the Department of Justice and enter private practice while they retried Zakarian on the remaining robber counts, acknowledge that much evidence linking Zakarian to the crime--his need for 80 plane tickets from Paris to Los Angeles to avoid stranding a planeload of passengers, his inability to pay for the tickets, and his fingerprint on the silencer attached to the murder weapon--is circumstantial.

But Tayback insisted Wednesday that “all the evidence unequivocally points to him,” and not to a professional assassin, as Zakarian’s attorney, Malcolm Guleserian, has said.

Moreover, Tayback tried to unravel Zakarian’s case by outlining “10 lies” he said the defense had presented in court, including Zakarian’s contention that his business was profitable, that he had unlimited cash at his disposal in Armenia and therefore had no need to rob Mikailian, and that he was not knowledgeable about firearms.

Zakarian and his sister Anait owned and operated the Econo Trans travel service in Glendale, specializing in flights between Armenia and the United States. Anait Zakarian was also charged with murder but was mistakenly released from jail in July 1995 while awaiting trial, and remains a fugitive. State and federal prosecutors were barred from discussing the sister’s alleged role in the crimes.

Prosecutors contend that on the day Mikailian was killed, Zakarian was in danger of stranding 80 Armenian customers--who were en route to Los Angeles--in a Paris airport due to an airline scheduling change. They say Zakarian called Mikailian, who owned Travel Town agency in Glendale, and ordered 80 Northwest Airlines tickets from Paris to Los Angeles, and that he planned to ship the tickets to Paris on an 11 p.m. flight so they would arrive there the next day, in time for the passengers.

Zakarian sent two $21,000 checks to Mikailian, but after learning he had insufficient funds in the bank Mikailian refused to give Zakarian the tickets. Prosecutors believe that about 8:30 p.m. that day Zakarian went to Mikailian’s office carrying a silencer-equipped .380-caliber Beretta and a machine gun in an athletic bag. Once inside, they contend, Zakarian shot Mikailian five times in the chest, then took a stack of documents that he believed to be the plane tickets from her desk.

Police later recovered those documents--which turned out to be worthless bookkeeping papers called “agent coupons” rather than the actual tickets--from Paris and found Zakarian’s fingerprint on them. A man living three blocks from the crime scene found the athletic bag with the guns in his yard three days after the killing, and Anait Zakarian was arrested when she apparently searched through the bushes for the bag a few days later. The bag also contained one blue-and-red ski glove, for which a matching glove was found under Zakarian’s bed when police searched his apartment.

As he had in the previous trials, Guleserian insisted his client’s complete innocence and claimed he was framed by Sisak Minukian, a former employee of Zakarian’s who has vanished since the killing. He said there was “not one iota of evidence” that Zakarian robbed Mikailian, nor that he had any reason to.

Despite records indicating that several of his bank accounts were overdrawn or closed, Zakarian ran a successful, “multimillion-dollar business,” Guleserian said, and in fact was preparing to buy three jets and start his own United States-to-Armenia airline. He charged that police and prosecutors have overlooked many pieces of evidence indicating someone other than Zakarian did the killing, and have prosecuted Zakarian simply because he was the last person to see Mikailian alive.

“This is not a fair trial,” Guleserian told the jury. “The burden is on [the prosecution] to prove their case. They haven’t begun to prove it. All they’ve done is allege a heinous crime.”