He Stands Up in the Name of Armenians

It was a passage from a now-obscure 1918 memoir by Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Ottoman Turkey from 1913-1916, that in 1987 changed the focus of Vartkes Yeghiayan’s life.

Yeghiayan, a Glendale immigration attorney whose ancestors were among the 1.5 million Armenians who perished at the hands of the Turks in the genocide starting in 1915, recalls, “All at once I came across this paragraph where the interior minister of Turkey asked Morgenthau for the list of Armenians who had purchased life insurance from American companies.

“I jumped out of bed. There was such a list!” Thus began Yeghiayan’s 14-year crusade to find the beneficiaries of policies that had been issued by New York Life Insurance Co. to those who later were killed and to get the company to pay up.

Morgenthau, who’d been among the first to condemn the massacres, was infuriated by the minister’s statement that, since the Armenians were “practically all dead now” and had no heirs, the money should go to the state: “You will get no such list from me,” Morgenthau stormed.

Years later, it was Yeghiayan in pursuit of the list--for quite another purpose. He wrote immediately to then-Secretary of State George Shultz and was told that the list of American insurance companies selling to Armenians would be in the National Archives in Washington. They sent him microfilm of 600 pages documenting insurance companies that had done business there--but no list of policyholders. It was a small start. Now he needed to find the heirs.

Yeghiayan’s Armenian friends and associates scoffed, telling him he was tilting at windmills, that the statute of limitations would have run out years earlier.

But earlier this month his determination paid off: New York Life, in a deal negotiated with lawyers brought in by Yeghiayan, William Shernoff of Claremont and Brian Kabateck of Century City, agreed to pay $7 million--10 times the face value of the policies--to an estimated 2,500 claimants and $3 million to Armenian civic organizations.

That, says Yeghiayan, 65, is hardly enough. “They kept this money for 87 years. They invested this money. They profited with this money. What would be fair would be for them to return the money with the profits.”

He figures that, at a return of 7% a year for 87 years, “we’re talking $657 million.” Under the proposed settlement, he calculates, 2,500 claimants would each get $2,800. “That comes to $32.50 a year for 87 years.”

Further, he says, his clients were “very disturbed” that Shernoff and Kabateck made a public announcement of a tentative settlement on April 11 before informing them of the deal, “contrary to their retainer agreement.” Earlier this week, Yeghiayan brought in another attorney, Mark Geragos, to replace the two.

Shernoff said Thursday that questioning of the tentative settlement is “kind of a surprising development to me” as Yeghiayan was present at the final meeting negotiating it and voiced no objections. He said Geragos’ firm has assured him they want him to remain on the case.

Dispute aside, Yeghiayan sees New York Life’s overtures as both significant and symbolic. “For the first time [the Armenian community] has gone beyond lamentation and liturgy to litigation,” from picketing and “going to church every April 24 [Armenian Day of Remembrance] and mourning” to taking legal action.

In January, the insurance company sent him computer printouts with the names of policyholders, taken from its index cards. At last he had the list which, he says, is “an important treasury,” in no small part because for the first time it documents names of those who perished in the genocide.

That list, he adds, also shows that New York Life “admits they haven’t paid and admits there was a massacre.” But, he adds, “not a single client” of his among about 60, including 11 named plaintiffs, is happy with the proposed settlement.

New York Life spokesman William Werfelman said Thursday that the company is “disappointed that some question the fairness or adequacy of the settlement,” which he terms “eminently fair and equitable.”

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Yeghiayan’s quest for justice began in earnest in 1990, when he placed a newspaper notice seeking those who believed they were rightful heirs. Alice Asoian of Irvine responded and became a key player in the case. She had possession of her uncle’s original policy, issued July 3, 1910, with a value of 3,000 French francs.

Her brother, Martin Marootian, 85, a retired pharmacist living in La Canada Flintridge who is now the lead plaintiff, recalls, “She looked at me and said, ‘I was wondering why God kept me alive all these years.’ ”

From the early ‘20s, Marootian’s mother, Yegsa, tried to collect from New York Life as beneficiary of her brother, Setrak Cheytanian, who was killed by the Turks. She continued her attempts in vain until her death in 1982.

