Suspect May Be Fugitive Banker

Federal agents have arrested a Southern Californian who they believe also is Lithuania’s most-wanted man: the onetime head of a Baltic business conglomerate and bank who is accused by authorities there of bilking investors out of $10 million.

The FBI said Wednesday that agents had arrested Gintaras Petrikas, 43, after an investigation that extended from Lithuania to Estonia to New Jersey and on to Los Angeles.

Petrikas, a well-known figure in his homeland, appeared to have maintained a low profile in Southern California’s Lithuanian community, which is estimated to number about 30,000.

“Some rumors that have come out of Lithuania said, ‘Oh, yes, he’s probably in California,’ but I never heard anything directly,” said Vytautas Cekanauskas, the Lithuanian honorary general consul in Los Angeles. Reports in the Lithuanian media, which could not be confirmed, said Petrikas might have changed his appearance after fleeing the country in 1997.

The man arrested last week was living under the alias Alexander Davidoff, the FBI said. The agency did not announce the arrest until now because, in part, American officials apparently did not realize the significance of Petrikas’ detention to Lithuanians, an FBI spokeswoman said.

According to statements from the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other Lithuanian government agencies, Petrikas had used numerous false identities to enter and live in the U.S.

On the afternoon of May 3, Petrikas and his wife left their Burbank apartment in a minivan, according to the FBI. Agents tailed them to a bank, where Petrikas was taken into custody without incident on what is known as a provisional arrest warrant.

Such warrants “give us the authority to take an individual into custody based on the reasonable belief that they’ve committed a crime in another country,” said FBI spokeswoman Laura Bosley. “It’s a temporary holding order.”

The next day, Petrikas appeared before a magistrate in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. He was ordered detained without bail, remanded to federal custody and is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown while awaiting extradition proceedings.

“It’s good news for Lithuania and it’s good news for the U.S. that finally justice is being implemented,” said Vygaudas Usackas, Lithuanian ambassador to the U.S. “This fellow has been hiding for too long. Thanks to an extradition agreement between the U.S. and Lithuania, he is going to face justice finally.”

Petrikas, the former chairman of Lietuvos Valstybinis Komercinis Bankas and a business group known as EBSW, is charged in his homeland with arranging for the bank to issue large unsecured loans to companies in which he had a substantial or controlling interest. He and alleged co-conspirators earned interest from those loans, Lithuanian authorities allege.

When EBSW went bankrupt, thousands of investors lost money, and in 1997 Petrikas fled the country after the Lithuanian government issued a warrant for his arrest.

The investigation that led to the arrest began in Tallinn, Estonia, where an FBI legal attache received a request for help from the Lithuanian government. The attache’s information suggested that Petrikas might be in New Jersey, Bosley said, and the case was sent to the agency’s Newark field office. Agents there did not find Petrikas, but instead found his fingerprint -- on an application for a liquor license to the state of California.

New Jersey agents then passed the case to the Los Angeles field office. Within hours, Bosley said, agents had determined that Petrikas lived in Burbank under the name Alexander Davidoff, staked out his house and taken him into custody.

Davidoff owns souvenir shops in Palm Springs and Hollywood, according to the FBI.

Angela Nelsas, director of the Lithuanian-American Community Inc. in Los Angeles and executive vice president of the nationwide Baltic American Freedom League, said she was pleased by the arrest.

“I think it’s long overdue,” she said. “We had hoped that he would be apprehended.”

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Times staff writer Ann Simons contributed to this report.