Prosecutors Admit Errors in Charging Men in Plot

Misled by an undercover informant’s exaggerations and a faulty translation of conversations in Armenian, federal prosecutors mistakenly charged five men last year with plotting to assassinate a U.S. Secret Service agent.

Chief Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard E. Drooyan acknowledged the error but insisted in an interview that prosecutors were compelled to act without exhaustive investigation because they feared for the agent’s life.

“We made our decision to file on the basis of what knew at the time,” said Drooyan, second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office. “But we weren’t afraid to revaluate the evidence. That’s what we’re supposed to do as prosecutors and that’s what we did.”

As it turned out, there was a plot--not to murder the agent, but to bribe him to drop fraud charges against one of the men.

Four of the accused have been allowed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges and the fifth has been cleared of any wrongdoing.

Had they been convicted of conspiring to assassinate the Secret Service agent as originally charged, they could have been sentenced to life in prison. The arrests generated headlines when they were announced in September. Some defendants were paraded before news cameras by law enforcement officers wearing masks and military-style clothing.

Authorities charged that the murder-for-hire plot was hatched at a Montebello doughnut shop, apparently to derail the pending fraud prosecution of Robert Kazarian, 34, of Glendale.

Kazarian was accused of plotting the agent’s assassination from his jail cell. Also charged were Kazarian’s brother, Arshak, 38, of Tujunga; Sahak Mazmanyan, 40, of Montebello; Rafael Kazareyants, 44, of North Hollywood; and Panos Zhamkochyan, 30, of Los Angeles.

According to an affidavit filed at the time of the arrests, an undercover informant with a history of drug use and numerous felony convictions approached a member of the FBI’s Russian Armenian organized crime squad in September and gave details of the alleged plot. The intended target, he told the FBI, was the Secret Service agent responsible for developing the fraud case against Robert Kazarian.

The informant, whose identity was not revealed, was described in the court document as having provided reliable information to law enforcement agencies in the past.

Agents fitted him with an electronic taping device that he wore to subsequent meetings with the suspects at the Montebello doughnut shop and at an apartment in North Hollywood.

After each meeting, the informant was debriefed by FBI agents and the tape recordings were turned over to an FBI linguist who listened to them and prepared written summaries.

The FBI affidavit said the summaries confirmed the informant’s account of the meetings, which reportedly included discussions about “the hit” and how much money he would receive for killing the Secret Service agent.

Prosecutors would later rely on those summaries when they took their case to the grand jury. During one of the meetings, the informant was given a $15,000 down payment as well as a 9-millimeter handgun.

Drooyan said law enforcement authorities decided they could wait no longer. They swooped down and arrested the suspects. Once that happened, prosecutors had 10 days to seek an indictment.

But the murder conspiracy case began to unravel in the months that followed.

Defense attorneys challenged the accuracy of the FBI’s summaries as well as its verbatim transcripts of the tape recordings.

“We even showed them where their own translators were at odds over what was said,” said defense lawyer Errol H. Stambler, who represents Kazareyants.

Drooyan, too, recalled some confusion in the translation. He said one defendant was represented as having mouthed the Armenian word for “shoot,” which sounds something like “trial” in English.

The translator assumed the Armenian interpretation. Only later did prosecutors realize the defendant had lapsed into English at that point and was referring to the pending case against Robert Kazarian.

At the defense lawyers’ suggestion, both sides agreed to submit the recordings to a neutral third party, Armenian translators who work for the U.S. District Court. The court translators produced a new verbatim translation.

Although there was some mention of murder on the tapes, Drooyan said, the new transcripts made it clear that assassination was not the plotters’ intent.

“What was clear was that there was an attempt to obstruct justice by paying off an agent,” he said.

Like Drooyan, the head of the FBI office in Los Angeles, Timothy McNally, said in an interview that his agents did not have time to prepare a verbatim transcript of the secretly recorded meetings before making the arrests.

“Not intending to sound like an excuse, but yes there was a problem” with relying on the summaries instead of a complete transcript, said McNally.

“When we have a threat against a law enforcement agent, as we did have in this case, there’s a time- critical response that must be made. We do our best to corroborate informant statements. Sometimes those efforts can come up short or deficient.”