The policy papers were the first brought forth as proof. Since then, there have been two more, one in France and one in Massachusetts. Yeghiayan also had those documents from the National Archives, a paper trail showing that New York Life had issued policies totaling $10.2 million to about 8,000 insured, of whom 2,500 are believed to be Armenian genocide victims. About 1,300 policies were paid before 1915.

He “started getting a very clear picture” of what had happened after New York Life closed its Constantinople office at the start of World War I.

“Basically, New York Life was asking Morgenthau, ‘What’s going to happen to us? They’re massacring the Armenians and we are going to face a major loss.’ ” A letter written by the company in March 1915, a month before the mass murders began, to then-Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan confirms the company’s pullout as of October 1914--and the fact that there were unpaid policies valued at more than $10 million.

“The people who bought the policies find out there is no office [in Constantinople] so they go to the American embassy to make payments so the policies would still be valid. And, they left the papers at the embassy for safekeeping, knowing they would die,” Yeghiayan said. An exception was Setrak Cheytanian, who handed his policy to his sister when she left for America.

In 1998, four years after Marootian’s sister died, New York Life agreed to compensate him, but denied there were grounds for a class-action suit. Marootian’s response: What about the rest of the Armenians whose ancestors died? In November 1999, Yeghiayan filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles, naming Marootian as lead plaintiff.

For Yeghiayan, the stumbling block from the beginning had been the statute of limitations. Holocaust victims’ heirs “showed me the way,” he says, when in 1999 they were able to extend the statute for insurance policy payoffs. In February 2000 he contacted state Sen. Chuck Poochigian (R-Fresno), who sponsored a bill permitting victims of the genocide and their heirs to pursue unpaid insurance claims in California courts by extending the statute of limitations until 2010. Gov. Gray Davis signed the bill in September.

Yeghiayan says plaintiffs’ attorneys will present a settlement counteroffer at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Christine Snyder in Los Angeles in the next few months.

For Yeghiayan, 65, this “passion of mine” has its roots in Ottoman Turkey, where his father, Boghos, the only family member to survive the genocide, was born. Yeghiayan’s grandparents and their other four children were killed.

The surviving boy, only 9, was picked up by Arab nomads. “They made him dress as a young girl and passed him off as a member of their own family” for four years.

Yeghiayan, born in Ethiopia and educated in Cyprus and California, worked for California Rural Legal Assistance in the ‘60s, returned to Ethiopia in 1974, later was a Peace Corps administrator and was then recruited by his old friend, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, to “go to Los Angeles and organize the Armenian community” for Moscone’s planned run for governor. Moscone was later killed by ex-supervisor Dan White.

Yeghiayan stayed and opened his practice in Glendale. He and his wife and law partner, Rita Mahdessian, handle about 600 immigration and personal injury cases annually, the majority for people of Armenian descent.

For Yeghiayan, the pending settlement is just a beginning. “There were 59 companies selling life insurance in Turkey,” he says, including two other American firms, Equitable and Mutual of New York. Those are next on his list. And, he asks, what about Armenian-owned real estate that was confiscated? The deeds are in Turkey--and written in Arabic.

“We Armenians are waiting for Turkey to join the European Union,” which will open the door to filing a real estate lawsuit in another EU country. “And what about [confiscated] bank accounts?” he asks. “This is just the beginning. If I’m around, I’m going to do it all.”

For Martin Marootian, justice also will be particularly sweet. He brings out a fading sepia photograph, taken about 1905 in Turkey. The man with the handlebar mustache, wearing a fez and holding worry beads, is his uncle. Of the 10 people in the portrait, only his mother and older sister survived.

Although he finds the proposed settlement “very unsatisfactory,” he says, “I don’t want a million dollars. I want primarily for the Armenian community to come forward” to claim their due and “I’d like the word to get around that there was a genocide. These people didn’t die in nice white beds.”